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(inspiring music) (inspiring music) - Welcome to Business Forward.

I'm your host, Matt George.

Joining me tonight, Eric Brinker.

Eric is the founder and principal at Brinker 13 and a whole lot more we're gonna get to very soon.

Welcome Eric.

- Thank you, Matt.

Thanks for having me.

It's a real pleasure.

- Well, it's cool.

Where are you at right now?

Where do you live?

- I'm in New York City.

I've lived in New York since I graduated from Bradley in '98, but have continuously traveled back to Peoria quite frequently, almost weekly in some cases.

- I've seen you out and about, and you do care about Peoria, Illinois and central Illinois, your whole family does.

So keep coming back, we love it.

- [Eric] I love it.

- So are you originally from here?

- No, I'm actually from Dallas, Texas.

- Okay.

- But I grew up coming to Peoria.

My mother and aunt were born and raised in Peoria, Nancy Brinker and Susan G. Komen, and my grandparents raised them and built their lives in Peoria.

And I think my grandmother, I can't remember what generation, but definitely dating back to the 1800s.

She's an old-school Peorian.

- That's awesome.

- We assume she was a bootlegger or something.

- (laughs) That's good.

So you said you graduated from Bradley University, what did you graduate in?

- I graduated in communications.

- Okay, I'm just kind of leading up to what you're doing now because some of the branding and some of the marketing that you've done in your career is phenomenal, but let's start with the family side for a second, because I find your family tree very, very interesting, and your mom.

I mean, your mom, when you talk about being proud as a son, she was an ambassador to Hungary.

Talk about that or tell me a story about what that even means.

- Well, she's always first to credit that her values came from her parents, but that they're Peoria values or central Illinois values.

I'm incredibly proud of her.

My aunt died very young in Peoria, Illinois of breast cancer at 36.

And at the time my mom was living in Dallas, Texas, and she was in the management training program at Neiman Marcus.

I was a very young, young kid, five years old and have vague memories of it.

My aunt was a Peorian through and through and was committed to the community and being part of it.

When she died, she asked my mom to make a promise that she would help change the face of the disease, and primarily it was the stigma.

My aunt was a model in Peoria and she was very active in the community, but it wasn't just a Peoria issue, it really was an issue everywhere.

Breast cancer just carried such a huge stigma, and I think that was one of the things that really motivated my mom to help change that face of the disease through the promise which has now become known around the world as Susan G. Komen.

And since then, she's had an amazing opportunity to serve the government, and I've gotten to be by her side while she's done all that.

And now she has a new venture, which we can talk about in a little bit.

- All right, well, so her own career in marketing and PR really helped ignite this cause because, if you think about it, I was thinking earlier as I was doing some research on this show and thinking about just how amazing the brand, everyone in the world knows what it means, and that's rare for a brand, am I right?

- Yeah, no, I think that that's what made it so unique.

And now you see so many other organizations that have emulated the model, which makes us particularly proud when you look at Alzheimer's and all these different sort of walks and organizations that are using cause-related marketing.

But early on this idea that my mom had was quite novel in the 80s, which was to rally corporations.

This isn't just something that's gonna be solved by the government.

It's gonna be something that's going to be solved two ways, at the community level, by community engagement, but also getting businesses involved.

And that's where the branding really came in with all of the pink marketing in the early days that really helped de-stigmatize the disease.

And that's what my mom felt was the most important to breaking down those barriers to then get people screened for the disease, which then down-stages the disease, which then saves lives.

It really was a simple model and continues to be today.

- Were you by her side when your mom won the medal, Presidential Medal of Freedom?

- I was, it was one of my proudest days.

I was invited to join her.

We got to visit with President Obama and talk a little bit about Peoria as well, and it was a really a neat honor.

I was actually with her, she was visiting in New York when she got the call from the White House, and it was really unbelievable.

I mean, it is such an immense honor to be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

So it was really neat.

- I mean, I have chills- - Certainly, my proudest as a son.

- I bet 'cause I have chills right now thinking about it because you have got to be sitting there just so humbled that that's my mom.

That's pretty cool.

- Yeah, it was a neat group of people.

Stephen Hawking and all these cool people that were honored in her class, it was neat.

- So over the years, you two have had a huge part of raising what's now billions of dollars, that's with a B, for Susan G. Komen.

In the business that you're in, how does a movement like this turn into such an iconic brand?

- Well, I think that a lot of hard work, never giving up, and most importantly, really having been able to rally the community, our own community in Peoria, as an example.

you've seen the support for the Susan G. Komen organization, but in general, I think that that's been a big piece of how this movement started.

It took community work and it took community participation, and all of us who have spent time in central Illinois have seen the impact directly.

- What's interesting is, and I still get upset to this day about my aunt also passed from breast cancer and my cousin was Jeff George, the quarterback at Illinois and played in the NFL, and I ran his foundation for 10 plus years.

In doing so, when she was diagnosed, we directed all of our dollars to breast cancer awareness and fighting.

I really think that when you look at the NFL as an example, there were so many quarterbacks, I remember Brett Farve and his wife and so many quarterbacks, and now so now so many athletes that have grabbed onto this and really kind of taken that torch in their own sectors of business.

That has got to just make you feel so pumped as that was my aunt, that is my aunt.

- Yeah, no, it's been amazing.

We've marked almost 40 years that my mom has since founded Susan G Komen, and I've been by her side.

We recently started a new organization called The Promise Fund that my mom founded, and it's a new model based in South Florida.

And it's really homing in on sort of some very specific breast cancer disparities around screening, and it's a really neat model.

She never stops and it's been an honor to join her for this next chapter of her career.

She will forever be the founder of Susan G. Komen, but she's officially kind of retired from the organization and is now leading the charge of this new effort and a new model that she's very, very passionate about.

And she's incredibly proud of kind of the impact that Susan G. Komen's made that wouldn't have made it possible for her to sort of do this next chapter of work.

And so I'm excited to be sort of, again, by her side, as she's, like many people who are visionaries, they're always looking 10 steps ahead, and so it's been fun to be by her side on this next chapter.

- Yeah, and so talk more about that because I was reading about it, and this is really taking a deeper dive into more specific angles.

Go into that just a little deeper.

I find this very interesting.

- Well, the model is really around using federally qualified healthcare centers and directing people who don't have access to quality health care, the ability to have very high quality screening.

And in certain communities, this problem isn't as evident or as necessary.

Peoria, for example, we have an incredible public hospital system.

We're very, very blessed for the kinds of medical infrastructure that we have, but in places like South Florida the hospital system is much more fragmented.

And unless you live in Miami and you're not in one of these communities, you may not have access as an uninsured person to the same kind of healthcare that someone who's insured.

And so the idea is really to navigate people, and particularly in Florida, where my mom lives now, by the way, there's been a huge influx in uninsured women moving into the state.

And so this is identifying a problem which hopefully then can be replicated in other communities and done at an extremely low cost and extremely low overhead.

So it's an interesting model, and it's a disruptive model.

I'm very, very proud of my mom for once again, sort of breaking some eggs and trying to shake up community health and find new ways to challenge the system.

- You know what's interesting about that, and I like the term disruptive model, but if you think about how many, male and female, I mean, this goes for all kinds of cancers, but if you're talking specifically to breast cancer and females with breast cancer, a lot of people just blow off screenings or they're like, "I don't know the cost of that."

A lot of times when I was writing grants and doing programs for cancer or that are cancer related, I always found that not having that navigator or lack of knowledge from the potential patient or survivor really was a mental drain for everybody.

And I think that's one thing that Komen has done is it really has opened up other doors, if you think about it, to other resources, holistic resources, as an example, but also financial resources.

And that's what this really is gonna focus on is get people in need.

- Exactly, and particularly the need is greater than ever now with coming out of this pandemic, the numbers that we're hearing of people who just have either missed or been unable or just can't get a screening scheduled or just to kind of put it off.

We've all sort of put off things during this, and so now the catch-up is critical because it can delay treatment and lifesaving care.

- I'm passionate about this cause.

I think I could actually just talk about this for the whole show, but I have other things I want to go to.

So talk about Brinker 13, that's your company.

What is that, what do they do?

- Sure, well, we're building travel retail, hospitality experiences for global brands.

My early part of my career was, I suppose, part of the founding marketing team of JetBlue, which is a very popular airline in the Northeast and had a real ground floor opportunity to work with the founder of that company.

And since then, I've worked for another hospitality company around building restaurants and airports, and we operate in some of the largest airports in the country.

And so sort of the evolution of my career was to sort of get in it on my own.

And so Brinker 13, which pays a nod to the company that my dad, Norman Brinker, founded, which was Brinker International, the parent company at Chili's.

And so really, I've got a personal passion for hospitality, so this was sort of a natural evolution for me to be able to take sort of some of my own career experiences and work directly with hospitality leaders in building next generation brands.

And really my focus is in travel in the hospitality and sort of retail space.

- And I didn't even mention your dad, your dad is a legend in his own right.

So when you were at JetBlue, as an example, did they have specific, because you got there at an early age, right?

- Yeah, yeah, so I was there early in the company, really within like the first year of the company's operations, and so really got to be part of a fast growing story, which was a lot of fun.

We got to be sort of one of the first airlines doing a lot of firsts.

We put satellite TV at every seat and really generous snacks and a great onboard experience and really novel things for that period of time in the early 2000s.

So that was a really neat experience for me to be part of.

- So what do you take from the training or the onsite experience of being at JetBlue and how does that kind of now correlate with what you're doing with Brinker 13?

- Well, I think a lot of it is building values into organizations and putting values first.

It's about creating an experience that tells a story.

I'm very passionate about just this concept of storytelling in building brands.

And it's essentially kind of what we did with Susan G. Komen.

- Right.

- I'm constantly telling a story, but I think it translates very well into hospitality and consumer brands.

So it's always trying to be authentic and building a culture that builds your own team members or crew members or employees from within, but also it makes them feel like they're owners and in some cases make them owners when possible.

And I think if you take care of your customers and you take care of your employees, the numbers follow, right?

So I think that that's really just, it's sort of a simple model and kind of what I follow in sort of the businesses that I help grow.

- It's a simple model maybe for somebody like you, but there's a lot of businesses as you know that struggle with that engagement piece or that vision piece.

They may have a vision for the business, but there's people involved and the people drive it is what you're saying.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, so let's talk Metro Centre.

So when you think about- - That's my favorite topic on this show to talk about, Matt.

- Okay.

All right.

Well, cool.

So I'm almost there almost daily at something.

I mean, there's just so many different things there.

It's in the hub of Peoria.

So talk about how you're involved and how long you've been involved with Metro.

- Yeah, so we're getting ready to celebrate our 50th anniversary.

- Wow.

- My grandfather was a commercial real estate developer in central Illinois.

He built Sheridan Village, which I'm sure everybody knows, and then he built Metro Centre really as like a retirement project.

He started it in his sixties when he was living between Florida and Peoria.

And he built the property and just kept adding onto it and adding onto it.

And he started the project, like I said, now almost 50 years ago, and my mom and I have had the opportunity to kind of carry on the legacy with me running the day to day.

And I've got a great team, a great property manager that's a native Peorian, Jason Fuller.

You probably see his name all over the property, but we've got a great team on site and we're really spending a lot of time leaning into what we think is the best location in Peoria and being a venue that can incubate, support and grow local businesses and do it in a way that our tenants, frankly, can afford the rent and can be successful at the same time, but on a property that's clean and well-maintained, and feels like Peoria.

And so that's really what we're doing.

We're doing some really cool marketing stuff, which I can tell you about, I guess, if you have a up on that.

- No, go ahead because I was just gonna ask you about the tenants, but then I was going to talk marketing, but let's go straight to marketing.

- Yeah, so that's been fun.

So a couple of things that have happened recently, which I'm really excited about is we partnered with Big Picture Peoria, and I am incredibly passionate about what they're doing around the community.

You've seen their large pieces of art that have been installed around buildings around primarily downtown.

And we have now installed the largest mural to date at Metro Centre, and it's really cool.

It's basically a story of Peoria, and I invite everybody to check it out.

Jeremy Blakely, who's the artist, incredible graphic designer right in Peoria, worked with us on it to just sort of tell the story of Peoria.

And it's right at our entrance on University Street, it's really colorful.

And I probably shouldn't jump ahead of our ribbon cutting, but we're intending to expand our partnership with Big Picture.

My hope is that we can have more murals throughout Metro Centre.

I think telling the story of Peoria through arts and celebrating our own arts community is a really cool thing.

So anyway, that that project is something I've been very passionate about.

- It's pretty cool, and you mentioned cleanliness and talk about the, you know, when you have a property, you have a responsibility to the whole community to make sure it looks good, right?

And part of that with the murals is a piece of that.

And the other piece now is the tenants, because how do you, like when you're looking at a business, how do you decide what businesses you want in, or do you decide or do people just come to you?

I don't know how that works.

- No, so we actively are essentially curating what's there and that's changed over the years, right?

Like retail has changed dramatically.

So how do we kind of keep the feel of what people have always known as Metro Centre and how do we evolve the tenant mix based on sort of what's realistic today, a clothing store that we may have had in the eighties, that concept doesn't really exist anymore, right?

So it's finding complimentary tenants that meet our brand.

We really like the fact that we have locally-owned businesses, and that's really important to us.

We've got a couple of things that we're doing, for example, to drive additional traffic.

During the holidays, we have these five Instagramable sort of holiday sets throughout the shopping center.

And our guests who visit Metro Centre can explore those and take pictures, and so that's been a lot of fun.

As a landlord trying to not only drive traffic, but actually be a real business partner to our tenants is what we're doing and providing extra support through marketing and different resources is something that we're really passionate about and that we think kind of sets us apart from everyone else.

- Yeah, and I love the shop local because, and I don't care what town you're in.

It is just fun to shop local and take care of the people.

I always say, it's kind of interesting, I want to go back to Komen because I'm gonna use this as an example, I always say, no matter who you are or what you do, it's your job to take care of the community and the community you live in.

Here's what's interesting.

With Susan G Komen, it's not only taking care of community, it's taking care of the world, if you think about it, because so many opportunities have really come because of that mentality.

But now you get it down to the Metro Centre, and your job is not only to, from a business standpoint, fill the Metro Centre, but from the community standpoint, to make sure you're taking care of the tenants too, correct?

- Exactly.

I mean, we think there's so much opportunity to incubate businesses at Metro Centre.

And I just go back to when I'm in places like New York, and I tell people about Metro Centre, Peoria has such a sort of mythical place in sort of marketing folklore with the, does it play in Peoria?

And I just love the idea that we're helping sort of give character and color to the city.

I met with our new mayor last week.

And it was really reassuring to see sort of the support from the city and what we're doing in the community.

I am incredibly optimistic about what's happening in central Illinois, and I'm very positive about it.

It's why I spend a week a month there because I think that there's a lot of opportunity.

And I think that I am really passionate about being part of it, but not necessarily me being part of it, but helping my tenants be part of it and helping them grow their businesses, I think is really a cool thing to be able to do.

- As a landlord, so to speak, so you take a place like Pottstown and you, let's say another group wanted to come in, but it's on that.

Do you say, "No, we already have that business here," and you kind of look at your model and say, "We need this over here."

Is that what you're saying?

- Yeah, yeah, I mean, we're not going to bring, I mean, well, first of all, there's no one like Pottstown, so there's not a replacement for them.

They're pretty unbelievable.

Highly recommend if you haven't gotten your smoked Turkey from them yet, you better get moving because it's pretty awesome.

But yeah, I mean, we really, really try to have complimentary businesses and not duplicate.

I mean, that wouldn't necessarily make sense for us.

- Yeah, that doesn't make sense.

I just always wondered how that was written contract-wise.

Well, so are you seeing new business, I guess by living in New York, are you seeing new businesses popping up everywhere, knowing that there's a lot of businesses that have closed over the past two years, but there's also new business right?

- Yeah, I mean, I'm amazed by, you know, we put a lot of plans on hold, frankly, that I wanted to during the pandemic.

Now that we're sort of back, I'm seeing a couple of things happen, a lot more interest in people just reaching out to us and a lot of new tenants.

we've signed several new leases recently, and there are a lot of new businesses that are growing.

And I think what's interesting is, after the pandemic, a lot of people have said, "I want to be in business for myself."

And that's, I think, driving a lot of the small businesses that we're seeing and I think we make a lot of sense for small businesses.

So I think you're absolutely right.

- It's interesting.

Well, I appreciate you coming on.

This is fun, and I think I say this sometimes with guests, but not all guests, that I think we could go and do three or four different shows because there's just so many topics.

And thank you so much for not only coming on, but for coming back to Peoria and taking care of our community like you do, Eric.

You do great things, and so does your family, so keep it up.

- And so do you Matt, thanks for having me.

- I appreciate it.

This wraps another show.

I'm Matt George, and this is Business Forward.

(uplifting music) - Thank you for tuning into Business Forward brought to you by PNC.

(uplifting music) - Can you hear me, Eric?