Member Spotlight

MEET PRSA AUSTIN CHAPTER MEMBER: Jeremiah W. Bentley

CURRENT LIVELIHOOD: I'm the corporate communications manager at Texas Mutual Insurance Company. In my role, I oversee the company's advertising and public relations campaigns along with all the print and online material we produce to tell the company's story.

CHILDHOOD AMBITION: I wanted to be a professional baseball player. The only problem was that I was never very good at it. I tried hard through 10 years of youth baseball but never overcome that fact that I couldn't hit, run, throw or catch. I also wanted to be involved in politics and ended up spending about 10 years working in government affairs.

DRAW TO THE COMMUNICATIONS FIELD: I had opportunities throughout my years in government affairs to work with our communications people and decided in 2007 that the types of challenges communications presented were ones that interested me. So I made the move to my current position. Every day presents a new opportunities to work on a wide variety of projects and collaborate with business units from across the organization to try to solve common problems.

HOMETOWN: I was born in Era, Texas, which is about an hour north of Dallas/Fort Worth. Era has a population of about 200. My graduating class in high school had 15 people, so I was barely in the top 10% even though I finished second in the class. As you can imagine, it was quite a cultural shift to move to Austin. My first major lecture class at UT-Austin was three times the size of my home town.

RECOMMENDED READS: I love reading books about how the human mind works and the things that influence our decisions. A few of my favorites are "Freakonomics" by Steve Levitt/Stephen Dubner, "Made to Stick" and "Switch" by Chip and Dan Heath, "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer, and "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely. I also like reading Seth Godin and Erik Qualmann's blogs along with the Freakonomics blog. 

FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT AUSTIN AND FAVORITE AUSTIN RESTAURANTS: My wife and I have two small boys, so our favorite things to do generally involve parks and playscapes. The Central Market on Lamar is great for having both (along with wine from the cafe for mommy and daddy). The Austin Nature and Science Center is also a great free place for kids along with the whole Lady Bird Lake area.  We also spend a lot of time outdoors exploring our neighborhood. Because of the boys we don't get out to a ton of restaurants, but we do make it out to Truluck's and Z-Tejas in the Arboretum, Hoover's home cooking on Manor, and we eat a lot of breakfast tacos from Ken's Tacos on Cameron and Liz's Grill in our neighborhood general store.