Seonaid Mackenzie’s lecture for the Carrington Programme, Wycombe Abbey School, High Wycombe
Have you ever noticed you can’t remember what you ate yesterday, but you can recall an embarrassing story a school friend told you ten years ago? This is because our brains are wired for stories. Whether we hear a bedtime story or a TV advert, our brains release oxytocin – the hormone linked to trust and bonding.
So what makes a good storyteller? I’ve been telling stories for decades, first for business and then for my children. My career has had three chapters: I began as a stockbroker, moved into running a single family office, and then built Sturgeon Ventures — a firm that helps people leave big institutions and launch regulated businesses.
Across all three chapters, storytelling has been my most reliable tool for winning clients and building trust. To deliver a story that someone will believe, it has to be factual and you must do it with the art of authenticity. When I was an institutional broker, I told stories to get underlying investors to buy the stocks I was pitching to institutions. These investors would hear four or five versions of the same pitch every day, so why would they come back to me? The answer, I discovered, lay in the same three ingredients that still underpin every meaningful business conversation I have: passion, authenticity, and empathy.
Passion shows you care. Authenticity shows you’re telling the truth. Empathy shows you understand the person on the other side of the table. Those three things build relationships; relationships become trust; and trust brings you the business.
There’s another part of storytelling most people overlook: listening. When I started Sturgeon Ventures in 2001, my first step with every aspiring entrepreneur was to uncover their story from the day they left university. Often their first jobs were miles away from finance, yet each step, however random, shaped who they became.
It’s very difficult to start your own business as a single person. You need capital, time, and technically more people. So I created a framework now known as Regulatory Incubation. To determine whether I take the risk of allowing a new business to work under my brand, I interview every founder using the STARR method – Situation, Task, Action, Results, Reflection. It’s common in recruitment, but it’s also brilliant for shaping a business narrative. From my point of view, it enables me to see whether their business idea is viable. Statistically, for every 50 new inquiries we get every couple of months, we only turn one into what we call an internal venture that we back.
Sturgeon Ventures’ Own Story
Sturgeon Ventures itself was named with a story. Everyone in venture capital seemed obsessed with oak trees – acorns becoming giants. I chose the sturgeon. It starts as a caviar egg the size of a mustard seed, grows to 15 feet, adapts to river and sea, and can live for a century. It has whiskers – a nod to due diligence – as it ‘tastes’ before it bites. That’s us: patient, adaptive, inquisitive. The metaphor helps emerging new businesses and entrepreneurs to grasp our ethos in seconds.
Back in the late 1990s, the method of communication was either by landline phone or meetings. As one of the very few women, I focused on my branding to make myself stand out. At the time, financial services branding always consisted of white cards with black type, so I printed bright pink, portrait business cards. I embossed them too and indented the logo, making it very tactile. The art of stroking creates seratonin in the brain, in the same way that stroking assistance dogs in hospitals can help patients. When people touched these cards, they would instantly feel more relaxed. Then the opportunity to tell their story would create trust.
Today we have multiple channels: websites, LinkedIn, podcasts, short videos – all ways to stand out and connect. There are key points to remember: use video to show real people, not animated stock characters with accents that don’t match your market. Don’t be overwordy on websites. Post little and often on LinkedIn; connect beyond your immediate field so your network spreads like a web. Podcasts are incredibly useful for widening your reach as well.
Testimonials are vital for success. People trust people. Prospects expect you to say you’re brilliant, but they’ll believe your clients if they say the same. Five minutes of a past client speaking on a video clip does more than any brochure. These voices also feed search engines, which makes your story easier to find in the first place.
My final encouragement for women is to apply for the roles that feel ‘not for you’. In hedge funds alone, managers tell me they rarely receive applications from women. I’ve done more than 250 startups in 24 years, with 5 per cent run by women, so anything is possible.Stories make us feel before they make us think. When you combine passion, authenticity, and empathy with a clear structure and proof, you don’t just get attention – you earn trust. And trust, in the end, is the most important asset you can have in business.
For further information on any of our Appointed Representative Firms (ARs) or ventures, please email hello@sturgeonventures.com
