Our Story
How The Story Mill was created and how we evolved into a storytelling and commumications agency serving clients across the globe.
Let's TalkLEADERSHIP TEAM
We are on a mission to support businesses and organisations who want to communicate in a way that engages, inspires and moves people. While storytelling is core to everything we do, we bring several other facets, beyond the story, to elevate your communication.
Claire Taylor
Co-founder and Chief Storyteller
After a twenty-five year corporate career in strategic marketing and brand development, I became intrigued by the power of storytelling.
As Marketing Director turned Brand Consultant, I trained as a storytelling performer and co-founded The Story Mill with the intention of bringing storytelling to business communications.
I'm passionate about facilitating our storytelling learning programmes with leaders, managers and executives and also working with our wonderful clients to co-create and produce impactful stories.
I love learning, and have an MA in Marketing, an MA in Creative Writing and I'm currently studying for an MSc in Studies in Mindfulness. Also, I'm an NLP Master Practitioner and trainer and have trained in Storytelling Performance.
Outside of The Story Mill, I enjoy walking, strength training, yoga, reading and spending time with family and friends.
As storyteller and continuous learner I'm constantly exploring new ideas to support you!
David Taylor
Co-founder and Chief Visual Storyteller
Having enjoyed a successful corporate career as a senior IT leader, I moved on and followed a long-held passion for design. After retraining in graphic and digital design, I set up and ran a digital agency combining design and technology.
A decade later, I co-founded The Story Mill.
Today, I love with our clients to co-create and produce impactful stories drawing on technology and design to bring well-crafted narratives to life.
Also as a learning facilitator, I enjoy supporting leaders, managers and executives as they learn to produce more powerful stories and visual communications that enable them to inspire and influence their stakeholders.
Outside of The Story Mill, I unwind by playing guitar, (electric and acoustic) and over the years I have been in various bands and often play at open mic nights. I also love cooking, spending time with family and friends and walking our dog.
As, both designer and tech geek, I’m always exploring new ways to enrich our programmes and our services for you!
Our STORY
Our storytelling journey has led to us creating unique learning programmes and creative services to help organisations like yours become more emotive and effective communicators.
We live in a world in which attention spans have shortened and competition for people’s attention is fierce.
Over a decade ago, we became immersed in storytelling and excited about bringing the tools of the storyteller to businesses and organisations. Why? To help people connect better and make their communications more engaging, inspiring and persuasive.
During our early storytelling programmes, we loved seeing participants learning to tell simple stories. However, they were puzzled about applying storytelling in more complex contexts. Our mission quickly became to help people with storytelling in their own work contexts.
People needed to tell stories in contexts that spanned sales and marketing, operations, data-analytics, technological innovation, healthcare, science, HR, finance, R&D, strategy, change management,
sustainability, ED&I and so on. Everyone had different types of stories to tell.
People wanted to tell stories for different reasons: to engage, to connect, to inspire, to motivate, to influence, to persuade and so on.
People had different audiences: leadership, colleagues, employees, prospects, customers, consumers and so on.
Unsurprisingly storytelling was a radically different communication style for people to learn and it took learning and practice time for them to be able to apply the art of storytelling to their everyday work.
Crucially, we needed courses that were context relevant so that people could learn, apply their new skills right away and boost their impact rapidly.
So, we listened like rocks, observed, like hawks and explored like honeybees.
We huddled around our wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor whiteboard and got creative. Eventually we developed our approach to meeting the storytelling needs of the wonderful diversity of people and contexts we meet in businesses and organisations.
Our models and methods have been tried and tested and honed with thousands of people in businesses and organisations across myriad contexts. And we customise our learning programmes to ensure they are applicable to each group’s unique needs.
Participants often need to create and deliver an impactful story soon after a workshop and are excited that they can draw on what they have learned to craft and tell, present or write a compelling story.
People often want to enhance their story with powerful slides and visualise data to make it easy to grasp. So, we have added presentation design and data visualisation to the mix of learning programmes we offer.
We continue innovating to bring you better ways to move leaders, colleagues, customers and others. In a world where attention spans are short, impactful communications are needed to engage, inspire and influence.
When it comes to BIG stories like cascading strategy or change, pitching services, requesting resources or other high stakes situations, we can co-create and produce your story with supporting visuals so that you can make the greatest splash.
Nothing delights us more than when people tell us that their audience hung on the presenter’s every word, that they won the business or that they created a boost of energy, enthusiasm and action within their audiences.
If you would like to boost the impact of communications within your organisation, we would love to chat with you about leaping to the next level, so please get in touch!
A selection OF our wonderful clients
We have delivered storytelling and/or visualisation training or crafted stories and developed visual presentations for these clients. Some clients have benefitted from both our unique learning and creative services
