Meet Michael Howard of The Social Media Masters in Central Phoenix

Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Howard.

Michael, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
From fast food to CFO/COO. The best place to start is at the bottom. I was a champion wrestler who gave up on his sports dreams because of injuries, flunked out of college after getting a presidential scholarship to NAU due to not showing up to classes, I was experimenting with a few things I shouldn’t have been and once I was back at home, I still wasn’t going to my community college courses. I was working as a fry cook and cashier at a WingStop in Chandler having to face lots of my old friends making up excuses why I was wearing a goofy visor taking their order.

It wasn’t until I met Gia Heller, CEO and founder of The Social Media Masters that my life began to change. She convinced me to stop working as a cashier at WingStop and to begin looking for other possible jobs. I worked as a busser at the dine-in movie theater and many local restaurants, worked my way up to food runner and eventually was deemed a captain at a high-end restaurant for a Fortune 500 company. I was rubbing elbows with some extremely famous people, actors, musicians, athletes and politicians. My clientele was the best of the best towards the end of my “server career”, and I was about to work at one of the best restaurants in the valley, but I was still left with this void that I was just waiting tables. I didn’t have their respect, I just took their order and remembered their ridiculous specifications.

While I grew as a waiter, I was also going to school full time at Full Sail University and was acting as CFO for the Social Media Masters. I had also begun working with some of our high profile clients as Gia saw it as a great opportunity for me to learn and grow in the industry that had helped her go from a rock-bottom moment in her real-estate career to an all-star yet again in a totally different industry. This is where I began to shine at something I was proud to do. It was a tangible skill that very few had the capability to do and that filled me with the courage to do something most dream of doing. I got to leave the job that made me feel trapped and instead got to throw myself into work that really mattered to me as the COO/CFO of The Social Media Masters. Now every day is like a video game where I am spending thousands of my client’s dollars and constantly watching the numbers and making tweaks to maximize potential. I also get to teach smaller business owners how to compete with larger corporations despite having a minute budget.

The moral of this story is to find the right support. Sometimes, you just need to look at things from a different angle to really understand how to make your life better. Before I was working at a job a hated not pursuing my passions. Now I have a day job that I love that pays the bills and more while I pursue my true passion of becoming a music producer and film scorer. Life isn’t going to hand you what anything, but it will make your dreams available at all times. You just have to know how to play the game and have the patience it takes to get over the learning curve.

Has it been a smooth road?
I would say that self-doubt and self-pity are what held me down the longest. I had gone through some issues in my life, but it wasn’t until I went to an educational program where I was reminded that everyone has problems and that while mine is unique to me, that doesn’t necessarily make my pain special. There are so many people who have felt far worse emotional, physical and spiritual torture than myself that it became clear to me that I had no excuses. We as a society have to overcome this idea that things aren’t fair and just realize that events are often uncontrollable and how long they affect our mental state is completely dependent upon us.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
The Social Media Masters is, of course, a social media marketing and branding company that helps companies of different sizes with their online presence. We have helped people sell stickers for toilets to renting luxury cabins to driving kids and adults to auditions for an acting program, we have seen it all. I would say the thing I am most proud of about the company is that we don’t just work with people that have money, we have all sorts of programs that involve training people how to maximize their organic reach both by themselves and with other willing community members. This is what sets us aside from our competitors. Many of our competitors are just putting up a post and if they have a budget, are haphazardly spending their client’s cash and getting poor results. Fortunately, things have gotten better since our founding over seven years ago, but there are still plenty of social media charlatans out there.

Is our city a good place to do what you do?
The best part about social media is that you can start out in any city. Phoenix made sense for The Social Media Masters because Gia had already built a large following in the city through Arizona Women Networking group. If you are just starting out, make yourself your first client. If you want people to believe you can get their page positive numbers and start generating link clicks, fans, and solid leads, then you better have a page that is doing that already! Have a list of businesses you are planning on approaching locally and think of offering them something special for being your first clients. If you have a huge Facebook or Instagram following in the valley, then going live from their location and personally supporting their business could be a pretty attractive feature. When starting out, you usually don’t have loads of cash for advertising or other traditional ways to build a company, so you have to get creative and start thinking of ways you can increase virility without breaking the bank.

Contact Info:

• Address: 2605 West Wolf Street
• Website: http://thesocialmediamasters.com/
• Phone: 602-295-1627
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/thesocialmediamasters

Image Credit:
Gia Heller

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