If You Can Think It, You Can Do It

School didn’t come easily to Chris Marentis—not because he wasn’t brilliant, but because the world had not yet come to understand ADHD. “I’ll never forget the time I was sixteen and the school guidance counselor sat down with my mother,” he recounts today. “She said I was a good kid, but they should consider enrolling me in a trade school because academics weren’t my thing.”

When Chris’s father heard about the conversation, however, he wholeheartedly dismissed it, asserting that they had no idea what they were talking about. Indeed, though Chris had been a C and D student, his father never worried about him. Articulate and with a strong sense of emotional intelligence, Chris was the kind of kid with a real presence about him, exuding the sense that there was something more going on. “My father always had an inner confidence about me,” Chris affirms. “His motto for me was, ‘If you can think it, you can do it.’ To see his unflagging belief stay resolute, I realized I wasn’t defined by the way the school was defining me, and that it was up to me to define myself.” Now the founder and CEO of Surefire Social, Chris has spent the past thirty years living true to his father’s motto: first he thinks up bridges between technology and marketing and media solutions, and then he builds them.

The reality that media would be dramatically changed by technology was first spelled out in the writing on the wall long ago, and Chris noticed it immediately. After serving as the CEO of several venture-backed Web 2.0 startups, he saw that Web 2.0 was democratizing the Internet environment and undermining the economic power that had, in the past, left the playing field so uneven. “I realized that, if you could do a few things in a smart and coordinated way, you could actually have more visibility than anyone else in your market and set yourself apart as an authority,” he remarks. “And I felt that this marked a profound shift for small business owners. While they used to get outmaneuvered by big national manufacturers or lead generation companies that leveraged a national presence to gain visibility at the local level, I believed that, if equipped with the right knowledge and technological tools, small businesses could have a new opportunity to really succeed.”

To provide a pathway to such knowledge and tools, Chris wrote a book called Surefire Social. He then designed a more robust educational platform to serve as a resource center for small business owners. He had never meant to go into the service business, but people immediately recognized the value of the information he offered, and before he knew it, he was being invited to deliver keynote talks all over the country.

Several months later, people began calling Chris to ask if he could personally assist with their web development, search engine optimization, and social media needs. Thus, since 2010, Chris and his team have focused on creating scalable solutions that are personable, comprehensive, and integrated. “Most small business owners have their technology rolled out in silos, with different people responsible for their website, search engine optimization, social media, and CRM,” he explains. “We match those clients with a coach or account services person who works with them to implement a cohesive system and then provides comprehensive marketing reports to the business, making sure all the moving parts are maximally aligned and effective.”

With the terrain of the marketing environment shifting and changing so rapidly today, Surefire Social’s services are ideal for small business owners who otherwise find themselves overwhelmed, confused, and frustrated as they try to keep up with new developments. “There are so many companies out there that promise the next big thing to attract traffic to a client’s website, but then can’t deliver,” he remarks. “That’s why empowerment through education is the fundamental cornerstone of what we’re all about. If we can empower business owners to be smarter about the questions they ask when hiring people and about thinking through the implications of a new way of marketing for their organization and workflows, we essentially put their success in their own hands.”

Chris’s passion for helping small businesses build names for themselves is not only professional, but personal. Born and raised in Long Island, where his father lived life with loud gusto and his mother ingrained him with solid ethics and moral bearings, he grew up watching his father run an HVAC business that began modestly but evolved into the biggest dealer for computer room air conditioning needs in the region. “My father didn’t necessarily have a grand entrepreneurial plan,” Chris recalls. “He was just open and always interested in new things. He never limited the possibilities of what he could do in life.”

When his father got a call from the Bank of New York, asking about the temperature of computer rooms and saying they needed a company that could come at a moment’s notice if anything went wrong, he was no expert in the burgeoning field. But with the will to learn and the drive to excel, he soon became one. “He was the perfect example of ‘If you can think it, you can do it,’” says Chris. “That’s why, now, I tell my employees to dream big thoughts about what Surefire Social can become. It’s about being free of the limitations we impose on ourselves when we think too narrowly.”

As a boy, Chris worked on his father’s trucks in the summers, helping on assignments or cleaning large condensers in Manhattan. “I’d get so dirty that I’d come home completely black,” he laughs. “I think my dad put me to work like that on purpose to challenge me to figure out what I wanted to be.”

In truth, Chris had always dreamed of becoming a successful businessman, but because his ADHD had led him to believe that academics weren’t his thing, he had compensated by focusing on athletics and his social life instead. But all that changed when he graduated from high school and spent a year at Nassau Community College. “It was a great environment, but I realized that I wasn’t going to end up where I wanted to be if I stayed on that track,” he remembers. “To accomplish the goals I had set for myself, I’d need to get the right education and experience, and going to Clarkson University was my goal. But in order to get there, I’d have to achieve on my own that kind of focus—the kind that years of medication and specialized teaching accomplish today.”

Committed to overcoming his ADHD and dyslexia to catch up in math, Chris’s work ethic kicked in, and he would stay up all night plowing through differential equations homework. After making the Deans list both semesters, he transferred into the Clarkson program of his choice, taking classes in engineering and business and cultivating the analytical approach to problem solving that has made him such an innovative and effective presence in the marketing arena. “This discipline has taught me to define a problem, then define the criteria for successfully solving it, then develop alternative ways to solve it, and then evaluate those alternatives in terms of costs, benefits, time, and other dimensions,” he explains. “That mode of operation really became a habit for me, and it’s been a powerful tool in all aspects of life.”

Upon graduating with has Bachelors of Science, Chris had no idea how to get a job and began by walking up and down Madison Avenue, dropping his resume in the reception areas of marketing agencies he came across. With no luck, he read a book about how to land a position and instead sent a series of targeted and personal letters. One of these letters was sent to Young & Rubicam (Y&R), among the largest marketing and communications agencies in the world at the time, explaining that Chris truly believed in the work they were doing and thought he could make a real contribution there. He was offered a job as a media planner, and for a yearly salary of $8,500, he accepted.

Over the next four years, Chris grew exponentially, working on some of the biggest brands in the country. The rewards were not without sacrifice, however. Many days, he would leave for the office at 4:30 in the morning, not to return until 8:30 at night. “To be successful, you have to work really hard,” he puts simply. “There’s no easy way around it. The truth is, lots of people make it look easy, but being successful is being extraordinary, caring enough to push yourself to do things that other people don’t.”

After wrapping up at Y&R and then working several years for Backer & Spielvogel, a legendary advertising agency, Chris decided to launch his first business, Home Video Communications, in 1986. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he laughs. “I wanted to make money on a trend, but I didn’t know how to raise money or work a network.. I had a lot of traction, but I didn’t have the sophistication to understand the politics of starting and running a business.”

Known by friends and business associates alike as being fearless  and overly aggressive, Chris managed to do some custom video work for 3M Corporation and Hi-C before almost going bankrupt. His father gave him enough money to rent an apartment in Manhattan for several months, and looking to get his feet back on the ground, he took a job with an early stage place-based media company called POP Radio, which provided satellite delivery of an in-store radio program. While there, he met Susie, a force to be reckoned with in New York advertising and his future wife. He also got stock options for the first time, and when POP Radio was sold, he made his first hit, taking in almost $400,000. “I was also earning between $200,000 and $300,000 a year in sales, and I got to see how you really start a business, from financing to strategic partnerships,” he reflects.

Chris was then hired to run the sports division of Miller Freeman, the U.S. based subsidiary of United Business Media based out of London. The business had one faltering magazine, Sporting Goods Business. At the helm, Chris assessed the situation, noted the framework of their competitors, conducted a competitive analysis of what the business could be, and completely revamped the whole publication. The new product was more fashion focused, printed in an oversized tablet format with beautiful pictures. The magazine was making a profit within two years, and when Miller Freeman bought Pacifica Publications in California, Chris found himself commuting across the country, running the biggest surf and outdoor business lifestyle publications and trade shows in the industry.

Within Miller Freeman, Chris then created Retail Sports Television. After he rolled the company out, however, it was sold to IBB Communications Group, which became LDDS and then WorldCom. When Worldcom later decided to shut down its satellite television services to focus on long distance telephone, Chris was hired by Ted Leonsis to run AOL’s sports division.

When Chris came onboard, AOL was making revenue from time spent on a given site, as opposed to advertising. When the company found itself forced to transition to an unlimited pricing model virtually overnight, it had to figure out how to get content providers to keep providing content, so Chris thought up a new paradigm that came to be known as the Anchor Tenant Concept. “The CEO and the Head of Corporate Development authorized me to test the framework out on several deals, and before I knew it, I was bringing in more revenue than the whole sales force,” he recounts. As a result, Chris was made Senior VP, running business development and helping AOL transition to the new model over the next eight years.

While he was making more money than he’d ever dreamed of, Chris found himself losing the things that were most important to him in the world: his wife, Susie, and his daughter, Georgia. “I felt I had something to prove, and I was so driven to be successful that I lost sight of what was really important to me,” he recalls.

At that time, Chris and Susie attended church each Sunday but were really only going through the motions. Through church, they were acquaintances with one of those couples who always seem blissfully happy, but as Chris was traveling to multiple cities each week for work and the Marentis’ were considering options with a divorce lawyer, the two couples had fallen out of touch—until the acquaintances invited Chris and Susie out for dinner one night.

Over dinner, Chris’s friend happened to mention that he was starting a Bible study class, and he offered to plan its meetings around Chris’s schedule so he could attend. Thinking he would only show up for one or two of the discussions, Chris agreed to come, only to find that the more he came to understand God’s word, the more he realized that God’s love was not dependent on his performance. “God loves us despite who we are in this world,” Chris explains. “Through Christ, He made us perfect. I realized that Christ loves me so much even though I am not perfect. He wants me to love others, especially my wife, daughter, friends, and co-workers, with that same grace. Since that tremendous change of heart, we’ve been doing our best to live a Christ centered life as a family. Knowing that God, who made the universe and everything in it, is the one in control, and not us, takes a lot of pressure off.”

After his time at AOL, and armed with a newfound sense of grace and purpose in the world, Chris retired for several years and then became CEO of Clearspring Technologies, which later became Add This, in 2007. There, he observed a trend in media consumption toward single, individual pieces of media, known as the atomization of the Internet. “I knew that if this trend developed, major players wouldn’t let their content go anywhere unless they had a way to track and measure it, because that’s the only way to monetize it,” Chris reflects. True to his father’s motto, Chris thought it and knew he could do it, so he brought a team onboard to implement the vision. In less than two years, it became a thriving and marketplace-defining business.

Thanks to the company’s success, however, one of the founders wanted to step back in and take over the CEO reigns, and Chris found himself faced with the stark realization that, unless you’re a founder of an early stage company, it’s not your company. With that, he took a position as President and COO of another location-based company, FortiusOne. “While there, I learned how geo-location was going to be a huge trend in digital marketing,” he remarks. “Viral content and location were becoming very important signals for search and discovery in search algorithms, and I decided to put the those two forces together.”

Chris decided to test his theory and implement a marketing program himself. That meant building websites, social media profiles and sites, and writing and publishing content. “Obama had just become President, and I knew green jobs would be hot, so I decided to see if I could make myself a leading expert in the field,” he recalls.

Without a special passion or knowledge base about green jobs, Chris wrote a book on the subject, created a website, launched a blog, and started doing webinars. Before long, he was being interviewed by top green job websites, and his book became a top-selling downloadable eBook. “Up to that point, as my career advanced, I had become great at building and leading businesses, but I had gotten out of touch with how the technology worked,” he says. “I didn’t want that to continue, so I was coding websites and doing all of it by hand. It was important to me to do that because, for a CEO to really run a company, you have to have enough expertise to be able to challenge people when they tell you something can’t be done.”

Having proven his theory correct, and having accumulated a wealth of business savoir-faire, Chris was, at age 51, ready to launch the successful business that he had dreamed of leading as a 12-year-old. Founded in 2009 in the basement of his home, Surefire Social now has 28 employees in the U.S. who focus on the intelligence and craft of the business. Their efforts are supplemented by a team of 55 in the Philippines who focus on development, customer service, and search engine optimization, and by a small development team in Ireland. “This structure allows us to deliver hand-crafted solutions at a price point that makes sense for our clients,” Chris says. “Our aspiration is to reinvent local business marketing, and we’re now moving into the enterprise space for national and local marketing, with specialized technology and implementation strategies for national companies looking to support their local dealers.”

In a sense, the renewed opportunity for success that Chris strives to give small business owners each day through Surefire Social is a reflection of the renewed opportunities he sees in Christ, which manifest in his life both professionally and personally each day. “My marriage with Susie, for instance, is now better than we ever could have dreamed,” he reflects. “Never am I as happy as when I’m with my wife and daughter. And though I’m not perfect and I fail everyday, I know the Maker of the universe has grace for me, my family, and everybody around me. We owe each other grace, and I keep that in mind as I continue to build Surefire Social.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Chris recognizes his lifelong passion for media and urges others to find theirs. “What do you really love doing?” he asks. “With the first advertisement I read, I was hooked. If you love what you do, you’ll be successful because you’ll spend a disproportionate amount of time on it.”

Chris knows that an exceptional level of commitment is the key to success because he saw it in his father, who went to work each day with the poise of someone who knows they’re better than anyone else they could compete with in that market. Chris couldn’t have followed in his father’s exact footsteps because he didn’t have that same passion for HVAC contracting, but he follows in his father’s spirit each day by going to work with that same poise. “God gifted me with the ability to connect the dots of technology and media solutions, to the point that I could go anywhere and talk to anyone about it,” he says. “And I have this passion for what I do, in part, because of him. I know how important new business generation is to a business owner. In an industry that tends to keep things faceless, I take it personally. Because that face is my father’s face, and I know without a doubt that, because I think there’s something I can do for them, there is.”

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