Ted Cantu – The WIN – How Did This All Start?

Everything has a beginning, right? None of us just wake up at the top with the Midas touch. Honestly, I never expected to end up leading more than 65 industries. In the beginning, I was like many others, hoping to break into entertainment. For me, that meant aiming for places like MTV and other creative studios making cool commercials.

Art was everything to me, and I loved the visual side of advertising. I got involved in the dot-com movement before the internet really took off. Back then, we had Netscape and Yahoo, but neither was a great search engine. When the Dot Com bubble burst, many of those overhyped companies collapsed, and after 9/11, it all came to an end.

Starting From Scratch And Creating
A New Aesthetic

I built up my resume with big names like Capital Records, Oprah Winfrey, WWE, Coca Cola, Budweiser, and Citibank. I took on fun projects when I could, but working with so many different businesses made me well-rounded. Once I started working for myself, I began collecting marketing books, manuals, and courses—anything I could find. In the corporate world, we rarely had resources to keep up with advertising trends. Marketing felt unfamiliar to us there.

Like many others after the Dot Com crash, I started exploring direct response marketing. I learned a lot from experts like Dan Kennedy, Seth Godin, Glazer-Kennedy, Joe Vitale, and even the early work of John Caples.

Instead of following the crowd and building a company on vague ideas, I set out to become the most knowledgeable in my field. It was a bold move, but it paid off. Soon, I mastered the basics of sales copywriting, SEO, video production, sales psychology, NLP, negotiations, and PR. I became a one-man army in advertising, and it worked out better than I expected.

That’s the basic story. I’ll share more about these early days in future articles.

But enough about me. Let’s hear what my clients have to say about my work. All the videos you’re about to see are unscripted and unplanned. We simply turned on the camera, and my clients took it from there.