(Call) Kevin Miller and John Zacharias are exemplary students of the school of hard knocks. The two founders of GR0 are recovering addicts who met by chance in rehab and built a digital marketing empire out of conversations.
Miller, who grew up in Ormond Beach, Florida and attended Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, spent three years at Google before moving to Los Angeles to start a new life. Zacharias grew up in Los Angeles and received his law degree from California Western School of Law in San Diego before devoting ten years of his life to the study of search engine optimization (SEO).
In a true story of a phoenix rising from the ashes, Miller and Zacharias found themselves at one AA meeting where they not only found the hope they needed to rebuild their lives, but also a shared entrepreneurial spirit that helped them build their company. .
Zacharias says of Miller at that meeting: “He talked about how he was working on an SEO project. He was the lead digital marketer for paid advertising at Google. But he was assigned an SEO project for Open Listings (later acquired by Open Door) and I didn't understand how to do SEO.” Zacharias contacted Miller after the meeting and offered to help with the SEO aspect of the project. The timing and measurements were perfect.
The result was a successful partnership and great success for Open List. "We always joked that Open List hired two people and they thought it was just me, but I probably talked to [Zacharias] 20 times a day, and I'm not exaggerating."
Their success with Open List led them to think they could replicate this effort and achieve the same results for hundreds of other clients, and thus GR0 was born.
First, the couple reached out to influential people in their network to create an advisory board full of successful entrepreneurs and big names. The list includes Paris Hilton, venture capitalist Carter Rheaume, Balance founder Judd Schoenholtz, BAM Ventures CEO Richard June, BWCP investor Jack Mohr and Doe Lashes founder Jason Wong.
"We had a vision and we pitched it to influencers in our network," Zacharias said. "And they believed. Because they believed in us and we knew they were successful, that meant a lot to me."
When GR0 launched in February 2020, neither Zacharias nor Miller realized how much time was on their side. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to expand their digital influence in order to survive, GR0 offered a valuable lifeline: a way for companies to continue to grow with the help of Google's algorithm.
"Google has been around for 25 years, but people have forgotten that it's a development channel," says Miller. "And there was no such thing as a big agency for people who didn't forget. Basically, they had to buy questionable backlinks from outside." As a result, the industry has gained a dishonest and tarnished reputation. GR0's solution was to allow companies to scale and grow in a completely transparent and honest manner.
Honesty and transparency paid off, and GR0 also grew during the economic crisis. With the acquisition of email/SMS marketing service QuaGrowth and Google advertising company TM Marketing Consultants, GR0 has been able to further meet the needs of its clients by using more innovative products as well as offering LinkedIn optimization and influencer marketing.
Thanks to GR0's marketing and SEO management skills, the company that creates the iconic and incredible floats has managed to rise to the top of the FunBoy pool floats rankings. After working with GR0, perennial flower company Venus et Fleur quickly climbed Google's "annual roses" rankings.
GR0 is also the company behind the successful Venus et Fleur ad starring Paris Hilton and social media icon Addison Rae. Their achievements and expansion made them public, and in 2022, SEM and Inc. They won Search Engine Land's Best B2B Search Marketing Initiative 2021 Power Partner Award.
With such rapid growth and development, you'd expect Zacharias and Miller to sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labor, but that's not the case. Both remain committed to hands-on customer interaction while staying true to their unwavering simplicity.
"There's nothing in the company that John and I don't do," Miller explains, "that matters a lot, and unlike me, we have our finger on the pulse of what the customers are thinking." I don't think any other digital marketing management team does that."
So customers can be satisfied. "We want to assess the real needs of the customer and then offer the most appropriate product at the moment," says Zacharias. "It's the difference between a customer who stays for three months and leaves, and one who stays for five years and is happy, grows their business and is happy."
As for happiness, that's what the couple programmed into the GR0 genetics. "I feel like we have a very dynamic and deep company culture because we talk about our mental health struggles," Miller said. By keeping these conversations open, she creates a safe environment that focuses on the mental health of her employees and never fires them for weakness.
Do their employees enjoy this open-door communication style? Indeed, the fact that GR0 recently won the equivalent of the Happiest Employee award and was named one of Fortune's 50 Best Advertising and Marketing Companies is a big yes.
Looking to the future, Zacharias and Miller plan to grow GR0 to serve Fortune 500 companies and take on larger marketing and search engine optimization projects with the services they provide to clients today.
With the same determination and passion that helped the two partners rebuild their lives, they will continue to expand GR0. Zachariah says, "Sometimes when everything seems to be falling apart, it's actually falling into place. Learn to get out of the way." Both agree that this is the key to success and effectiveness.