How a Company Story Is Extracted

This is a method page. It sets out the steps by which a company's story is extracted, what goes in and what comes out at each step, and the point at which the work can stop. The same method sits behind a corporate history, an anniversary book or a commemorative publication. The definition of the category and the measured evidence base are set out on a company story is a record; what follows here is how that record is assembled.

The work is divided into two phases. Phase A is source gathering. Phase B is narrative construction and preparation for publication. This division is the backbone of the page, not a presentational preference. Phase B begins only after the Source Inventory delivered at the end of Phase A has been approved in writing. Without that approval, the second phase is not opened.

Phase A: source gathering

The purpose of Phase A is to establish what exists, not to improve on what exists. No narrative is constructed in this phase, no framing is proposed and no publication-ready sentence is written. Whatever the collected material says is what enters the record.

The inputs are as follows:

  • Founder session. A structured interview with the person who founded the company, focused on dates and decisions.
  • Long-serving employee interview. The person who carries the institutional memory and remembers the period closest to the founding.
  • Interview with an employee in the field or in customer contact. Someone who describes how the work is actually done from the operational level rather than the management level.
  • New employee interview. Someone who can still look at the company from the outside and still notice what has become self-evident inside it.
  • Customer interviews. Sources that confirm from the other side when the relationship began and what changed.
  • Review and dating of the existing archive. Reading the documents, correspondence, advertisements, newsletters, contracts and photographs the company holds, establishing their dates and recording their provenance.

Archive review here is a reading task, not a technical operation. It means locating the existing material, establishing which year it belongs to and recording where it came from. Restoration, digitisation, scanning and reshooting are out of scope.

The outputs are as follows: interview transcripts, a written Source Inventory and an assessment of which narrative can be built from this material.

The Source Inventory is the document in which what exists and what does not exist is recorded item by item. Four things are recorded for each item: what the material is, which date it belongs to or that its date is unknown, who or where it came from, and whether it can be independently verified. Items that cannot be verified are not deleted; they remain in the inventory with a note that verification was not possible. The assessment section answers a single question: can a publishable narrative be built from this material, and if so, at what scope.

Why we make this division

The reason is straightforward: the material may turn out to be insufficient. The founder may have died. The archive may have been lost in relocations, in a fire or simply through neglect. It may be that no one in the company remembers the year of founding, the date of the first contract or the name of the first customer. Accounts may contradict one another with no document to resolve the contradiction.

These possibilities are real, and when they are not stated in advance one of two poor outcomes follows. Either the gap is filled with invention, which is unacceptable to us. Or the client pays in full for work that was never going to come together. For that reason, if the material is insufficient at the end of Phase A, Phase B does not begin. What is delivered in that case is the Source Inventory, the transcripts and a written statement of what is missing. That document carries value on its own: a list of the missing dates and sources shows the company what it needs to collect in the years ahead.

The measurement side points in the same direction. In the GEO study by Aggarwal and colleagues, published at KDD 2024, adding quotations to the same content raises the Position-Adjusted Word Count metric from a baseline of 19.5 to 27.8; adding statistics raises it to 25.9 and citing sources raises it to 24.9. A quotation, a figure and a source have to exist before they can be added. Phase A establishes precisely whether they exist.

Phase B: narrative and publication

Phase B begins once the Source Inventory has passed written approval. Its outputs are as follows:

  • Verified event timeline. Every line answers who, when and on the basis of which source. An event whose source cannot be shown does not enter the timeline.
  • Narrative framework. The axis along which the events in the timeline are ordered, what belongs to the main line and what belongs to the background, and which sections rest on which sources.
  • Publication-ready text. The framework written out in the agreed form. Length, number of sections and number of revision rounds are set out on the scope and exclusions page.
  • Structured data. Machine-readable marking of the people, dates and institutions in the text. This layer is a carrier, not a cause; the reasoning is set out on the entity-based SEO and answer engine visibility pages.

The first question in Google's helpful and reliable content guidance reads: "Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?" The text produced in Phase B is built to be the answer to that question, because the material it rests on was gathered at first hand.

How we deal with images

For the images the client already holds we write three things only: the caption, the alternative text and the source credit. What the image shows, which date it belongs to and where it came from are entered into the text. The image itself is not touched. It is not scanned, restored, digitised, colourised or reshot.

Interviews are not filmed. An audio recording is made and its sole purpose is transcription. The recording is not a deliverable and is not published.

Consent

A written consent record is kept for every person interviewed. The record states one of three options: the person may be published by name, the account may be used in anonymised form, or the material remains for internal use only. The choice belongs to the person interviewed and can be narrowed later. No statement without consent enters the published text.

Who conducts the interviews

The interviews and the archive reading are conducted by our founder. He began in 1996 with photography and videography, worked on interactive projects in 2003, moved to digital marketing and SEO from the 2010s onwards and developed this framework in 2024. The visual background appears here not as a service item, but to explain where the practice of sitting down opposite a person and getting them to talk comes from. The detail is on the who conducts the interviews page.

What we do not promise

  • We do not shoot photography or video. We do not produce corporate films, promotional films, anniversary films, documentaries or animation. We do not provide editing, colour grading, voice-over, drone, studio or crew services.
  • We do not film interviews. The audio recording serves transcription only, is not a deliverable and is not published.
  • We do not scan, restore, digitise or reshoot archive photographs. For an existing image we write only the caption, the alternative text and the source credit.
  • We do not select images, we do not clear image rights and we do not handle licensing. We also do not carry out the cover design, typesetting, printing or binding of the book.
  • We do not promise that the material will prove sufficient at the end of Phase A. If it is insufficient, Phase B does not begin, and that possibility is stated in the contract from the outset.
  • We do not guarantee citations, rankings or visibility. What we provide is measurement, a stated method and a report; the detail is on the transparency page.
  • We do not claim that structured data produces citations on its own. Schema carries an existing record; it does not replace it.
  • We do not buy placement in earned media and we do not promise publication. The publication decision belongs to the publisher.
  • We do not take on work while our capacity is full, and we do not accept anniversary projects when fewer than eight weeks remain before the event date.

Where to start

The starting point is Phase A and the first delivery is the Source Inventory. The duration of each step, the number of revision rounds and the contribution expected from the client are set out on the scope and exclusions page, our general working arrangement on the working model page, and our measurement and reporting method on the method page. Applied examples can be read in the case studies, and you can reach us through the contact page to discuss your own situation.