Q&A with Two Story Gurus: Paul Furiga and John Durante: Evolution of "StoryCrafting"

See a photo of Paul and John, their bios, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Paul Furiga and John Durante, Questions 3 and 4:

Q: What brought the two of you together as business partners? Did you both support the idea of storytelling for business when you started or did one of you have to “sell” the other on the idea?

A: (While John is an important collaborative partner, for the record, know that John is a consultant currently engaged by WordWrite and at the present time does not possess a financial equity stake in WordWrite nor StoryCrafting.tm)

I had collaborated with John on a number of other projects through a third party. From that experience, I knew he could help me when I was ready to flesh out the Storytelling idea for the agency. I called him, he was available to take work on the assignment and I did have to sell him on the idea — for about a minute!

Q: How did you go about developing your StoryCraftingSM service? Talk about the process and how the ideas developed.

A: Even before I formed WordWrite, I knew that I wanted to develop a distinctive service based on the power of storytelling. I had tons of ideas as to why storytelling was important to public relations from my previous journalism experience, but knew that as an agency product, I needed a structure to help clients understand the power of storytelling, to help them develop their own unique story, and then tell it. Early on all of this was just offered up to John — lot of mental dumps from me, lot of reading by him where I wanted John’s perspective and advice about how to turn this into a viable agency process. His forte is candor and analytical thinking, and that’s what I knew he would add could help bring the needed operating structure.

And away we went — meeting weekly just the two of us for about the first six months, during which we took the idea and created a process: engagement time frames, number of client meetings, methods to canvass market data, how to make the clients accountable, pricing, results measurement, you name it. We laid all this on the table in preliminary forms. We really did hit on a complete process early on with definable time frames, price points, client work steps, even meeting agendas. Naturally we started to refine, share with WordWrite staff, friends and clients, and we collected responsive ideas that brought us where we are today.