Henry Woodman, a University of Arizona and Nova Southeastern MBA graduate, speaks three languages and has built a career at the intersection of travel, media, and technology.
In 1984, he co-founded WoodMark Productions, later producing the game show Machos in Santiago, Chile.
He went on to found World Travelvision, which evolved into IcePortal, a leading visual content platform for the travel industry.
Henry is currently the executive producer at Anemoia Media and a four-time Emmy nominee. His latest book, The Reincarnation of Marie (June 2024), is now in development as a TV series, with more at www.MarieTheStory.com.
In his conversation with Trisha Stetzel, Henry shared his entrepreneurial journey, starting with video game machines in Tucson laundromats. He discussed the challenges of launching businesses, his work as an angel investor, and his favorite business book Traction.
He also spoke about the inspiration behind The Reincarnation of Marie and his vision to expand it into a media series.
Connect with Henry on LinkedIn.
This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix.
TRANSCRIPT
Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.
Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. It is my pleasure to introduce you to my new friend. And he might be a good golfer. Maybe we might get into that later. Uh, Henry Woodman, who is the executive producer for Anemoia Media. Henry, welcome to the show.
Henry Woodman: Thank you. Happy to be here. And no, not a good golfer. Not a good golf. Yeah, that’s not a strong player.
Trisha Stetzel: This is how we met, right? You guys have to go out and look at his social media. You’ll know exactly what I was talking about. Henry, welcome to the show. I’m so glad that you’re here today. Would you tell my listeners a little bit more about who Henry is?
Henry Woodman: Yeah. You know, it’s funny because now when you look back as you get older and you go, okay, what what what defines me? And I think to summarize it, it’s probably a hedonistic and opportunistic entrepreneur, which basically means I do stuff that I enjoy and that I think I would like, and I try to take advantage of opportunities that might have presented themselves. Right. So it’s not like I look at my life and I go, okay, here’s the vision. I’m going to end up and I’m going to run a tech company. That was never a thought in my mind, and it ended up happening. It’s just an opportunity.
Trisha Stetzel: It’s just how it worked. So tell us a little bit more about anime and media and what projects you’re working on right now.
Henry Woodman: Got it. So Anemoia Media really is an LLC. It’s a vehicle to produce a series for streaming from a book that I published about six months ago. And the reason for creating the LLC, obviously legal protections, and you end up using that vehicle in order to drive the production forward. Now we’re just in the development phase, which is a whole nother challenge, and I wouldn’t recommend anybody get into the film or television business unless they want to kill themselves and torture all the thing in their body. But that’s just me. Right. It’s only because I could. And it was something I dreamed of 40 years ago. And now I’m going full circle.
Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. Uh, can we talk about the book? Would that be okay?
Henry Woodman: I could talk about anything you want. I’m an open book.
Trisha Stetzel: Do it. Tell me about the book.
Henry Woodman: So the book is called The Reincarnation of Marie, and it really is about a guy who believes he has found his soulmate with one problem. She died 70 years earlier, and it’s based on reality. There was a woman in the late 1800s named Marie Bashkirtseff, and she had written a journal from 18 to, excuse me, from 14 to 24. She died of tuberculosis at 24. Two years after her death, the book or the journal that she was writing was published, and it became a huge international bestseller. It was talking about things that at the time, women didn’t talk about, right? Sexuality and masturbation and nudity and things like that. It’s like, oh my God. It was somewhat scandalous. And so, you know, 70 years later, somebody picks up the book, reads it, and slowly finds himself falling in love with the author. Marie visits her tomb, visits her places, and then realizes, oh my God, I’ve lost my mind. I have fallen in love with a dead woman. Right. And finds her reincarnation. And that’s kind of the the gestation of the story.
Trisha Stetzel: Okay. Very interesting. And I think we should dig into Henry a little more, because I know a little bit more about you than what you spoke here. You have a very vast background. So can you can you just give us a taste of some of the things that you’ve done in your lifetime.
Henry Woodman: Well, the reality is, I did, like I said, the hedonistic route. For example, at 13, I’m in junior high and this is 1973. So, you know, I go to Mexico for a swimming meet. I was a swimmer. I come back because I bought a switchblade. I thought it was really cool. Right. And I’m showing off this switchblade in junior high again in 1973. You could do this stuff, right? Right. And so the kids loved it. And I thought, oh, God. So I got a ticket to go back to Mexico City, bought a couple of boxes of switchblades, came back to junior high and sold them to be the cool kid in, you know, junior high to my friends for a huge markup, right? And they all bought it. And that was kind of the first endeavor. And then, you know, doing pet portraits and then, you know, video games and laundromats and ended up moving to Los Angeles after college thinking, you know, I want to get into the film and television business. That did not happen even though I bought the rights to the book I just mentioned.
Henry Woodman: Ended up getting on a travel film crew as a PA, what’s called a production assistant. After ten years, worked my way up to producing travel films, and eventually one of the places we were producing films was in Chile, in Latin America, and realized that had gone from Pinochet’s dictatorship to a democracy. So I thought opportunity, new television station, need for programing. I fly down and I meet with the production company I worked with in Chile, and I then set up a meeting at the new television network to pitch a show idea that I ripped off from a US show, by the way. And two months later, we’re on the air with the show, right? So I’m producing game shows in Chile now and commercials and other things. And in Chile, somebody gives me a CD-ROM, we’re going to go to this full circle, gives me a CD-ROM, and it has a 360 degree virtual tour, and from a guy who used to produce travel films and then sit at a computer and look up and down and all around. That was the coolest thing ever, right?
Trisha Stetzel: Yeah.
Henry Woodman: I am now going to go out and produce virtual tours so I don’t have to travel with five guys in 17 pieces of luggage, right? So I set up another company to do World Travel Vision, which essentially is doing virtual tours for destinations and hotels. So then a couple of years into this, this is now the mid to late 90s. They say, how do we get these virtual tours on this new world Wide web thingy? I’m like, I don’t know, send them a CD-ROM because that’s what I gave them to go to the trade shows and the conferences. And eventually I went, okay, let me look into it and see what I can do to help. One thing led to another. We went from virtual tour production to virtual tour distribution. Virtual tour distribution. Realizing, you know photos is a bigger problem because those old systems that would give you the rate and availability for the travel sites never had pictures. Well, for the travel agencies. The brick and mortar never had pictures. Go to the internet and it said no photos available early on when you were dialing up with AOL, right? For those that are old enough to remember this.
Trisha Stetzel: You’ve got mail. Yeah.
Henry Woodman: And so then I realized, okay, so here’s another problem. Pictures are an issue. Right. And so because I was delivering virtual tours with these links, I could figure it out. So we were an overnight success after 25 years of, you know, struggling and and learning on the way. And that was the business that I sold a few years ago called, you know, Ice Portal. So if you go to any travel website and you see pictures of any hotel, you know, the Hilton’s, the Hyatt’s, the Wyndham’s, the best Western’s the Accord’s of the world that would have come through our servers. We would collect from their database size tag, categorize and send it to every travel site on the planet.
Trisha Stetzel: Wow.
Henry Woodman: I didn’t even breathe.
Trisha Stetzel: I know. And we talked about this before we started recording, but I think it’s appropriate to ask the question here, which is you, you must have been in the right place at the right time for all of these things to come together. Yeah, you hear that a lot?
Henry Woodman: Yeah. And I and I tell people, I said, listen, I’ve been in the right place at the wrong time. I’ve been in the wrong place at the right time most of my life. And every now and then, because you’re always out there and you’re networking, you stumble your way into the right place at the right time. Had I not been in Chile and somebody giving me a CD-ROM, had I not been producing travel films and know what that industry looks like, had I not been fascinated with this new computer thing and then got into virtual tours, had I not been asked by hotels, hey, can you deliver this to this new medium, the internet? And then I look into that and had I not seen, hey, there’s a bigger problem. You know, the nice to have is virtual tours. The need to have is pictures, right. And so it’s not a matter of I just happen to sit there and go, hey, pictures is a problem. I have no idea unless I happen to be sort of stepping my way through this. And then. Oh, there’s an opportunity. Oh. And oh yeah. That that could use oh, here’s a problem. So I didn’t really say I found myself in the right place. I just happened to find myself in a lot of places and a lot of times. And they were right very few times. I mean, very rarely was I right, because, you know, the the path that I wanted to take didn’t ever happen. So I ended up following whatever opportunities presented themselves.
Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely.
Trisha Stetzel: Okay. For those of you who don’t know what a CD rom is, I’m going to say Google it and then I’m going to sound old. Go ask your chatbot. Right I don’t know.
Henry Woodman: True true.
Trisha Stetzel: True. All right. So you’ve had lots of experience in starting businesses. What is it that you actually look for when starting a business?
Henry Woodman: Well, the reality is the real business was the last one. Everything else was sort of hedonistically and opportunistically. Because when I look at starting a business, it’s generally what is the problem, right? And what problem am I solving? And is it really a problem. Right. It’s not. Oh yeah. It would be nice. I really like clothing. I want to open up a boutique store in downtown. Okay. Is that a problem? Nah, I don’t think so. But, you know, I could be wrong. So the reality is, what’s the issue? Um. And do I have expertise to know about it? And sometimes the expertise isn’t even worth it, because a lot of people that are trying to solve a problem find the problem from the outside. They’re not on the inside, because if you’re on the inside, you’re just like, oh, that’s just the way it is. That’s the way we’ve been doing it forever, right? Um, nowadays I think that the the opportunities are everywhere and everyone’s trying to find them. But if you find your way into a certain industry, like, I know nothing about certain industries. And then when I get into it, I’m like, wow, that’s pretty dysfunctional. How do they even survive? You don’t know those things until you find your way into that. So I’d just say the problem that you’re solving or what problem is it and is it an opportunity?
Trisha Stetzel: So, Henry, if somebody’s listening right now and they’re like, oh gosh. Well, I created this solution in a vacuum and I’m putting it out there and nobody’s buying it. What would you tell them?
Henry Woodman: You know, I I’m. In full disclosure I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been an angel investor. I’ve invested in 46 companies. And now I’m kind of like, oh my God. The biggest challenge by far is not creating this cool product. It’s letting the world know it exists. Right? It’s one problem to say, listen, I have this really cool thing. There are millions of people that would love it, okay? How do the Trishas and the millions of other people in the world know this product exists? Lots of time, effort and money and multiple beating over the head and saying, hey, we got this product. Hey, we got this product. One of the advantages, too, is can you do it as an enterprise so you don’t have to sell individuals, you don’t have to deal with the customer. You can go B2B business to business and let them deal with their customers. Right. So the hardest thing for any startup, in my opinion, is not building the technology. Anybody can do that or creating this or whatever widget they want to do. It’s the marketing element of it. And even now everybody’s like, well, social media, hey, everybody’s doing so oh, influencer. Yeah, everybody’s selling influence. I don’t even have the answer to that except it’s really hard.
Trisha Stetzel: It is. And especially if you’re a solopreneur or you have a small business or a medium business, you don’t have a team of people that can get out there and do it for you. So something you feel like you have to take on yourself and well, if you’re not an expert at marketing, you’re not an expert at marketing. That’s just the bottom line, right? Uh, you mentioned when I asked you about what you look for in starting a business, that your last one was really the true business. So what would you do differently with that last business?
Henry Woodman: Well, you know, when I started the business, I really didn’t have a good understanding of the basic needs of a business. You know, when they’d say things like, hey, you need to hire the best people, you know? And I’m like, yeah, I can’t even afford myself. I don’t know what that means. Right. Or you need KPIs. And I’m like, ah, yeah, what’s a KPI? Right. I had no idea. Um, you need a vision. I want to make money. Right. So the reality is I ended up somebody, like, years into the business. Somebody handed me a book called Traction by Gino Wickman, and all of a sudden, it was like the light bulb went off. It’s essentially it was my Bible, I even. Gino Wickman, the author, I even texted him and I said, listen, our backdoor password to our technology was your name because you essentially helped us create the structure and the processes around the business. When we didn’t know what a vision was, you clarified what that meant, what KPIs, what the scorecard looked like. What does it mean to have a culture? How do you build a culture? He does pretty much everything you need to know to run a business, with the exception of marketing. He talks about it, but there’s no clear cut way to market a product. And there’s so many different ways for the different products, whether it’s a service or a widget or what have you, you know. But that was my Bible, and I made everybody in the company read it, and every new employee had to read it. And that was kind of our our Bible.
Trisha Stetzel: I love that and great book, by the way. Great suggestion. So, Henry, if people are already interested in having a conversation with you or at least connecting with you, what’s the best way to find you?
Henry Woodman: I think the best is speaking of the book that we talked about earlier. It’s called Marie the Story.com. And on there there’s information about me. And then there’s a able a way to connect. There’s even Facebook and Instagram links on that page as well.
Trisha Stetzel: Perfect.
Trisha Stetzel: Marie the story.com.
Henry Woodman: Yeah. You got it.
Trisha Stetzel: And then again, I’ll also put that in the show notes. For those of you who are listening from your computer you can just point and click. Otherwise you just have to remember it and it’s very easy. Marie the story.com. Awesome. Um all right, so you already talked about your favorite book. Is there any other book that’s really been instrumental to you in the business space besides traction?
Henry Woodman: You know, I’ve read a lot of business books. You know, you know, the hiring. Um, they had grit. They had, um, I mean, the reality was, um, things like mindset. It’s not so much a business book, but a focus on discipline and how you focus your mind. The reality for me was, and I’ve read Scaling Up, and I’ve read a bunch of others that are similar conceptually to traction. What traction does is, at least for me, for a small business at the time, was clearly articulate what exactly these things mean and how to put rubber to the road, which is what traction stands for. You know how where rubber meets the road. So in my opinion, traction was the that’s all I really needed.
Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. All right. Confirmation traction is the book. I love it.
Henry Woodman: Yeah. You’re welcome. Gino.
Trisha Stetzel: All right. This may be controversial. Henry, can anyone start and run a business?
Henry Woodman: Well, anyone can, but not everybody is going to succeed. Um, in my opinion, there is a marketing glamor about. Yeah, I got my own business. You know, I just make my own hours. I’ll make a ton of money and. Wow. You know, the first I’m going to say, decade or so in the last business, I made less than I was making before. I, you know, it’s not like it was, you know, fairy tales and rainbows and unicorns. It was a lot of effort. I was the first one in. I was the last one out. If there was money left over, God forbid I might be able to pay myself. I mortgaged my home, or I got a second mortgage to pay the employees when I couldn’t make it. So. And even starting a business, people won’t take it seriously because they’re like, okay, you just started. I don’t know if you’re going to be around in a year or two. So, you know, call me then and see how we’re doing because I’m not going to bet on something now. Widgets and other things are different. But you know what? I was into service. You know, software services was a little bit different. You know, we had to interconnect with like Hilton and Hyatt. These are big companies that don’t take it. You got to be got to be serious. Got to be hanging around a while. So I think anybody can start. But if I look back and think, oh wow, somebody would have said 90% of small businesses fail within the first five years, I probably would have said, what? You know what, let me see if I can buy a business or do something that already has a established client base and has an established process and procedures, and, you know, somebody wants to exit and I want to be able to do that. I didn’t think I was I didn’t know enough to know that I couldn’t. Right. So I think that’s a good thing. Um, I just think that nowadays with AI and stuff, you can get a lot more information a lot faster.
Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think that your story probably resonates with a lot of listeners, too. First one in, last one out trying to make payroll. What does that look like? This is really hard. I’m five years in. Why isn’t this any better than it was before? What would you say to those people that are in that, you know, 5 to 8 year struggle right now where they haven’t quite turned the corner, they built their business and they’re almost able to pay themselves, or maybe they could pay themselves or they keep putting money back into the business. What would you say to them right now?
Henry Woodman: You know, it’s kind of like and you hear these stories like, oh, it was like the darkest before the light, or I was on the verge of throwing in the towel and, you know, it turned the corner. Yeah, we all say that. Right. And so I think luck plays a part in this, but the reality is it’s a matter of wash, rinse, repeat. Do it again. Wash rinse repeat. Do it again. Starting a business is really about discipline and consistency. Consistency. Meaning set up the procedures and the process. And if you know anything about lean management and kaizen, how to make it more efficient, how to use more with less, how to essentially create and do, whether it’s marketing or sales or whatever it is that you’re doing without having to go overboard. And I and I honestly believe if I knew how to raise money at the time, I probably would have and I would have spent it all on stupid things and I would have bankrupted the business. True story. The fact that I had to bootstrap my way and learn how to overcome the hurdles in the mountains. I think looking back might have been helpful, and the fact that I hung around long enough and I kept plugging away and networking, I think in the end was helpful. So not everything will work out. But if you really believe and keep trying. And I didn’t have an option B, you know, it was like either this or I, you know, ask you if you want fries with that burger. Right. That was that were my two options. Right. So that was my my motivation. I can’t fail because I don’t know what I would do. And I would just keep plugging away and plugging away and calling and making the calls, you know.
Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely.And you got to get up and go to work every day. I talked to a lot of business owners that are just waiting for the phone to ring, and it doesn’t work that way in most industries. I don’t want to qualify all of them in the same space, but the phone’s not just going to ring without some work.
Henry Woodman: Yeah, and I’ll give you an example. You know, when we started the company, we were essentially a photography company doing virtual tours, right? Then we did virtual tours and distribution, and then we wanted to get into photos. So what we did is we called the conferences that catered to hotel and hotel distribution. And we said, listen, we’ll provide you guys with the photography of the event. We’ll send one of our photographers because guys, guys on staff, right? You essentially pay for the hotel and the and the ticketing and the entries and everything, and we’ll take care of the photography, which costs us really nothing more than what was already on our salary. So we got free entry to the thing, we got free hotel. All we had to do was go to the conference, shoot the pictures. So for us, it put our name out there. They gave us a booth, right. So they our name was there and they’d see us every year. And then I talked to, you know, the principals and they’d go, okay, so he’s still here. Yeah. Okay. We should take his, you know. So it was just a matter of keep plugging away, get creative.
Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes it’s just three feet from gold, right. Uh, and it’s not meant for everybody. But if you believe that you have the solution to the problem and not just putting something out there and hoping, praying that someone will call you. Let me cross my fingers. Right. But, you know, you actually have a solution to the problem that your audience has. It will happen. It will. And we learn from our mistakes, for God’s sakes.
Henry Woodman: Oh, my God, I should be a genius.
Trisha Stetzel: All right, Henry, what’s next for you?
Henry Woodman: Well, the next is, you know, from the book being published at NYU media, we’ve developed we’re developing a series called slippin, which is kind of a play on the word slippin through time. So it’s either the reincarnation that I was talking about, the reincarnation of marine Or he is going into a quantum universe, or there’s another him in another part and he meets it, or he’s making all this up and he’s a figment of his imagination. He’s hallucinating this whole thing. We don’t answer those questions, but the series goes through a bunch of, let’s call it trippy, sort of psychedelic type experiences of I fell in love with this woman. Is she coming back? Is there such a thing as reincarnation or is it. No. Oh my God. Right. So that’s that’s the series.
Trisha Stetzel: I love that, that’s fantastic. All right. So we’ve probably peaked some more interest there. And sending people to Marie the story.com is where they need to go. They first they can connect with you there. Second they can learn more about Marie and where this story might be going. We don’t know yet. That is very interesting. All right. I’m in. So, Henry, as we get to the back end of our conversation, what’s one story that you’d like to share about something that’s happened to you, or maybe somebody that you’ve worked with that might just give us a gift before we part ways today.
Henry Woodman: So I’ll leave it with it’s all about me, me, me. Um, so I in college, this is the early days, and I was in college in 1979. I was a sophomore, and I’m addicted to a video game called Pac-Man. Probably know this, right? I mean, I had calluses on my thumb and forefinger. So there I am in Tucson, Arizona, at University of Arizona, and I’m sitting in a laundromat, and I have a pocket full of quarters, and I want to play Pac-Man, and I don’t want to study. And I’m thinking, man, this place needs a Pac-Man. And so I go back to my dorm room. I call every laundromat and I mean every laundromat in Tucson. And I said, guys have video game machines. And they all said no. And eventually I’d say, would you would you like one? And, you know, we’ll share the revenue. And a couple said, yes. Now, I had no money, but I took my tuition money. I went to an auction because, you know, they had these video games at these malls and they the ones in the back, nobody played. They’d sell them at an auction just to get them off their books. So I bought one. I put it in a laundromat. It did really well, you know, a couple months later, I put in another laundromat. So by the time I graduated college, I had video games and many of the laundromats around Tucson because people were a captive audience and I could never leave, and I never even solved my own problem, because I would go in to get the machine and try to play. And somebody was playing it. And I can’t essentially, you know, take money out of my pocket to play the game for free. And so that was kind of the story of fulfilling a hedonistic and opportunistic need in my life as a college student.
Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. And it wasn’t the laundromats challenge. It was your own. Right. That’s your own challenge. You wanted to fill that void. I love that, Henry. This has been so much fun. Thank you for coming on the show with me today.
Henry Woodman: Thank you. Trisha.
Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, you’re very welcome.
Trisha Stetzel: All right, folks, the information will be in the show notes. All you have to do is point and click. If you’re just listening, you can remember Marie this story.com go and connect with Henry. By the way, we didn’t even talk about half of the things that he’s done. Very interesting guy. You should go out and at least, you know, find out where he’s at and ask him to play golf. I’m just saying.
Henry Woodman: Hey, if you want to be me, play golf, man. That’s an easy one.
Trisha Stetzel: If you want to win, play golf with Henry.That’s all.
Henry Woodman: I’ll let you win.
Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. Beautiful. All right. Henry Woodman, executive producer Anna moya, media. Marie, the story. Com. Thank you for being here with me. I appreciate your time today.
Henry Woodman: Thank you.
Trisha Stetzel: That’s all the time we have for today’s show. Join us next time for another exciting episode of Houston Business Radio. Until then, stay tuned, stay inspired, and keep thriving in the Houston business community.
