Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Stephanie Judd. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Wolf & Heron helps people increase their impact at work by training them to be influential storytellers. We typically work with sales teams to identify and refine personal and professional stories they can use in the sales process to build rapport, establish trust, and communicate the value of their product or service in terms that anyone can understand and be inspired by.

We’re special in two ways. The first is that, unlike many other storytelling companies, we focus on storytelling specifically from the point of view of influence. We looked at research related to behavior change, decision making, biases, habit development, information processing, employee engagement, etc. and laid that next to what we know about storytelling to develop our perspective. We’re also special in that the design of our programs and products are all informed by this same expertise in engagement and inspiration. Our Influential Storytelling workshop is highly interactive and facilitated by change management experts, so participants invariably describe how they are changed personally and professionally as a result of having experienced it.

Alright, Stephanie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Some of the most interesting parts of our journey emerge from areas where we believe something that most people in our industry do not – do you have something like that?

A critical quality of a story that is truly influential is that it creates a physio-emotional experience for the audience. I often get push-back from clients—especially those in data-heavy industries—that emotions have no place in business, and it’s the data that matters.

But emotions do make a difference. They’re what give that data soul. Just recently I was training a salesperson at a company that provides software to financial firms for managing investment portfolios. She focused on touting the technical features of the software to her clients instead of the experiences and values these features can offer. One feature was the real-time availability of all the investments summary data via a one-click dashboard. Her sales presentation included a slide with a bullet list of all the different data that would be available for fast decision making when the time came.

After coaching the salesperson on Influential storytelling, she told a story about a time when she had to make a split-second decision in the middle of Target while wrangling three kids under 5. In her story she shared the value of real-time information that was available at her fingertips to help her with her decision, and the peace of mind that offered her. That personal, emotionally-driven story was much more effective at communicating the value of the dashboard than the bullet list in her slide presentation ever was.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Kara and I knew each other long before we ever thought of the idea of being entrepreneurs, let alone business partners. We both attended the University of Michigan as graduate students at the Erb Institute, where we pursued both an MBA and a Masters of Natural Resources and the Environment. Because we were in this smaller dual-degree program together, we were friendly to each other, but not really friends.

Upon graduating, both of us ended up recruiting at a change management consulting firm. Throughout the interview, offer, and negotiation process we carpooled, traded notes, and gave each other feedback and encouragement. When we both ended up accepting the job, we became colleagues and eventually housemates. This is when we learned that we could not only work well together, we also really liked and respected one another.

After about 3 years at the firm we both got that all-too-common three-year itch and we started looking at what would be next for us. Both of us felt it was time to move across the country to the places we each thought of as home. Kara moved to upstate New York, and I moved to Colorado. But in these new locations, the exciting work we had been doing in change management was hard to find. We individually decided to open our own firms as a way to continue the work we so much enjoyed doing.

But entrepreneurship is hard, and solopreneurship—especially—is extremely lonely, and the two of us called each other frequently for support and accountability. About 6 months into our individual journeys we were both still nowhere and had no clients to speak of. We decided to go on a “retreat” with each other to get ourselves motivated and focused.

It was during that retreat that the Erb Institute sent out an email to alumni announcing an upcoming conference and the desire for alumni to provide professional development content as part of it. Kara and I were both staring at each other with wide-open calendars, so we decided to offer up some content. We considered the audience—a smattering of environmentalists working inside a variety of companies and industries hoping to drive sustainability initiatives—and decided that a skill related to influence and inspiration would be useful.

At that conference we delivered the first version of what is now our Influential Storytelling workshop. We generated three solid leads, landed two of them, and decided we were DEFINITELY better together than apart. Thus was born Wolf & Heron, and the rest is history.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Our business model in 2020 was largely built around Kara and I traveling to locations around the world where several (sometimes 100s!) of people would gather for a conference, retreat, kickoff, or professional development event. We would deliver our Influential Storytelling workshop in-person, and leave a room full of people inspired and motivated to build storytelling into their professional practice.

When COVID arrived in the United States, it felt like everything shut down in the course of a few weeks. In March 2020, almost 90% of our booked business called us to postpone or simply cancel, and our sales pipeline completely dried up. We had pivot almost immediately to save our business and our livelihoods.

The first thing we did was convert our Influential Storytelling workshop into a bang-up virtual experience. We also expanded the program for deeper learning, built out a self-guided online version of the workshop, and repositioned our individual coaching services. Our new offerings gave us the chance to save a few of our existing contracts, but it also opened up an entirely new market of global enterprise clients we had never considered before. By the end of 2020 we were in conversation with Google and now we have a year-over-year contract with them that has dramatically shaped our credibility in the marketplace and our positioning as a professional development firm for tech companies.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wolfandheron.com
• Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/wolfandheron_leadership/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wolfandheron/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4qy9dhccZjXYWwSnwgoe7w

Image Credits
Desiree Johnson Photography, Marc-Gregor Photography