Welcome back to Incorporating SuperPowers, and today we’re going to go into storytelling. Matter of fact, today we’re going to go into mastering your story. My guest today is the CEO and president of INVNT Group. Scott Cullather is… Well, Scott’s a kindred spirit. He’s like me. He’s married to his business partner. They’ve been in business for quite some time. They’ve built a business, sold a business, and are back in business. They’re serial entrepreneurs. And he helps businesses and people and individuals master their brand story. And I’m super excited because he’s got a book that he’s written with his wife that’s called Challenge Everything: The Battle Cry That Blew Sh*t Up and INVNTd Live Brand Storytelling. This, folks, you’re going to want to listen to this conversation because the importance of storytelling in today’s digital world is super, super important. Scott, thank you so much for being here today.
Justin, it’s a pleasure to be with you. I wish my mom was listening right now to hear the wonderful introduction. I think she’d be very proud of me. Thank you for that.
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, we were talking before the show and you’ve been in this space for quite some time. And the work that you’re doing out there and some of the stuff that you’re sharing with me, some of the programs that your company offers for helping businesses, working with people that are wanting to tell the story, some of the clients that you’re working with that are just so inspirational, bringing those stories to life in mastering the art of storytelling and the brand story, especially is so important today, especially amidst the sea of choices that people have to listen to and dare I say the sludge of social media that exists.
Nailing your story and connecting with your audience in a very unique and authentic way right now is probably one of the most important things a company and a brand can do. So talk to me a little bit about, how… Let’s just start. How did you get started on this path?
So, I actually have grown up my entire life in the business of marketing communications. My father was a pioneer in the industry of live events and was in fact the 13th employee at a company called Jack Morton, which is now a global marketing communications agency that was acquired by Interpublic Group. So I had the fortune and the good blessings of growing up in the business and so it really was in my blood.
And in 2008, after having worked with his business for about 15 or 16 years he had retired, and at that point, his business partners, former business partners, and myself were going in different directions. And so my wife, my now current wife, who was my partner at the time, decided to split off and start our own agency called INVNT in 2008.
So let me get this straight. Your wife broke off and started the business. This sounds very familiar, folks, because if you followed my story at all, that’s exactly what happened here, is that my wife had a great idea and I followed along because I saw what she was on to.
This actually was slightly different. This was her idea. I actually wound up leaving first. She stayed behind for a couple of months to look after some business and some accounts that she was responsible for and then joined me. But the idea was very much birthed out of her soul and spirit, for sure. And we’ve been business partners ever since.
So we launched in 2008 with this notion of creating a globally recognized brand that was in the world of marketing communications that helped companies and individuals bring their brand stories to life. And now almost 13 years later, we’ve gone through… As you pointed out in the intro, we were acquired in 2015 by Time, Inc. We wound up having basically a life-changing deal for many people in our agency. It was every entrepreneur’s dream. Big, giant holding company. Time, Inc. comes in and buys us. Two years into that, it didn’t actually materialize the way we all wanted it to, and so we wound up having the fortune of being able to get our agency back in 2017.
So since we started, having gone through that evolution, selling the business, getting the business back, we now have nine offices. We’re in six different countries, and we basically have a full-service offering for brands and organizations that want to bring their stories to life through brand storytelling.
And so now, today we’re the INVNT Group and we have a brand strategy agency called FOLK HERO. They help executives design the positioning and the strategy and the single organizing message and all that stuff. We have FOLK HERO that helps… Sorry, that is FOLK HERO, the brand strategy agency. We have MEANING, which is the culture consultancy business that helps those messages come down through an organization. We then have HEVE, which is a digital content studio, helps businesses amplify their messaging. And then of course we have INVNT, which is the founding company of the INVNT group, which is the live event business or the experiential business, also helping brands bring their stories to life, but through live events.
This is good. So I got to ask. With COVID and whatnot, how are you going to pivot during the portion of the live event of the storytelling? How did the COVID have an impact on you?
Massive impact on us as well as the entire world. Not only within live events but events were hit substantially hard, as you know because everything effectively shut down. What we had going for us is that we always had a digital or virtual offering to our live events. We found the need to do that because there’s such a large population of millennials and Gens at our events. They go to festivals, they go to business events, they go to product launches. They go to all these cool experiences and they don’t want to just have a live experience. That is something that’s very important to them, but they want to have a live experience that they can ultimately share. And so a shareable experience being the number one thing for millennials and Gens drove us to always have a digital solution.
So when the pandemic hit, it wasn’t an easy pivot or an easy shift for us to move mostly from life with some digital and move that too mostly digital with some live. But that’s effectively what we’ve done. And since the pandemic hit, the world shut down and the live event world shut down in March or April of last year, we did about 40 or 50 different events all over the world for some of the largest companies in the world, everywhere from General Motors, to Samsung to SAP to Facebook to Merck pharmaceuticals to Pfizer, SC Johnson, on and on and on. All of these organizations feel the need to communicate authentically still to their employees and their key target audiences, and we were able to help them bring those stories to life through a virtual offering or virtual experiences.
This is good. This is a great transition, folks. So Scott, before we go on break, where can people go to learn more about your business?
Yep. So you can find us at invntgroup.com, and you can also learn from my website, scottcullather.com, And then our book, Challenge Everything: The Battle Cry That Blew Sh*t Up and INVNTd Live Brand Storytelling can be found on Amazon or any of the other online retailers, as well as bookstores around the country. Notably, Hudson bookstores in every airport in the United States are carrying our book.
Fantastic. Folks, stay with us because when we get back, we’re going to dive down the rabbit hole a little bit more as to are some of the things that you should be doing right now to get your brand out and start telling your story? Stay with us, we’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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