Episode 01: Backstory of Backstory | What's My Story? | Why Should You Care? | Does Storytelling Actually Work in the Investment Biz (Spoiler: Yes, It Does)

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In this episode, I discuss:

Why you need to work on your backstory, the theory behind the backstory framework, how to use the framework, and common mistakes to avoid.

I cover the 5 most frequently asked questions about backstory:

What is your backstory and why should we care?
What is the theory behind storytelling?
What makes a good backstory?
Does storytelling actually work in the investment biz (Spoiler: Yes, it does)
What are the biggest mistakes people make in storytelling?

To get more storytelling tips and listen to stories of the people behind the portfolios, subscribe to Billion Dollar Backstory on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Below is an AI-generated transcript and therefore it may contain errors.

You know those moments when you're at a work event, maybe a networking cocktail party, maybe a sales meeting, and someone says, tell me about yourself, you know, give us a little backstory and then you break into a slight sweat because while you obviously know your backstory, you lived it, you don't know how to tell it.

Maybe every time you do it sounds different, or you just kind of clam up and stammer out some bullet points. You know, I worked here from this year to that year, then I went here from this year to that year and blah, blah, blah. The person smiles and nods in their head, sends some nicety about a place you worked and then moves on.

Me too. That was me too. And yet, while that was happening to me, I was building a career, a reputation, a business, telling the stories of other people and raising a whole lot of money on Wall Street. 8 billion dollars that led to 30 billion in follow on assets under management for new funds, startup firms for founders against the odds.

I mean, I can tell a mean backstory, just not my own. And you know what? The same was true for those founders. I was out there telling their stories, but if you asked them, they were just like you. And. Bumbling stumbling. Not powerful at all. I'm starting with this very odd line of thinking for a very important reason.

We're all in the same boat. You. Me, the founders, you'll hear from on this podcast, the experts who will give us advice. No one is 100% confident at telling their backstory in the beginning. No one kills it out of the gate. And that, my friends, is the first rule of this backstory club. We all start at the beginning.

It's what we do. How we use our words, how we tap into our authenticity, why we're driven to use story to shape outcomes. That's what matters. We start from the bottom. Now we're here, or we will be together. So today I wanna share with you the five questions that I am most frequently asked about Backstory.

This is basically the backstory of back. Because we all might be thinking these questions and you might be surprised by the answers. I also want to share this as a way to encourage you to start exploring your own backstory. , whether it's just with yourself in solitude or with other peers in your industry or with your friends or family.

These five questions set the foundation for why working on your own backstory is important. I'm gonna walk you through the questions and some of the key points I want. You to take away so that you have the theory behind the framework, a glimpse of how to use the framework, and you can learn from the common mistakes in backstory work so you can avoid them, or at least recognize them when they happen and learn from them the next time.

So here are the five most frequently asked questions I get around backs. Question number one, what is your backstory and why should we care at all? ? Okay, so I love this question. It basically goes to the beginning of, of the conversation here. I love this question because it gives me a chance to show the power of story on the story I know best.

My own, and I say that with a pretty healthy dose of humility because it took me a very long time to be able to tell my story. As I said, I was much more comfortable telling the stories of others and much less comfortable telling my own story. For years. But here's the thing. I saw backstory and storytelling in general work for them.

I saw it raise billions of dollars for these founders of investment boutiques. I saw it literally change their businesses and now jumps up to today. I am seeing firsthand the power of story is changing my business too. I mean, my goodness, it's changing my life. So let me tell you my backstory. I'm gonna go back to the beginning.

My name is Stacy Havener. I'm the founder of Havener Capital Partners, a sales and marketing agency that helps investment boutiques grow. In my career, I've raised over 8 billion. That has led to over 30 billion in follow on a u m for new funds. Startups, investment boutiques against the odds, and we're just getting started.

Our mission is to level the playing field in asset management, or at least put a dent in it by helping boutiques raise a hundred billion this decade now. on paper. None of what I just said makes any sense. I'm a blue collar kid from a working class town who got the wrong degree from the wrong school, and I'm a woman.

I didn't grow up with dreams of working on Wall Street. I wanted to be a college professor, but soccer changed everything. I went to Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, Connecticut. My hometown at the time, and my freshman year was the first year they had a women's varsity soccer team. So to say that we were under.

Is a huge understatement. We were the bad news bears , but when I left four years later, we were ranked third in the nation in division three, and it was my first experience building something as a founder. obviously has direct ties to what I do today as a day job, but that's just one part of the soccer story.

Soccer played another part too. I majored in English literature. I was a poet, uh, a writer, a storyteller, and I had dreams of becoming a literature professor, but I had paid my way through undergrad and I was going to have to pay my. For grad school too. Um, my high school soccer coach and I had kept in touch over the years because I was basically still home and he would come to my games.

He was an incredible father figure in my life. And while I thought he was just a soccer coach, he apparently had a day job, which was running a billion dollar small cap equity shop, a boutique asset management. and he knew my situation and he offered me a job. He said, you know, you can come here, work here.

You can save some money for a couple years, and then you can go back to grad school. He wanted to launch a fund for the first time and he was like, you can help me do that. So I'm like, coach. That's all well and good, except I know nothing. About stocks. My dad was a math teacher, so I liked math, but again, poetry and writing, that was really my jam.

He was like, I'll teach you. So I did. I went there. I learned aun. I learned how to launch a fund, how to structure. I learned everything that goes into it. And then basically once the fund was launched, she handed me, this is gonna. Me here, but whatever he handed me, which was the basically a list, the s and p Blue book, and he was like, let's figure out how to raise some money.

Here's a let of start, you know, calling people. And I went to what I knew best. I, I was way out over my skis. I was way out of my comfort zone. I didn't know that there was a way air quotes to, to raise money. So I went to my comfort zone, which was stories. We raised 500 million in two years. I was hooked. I never went back to get my degree.

I felt like for a girl who loves words, I had found a home in an industry filled with men who love numbers, and I built a career telling stories of these boutiques, these underdogs, and helping them go from the beginning to billions. . I mean, it makes total sense in some weird way and, and so the backstory is important because this is more than a job for me.

It's really a mission, it's a passion, it's a calling because standing for underdogs is very near and dear to my heart in so many ways. I was one. . So that's my backstory. I share it with you, not only because I'm the host of this podcast and I want you to get a chance to know me, but also because the more we hear people tell their backstory, the more it helps us get in touch with our own.

And that's what I'm hoping this podcast is gonna do. It's not just let me tell you how to do the things. It's also, let me show you, let. let you hear other people share their backstory, because just in that process, you are going to find more competence in authentically telling your own. So with that, let's move on to question two.

question two, most frequently asked question I get around backstory is what is the theory behind storytelling? Like, why, why should we even believe in this at all? Okay. Very fair question. I would say the theory isn't even about story. It's about human behavior. . To me that's at the root of everything and, and especially storytelling.

So human behavior is, scientific Studies show that 95% of decision making is subconscious. Now this is not a stat that anybody in the investment industry likes. Or probably wants to believe, but this is a human thing. This is not an investment thing. This is not another different industry thing. It's a human thing.

And if we layer down and think this through, if the decision making is happening in our subconscious, that's emotion. And the way to connect emotionally is through story. And that goes back to the beginning of. , the storytelling is the art, but the theory is based on science. So in the investment space or any industry really, um, when you launch something, people ask you, you know, what are you building?

There's that question, who do you wanna be when you grow up and you look around as a founder and you, you look for. The other firms that are successful and you, you point to them and say, I wanna be them. That big successful firm over there in the investment world, you might point to BlackRock, they're the biggest.

But that could happen in any, any industry. You, you see the bigs and you envision a future that looks a lot like them, and so then your rational mind goes, okay, great. Well if I wanna be them, then I should use their playbook. . And the problem is that playbook doesn't work for you. You can't use their playbook.

It's a playbook for the big, it's a, it's not for you. It's not gonna work. And so now you have all these startups and specialists trying to use the wrong playbook and banging their head on their desk going, why isn't this working? It doesn't play to the strengths of a startup. Or a founder led specialist.

The analogy I often give here is David and Goliath. Again, we just talked about underdogs. I mean, David is the, is the pen ultimate underdog who beat Goliath? The pen, ultimate powerhouse. And how did he do it? Did he use Goliath's playbook, which was, you know, artillery and armor and all this heavy equipment and, I don't know, probably master plans, documents, a whole squad of people.

David beat Goliath with a slingshot because it just so happens that David was a real badass with the slingshot. And if he had tried to beat Goliath with Goliath playbook, would he have won? Definitely not. Instead he went to his specialty. That's how he beat Goliath. And so we as boutiques need to find our slingshot and it's not going to be using the playbook of some big, one of the reasons the Big's playbook doesn't work as well for boutiques is big's downplay people, individuals, I mean, really our whole industry does the investment industry prioritizes numbers and data.

Over words and stories. It values performance over people. And that's wrong because every business is a people business. Even the investment industry, people do business with people. People invest with people, and people connect with people. Story is where it starts. All right. Let's go to question three.

What makes a good backstory? Great question. Very tactical. Before we go to what makes a good backstory, let's start with stories in general. Let's go to the movies, right? Classic books. Let's go to Joseph Campbell's, the Hero's. screenwriter use these classic story arcs, but they can apply to any story, not just movies, not just books.

And if you Google this, which I encourage you to do, go down the rabbit hole on all the story arcs, all the frameworks. Find something that resonates with you. . There are a lot of different frameworks for how to write a good story, and they have varying levels of complexity. Some have five phases, some have seven, some have 12.

I'm going to break it down to three. Super simple. Okay, here we go. Here's the story arc. You started here, something happened, some obstacle or conflict, and you ended up over here, changed that. I'll say it again. There's some ordinary world that you're starting in. You encounter a conflict or opposing force, and you emerge changed.

That is the makings of a great story, and you can layer in the rising action as the conflict builds and the following action as you resolve the conflict. But any good story is a journey, a transformation. Every good story also has high stakes. In other words, would you have cheered for Rocky if he was the favorite?

Like he had the best trainers and the best record, and every time he stepped into the ring, he just won every match. You're like, great. Uh, this guy's crushing it. And what's the point of this movie? Like we can't cheer. , right? I mean, it's just like, why are we watching this or Liam Neon and taken, what if his daughter wasn't kidnapped by terrorists, but she was just like at the mall and forgot to call home?

What? Why do we care about this movie at all? We need steaks. We need a reason to care. We need a common shared experience, even if we haven't lived. Being an underdog. Fear of losing someone we love or losing something important, a journey, a life-changing adventure, whatever that is, it needs to have stakes and it needs to tap into emotion.

Yeah, emotion. I know even in the investment space, Every portfolio manager is cringing right now. I'm not saying you need to pour your heart out in meetings. I mean, you can. I'm here for that. But you do need to bring some vulnerability and authenticity to the conversation. You can shy away from matters of the heart, but, but your story isn't gonna resonate as well.

So let's take an example. If you spent the bulk of your career, Working for a great mentor, maybe an investing legend, someone who took you under their wing and for years you were beside them learning, investing, building a company, and then something happens. They retire, they pass away, they leave the company to someone else.

There's a change. There's a lot of emotion around. and no one believes you. If you say there isn't, because it's just not true, right? I mean, you don't spend the bulk of your career working for someone building something amazing and not have feelings about that, be it good or bad. So you can share what you loved about one part of your journey and what frustrated you about another part.

Give people a reason to care and to connect with. . That's vulnerability. That's authenticity. Has nothing to do with your personal life. It's just getting to the messy parts of any story and vulnerability and authenticity. These concepts are, are important as you raise capital, and they are a daily practice.

But there's another element that matters in story. , it's really important. I'm blathering on, and I don't care because I want you to have all this. So who is the hero of the story?

There's a sort of asterisk on that, which is there can only be one. There can only be one hero. So in 99% of the stories you. Your client, your prospect, your investor. The other person is the hero. And you are not the hero. You are the guide. Okay? They are Luke Skywalker. You are Yoda. They are Harry Potter.

You are Dumbledore. They're Katniss. You're Haymitch. Okay. Almost all the stories you tell are are not about you. You aren't the hero. Why? Because people don't care about you. They care about themselves. They care about what you can do to help them. So they're the hero except for one story, which is your backstory.

And if you imagine the movies. because the movies are so much of storytelling, and if you think of any movie where there's a hero and a guide set up. So let's take the last one. We did Hunger Games, Katniss and Haymitch. So in a movie, the Hero does not choose their guide. , they're just handed the guide, right?

Kanas didn't have a lineup of 10,000 potential guides in the movie, and she had to pick one, right? She just got handed Haage. But in the investment industry, in the asset management industry, there's tons of funds you could. There's tons of boutique asset managers and not boutiques, bigs. Every flavor active has a, there are a ton of choices for whom you're gonna pick as your guide.

There's a conscious decision that needs to be made. around who you're gonna choose, and that's why this part of storytelling, the backstory is so important. Your prospects have a choice and the backstory helps them choose you. That's why the vulnerability and authenticity are so important because they aren't just buying a fund or a product or a service or whatever industry you're in.

They are hiring a human. They are choosing a guide. Okay. My gosh, that was a lot. I basically blacked out there. So let's recap framework of a good story. Just three things that you need in the story itself. Started here, encountered a challenge, emerged changed. Perfect. But you need to have a conflict. You need high stakes.

You need a motion and vulner. And you need to know you aren't the hero in most stories. You are the guide. Accept your backstory, and you are the only one who can be the hero of that. You want people to leave a meeting with you and think, I am cheering for that guy or that gal. So tell them the movie version.

Make them literally be reaching for the popcorn, saying, I'm here for this and I'm cheering. That's the vibe you want when you tell your backstory. Okay. Question four, does it work? Does storytelling work? No. For real. Does it work, ? Yes, it works for real. Okay, next question. No, I'm, I'm serious. It works. , and I know that investment people speak numbers, so let me give you some examples of stories at work that I've personally been involved with.

Okay, ready? I've helped a new fund go from $1 million in a u m to 1 billion in a u m in three years, raised 300 million for a new boutique with bottom decile performance. Raised over 500 million for a boutique and closed their flagship strategy in three years. Doubled the size of a boutique asset manager with one.

got a 10 million commitment after one phone call secured 60 million in seed capital for a new interval fund before launch, secured 25 million in seed capital for a new mutual fund before launch. I could go on. The point here is, yes, it works, and I get why people doubt it. I mean here we are in the investment industry filled with just wicked smart people with all these advanced degrees and bonkers experience, and here comes this chick, me saying, hold the phone.

Stories are the thing stories before sales, and I'm taking everything that people have been taught and flipping it on its head like a total disruptive rebel. I get it. I get it. I'm not saying story's the only thing. There's still a whole bunch of due diligence that needs to get done. There's quant research, operational due diligence.

There's a lot. It's not that the, it's not that the quantitative and the numbers aren't important. It's that they aren't the most important and they aren't the only important thing. words and people matter. Stories matter, and I get why that sounds crazy, and maybe I would be a doubter too if I hadn't seen it happen again and again and again.

So when I shared my backstory, I mentioned, it took me a long time to realize I was doing something different, and it did. It took me a long time. to unpack what I was doing because I was clearly doing the same things over and over again as I was raising this money. I just didn't know what it was. Over time, I was able to codify that I, I put it into a blueprint.

We call it our billion dollar blueprint. It's built for boutiques and it's repeatable and it's systematized, but. If someone said to me, yep, Stacy, I see all of that and I get it. I see your blueprint, awesome sauce. It's amazing. But I only have time for one thing. Like I'm gonna do one thing out of this whole B blueprint.

What should I do? I would say get your stories straight and I mean, get 'em right. And start with your backstory. The whole blueprint that we use at Haer is built around storytelling. It's the greatest, most underappreciated asset, and it's all inside you. , you are looking for growth. You're looking for asset growth.

If you're a boutique asset manager, a wealth manager, you're looking for career growth or a board seat or a new job or whatever it is that you're looking for, typically you look externally, you look outside yourself and say, yeah, I wanna grow. So it's out there, the key to it all, but it's not. It's internal.

It's the growth starts inside you. and stories shape outcomes. They allow you to write your future. So use your words . You'll be amazed, I promise. All right, question five. Last question. What is the biggest mistake you see in story in storytelling? That's a great. I'm all about learning from mistakes. So this one, this isn't a mistake per se, but I wanna share it.

To go back to the first rule of the Backstory Club, we all start at the beginning. We all start at the bottom. Somebody cue Drake. Okay? There are a lot of challenges, but um, typically for us, when we are working with a portfolio manager or founder, , we all know what the psychographics of a portfolio manager are, right?

They are they happy to go do sales and marketing? Not really. I mean, are they happy to even step out from behind their Bloomberg? Not really. Stories and words. This is not their comfort zone. So when we say, Hey, we wanna talk about stories and we're gonna use storytelling to help you raise money, this is a huge ask for.

And when we work with fund managers, what's really interesting is when we ask them to tell their story, you know, we say you've made this decision, decision to launch a company, which is no small decision. You know, if you launched your own firm, what was your journey like? What was your path to get here? I mean, they literally look like they're gonna pass.

I, I mean, they go white. They don't know how to answer it. They, they're like pale, okay. They get very uncomfortable and. . Really what they're looking for when they start talking is, how do I get back to my comfort zone, which is back to the portfolio, back to the markets, back to the numbers. Portfolio managers are most comfortable with numbers.

Their unique ability is investing in markets, not storytelling. . So what happens is the first time we do storytelling with them, they are so uncomfortable, visibly uncomfortable because we're asking them to do something they've never been asked before. They've spent their entire career being told no one cares about them.

And by the way, this is obviously not their language. And as I shared with you, whenever you get nervous, you go to your comfort zone. So if you're in the investment bi. that they're gonna go to their portfolio. How can I get back to that? How can I get back to the markets and the data and the stats? And they really don't wanna talk about themselves, their values, their philosophies, sort of the qualitative stuff.

So when we start working with managers, I prefer to do those calls with the portfolio manager slash founder without anybody else. because sometimes if there's an audience, it's even harder for them to get in touch with these stories with authenticity. So they practice just telling it to me. And if I really feel that we're struggling, like we're not getting anywhere, I can't find the story, I can't find a thread to pull.

Um, there's a big unlock that you can use, which is I ask them to tell me about their. Tell me a story about your mentor, and it typically brings them from their head to their heart. And once you get them functioning in the heart part, so to speak, then they're able to talk a little bit more freely. So this question was about what's the biggest mistake?

So to speak, and I don't, this isn't a mistake. I think what I'm sharing with you here is this is a natural block to getting in touch with your story, and it's okay. You're not gonna nail it on the first try. I think the mistake is to have this pressure on you of. Like, go tell your story and you're gonna nail it.

You're not, and you know what? If there's people around, it's going to be even more challenging for you. So find one person or practice by yourself, right? Because, uh, you gotta get in touch with the sort of heart elements. And for most people in this industry, you're gonna be stuck in the intellectual, rational parts.

Now, what I don't hear from clients of haven or is things like stories aren't gonna work because if they said that, I'd be like, well, we are not the group for you. I am sure there is somebody else who likes to, you know, fling fact sheets around and throw funds at a wall and see what sticks. But that is not us.

So we are brave enough to attract people to our roster who believe in the power of. and our, our, on the opposite side, our repel, if you will, is if you don't believe in it. We're not your people. So by virtue of the fact that that managers are coming to us, that, that they're on our roster, they believe enough in story and are open enough to try it.

But that doesn't mean it's easy. . We'll talk more about attract and Rappel another time. I could totally riff on that right now, but I'm not going to. So big picture you have it. You've got the five questions that I'm most often asked about backstory and storytelling in general. You've started to peel back the layers on what works in storytelling, and specifically why backstory is.

You've got the confirmation that yes, it indeed does work, right? It's worth it to try this and lean into it, and you're starting to understand what makes a good story in the common mistakes. You've also got at least one example of a backstory now, because I shared mine with. And I mean, just wait to see what we've got in store for you.

On this podcast, you are going to hear so many fabulous stories of people behind the portfolios, ones who have made it and raised billions of dollars and built some of the most successful investment firms. as well as the next gen, the emerging managers, the ones who got next. And we're gonna hear from experts in sales and marketing their backstories and how story has helped them shape outcomes in business and in life.

So the question I have for you now is, what would it look like for you if you built upon this learning? , what can you do today to start leaning into story? Maybe you put a block of time on your calendar to start working on your backstory. Or maybe you ask clients or peers or people you love to tell you their backstory.

Just, you know, throw it out there it out. Like, Hey, tell me your story. How did you get here? How did you build your business? How did you become, insert whatever their career. These questions are the basis for powerful business changing conversations, but they're also the basis for powerful life-changing conversations, and it's hard work, but it's work that matters because people matter.

You matter. So high five till next time.