Section 1
Stories decay on a schedule
Three clocks run against every piece of company narrative. The customer clock: your best-fit buyer changes as you move upmarket, narrow, or add a product, and a story written for the old buyer quietly recruits the wrong prospects. The proof clock: figures age. A result from four years ago invites the question of what you have done since, and the absence of a recent number is louder than the presence of an old one. The objection clock: the default doubt in your market shifts. Buyers who once asked whether the approach worked now ask about integration, or cost, or compliance. A story that handles a settled objection while ignoring the live one is answering a question nobody is asking. The upstream error catalogue is in [Common Storytelling Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make](/blog/common-storytelling-mistakes-entrepreneurs-make).
Section 2
What ages and what should not
Some elements are supposed to be stable. Why the company exists, what it refuses to do, the standard it holds itself to. Changing these frequently is not evolution, it is drift, and customers notice before employees do. Everything else should be dated material with a review cycle. Proof points, named clients, the buyer description, the competitive comparison, the objection handled, and the description of the product itself. The practical distinction is between the reason and the evidence. The reason can stay for a decade. The evidence should never be older than your last significant change in what you sell. Mission-level framing is discussed in [Using Stories to Drive Social Change as a Founder](/blog/using-stories-to-drive-social-change-as-a-founder).
Section 3
A refresh cadence
Not everything needs the same review interval, and treating it uniformly is how teams end up doing none of it. The table below assigns each story element a review frequency, a trigger event that forces an early review, and the owner responsible.
Section 4
The annual rewrite, done in a week
Start with an audit that takes an afternoon. List every published story asset with the date of its most recent factual update, not its last edit. Most companies find assets that have carried the same numbers for three years. Then run the mismatch test. For each asset, ask whether the client in it resembles the clients you now want, and whether the problem it solves is the one you now lead with. Two questions, and they will eliminate a third of the library. Replace rather than patch. Editing an old case study to fit a new position produces something that reads as neither. Commission two new ones from recent work, retire the ones that failed the test, and accept a smaller library that is entirely current. Finish by dating everything publicly. A visible date is a credibility signal, not a weakness. Evidence patterns worth emulating are in [Before-and-After: ROI Stories from Automated Startups](/blog/before-and-after-roi-stories-from-automated-startups).
Section 5
The opposite failure
Rewriting too often is its own problem, and it is more common in companies that take messaging seriously. Positioning that changes every two quarters never accumulates recognition, and the market reads the movement as a company that has not worked out what it is. The other cost is internal. Sales teams stop learning the story if it will be replaced before they are fluent, and they revert to describing the product in their own words, which puts you back where you started. A workable rule: evidence updates continuously, positioning changes only when the business genuinely changed, and the founding reason changes almost never. If you cannot name what changed in the business that requires a new story, you do not need a new story. You need new proof for the one you have.