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7½ Reasons To Trust Us

Professionals’ choice

Delivered Brand Story workshops training and talks for Chartered Institute of Marketing, Public Relations Consultants Association, and Chartered Institute of Public Relations and many blue chip clients around the globe.

Published author

Written 7 books on creativity and brand communications translated into 8 languages.

International speaker

Motivational Speaker extraordinaire. TEDx veteran. Spoken at conferences, blue chip client events in every Continent on the planet except South America – and Antarctica. (We’ll get there one day.)

Creativity expert

Trained over 7,000 people in brand communications and creative thinking techniques. Even running ‘Tubespiration’ creativity classes on the London Underground, and also through the ‘World’s smallest Conference Centre’.

Award winner

Outstanding communications professional – Official – voted UK wide ‘Outstanding PR Practitioner of the Year’ by members of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in 2013. PR Strategy, Crisis Comms, Creative and, of course, Brand Story expert.

Pioneer

We practice what we preach. Our not-for-profit social enterprise the Flexible Thinking Forum, is tackling the crisis in our communities of declining Social Capital. (which we define as ‘How we help each other, to help each other’)

Visit our Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce funded project – the BarryIdeasBank.

Meme master

Master of memes for social good. Creator of the ‘Blue Monday’ meme and champion of ‘Twixtmas’ – the five days between the Christmas and New Year holidays to make the world a better place.

#7^½

Always gives you more. Passionate about partnership working, from delivering a Brand Story project or training for your team, or conference to being an associate partner with your business.

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How We Help You

Project, Awayday or training sessions

You recognise your Brand or Brand Story and Corporate Narrative needs to work harder.

Storytelling doesn’t have to be twee, hippy, or New Age-ish.

Your Brand, its story and narrative, is the most powerful ingredient for your future success.

Your over-arching narrative story sits above strategy and tactics. It underpins your next sales pitch, the changes you need to take to survive or prosper, or what gets you and your team out of bed each day.

There’s a paradox however. The best experts in knowing the story of you are your own people – yet your biggest enemies in the way of realizing your story are – your own people: they are too close.

We overcome this paradox by working with your team – either as a Project or in our training sessions.
We act as your Mentor/Coach/Trainer/Partner – sparking new insights and ideas.
We also boost the storytelling capability of your team with easy-to-use tools. We unleash their power to give your Brand the character, story and narrative it deserves.
We enable you to become better listeners – achieving what we call ‘Level 5 Listening’ – where you hear, detect and respond to the underlying narrative in any new information.
We can deliver your Brand, Story or Narrative solution as a Project or as a training session.

Andy as your Associate

Andy Green works as an Associate with selected agencies. This enables you to offer Brand Story as a product to extend or deepen your service offering.

Andy enjoys long relationships with agencies where he provides counsel 24/7, team development, creativity and Brand insight to transform your own agency story, and more.

All at an affordable and profitable rate.

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How We Do It

Level 1: We build your sustainable Foundations

Transform Your Brand Story – uses our ‘7 Steps Storytelling Toolkit’ enables you to understand what is narrative, how you need to change the underlying narrative to create the change you want, how to use the 5 key narrative choices, what is your Brand Persona, your Brand Story and your Theme to unleash your more powerful story.

and/or

Transform Your Brand – uses our ‘5 Step Brand Review’ to identify, challenge and change the fundamental elements of your Brand. We create a new or revitalized Brand that is distinctive, compelling, consistent and authentic to create greater competitive advantage for you.

Level 2: We address your Focussed Needs

Advanced storytelling and narrative skills, tailored to your specific needs:
Leadership Stories to Inspire – creating your new narrative to go the extra yard
Your Story for Sales Success– why storytelling will transform what you say, and improve the salesperson’s most valuable asset – their ears
New Narratives for Change – create the vehicle to take you and you’re your team forward on your mission
Stretch Narratives – to achieve improved performance
Out-of-Rut Transformation – overcome inertia, silo thinking that holds you back
Meme strategies – create more ‘messages with an engine’ that go viral to achieve greater results

Here’s an example of one of our Focussed Need sessions,‘Your Story for Sales Success’ which covers the different steps to transform your sales pitch story.

Step 1 ‘The Promise’
Who do I help and how

Step 2 ‘Your Story of How’
The story of your struggle, how you earn the right to be trusted

Step 3 ‘Your Story of Success’
How you have helped others

Step 4 ‘Your Story of a Shared Future’
How together you will secure a better future

Level 3: We take you to higher levels

YourBrand Supranarrative – we share advanced narrative patterns – to provide a wide ranging resource to enable you to be more resilient, anti-fragile and confident to survive and succeed.

Values-led Change, makes pioneering use of the proprietory ValScan™ system to enable you to harness and use the power of Values to give greater power, resilience and impact to your communications and change programmes.

Social Collaborative Capital – enables you to identify, nurture and harness new resources in your networks, communities to tackle your challenges.

Also available as awayday – half/1 or 2 day activities

Create your new Story and Narrative for your next project, business at your next team meet.

Creative journeys – Tubespiration, Walkspiration, Tramspiration, Carspiration – show how to transform the downtime in your daily schedule for better creative thinking, to establish more powerful and resilient creative thinking habits.

Creative Toolbox – going beyond traditional creativity skills training, to provide new skills and tools to boost your opportunity spotting skills, and empower you and your teams in a faster-moving, more complex world.

5 Listening – hear, detect and respond to, the underlying narrative in any new information.

We deliver results that are powerful, sustainable, and authentic.

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Here’s some of the people we have helped…

We have worked with the following organizations around the world including:

Asda plc, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, British Airways, British Council, BMW, Cardiff City Council, eBay, Etisalat, Microsoft plc, Pace Electronics plc, Sunbulah Group, UK Government (Dept. of Health, Environment Agency), University of East Anglia, Warwick University and many more.

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Our Story ‐ Why are we passionate about Brand Storytelling?

Andy Green

Andy Green grew up with a younger autistic brother who, to this day, is not able to speak. Andy’s early years shaped his commitment and drive to overcome communication barriers.

Andy also hates waste of talent. He is passionate about creating change, to enable people to make the most of their potential and situations.

Our home page photo of the Blackwall Tunnel, Poplar, London is intended to convey a sense of journey – going into the unknown, venturing to new discoveries, entering a different space. It also has a personal significance for Andy.

Andy’s childhood was spent in Balfron Tower – a 26 storey block of Council flats adjacent to Blackwall Tunnel Approach.

More recently, Balfron Tower has since become a National Trust attraction, celebrating its illustrious architect Erno Goldfinger (it’s incredible but true, he actually inspired James Bond author Ian Fleming to name the arch villain ‘Goldfinger’ after him. It was Fleming’s way of getting back at Goldfinger after they had fallen out.) Andy had a mock Blue Plaque put up on his old flat to celebrate his living there as part of the National Trust celebrations.

Although one of Andy’s dear mum’s less flattering comments about her son, which she was oft to repeat was, “Andrew, you’ve got a mouth like Blackwall Tunnel!”, the Tunnel was also responsible for one of Andy’s more unusual claims to fame: he boasts he once hit a cricket ball under the River Thames. Yes, under the River Thames. During a game of cricket with his mates on an open grass space next to the Tunnel, Andy hit a six, and the ball rolled down Blackwall Tunnel Approach, into the Tunnel. The rest is history, and a much repeated tale.

Andy’s other talents include award-winning communications, possessing a great ability in ‘minessence’ – to miniaturise and simplify complex ideas or technology into concrete and practical applications. Storytelling provides a key for unlocking the gateway to Andy’s quest in life.

We?

We talk of ‘we’ as we are a network of highly talented practitioners in different specialism in communications and change management.

Using the proprietary ValScan™
(which we use in our Brand & Brand Story projects),
Andy’s top 5 Values were revealed as:
1. Transformational communications
2. Creativity
3. Fantasy/Play/Humour
4. Discovery and Insight
5. Minessence

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Act Now

Start your story now. For an informal discussion on how to achieve better solutions and outcomes get in touch at andy@storystartshere.today or you can call 07815 884 525.

For details of the Flexible Thinking Forum, Andy’s not-for-profit social enterprise tackling the crisis in declining Social Capital in our communities, visit http://www.flexiblethinkingforum.org.uk

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