Building a Company Customers Can Trust

When we set out to launch Company Alarm, it was a labor of love.

My husband Andy and I have been battered for years by the strain of the theft of his business, which held a $5 million piece of land in Las Vegas. Together, we’ve met with lawyers, attended court hearings and struggled through countless sleepless nights trying to make sense of what has happened to us. How could this happen? How do we move forward?

Eventually, we came to realize that the only way we could make sense of our pain was to use it as an inspiration to save other businesspeople from repeating our fate. We would take the hard lessons we had learned from our own experience with business identity theft and use it to help others.

But starting a company to combat something as puzzling as business identity theft isn’t your typical venture. We knew education would have to be a huge component of our business plan, because people understand what a stolen Social Security number means, but most have never even heard of business identity theft. After all, we knew nothing about business identity theft when it rolled over us and flattened our lives. So, we figured, we’d have to teach the public about it, in order for for Company Alarm to be successful.

Being a teacher, however, is a hard position for a business to be in, particularly a startup. As Mark Schaefer writes in The Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins, most American consumers don’t trust the word of businesses these days.

We realized that for Company Alarm to succeed, we would have to build a business that people would trust. No pressure, right?

Fact versus fiction

To begin, one of the first things we did was lay out our company values as a team. As our fabulous brand consultant, Rachel Cogar Yeakley, put it, our values “are non-negotiable.” These are the bedrock of Company Alarm, the foundation upon which our business is built.

And our No. 1 value is integrity.

That means rigorously researching a topic before reporting it as gospel to our clients. It means spending as much time fact checking our marketing materials as making sure they look pretty. It means being transparent in our operations, and, above all, truthful in our words. No matter what.

Our promise to you is that when you read something from Company Alarm you can count on it being the truth of the matter, that we’ve spent the time to make sure we’ve dotted our I’s and crossed our T’s to give you the most reliable information possible on the threats posed by business identity theft.

If we’re going to be in the education business, it’s only right that we get it right.

A personal touch

The simple truth, however, is not enough. From our own experience, we knew how painful business identity theft could be. Being an entrepreneur, being a business owner, is an act of passion, not just cold calculations on a spreadsheet. There is something essentially human about going into business.

So that means we can’t be robots. We need to connect with businesspeople as people in order for this to work.

That’s why you see so much of Andy and I’s story on the Company Alarm website – and why, in the future, you’ll see other people’s stories, too. We want you to know that we understand not just the financial value of your business, but its personal value as well.

In drafting our core values with Rachel, our team got to talking about how launching a business is really about trying to grab a piece of the American dream. That’s certainly why Andy became an entrepreneur. At the age of nine, his mother put him on a boat to escape communism overrunning Vietnam. She sent him, alone, out to sea, so that he might forge a better future for himself. Andy never saw his mom again.

That’s what being in business means to us. It’s incredibly personal. And having our American dream attacked by thieves made it all the more devastating.

So, we get it. Company Alarm is not just protecting an asset. It’s protecting your most sacred aspirations, for you and your family.

The focus is you

To use marketing speak, I guess you could say our intention with Company Alarm is to be “customer centric.” Our primary focus, the reason we get up in the morning, is to serve you, the customer.

But, honestly, that doesn’t even begin to capture the feeling of what we’re trying to do. I’ve come to think of Company Alarm as almost a philanthropic endeavor, a mission to help businesspeople everywhere.

When we look at who we are — who Andy is — and the core beliefs he has carried with him all the way from Vietnam in 1979, we know we’re here to be champions of the American dream. We believe that if you can dream it, you can do it. We also believe with all our hearts that businesspeople are the heroes of the American dream because they work hard, sacrifice and invest their time and money into products and services that make this world a better place. And that’s a cause we patriotically stand up for and support.

YOU are the heroes of the American dream.

We want you to go out there and work hard and work smart to build your business and make your impact. And while you focus your genius on helping your audiences and making the biggest impact possible, we’re here to help you protect your business — your piece of the American dream.

You’re the hero, and we’ve got your back!