We recently connected with Jason Wasner and have shared our conversation below.

Jason, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

When I started working at Acclaim 13 years ago, the owner at the time, Jeffrey, had been dealing with a substantial amount of turnover which led to a shaky situation for the agency and its clients. When we first met, we had an immediate rapport, and I made him an offer…give me 6 months to run the agency in a way that may not make a lot of sense. It will sometimes look like I am throwing money away, but please give me the chance to change the culture and approach and I think we will see some solid results. I told him, if it doesn’t work, I can run things like everyone else, but I have no interest in doing that until after we test the theory. He gave me that latitude, and away we went.

The approach was to lean in on ethics, on reputation, on building a stronger relationship with clients. I spent a long time studying marketing and raw data from different companies, and the data seemed to say that the industry and agency would grow with a greater focus on diversity and making tv/commercial/film look more like the actual population and less homogenized. This led to the agency posting our 7 best years, and an agency that reflects the times and changes both within the industry and society at large.

We need a media that looks like and positively represents ALL of its people, and I see signs of resistence but also a steady climb in the right direction. It has been at the backbone of our agency, and thinking about expanding the vision of equality and diversity is a constant source of learning and inspiration. I am truly grateful to be in this position, and get to help talented hard working people of all races, religions, and orientations chase their dreams. What could be cooler than that?

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Like a lot of folks in the entertainment world, I have had to learn a lot of different skills over the years to make a living and to grow as an artist, an agent, and really as a person. I started working in live sound for bands, acting, and writing at the end of high school and the beginning of college. From there, I did some rewriting work and went into music for commercials and sporting events while doing a bit of acting here and there.

That lead to me starting at my first agency, as the music side of things began to change and the demand for custom music lessened(music was my primary source of income). The first agency I worked at in Houston was quite large, and a tremendous challenge. In those days, a talent agency had stacks of physical head shots which they used to help find actors jobs. We would send couriers across town to drop off headshots after getting the specs for a project, and then track people down via home phones and maybe pagers. Needless to say, it could be beyond stressful and everything was a race. You had to memorize hundreds of numbers, names, faces, details about talent, and people’s voices so when the phone rang, you were ready. Within 2 words, you knew hey, I am talking to X actor and they need this info. 5 years there was followed by a move to Austin and work at a new agency in a new town.

That agency gig lasted about a year, and then I moved into advertising and technology for a bit. This time was trying, as I started working for a .com that had high ambitions and lesser morals. I spent my spare time there learning marketing data and charting a way back to the agency world. I produced videos and created documents for them, learning directing and editing on the fly. A few years later, I was lucky enough to meet Jeff who I eventually bought the agency from.

For those that aren’t fully clear on what a talent agency does, we operate similarly to a temp service, finding actors opportunities and jobs. On the more personal level, we are often the actors support, mental health advisors, career guides, confidantes, and friends, depending on the agency and agent. Because of my background at that early agency, I have cultivated a lengthy history with a huge number of entertainment professionals and producers over the years. I try to liken it to having a couple of thousand ongoing conversations with other creatives, many of those conversations lasting the better part of 30 years.

At our agency, we have a team that has worked together for over 10 years, all with a background in front of and behind the camera. We are intensely passionate about helping our creative family grow and evolve, while at the same time protecting and cultivating a better working world for entertainment folks and creatives in Texas and beyond. So far, it has been a really fun ride. Having purchased the agency about 6 years ago, I plan to stay on this roller coaster as long as I can and continue to share that ride with people I love and respect and am inspired by.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Like so many people in our industry and beyond, the pandemic presented a great number of challenges and learning opportunities. The production industry was a particularly volatile one because you had people going to jobs that were coming from all over the country, often places like LA where the population density made it very difficult to stay covid free. In Texas, we spent the initial 2 months of the shutdown in communication with casting agents and producers to try and chart a path to safe sets and a sustainable industry, because this is a tight knit industry and no one here wanted to just rush back to a catastrophic situation(potentially of our own creation), which led to us being one of the first states to reopen and to stay open for the duration.

Those 2 months of initial shutdown were a true challenge. I was basically paying people to sit at home and sending out temp jobs and referrals to my talents to try and keep people busy and alive. The time indoors was a big change, and it brought my wife and I even closer together while really challenging a lot of couples and families in the industry. I have never had so many clients get divorced than during the pandemic years. We had many actors lose large numbers of family members but I am happy to say for our part, every one of our actors made it through the pandemic safely due in large part to those folks that mapped out how to create a safe work environment for folks to shoot.

As the pandemic evolved, we became quite busy while truly having to navigate an industry repeatedly hit with challenges great and small. NY and LA, the 2 primary hubs of production business(and where most of the deals are made), were intermittently shut down and with them, large portions of the industry. So while Texas was open pretty much nonstop after those initial 2 months, the industry we are in was in constant flux. Needless to say, my work as an amateur pro bono therapist to actors expanded greatly, as people of all walks were faced with obstacles they had never experienced before and hopefully never will have to again.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

While we don’t sell anything, we are in a business of a great many people and we rely on that industry to both bring us clients(on the production side) and talent who we represent(our acting clients). The biggest source of those clients is word of mouth and reputation. Yes, a nice website is useful, and there are many ways of doing different types of outreach and going to events, but the bottom line is people want to work with someone they can trust, who understands the industry, and who will fight for what is best for them and the industry at large.

When I bought the agency, I asked the previous owner, does the agency owe anyone any money? He said no. I said, are there people who think we owe them money? He said yes. I paid both of those people every cent they Thought we owed them, because my reputation and the agency’s needed to be golden. Free of any weight from the past, free of any animosity that may fester over time. You don’t know who is talking about you, and you can’t control it, but you can make sure that your actions give them the kind of material you’d want people to talk about.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.acclaimtalent.com
• Instagram: @acclaim_talent
• Other: Facebook: Acclaim Talent.