STORIES INCORPORATEDCorporate Storytellers

Harvard Business Review, Your Company's History as a Leadership Tool, by John T. Seaman Jr. and George David Smith

"A sophisticated understanding of the past is one of the most powerful tools we have for

shaping the future."

Your company’s story is compelling to all stakeholders.

Customers Employees

Investors Partners/Vendors/Suppliers

Community

A corporate history is a way to document, preserve and share your story.

We create beautiful corporate histories, and we make them engaging

through interactive, multimedia content.

Narrative Text

Photo Galleries

Interactive Photos

Interactive TimelinesAudio Clips

Video

Embedded Presentations

Ways to put your story to good use...

Culture Preservation“At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff — like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers — will happen naturally on its own.”

Zappos Blog, Your Culture is Your Brand, by Tony Hsieh

Leadership“History is a rich explanatory tool with which executives can make a case for change and motivate people to overcome challenges. Taken to a higher level,

it also serves as a potent problem-solving tool, one that offers pragmatic insights, valid generalizations, and meaningful perspectives.”

Harvard Business Review, Your Company's History as a Leadership Tool, by John T. Seaman Jr. and George David Smith

Sales, Marketing and Fundraising“Evolution has wired our brains for storytelling... We know that we can

activate our brains better if we listen to stories.”

LifeHacker The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains by Leo Widrich

Human Resources Onboarding and Training“Many groups use what sociologists call sense-making, the building of a narrative that

explains what the group is about. Jim Collins, a management expert and author of Good to Great, told me that successful human enterprises of any kind, from companies to

countries, go out of their way to capture their core identity. In Mr. Collins’s terms, they ‘preserve core, while stimulating progress.’”

The New York Times, The Stories That Bind Us, by Bruce Feiler

Our Story Personal History Beginnings The story of our company begins at an assisted living facility, where our co-founder, Lauryn Sargent, was visiting her husband’s 100-year-old grandmother. Lauryn was trying to figure out a fun activity to do with Grandma, who was mentally sharp but physically disabled. Lauryn realized that interviewing Grandma about her life story and then documenting that story in the form of a book would be just the thing!  The activity would be fun, therapeutic and a good mental exercise for Grandma. Not only that, but Grandma’s story would be preserved for generations to come! The bell went off in Lauryn’s head that many families might like this service for their loved ones, and that there might be a business opportunity in creating personal histories. She learned quickly that she was onto something: her entry into a business plan competition at George Washington University was the winner! At the time, Lauryn managed recruiting for a publicly-traded company in Washington, DC. Lauryn loved the world of corporate recruiting—and she had excelled at it for the previous eight years—but winning the business plan competition convinced her to leave her job to work on her new company, Stories Inherited, full-time. Her new company’s first personal history project was a hardcover book documenting the life of Helen, a beloved wife, mother, and grandmother who lives in Virginia. Stories Inherited was officially in business. Technology Becomes Part of the Company DNA Shortly after completing Helen’s story, Lauryn attended a Foster.ly networking event, where she found herself talking to a local entrepreneur. The local entrepreneur was intrigued by Lauryn’s business and suggested that Lauryn look into publishing her personal histories as interactive books to be viewed on the iPad. Lauryn quickly realized the potential that this technology offered; it meant that Stories Inherited personal histories could include audio and video clips and photo galleries in line with the text that Lauryn would write. Lauryn learned the software necessary to create an iBook and published an interactive personal history documenting the life of her grandmother, Maida. The interactive history featured text along with audio clips with Maida’s voice and even a video tour of the house in which Maida grew up. The Company Doubles in Head Count In the summer of 2012, Lauryn was browsing Foster.ly’s website when a new member’s profile popped up on the page. The new member’s name (Scott Thompson) and face looked familiar to Lauryn. Sure enough, Lauryn remembered that she had interviewed Scott about two and a half years earlier, when Scott had applied for a position at LSI, the company where Lauryn worked at the time. Though LSI did not offer Scott the job, Lauryn remembered being impressed by him. In fact, three months after their March 2010 interview, Lauryn had reached out to Scott with another job opening, only to find that he had already landed a position at NASDAQ OMX and was no longer on the job hunt. Lauryn decided to reach out to Scott in the summer of 2012, thinking that he may be a good fit to join Stories Inherited. The two discussed Stories Inherited at a DC Starbucks. Scott was immediately impressed by the quality of the products Lauryn had created, and he loved the idea of combining his love of entrepreneurship with his love of history (he had majored in history in his undergraduate studies at Tulane University before receiving his MBA). When Lauryn invited Scott to join Stories Inherited as a partner—pending completion of a six-month trial period—Scott excitedly agreed, as he had been seeking new opportunities that summer. Going Corporate At around the time that Lauryn was bringing Scott onboard, she landed a meeting with Elisabeth, the Executive Director of an assisted living facility in Hyattsville, Maryland. Lauryn was hoping that Elisabeth could introduce her to some residents who might be interested in Stories Inherited’s services. Impressed by the interactive personal history that Lauryn showed as a sample, Elisabeth asked Lauryn if Stories Inherited could create an interactive history of the assisted living facility to be displayed in the lobby as a marketing tool. Lauryn loved the idea of doing a corporate history and excitedly agreed. In September 2012, Stories Inherited’s first corporate contract was signed. The resulting product was truly innovative, boasting features like video footage of activities at the facility, audio testimonials from residents, interactive photo tours of the property, and an interactive glossary. Despite its rich features, the first corporate history was still modest compared to what was to come. In thinking further about the prospects for creating corporate histories and speaking to many business owners about the idea, Lauryn and Scott realized that they could provide serious value to companies by documenting corporate histories. They pledged to spend at least an equal amount of their time developing corporate customers as they would personal customers. Expanding Scope In November 2012, Lauryn attended an internship career fair at the University of Maryland. During her attempt to meet internship candidates, she met Ghermay, the founder and CEO of a DC-based technology company called New Light Technologies—also there to meet internship candidates. Ghermay, always willing to mentor startup companies in the DC area, engaged Stories Inherited in December 2012 to complete a corporate history of NLT. The robust interactive book pulled from 30 video-recorded interviews—featuring Ghermay, current and former NLT employees, industry colleagues, and even competitors—that Stories Inherited conducted. Stories Inherited created 25 original one-to-two-minute videos to intersperse through the narrative history of the 12-year-old business. Building on the features from Stories Inherited’s first corporate history project, Lauryn and Scott added multimedia organizational charts, interactive timelines, and embedded slide presentations. A New Brand In January 2013, Lauryn and Scott decided to accommodate corporate history customers under a sister brand, Stories Incorporated, and focusing the Stories Inherited brand on personal histories. The Stories Incorporated website launched that month.