We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Wes Meyers a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Wes, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

As one might imagine, the question we get asked most often is “Where did the name Burning Tractor come from?” No, we don’t sell farm equipment. No, we don’t repair tractors. And NO we don’t need trucking logistics solutions so, please, STOP calling. So why did we name the company Burning Tractor? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Growing up on a horse farm in East Texas, I had a LOT of chores. What might today be considered “child labor”, we just called, “daily life.” At the time, I was quite envious of my friends playing video games in the city, but I had no idea the work ethic and rock hard resilience my parents were instilling into me and my siblings.

When I left to attend college, my folks realized that they now had a LOT of chores and the farm quickly began to fall into disarray. So the first summer I returned home, I was met with open arms and a hand-written ‘chore list’.

The first, most daunting task, was to mow the 35 acres on the backside of our property, so I hopped onto the 1967 Minneapolis Moline with the cracked gas tank to get started.

Not long into the task, the Texas heat seemed hotter than normal and I quickly realized that flames were blasting out from around the engine and up through the exhaust pipe. I didn’t have a fire extinguisher, or a phone, BUT I did have a half bottle of hot fruit punch Gatorade! I threw it on the fire but the fire just got bigger — and as I turned to run, I heard a loud “Bang”! I hit the dirt, convinced that the cracked gas tank had just exploded, but instead, the engine flames had burned through the 4inch thick radiator hose causing the fluid to explode out all over the engine… coincidentally putting the fire out.

I returned home with an exciting story of explosions and fire, but my mom ( in true form) responded “Damn it Wes! Well, take the truck and go to Tractor Supply Co, buy a new radiator hose and fluid, and keep frickin’ mowing!”

And that is why I named the company ‘Burning Tractor’. Because no matter what happens – we will get the job done.

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?

I first entered the film industry in my mid-twenties. I had recently failed at my dream of becoming a rock star in Austin, TX and it was time to “find a real job.” At the time, my older brother was working in Shreveport, LA for a company called World Wide FX, and told me they were hiring. I wasn’t exactly interested, but I applied, and they hired me! I started my minimum wage job as a VFX compositor, working night shifts in an old office building across from a Walmart parking lot. It was at this moment I knew, my life had officially ended.
 But after a while I began to like it, and even started to become good at it. Within a couple years’ time I was one of the top artists at the studio. More importantly, I realized that there was a ladder to climb. From there I moved to Dallas to be the Visual Effects Supervisor at a commercial house called Element X. It was a great change of pace compared to the assembly line composting work of feature film. The company was fun, the culture was incredible, and I was able to grow tremendously. I took on the roles of creative director, colorist, and editor. I learned motion graphics, worked on set, and even got to direct some commercial spots. But after 5 great years things eventually hit a wall. I had burned out from too many long nights, weekend work and not enough vacations. Maybe the film industry just wasn’t where I was supposed to be after all. 
So I quit, moved home with my parents, and spent all my savings on a T-Shirt printer. I was going to take all my new gained art skills and start a graphics T-Shirt company, and I was going to kill it! Things started slow, but it was an exciting time. No clients, no notes, no render times, a great reprieve from the fast pace of commercial and film. But as the months came and went, so did my savings. T-shirts were printing but unfortunately not fast enough. I was down to $900.

One month from being flat broke, I received a cold call from a VFX studio that needed an onset supervisor for a sci-fi film. Later that day, another studio called, they also needed an onset sup for a sci-fi film?! The next day the sci-fi film called, and they said that 2 of the 3 VFX vendors had listed me as their supervisor, and they wanted to know who the hell I was.

“Well, I’m 30 years old, live with my parents and own a T-shirt printing company with my mom… how can I help you?”

After some interviews, they hired me to supervise the show and to also negotiate bids from VFX vendors. It was a pretty difficult show, and I couldn’t get any vendor close to the allotted budget. We were getting close to wrap, and we still hadn’t struck a deal. The producers were really beginning to breathe down my neck and I had to come up with a solution. “Well hell, I know how to do this shit” I thought, and with the budget I could buy the equipment and software to do it. I put together a proposal splitting the show between myself and one of the other vendors, and the producers agreed! The deal was done. I went from having $900 to my name, to making more money in one month than I ever had in a year. Burning Tractor was born.

Seven years later Burning Tractor is now a full-blown production company specializing in Visual Effects. We have grown steadily through the years, beginning with smaller independent film projects, then becoming an overflow shop for larger vendors, and now realizing direct market access with clients such as Amazon, Apple +, Netflix, HBO, Showtime, and more. We are one of the few companies in Texas that specializes in VFX for Film and Entertainment on the highest level. What has been amazing about the journey is that 90% of our growth has come through word of mouth. Our work has led to an ever-growing network of relationships and recommendations. We pride ourselves on delivering quality product that is on time and on budget. It has been a truly humbling experience, and I wake up pinching myself each day…. I never expected it to get this far, yet it still feels like just the beginning.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Burning Tractor began in the wake of landing a few contract jobs back-to-back. I honestly wasn’t planning on returning to the film industry but wanted to continue to grow the T-shirt company which had finally started to make some headway. However, life had a different plan and the jobs just kept coming. I left my poor mom with the T-shirt biz, and I moved into a studio loft in downtown Dallas, TX and went to work. The next year I did contract labor for various corporate clients and little bits of VFX here and there. Things were going well, and I was saving money. Eventually I got a call for a job that I would need more than just contract help on. I needed to hire.

Hiring your first full-time employee is an awesome (and also terrifying) experience. You are taking on the financial responsibility of another human being. What happens if you fail? If the clients stop calling? You now have to succeed. 
To ease this new financial anxiety, I saved as much as I could freelancing, I didn’t travel, I didn’t live extravagantly. I wanted enough savings to be able to cover payroll for an entire year, in the case I lost everything. That initial amount seemed like a lot at the time, and when I ran my first bi-weekly payroll I about puked….“I have to do this every two weeks?!?”

But I now have 9 full-time employees and the ability to scale to up to 200 contractors, and I still run the business by the same mantra, “always keep a year in the tank.” It forces me to grow smart and slow. It allows me to pivot without panicking and it turned out to provide a life-saving emergency fund when the industry was suddenly halted by a global pandemic. 
The other benefit to keeping funds on hand, is that when you have to grow fast, (which will happen, and is scary) you can take the necessary hit. In our case we had an opportunity to work directly with Amazon Originals, our first big show. However, we did not have the necessary security certification in order to be awarded the show. There is a 402- security touch point audit that vendors are required to pass. It requires physical security in your facility as well as pentagon-level-strength cyber security protocols. At the time of receiving the call for the job were working out of my townhome, so I told Amazon not to worry and that we would GET IT DONE.
 So while supervising on set, breaking down the show, and doing previs as a “contractor”, I was leasing office space, buying cameras, installing door locks, rebuilding servers and implementing a new cyber security pipeline, none of which I knew a damn thing about. And all of this in faith that once completed, Amazon would award us the 10-episode series. After several months, the gamble, and expenses paid off – we got the award. Burning Tractor was now a TPN-Certified studio playing in the big leagues.
 If I had to start again, I wouldn’t be afraid of taking out a loan for the initial investment, but I am proud to say that Burning Tractor has never had to borrow money and is and always has been completely self-funded.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Bad morale will destroy a company; I have seen it happen first-hand. I personally left the industry due to the constant beating of notes and revisions and overtime and more notes… it was absolutely soul-sucking. The Visual FX industry is not 9-5. Every job is deadline-driven by a release date. Regardless of last-minute creative changes, pipeline hiccups, tech fixes – the work is due! This model can easily lead to unethical amounts of overtime and worker abuse. So how do we avoid this and keep morale high? 
1. Stay out in front of the work. You have to constantly manage your inflow and outflow. The best way to do this is maintain the ability to scale. Build a network of contractors or other vendors that you know you can count on in a pinch. We can’t predict when three jobs will all land on top of each other but, with proper scale management, we can take on all three without detriment to the artists. 
2. Know your role. We are all artists, and it is extremely easy for us to get fully emotionally invested into our work. We pour our hearts and souls into our work. BUT we have to remember that we are working for someone else. It took me a while to get a good grasp of this. I would work a shot and fall in love with how cool it was, all that blood sweat and tears, totally worth it. And then some ad agency creative director with thick-rimmed glasses from the west coast who can barely open photoshop gives some asinine note that breaks the entire composition and makes the shot horrifically ugly. We’ve all felt that lump in our throat. But we need to take a step back, breathe and remember our role. We know we made something beautiful, and we are fully capable of doing it again, but our role is “art for hire”. We are at the whims of our clients, and our clients love us when we do what they want. So, when I see this type of emotion in the studio, I try to whimsically remind everyone of the tasks at hand. I know how you feel, we’ve all been there.
3. And lastly, “Free Lunch Friday!” When in doubt, free food! Every Friday the whole studio gets to go to lunch together. Team building outside of the office is great for morale. And if you throw in a couple drinks you can really blow off some steam!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.burningtractor.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wesmeyers/?hl=en
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wes-meyers-2b254828