What if you could build something that made every part of your business better?

Something that pulled in customers without paid ads, recruited talent without job postings, and opened doors without warm intros.

Something that scaled every conversation, every campaign, and every pitch without you having to spend another dollar or another hour.

In this issue, I am going to show you what that force is, as well as:

Enjoy learning how to make sure the force is with you…LG

There is a hidden force in your startup.

Most founders walk right past it. They reach for ad budgets, hiring sprees, fundraising, and feature releases instead. They burn money and time chasing growth the hard way, when the easier path was sitting in front of them the whole time.

It is the same asset TOMS, Warby Parker, and Airbnb used to build billion-dollar brands. And it is sitting in your business right now.

Here is why it works. Every other asset you have is linear.

A marketing dollar buys one marketing dollar's worth of impact. An employee delivers one employee's worth of output. A vendor produces one vendor's worth of work. Spend twice as much, hire twice as many, and you get roughly twice the result. That is the math.

This one asset does not play by those rules. It delivers exponential impact on everything else in your business, at no additional cost.

It is your story.

The right story does not just describe your business. It multiplies it. It works on customers, employees, investors, partners, and press all at the same time. It is the single biggest piece of leverage a founder has, and almost nobody treats it that way.

The military has a name for what your story does. They call it a force multiplier.

WHAT A FORCE MULTIPLIER ACTUALLY IS

In the military, a force multiplier is a capability that significantly increases the combat potential of a fighting force. It does not add more soldiers. It does not add more weapons. 

It makes the soldiers and weapons you already have hit harder, move faster, and win battles they should not be able to win.

But one of the most powerful force multipliers in military history was not a piece of equipment. It was not a technology. It was a single event, turned into a story, that shifted the psychological balance of an entire war.

A SINGLE RAID THAT CHANGED A WAR

February 1942. Three months after Pearl Harbor.

America was reeling. The Pacific Fleet sat broken at the bottom of the harbor. Singapore had fallen. The Philippines were falling. Morale at home was at its lowest point of the war.

Roosevelt wanted to hit back. He wanted to hit Tokyo.

There was just one problem. Nobody knew how.

Carrier fighters didn’t have the range. Land-based bombers couldn’t reach Japan from any airfield America controlled. Every planner came back with the same answer. It can’t be done.

Then a Navy officer asked the question nobody else had asked. What if you put Army bombers on a Navy carrier?

It was absurd. Army bombers were twice the size of carrier planes. They couldn’t land on a carrier. The deck was too short for them to take off.

He picked the B-25 Mitchell and stripped it down. Pulled the lower gun turret. Yanked the radio. Replaced the tail guns with broomsticks painted black to fool enemy pilots. Every pound saved was a mile of range gained.

Eighty volunteers stepped forward. None of them knew the target. They trained for three weeks at a dirt airfield in Florida, practicing how to lift a fully loaded bomber off a runway in under 500 feet. Less than a third of what they were used to.

Then they were out of time.

On April 2, the USS Hornet slipped out of San Francisco Bay. Sixteen B-25s lashed to her deck. Once at sea, the captain announced the target over the loudspeaker.

“This force is bound for Tokyo.”

The ship erupted in cheers.

At 7:38 a.m. on April 18, lookouts spotted a Japanese picket boat. They were 650 miles from Japan. A hundred and fifty miles farther than the plan called for. Ten hours earlier than the planned launch. In broad daylight.

Halsey sent the signal. 

“LAUNCH PLANES. TO COL DOOLITTLE AND HIS GALLANT COMMAND GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU.”

The sea was rough. Forty-foot swells. The deck pitched and rolled. Doolittle went first. One by one the others followed. Sixteen bombers. Every one made it into the air.

They flew at fifty feet over the ocean to avoid radar. Six hours later they reached Japan. The bombers climbed to 1,500 feet and dropped their payloads on factories, oil tanks, and shipyards across Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya.

Then they turned west, toward China, on fumes.

The physical damage was small. A handful of factories. Some warehouses. Modest by any measure.

The psychological damage was enormous.

Japan had told its people the homeland was untouchable. The myth was broken in a single afternoon. Japan pulled four fighter groups back from the front lines to defend the home islands. Admiral Yamamoto, humiliated, rushed forward his plan to attack Midway.

Six weeks later, the U.S. Navy sank four Japanese carriers in a single morning at Midway. The tide of the Pacific war turned right there.

Back home, for four months Americans had read nothing but bad news.

Now the front pages screamed TOKYO BOMBED.
Strangers cheered in the streets.
Factory workers picked up the pace.
Recruiting offices filled.

HOW STORY MULTIPLIES YOUR FORCE

Founders rarely have the resources to win on the things big companies win on. Deep pockets. Established brand awareness. Massive customer bases. Decades of distribution. You cannot beat them at the things they were built to win.

So you compete on the things they cannot, or do not think to do. Speed. Creativity. Storytelling. The willingness to swing at problems they consider beneath them.

Your story is the most powerful weapon in that arsenal. The right story works on every front at once.

It makes customers emotionally invested. They do not just buy the product. They tell their friends. They become evangelists. According to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, word-of-mouth referrals convert at five times the rate of paid advertising. That is a 5x multiplier on every marketing dollar you do not have to spend.

It pulls in talent. The right story makes people leave better-paying jobs to come work for you. It infuses your team with vision, belief, and optimism. They take pride in the story. They tell it. They infect others.

It opens doors. Investors, partners, retailers, journalists. A great story makes them lean in. A weak story makes them tune out.

It sets you apart. In a market crowded with sound-alike competitors, a unique founder story is the one thing your rivals cannot copy.

It saves time, money, and energy. Without a great story, you have to invest in communicating who you are, what you do, and why it matters every single time. With a great story, that work is already done. You can rely on it forever.

ONE-FOR-ONE-TO-MANY

When Blake MyCoskie founded TOMS in 2006, he did not lead with a product pitch. He led with a story. A trip to Argentina. Children walking barefoot. A simple idea: for every pair sold, give a pair away. One for One. (For the full Blake MyCoskie founder story, click here). 

What matters here is what the story did once it was out in the world.

It pulled in customers, employees, retailers, newspapers, major magazines, and evangelists who built entire companies on the model, including Warby Parker and Bombas. Bain Capital ended up buying a 50% stake at a $625 million valuation. Four years after that, TOMS had given away more than 86 million pairs of shoes.

Mycoskie never built a traditional marketing function. He did not need one. The One for One origin story did the work, every day, on every front, at no additional cost.

That is what a force multiplier looks like in business.

THE FORCE THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

Once you nail the foundational elements of your story, you can rely on them forever. The story gets infused into the people you share it with, and they share it of their own will. 

That is exponential reach. That is combat potential. That is force multiplication.

Sixteen planes changed a war. One vacation in Argentina built a billion-dollar brand.

Build your story like the strategic weapon it is, and it will keep fighting for you long after you have stopped pitching.

A great founder story is not decoration. It is infrastructure. Build it once, build it right, and every campaign, hire, pitch, and customer conversation gets easier. Here are three ways to start treating your story like the strategic weapon it is.

1. Build Your Story Before You Build Your Marketing.

Most founders treat their story as a marketing asset. It is not. It is the foundation that makes every marketing asset work harder. Clear story, clear ads, clear hires, clear customers.

ACTION: Write down the three sentences that capture who you are, what you are building, and why it matters. If you cannot do it in three sentences, your story is not ready to multiply anything.

2. Keep Your Story Simple.

Simplicity is its own force multiplier. A simple story is fast to understand and easy to share. A complicated story dies on the vine. If your audience has to work to follow you, they will stop following you.

ACTION: Strip your story down to the fewest words that still carry the emotion. Test it on five people outside your industry. Whatever they can repeat back a week later is your real story.

3. Lead With a Moment That Grabs Attention.

Think about the headlines that filled American papers after the Doolittle Raid. TOKYO BOMBED. Two words. Total impact. That is what the opening of your story has to do. Drop your audience into a moment they cannot ignore.

ACTION: Find the single scene that made you commit to this company. The conversation. The trip. The frustration. The thing you saw that you could not unsee. Lead every introduction with that scene, not your company description.

A landmark study by Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman at the Wharton School analyzed nearly 7,000 New York Times articles to figure out what makes content go viral.

The finding: stories that triggered high-arousal emotions, awe, anger, anxiety, and inspiration, were shared at dramatically higher rates than neutral or sad content. Awe-inspiring stories were 30% more likely to make the most-emailed list than the average article.

Meaning = your story does not need to be slick. It needs to make people feel something big enough to share. That is what turns a single story into a multiplier.

This week’s video is a Memorial Day tribute I produced for the Defense Credit Union Council (DCUC) honoring the men and women who gave their lives in service to our country.

It was an honor to collaborate with Anthony Hernandez (retired Air Force Commander) and the DCUC team. It is a reminder that sacrifice echoes far beyond a single generation. The courage, commitment, and service of those we remember today continue shaping the freedoms, opportunities, and lives we experience every day.

Their memories act as a force for us all as they fuel the very spirit of what makes our country great. Watch here:

Honor & Remember: Thank You Servicemembers & Veterans
https://youtu.be/EfZtIf8PAYs?si=giQN9T3ozt7lSK0i

Need help with your story? I got you.

Send an email to [email protected] and someone from my team will circle back with you.