They Asked for Storytelling. They bought a module

The strange economics of being the storytelling specialist

It usually starts well.

Someone asks for a storytelling program. We talk for an hour. By the end of that hour, I can usually tell them exactly what’s broken, and they can hear it. I send a proposal built around that one problem.

And then, silence.

I used to read that silence as a verdict. Too expensive. Too long. Missed something in the brief.

In enough cases now, that reading hasn’t held up. The price wasn’t the issue. We answered the brief, point by point. And sometimes, months later, I find out they went with a large leadership or strategy consultancy. A firm with a global footprint, a proven curriculum, and a name that shows up in every industry report.

Why they made the right call

I want to be fair about this, because it would be easy to call it unfair.

If the brief says “leadership communication program” or “storytelling training for senior executives,” then comparing me against a global leadership firm is exactly the right comparison. The buyer named the problem, found the people who fit that name, and picked the strongest one.

That’s careful procurement, doing what it’s supposed to do.

The interesting part is what was sitting underneath the label.

A label can be true and still tell you nothing.

A friend of mine studied at a small university in London. One professor there kept telling the class they’d all go on to join a Fortune company. It became a running joke.

Years later, my friend pointed out that the professor wasn’t wrong. A fair number of that batch did end up at Fortune 500 companies: McDonald’s, KFC, Starbucks.

Technically correct. And it told you nothing about what anyone actually meant.

Storytelling on a brief often works the same way. It’s true, in a sense. But the word is doing a lot of work, and nobody stops to ask which kind.

When I look back at the work, the real problem is almost always narrow and specific:

• A pitch that sounds like every other competitor.
• A change message that isn’t landing emotionally.
• A technical explanation that loses a buyer it should have won.

Each one is a storytelling problem in the truest sense. And each one gets filed, understandably, as a module inside a larger leadership or strategy engagement. The small, later chapter, when it should have been the main subject.

Why the economics are strange, not unfair

I say strange on purpose. Unfair would mean someone did something wrong. Nobody did.

The economics are strange because the comparison rewards the wrong kind of evidence.

A big firm’s proof is scale, breadth, and decades of track record. That proof is built to be seen and compared at the proposal stage, by a committee that has never met the people who’ll do the work.

A specialist’s proof is different. It’s a precise read on one narrow problem, shown in one conversation. That doesn’t turn into a number or a logo. On paper, it’s almost invisible.

So, the market ends up sorting on the wrong question at the exact moment it matters. Not “who understands this problem best?” but “whose competence is easiest to compare on paper?”

That isn’t a flaw in any buyer’s judgment. It’s how comparison works when one kind of evidence photographs well and the other doesn’t.

What the specialist’s evidence actually looks like

A founder reached out to me a few hours before an investor pitch. He wanted to run his story by me.

He told it well. Almost too well. A straight line from idea to traction, no bumps, no doubt.

So, I asked him one question: “What’s the hardest thing that happened in the last two years that you haven’t told anyone?”

He told me about the quarter he nearly ran out of cash. Sitting in his car after a meeting that went nowhere. He went home and rewrote his business model on a whiteboard in his living room. That rewrite is the product he sells today.

That was his story. It took one question to find it.

Try putting that on a proposal. You can’t. There’s no slide for “I’ll ask the question that finds the real story.” But that’s the whole job.

It reminds me of a scene in Made in India – A Titan Story. JRD Tata tells Xerxes Desai about the first elevators. They were slow, and people complained. Nobody could make them faster without tearing the building apart. So, someone put a mirror inside the lift. People looked at themselves instead of the floor numbers, and the complaints mostly stopped.

“Look for the mirror,” JRD tells him.

A standard program speeds up the elevator. It works on the thing everyone is complaining about. The specialist’s job is to look for the mirror. And “I’ll look for the mirror” is very hard to compare against a forty-page curriculum.

The quieter cost

There’s a second effect of all this, and it’s easier to miss because it doesn’t look like a lost deal. It looks like a disappointing result inside a deal that was won.

In one of my workshops, a woman at the back raised her hand after I’d finished a section on techniques for finding the stories. “But what if my work isn’t interesting?”

The room went quiet. A few people nodded.

That was the real barrier. Not technique. Not frameworks. The belief that her own work wasn’t worth telling. I asked her what she did. Procurement. “Spreadsheets and vendor calls,” she said. I asked if she had ever had any trouble with any vendor. Then she told me about the Diwali weekend she called seventeen suppliers across three states after one ghosted her before a launch, and found a small vendor in Tirunelveli at 11 PM on a Sunday. They’re still her supplier.

She had a story all along. What she didn’t have was anyone asking the right question.

Now picture that same room inside a large leadership program, where storytelling is Module 4 of 9. The technique gets taught. The module gets delivered. The box gets ticked. And the question she raised, the one that actually mattered, never gets asked.

That’s the quieter cost. The actual pitch, the actual announcement, the actual explanation that started the whole thing keeps failing the same way it did before. Nobody connects the two, because the engagement was completed. The broken thing was simply never reachable by a module designed to work the same way for every client.

Eighteen months later, the same complaint comes back in slightly different words. Waiting for someone to notice it was never fixed.

The irony in the numbers

A recent Draup study, featured in Forbes, found that 316,011 professional profiles list SQL as a skill. Only 15,093 list data storytelling. That’s about 21 people who can query the data for every one who can explain what it means.

The research calls it the “Execution Premium.” As AI takes over routine technical work, companies are paying more for people who can turn output into meaning.

So, here’s the strange part. The skill the market says is scarce and valuable is the same one that keeps getting bought as a line item inside something bigger.

What I’m doing about it

The answer isn’t to make my evidence look more like scale. That’s a losing game, and it would dilute the one advantage a specialist has.

The better answer is to make the specialist’s evidence visible earlier, before the brief gets written. Before someone types “storytelling training” or “leadership communication program” into the RFP.

If a buyer has already read something like this and suspects their real problem is narrower than the label they were about to use, the comparison changes shape before it starts.

That’s why I write about this openly. It isn’t a complaint about losing to bigger firms. That would waste everyone’s attention, including mine. It’s an observation about a real, structural problem: storytelling keeps getting bought as a module inside something else, when in many cases it should have been the main engagement.

No proposal, however well written, can change a comparison that was decided by the label on the brief before the proposal was ever read.

What I’m not saying

I’m not saying large leadership and strategy firms do bad work. Plenty of those engagements are exactly what they say they are, delivered well, by firms built for that scope.

My point is narrower. Some share of the work filed under “leadership communication” or “storytelling training” is really a narrative problem wearing a borrowed label. That work gets underserved when it’s folded into something bigger, no matter how well the bigger thing is delivered.

Why I’m saying it in public

The natural move is to keep an observation like this private. Share it with a colleague after another quiet loss. Don’t publish it where a prospect or a competitor might read it.

I think the opposite is right.

A private grievance changes nothing about how the next brief gets written, because the person writing it never sees it. A public one, read by even a few people before they write their next brief, might reach the exact moment where the mislabelling happens.

Before the RFP goes out, not after my proposal has already become one more column in a comparison it was never going to win.

If you’re about to write a brief with storytelling in it, stop and ask what that word is standing in for.

Then go look for the mirror.