Every Brand Voice Starts With a Real One
By Barbara Kumari, Founder of Narrative Ops. She’s partnered with brands such as NYT Licensing and Microsoft to design storytelling systems that outlast hype cycles and drive lasting market edge. Find her on LinkedIn.
It started, like too many corporate sagas do, in a windowless conference room at 8:12 a.m. The coffee was lukewarm, the Slack sidebar was buzzing like a casino, and instead of talking about a product launch, the team was arguing over The Bachelor.
Someone asked if “data-driven” just meant whoever shouted loudest won. That was the moment it hit me: this wasn’t marketing. This was karaoke with spreadsheets.
On paper, I was fine. Ten years of technical writing, research, marketing, and strategy—LinkedIn would’ve tossed confetti across the screen. I could take copy that sounded like a refrigerator manual and make it safe for a CFO’s inbox.
But the signal kept slipping. Deadlines stretched like bad taffy, meetings multiplied, and every “alignment” exercise ended with a migraine and a color-coded Miro board no one opened again.
One Tuesday, after a meeting that should have been a sentence, I closed my laptop the way you close a book you don’t believe in.
No Substack manifesto.
No grand speech.
Just a quiet epiphany: this isn’t how truth ships.
Enter Narrative Ops
Narrative Ops was born from that moment. The rule of engagement: treat truth like an asset and shipping like a habit. We started running newsroom standards through B2B pipelines, stripping out the Slack soap operas and corporate theater, and building content that could stand on its own when procurement leaned in with a red pen.
Here’s the thing: vibes are nice, but they don’t close deals.
Receipts close deals.
And receipts without a story?
They’re just receipts.
So we started pairing the two—proof with prose, logic with heat—until brands stopped waving at the market and actually got a wave back.
The Two of Us
I didn’t build this bureau alone. Guddu Kumar, my co-founder, brought an operator’s sharpness to the table that kept the whole thing from turning into a writer’s daydream. Where I obsess over words, he obsesses over systems. He’s the one who makes sure the engines run, the deadlines hold, and the shipping never stops.
Between us, it’s reporter’s brain and operator’s instinct, marketer’s heart and engineer’s discipline. The combination means we can take a mess—whether it’s an expert brain dump, a spaghetti org chart, or a pile of acronyms—and turn it into a machine that produces revenue-ready assets on repeat.
How We Process Your Case
You bring the brief, the experts, the stakes, and your napkin notes. We sit down with you and unpack it from every angle: product, legal, sales, and more. We actually listen like it’s paid work—because it is. Before a single line gets drafted, we define what “done” means.
Then we write so you can say yes without needing to Google half the terms.
And when it ships, it’s not just one asset. It’s a package that travels. You get something you can post without wincing. Sales reps get lines they can drop in meetings without losing cadence. Teams borrow and re-borrow the work until the edges go soft.
That’s by design.
What We Count
Clicks don’t keep the lights on. Outcomes do. For us, that means pipeline moved, deals accelerated, support tickets reduced, and legal and security approvals sped up. If an asset can’t be cited, it shouldn’t ship. If compliance can’t clear it, it’s dead weight. We’re allergic to dead weight.
Proof of Concept
The model has already been tested at scale. I’ve ghostwritten for executives at Microsoft, Billtrust, AAOS, NYT Licensing, Dealer Inspire, and many more. We’ve built explainer libraries for startups juggling product, pricing, and UX confusion all at once. We call our deliverables dossiers for a reason—they’re built to be lifted and reused until the staples complain.
What I left behind in that corporate fever dream—delay, paralysis, and fluff—is exactly what we pull out of your content.
Check out just a few examples of our work here.
The Market Shift
AI has scrambled how people search, skim, and decide. The old SEO hymnbook is full of missing pages. We bet you, like the rest of us, aren’t begging for more content; you’re starving for signal. Sharp, credible, quotable content is what moves the needle now—the kind a sales lead can reference mid-call, a committee can circulate without edits, and compliance can approve without turning it into chalk dust.
The Bureau Today
We operate Narrative Ops as a lean, cross-continental bureau with a global presence. The formula is simple: his systems, my sentences, our shared refusal to waste time. We don’t chase trends; we build editorial engines that make truth persuasive and repeatable.
If you’re tired of pretty paragraphs that don’t move pipeline, bring us the mess and the mandate. We’ll bring the badge, the highlighters, and the stubborn belief that truth ships.
Case open.