Paper Napkin Wisdom - Podcast And Blog For Entrepreneurs, Leaders And Difference-makers

Wintress Odom is the Founder and CEO of The Writers For Hire, a company built on clarity, discipline, and consistently high-quality work. From the outside, it's easy to assume the success came from systems, execution, and technical excellence alone. But on her paper napkin, Wintress wrote something deceptively simple: "People come for the work. They stay for the team." That sentence didn't come from a leadership book. It came from lived experience — from building a business, leading people, and learning (sometimes the hard way) what actually keeps a team engaged over time. This conversation is about a shift many leaders make too late… and how everything changes when they finally make it. The Napkin That Changed the Way She Led Early in her journey, Wintress did what many high-performing founders do: She optimized for output. She valued efficiency. She valued competence. She valued getting the work done — and getting it done well. What she didn't value (at least at first) were the things that felt inefficient: