John Corcoran 16:23
I could think of some other worse worst case scenarios, but sure, we’ll go with that.
Brett Winn 16:28
Yeah, and so we also reached out to my buddy, John Gunn, who’s a director now as well, but at the time, had made one film, and asked him if he would participate with us. And at first he said no. And then we hung up, and he talked to his wife and told her the idea of Brian trying to get a date with Drew Barrymore, and it was actually his wife Lisa, who said, If you can get Brian a date with Drew Barrymore, I would pay money to see that. And so we didn’t have any money, obviously. And so we went to Circuit City and we bought a video camera that fully prepared to take advantage of the 30 day return policy.
John Corcoran 17:07
And this was, what year?
Brett Winn 17:09
This was 2003 Okay, so, so we documented our buying the camera. So we did it with a still camera. We shot photographs of it, and the camera didn’t start rolling till after we’d purchased it, and that gave us a window to get a date with. DREW. We had 30 days to get a date with. Drew Barrymore. Okay, perfectly. The $1,100 from the budget was from a game show that Brian was on called taboo, where he won. The winning answer was Drew Barrymore, and the prize money was $1,100, hilarious, and I couldn’t make this up, you know, it was very, very real.
And what’s interesting is, for us Stopping down to make the film was all about, you know, chasing a lifelong dream and chasing your passion for making a film. It really wasn’t as much about Drew, although, of course, if he wins it, he gets it. But I think that experience really related to people in a way that, like, we all there’s there’s something out there, there’s everybody has a bucket list, and so to take time and take a pause in your daily life and go after something, I think is really aspirational and inspirational.
John Corcoran 18:16
And, now, were you saying that at the time? You know, I’m wondering if, like, you know, a week into it, you’re thinking like, you know, we haven’t gotten much footage yet. We’re not getting paid for this. Like, is this even interesting at all? No doubts crop up in your head.
Brett Winn 18:30
Well, honestly, we didn’t have a whole lot to lose, and so we didn’t know if it would be anything. I think at some point we probably thought, well, maybe our parents will watch this, you know, it’s gonna be interesting, and we certainly didn’t think about it in those terms. But the more everything started unfold, and we used the six degrees of separation to try and get to Drew and crazy things started happening, the more we realized, like, oh, we were bonding, having such a great time trying to get to her, and the experiences were so fun that we’re like, I wonder if people would be interested in this, this is, this is, and if not, you know what? I have no regrets. It was a great experience for the three of us to go through it, and our families.
John Corcoran 19:10
You know, yeah was now, did that in a weird way, or maybe directly, did that lead to the refinery? Like, did that experience of, of creating something from nothing? You know, we eventually sold the film. Did that kind of give you the idea or the courage to start your own business?
Brett Winn 19:31
Yes, maybe indirectly. I mean, I don’t think it was, it was necessarily my day with Drew, but what I found out through the process was, I like to be able to do things myself. I want to have an idea. I want to make it. Want to make it the one. I want to make it, and then I want to try and sell it. And I think that that part of that entrepreneurial journey is what I really fell in love with. And it’s interesting because my two buddies, John and Brian, went off to direct, to build directing careers, and I got offers to direct as well, but I chose to go back to the entertainment market.
Marketing, because I love the business side more, but I think I also didn’t want to direct anyone else’s project because I only wanted to do what I wanted to do. I couldn’t imagine being handed a script that I halfheartedly liked and have to spend the next two or three years invested in it. And I think maybe that’s the part of the entrepreneurial journey where it’s like, I know what I want, I want to do it my way, and I want it, you know, I don’t want anyone telling me I can’t.
John Corcoran 20:25
Of course, once we have an entrepreneur, you have a bunch of clients, you also have to, Oh, of course, do things that they’re happy about, right? All the time, all the time, so there’s always compromise, yeah.
Brett Winn 20:35
I think especially opening, uh, an entertainment marketing agency, you know, our job is to make any movie or series look great, even though we know that the chances of it actually being great are slim to none.
John Corcoran 20:47
Yeah, we could have a whole side discussion about now, you’d mentioned, I think, before we started recording, that swingers was one of those movies that inspired you, in part, to do date withdrew, and that’s a movie where you could see, you know, Vince launched Vince Vaughn’s career, and, and a bunch of others and, and, you know, a lot of the the folks that came out of these indie movies, they ended up having to do that balance between taking a script that comes to them getting a payday, and then doing something that’s more, you Know, satisfies their creative juices more of their own individual project. And, you know, some people, I think, in Hollywood, have done a better job of that than others, kind of balancing. It’s not easy to, you know, forge a career like that, no.
Brett Winn 21:31
And I think it’s been an interesting look. We always want what we don’t have. So I’m always comparing my agency with the other big agencies that are out there, and there’s always someone working on a bigger film or like, Oh, someone just did the trailer for a joke or two. Damn. Why didn’t we do that? And yet, at the same time, I think we built a career on working closely with our clients, forming really good relationships. And sometimes it’s more fun to do a great trailer for a terrible film than a great trailer for a great film, because work that goes into it and the problem solving ability is inherent. You know, not that it doesn’t take a lot of work to make a great film look great, but I think it actually takes more to make a bad film look great.
John Corcoran 22:17
It’s interesting because, you know, I think today, now, it’s a different world. There’s so much more information coming at us, but you have the movies that are coming out. I remember, like 20 years ago, like a great trailer would come out, and he’d be like, Oh my god, that’s amazing. And everyone would rush to see it, and then it would just die afterwards. And that doesn’t have to seem to happen as often. Now, in other words, I think, like you can’t, you can’t completely dissuade the movie from going public, because they’re going to find out sooner or later whether the movie’s a dud or not.
Brett Winn 22:55
Yeah. I mean, I still think the world falls for a great trailer, which I love. And I love great trailers, too. And I’m subject to, you know, my competitors making something. I’m like, Oh, my God, I have to see that we’re not working on it. You get there and you’re like, Wow, you guys did a great job, because that’s rough, you know. But at the same time, I feel audiences are evolving, you know, earlier on in my career, the types of, not necessarily trailers, but TV on air promo or TV trailers that would air would be heavy hand and be like, it’s the one movie you simply can’t miss, don’t miss, and we were sold to and we believe it.
And it’s not that it doesn’t happen today, but I think audiences today are not only does it not work as well for them, they’re actually kind of turned off by that, like they don’t want to be told that they have to see it like give me the material I’ll choose for myself. And what’s interesting is that social media marketing and creative content is what we called it, where it was making materials to market the movie, sometimes without the movie materials at all, or some movie materials, some behind the scenes, some interview footage, some some creative way to get people excited tends to move the needle now, almost as much as the trailer interesting.
John Corcoran 24:07
So when are you planning that out? Like, are you planning not just the trailer, but you’re thinking like, multimedia. Are you thinking like, is it, you know, where I was like, 20 years ago, it would have been all right. We need to create one amazing two minute trailer. We need to create one amazing 32nd trailer, full stop. That’s all you had to do. And now you’re thinking like, well, we need to create 70 different shorts for Instagram, and they need to have a narrative arc. Is that what you’re doing too?
Brett Winn 24:35
Yeah. I mean, I think it was mostly about the TV campaign when I was younger, right? The trailer was big, and that was great. But really, what it was, it was about the TV campaign. And what was crazy about the TV campaign is you could cut 50/32 spots because you were hitting people live on air. And so we had to go after every single network of like, okay, who’s the audience at CBS? Who’s the audience at Fox who. Was the audience, and then you’d span out to the cable networks and the MTV generation and so you’d be trying to craft the movie into 32nd bite sized pieces geared specifically towards those audiences. And it was a lot.
Now I think those 32nd spots, while we still do quite a bit of them for big films, it’s not as much, because they’re finding that, you know, few really good spots go a long way. And where we used to worry about that, spots that have been on the air for two weeks, we need fresh new spots nowadays. They’re like, well, the spot works and it’s good, and people aren’t watching live TV as much. You don’t know how or where, when they’re going to see it, and they don’t get burned out from seeing the same spot. In fact, it’s probably not a terrible thing, so that’s changed, certainly changed the economics of what we do.
John Corcoran 25:48
You, you’ve I worked on some amazing films and projects just I’m scanning over your website here, but can you think of one or two where the film footage, the footage came in to you and you were just blown away, you know, just blown away by, oh, this is amazing, this project. And just get chills to even work on it.
Brett Winn 26:10
Yeah. I mean, we worked on Ford versus Ferrari. We cut the trailer for Ford versus Ferrari, at least the first trailer, and that was, you know, that’s a bucket list project for me. I mean, I’ve known the story of Carol Shelby my whole life. My dad was a huge Shelby fan, and it took them 10 years to really get that movie out and about. And then all of a sudden you realize, oh my god, it’s Christian Bale, and it’s Matt Damon, and just this all star cast, and it was put together so well, and so I beg, borrowed and stole to work on that movie, and I was just in love with it from the first time I saw it. It’s such a well crafted, fun movie.
And it’s not often a car movie that has all these other emotions going for it. And that’s definitely a bucket list project that I love to tell people we worked on. You know? I hope you can go back and look at your career and be like, Oh, I got to work on things that mattered beyond everything else. I mean, I remember we got to work on creed, and I was a huge rocky fan growing up, especially being from Philadelphia originally, and then south Jersey, I grew up with peach dragon. It was one of the first animated movies I loved, and we cut the trailer for the new Pete’s Dragon. Definitely Ford versus Ferrari and then, and then another one was Kong. We did a really fun trailer for Kong, but I just remember growing up with with Kong and Godzilla movies, and it’s fun when, when your childhood comes back around and you get to play with it as an adult.
John Corcoran 27:37
Speaking of that, that’s kind of the experience of being a parent. I know you’re a parent. I am as well. I took my kids to Disneyland a couple of months ago. You worked for Disney for a bunch of years. That’s a company that has been part of the American psyche for so long. What was it like? You were there for about six years, six, seven years.
Brett Winn 28:00
I was only there for a year.
John Corcoran 28:03
Okay, yeah, okay, so what was the experience like being there? Um, it was awesome.
Brett Winn 28:08
And I probably was there too early in my career to appreciate it, if that makes any sense at all. So I came right out of sitting in the Hot Seat cutting big movie trailers for big agencies to then working as an executive at Disney. And I kind of equate it to the guy who’s like, if you’re a quarterback, to then get thrown into coaching when you’re not quite ready to coach, because you still want a quarterback. So I remember feeling a little more disconnected because I wasn’t sitting in the bays with them, and I had this moment of realization of three or four months in that I was like, Oh my gosh, this isn’t for me right now.
Like I looked at the president of marketing’s job, I don’t think I want that job. I certainly don’t want it now. And I was so afraid that I was committing career suicide by telling the guys at Disney that, hey, I realized pretty quickly this isn’t for me right now. And it was, it was a really trying time, because I literally left Disney to start the refinery with my partners, and I was like, Oh my gosh, it’s either gonna go really well or really not.
John Corcoran 29:16
And you ended up forming it about a month before the great recession started. So fall in 2008 I think this is maybe October 2000 September.
Brett Winn 29:26
Yeah, it was where we started, remember? And then October everything collapsed, and that was when everything collapsed, yeah, yeah. I mean, the good news at the time. So I partnered with my two partners, Adam and Brad, and they do print. So I did all the AV and they did all the print. So it was a nice marriage balance, yeah, and so. But they had been, they had been going for a little while before I joined them. So they had a team of maybe 10 or 12 people, but I had, like two other people in me, and so I was used to not making a ton of money. And fortunately enough, we had some more. And so we didn’t need a lot to work on, or to make money. And I think the first two trailers we worked on from the day that the doors open, were old dogs, which was a Disney film, and all about Steve, which was Sandra Bullock, and Bradley Cooper, which is Wow. What, What a film.
John Corcoran 30:21
That’s like, I’ve heard of that one, so maybe.
Brett Winn 30:24
Yeah, yeah, there’s probably a reason, yeah,
John Corcoran 30:28
No offense and so tell us a little bit about some of the highs and lows of running the Refinery over the years.
Brett Winn 30:38
Well, you know, it’s interesting, because when I started, we were fortunate enough to jump onto two big campaigns, which doesn’t really happen. So all about Steve was for Fox, and old dogs was for Disney. And I remember, gosh, it was myself. I had an assistant editor, and I had a coordinator, and I remember my fox client coming over early on, working on all about Steve. And he came to the office at like, six o’clock, and I’d started to put a trailer together. And he had some ideas, and I had some ideas, and we kind of hashed out what a cut could look like. And he left at 10 o’clock at night, and was like, hey, I need it in the morning. Is that cool? And of course, I was like, Yeah. And just even my most times, we take about two weeks to cut a trailer to not chase one night.
But I had a pretty clear direction. And so I worked till about 4: 30 in the morning, cutting the first version of this trailer, and then we had it coordinated where I would burn a DVD myself, drive it to Beverly Hills. He leaves his window open with a crack in his car. I slipped the DVD in his car, drove home, went to bed, and he called maybe two hours later and said, All right, I showed it. They really like it. We need to get back in and start working on it. So I had to shower, drive back to the office and get going. And I think we worked until like 10 o’clock that night. And I’ll never forget our CFO at the time we had, we were fortunate enough to have a CFO from the beginning, or smart enough maybe to have a CFO from the beginning. And I remember him coming into my office and going,
Wow, you look exhausted. I’m like, Oh, dude, you’re not gonna believe I just got my butt handed to me. This was a crazy evening, and he laughed, and he said, You know what, one day the company’s gonna be bigger and some punk kid’s gonna walk down the hallway and he’s gonna look at you and he’s gonna wonder, what does that guy do here? And when it happens, that’s how you know you’ve made it. So it was a wild ride. We kind of had a hockey puck tie, a hockey stick kind of take off where we went from like two films to eight films in the first year. And so I had to staff up really quickly, and I learned one of the greatest lessons in entrepreneurship, which was, you better be looking for more work while you have the work, because you can, yeah, more work when you’re done the work. And so deep in the work that when year two rounded out, I went looking for work, and everyone’s like, Oh, we love you, but we’re all set for now.
John Corcoran 32:57
And so, yeah, that must be one of the challenges, because I don’t know how long these projects lasted, but I imagine that you have a kind of a short window where you need to do a lot of intense work, because, you know, films tend to be done, you know, they’re edited right up until the deadline. And then you have, like, probably a couple of weeks to do your work, right? And so then you have employees that you have to keep busy the rest of the time.
Brett Winn 33:21
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, we are working on it early on. We’ll get rough cuts at films, and so as they’re working on fixing, you know, making the film better, we’re also working on the marketing. But it really is, yeah. I mean, I’d say that a lot of our work used to maybe still does, come in the last three or four weeks before a movie comes out, where the studio gets panicky. We’re trying a million different directions. We’re trying to stay on track and make sure that we’re keeping up with the progress of the film, and if audiences aren’t reacting, how do we pivot?
And so, yeah, So the second year, I wasn’t really used to not having work, and so a couple jobs ended at the same time the movie came out. Maybe you do some home entertainment spots, and then it’s over, and then I hit the pavement. And it’s not that people didn’t want to work with me, they just didn’t have anything right then and there. My book of business wasn’t so big that I had a bunch of people too and so I think from year two to year three, I had to let go of half of my team, which at the time was only like 10 people. Yeah, that’s still a really good lesson, and a hard lesson, right?
Brett Winn 34:27
I had to really figure out a way to survive. And so I made a vow. I never wanted to do that, you know. I never wanted a big build, too big, too fast. And so I feel like you always kind of keep it where everyone feels just a little bit overworked, you know kind of the sweet spot, but yeah, change so much. It’s like a strike.
John Corcoran 34:45
We have so you Yeah, so that you had the actor and the writer strike, which concluded maybe about nine or 10 months ago. Now, as we record this, what was that experience like for you and when you saw that that was coming down the horizon?
Brett Winn 34:59
Well, the writer. Writer strike was rough. And I think leading into the writers strike, we did a little bit of a reduction in force, you know. And sometimes that’s good. Sometimes you can kind of, you know, there’s maybe people who are excelling more than others, and so it’s an opportunity. But it was really, you know, those times are always super difficult. And then the actors strike happened, and then everyone was panicking, everything shut down. And again, I remember, there’s still stuff in the pipeline, so we just don’t know how long that stuff’s going to hold us until they run out of material.
But it was really interesting talking about the emergence of EO and my own business. As last summer, I was preparing to be president, I went to a conference in Boise, Idaho, for EO, and coincidentally, I was there at the same time we were supposed to do our quarterly EOS meeting for the office, or basically our quarterly setting goals for the next quarter, and we couldn’t move the date. My leadership team wasn’t available, and so we decided I wouldn’t be at that meeting because I had to be in Boise, and I remember talking to them for an hour and a half the day before the meeting, and kind of setting a course for what they would talk about in their quarterly review.
And meanwhile, I went to all my sessions and was learning what I was learning. And they had a speaker that night, and the speaker was an amazing mentalist magician named Wayne Hoffman. If you ever have a chance to check him out, you should definitely check him out. And he went into not just illusion and mentalism and magic, but he also went into his theory on how to get what you want. He had three kinds of tips on how to get what you want. So before he was done, I got a text from my leadership team saying you need to call us right away. We’re in panic mode.
And I said, All right, I’ll call you in 20 minutes when this is done. And as soon as Wayne was done, I went and called them, and they said, Hey, listen, we sat down and we were starting to build our rocks, but first we went through our projections for the quarter, and this was the first week in August, they said we went through our projections for the quarter, and we’re gonna miss the mark by 50% and we’re not sure how it’s gonna be the month after that, so we’re gonna recommend that we lay off 40% of our staff.
And I was like, what? And then they said, and we feel like you’re prioritizing EO over the business. So we want to talk to you about that. We’re not really sure what your role is right now, you know, these are your partners telling you, this is my leadership team. These are not my leadership team. Yeah, yeah, I have a leadership team of creative directors and so and so and look, we’ve, we’ve gotten very close over the years, and I applaud them for having the courage to have a conversation like that with me. They’re expressing their fears, and rightfully so. And I remember calling my CFO back and saying, Hey, how did the wheels just fly off the bus here?
He’s like, Oh, you know the projections are what they are. He’s like, I can’t control the team’s projections, and if that’s the case, we’re going to be in deep trouble. I said, Yeah, but it’s the first week in August. Don’t you think that we can get work before the end of the month? And he said, well, even if we got work towards the end of month, chances are it wouldn’t start until the next month, in which case we’d miss our numbers. And I said, Okay, so the challenge is, how do we get work and get it in this month to work on? And he said, Yes. I said, Okay, challenge accepted. And so I flew back and we met in the office the next morning at 8: 30 and I said, Hey, listen, first of all, I need to apologize, because I double booked myself. I’m not going to let that happen again.
I don’t want you to ever think that eo is more important than our business. And I apologize. I said, the other thing is, I started thinking a lot about my role here, and I said, I feel like now that I’m out of the trenches and you guys are in the trenches, I feel like my role needs to be. I’m here to motivate you, to inspire you, to hold you accountable, and to drive business. And if you guys are okay with that, then we’ll proceed that way.
Brett Winn 38:52
And they’re like, Okay, yeah, I like that. And I said, now let’s talk about not hitting our numbers for the month. And this was the craziest thing. So I just saw Wayne Hoffman talk about his three tips for being successful. And his first tip was, make a to-do list that you can actually do. His second tip was to be specific with what success looks like. Can’t just be, I want to be rich or successful. It has to have your eye on a target that’s tangible. And then the third thing was this idea that yes lives in a world of no.
What he meant by that was, you know, he challenged some of his friends to go out and ask for crazy things that you’re certain they’re going to say no to and and the wild part is, a lot of times you get a yes instead of the No. And so I threw that back on the team, and I said, Hey, listen, in all this time of me prioritizing, I had this great speaker. This is what He taught. So here’s my challenge to you. I challenge you to reach out to clients and get 10 no’s by next week. I think you need to ask them really specifically, in a way that sounds something like this: Hey, how are you holding up in the strike? I’m sure it’s challenging. It’s been incredibly challenging for us, especially lately, but we’ve had a great track record with.
We’ve done a lot of great work over the years, and if you have anything big or small, preferably sooner than later, we’d really appreciate it. And so they accepted the challenge, and they went out and my, my, one of my creative directors reached out the next day and said, Hey, I got three no’s. I was like, okay, he goes, but I got two new jobs. Great, okay? And so by the end of the month, we ended up breaking even and not firing anybody. And I think it was because there’s a lot of prescriptive thinking that the clients wouldn’t have anything. And you know what? There are some that said, I don’t have anything, but there also, obviously were enough clients that did have stuff. And so sometimes perspective and positioning in the way you look at things, and you know, I think if a no is okay, then you might ask in a different way.
John Corcoran 40:52
If a no is okay, then you might ask in a different way.
Brett Winn 40:55
Yeah, meaning if the expected, you’re gonna ask for whatever you want to ask for. Because you’re already gonna expect to know not that you want a no. You want the Yes, but you’re going to ask in a different way that maybe is a little more honest and sincere, because you’re trying to sugarcoat it. You’re not trying to butter anyone up. You’re just being honest with what you’re asking for, yeah, and if they say no, you’re like, okay, because I kind of expected that, you know.
John Corcoran 41:15
yeah, yeah, yeah. This is going circling back with something you said earlier in the conversation, but I meant to ask it, which was, sometimes it can be so hard to be in a creative role, especially when there are multiple masters. And it sounds to me, if I understand your role, you’ve got the filmmakers on one side, and then you’ve got the studio, and you’re kind of bridging the two. Is that a challenge, is that a real tough role to play, where you got the filmmakers, it’s their baby, you got the studio that has a vision of what they want, and you’ve got to kind of satisfy both.
Brett Winn 41:51
Well, I mean, it works a little differently than that. Most times, most times, our only connection to the filmmakers is through the studio under normal circumstances. And so really, it’s the studio exec that we’re catering to, you know, that we’re trying to align with and make sure we’re coming up with the right marketing angle for them. I have had it in the past where, in fact, one of them was for my buddy, John Gunn, who I co directed my day, withdrew with, and he just did a film called Ordinary Angels with Hillary Swank, which we did the trailer for. And that was a little more of a balancing act of, like, John’s my best friend, but he’s a friend of yours.
John Corcoran 42:30
Yeah, then I had to kind of balance, and he is texting you, saying, like, you better not f this up, buddy.
Brett Winn 42:34
Well, I mean, he would ask me what we were working on before I showed this studio, and I’m like, I can’t, can’t really show you that. Like, I have to let you have the proper channels, because we go out of sequence here. This is gonna get messy. Yeah, I’m gonna get in trouble. But I do feel like we’re in a creative industry, yet we’re also in a service industry. And so what I try to tell my team is that version one, when you send the first version of a trailer to a client, you’re a chef, and almost every version after that, you’re a waiter, you know? And I think that we’re, we’re in it with you, right? We’re trying to craft this perfect meal.
And so you throw out first what you think would make the perfect meal. And they’re like, Well, I don’t think that should have a side of mashed potatoes. I think they should be green beans, and we should have no salt on them. Yeah, that kind of thing. And then it’s a balancing act of, yes, we have to do what they’re asking, but we also they’re coming to us for our wisdom and suggestions. And so if they point you down a path and you’re like, Can I also try something else? Or do you have to try it this way? Because you never know who the notes are coming from.
Sometimes they’re direct from filmmakers. Sometimes it’s from the head of the studio. I’m at our agency. I’m we’d say we’re the king of the alts, meaning like you tell us what we want to do, we’re going to give you the version that’s that as best we can. And if we feel like it’s really not working, we’re going to give you an alternate version of what we think might work better. And at least that way you’re prepared, yeah.
John Corcoran 43:56
Yeah, I’m way over on time, so I apologize about that. We chatted a little bit about EO. You mentioned the EO Entrepreneurs Organization, which we know each other through. And I just want to wrap up on that last question, because you said that you had gone to this event in Boise, and your leadership team questioned you while you were there. And I’m curious, because you are going to be the incoming president of EO Los Angeles, obviously been very involved in that organization. Why do you? Why have you thrown yourself into that organization? What have you gotten out of it, specifically for yourself, personally and for your business?
Brett Winn 44:31
Yeah, you know, I had a friend of mine who’s in the music industry, and he was an EO, and we were talking during the pandemic, actually, and he was like, you really should join. I think you’d find it really helpful, especially given the trials and tribulations of being in the pandemic and everyone’s going through stuff, it might be a nice sounding board for you. And you know, I was hesitant. My business partner, Adam, is in YPL, and so I’ve heard some of his stories. Anyway, Long story short, I joined, I got in a forum, and I really was going into it thinking, happy.
Share experiences, but these other entrepreneurs are gonna have nothing in common with me, because I’m in a creative business, and they’re in, you know, retail or whatever they’re in, and what I quickly found out was that, if you own a business, we’re all in the same boat. You know, we all go through the same trials and tribulations. We’re all trying to get work, we’re all trying to find the right profit margin. We’re all dealing with a staff and a team and how to lead them successfully. And I was fortunate enough to get on the board early on. I think I was only an EO for like, a month, when the incoming president lived by me and was like, Hey, you’re gonna be on my board.
And I was like, okay, and had I not been on the board, I don’t know if I would have known of everything that EO had to offer, but I kind of threw myself in with with both feet, and found just a wide array of inspiration and experience shares and great speakers, I kind of rekindled my quest for learning and for self improvement. I can even begin to tell you that even just that first year, all of the growth that happened in me, both as a leader, as a human, as a dad, as a as a husband, you know, talking about how to meditate and how to have a gratitude journal, and all these peripheral things you don’t think will impact your business, and they do, because they impact you as a human, and they impact how you approach Different situations.
And just to be in an environment with people that you can share entrepreneurial experiences with that you can’t share with your friends because they just wouldn’t understand. And I think that going through that and growing and being able to share my own experiences just made me want to give back as much as I’d gotten from it, and I think I look forward to my presidency to be able to give back and hopefully inspire and delegate really well. But I also look forward to becoming a better leader and always improving. And how do I take the lessons that I’ve learned from my own business and apply that to the presidency, and then vice versa, and the presidency throughout it, at the end of it, apply it back to my business. And I’m just really, I’m proud to be an EO. I think it changed my life in a great way. I think it gave me confidence maybe I didn’t have before.
John Corcoran 47:11
Yeah, yeah, Brad, this was great. Where can people go to learn more about you and the Refinery?
Brett Winn 47:18
You can go to therefinerycreative.com. You can also look me up on Facebook. I’m just Brett Winn, or Brett C Winn on Instagram, or you can look up The Refinery on LinkedIn. Brett, thanks so much. Thank you.
Outro 47:37
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