Jon Zacharias never imagined he would be running his own company, let alone one completely outside his field of study. The up-and-coming e-commerce marketer was once a student at the California Western School of Law, working at a law firm to pay rent. While there, Zacharias realized his passion lived beyond the courtroom.
“I have a law degree, and I was working for one of my dad's friends at a wage-an-hour class action firm while I was in school. I realized I was way more interested in acquiring cases than litigating them,” Zacharias says.
After completing his degree, Zacharias decided to pursue a new calling—Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. More and more, the internet was controlling how information was dispersed through data organization. Zacharias began to wonder how that data was organized and whether that knowledge could help brands rank higher in the Wild West of search engine results.
As it turns out, it could: “I spent the next seven, eight years analyzing the science behind SEO. Once I had that perfected, I started applying tactics that had never been used in e-commerce. It was really like the second wave of SEO,” Zacharias adds.
With the help of his friend and co-founder Kevin Miller, Jon Zacharias was able to launch a digital marketing firm specializing in SEO at the end of 2019, aptly named GR0. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic’s tumultuous global economy, GR0 was able to find a unique purpose in the increasingly digital market for smaller brands, finding numerous e-commerce partners along the way.
With Zacharias’s secret science, GR0 is able to offer clients something they could never access on their own—massive celebrity partnerships.
“We give brands the opportunity to work with huge celebrities they wouldn't normally be able to afford because they couldn’t put millions of dollars down upfront,” explains Zacharias. “But they can afford a whitelisting campaign. It’s a new type of campaign that we're offering, and it is very, very powerful.”
Zacharias found a powerful work partner and friend in Miller who brought his own expertise to the table as a former employee at Google and smaller Silicon Valley startups.
“Our personalities were perfectly matched to quickly become best friends, and our skill sets were perfectly matched to become business partners,” explains Zacharias. “Building a company together was the obvious next step for us, and it's been incredible working alongside my best friend to create something so significant."
Zacharias is satisfied with GR0’s start and sees a fruitful, long road ahead.
"I'm so humbled by GR0's success. We believe so strongly in the mission of our company, but we never expected it to happen so fast,” says Zacharias. “I've been preparing for this for ten years, learning about SEO and organic growth for my entire professional career. To have it all culminate with GR0 bringing so much success to our clients is amazing."
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