Today we’d like to introduce you to Zach Smith.
Zach, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I want to start this off by giving a shoutout to everyone who helped me get to where I am today. As kind of a joke, I sent a snap chat out to a bunch of friends and said, “This magazine wants to do an article on my inspiring story, but everything has gone so great for me that I don’t know how I am that inspiring.” Well, let’s just say I had so many amazing people who are close to me remind me of times where I have been knocked down and had to overcome it.
I am a young man from Cleveland, Ohio. I have shown a lot of resilience to be here and successful in LA today. As a kid, my only dream was to become a professional baseball player. My entire life, baseball is all that I wanted, and I always made sure I outworked everyone. I owe a lot of my motivation and determination skills to my parents who were always very supportive of my dream and always told me to have “No Regrets” when it came time to hang up the cleats. I would even write No Regrets inside all of my baseball hats since I was a little kid and got it tatted on my pitching arm after I signed for college ball.
My senior year I was ranked in the top players in the state of Ohio I went on to play college for Hawaii Pacific University. I was the first person in my immediate family to attend college and at the time did not realize that my work ethic for baseball would be the cornerstone to my success. My determination and work ethic for baseball quickly translated into everything that I did throughout college. I was on the Deans list every year and eventually graduated with both a degree in Marketing and a Masters in Business Administration in just four and a half years. Although life was all great on the academic side of things, on the athletics side, I was plagued by injury.
For three straight years, I had injuries that kept me out of the game for a substantial amount of time. After still being lightly scouted I eventually went undrafted and saw my dream come to an abrupt halt. Although this happens to many people, I believe I am different because I truly did outwork every player that I ever played with, for a chance to make my dream become a reality. I have NO REGRETS when I think back to my baseball career. It may not have become a reality, but this was not the end of the road for me. I took what I have learned from baseball in terms of giving it your all and funneled it into the rest of life.
Immediately after college I got into financial advising and did very well doing so. In fact, with a company that is in 49 of 50 states, I was in lead to becoming a rookie salesman of the year. But after eight months I was given an opportunity to move to LA to model, and I took it, leaving what appeared to be a financially secure job. I was not truly happy day in and day out with what I was doing at the time and couldn’t stop thinking about living only one life and having No Regrets. I knew that modeling was not the final answer for me, but I wanted to use it to support myself until I could find my next passion.
As a model, I started to really get into promoting myself and found out that I was really good at it. Within just six months I was able to gain over 10,000 Instagram followers. I started to use my skills to help out other models and then eventually started to charge for my services. I found out that I really did have a niche for marketing. I took these skills and what I learned with my MBA and marketing Degree and expanded my work to help small businesses with their Social Media, PPC, SEO, and website design. Now I own my own company and website called SB Digital marketing.
Today, I am extremely happy to tell you that I have found my passion in digital marketing and helping others to watch their dreams become a reality. I do want to mention that besides the business that I am mentioning today, I still do give baseball lessons all around the LA area and I do personal training as well for athletes. Sports will always be my get away. It is also a great way to meet people for my marketing business. There is a lot of marketing in sports, health, and fitness.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
There’s always going to be struggles, but if you really believe in yourself and that what you are doing has a greater good, then it is easier to overcome these obstacles. Baseball taught me how to overcome obstacles and never lose sight. In high school, I broke my elbow while pitching, my sophomore year. I was told that I may not be able to throw very hard ever again. Because of this, I decided to opt out of surgery.
After six months my elbow never healed, and then I had to have the surgery to get two screws in my elbow and faced another six+ months of healing and intense rehab. I did everything that I could to make sure that I could come back. At the end of my Junior season, I was finally able to pitch my first game. I took that momentum and started to work harder than I ever have.
I entered showcases all summer long and stuck to a very strict workout regimen. I was able to gain a lot of velocity on my fastball then started taking out some of the best players in my state during a fall ball league. Due to this, I was ranked in the top players in Ohio even though I missed a lot of valuable time. Then in college, I tore my labrum in my shoulder twice and was told I had a 50/50 chance to heal up without surgery.
Both times I decided to not have surgery because if I did it would be the end of my career. By my senior year, I met one of the best pitching coaches in the world, Dave Evans, from Houston Texas. He saw my work ethic and started giving me free lessons if I showed up and worked hard every day. He taught me how to throw from a biomechanical sense and fixed the issue in my pitching mechanics that was causing all of my injuries.
I had a very good senior year, stats wise, but I tore my hamstring and missed five weeks. Even after the season, I received some workouts from the Yankees and Brewers, but they wanted to see me play an independent season to show that I could stay healthy. I decided that I gave it my all, it didn’t work out and that it was time for me to take my education and do something with it.
I knew that all my hard work in baseball would translate over to the real world and I could create the lifestyle that I wanted to live without baseball. I want to travel and see the world. Then when I left my Financial Advising career to move to LA, I also left my girlfriend of two years and a lot of security. A long distance relationship is very hard, but my girl and I knew how much we cared for each other and trusted each other.
We are still together and doing great, but it was not easy by any means. I also left a secure job to a new city with no source of income but the faith I put in my agent that modeling would pay the bills. As I did well, and still do okay modeling, it was not enough to maintain my rent. I had to move into a college Roommate’s place with his parents for a while until I could get onto my feet again.
This was a blessing in disguise because he eventually became my business partner and now today he is still involved with SB Marketing Pros. (Small Business Marketing Pros
Please tell us about SB Marketing Pros.
SB Marketing Pros is a small business of experienced and talented marketers who have a passion for helping other small business owners stand out and reach their goals. What we do is help your business generate more leads and sales.
Our process is to analyze how your company is marketing throughout the digital world, quickly make necessary adjustments, cut down on wasteful costs, develop a marketing strategy and campaign, and ensure that your business will flourish. We work closely with you and your business to tailor a plan and make sure you are involved as much as you want to be. We help to manage small business’ around the country and run their SEO, PPC, Social Media, and website development. We help your brand to stand out in your local community as well as nationwide.
One of our goals is to help you to become ranked in search engines such as google, bing, and optimize search results and paid advertisements in these same search engines but also platforms such as Amazon. We create your campaigns and ads and get them in front of people, resulting in more leads and more sales for your business. Another asset that we bring to the table is creating leads and developing an email marketing plan for your company. We also work with individuals such as models, influencers and actors to help promote their social media accounts, blogs, etc.
Along with our marketing skills, SB Marketing Pros will help to develop our client’s websites and graphic designs. What sets us apart from our competition is that we are also a small business. We charge less than the big agencies that are available to small businesses, and we are much more accessible. You get the feeling that we care for your business and you know who is working on your marketing.
With larger agencies, you have no idea if an expert is working on your account or someone they just hired a week ago. Plus communication is much more difficult with these large agencies. We stand apart because we can relate to you and how much you care about your own business because we feel the same way about ours. We are much more invested in our clients than other agencies who are in our industry.
We work with various companies and people such as skin care lines, jewelers, therapeutic companies, clothing lines, real estate agents, models, blogs, etc. No matter what your industry you can always benefit from digital marketing. Something you can do for your business is reaching out to us through our website or via email about obtaining a free analysis of some changes and additions we can make to help your companies digital marketing set up and campaign.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
To be completely honest, I am big in believing that everything happens for a reason and to trust the process. I don’t think there is anything different that I could have done to be in a better and happier place than I am in now.
Contact Info:
- Website: Sbmarketingpros.com
- Phone: 310-579-9884
- Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
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