Jon Wroblewski of Wyman Talks about His Group
Where
are you from originally?
Cedar Park, TX.
North Austin.
What
university did you go to?
Texas A&M University - Thanks & Gig Em.
What
brought you to Austin?
Took a job doing sales for Dell Inc. in Round Rock.
What is your
group’s mission?
Our mission is to be the one of the largest
self-sustaining philanthropy funds for the entertainment industry &
small-to-medium sized businesses.
What
need does it fulfill?
We help startups & investors develop projects
& ideas by providing a platform for development, launch & into the next
phases of growth.
What
exactly does it bring to startups?
Well all of our services are focused on providing our
clients with core business components in order to create a long-term structure
for organic growth. Think of us as a
hybrid think tank, business services firm, digital agency & production
house all rolled into one.
A place where entrepreneurs & creative people can
come together to learn and grow, with the capability to build nearly anything,
allowing us to work on projects that other companies simply don’t have the
infrastructure to support.
What
type of startup would benefit from your group?
All of them. Every startup can benefit from our services
because we provide services that are essential to properly structuring a company. With the recent explosion of digital data, growing
mobile utilization & on-going changes being made to specific investment
vehicles, business owners are having to make adjustments to keep up with
current trends.
This is where our multi-service approach helps because we
can take a startup idea and help with everything from start to finish. Providing services like financial advisory,
group benefits, funding, media production, web development, digital asset
management, SEO, graphic design & application development, just to a name a
few.
So by combining all of our services to create an
end-to-end solution helps cut down on cost & complexity for our customers.
What was
the most challenging aspect of starting up the initiative?
Honestly I feel that our biggest challenge was first
validating our end-to-end model, it’s not everyday you have a company wanting
to provide 7 specific services at a high level & bring them all
together.
Once our model was validated our focus turned to continuing
to educate clients, investors & employees on the film industry. A film is nothing more than a business but it
just so happens to be a very different business. So it’s important to always be reading up on
trends, laws & making sure you don’t get left behind.
What
advice do you have for entrepreneurs?
In beginning it’s a lot of trial & error, start
failing early & often so you can get past that stage as quickly as
possible.
Be proactive & talk to as many other business owners as
you can about their experience, it can help you avoid mistakes & its great
networking.
What
Austin-based resource have you found to be the most helpful and why?
Capitol Wealth Strategies, a locally owned financial
advisory firm. As a business owner it’s overwhelming
to try & structure buy/sell agreements, investments, insurance, group
benefits & retirement plans on your own.
CWS focuses on working with business owners on all of
these things & where able to educate me on what’s available to me as an
owner of a company as oppose to just being an individual. Like funding my retirement into a
supplemental executive retirement plan as oppose to a IRA or 401(k) for tax
advantages. It’s working with resources like CWS & the
Texas Entrepreneur Networks that can really take your company to the next level
just by providing a little guidance/education.
We're organizing a funding forum for film deals to be held January 10, 2013. Please go to the Texas Entrepreneurs Network website to learn more.
