How storytelling in business took me from stage fright to a room of 1,000

Before any argument about storytelling in business, Aziz Musa puts the thing he is least proud of on the table. He could not present. At university he would try to stand in front of people and the words would not come. He would sweat. He could not read his own notes and could not see properly.

Then, at 23 or 24, working in a company of a thousand people, the general manager asked him to present to the managers. It was a disaster. He says the word three times. The slides were not in the right order and the text on them had mistakes in it. He could not get the words out at all. He still feels embarrassed thinking about it, to a degree he says is not normal. He went away, was upset, cried, sat with himself and decided it would not happen again. Not that he would become good at presenting. That he would become the best presenter in the company.

He bought about twenty books on oratory: how you speak, how to use speech, body language, how a presentation is built. Then he went to YouTube and watched, for hours at a time, Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Hitler, anyone at all who could hold a room. He makes a joke about what that did to his recommendations. He did not understand a word of some of it. He was not there for the words. He was watching what the hands did, and where the voice went up, and where it came down, and when.

What he came away with was one thing. A story ties the audience to you. If you have a story and you tell it in a way people can feel, you can take them with you. Six or seven months later he had to present again, this time in front of the heads of the company, and he was the best in the room by a distance. After that he was presenting for other companies, and speaking at conferences. At one product conference, standing in front of a thousand people, he used no slides at all. Voice and stories.

Five years ago, making a three-minute video with a client took about a week: the writing, two rounds of editing, all of it. Three minutes went out to social media and people engaged with it, because you could see the time in it, and it sat next to posts that were just text and a crop. AI does that same job in five minutes, so everyone does it, and what people would have called world-class five years ago now goes past without being noticed.

So the thing that earns attention has reversed. It is the content that is not made by AI, the content that is real, the content with mistakes in it. His evidence is his own show. 50,000 people a month watch it on YouTube, and it sits in the top ten of the marketing category in most Gulf countries on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. He is direct about the quality: his Arabic is still broken, and he still cannot land a point the way he can in English. The mistakes are part of why people stop on it.

There is no AI that can imitate my broken Arabic.

From that he draws the rule he now gives every client. No company will grow in future unless the founders make content themselves, and it does not have to be good. It has to be as good as they can manage, because then it is real. If you bake cookies at home and sell them on Instagram, the first post should be you working and talking: why you started this, why you make them, how you make them. You are the content and you are the product. People buy you, not only the thing. A bad product still only sells once, but if the product is good and they like you and you keep talking to them, an audience builds and that audience brings the next one.

He adds the caveat himself, because it is the part founders skip. What anyone sees on camera is a piece of a person, maybe 5 per cent, no more and no less. He is not that person all the time. He has plenty of faults. Anyone who worked with him in Sudan will tell you he shouted and that his manner could be bad, and he says so plainly. He loses his temper quickly, although rarely since the war, because the war taught everyone what actually matters.

He had been telling clients for a long time that the content had to come from them, and by January he found only about 20 per cent of them had started. People learn from examples, so he made himself the example. He would make the content himself, and when he did he would only tell stories: things from business, things he had learned, the way this episode starts with a laptop and a ruined presentation. It spread faster than he expected. 100,000 followers on Facebook, 25,000 on TikTok, 2,000 on Instagram, and thousands of people replying.

The Impact Lab brings in nothing. He calls it close to a charity. He makes all of it free, and when companies ask him to be an influencer for them he says no, because he does not make content to earn from it. Cush Digital is his company and it is doing fine, and he deliberately does not make this content for it. That is the whole demonstration: the person speaking is what has the effect, whoever the person is. So when a client, often a Saudi one, tells him he is no good in front of a camera, Aziz shows him his own content, the broken Arabic, the switching between languages. Give this to any content professional, he says, and they will tell you it is bad. Then look at how many people are engaging with it. Not because bad content is the future. Because it is real, and there is no machine that can fake that. Leave the cheap and ugly stuff alone and tell your stories, because everybody wants to hear them.