The Story You Never Say Out Loud Is the One That Scales

She Was Mopping the Floor Last Week

Monica von Waaden runs a nonprofit that feeds more than 5,000 kids a week across Round Rock and Austin. Last week, a friend walked into her office and found her pushing a mop across the floor. “You’re mopping?” her friend asked. “Yes,” Monica said. “I’m mopping.”

That’s not a cute anecdote. That’s the whole leadership philosophy, in one sentence, from the founder and executive director of Hope Austin (now expanding as Hope Round Rock). I’ve spent thirty years telling business owners that persuasion starts with alignment between what you say and what you do. Monica put it better than any framework I’ve built. “I would never ask somebody to do something I wouldn’t do,” she told me. “Regardless of your position in a company or any business, you have to be willing to do everything it takes for that business to run.”

But the mopping isn’t really the lesson either. It’s a symptom of something deeper, and it’s the thing I want to write about today: the difference between a mission you write on a wall and a story you carry in your chest. Only one of those actually scales.

Nobody Invents a Mission. They Inherit an Image.

Ask most founders where their mission statement came from and they’ll point to a whiteboard session. Ask Monica where Hope Austin came from and she points to her mother’s classroom.

Her mother taught in the poorest schools in El Paso for her entire career, by choice. Her father, an electrical engineer, insisted that the kids her mother brought home for dinner, and there were always extra kids at the table, be included in the family science fair projects. Not because it looked good. Because those kids’ own parents couldn’t offer that in the moment, and he could. “I grew up in a home that was just filled with philanthropy,” Monica told me. “So that’s where I learned it.”

She didn’t set out to run a nonprofit. She was a special education teacher, then a domestic violence advocate, then a lawyer. It wasn’t until she became an empty nester that the image she’d been carrying since childhood, extra food, an extra seat, a kid who got to learn something he wasn’t going to learn at home, finally had somewhere to go. She built Hope Austin around it.

I hear a version of this from almost every serious business owner I sit across from on Rock Solid, my clients, and I’ve watched it happen in my own life. My work in persuasion architecture didn’t come from a textbook. It came from watching how badly most businesses treated the people trying to give them money. You don’t invent a mission. You notice the image that’s been sitting in you the whole time, and then you go build something around it.

That’s step one of leadership, and it’s the step almost nobody skips on purpose but almost everybody skips by accident. You get busy. You start optimizing the org chart before you’ve named the image that’s supposed to be running through it.

You Can’t Delegate a Story. You Can Only Keep Living It Out Loud.

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for a lot of leaders. Once you know your story, the instinct is to write it down, put it in the employee handbook, and hand it off. Monica doesn’t do that. She throws the recycling out. She mops. Every single one of her drivers, packers, and her operations lead are volunteers, including her. Nobody at Hope Austin draws a paycheck.

That’s not inefficiency. That’s the mechanism. A story doesn’t scale because you documented it well. It scales because people keep watching you live inside it, and some of them decide to move in.

Some of Hope Austin’s roughly 60 volunteer drivers have been showing up every Wednesday for more than nine years. Not for a paycheck. The school districts know them by name. “Oh, it’s the Hope Austin driver. It’s Kathy. It’s John,” Monica said. “They’re so happy to see them.” The drivers aren’t executing a delivery route. They inherited the image too, and now they’re the ones carrying it into the schools.

This is the part of Be Like Amazon I think gets misread the most. People assume it’s about operational speed. It’s actually about obsession, and obsession is contagious in a way that a policy document never is. Amazon didn’t scale customer obsession by writing it into a manual. Bezos kept an empty chair in the room to represent the customer, literally forcing everyone to watch him live it. Monica’s mop is her empty chair.

The Story That Never Makes the Annual Report

Monica told me about a second grader she’d seen at the same school every week last summer. On the last delivery of the season, the girl stopped her. “I wanted to tell you something,” she said. “I know you.” Monica asked how. “Well, I don’t know your name,” the girl said, “but I know that you feed me, and that really makes my mommy very happy. So I do know you.”

Monica calls moments like that “the pebbles that keep us going.” Her team mostly never hears them. The educators handle the day-to-day contact with the kids, on purpose, and Monica told me it doesn’t change the service model one bit whether they hear the stories or not. They’ll do the same work either way.

That’s WIIFM in its purest form, and it’s not the version I usually teach. Most of the time I’m asking business owners what’s in it for their customer. Monica flipped it on me without meaning to. What’s in it for the leader who never gets the thank-you note, never gets tagged in the post, never even gets asked their name? If the honest answer is “nothing, and I’d do it anyway,” you’ve found the real story. Everything else is marketing copy.

Handing It Off Without Handing It Over

The clearest proof of Monica’s philosophy showed up in a part of the conversation that wasn’t about the nonprofit at all. Her husband Mark built the family’s Panera franchise business. Their younger son, Alex, tried a few other things after college, wasn’t fulfilled, and eventually asked if he could come work with Mark. Mark’s answer: “Start at the bottom.”

Alex worked his way up through operations, learned the business hands-on, and was recently promoted to president of the company. This year he opened his first store from the ground up, building it himself, with Mark standing back and watching. “We always told our kids we will never rob you of your purpose,” Monica said. “It is your responsibility to go to college and make your own path, your own career. We do not hand over anything to our children.”

That’s the same instinct running the nonprofit. She’s not building a machine that runs without her. She’s building people who’ve watched the story enough times that they can go carry a version of it themselves, in their own store, on their own route, without anyone handing them a script.

What Story Are You Actually Letting Other People Carry?

Most leadership advice is about systems: processes, org charts, KPIs. Build those. You need them. But systems only move the story you’ve already put inside them. If the image at the center is fuzzy, the system just scales the fuzziness faster.

Monica’s image was never blurry. An extra plate at the table. A kid included in a science project he wasn’t supposed to be part of. Sixty volunteers who show up on Wednesdays because they caught a version of that same image from her, and decided it was worth carrying too.

So here’s the question I’d put to you, the one I’m putting to myself: what’s the image in your chest that started all of this for you, the one you’ve never quite said out loud to your team? And who around you has actually been given the chance to carry it, instead of just execute it?

Monica closed our conversation with a line I haven’t stopped thinking about. “It’s a together endeavor.” That’s not a tagline. That’s what it sounds like when a story has actually scaled.

Monica von Waaden’s full conversation, including how Hope Austin rebuilt its entire backpack program around real nutrition instead of processed snacks, is on this week’s episode of Rock Solid: Round Rock Business Leaders. You can also connect with her directly at hope4austin.org or find her on LinkedIn.

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