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New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

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Hey everyone and welcome to how I built this resilience edition.

On these episodes, we're talking with entrepreneurs and other business leaders about how they're thinking creatively during such a disruptive time.

And today, we're going to hear from Jeremy Zimmer, CEO and co-founder of United Talent Agency.

It's one of the biggest agencies in Hollywood representing thousands of producers, actors, musicians, and so many others.

And naturally, UTA and the entertainment industry was hugely affected starting this past March.

When many productions and live performances came to a screeching halt.

Jeremy has been in the business for more than 40 years, and even though he's never seen anything like this, he's optimistic about his company and the future of the industry.

Take a look at March. When did you realize that this was going to have a huge impact on your business?

Well, I don't know that in March, I could understand or grasp the full impact that it was going to have, but I certainly remember it was, I was supposed to go to a Laker game.

And I was debating Shagosh, I'm not going to go and then the news came out about Rudy Gobera, and then suddenly the game was canceled and boom.

And that was the first sign of, wow, they canceled basketball games like that seems really a big thing.

The season was canceled shortly thereafter and then boom, it was, it was hard to comprehend in the beginning.

Yeah, UTA like other talent agencies has been affected by this.

You have had to have furloughs and pay cuts. You're not taking a salary. Talk to me through a little bit about how this has affected UTA so far.

Well, so far it's affected us because you know, first of all, everybody in the company participated in a salary reduction of some form or another.

That was a really difficult thing to ask everybody to join in the sacrifice, but you know, what we realize is the overall financial health of the company, sustaining the company for the duration is going to be more, a more positive and ultimately important thing for people than, you know, trying to maintain everybody's salary at that current level in the short term.

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