(Personal) How It Started for Me

(Transcript)

This whole series is about how to create the kind of relationship with your customers that make them almost immune to offers from competitors.

It starts with a story- with your story. Now this is one thing that’s absolutely true about every human on the planet: Every person loves stories so I’m going to tell you a little bit about the story of my company, Cult Your Brand.

It all started with me and my two best friends. We’ll call them – let’s call them “Brad” and “William.”

Now there’s three characters in this story:

Me – I’m this tall kind of intellectual Midwestern guy who maybe over-thinks things and tends to procrastinate a little bit.

Brad grew up in Massachusetts and then moved to West Texas before moving on to Central Texas to go to school. He and I actually ended up going to the same University. He was an odd mixture that East Coast and West Texas. Really incredibly funny. An artist by nature, wildly creative but maybe a little bit a little insecure, maybe not totally sure of himself.

And then there was William who was just a Central Texas good-old-boy – an
entrepreneur, very practical.

So you’ve got the intellectual, the artist and the entrepreneur. We were best friends. We were like the three musketeers. We were together all the time, every day of the week, morning, noon and night.

We all had businesses we were working on trying to build.

And then this cult came to town.

Brad and William were both really fascinated by this cult. The promise that this cult made to people was that if you did things in their way – you know, saw the world and the universe and God and life through their lens – then you would save your children.

That was really the bottom line – make sure your kids grow up straight.

William’s wife henpecked him constantly to join. I had absolutely no interest. My wife had absolutely no interest. Brad was kind of caught between the two of us but at the end of the day he kind of would follow William wherever he went.

Ultimately they joined the cult and it destroyed our relationship. Not because I wanted it to be over but because the nature of the cult was that they couldn’t have friendships outside of the cult.

Well, that whole experience blew my mind. Because I watched these guys suffer
physical and mental and emotional abuse and yet maintain their loyalty to this
group. And I had to figure out, “what is it that causes people to be loyal even when the reason that they got connected with a group no longer exists.”

And that was the foundation of my company, Cult Your Brand.