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How did you get started, Bill, with story builders or storytelling?

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You mentioned thousands of years of storytelling.

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I mean, you've obviously a little bit of a history buff with that.

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But how did you get started with helping people tell their stories?

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Well, I had always loved stories and storytelling.

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You know, as a young kid, I was the one who was, you know,

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reading the cereal box five times every morning, just sucking up

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any word I could over breakfast.

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And so I always love stories.

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You know, I majored in English and history.

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You know, what are the stories? How do you tell them?

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And then and then life happened. Right.

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And I met a wonderful woman.

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We got married. Kids started coming. Had to pay the bills.

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I got involved in education.

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And so I was doing something that, you know, Stephen Pressfield

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talks about a shadow calling.

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I was doing something that was close, but not quite what I was really wired to do.

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And so help start a start a school up in Ohio, led that for a dozen years.

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And then, but this felt this stirring within that I was supposed to be doing more,

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especially around writing and telling stories.

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And so eventually I stepped away from that school and stepped out into the unknown.

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We had six kids, one a year with no income as we engaged that.

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But I've never worked harder in my life.

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Dove in, became a student of story and just unpacking all that began writing.

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And over the next few years, began writing books, helping people

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bring those books to life and learning how that's done and really seeing a need,

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a need for people who had had like that you showed on our website

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that who had a message the world needs to hear.

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But they they weren't they didn't have the skill set to say it well,

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or they didn't know how to say it well.

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Or maybe their their skill set was as a speaker, not a writer.

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Or they're trying to put all pieces and parts together.

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And they had so many pieces and parts and ideas that they just, you know,

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what I call a creativity conundrum.

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Right. You get so many ideas that you're paralyzed and can't do any of them

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in that place.

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And so, you know, having that kind of

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seeing that need began to coalesce this team of story builders

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who want to help bring these stories to life in a way that is high trust

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relationships.

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And so that's really where we focused.

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And that's how story builders came to be.

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It actually started with a book.

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This book right here, in fact, by the name of Hugh Hewitt.

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Way back in 2003, I picked up this book and read it and it changed

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the trajectory of my life, caused me to lean into saying things,

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actually led to a relationship with Hugh, which led to an opportunity

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to create a book, which would be any it all.

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It all started with a book.

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So it's not surprising that I spent a lot of time with books

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and all things books related, helping tell those stories,

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because that's really how the story began in the first place.