What is an origin story?
The origin story for your business is its backstory - the things that happened before your client is now encountering your business. The term is borrowed from literature, and particularly from comics, where origin stories typically explain how a particular character got their superpowers.
This really points up one of the most potent elements of origin stories for solopreneurs. Your origin story illustrates your superpowers - the exact thing that you want your potential clients to understand about you.
For this reason, if you’re only going to tell one story about your business, this is the one I’d recommend, out of all the different kinds of stories you can tell in a business context.
And, superpowers apart, it makes sense that origin stories are so popular - we all want to understand why and how something happened. On the macro scale, all cultures and religions have origin stories, from the Christian God creating the world in seven days in Genesis to the belief of the central African Bushongo tribe that the world was vomited up by a god called Bumba. On a micro scale, we like to know the journeys other people took to get to where they are now.
If you’re the founder of a small business, there are many different angles you can take to telling your origin story. For instance:
you can tell the story of the nuts and bolts of how you started this business
or the story of the ‘inciting incident’ that inspired you to go into business in the first place
or the struggles you had when you were first starting to get established (we all like a David and Goliath tale…).
But one story that is highly personal, often memorable, and can be easy for others to identify with, is the story of how what you loved doing as a child is expressed in your business now. We all have vivid, sensory, childhood memories, which means your story is likely to resonate with your readers, perhaps triggering some of their own memories from that time.
Also, it helps to show how well-suited you are to your business - these are skills you’ve been honing for your whole life, not just something you have studied for the last year. In fact, they’re your superpowers.
An Origin Story Example
You probably won't be surprised to hear that reading, writing and stories have been part of me since my very earliest memories.
As a small child I used to wedge myself under the footwell of the desk in my room so that I could read undisturbed (it meant my younger brother couldn't see me when he peered round my bedroom door, hoping to persuade me to play racing cars with him) and I created tiny books and magazines (at this point the positions switched with my brother and me, as I tried and failed to persuade him to contribute stories or pictures for my magazines).
The worlds within books often seemed more real to me than the physical world around me (and almost invariably more interesting).
I saw reading, writing and playing imaginary games based on the books I was reading as part of one big continuum - all equally creative and valid activities - I think it's one of the sorrows of adulthood that this changes.
My childhood self would be delighted to know that I pulled off my ambition of getting paid to read (and even more impressed that I get to eat unlimited quantities of chocolate at the same time).
All those years of soaking in stories are what I draw on every day in my work now. I didn't know I was putting in an apprenticeship, but I was.
Decades spent reading, first for pleasure, then for my undergraduate and postgraduate Literature degrees, then for publishing companies where I worked as an editor (quite apart from my student jobs in bookshops and libraries), have meant that words and stories are my currency - they’re the lens through which I see the world.
Understanding stories, joining the dots to create meaning from stories, shaping and editing other people’s stories, has seen me through my whole working life. From editorial jobs in publishing, to running a nationwide reader development programme for a library service, to running a children’s book festival, to becoming a book coach and, more recently, a messaging coach and copywriter, words and stories are the common thread that’s woven through the fabric of all my work.
This lifelong focus on stories is what makes me different from most other messaging coaches and copywriters. It’s my secret sauce, my superpower - and it’s something that most of my clients respond to and resonate with. But of course, if I didn’t tell my origin story, they wouldn’t know about it.
What's always been true about you? How is it expressed in your day to day life now? Try journaling about this for a while - what are all the ways that what you loved as a child are expressed through what you do now as an adult?
If you’d like my help to uncover your origin story, that’s pretty much my favourite thing to do! Unlock Your Message is my 1:1 programme that uncovers the stories at the heart of your business so we can put your secret sauce into words.