Your personal story may be bringing people closer to you while leaving them no closer to understanding your business.
Imagine this.
You’ve just delivered a terrific keynote.
The room was engaged. People laughed in the right places, nodded at the important ones, and lined up afterward to tell you how much your story meant to them.
Someone wants you on their podcast. Someone else asks for a selfie. A third person tells you, “I’ve never looked at it that way before.”
That’s what winning looks like.
Then somebody asks:
“So what exactly does your company do?”
Ah.
Last week, in Check the Levels: Does Your Audience Clarity Measure Up?, I explored what happens when the way people understand us hasn’t kept pace with what we’re building.
There’s another wrinkle.
Your audience and your company’s audience may be hearing two entirely different stories.
And both may think they’ve understood you perfectly.
The people who follow your work might love your perspective, your personality, your origin story, or the philosophy behind everything you do.
They feel connected to you.
Meanwhile, the people considering whether to hire your company, invest in it, partner with it, or work there may be listening for something else entirely.
They want to understand the business.
Which can be surprisingly difficult when the person who built it is also its most compelling storyteller.
I’ve met founders who can describe their journey so vividly that I feel as though I’ve been along for the ride.
I know what they sacrificed, what they believed when nobody else did, and the moment everything finally started coming together.
I’m rooting for them.
But I’m still waiting to understand what they’ve built.
And that’s where things start getting expensive.
Back at the company, the sales team may be spending the first twenty minutes of every conversation explaining what the business actually does.
Marketing may be building campaigns around the founder’s ideas because those ideas get attention, while struggling to explain the company’s value in terms prospective customers recognize.
The CEO may be preparing for an investor conversation and discovering that the organization’s story depends on the founder being in the room to tell it.
And the founder may be wondering why so much visibility isn’t producing more opportunity.
Everybody’s working.
Somebody’s getting applause.
The business is still doing an awful lot of explaining.
I spend a good part of my time listening to founders and leaders describe what they’ve built.
Often, I can hear what they’re trying to say before they’ve found the words.
That’s when people tell me, “You get me,” or “I feel seen.”
I love those moments.
But while I’m listening to the person speaking, I’m also listening on behalf of the people who aren’t in the room.
The prospective customer trying to understand the company.
The executive who has to explain the strategy to a team.
The person who might recommend the business to someone else, provided they can explain why.
And I can almost hear the questions they’re going to ask.
The founder knows the whole story. The audience is walking in halfway through, trying to make sense of what they’re hearing.
And when the founder is the most memorable part of the encounter, the company can become something of an afterthought.
That’s a shame, because the founder’s personality and experience can be tremendous assets. Nobody wants another organization that sounds like it was assembled by a committee of LLMs in a windowless room.
But the company has to make sense without its founder standing beside it, translating.
Otherwise, sales, marketing, and leadership begin telling slightly different versions of the same story. New hires inherit the confusion. Campaigns become exercises in figuring out what everyone meant in the first place.
Eventually, all that extra explaining becomes business as usual.
Until the company expands, launches something new, or pursues a major opportunity. Suddenly, its story has to travel beyond the people who’ve learned to fill in the blanks.
And misunderstandings have a way of growing right along with the business.
Which brings me back to that keynote.
Imagine someone in the audience asks what your company does, and another person answers before you can.
They get it right. What you’ve built, why it matters, and who it’s for.
You’ve made an impression that can travel without you.
The next time someone congratulates you on telling a great story, pay attention to what they understand about the business behind it.
The applause is lovely.
What happens after you leave the room may be worth considerably more.
If your company’s story still needs you in the room to make sense, we should probably talk.