Annie Franceschi, Founder of Greatest Story Creative®, is helping coaches and consultants grow their businesses through clear messaging, visuals, and strategy.
Growing up, Annie’s dream career was to be a screenwriter and movie producer. To manifest this dream, she studied filmmaking in college, moved to LA soon after, and landed a job with Disney. While climbing the corporate ladder, Annie quickly realized that she was not actually writing movies, nor was she truly leaving a legacy. In search of creating her own value, Annie began helping others through written and design work. In 2013, she quit her dream job at Disney to launch Greatest Story Creative®. Today, Annie is on a mission to help others realize their own value by owning their story and sharing it with others.
We asked Annie about the problem Greatest Story Creative® aims to solve, how her definition of success has evolved throughout her founder journey, and her vision for creating a dream life while growing her greatest business.
Q: Tell us the story behind your company’s founding. How and why did you start working on Greatest Story Creative®?
A: Though I’m now a fourth-generation entrepreneur, I never imagined myself being a business owner. I always thought I was going to be a screenwriter and movie producer!
When I was just 16, I had an idea for a movie and wrote a full-length screenplay for it in just one week. My big dream became to work in the movie business, writing and producing screenplays. So I studied filmmaking at Duke University and, upon graduating, I did what I had to do to make that happen: I moved to LA.
Very quickly, I discovered I wouldn’t be writing movies as much as writing expense reports. I got a job as the second assistant to the President of Lionsgate films—a la “The Devil Wears Prada.” About a year later, I jumped to a role at Walt Disney Animation, and later became a founding member of The Walt Disney Studios Franchise team in 2010.
After becoming known for my strategic abilities, I was promoted to writing and designing story presentations about upcoming films like “Maleficent” and the live-action “Cinderella” for our major executives to share at Comic-Con, D23, and other global marketing events. I survived corporate politics and the ladder climbing to finally get this dream job. But when I stopped to look closely at it, a funny thing happened. I realized that it was just a dream job, not a dream life.
While it was amazing and fun, I wasn’t writing any of these major movies. I wasn’t changing anyone’s life or leaving a legacy. When I thought about having a family, I saw that I didn’t want my boss’s job, or her boss’s. All this gave me a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach: if this isn’t it, now I have to find a new direction. But what?
Around the same time, I started a side business helping people through writing and design, creating their business cards or telling their story in their wedding invitations. With just a handful of first clients, I’d seen that when you help someone start a business or get married, you have an impact on their lives for the rest of their lives. There’s nothing quite like it.
These sparks led me to do the unthinkable. In 2013, I quit my dream job at Disney. Ten years ago this year, my husband and I left our film careers to give ourselves permission to try and reinvent ourselves. I chose to found my company, Greatest Story Creative®, to help real people tell their stories and grow their greatest businesses. And as it turns out, mine was the very first story I needed to tell. Five years later, I even wrote my first book, “Permission to Try,” about this pivot and how you can take a professional leap even when you’re not sure what’s next.
Because of my grandparents and parents, I always thought being a business owner meant long hours at a retail store or a small gift store run from home. While I never imagined becoming a business owner, it turns out that I had to find my own way—my own story of what led me to it and my own way of doing it. Now that I’ve been in business for nearly a decade and seen firsthand the creative, balanced, and passionate life it’s given me, I can’t imagine not being one.
Q: What problem does Greatest Story Creative® solve?
A: Having advised hundreds of coaches and consultants since 2013, the number one thing I hear people struggling with is the pressure to self-promote and market themselves on social media. They often end up caught in what I call a “behavior bottleneck.” They feel unclear about how to tell their story to ideal clients, so they never talk about what they do and feel afraid to send people to their website. The results are getting stuck financially and emotionally in business. This is what I’m always working to change. Through Greatest Story Creative®, I work to give incredibly talented service-based entrepreneurs the clarity, tools, and confidence to share what they do and the strategies to help them market themselves without stressing social media.
There are so many business owners who don’t understand social media or general marketing. They need common-sense ways to grow a business that don’t rely on a ton of investment into funnels, ads, and likes, but so few marketing influencers speak to them directly. That’s what I try to do wherever I can.
Through my Brand Story Solution, I give clients the clear marketing message, consistent visual brand, and compelling website they need to establish themselves as experts and confidently share their work with others. And through my Establish Yourself® Framework in strategy coaching and my business book, ”Establish Yourself,” I help coaches and consultants identify a clear, practical plan to grow their greatest business that doesn’t rely on icky self-promotion or confusing social media strategies.
Q: Have you struggled with self doubt as an entrepreneur?
A: Three years into running my business, my clients suddenly disappeared and I began to seriously consider leaving entrepreneurship for a “stable” job. Deep down, I knew why things were drying up, but I was afraid to face the reality: I hated selling. Much like today, at the time, my inbox was flooded with a million sales pitches. I hated that approach so much that I went too far in the opposite direction: I wasn’t selling myself at all. I was so afraid to own my unexpected path to entrepreneurship that I came off as the friend in discovery calls, not the confident expert.
As I share in the introduction to my book, it took making my first real investment in a business coach to get the clarity and perspective I needed to see one fundamental reality. I learned that in order to have my greatest business, I needed to embrace my story. I needed to not be afraid to lean into my experience even though it didn’t seem like the perfect resume to me. When I did that, my business took off and has continued to fly. In that time, I’ve more than tripled my revenue, attracted dream clients, and built a business that I really love to run. And it’s one that never requires me to be a sleazy salesperson.
On this note, in my own experience and in having spoken to thousands of service-based entrepreneurs, the greatest misconception I’ve seen is that there’s a perfect message or story and you can’t be successful until you have those elusive words in hand. Having written more than 100 brand voice guides, I can tell you that there’s no perfect message, website, or brand. In fact, chasing branding perfection will keep you stuck looking for something that doesn’t exist. The key is really to embrace your story: to find the parts that have made you the expert you are and to own them with confidence in all that you do.
Q: We dare you to brag. What achievements are you most proud of?
A: Professionally, I’m most proud of writing my two bestselling books, “Permission to Try: 11 Things You Need to Hear When You’re Scared to Change Your Life,” and “Establish Yourself: Brand, Streamline, and Grow Your Greatest Business.” I spent more than three years of my life writing, designing, publishing, and releasing these books. Along the way, there were many times where this journey became a highly-isolating experience full of self-doubt. Yet, especially in the age of the internet, the thing that’s so remarkable about writing a book is that it’s tangible. These books now exist in physical form, I could never get the thousands of copies back even if I tried. What I’ve written could potentially live on after me, and impact in a myriad of ways far beyond me or my intent. While so challenging to produce, my books continue to take me on remarkably rewarding adventures years after their releases.
Personally, I’m most proud of staying brave in my journey to having my son, Leo. Our path to becoming a family was marked with four years of infertility uncertainty, scary medical appointments, and summoning hope over and over again when we constantly got bad news. Looking at Leo now, I often say that we are the luckiest after being so unlucky for so long. It’s important to note that not everyone’s infertility story ends in children and they are always stories of grief. So I’m additionally proud of sharing my own infertility story when it didn’t have a happy ending to share in my book, “Permission to Try.” In this book, I wanted to be intentional in assuring others that at times, your story doesn’t make sense, and that’s normal and okay, especially if you are dealing with infertility.
Q: Has your definition of success evolved throughout your journey as a founder?
A: Having both parents and grandparents in a retail business and having hustled myself in corporate America, I naturally transferred my expectations around work from my career into my business. In the early years, I saw working long hours as a badge of honor and always equated more “hard” work with more success. I’d go on New Year’s vacations with friends only to spend most of it hiding away in the beach house dining room, updating my portfolio on my laptop. I saw the online gurus teaching digital product sales, social media marketing, and the close cart/million follower culture. Marketing everywhere, working constantly—this seemed like the recipe for success. But I never could make it work for me sustainably.
In 2016, I began a journey away from these mindsets to a new strategy—smarter and easier, not harder. I let go of the emphasis on the hard work and time to be spent on a business, and focused more on making that hard work and time make more of a difference and, quite frankly, be easier to accomplish. I took the entire month of December off that year and called it “Batch December.” In the experiment, I spent 160 hours that month solely on making my business more efficient and easy to run through systems, processes, and branding. The fruits of this work were immediate, impactful, and everlasting.
Since then, I’ve done seven Batch Decembers and have become known as a successful business person who takes every December “off.” Doing this has continually taught me to value ease, time, and efficiency when it comes to having a successful business. The results have only deepened that new compass for me. I’ve become a consistent six-figure business owner and more than tripled my revenue while working less than ever before. I love what I do and actually have fun running my business. I’ve proved to myself that success is really about growing your greatest business, not the one you’ve seen on “Shark Tank” or the one people tell you that you should have. I believe it starts with giving yourself permission to let go of what doesn’t work for you to find what does.
Q: What would you tell your younger self if you were to start your entrepreneurial journey all over again?
A: If I could talk to my younger self at the very beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I’d tell her to “embrace your story.” That permission and confidence that I can have a business built from my experience, strategies, and non-hustle values is essential to my success today. I only wish I’d known it to be so true and valuable earlier on.
Q: How would you describe the journey you’ve had in a few sentences? Would you do it all over again?
A: After falling in love with movies and storytelling as a kid, I got my dream job at Disney telling stories of upcoming movies. Once I realized it was just a dream job, and not a dream life, I quit. Though I had no idea what I was doing, I began branding and growing my greatest business in 2013. Now, nearly a decade later, I’m so grateful to have advised hundreds of entrepreneurs, spoken for thousands, created a business that’s easy and fun to run, and written two bestselling books designed to encourage others to live their greatest stories. I couldn’t have done it without my favorite person, my husband—Gus, and our favorite person, our son, Leo.
Q: What’s next for you and Greatest Story Creative®?
A: As time goes on, I’m always creating ways to bring more fun and strategy into the work I do. As I head into my 10th year with Greatest Story Creative®, I’m excited to introduce a new branding and sleaze-free sales workshop, Package Your Process™, and publish my third book, a joyful children’s book about entrepreneurship. I’m really hoping my three-year-old likes it even though there aren’t any trucks in it.
Annie is a member of Dreamers & Doers, an award-winning community that amplifies extraordinary women entrepreneurs and leaders by securing PR opportunities, forging authentic connections, and curating high-impact resources. Learn more about Dreamers & Doers and get involved here.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
