Charlie Kirk sat before a Salt Lake City audience of restaurateurs last September 10, dispensing business advice drawn from his own unlikely rise.
The conservative activist argued that a company needed a deep connection to the founder’s “energy and vision” to endure, but he also warned that “separating the brand from the founder” was among the greatest challenges an entrepreneur could face.
“We have not done this successfully yet,” Kirk acknowledged of Turning Point USA, the organization he built to influence and mobilize young people.
Hours later, a gunman fatally shot Kirk on a Utah college campus. He was 31.
In the year since his death, Turning Point’s leaders — including Kirk’s widow, Erika, and some of his closest friends and lieutenants — have confronted the very challenge he described that tragic morning: preserving and expanding a political movement that had been built, to an extraordinary degree, around the energy, instincts and celebrity of its charismatic leader.
