Intro

At the time of writing this, I’m entering my fourth year as a certified Storybrand guide. Obviously, I’m loving it (or I wouldn’t be making the effort and investment year after year), but I’ve also seen others come and go – and I know it’s just not for everyone.

The review below outlines my own experience as well as the conversations I’ve had with fellow guides over the years. I’d like to point out here that although I’m an affiliate for some related products (like Business Made Simple University and BMS Flight School), Storybrand does not have a referral program for the guide certification program, so I’m not benefiting from anyone signing up to become a guide after reading this.

If you’re still on the fence after reading this, of course the Storybrand sales team exists to answer all your questions – but also feel free to schedule a conversation with me.

The Storybrand Framework

The foundations: Building a Storybrand

Created by Donald Miller, the Storybrand framework first appeared in his book “Building a StoryBrand“. The framework is a game-changing tool for businesses looking to connect with their audience.

The StoryBrand framework encourages businesses to craft their marketing messages as if they were stories. Why? Because stories resonate with us, and most importantly, they stick with us. By positioning the customer as the “hero” and your brand as the “guide” who’s going to help them achieve success, StoryBrand flips traditional marketing on its head. It’s not about tooting your own horn; it’s about showing your customers how they can overcome their challenges – with your help, of course.

Marketing Made Simple = why I became a guide

Marketing Made Simple was Donald Miller’s next book, and that gave us the practical tools for implementing the StoryBrand framework into effective marketing materials. Whether it’s your website, email campaign, or social media strategy, applying these principles can transform the way you communicate.

This was the book that called me to action: I started applying the framework to my clients’ marketing as much as I could… with ok results and raving clients, but I didn’t feel like I was doing it completely correctly. I also felt like my work was getting repetitive… I needed help getting better at it.

The other thing that drove me to get certified in the end, was the fact that I wanted to advertise my Storybrand services. Obviously, when you’re not certified, you’re not allowed to tell others you’re implementing the framework for them.

Pre-Certification: the Application Process

I applied to get certified in December 2020. The application process was straightforward: I answered a couple of questions, shared some examples of my work, and someone from the sales team scheduled a call with me after the holidays.

After passing that first “test”, I got on a second call with the head of sales, who asked me more questions and confirmed everything I thought and hoped about the Storybrand Guide Certification program 🙂 So I was happy to hear I was accepted to join the certification round in February 2021.

Note: I had been looking forward to becoming a guide for a while. That’s why I went into the application process thinking that places were limited, and that the application processallowed them to determine if they could accept me into the program. I now know it was the other way around – the process is meant to help new prospects determine if the program is the right fit for them.

The Storybrand Guide Certification Process

There are two ways of looking at the Storybrand Certification process: one might say it’s a 4-day training after which you get certified – but most will tell you that although you get the basics and the certification right away, those four days are only the beginning of the learning process.

• Before it started, future new guides got divided into smaller groups – and each group was assigned an “onboarding coach”.
• On days 1 & 2, we joined the “Storybrand Livestream”: this is a profound and intense 2-day online workshop where Donald Miller, Dr. JJ Peterson, and (back then) Koula Calahan guided us through the process of creating our own marketing collateral, using the 7-step Storybrand framework.
• Between Livestream bits, we joined our onboarding coaches and alternated quiet time (working on our marketing) with feedback and discussion in the group’s Zoom room.
• While the first two days were about going through the process ourselves, days 3 & 4 were all about training to apply the framework. We created one-liners, scripts, emails, even websites for fake companies – and got feedback from coaches, Dr. J.J, and Donald Miller himself as we did so. The training was much more interactive than any other certification training I’d taken so far.
• On the last day, we also learned about how to use the resources we’d get access to, what we were and weren’t certified/allowed to do as Storybrand guides, and much more.
• After this, we had biweekly group calls with our onboarding coach for 6 months to help us navigate the joys and challenges of being a new Storybrand guide.

The training got me dozens of big aha moments – I learned about all the things I had been doing wrong, trying to apply the framework without an in-depth understanding of all of its elements. However, by the end of the training, I felt like I was drowning – I definitely needed a lot more practice before I’d be able to deliver really good work!

Honestly: the certification process was intense, even more so because I was in a different time zone (most days ended way after midnight for me that week, while I’m usually in bed by ten).

A second disappointment was the variety of guides in my onboarding group. My onboarding coach (Rob) was the very best and I don’t think I’d have found my way without him, but most of us were very different:

• We were located all around the world – e.g. one other guide in the onboarding group was in Hawaii while I’m in Europe, we’re 12 hours apart, so we just couldn’t have calls at a decent time of the day for both of us (the calls were around 4 AM for him. Lucky me).
• Our group was a motley crew of different business types – some worked in the marketing department for a company, others (like me) owned their own business, and others worked at a Storybrand Certified Agency. Some (like me) had been in marketing for several years, while a couple of new guides were planning to follow the Storybrand journey to start their marketing business.

In other words: the onboarding calls were trying to cover all the challenges for all kinds of businesses from all over the world, and not as efficient as they could have been. I have been told they made some changes since then. If you’re a newer guide with a different onboarding experience than mine, please add it in the comments!

The Storybrand Community

The very best thing about Storybrand, by far, is its community. I couldn’t believe a community like this still exists in today’s competitive landscape: the pay-it-forward mentality, generosity, and openness of my new fellow guides seemed to good to be true at first.

The Slack Workspace

Storybrand has a very active Slack workspace with dozens of channels, and I soon learned to mute them all – except for 3-5 channels I was really interested in and wanted to follow closely.

There are channels for different regions (states in the US, countries, there’s one for European & UK guides,…), for different applications and industries (non-profit, copywriting, design),… My own favourite channel is the #peerfeedback channel, where guides post what they’re working on – and others help them fine-tune it.

Types of Guides

One very peculiar thing about the Storybrand Guides community is that there are so many different kinds of guides.

• Solopreneurs, agency owners, and people who work in the marketing department of a company
• Copywriters, web developers, graphic designers, tech people
• People who launched their businesses after they got certified, and people who have been doing it for decades
• Skilled experts and true artists, as well as tech gurus, AI wizards, and strategic masterminds
• Guides who are committed to ongoing learning, show up for the calls, do the work – and others who may or may not have been paying attention during training
• Guides who use the Slack workspace intensively to improve their visibility and get referrals or subcontracting work from other guides, vs guides you’ll never see or hear from
• Guides who have solid foundations for lead generation and sales (e.g. they attract new clients through SEO, consistent networking, speaking gigs, etc) vs guides who whitelabel and subcontract for other guides

This makes for a great and varied community. If you’re active on Slack, show up for relevant calls, and/or simply reach out when you’re stuck, you’ll always get answers to any questions.

Ongoing Learning & Support

One essential part of being a Storybrand Guide is to make use of all the opportunities you get for learning and support.

True, with a community of hundreds of guides and at least as many resources in the library, things can be very overwhelming. But with the help of other guides who have a similar business to yours, you can soon make your way through all the incredibly helpful resources.

There are a lot of live calls you can attend, and a lot of replays can be found in the replay library:

• Calls helping guides run their business – decide on what to offer, how to market it, and how to handle sales
• Goal setting, planning, and coworking/accountability calls (yes, I’ve hosted a couple of those)
• Opportunities to get input and feedback on your work from either Storybrand leadership – or fellow guides
• Calls that give guide subgroups a chance to check in and compare notes – like the international guides, guides of colour, copywriters, agency owners,…
• The infamous Friday Guides Hangout, which is happening late at night for me so I can only guess what mischief others get up to 🙂

Apart from call replays, the official resource library includes a lot of other materials to help guides run their business.

One thing to note is that while Storybrand HQ hosts some of the calls (a monthly round table, biweekly Brandscript Bootcamp, monthly group discussions,…) – many of the calls are hosted by fellow guides. Any guide can host a group call or webinar and simply invite fellow guides to join in.

To me, the latter calls have been the most useful – it’s where fellow guides get vulnerable and share what’s not working for them, where we get to share thoughts and ideas, and get inspired by others.

For me, the Slack workspace plays a huge role in the ongoing process of being a guide: fellow guides share resources, templates, and feedback. And did I mention the generosity embedded in this amazing community?

Why I’m Still a Storybrand Guide (it got close for a bit there!)

At the end of my first year as a guide, I was ready to cancel my certification.

In the first year, I hadn’t gotten any clients through the platform, no referrals or subcontracting work from other guides, and while my work had become exponentially better, I concluded that I had learned what there was to learn – and renewing my certification wasn’t worth the investment.

But when I stopped to think about it, I realised that the value (for me) didn’t get from the actual little badge I could now put on my website: the value came from the community. I would normally be paying a coach or joining a mastermind each year, and the Storybrand community, group calls, 1:1 conversations with interesting people, and tons of resources had gotten me more than any coach or mastermind had done before.

That is the main reason I renewed for a second year… and it wasn’t until the end of my second year (or maybe even the third year) that I started to get leads specifically because I’m a Storybrand guide. I considered it a double win 🙂

The Cost of Being a Storybrand Certified Guide

Last I checked, there’s a 10k (US dollars) investment for becoming a Storybrand Guide – and 5k for renewing every year. So if you’re looking to simply buy a certification that looks good on your website and proposals, I’m sure there are cheaper ways to do that.

Is the certification worth the cost? What about ROI?

Some new guides seem to think getting certified will magically bring them leads, top clients, and they will get their investment back in no time.

That’s not the case.

Yes, I’ve seen new guides make their investment back quickly; but as far as I could see, those guides either already had an established business, and/or solid marketing skills, and/or a lot of confidence to go out and sell a method they learned to use quite recently. They had a clear idea ahead of time (or they got really clear really fast) and simply hit the ground running.

But I’ve also seen guides struggle to find their way. If you’re new at running a business, marketing your services, you don’t have an existing network, and maybe you don’t have much experience working with clients either, Storybrand is an excellent place to grow – but for many, it’s unrealistic to expect full ROI within months.

A Storybrand badge is not a magical charm. To get your investment’s worth, you’ll need to get out of your comfort zone and do the work. (see “selling Storybrand services” below).

In short: “if you build it, they will come” does not apply here – few people get rich from building a beautiful website, slamming a Storybrand Certified badge on it, and simply waiting for leads and clients to come running.

The Day-To-Day of Being a Guide: Selling it, Applying it,…

Applying Storybrand To and In your Business

The months after the certification training were the hardest; not only were we still learning how to apply the Storybrand framework correctly, we also had to apply the framework to our own marketing materials AND decide if and how to change our existing business to incorporate our new skills.

Those were 9 months of my life I’ll never get back, but if I could do it again, I would concentrate on the following:

1. First take 3 months or so to learn the skills, show up for the calls, watch the videos, do the work – without changing how I’d run my business yet.
2. Then, decide on how Storybrand will be a part of my business. I had a thriving business before I got certified, and got distracted trying to follow the instructions on “how to run a Guide business” and imitating other guides.
   In hindsight, I would not have changed my services much – continue doing what I was doing, but change how I was doing some of it (and get my clients a better experience and better results).
3. Then, collaborate with a small group of fellow guides to strategise, write, design and review each other’s marketing materials. Writing your own marketing copy doesn’t get easier just because you’re great at doing other people’s marketing! I ended up hiring a more experienced guide to write my home page, but keep thinking back it would have been great practice for me to do this for someone else – and that person doing it for my business in return.

Selling Storybrand Services

Once you’re certified and confident you can do great things for your clients, it’s time to put yourself out there. From what I’ve seen, there are different ways guides get new leads and clients.

If you’re hoping to get white-label work and/or referrals from fellow guides:

• Show up on Slack and group calls to stay “top of mind”. Showcase your work, talk about challenges and successes, and share helpful tips and insights. And keep a very close eye on the #outsourcerequests channel.
• Pick a niche, speciality, industry, or one thing you want to be known for. There are hundreds of “Storybrand copywriters” in this community, what makes you different?
• Reach out to guides you’d like to work with. Get on a video call with them, or even meet up in real life if you can. It’s not sleazy if you’re upfront about it: if they need the help, why would you not offer it? And if they don’t need the help, they can tell you right away, no harm done.

If you’re looking to find clients directly:

• Be clear on who your ideal clients are. Niche down. Make sure your messaging 100% resonates with the people you’re trying to reach.
• Optimise your profile on marketingmadesimple.com
• Reach out to your local networking groups and chamber of commerce: maybe you can host a one-liner workshop, or do the Storybrand Keynote? Those are extremely efficient lead generators!
• Host online webinars or workshops on a topic your ideal clients need help with, and offer them a free 20-minute consult afterwards.
• Apply SEO on your website, use the right keywords or hashtags on social media, make sure people who need your services can find you.

If you build it AND put in the effort, they will come.

Conclusion: Pros and Cons Listed

The benefits of being a Certified Storybrand Guide:

• Learn how to properly apply the Storybrand framework on the work you do for clients – during the certification, but also by coaching others through the livestream, and attending regular calls to hone your skills
• An incredibly generous community and network
• A cornucopia of resources, recordings, guides, and more
• The yearly Made Simple Summit in Nashville, for Storybrand Guides & Business Made Simple Coaches only: not mentioned above, but one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. Worth the trip!

The downsides of getting the Storybrand Certification:

• The price tag, of course – it’s not something everyone can afford easily
• The overwhelm many guides experience in their months after getting certified
• And… being a Storybrand Guide is simply not for everyone. Make sure you do your homework and have some honest conversations before you take the leap!

For me, the pros (vastly) outweigh the cons. That is not the case for everyone though – so if you’re still on the fence after reading this, feel free to reach out to me directly – we can schedule a call if you have more questions, or I might be able to direct you to a guide in your industry, area, or type of business who can tell you more.