WARNER BROS STUDIOS, BURBANK, CALIFORNIA
For over a century, storytellers have come to Hollywood looking for a "greenlight" – permission from a studio or network executive saying, "Yes, we give you permission to tell your story, and we will empower you with our resources and distribution channels."
But just like the stoplight in the Story Greenlight logo, the world has been turned upside down.
Today, anyone with a smartphone and internet connection has the equipment, the platform, and the permission to say whatever they want to say.
And the world is now a very, very noisy place.
Which leaves us with the questions that have always been the trickiest to answer:
Now that everyone is talking, what do I say? Who do I talk to? How and where do I talk to them?
That's where Story Greenlight comes in.
Steve Jobs once said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."
Looking back at my own life, I've come to see that I've spent the last 40+ years elevating ordinary messages to become extraordinary – and helping others do the same for themselves.
I've helped shape content for some of the largest media companies in the world including ABC, NBC, Universal, Disney, Apple, Netflix, and many others.
My commentary has been featured in USA Today, TIME Magazine, the Associated Press, and multiple textbooks.
My online businesses have supported clients and students in over 50 countries across 6 continents.
But like all good stories, it didn't happen the way you might expect.
It actually started at the age of 4 when I started picking out melodies on our family piano. When I started turning the happy-go-lucky world of "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" into a spooky place by playing it slowly in C minor instead of C major, my mom decided it was time for me to get some lessons.
I grew up playing classically and by ear. It took years to realize that very few people do both.
Meanwhile, the more I learned about music, the more frustrated I became on Sunday mornings sitting in church. Every Sunday we'd all sing hymns with 6 verses played the SAME DAMN WAY, EVERY SINGLE VERSE.
I was bored out of my musical skull.
Over time, I learned how to play the piano in a way that brought those "boring" words and melodies to life – so that people could experience a mental and emotional state that left them open to what they needed to receive that day.
I was beginning to learn the power of taking an ordinary message and elevating it into something extraordinary.
In junior high, I discovered MIDI sequencing and started composing, arranging, and recording my own music.
A desktop PC, Cakewalk 5.0 for DOS, a synthesizer module, a keyboard, and a cassette deck with Dolby C kept me happily experimenting down in the basement for hours on end.
I was learning how instruments, ideas, and ultimately people work together to create something greater than any one person could make on their own.
But my musical talents were less helpful in high school. I was trying to fit in with classmates who were obsessed with sports, in a zero-stoplight town that worshiped basketball.
Not a good thing when you're terrible at pretty much anything athletic.
Thankfully, my high school art teacher introduced me to video production – in the days before digital video, and making videos was REALLY complicated and hard to do.
But I was down for the task, because I discovered an angle for my unathletic self: if I stood on the sidelines with a camera on my shoulder, I could make videos that told stories of my classmates and their sports journeys.
They got to look good, and I got to survive.
Before long, I was Jeff the Video Guy, shooting and editing video projects, arranging and recording my own music, presenting them on huge screens at high school graduation in front of the entire town.
Who knew that just trying to get by in high school could turn into something that brought entertainment to thousands of people?
Faced with the idea of college, the school where I wanted to go had no video or film program. They did have a radio program, though.
I always used to make fun of radio announcers who talked in their super exaggerated "cheesy radio" voices.
Then one day I listened to a recording of me talking on the air in my "normal voice" and was horrified to hear that I sounded like I was either sleepwalking or was about to slip into a coma.
I started paying more attention to my presentation skills after that.
I remembered how much fun I’d had doing video in high school, so I transferred to film school in Los Angeles. But even though I was working 3 part-time jobs to pay my way, I ran out of money, and I had to drop out of college.
I started scrambling to do anything in the entertainment industry that could keep my rent paid.
Thankfully, a film school connection turned into my first internship working at a TV show as an assistant editor – starting at 11pm on Friday and Sunday nights, for five months, for free.
I found out later that everyone was just kind of blown away that I kept showing up.
Turns out, showing up over and over is half the battle for most things.
As I continued showing up, I began learning the skills that provided the foundation for a 20+ year career editing TV for some of the largest TV networks and cable channels on the face of the planet.
I built up a credit list of clients that include ABC, NBC, Universal, Disney, Apple, Netflix, all sorts of folks.
I became a professional storyteller in Hollywood, the storytelling capital of the world.
I thought that working on shows seen by millions of people was the point. It wasn't.
SMALL GROUP COACHING FOR YOUNG TV EDITORS
Some years into my TV career, I could see that my income was hitting a ceiling, so I started learning about ways to create more sources of income.
I began teaching others what I’d learned in Hollywood, which threw me into the world of course online course creation, sales, and in-person coaching.
At first, I taught young editors and assistant editors who wanted to do what I was doing – broadcast TV editing in Los Angeles. That worked well, until I decided that I wanted a bigger target audience.
That began a stretch of time that I call my Business Desert.
THAT ONE TIME I LITERALLY WENT RUNNING ON THE SAND DUNES IN THE ARABIAN DESERT. IT SEEMED COOL AT THE TIME.
I spent years offering solutions to people who didn’t really have a problem, didn’t have the money to pay for it, and usually ended up being the types to fix it themselves.
Whoops.
To make things worse, those years were the beginning internet marketing, and it was nuts. Marketing gurus taught all sorts of hyped-up, even outright deceptive marketing tactics and persuasion tricks, and I hated it.
I didn’t know why, other than it just made me want to take a shower.
For a long time, I got really turned off to business and marketing in general.
But just like the kid who kept showing up over and over on Friday and Sunday nights for free until he got his break into the TV industry, I kept showing up in business.
People kept telling me that my ideas were powerful and desperately needed in the business world. So I kept looking for that connection.
"We have been working with Jeff for a year, and his way of peeling back the layers and connecting with his clients is nothing short of amazing. Jeff truly has a gift for human connection and the art of communication."
ROXANNE RAYNOR, Virtual CFO Partnerships & Podcast Coordinator, Summit Virtual CFO by Anders
Over the years, I expanded my coaching work into working with business experts and consultants, until one day an accounting advisory firm reached out asking me to work with their in-house experts to help them become public-facing industry thought leaders.
Then that same firm asked me to work with their podcast hosts to help them with their communication and storytelling skills.
Not only did those thought leaders and hosts grow, the skills they learned started spilling over into their own client-facing relationships.
As that work continued, the results were so successful that one day I told the CEO of the company that I’d decided to focus my coaching work on thought leader development for business experts.
He said that was a great idea, and that he thought I should focus even further on communication and thought leader coaching for accounting companies who offer client advisory services. And he said he’d be happy to approve the use of his company as a case study.
So here we are.
And here’s why I’m excited:
I’m a firm believer that while business runs by the numbers, business is ultimately sustained by people.
When we understand and truly connect with people, everyone wins.
Team members find a new understanding and confidence in themselves, clients discover new possibilities through engaging with trusted advisors, and businesses find new ways to not only survive, but to thrive.
Those wins might seem to live in the world of marketing, sales, client service, and business operations, but they’re actually connected by a bigger idea:
Human connection through powerful communication.
And just like I’ve spent my entire life learning how to communicate and connect with people in powerful ways, clients of Story Greenlight get to experience the same thing.
When people come together, everyone wins.
Because let’s face it… there’s a whole world of forces trying to divide and tear people apart. People like us are here to rebuild what’s been torn down, to bring people together to create good in the world.
I believe in a day when that battle will ultimately be won.
For now, the mission never ends.
But it’s a fight worth fighting.
© 2024 Story Greenlight
Part of Resolve Entertainment, Inc.
