"So what do you do?" someone asks, and you give them something like: "I help B2B founders build their personal brand on LinkedIn." Clean answer. Accurate. And the kind of sentence nobody remembers five minutes later.
I know, because it happened to me on my own podcast.
I was 10 minutes into a conversation with my guest Renee Lynn Frojo, a journalist and brand storytelling strategist, when she paused and said, "Would you like to be a client of mine for a minute?" And then she flipped the interview on me.
She started with the kind of questions most interviewers ask. What I was working on, who I helped, and where the work showed up. I gave the answers I always give: founders and execs, LinkedIn, visibility, the people with the goods who can't get seen. Fourteen years of executive communications. I love the work.
She kept going anyway. "But WHY do you love it?" she asked. "Why does it matter to YOU?"
That's when I stopped.
Within three more questions, I wasn't talking about LinkedIn anymore.
I was back in 2016, working in Taiwan for a virtual makeup app. My role was marketing comms, but a piece of it meant live-streaming lipstick sales: applying makeup in front of my phone while hundreds of strangers watched. I was using my Mandarin, using my marketing background. And something about it didn't fit, though I couldn't quite explain why at the time. I felt my impact on the world was limited as I wasn’t doing the kind of work that felt meaningful to me.
This is me back in my makeup live-streaming days, circa 2017
What kept coming to me was my nana, who had passed away that year. Not disapproving, exactly. More like she was seeing me. I could feel her thinking, "Christine, you're so talented. Do you really just want to sell lipstick online?" I quit not long after. I moved into marketing leadership in earlier-stage startups, and over the next few years, I landed where I am now, helping founders who have the goods but can't get noticed by the right people.
The strange thing is that the story was always there. I'd told it at dinner parties for years. I'd just never once connected it to my work on LinkedIn, because I'd been leading with the WHAT for so long (the service, the channel, the outcomes I could point to) that I forgot there was a WHY underneath it that someone could actually lean into.
What Renee calls your Premise
Renee does this for a living. She spent years as a journalist before she built a brand storytelling practice, and that training is why she can pull things out of people they've never said out loud.
She told me about one interview she did where her guest went quiet, then said, "I don't think I can publish this. I'm not ready for that story to be shared yet." It wasn't a gotcha moment. She'd just asked him the kind of question most of us have been trained to avoid asking.
What she's looking for with those questions is your premise: the argument behind everything you do. It's the working thesis your entire body of work is quietly proving, whether you've named it or not.
Simon Sinek's is "Start With Why."
Brené Brown's is "Vulnerability is courage."
Apple's is "Think different."
These aren't taglines somebody slapped on later. They're arguments, and everything those people produce is another piece of evidence for the same one.
Most founders I talk to don't have a premise. They have one somewhere inside them, usually, but nobody has ever sat across from them and asked the questions that surface it.
I see this pattern in my own client work. The founders who actually break through are the ones who already know why they do this work beyond the paycheck, and are willing to say it out loud with specific examples to back it up. Some still struggling haven't named their deeper why yet, or they have, and they don't trust it belongs in public.
Renee is careful about virality, and understandably so. She's watched founders chase it, win it, and end up with thousands of followers attached to a business that doesn't convert.
But I think when the premise is clear, virality becomes a multiplier. I help my clients go viral all the time. The ones who turn it into real business impact have viral posts that are another piece of evidence for the argument they were already making.
Why this matters right now
When anyone with a ChatGPT tab open can generate a LinkedIn post about their industry in 30 seconds, the WHAT is officially a commodity. "I help companies with X" could have been written by any of your competitors, probably while they were half-listening on a Zoom call.
The story underneath it, the version of you that ended up doing this work instead of something else, is the one thing that can't be manufactured. At this point, it might be the only moat left.
The 4 P’s of finding your story
The way Renee builds the premise is from the bottom up, not the top down. She asks layers of "why" until the person hits something they weren't planning to say. Then she looks for what she calls the four Ps underneath.
Point of view. How you actually think about this work, versus how your field talks about it.
Process. The approach you use to solve this problem that doesn't look like how everyone else solves it, and the experiences that shaped it.
Problem. What you solve, the unique way you solve it, and why it's worth solving right now.
Personality. The "why me" of all of it. Why you're the one who should be doing this, not somebody with a similar offer.
She's listening for the moment your work stopped feeling like a choice.
For me, it was that office in Taiwan with a lipstick in my hand. I don't think selling lipstick is beneath anyone. I just knew, the way my nana's imagined face knew, that I was built to do something else. And I'd told that story at dinner parties for years without ever bringing it anywhere near my work.
The line I hear most often from clients when I suggest they share something like this is, "Yeah, but I don't have a story." Renee hears it constantly too, and her answer is the part of our conversation I keep coming back to:
"Everyone has a unique life in a unique order with a unique set of experiences that has never happened before in the history of the planet. When someone says 'I don't have a story,' what they're really saying is 'I'm afraid my story doesn't matter.'"
The fear of sharing it is usually the signal that there's something worth sharing.
Next time someone asks what you do
Pay attention to what comes out of your mouth. If it sounds like a LinkedIn headline (clean, accurate, forgettable), ask yourself what you're leaving out. Then go one "why" deeper. And one more. And one more.
Keep those ideas flowing,
-Christine
The latest episode of Marketers Do Coffee with Renee is live.
Rene walks through her whole process of extracting stories, including the Kindle Scribe hack she uses to catch stories in the moment and how she gets even her most private clients to share the tender stuff without panicking.
Watch or listen on: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
Learn more about my work at Orchard Strategy