Dean Renfro is CEO of Business Profits Academy, a coaching and consulting business designed to help small businesses generate more leads and make more profits. He is also a husband, father, pastor and grandfather and is passionate about helping individuals and families capture their life stories, moments, precious memories and the share then with generations to come. These books are a labor of love from Dean’s own journey to capture some of the precious memories of his mom’s life when they learned she had Alzheimer’s. In this interview, Dean shares information about his new books and software system to preserve memories and your legacy.
Tami Patzer: Hi, this is Tami Patzer and my guest today is author Dean Renfro. Dean is the CEO of Business Profits Academy, a coaching and consulting business designed to help small businesses generate more leads and make more profits. He is also a husband, father, pastor, and grandfather and he’s passionate about helping individuals and families capture their life stories, moments, precious memories, and share them with generations to come. He has written not one, but two books and they are a labor of love from Dean’s own personal journey to capture some of the precious memories of his mom’s life when they learned that she had Alzheimer’s. Welcome Dean.
Dean Renfro: Tami, thanks for having me today, I really appreciate the opportunity to share with your listeners and with you this thing that kind of gets ahold of you in life and you realize this is too important to just let go of and not see something happen from it. I really appreciate getting to share today with you.
Tami Patzer: Good. Before we get into the books, let’s tell everybody a little bit about you and your background, because you do have quite the history. Let’s start with a little background about you, for example where do you live, and most of all why do you write?
Dean Renfro: I was born in the shadow of The Walls of the Texas prison in Huntsville, at that time the only prison in Texas that was called The Walls unit. Now it’s known for its infamous place of where they deal with hardened criminals. From there I’ve lived in small towns, big towns, big cities here in Texas and being involved in very different places. As far as Texas goes I’ve got a pretty big handle on the Texas culture which your listeners can probably tell “Yeah, that guy’s from Texas.” The funny thing is I had never been out of Texas until I was almost twenty years old. Sometimes people find that hard to believe, but they just don’t really realize how big Texas is that you can go a long way and not get out of Texas.
In the forty something years that I’ve been involved in small businesses, and pasturing in particular, and starting new churches which led to the necessity of being able to fund yourself, I’ve been a Jack of all trades. Several different businesses in different towns and places. It’s let me to have that involvement. That led me to some journeys along the way where I realized there are things important that you need to pass onto people. There’s things you need to share with business people. There’s things that you learn that are valuable to other people. I began to realize the need to write. I’d known about the need to write ever since I got out of college and is one of those things where you stumble along and think “I need to do something about that, I need to write about that.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Finally one day it ran over me like a truck and I realized “I got to start writing, I got to start writing.”
Tami Patzer: Obviously something happened that made you realize it was time to start writing this stuff down. What was that moment?
Dean Renfro: Part of it I have to go back to seminary experience and being a part of the dean, the president staff and going around, going different places we would have conversations. He has several doctorates and he was always talking about dissertation, and research, and study, and how important that was. That birthed inside of me some things … “You know, I’ve got some things I need to say.” Then life gets busy and you have kids and you’re here, and you’re there, and we’re moving, and all those kind of things. As it began to move that toward that and I began to do ministry across the United States I begin to realize “I’ve got some things that I know and understand that other people don’t.” About the only way to really communicate that and to get an inside track with people when they don’t know you is to have a book. Some exposure to people like Dan Kennedy and Mike Koenigs, I began to realize that book concept is a ticket into people’s lives, and to people’s businesses, and opportunities that you can share with people because simply people don’t throw a book away. They don’t hide the … They might put it on the shelf and never read it again, but the fact that you’re an author creates a different kind of opportunities for you. Partly through personal growth, exposure to some people who were prolific writers who were successful prolific writers. I lost track of how many books Dan Kennedy has, but he’s written about all kinds of things. It’s a totally different niche, but just the exposure to the fact that you’re walking around all the time with all this experience, and knowledge, and information that you’re encountering that if you don’t put it into something like a book it’s going to get away from you.
