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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and I feel like there's three words that have followed me for 16 years as an entrepreneur.
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I've always heard these and it still rings true today, and that is content is king.
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We've all heard it in so many different ways, and that's why today, I'm so excited to be joined by a guest who not only understands the importance and the value of content marketing, but this is someone who really flourishes when it comes to bringing it into reality.
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Especially if you are one of those people I'm going to lump myself in here that you've found yourself wondering what's my secret sauce, how, what's going to make my content any different from everybody else's?
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Well, today's guest is going to challenge us and really invite us, in a positive way, to step into our special sauce.
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So let me tell you all about today's guest.
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His name is James Merkley.
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James is the owner and founder of StoryPath Creative, which is a content creation and content coaching agency that has helped their clients see well over 10 million views on social media.
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James is a husband to his wife, erin, he's a father to his son, ander, and he loves getting to do life and business in the beauty of Colorado.
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There must be something in the air in Colorado because I feel like we have so many amazing guests from the mountains.
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He was a professional musician for nearly 10 years before he jumped into business ownership and entrepreneurship.
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Since he made that shift, he has never looked back.
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He has over a decade of experience in professional branding and video production and James is passionate about helping his clients find that thing I teased about already their secret sauce and use that to help them discover and build their online audiences that they can then monetize.
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He has helped businesses grow new revenue streams from social media and has worked with nonprofits use that to help them discover and build their online audiences that they can then monetize.
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He has helped businesses grow new revenue streams from social media and has worked with nonprofits all across the country, helping them raise millions of dollars in funding.
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He loves it when he gets to help his coaching clients grow from zero to hero.
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So if your limiting belief coming into today's episode is well, I don't even have an audience.
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I don't even have people who know who I am, well, that's okay, because James loves doing this on social media without spending thousands of dollars on an agency doing it for them.
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So I'm personally equally as excited as you all are to learn from James here today.
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So I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with James Merkley.
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All right, james, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show, thank you so much, Brian.
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I'm excited to be here.
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Heck.
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Yes, there's so many cool aspects of your story and your journey and I can already see, I would imagine, that being a musician and being in the production side of the world gives you so many insights into it.
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But before we talk content marketing, before we talk about the content itself, take us beyond the bio.
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Who's James?
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How'd you start doing all this cool stuff?
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Oh man that's a long story.
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I think I've always been.
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I got diagnosed late, diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and it makes a ton of sense because my life has always been just like ping pong and between things and opportunities, I've never been able to sit still and just do a job in one place.
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I've always been dabbling in so many different areas, doing a bunch of different things, and so even when I worked full time in other companies and with other opportunities, I was always dabbling and putting my hands and my fingers into creative things, and I'm really big on what's the future hold for creatives and what's the future hold for just the society and just people who are trying to make money online or make money for their businesses.
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And so I've just always been trying to figure out how do we move forward into the future as creatives, especially because I've been a creative my whole life.
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And it's like, how do we move forward into the future as creatives, especially because I've been a creative my whole life?
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And it's like, how do I help other creatives do the same thing and how do I help people in general move forward into the future and not be afraid of it but leverage it in ways that are actually beneficial for their lives, and so that's a little bit about me In terms of just like outside of my work life.
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I love just getting to spend time with my family.
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I'm just a at my core, I'm a homebody, I'm an introvert to the T, and I love just spending time at home with my son he's two and a half.
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My wife we've got literally.
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Tomorrow is our 10-year anniversary and I just love getting to spend time with my family, my close friends, and then enjoying the beautiful Colorado landscape.
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There's so much fun to do here Skiing, being in the incredible wilderness of the mountains and just spending time doing outside activities.
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There's just so much to do here, and so I live a very genuinely blessed life, even when it's hard.
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I live a very genuinely blessed life even when it's hard, so I'm very grateful for the opportunity to just to be here and talk about how to find people's secret sauce today no-transcript.
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Even know where to begin, james, because what I see I'll list out a few things is I see the story component of it.
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Of course it's in the name of your business, it's obviously a very core part of it.
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But then I also think about the actual content.
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A lot of people worry about production and then, even going a step further, what about the platforms?
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Obviously, success on social media is so important to you, and then I'm just going to throw one more thing into the mixer before I kick it back to you is the strategic component.
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You understand that all of this content is for a purpose, whether it's nonprofits looking to fundraise, businesses looking to convert new customers and clients.
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These are four big areas that I've just thrown onto the table, James.
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How do we start making sense of it?
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When you look at the scope of what you do?
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What are those ingredients that you look at?
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Yeah, absolutely so.
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The way I break this down is storytelling has, throughout all of human history, is always been the vessel at which things are pioneered as civilization is advanced.
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People grow and develop their skills.
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Storytelling has always been the framework for how society moves forward.
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If you think about it back in the, if we could look way back in history, storytelling was the way that mentors would create new mentorship and help their people move forward in their fields.
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They would teach and they would tell stories.
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And if you look at kind of modern day application of storytelling, brands are doing storytelling all the time.
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You're saturated with storytelling, from the creative storytelling that you see on your favorite TV program or movies or video games or wherever, all the way down to a simple ad.
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You're always being, I guess, indoctrinated with somebody's story that they're putting in front of you.
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Now the thing is there's good storytelling and there's bad storytelling, and we've all been at that party when you try and tell a story to somebody and everybody's just kind of sipping their drinks and they're like, okay, yeah, cool story, bro, that was awesome, right?
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And nobody seems to connect with your story.
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And this has happened, I'm sure, to everybody.
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Contrast that with those people who, for some reason, whenever they tell a story, the whole room just zeroes in on what they're trying to say.
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It's like this magnetism, it's like they just know how to use the right tone and frequency and the right the communication styles that they use are just they hit home at the right moments and people zero into that story and typically, typically people have some sort of a transformation.
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Either they laugh loud because the story is funny or they start crying because the story is really intense and emotionally driven, but either which way, the story produces a outcome.
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And so the reason why I call my company StoryPath is because every company wants an outcome.
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If you're a business owner, if you're a business developer, if you work in business, you always are looking for some kind of an outcome to some degree or another.
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And where a lot of businesses seem to fail is that they forget that story is the vessel, the path, aka story path.
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Story is the pathway to getting to that outcome.
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But you have to learn and tell great stories along the way.
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So what I do with my team is we kind of help companies and businesses, wherever they're at, in their journey of being a storytelling brand, being a storytelling company.
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We want to help them on the DIY side, where they don't have a ton of budget to tell their story, but they're like hey, I can hustle, I can learn, I can grow.
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And we come in same sort of methodology as used in historical days, when you had a mentorship, or a mentor and a mentee and an apprentice, if you will, and that mentor turns that apprentice into the master.
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Right, we want to do the same thing.
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We help our clients turn themselves into the master because we're we want to do the same thing.
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We help our clients turn themselves into the master because we're handholding them to that process.
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And then we have companies in businesses that they're like hey, we have budget, we want you to do our storytelling.
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And that's where we use our strategies and we use our equipment, we use our uh, our vehicle, and we actually produce the content that tells a great story.
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And then, lastly, if there's companies that are companies are like James, I love all this, this is fantastic.
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I don't want to touch storytelling.
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I want you to touch storytelling.
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You're the master, you're the expert, you go for it.
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We do that for them.
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We have turnkey solutions as well.
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So, basically, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to teach and equip companies and businesses on how to ingest their personal story not someone else's, not some popular story that's out there, but their personal story into everything they do.
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Because, at the end of the day, I think we live in this day and age where people are connecting to stories more than ever before.
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I don't know if you've seen this, brian, in maybe your podcast series, but like and maybe in your analytics, but it would be interesting for me to learn about this.
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But I'm sure the people who have dynamic storytelling abilities, they have those like zero to hero stories and they tell those stories.
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I'm sure those are probably maybe some of your better performing podcasts and it's fascinating to me.
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But a lot of people come to me and this is the most tragic thing that I hear.
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A lot People come to me and say, james, this is really good information, this is awesome, I love this, but I don't have a story to tell and that breaks my heart like genuinely breaks my heart every single time.
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And the reason why is because we all have a story.
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We all have something that's going to connect us with different people.
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We all have something, a secret sauce, and I, literally I have a plaque over on my wall that says if you search for gold in others, you will find it.
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And sometimes people just need to learn that they can search for gold in themselves.
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They can search for gold in their own company and they can find it.
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And so my job as a storytelling agent aka a teacher on how to tell stories, or if I'm doing it for the company my goal is to hunt for that gold.
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I hunt for that secret sauce, I hunt for that special thing, that special story that encapsulates that person or that company or that brand, and then I figure out how do I communicate this, how do we build an audience around this?
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And everybody has something.
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You just have to find it.
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I have yet to find somebody that just has a dud of a story that doesn't go anywhere.
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I don't think that kind of a story exists.
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It's just the way that you tell it.
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That usually is what makes it flop.
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So that's a big, big, big overview of what we do.
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There's a lot of minutiae to it, but that's kind of like the 30,000th of you.
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Yeah, I really appreciate that, James.
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I'll tell you what listeners we're definitely gonna get to.
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How do you find that secret sauce?
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How do you find that goal that James is talking about?
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But before we get there, james, I will say one thing that stands out in everything that you just shared with us, including the party analogy, which we can all relate to.
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I feel like anytime I tell a bad story, it just ends with I guess you had to be there.
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And what really stands out, though the way you talk about it is.
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It actually sounds to me like you're less interested in the content of the story and you're more interested in the delivery of the story, the words, the framing, the, the emotions that we inject into it.
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Talk to us about that, because actually, one other thing that you said towards the end there is storytelling abilities, and I think this is such an important part for all of our listeners to take away from today, today's episode, is the fact that it's not about having the greatest story.
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You're right.
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I mean, I know as a podcaster we all love those clickbaity titles where, like someone who arrived in the country with $10 in their pockets, you know, became a multimillionaire.
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Everyone loves that clickbaity title and that hook, of course, from the content of the story.
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But talk to us, content aside, about that delivery.
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What do storytelling abilities?
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What do they look like?
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Yeah, and that's such a great question because abilities kind of, they need to take shape and form depending on the audience.
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You can't tell the same story to the same audience or to a different audience the way you told it to the previous audience, if that makes sense.
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A practical example of this is that you can't take how you tell a story from a stage.
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If you're a public speaker, you can't take that story and tell it the exact same way on social media.
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Right, there's a lot of constrictions, there's a lot of parameters.
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You obviously have less time to hook an audience on social media than you do in a live audience setting from a stage.
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So, telling stories, there's an art to it, there's a dynamic nature to telling stories that you have to learn and you have to figure out where your audience is best positioned.
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So this is where me and my team we get really strategic.
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When we're gonna tell someone's story, or when I'm coaching somebody on how to tell their own story, we start with where might your audience be?
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Who are they?
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What are they doing Like?
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What's your customer avatar?
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Companies need to know these things because if you don't know who you're trying to target, you can't tell a story that's going to hook them.
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You can't tell a story that's going to captivate them.
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I told this story when I was presenting a while back and I knew I was talking to kind of blue collar workers and I knew that I was presenting in front of a bunch of blue collar workers and I was talking about content creation and how you grow your business.
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But I wanted to tell a story and so I embedded this story of a dusty old pair of boots and I made some flair around it and I made it all about the blue collar experience and that story was it was totally made up story.
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But I was trying to prove a point that a story that has no actual application, reality can be powerful.
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And so you have to figure out what stories are going to captivate your audience and how do you bridge the gap, aka, how do you create that pathway between where you're at and your audience and how do you connect you, your story, to that audience.
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So one of the things that I love to start with with my clients when I'm trying to help them figure this out is I I like to, I like to ask, ask them like, what's, what's your favorite person to talk to?
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Um, like, we all have that person in our lives that we can just sit with them and talk for hours, hours and hours and hours.
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And if you're a smaller business, that's your target customer, typically this person that you just can zero in on and you can talk with them for hours and they clearly connect with you.
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And it's like how do you connect with those people and how you tell a story for what they need?
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So, for example, if I were creating a customer avatar, my typical customer is somebody who scrolls a lot on social media.
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Okay, so I know I need to tell a story that hooks them in the first three to four seconds.
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Right, I know that that's a tough thing for a lot of businesses, but you can tell a story or hook them in the first three to four seconds.
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Some people's audiences are found in podcast forums like yours, and it's like OK, how do I hook them in the first maybe five to 10 seconds?
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I love how you did your intro, brian, because you spend a lot of time crafting these intros for your guests and in that crafting process it's clear that's where you're hooking your audience.
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You're giving your audience what they need in that first maybe 10 to 15 seconds, maybe even 20, 30 seconds, and that's what's connecting them to the show.
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And so these are like the things that you have to remember.
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Like every story you tell, it's going to be based off of who you're talking to, what's the platform that you're using and what are kind of the limitations to that story, because there can be good storytelling done anywhere.
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You can do it in any setting.
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Even a crowded party with lights and sounds and big music, you can still tell a story where people zero in and lean into what you're saying.
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And you can tell a bad story too, like we were talking about, where people are like okay, well, good story, dude, so it all depends.
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It all depends.
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Yeah, so well said.
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Such important considerations for us.
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And, james, you're right, this actually feels like the first time in 1100 episodes that someone's calling out and breaking that fourth wall of yeah, as a podcaster, I recognize the first 10 seconds of the episode.
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Of course, my intro.
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I want to read your bio and I wanna introduce you to the audience, but I always am very acutely aware of the fact that I need to talk about something that applies to their businesses, and so you know, when we talk about content is king.
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It's something that we've all heard and people say, oh yeah, I actually do want to go deeper into that topic.
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So I really love the fact that you called that out, james, as an example.
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But part of being a podcast host is also having my listener hat on and saying what are the limiting beliefs, what are the excuses that people are going to have?
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As they're hearing you say this and inevitably I knew that we'd go here in today's conversation and that is you've already addressed it which is, james, I don't have a story.
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I don't know what my story is to tell.
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I'm just.
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I used to feel this way, james, personally, as I was like you know, I'm a 22-year-old back when I started my marketing agency.
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I'm a 22-year-old white dude from a suburb in central Massachusetts Like what's my story who got a four-year degree and started an agency, and I hope that I'm successful with this.
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I didn didn't know what my story was, James talk to us directly, address all those people which we've all been there who feel like they don't have that story or they don't know where to find that story.
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Yeah, that's, and, like I said, this is the thing that it breaks my heart, but also it's my favorite place to sit with a person in, because it's there's such a rawness when somebody comes to me and says, james, I don't know my story, I don't know Like.
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When someone says I know my story but I don't know how to tell it, that's, that's a clear ramp into like, okay, let's create strategy.
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But when someone says I don't know my story, I don't feel like I have a story I don't.
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I don't think I.
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They compare, they contrast that, like you said, they have a limiting belief.
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It's the most tragic place, but also my favorite place to sit in and what I usually respond to those people.
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I usually respond by saying this I say you don't have a story because you haven't told it.
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That's the only reason why you don't have a story.
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Think about it this way If the Hobbit was never written, it was still a story.
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It was still in JRR Tolkien's head.
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Right, it was still a story.
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It was still in jr tolkien's head right, it was still there, it was conceptualized, it just hadn't been told.
00:19:32.872 --> 00:19:37.480
Stories are told right and so at the end of the day, you have a story.
00:19:37.480 --> 00:19:38.828
It's just about telling it.
00:19:39.450 --> 00:19:54.538
And one of my favorite things to do with people when they are in the process of, like, discovering themselves a little bit, because there is a process in in this whole, in this whole development of your story, there is that there's a part of the process where you have to discover yourself, especially if you're a small business.
00:19:54.538 --> 00:20:07.484
If you're a medium to large business, it's a little harder to do this, um, it takes a little bit more of a like a systemic sort of approach, but if you're a small business, you get the luxury of doing this by yourself, which is tremendously important.
00:20:07.484 --> 00:20:17.815
And what I love to tell small business owners to do and for your audience that are small business owners Go to the mirror Every day for a week.
00:20:17.815 --> 00:20:36.233
You don't even have to do a full seven days, you can do five days, just the work week, because it's gonna be weird, it's gonna be obnoxious, you're gonna hate it for a little bit, but go to the mirror and tell yourself your story from the moment you were born to the day that you're living right then and there, tell yourself your story.
00:20:36.233 --> 00:20:51.153
Because what happens is and when I do this exercise for myself, I still do this exercise, and the reason why I do this exercise is because your story is always changing, it's always adapting right and there's new elements that get embedded into your story.
00:20:51.232 --> 00:21:00.301
Also, you can't remember everything, so we have sensory recognition, and sensory things will spark memories to be produced.
00:21:00.301 --> 00:21:08.190
I just the other day smelled something in I think it was a restaurant, and I remembered something from my childhood.
00:21:08.190 --> 00:21:12.117
It's crazy how hearing things, smelling things, tasting things can spark memories.
00:21:12.117 --> 00:21:24.278
So retelling your story consistently to yourself reminds you of things that are really powerful nuggets or elements or story beats that you can ingest into your storytelling, that make an imprint.
00:21:24.278 --> 00:21:36.237
But go to the mirror and tell yourself your story first, because you can't tell anybody else your story until you have at least put it on paper, right?
00:21:36.838 --> 00:21:39.566
Jrr Tolkien will, using this Hobbit analogy.
00:21:39.566 --> 00:21:44.826
Jrr Tolkien, he, he put the Hobbit on paper before he ever put it to print.
00:21:44.826 --> 00:21:49.508
There's something so powerful in that whole process, though.
00:21:49.508 --> 00:21:56.707
He had to flesh out this whole universe, this little Hobbit character named Bilbo Baggins.
00:21:56.707 --> 00:22:02.166
He had to create an entire world around him before he ever went to print with the book right.
00:22:02.166 --> 00:22:04.833
And we need to do the same thing with our stories.
00:22:04.833 --> 00:22:06.637
We need to figure out what is our story.
00:22:06.637 --> 00:22:09.750
If I'm the character of my story, who am I?
00:22:09.750 --> 00:22:13.625
Where am I going, what's my trajectory, where have I been?
00:22:13.625 --> 00:22:19.586
All these different things and then we can start putting it to print, aka telling other people about our stories.
00:22:20.086 --> 00:22:35.089
So a lot of the grassroots parts of telling your story is simply by sitting in front of a mirror and just getting it out there, being like this is my story, and then you fall more in love with your story or I should say, you accept it more.
00:22:35.089 --> 00:22:44.238
The more you tell it to yourself, the more you learn how to accept your story and then you can tell it to other people unashamedly.
00:22:44.238 --> 00:22:54.198
Can tell it to other people unashamedly I, especially in business ownership, is when you first start in business I think you were kind of hinting at this, brian.
00:22:54.198 --> 00:23:00.114
When you first start, you have imposter syndrome and you expect that to go away.
00:23:00.114 --> 00:23:04.688
Even five years into running this agency, I still have imposter syndrome.
00:23:04.827 --> 00:23:08.053
Like some days I wake up and I'm like what am I doing, right?
00:23:08.614 --> 00:23:10.596
Those are the days where I tell myself my story.
00:23:10.596 --> 00:23:17.032
Those are the days where I I funnel in some powerful new element to that story.
00:23:17.032 --> 00:23:37.733
We just had a nonprofit raise over a million dollars for this, uh, for this fundraising that they're doing, this research that could transform a neurological disorder in kids A million dollars and that's only the first hurdle, but our video reproduced for them, plus fundraising raised over a million dollars, it's crazy.
00:23:37.733 --> 00:23:44.075
I get to take that powerful story and embed that into my story now.
00:23:44.075 --> 00:23:53.566
And so those days when I wake up and I'm feeling like an imposter, I'm like I'm not an imposter because I went from here to here, to here and I had victories along the way.
00:23:53.566 --> 00:24:05.113
Right, bilbo came back to the Shire as a hero, not because he was just heroic, but because he had done stuff along the way that proved he was a hero.
00:24:05.113 --> 00:24:12.827
So that's it's so important to tell yourself your own story because as you do that, you learn how to get better at telling other people your story as well.
00:24:13.548 --> 00:24:15.795
Yeah, so many good things in there, james.
00:24:15.795 --> 00:24:23.625
I want to reiterate for our listeners, because two big themes, just honestly, james, the value in those lessons you just gave us.
00:24:23.625 --> 00:24:28.776
They really sit with me constantly and it's been a driving force in my 16 years of being an entrepreneur.
00:24:28.776 --> 00:24:30.699
The first is the power of reps.
00:24:30.699 --> 00:24:35.386
I love how you didn't say, go in the bathroom and look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself the story.
00:24:35.386 --> 00:24:38.701
Today you said, hey, minimum of five business days this week.
00:24:38.701 --> 00:24:40.246
You want to tell yourself the story.
00:24:40.246 --> 00:24:50.374
And then the second thing I think it's so important that you call that out this is the real stuff of entrepreneurship, which is I sum this concept up quite simply as the weights don't change, we do.
00:24:50.374 --> 00:24:58.752
If you and I start picking up 20 pound weights today, they might feel a little bit heavy, but if we keep doing it for a few months, well, the weights are gonna feel really light.
00:24:58.752 --> 00:25:01.746
And it's, of course, not because the weights change, it's because we change.
00:25:01.746 --> 00:25:04.467
And I always think about it in the context of a podcast.
00:25:04.606 --> 00:25:08.148
James, when I tell people that I host a podcast, I always get the same reaction.
00:25:08.148 --> 00:25:14.894
People are like I hate the sound of my own voice on a microphone and I'm like we all do, but it's normalized to me Now.
00:25:14.894 --> 00:25:21.798
I just know what I sound like behind a microphone and I'm sure you're the same way, having been a musician and so those things.
00:25:21.798 --> 00:25:30.623
It's not that you and I are different from anyone else, we've just done it enough times that now it's normalized, and so I love those actionable insights and takeaways.
