Matt Ravden

what's your story?

Every organisation needs a story. It’s what motivates people to buy from you, encourages people to invest in you, and inspires people to join you. It’s the essence of who you are, why you exist and why you stand out from the crowd. It’s your DNA. Your source code. For story, read strategy. Read vision. Read purpose. They are all cut from a single cloth.
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And yet, how many businesses have really got their story nailed? Does it sing out through your website? Does it run seamlessly through everything you do and say, from videos through to investor decks? Can your staff articulate it and make it their own? If the answer is yes, congratulations! But if it’s no, you probably have the sense that the story is there … but you haven’t yet done it justice. You know what you’d like to be saying, but you’re struggling to articulate it in the right way.
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Often, the story is hidden in plain sight. It’s in the heads of the CEO, or the co-founders, but it hasn’t yet been hard-wired into a shareable narrative. Marketers today tend to be lead generators and data junkies rather than storytellers. So, it’s left to founders and CEOs, not only to be the visionaries, but to be the mouthpiece for the story. And that’s easier said than done.

How do I help?

I have an unusual ability to talk to CEOs (or founders, or other leaders) and get to the heart of the story through an engaged, interesting, journalistic conversation, or series of conversations. I quickly understand the context – what’s your purpose, what’s your competitive landscape, what are you trying to achieve – so I can challenge, empathise, put myself in your shoes, or the shoes of your staff / customers / investors.
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What you get is a written narrative that captures the essence of your source code. Who are we? What is our vision / mission / purpose? What’s our legacy – how do we want to be known? Why are we important?
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By encoding your DNA into a narrative, you have a reference point for all subsequent content and communications. You can infuse it into your website, your blogs, your investor decks, your corporate videos, your internal comms, your recruitment effort. It becomes an essential tool, not just for your marketing team but for your entire business.

Then what?

For some clients, the project might finish with the delivery of the narrative. But for others, we’ll have regular, short conversations, each one with a specific output, like a blog or some other thought-provoking piece that captures a part of the narrative in a compelling way. Or, some time after the first engagement, it might be necessary to refresh the original. There might also be a need to train the storyteller or build a legion of good storytellers. As you’ll see from some of my testimonials below, one of the most significant benefits of this work is that it often wakes organisations up to the imperative, and the power, of storytelling. I’m happy to be a part of that skills transfer.

testimonials

If your story doesn’t resonate, you’re going nowhere. I’ve been working in strategy for 30 years and Matt is the best I’ve ever worked with.

My clients to date have typically been B2B tech businesses; sometimes very early stage (pre-funding), sometimes much more established (VC-backed). They’ve all shared the challenge of finding a way to tell their story in a way that captures the magic of what they are doing, and what they want to achieve.

“You can deploy all the marketing tech in the world but if your story doesn’t resonate with your market you’re going nowhere fast. I’ve been in amongst marketing strategy and communications for 30 years and Matt is the best I have ever worked with. He is the master.”

Keith Wallington | Chairman and Investor in B2B SaaS businesses

"The better we got at talking about our proposition with our industry, the further we seemed to get from being able to talk about it with the rest of the world. This was creating friction on scaling, pitching, onboarding and, increasingly, talking to the press. Matt took us back to our core, and helped us find a narrative path that didn't shirk the complexity but illustrated our solution as an inevitable antidote to a critical global problem. We even enjoyed the process!"

Jo-Jo Hubbard | CEO & Co-Founder, Electron

"At Arkivum one of the major challenges we face is to articulate the value of a complex product in an often already complex market. Matt has been able to craft a narrative which both remains grounded in the operational realities of the sector while also pushing a more aspirational narrative. The story he has created for us has added great value across our content including the website, brochures, and sales presentations"

Tom Lynam | Marketing Director, Arkivum

“Matt has an incredible way of drawing the stories out of your head and recreating them in a way that you would never have quite done it yourself and yet feel like you have. Matt created the base vision narrative from which we developed our website and other pieces of collateral. We then expanded on this work to create a series of blogs to bring the narrative to life. Matt is what I refer to as a story whisperer and it’s a truly unique skill.”

Alan Kenny | Learn.Do.Get.

“At Balabit we had a major misalignment causing lack of engagement. Marketing was telling a story of a distant future, developers were working on the next idea, sales were using outdated slide decks, so we had constant conflict internally. Under Matt’s leadership - through a series of iterations - we translated the vision into a story, resulting in a portfolio strategy explaining to both the market, investors and our own colleagues how our puzzles come together and how we fit into the bigger scheme of cyber security. The changes went down even to details like website messaging rewrite, challenger sales representation in sales scripts, product naming simplification and so on.”

Zoltán Györkő | CEO and co-founder, Balabit

“Matt helped us craft our strategy as a story, enabling us to look around corners, clarify and shape our own thinking about the future in a narrative form.”

Peter Bauer | CEO and Co-founder, Mimecast

“At 3radical we found ourselves in a position of having slightly different stories for different audiences across our geographies, and we needed to re-inforce our central, unifying narrative. From day one, Matt was urging us to tell a simpler story and lead with one key message. Now we’ve created our own industry term - Earned Data - and we’re rapidly establishing its relevance and importance globally. Matt has been integral to this shift in the way we tell our story.”

David Eldridge | Chairman, 3radical

"At Redstor we had been competing in a very crowded market, surrounded by giants, talking the dry language of traditional data backup and restore. Matt ran a series of workshops with us and helped unlock a real hunger and willingness to be more disruptive with our storytelling and positioning so we could stand out from the crowd. He encouraged us to focus more on our vision to give businesses the same on-demand access to data that we’ve come to expect as consumers from streaming services. The work was a game changer for us and we’re now on a very different path with our storytelling.”

Paul Evans | CEO, Redstor

"Developing both a company and category narrative is not an easy task. As a business, we were struggling to create something that was both true to our founder’s view and that everyone could buy into. This is where Matt came along, to help navigate, guide and challenge, allowing us to inject momentum and finally complete a project that had stalled. Matt was able to successfully build rapport across the business even in a virtual world, and we greatly benefited from his expertise. The end result was fantastic, and we are already benefiting from it with both customers and analysts."

Lauren King | CMO, Peak