When Every Person in Your Company Points the Same Direction, That’s Not Culture. That’s Story Governance.

What a Recovering Engineer Discovered About the Hidden Force That Holds — or Destroys — Every Brand

You know your brand story matters. You’ve invested in it — the workshops, the messaging framework, the brand guide that lives on the shared drive. And you believe, because you’ve seen it work, that the right narrative can move people, align teams, and grow a business in ways no ad campaign ever could.

But walk into any company with more than fifty people and ask five leaders to tell the brand story. You’ll hear five different versions. Ask the frontline staff. You’ll hear five more. The story you built hasn’t traveled. It’s fragmented. And now with AI producing content at machine speed, every tool in your stack is scaling that fragmentation in real time, with confidence, in public.

Therefore, the most critical operating discipline in your organization is not your content strategy. It’s your narrative governance — the cause-and-effect logic that connects your purpose, your vision, your mission, and your strategy into a single coherent thread that governs every decision, every channel, and every AI output in the enterprise.

Gavin McMahon calls that thread the Arrow of Coherence.

Meet Gavin McMahon: The Engineer Who Discovered the World Is Made of Stories, Not Atoms

Gavin McMahon is the founder of a 25-year leadership and storytelling consultancy and author of Story Business: Why Stories Rule the World and How They Can Reinvent Your Business.

A recovering mechanical engineer who began his career working on nuclear submarines and manufacturing plants, Gavin transitioned into digital transformation at Gartner in the late 1990s — and failed spectacularly enough to learn something important.

His black-and-white engineering worldview collided with the messy human reality of organizational change, and what came out the other side was a framework for how companies actually create value: through story.

Story Business is the product of 25 years of testing that framework with real companies navigating real change, and it is one of the most practically useful books on organizational storytelling published in years.

What’s in it for You:

• What the Arrow of Coherence is and how to apply it to unify your brand story across every department, channel, and AI tool
• Why most companies suffer from a synonymous mess — purpose, vision, mission, and strategy all tangled together — and the one narrative move that untangles it
• Why brand storytelling is world building, and what that means for governance rather than just marketing
• Why the CEO is your most underutilized brand storyteller — and how to activate that power
• How show Bibles differ from brand guidelines, and why that distinction determines whether your story survives scale
• Why AI amplifies your narrative entropy at warp speed unless a governing Brand Brain is in place first
• The two things Gavin wishes he had known in the 1990s — and why they will change how you lead
• The Synonymous Mess That Is Quietly Destroying Your Brand

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Because If No One Is Governing It, AI Is Fragmenting It Faster Than You Can Fix It

The Moment Your Brand Story Stops Being a Marketing Problem and Becomes an Operational Emergency

As a brand marketer, you know how important it is to communicate a clear, cohesive, and compelling story to stand out in the noisy world we all compete in.

But you may be frustrated watching AI fragment your story at machine speed, because no one in your organization is actually governing it.

Marketing is saying one thing. Sales is saying another. HR is in a completely different novel. And every AI tool your team is running without a shared narrative underneath it is amplifying that fragmentation in real time.

That’s the problem at the center of this conversation with Rain Bennett — award-winning documentary filmmaker, founder of Elamir, and author of The Chief Storytelling Officer. His new book makes the case — compellingly and correctly — that brand story isn’t a communications deliverable you hand to marketing after you’ve built the product. It’s the operating system you build your entire business on. And it belongs to every department in your organization.

Rain brings a perspective most brand strategists don’t have. Twenty years as a documentary filmmaker taught him how to find the powerful story inside any organization — even dense, technical, B2B companies — and make it clear and emotionally compelling for the exact people who need to understand it. That skill, he argues, is now the most urgently needed capability inside every enterprise navigating AI-accelerated narrative drift.

What Is a Chief Storytelling Officer — and Why Your Company Needs One Now

What’s in it for You:

• Why marketing, sales, and operations are telling three different brand stories right now — and the only way to stop it
• How Rain’s Narrative Operating System (NOS) governs story across Vision, Mission, Brand, Product, Marketing, Sales, and Feedback Loops
• Why the Chief Storytelling Officer is an engagement role, not a communications role — and what that distinction means for every function in your business
• How to extract the story your organization is already living before you try to tell the story you want to tell
• Why AI has turned narrative drift from a slow burn into an exponential emergency — and what the CSO does about it
• Why you must build your brand story alongside your product, not after it

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Your Agency’s Most Valuable Asset Is the One You Keep Giving Away for Free

Why the Smartest Agency Owners Are Finally Treating Legal as a Growth Strategy

You want your agency to command premium fees, build lasting enterprise value, and stop competing on execution alone. The thinking and strategy you deliver every day is worth far more than the work you produce.

But most agency owners are unknowingly giving their most valuable intellectual property away in spec pitches. In vague client contracts. In freelancer agreements that hand over rights they never intended to transfer. And AI has quietly turned that costly habit into a legal emergency.

If you want to protect what you’ve built, profit from how you think, and walk away from your agency on your terms someday, this conversation with Sharon Toerek, you can’t afford to skip this conversation.

Sharon Toerek is the founder of Legal+Creative, a law firm dedicated exclusively to serving independent marketing agencies across the US, and host of The Innovative Agency podcast.

With a career built on intellectual property, trademark, and copyright law, she has spent over a decade helping agency owners see legal not as a cost center but as a competitive advantage.

Most agency owners think about legal the same way they think about insurance: necessary, boring, and only relevant when something breaks.

Sharon has spent over a decade proving that’s exactly backwards. She works exclusively with independent agencies, helping owners protect their IP, negotiate stronger contracts, and treat legal as a profit lever. This conversation will change how you think about your agency’s most overlooked growth driver.

What’s in it for You

• Why generic AI-generated content may legally belong to no one — not your agency, not your client, not anyone — and what that means for every deliverable you’re producing right now
• How feeding client data into generic AI tools is a hidden data privacy violation waiting to happen, and why most agencies are doing it without realizing it
• The single biggest mistake agencies make during new business pitches — and how to protect your IP before a prospect ever becomes a client
• Why your agency’s underlying methodologies, processes, and frameworks are protectable assets most owners are accidentally giving away in their client service agreements
• The five moves every agency must make now — from internal AI policies to errors and omissions insurance — to govern AI use, protect IP, and build an agency worth far more when it’s time to sell

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Why Your Brain Keeps Sabotaging the Story You’ve Been Rehearsing

The Gap Between What You Know and What You Deliver Under Pressure Is Always a Psychology Problem First

You’ve trained the skills. You’ve rehearsed the pitch. You know the product cold, you’ve done the roleplays, and your track record proves you can close.

But when the moment gets biggest — the board presentation, the high-stakes close, the conversation that could change everything — your mind betrays you. Not because you weren’t prepared. Because nobody trained the psychology behind the performance.

That’s the invisible ceiling Collin Henderson has spent his career helping high achievers break through. And in this conversation, he delivers the framework, the neuroscience, and the hard-earned personal proof that sales psychology beats sales strategy every single time.

Meet Collin Henderson: Performance Coach to Elite Athletes and Fortune 500 Teams

Collin Henderson is a seven-time author, host of the Master Your Mindset podcast, and a performance coach whose clients include number one NBA draft picks, Heisman football finalists, and top-producing sales teams at Nike, Amazon, Salesforce, Zillow, and Alaska Airlines.

His new book, The Oz Method: Psychological Secrets of Influence for Sales, Leadership, and Life (IdeaPress, 2026), delivers a parable-driven performance framework inspired by L. Frank Baum’s classic. It’s built for anyone whose psychological readiness isn’t keeping pace with their technical skill.

What’s in it for You

Tune in to this conversation and you’ll discover:

• Why the brain is hardwired to respond to problems before solutions — and how to use that truth in every conversation you lead
• Collin’s five-part story framework: Set the Scene, Establish the Challenge, The Growth Journey, Face Your Fear, and Resolution — and exactly how to apply it in sales, leadership, and communication
• Why identity is the hidden ceiling on your performance, and what it means to rewire the beliefs driving your behavior
• How “trauma, drama, daddy and mama” shapes the way high achievers freeze under pressure — and how to finally break the pattern
• The one question Collin calls his most powerful influence tool, and why it creates collaboration instead of resistance
• Why boring will put you out of business faster than any competitor ever could

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Find Your One Word and Become Impossible to Ignore, With Brian Burkhart

Because the difference between a commodity and a movement is one core belief.

You’ve built something real, and your team believes in what you offer.

But if you can’t name what you stand for, you won’t stand out — you’ll just be another commodity in a race to the bottom you can’t win.

Today you’ll find your one word — your core belief — and make it art that activates feeling and makes you impossible to ignore.

Brian Burkhart has heard that pitch before. As founder of Square Planet, and author of Stand for Something: The Power of Building a Brand People Authentically Love.

He’s also, impressivley, a former Disney submariner turned Fortune 500 communication strategist; he has spent decades helping senior leaders and TEDx speakers find the galvanizing signal that transforms commodities into movements.

Brian has done it for brands with 120 years of history and for first-time speakers stepping onto a red circle stage. His weapon is deceptively simple: one word that captures what you believe — and the art to make people feel it.

What’s in it for You:

• How to distill your core belief into one powerful word that galvanizes your entire organization
• Brian’s 10-step ancient Stoic framework that works for any presentation, pitch, or keynote
• How to reverse-engineer your core beliefs directly from your daily actions
• Why your audience decides with feelings first — and how to make art that activates them
• The Mad Men “It’s Toasted” moment that proves one idea beats every feature list

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How One Simple Brand Theme Can Move Millions to Act

What the World’s Hardest Storytelling Challenge Teaches You About Your Own Brand

You have something important to say. You have the passion, the proof, and the purpose to back it up. And every time you step into a room that should care — a customer meeting, an investor pitch, a keynote — you lay everything on the table and wait for the room to move. It doesn’t.

That is not a message problem. It is a complexity problem. And no category in business demonstrates the damage of that problem more vividly than sustainability, where years of worthy but exhausting communication has produced the opposite of action. So when a serial entrepreneur from London found a way to compress the entire challenge of climate change into four words — almost nothing changes everything — and built a global movement around it without once leading with the cause, the lesson for every brand builder is impossible to ignore.

Ryan Kohn is the co-founder of PROPER Snacks, the UK’s leading premium snack brand and one of the first B Corps in the sector. From a kitchen-table idea to a global company selling over eight million snacks a month, he scaled PROPER into a household name and led its 85-person team before exiting to private equity in 2021.

Alongside PROPER, Ryan launched ventures spanning carbon-neutral property development and the UK’s largest student events business, earning recognition as EY Entrepreneur of the Year. Beyond business, he co-founded campaigns alongside Riz Ahmed and HRH Prince William, served as a board member of environmental charity Hubbub, co-authored a B Corp guide to achieving net zero, and mentored the next generation of entrepreneurs through Virgin Start-Up and Tesco Back It.

Most recently, Ryan founded Point One, a global initiative making it radically easy for businesses to support the clean energy transition. Point One asks companies to contribute just 0.1% of their revenue — one dollar per thousand — into a shared fund that unlocks and accelerates clean energy projects, particularly in developing markets.

Pooled across everyday economic activity, that rounding-error commitment has the potential to fully fund the global clean energy transition within 15 years.

What’s in it for You

Tune in to this episode and you will discover:

• How to find the single brand theme that compresses your biggest, most complex idea into the one line your audience cannot forget
• Why leading with your cause — or your industry’s equivalent jargon — is the surest way to lose the audience you most need to reach
• How Point One built a global brand movement by meeting audiences inside the cultural moments they already love, not the cause they need to care about
• Why simplicity is not a shortcut in brand storytelling — it is the destination, and what it actually takes to get there
• What the Story Cycle System revealed about Point One’s brand positioning when Park ran it live through the StoryCycle Genie during the conversation
• How scenes from your life — not a polished origin story — are the raw material for the brand narrative that will move the people you most want to serve

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Stop Pushing. Start Finding the Buyers Who Are Already Sold on You.

The One Shift That Separates Struggling Founders From Founders Who Scale

You’ve built something genuinely great. You’ve done the research, built the pitch, run the demos, and followed every best practice in the playbook.

But prospects keep disappearing. Sales cycles drag. You’re pouring energy into conversations that go nowhere — and you can’t figure out why.

Here’s the hard truth: the problem isn’t your product. It’s that you’re pushing it onto people who aren’t ready to pull.

The moment you stop trying to convince the wrong people and start finding the ones who are already sold — everything changes. Sales cycles shrink. Deals close without a fight. And the product practically sells itself.

That’s the transformative power of the PULL framework. And in episode 576 of the Business of Story podcast, the man who built it is here to show you exactly how it works.

Who Is Rob Snyder? The Harvard MBA and McKinsey Veteran Rewriting the Sales Playbook

Rob Snyder arrived at Harvard Business School with a McKinsey pedigree, a million dollars in startup funding, and a business that looked brilliant on paper. Two years later, he was deep in what he calls “the pain cave” — doing everything right and going nowhere.

Then one unexpected phone call changed everything.

A restaurant owner he’d once tried to sell to called out of the blue — not to buy Rob’s product, but to ask if Rob could help solve a completely different problem. That pivot led to a new company that went from zero to $4 million in annual recurring revenue in two years.

That experience sent Rob on a decade-long quest to figure out why some products take off while others stall — even when the founders are smart, well-funded, and working hard. The result is his book, The Power of Pull, a battle-tested framework for finding the customers who are already sold before you ever say a word.

What’s in It for You

Listen to this conversation with Rob and you will discover:

• What “the pain cave” is and why even the smartest, best-resourced founders get trapped there
• The four-part PULL framework — Project, Unavoidable, List of options, Limitations — and how to use it to identify buyers who are already in motion
• Why your product description is probably convincing people not to buy — and the simpler language that creates instant pull
• How to turn a single customer success story into a repeatable sales engine that closes deals without pitching
• Three concrete action steps you can take this week to find your pull customers and accelerate growth

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State of Storytelling 2026 Proves Brand Narrative Is Finally a Business Discipline

Why the Smartest Companies Are Hiring Chief Storytelling Officers to Operationalize Their Brand Story ACross the Enterprise

You’ve invested in marketing. You’ve hired talented people. You’ve built messaging frameworks, refreshed your brand guidelines, and probably paid an agency or two to capture what makes you different.

And you know story is the currency of connection. The thing that turns strangers into customers and customers into advocates.

But ask five of your most senior leaders to tell your brand story right now.

Odds are you’ll hear five different versions.

Research from Elliott Rayner’s State of Storytelling 2026 reveals that only 19% of employees inside most organizations can consistently articulate the three core questions about their company: what value do we create, who cares about that value most, and why are we the best at delivering it?

Nineteen percent.

That means 81% of your brand touchpoints — every sales call, every product demo, every investor pitch, every customer email — are being delivered without a shared, aligned story underneath them.

That’s Narrative Entropy. And it is quietly compounding in your organization right now.

Therefore, the most visionary companies aren’t just fixing their messaging. They’re building an entirely new operational function around the one discipline that governs every other function in the business.

They’re hiring Chief Storytelling Officers. And they’re paying up to half a million dollars a year to fill the role.

That’s the wake-up call at the center of this conversation.

Elliott Rayner is a fractional Head of Storytelling, product narrative strategist, and the author of The State of Storytelling 2026 — a landmark report built on analysis of twenty-five C-suite storytelling job descriptions from some of the world’s most sophisticated companies.

Based in the Netherlands and drawing on a career that began at the Adidas Global Headquarters and included product stewardship of the iconic New Zealand All Blacks kit, Elliott has spent the last decade helping companies discover and operationalize the story they can tell better than anyone else in the market. He teaches storytelling as a business function through his Maven cohort and publishes frameworks via his website ProductNarratives.com.

What’s in it for You:

• Why Narrative Entropy is measurable — and the three-question survey you can run inside your company this week to quantify it and build the business case for storytelling investment
• What a Chief Storytelling Officer actually does — and why it’s far less about creating stories and far more about creating alignment across the entire organization
• The Discover, Define, Deliver framework fractional heads of storytelling use to operationalize brand narrative in three to nine months
• Why AI makes this urgent — and how “execution has become cheap, but meaning has not” reframes every conversation about where human value now lives
• What the salary data reveals — and why the investment signals these organizations know exactly what they’re buying

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You Built It for Freedom. So Why Does It Feel Like a Prison?

What Every Agency Founder Gets Wrong About Growth — and the 5-Stage Evolution That Sets You Free

You started your agency because you wanted more control over your time, your work, and your life. You were good at something — maybe great at it — someone offered you money, and you were off to the races.

But somewhere between the thrill of landing your first big client and the exhaustion of your eighty-seventh consecutive 60-hour week, something went sideways. You have a team now. You have clients who trust you. You have revenue. And somehow, you have less freedom than the day you started.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s a trap. And it has a name.

Your business owns you.

Jason Swenk has been in that trap, fought his way out, sold his agency to prove it, and spent the last decade teaching other founders how to follow that same path — at every stage of the climb. He joins me on this episode of the Business of Story to share the exact framework that changed everything.

What You Will Learn from Jason Swenk on the Business of Story

Jason Swenk is the founder of Agency Mastery 360, host of the Smart Agency Masterclass podcast, and author of Operator to Owner — the no-fluff manual for agency founders who are ready to stop working for their businesses and start owning them.

He built a digital agency that grew to over 100 people, surpassed eight figures in revenue, and landed clients including AT&T, Hitachi, and LegalZoom — all before he sold it and realized his entire identity had been the business itself.

Now he coaches 7- and 8-figure agency founders at Agency Mastery to make the identity shifts that most growth advice completely ignores.

What’s in it for You

• The 5-Stage Founder Evolution Framework — Operator, Manager, Architect, CEO, Owner — and which stage your identity is actually at right now
• Why chasing revenue milestones without evolving your leadership identity keeps you trapped, even at $10 million in revenue
• The 1-3-1 system that teaches your team to make decisions without you — and how to stop being the bottleneck in your own business
• The fist-on-paper circle exercise for identifying who you need to hire and what you need to let go of forever
• Why hesitation — not artificial intelligence — is the actual existential threat to your agency’s survival

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The Most Urgent Upgrade of the AI Age Is Personal, Not Technological

What Happens When the Man Who Built Five Companies and Backed 12 Unicorns Tells You the Real Problem Isn’t AI — It’s Us?

You believe in the future of artificial intelligence. You’ve watched the tools evolve in real time, you understand the leverage they offer, and you’re leaning in — because that’s what serious leaders do.

But something underneath the optimism keeps nagging at you. If the technology is this powerful, and the people wielding it haven’t fundamentally changed how they think, how they lead, or what they’re building toward, then we’re just amplifying the same fears, the same scarcity thinking, and the same blind spots that got us here.

I’m your host, Park Howell, the world’s most industrious storyteller. Today’s guest built his career at the edge of that exact tension — and came back with a warning and a framework that every leader navigating the AI age needs to hear.

Meet Brett Alexander Hurt: Serial Entrepreneur, Investor in 151 Startups, and Author of Love Conquers Fear

Brett Alexander Hurt is one of the most accomplished technologists of his generation. He co-founded data.world, acquired by ServiceNow on July 7, 2025. He co-founded Bazaarvoice, which achieved a unicorn IPO.

He sold Coremetrics to IBM. He has invested in 151 startups, backed 12 unicorns, participated in 52 VC funds — including SpaceX — and was named Austin’s Best CEO with the Legacy Award. He is an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow and the host of the Love Conquers Fear podcast, 62+ episodes strong and publishing every Tuesday.

His new book is Love Conquers Fear: Humanity, AI, and the Age of Abundance for All, published June 23 by Do More Good.

Brett Hurt is not a philosopher guessing about AI from the outside. He is a builder who got everything capitalism promised — the Lamborghini, the exits, the recognition — and discovered it wasn’t enough. That discovery changed everything about how he thinks, leads, and writes.

What’s in It for You:

• How leading with love — not fear — is the only strategy that actually works in the age of AI
• Brett’s wild arc from chasing Lamborghinis to a psychedelic awakening that changed everything
• Why AI isn’t here to replace you — it’s here to make you more human

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