The First Fifth
- Things We Learned
to do Before
Hitting "Record"
Prashant Vallury and Steven Dobias 24 June 2025
This document outlines a production ethos for brands who desire a resonant, meaningful connection with their audience. The sole prerequisite for meaningful application is the existence or adoption of a mindset that the best stories don’t magically appear. They spring from intention.
Introduction
Prashant Vallury and Steven Dobias 24 June 2025
This white paper distills twenty-five years of storytelling into five phases. Refined through years in musical performance/composition, sound design, journalism, law, consulting, and film production, our goal is to empower founders, executives, leaders, and their teams with a pathway to emotional clarity.
Whether you seek to produce content in-house, or hire an outside source, this process reduces massive backlogs of information into its core connective tissue – something that reinforces a direct connection between you (and your offer) and your target market (and their specific pain point that you are solving for).
Phase One
Mindsweeping
When consulting consultants, we quickly learned that a near universal fear amongst everyone in our audience was that of a blank slide (or page). These are among the brightest strategic thinkers in the world. But asked to document their thoughts on a specific problem and outline a custom solution, that blanking cursor on the screen began to resemble something far more sinister.
That’s why so many companies, not just consultancies, have a library of previously used content that can be a springboard to new presentations (Spinnuzzi). Someone, at some point in the past, overcame their fear and created a presentation that actually won business. Why reinvent the wheel?
When faced with the flashing cursor of doom, it became much easier to reject the fear, go into that archive and hit CTRL-V. We call this choice, and the consequences it unfurls, the Control-V Conundrum. Over time, a once personalized solution because generalized. And little by little, that connection you had to your audience begins to fade into nothingness. Every conversation turns into a sales pitch because a story has been watered down to general principles and price estimates.
4 the Control-V Conundrum refers to the act of copy/pasting old work into a new setting with the hope that minor tweaks are enough to sneak past the emotional guards in your audience and also spare you the painful work of building a solution from the ground up. If it works, it’s likely because you are doing it better than the competition, not because you are doing right by your audience
THERE'S ONLY ONE PATH FORWARD. AND THAT'S FACING THE FEAR OF THE BLANK PAGE.
Mindsweeping
Refers to the soft art of taking perspective inventory. Whether you are rolling solo or working with a team, start this process by first cataloging everything you know about the audience and their situation.
What is everyday life like for the person on the otherside of the table?
What challenges do they have?
What problems arise at work that get in their way?
Where do they want to go?
Where does their company want to go?
What (or who) stands in their way?
You might notice
You might notice that none of the questions we are asking thus far focus on you, your solution, or how great it is. And for this a great deal of gratitude is owed to the co-authors of the award-winning white paper, The Neuroscience of Persuasion (Partners).
Why does all this matter? Studies show that people will resist an argument if they feel that the emotions and arguments being imposed on them are inauthentic (Appel). Getting to know your audience, where they’re coming from, and where they want to go helps you understand their situation and makes them feel like they’re being heard. It leads them to believe that you get their point of view and that there’s shared perspective between you.
This perceived similarity allows your ideas to be heard more clearly, and makes your message more persuasive (Bullock). Your audience becomes emotionally invested and will actively collaborate with you in reaching solutions to their problems.
You might notice
You might notice that none of the questions we are asking thus far focus on you, your solution, or how great it is. And for this a great deal of gratitude is owed to the co-authors of the award-winning white paper, The Neuroscience of Persuasion (Partners).
Why does all this matter? Studies show that people will resist an argument if they feel that the emotions and arguments being imposed on them are inauthentic (Appel). Getting to know your audience, where they’re coming from, and where they want to go helps you understand their situation and makes them feel like they’re being heard. It leads them to believe that you get their point of view and that there’s shared perspective between you.
This perceived similarity allows your ideas to be heard more clearly, and makes your message more persuasive (Bullock). Your audience becomes emotionally invested and will actively collaborate with you in reaching solutions to their problems.
Once you have exhausted all your knowledge of the audience, you have two choices ahead of you. Keep moving or get on the phone and get some answers to critical questions
The purpose of mindsweeping is to exhaust your mind of all your audience knowledge. Put everything you know out there – whether you think it germane or not. Once you have completed this exercise, you’ll either marvel at how much you actually know about the audience, or feel shocked by how much you have to learn about them.
