I still remember the day we arrived in the South Indian city of Mysore(I prefer calling it Mysuru) with nothing but our backpacks. Technically speaking, it took us a 90 minute flight from Mumbai to Bangalore and a three hour cab ride to get to the city. But the actual journey had been much longer. 2017 was when I visited Mysuru for the first time and was smitten by it. It was only after the pandemic and the work-from-home situation for my wife Sarika that I was finally bold enough to take this step.
The plan was simple. Look for a good apartment on rent, and spend a few months in the city. If things worked out, we’d stay. If they didn’t, we’d head back home to Mumbai. That was in December 2020.
How 2021 started…
We found a nice little independent house with some space for a garden, and we immediately closed the deal. But in January 2021, we struggled to get into our routines. We needed furniture, an internet connection, a house help and many other things we took for granted in Mumbai. The list was endless. And it wasn’t like we knew anyone in the city. Among the both of us, only I could manage Kannada(the local language), and that too just about.
But I was prepared for this. I think once you have traveled solo for 18 months with only your backpack, you realise that settling in takes time. I was just happy to be in a place that had enough green, blue and brown as opposed to the varying shades of grey that was Mumbai(h/t to my cousin Tithi for this description). Sarika was happy too. By end of January, we had somewhat settled in and slowly other family members started arriving. Tithi, my cousin and colleague, was the first one to show up. She planned to live with us and work with me on The Story Co. Sarika had taken a leap of faith with me, so had Tithi and her parents.
We hoped to find our rhythm in the city after that. And it looked like we were for a while. My father-in-law joined us too for a few weeks. Whisky rates in Karnataka(the state Mysore belongs to) are really high. Except that, he enjoyed everything in the city. We even took a weekend trip together to Coorg. It was fun to be together as a family.
Like they say, Murphy’s Law hits you when you least expect it to.
My chest started hurting.
A couple of weeks after the Coorg trip, I had an excruciating pain in my chest which had me admitted in the hospital. After five days of investigation, the reports confirmed that I was infected with Tuberculosis. While shifting hospitals, suffering from pain and getting intrusive treatments done, I could not stop wondering if moving to Mysuru had actually been a good idea. Though mom was in Mysore for a few days at the time, for the most part, it was just Sarika and I who were fending for ourselves in a new city. And Sarika was taking the brunt of all this, as I was either in pain or painkiller induced sleep.
After 10 days in the hospital, I got back home. But that was the start of six months of daily medication. The first few days, I could not stop sleeping after taking those Akurit tablets. I would look out of the window while working and wonder if The Story Co would ever gather pace. Since you are reading this blog on The Story Co, you probably know what the company is all about. But for the ones who do not know, my company is a business storytelling coaching and training firm.
But back in February 2021, we were providing a hybrid of consulting and content creation service. Along with my colleagues, Ranjani and Tithi, I was helping startups and SMBs build a foundational communication kit for themselves. We used to call the document, the ‘brand storytelling toolkit’. TB had hit me just when we were getting an enquiry a day from startups of all shapes and sizes.
Ready, Steady, Slow…
More often than not, challenges seem bigger in our head than they actually are. I had started The Story Co in April 2020 with the idea of building a business storytelling knowledge or learning company. I was convinced then, and even more so now, that stories could help organisations and individuals connect better with their audiences.
Not knowing how to start a knowledge or training company, I decided to start with what I already knew. And that was service. With my eight years of PR agency experience, a year and a half of running a content company and two of being a freelance writer, service is what I knew best.
That’s how the ‘brand storytelling toolkit’ started. Thanks to that, we got regular work. It reaffirmed what I already knew, that it is easier to build a service business than a knowledge one.
But I did not want to build a service business. There were two reasons for this. One, the only way to scale such businesses is by acquiring more business and team members. Two, I believe storytelling needs to be looked upon as a fundamental skill and everyone needs to learn it for themselves. Outsourcing your story to a professional, maybe needed in some cases, but not always.
I had seen so many set backs in the years preceding that hospitalization that I felt going back to a job was the best bet. In those days while I took meds for TB, I somehow went back to lessons from the book ‘Atomic Habits’. It reminded me that its okay to be slow, what’s more important is to be deliberate and to make progress everyday. That’s when I decided that no matter how small, I would make progress everyday. How? By learning about business storytelling and writing about it every day.
I had taken so many risks in life. And I convinced myself, that this time I would take the risk of being deliberately slow while staying consistent.
From Service to Coaching:
As weeks went by, I felt stronger. A lot of the work we had done before I got hospitalised, started paying off. Enquiries increased, so did client pay outs. By May, we had a semblance of a business. Given the nature of the business and my unwillingness to add more people, we were closing only 2-3 deals per month. But I was happy.
By this time, my mother(Sharada Bhandary), also arrived in Mysuru to start her post-retirement life. Things were looking up, but I knew it won’t be the case for too long.
With every passing day, I started realising that my business model and my preferences(of not building a big team and of working from a small city) did not match. Given that our story exploring projects were deep engagement over a long period of time, the financial model wasn’t working either. Also, considering that most of the businesses we worked with were startups or MSMEs, charging them tens of lakhs of rupees also wasn’t an option.
By July, I knew the time had come to take the next step. Coaching.
I figured that the same models I had researched and applied for the consulting-cum-content service hybrid could be used by founders and entrepreneurs under my guidance for them to build their own stories. This model had a couple of advantages. One, it defined the scope of my and my team’s involvement. We could charge for the time we spent on projects. Secondly, founders themselves had to take ownership of their company’s story and storytelling. This took me one step closer to my mission of making individuals learn and apply these skills.
I was tested in July, August and September. Since a lot of startups and ex-clients knew us for ‘storytelling as a service’, we had to keep rejecting those inquiries. We were pitching the 8-weeks coaching program to founders, but most of them were not ready to take it up. They were looking for someone who would take the work load away from them. Along with the 8-week Founder’s Storytelling, we also offered Leadership Storytelling and Sales Storytelling coaching programs.
It was only in October that our marketing started delivering results. We started getting clients for the coaching programs. Not as many as I would have liked, but it was a start. Again, there was a promise of stability.
But was coaching enough?
The compounding of a few things started bearing results from October 2021. The stories and information that I was sharing on Linkedin were appreciated by a lot by people. Our webinars titled ‘Deconstructing Girish Mathrubootham’s Storytelling’, ‘Airbnb and Brian Chesky’s storytelling’ and other videos received a fair bit of appreciation.
That’s when training and workshop enquiries started trickling in. I knew this was the start of the next phase. But either due to pricing or our inability to convince clients about the benefits, a couple of them did not take off.
With all our discipline in learning, and sharing knowledge, we were still not making enough money. I would ask the team once in a while whether we were on the right track. Also the limitations to scaling of a coaching business were clear to me. But I knew the one-on-one discussions with ideal learners were worth a lot. But it was time to focus on the one-to-many format.
Towards the end of 2021, I was riddled with some doubt, but happy with a lot of the work we had done. I also enrolled for my first Vipassana course scheduled in the second half of December 2021. That was a big step.
A milestone project:
Then one day in November when I was enjoying my post lunch siesta(a habit I have developed since I moved to Mysuru), my phone rang. I was half asleep and the lady on the other end asked me if I could conduct a business storytelling workshop for a corporate communications team. This was no small company. Actually, it was one of India’s leading automobile companies. They were looking to organise the workshop in less than three weeks time. Considering it was a corporate and a large one at that, I wasn’t sure if they’d actually be able to pull this off within the timeline.
But we decided to send the best possible workshop design nevertheless. This is where a few workshop designs we had created earlier came in handy. Mind you, we still hadn’t conducted a proper business storytelling workshop. We had done webinars, yes. We had helped startups find and narrate their stories, yes. I had coached executives to use storytelling in communication, yes. But we hadn’t conducted a full-fledged workshop till then.
I felt this would be a big red flag. But somehow, with the workshop design and the proposal we sent, I was never probed about previous assignments. I am sure luck played some part there. The deal was closed less than ten days before the scheduled dates for the workshop.
And then the grind began. All of our work in the past 18 months came into play. The stories we knew, the models we had researched and all the webinars we had conducted started making sense.
But to be honest, I was pretty nervous on the nights leading to the workshop. This was the first workshop and it wasn’t even a virtual one. I had to hold attention and deliver value to 16 participants for not one, but two days. Thankfully, Ranjani’s research and curation and Tithi’s presentation work helped. They gave me the space to focus on what I was meant to deliver.
All my worries subsided within 30 minutes of the start of the workshop. At conclusion on day two, we were given a standing ovation by what is one of the best corporate communications team in the country. The final rating: 9.4/10!
Ranjani, Tithi and I knew that this was a milestone in our journey. And that the opportunity had come to us on the back of our work, and not my network made 2021 feel sweeter.
Vipassana, the perfect way to end the year?
Immediately after this training, I headed to Vipassana for the ten day silence and meditation retreat. It was clear that The Story Co had to focus on training or as you call them, learning programs. But the focus had to be two-fold: programmes for corporates(B2B) and courses/workshops for individuals(B2C).
To me, 2021 will be the year where I finally backed myself to be slow and deliberate. And the approach did deliver results. Despite never being in a hurry, things moved in really fast in 2021. From service to Tuberculosis to coaching clients to training corporate employees. I felt like I lived four years in one.
What does 2022 hold for The Story Co? You can read that in the next blog. But if there is one lesson from 2021 that will remain with me is that ‘ready, steady, slow’ is as good if not better then being mindless and fast. All you got to do is back yourself up.
But I realise that even this humble journey has been made possible by people who support me or my team in different ways. So I am happy to share this journey with everyone who may find it useful.
Thanks.
