Just Be Yourself: Interview with Emmy Award-Winning Producer J. B. Miller

I recently went one on one with J. B. Miller, founder and CEO of Empire Entertainment. J. B. was a consultant on the Academy Award-winning feature film Capote and received an Emmy Award for his work on The Cruise.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. ​How did you get here? ​What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth? 

JB: Well, how did I get here, I grew up with two younger brothers just outside of New York City. But in the gravitational orbit of New York City, very much loving television and film and movies and music. And, you know, from a very young age, I was fortunate to discover that I liked producing, I liked putting creative projects together and leading them. And that was a huge advantage for me, because I was able to know what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be so I didn't waste a lot of time zigzagging in different directions. I sort of went straight for it. My career has taken me from what's now Live Nation working for a man named Ron Delsener, who was New York's biggest concert promoter at the time to, interning with David Letterman at NBC to working at MTV in the early days to working in artists management and Broadway and off Broadway production. Later in my career, I began serving as a producer for corporations and private interests around the world. And 30 years ago I actually my company - Empire. You also asked what brought me here. One of the big setbacks, I guess, was when I was working for another company. I had completed an MBA and was very ambitious about growing that company’s business but their short-sightedness led to my realizing that I had to start my own thing. So while it was scary at the time, it was one of the best things that could have happened. They kind of forced my hand to go on my own. And that was a good evolution.

Adam: How did you come up with your business idea? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?

JB: I don't know how much I can guide others but I was doing what I loved, I was learning and accruing a great deal of experience. So my path was to go and do that for myself, not for somebody else and to build equity in a company that I owned and operated and, directed its destiny. It's sort of trite when people say, “Do what you love, follow your passion, and everything else will follow”. But in my case, I think that was very true. I also feel that being perceptive, being open to new influences, finding new ways and things that you enjoy, and where you can add value is also a part of, discovering where and why you might want to start your own company or do your own thing.

Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?

JB: These steps have included everything from refining, iterating, and improving our product and service mix. It’s thinking about - what is the company? Where are we providing value? And how do I provide access to my potential client base in a packaged easy way for them to use our services? I think one thing that I do constantly is to reevaluate, are we providing value? Do people continue to need us to do the things that we're doing? Or do we need to change up our game to remain relevant? And that's not a thing that you do every five years or one year. It's a mindset that I and my company cultivate. Even though we have produced 1000s and 1000s of projects, for every project, we sit down and do a debrief, and part of the debrief is what did and did we do it well. Is there anything we could have done better? Who did we meet? What did we learn along the way? What should we not do? Again, that kind of willingness to consider feedback and dig for feedback, I think is the cornerstone of improvement. So that's, that's a big part of how we do it.

Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?

JB: Don't sell. Just be yourself. Know and love the thing that you do. Understand the value that you provide. Try to find people who can use that value who need those services, and just simply make them aware of the existence of your utility to them. Yeah, I've never made a sale where I convinced somebody to work with me. All I ever did was make sure that I was at the right time at the right place, and they understood that I could help them. And there was no artifice to it. The one thing you don't want to do is sell or try to create some phony, nonsensical reason that they should work with you or overcome their objectives. Everybody gets their guard up the moment they’re sold to. So don’t sell. Just talk, just be yourself, ask questions, and see if you can provide value. And it's also totally cool if you can’t. If that client doesn't need you, or has another vendor, or is not in the market at the time. Don't push it, just say it's nice to meet you. We're here if you need us. That's it.

Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level? 

JB: There are many facets and dimensions to successful leadership. I possess some of them, and I have a deficit in others. One fundamental imperative to me is making sure that the people on the team that you're working with understand what we're all trying to do, right, just alignment, just basically making sure you know, we all understand what we're building and how soon it has to get done and what the parameters and constraints are for that. A good leader helps make sure that no one is left or behind on the vision and that everybody understands the mission and their role in executing it. I think good leaders, again, will elevate people and give them the opportunity to succeed and to play a true role. The idea that some people are leading and some people are following is also erroneous. While it may be true on paper, every single person in the effort has a role to play. So creating space for everybody, regardless of their skill sets are their social abilities, is an important part of leadership. I think being patient but also being a little bit demanding, holding people to a higher standard of speed, or quality is an important thing that a leader can do. But, and this is where I may not be the best in the world, but trying to do it in an encouraging positive incentive-based way and not doing it in a “you disappoint me kind of way.” Those are some of the things that I think I've discovered and continue to try to work on.

Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams? 

JB: Listen to your team, talk to them, and try to understand. Are they happy? Do they feel productive? Do they have better ideas than the one that we’re all committing to? Genuinely take input, ask questions, give them a chance to speak. But also, you know, not being afraid of deciding once views have been aired. It's good to be democratic and egalitarian but it's also necessary to be firm and consistent once a group on alignment - especially in a creative field like mine. Sometimes you'll encounter people that have a different creative point of view on the thing that they want to do. You can't make a movie when two different important people are making a different movie, right? So there needs to be leadership, there needs to be direction and there needs to be standards. And if there are variations of point of view, deal with them don't continue to move forward as a conflicted enterprise, that's never a good combination. 

Adam: What are your best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders? 

JB: One thing is to continue to learn and pay attention. I read the news a lot. I look at a lot of digital sources of information. I think you can’t shut yourself off from the world. And I think a good leader is constantly searching, sifting, listening, asking, querying, poking, watching, and intelligence gathering, A second thing is to define what the project is and some success metrics, like what are we what are we really going for? If it's about making an audience feel some way can we articulate what that is? And really taking the extra time to think through the mechanisms. So many people say, Oh, we're going to do this thing, and it's going to be so cool, and it's going to just result in goodwill and all these things. That's not how it works. You have to do the work. You have to really think about the mechanics of how do you get an experience to change of perception or inspire a change or action.  you need a quantifiable way of making sure that what you do sticks. There's a rigor to doing it And sometimes people take the shortcut, and I don't think you can be successful taking that shortcut. Finally, you need to paint a picture.  To be a visionary, to be passionate about the vision, to communicate the vision, to win people to your vision, and then to let them loose on helping you achieve that vision.

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received? 

JB: I think my dad once told me like, just do what you love. Don't worry about the money. Don't worry about the noise and the chatter and everything else. Just do what you love, and everything else will fall into place and follow. And I do think that there is real truth to that. I have experienced that anyway.

Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?

JB: In my career as a producer of large, experiential storytelling over the years, I started making movies and putting on concerts and parties and conferences. And have steadily mastered the skill sets of a wide range of different kinds of productions, such that today we can plausibly describe ourselves as genre-agnostic producers. What’s been interesting over the course of my career is to see large institutions and entities increasingly understand the necessity for those integrated storytelling skill sets to help them accomplish their own goals. And whereas I may have begun my career thinking, I want to make movies or television, and I still do that a lot, I'm also increasingly seeing my skill sets, and those of my colleagues at Empire, deployed and leveraged by global institutions to effectuate change and make a difference in the world whether that's building smarter economies promoting greater equality sustainability or helping us solve civilizational challenges, like the pandemic, climate change, etc. It's been gratifying and validating to see the skill sets of producers increasingly have use and utility in shaping the world that we live in. So I'm somewhat honored by that, especially at the position that we've reached.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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