Five in five* with senior account exec Kyle Rhine

Kyle Rhine is on his second tour of duty with Interrupt. The senior account executive is drawn to agency life, he says, because of its ever-changing daily demands. “You’re constantly working on a wide variety of branding and marketing projects with different clients and products,” he said. “We’re a super smart team and I honestly learn something new every day.”

We spoke with him for February’s installment of Five in Five, where we get to know an Interrupter by asking five questions in five minutes*.

I grew up in Lima, Ohio. It’s a small town—I only had 100 people in my graduating class. I still have a good group of friends I talk to on a daily basis from high school. We have a text message thread where we’re constantly debating politics and other things we would’ve considered “old people” stuff when we were teenagers.

There was a lot of what you could call trial and error. I had four different majors. I started off in computer science, but didn’t like coding. I tried business, but I didn’t like math. I tried aviation management, but should have been on the pilot track. I finally landed on criminology and was 75% through the hiring process for the U.S. Border Parol when I blew out my knee. After 7-years in big box sales management, I found my way to agency work because it’s a desk job that’s not really a desk job—you’re interacting with clients all day.

Ah, yes. ‘80s action movie soundtrack music is my go-to when I need inspiration to crush my task list. You should try it sometime, it really works.

I was the lead in our senior class production of Grease. I was Danny Zucko. I grew my hair out for the part and greased it back. I’m no John Travolta but I think I did a pretty decent job.

What can I say, she’s number one in her troop. She’s sold over 500 boxes of cookies. My wife and I know the power of social media and—I’m biased here—her cuteness. We leveraged that by recording sales pitch videos. We set up just like we do for a video shoot at Interrupt—I walked around the house with her scouting a location and we did multiple takes. It was cool to see how much more confident she become while practicing her sales pitch. She knows all the cookies by heart and she even went around our neighborhood and knocked on doors and sold some cookies. She takes after her old man, I guess!

*It may have taken us (way) longer than five minutes to have this conversation. But it shouldn’t take you longer than five minutes to read them, so we think it still counts.