Your Core Story Is the Only Thing AI Can’t Replace

Ennis Wright grew up off Chandler Creek in Round Rock, went to Stony Point High School, played football, graduated from Prairie View A&M, and built his career through Oracle, Canva, a startup, and now TikTok, where he works as an Account Executive helping brands figure out what they’re doing wrong on the platform. He sat down with me on Rock Solid last week and said something I’ve been thinking about ever since.

“Storytelling went from not as big of a deal to the name of the game. If you can’t storytell, you’re going to have a hard time growing in today’s world.”

He said it plainly, the way someone says something they’ve watched happen in front of them across several different companies and several different eras of social media. He’s 26. He’s already seen the before and after. And his next line is the one that stopped me: “AI has come in and told us, I can do all this for you. The only thing you need to do is storytell.”

This is exactly what I’ve been saying to clients for years. But hearing it come from someone living inside the fastest-growing discovery platform in the world made it land differently. AI commoditized almost everything else. Story is what’s left.

Ken Goodrich Built $100 Million on a Flashlight and a Red Screw Before TikTok Existed

I use this example constantly because it is the cleanest proof I know that story is not a trend. It’s the mechanism.

Ken Goodrich built a $100 million HVAC brand. In an industry where every company does the same thing, replace air conditioners, fix ducts, clean coils, charge too much, he built something that people recognized, remembered, and chose. His story started with holding his dad’s flashlight as a kid, watching him work. That became part of the company’s identity. It became the logo. It wrapped the trucks. His dad had also taught him something: every air conditioner needs to be tightened right. So Ken came up with an innovation, red screws instead of the standard silver or gold. Why red? So customers could see which units had been done correctly. They could look and know. That’s care made visible.

The story became the company. Not a tagline. Not an ad campaign. The actual belief the team operated from. “Are we making it tight and plum and level? Can the customer see the red screws?” Those aren’t just operations questions. They’re story questions. When you get your story right, it touches everything: how you hire, how you train, how you price, what you’re willing to say no to.

When I told Ennis that story, he said: “I can imagine what they would have done with TikTok in that time.”

Yes. A founding story that visceral, that visual, that human, holding the flashlight, the red screws, the dad teaching the son, that’s not a story you have to manufacture for TikTok. That’s a story TikTok was built to carry. A 60-second video of the son explaining why every unit gets red screws would stop the scroll every single time.

Three Stories Every Business Needs and Almost None Can Tell

Here’s what I said on the episode, because I’ve built a whole framework around this: every business has three stories it needs to get right.

The founder story. Why you exist. What happened to you or what you saw that made this business the thing you had to build. Not your mission statement. The actual moment. The thing you watched or experienced that made you say “someone has to fix this, and I guess that’s me.” Ken Goodrich’s founder story is the flashlight. What’s yours?

The culture story. How your team operates when nobody’s looking. What they say when they talk about the work to each other, not to customers. The inside language, the rituals, the standards that don’t have to be enforced because everyone just does them. For Ken’s team, the culture story is: we don’t cut corners, and you can see it in the red screws. What does your team do that customers can see?

The customer story. The transformation you create. Not the service you deliver, the before and after that happens to the person you serve. A senior who stays in her home instead of moving into a facility. A business owner who doubles his conversion rate without doubling his ad spend. A Round Rock founder who finally fills the roles that have been open for eight months. Transformation, not transaction. What changes for the people you serve?

When these three stories are not aligned, when the founder has one version, the sales team has another, and the website has a third, the business struggles in ways that feel like marketing problems or sales problems but are actually story problems. The message isn’t landing because there isn’t a coherent message. There’s just a bunch of accurate facts with no through line. That leaves the signals for AI confused too.

When they’re aligned, everything costs less. Ads convert better because the story is the same across every touchpoint. Recruiting gets easier because the job description tells the same story as the culture. Sales cycles shorten because the customer story shows up before the prospect has to ask. TikTok, when you’re using it well, is just one more surface where the same story gets told in a format people actually want to watch.

Cardiff Bank and the Borrower Who Is the Story

Ennis mentioned a company called Cardiff Bank, a small business lender that stopped marketing like a bank and started marketing like a storyteller. They put their customers in their own stories. Not testimonials. Not case studies. Actual narrative content where the business owner is the main character and Cardiff is just the thing that made the next chapter possible.

This is the buyer legend model. The customer is always the hero. You are always the guide. When you try to make yourself the hero of your own marketing, you’re writing yourself into the wrong role and the audience knows it. When you center the customer’s story, their fear, their goal, the moment they chose you, what changed after, people who share that fear or that goal recognize themselves in it and think: that could be me.

TikTok is not a great platform for talking about yourself. It is an exceptional platform for telling stories that let other people see themselves. That distinction is everything. If your TikTok content is mostly about your company, your product, your awards, your process, you’ve missed the whole point of the format. The format rewards the video that makes the viewer lean forward and think “wait, that’s exactly my situation.”

You Don’t Need to Go Viral. You Need to Be Found.

My son sold babka at a farmers market in Austin. He’s 16. A creator who only buys from booths with no customers stopped at his table and filmed it. That video got 700,000+ views. He wasn’t trying to go viral. He was trying to sell babka on a Sunday morning in a local market. A consistent story, kid, handmade bread, farmers market, authentic, was enough for someone to recognize it and amplify it.

Ennis was clear on this: consistent 50-like videos beat one viral moment followed by silence. You build an audience by showing up with the same story at the same frequency. Going viral is a bonus. Being findable is the strategy. And being findable requires having something specific enough that when the right person searches, whether on TikTok, Google, or anywhere else, your content answers the question they were asking.

Generic content answers generic questions. And as Ennis pointed out, AI now generates generic content faster than any human can. The brands that try to compete on volume of generic content will lose that game. The brands that have a specific story, told consistently, will be the ones the algorithm surfaces when someone is actually looking.

The Core Story Intensive Exists for This Exact Reason

For years, I have watched companies spend real money, on agencies, on ads, on content plans, on software, trying to fix a problem that isn’t a production problem. They don’t need more content. They need a better story to put in the content they’re already producing.

The Core Story Intensive is the work I do with business owners to surface the three stories I described above: the founder story, the culture story, the customer story. We find them, sharpen them, and make sure they’re saying the same thing across every channel. Not because it’s a nice branding exercise. Because misaligned stories cost you money at every stage of your funnel, and you often can’t see that the story is the problem because you’ve been living inside it too long to read it clearly from the outside.

Ken Goodrich didn’t need to manufacture a story. It was already there. He just had to recognize it, articulate it, and make sure the whole company was telling it the same way. Then amplify it. That’s what we do in the Intensive. Not from zero. From what’s already there, the moments you lived through, the customers you transformed, the belief that made you build the company in the first place. All of it is already in your business. The work is finding it before TikTok or Google or your next prospect asks for it and you can’t give them a clear answer.

What story do you tell customers who ask why they should choose you over everyone else? If the answer isn’t in your content already, that’s the problem worth solving first.

Listen to the Full Conversation with Ennis Wright

Ennis covered a lot more ground on Rock Solid than I could fit here, TikTok’s halo effect, why 60% of TikTok users haven’t touched Meta in the past month, how local Round Rock businesses can target by zip code and hashtag, the difference between open loop and closed loop commerce, and TikTok One, the creator marketplace program that lets you be on TikTok without ever being on camera. If you own a business in Round Rock or anywhere in central Texas, this episode is useful to you right now. Catch the full episode on Rock Solid here, or watch it below. And you can find Ennis on LinkedIn, if you want to start using TikTok for your business and want someone who actually knows what they’re doing to help you think through it, he’s the person to reach.