Today we’d like to introduce you to Dre Smith.
Dre, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I am a 26- year old entrepreneur, speaker, and model. I was born and raised in Prince Georges County, MD, where I attended Dr. Henry Wise High School. And although I was an All-State football player, making football the priority in my life at the time, I always knew that I wanted to own a business. It became more evident to me during my senior year of high school when I started my candy business. While my other classmates who sold candy raked in $30 a day, at most, I was bringing in $120-$140 a day selling candy. I was able to see what they were doing wrong, separate my self from the competition while also scaling my business to include chips and cold beverages. While my candy business was short-lived due to school regulations, at that moment, I knew entrepreneurship was in my future. After high school, I went to college at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA, on a football scholarship where I studied Hospitality Management with a Minor in Business. Although I did enjoy football and had a great college career, I knew early on I did not want to play in the NFL, so I decided the summer of my junior year to take an internship with a property management company. A few months before graduation, I accepted a job offer at a property management company called Kettler and proceed to do the best I could to climb the corporate ladder.
Although I was committed to my career in property management, I never lost the hope of owning my business one day. In property management, I learned a lot. Each property is like a small business, having its own marketing budget, overall budget, payroll, and operating expenses, so the job gave me great insight into how a business is run. During my time in property management, I was also able to create a vast network of successful individuals. With the three bedrooms at my buildings going for over $7000, I was able to not only have conversations with high net worth individuals and business owners but also build friendships with them too. Within two and a half years, I became a manager, managing multiple luxury highrise buildings in Tysons Corner, VA. During that time, I was also into music. I played the piano, drums, and was a songwriter. This led me to start my first company in 2016, All About It, which operated as a music production company. With that being my first company, I learned a lot. I managed multiple artists and did the best I could to build up the artist while creating great music. By mid-2017, because of things not working out with the artist, I put the music production on hold as I began to think of my next entrepreneurial idea. During this time, I also started dating Breanna Aponte, who is now my fiance. Bre, who moved from Cleveland, Ohio, had been living the full-time entrepreneur life from the age of 20 (she was 25 at this time).
And although her business had success in Cleveland when she made a move to D.C., her business struggled. At this point, she had no idea what she was going to do, and it was a tough time for us both. However, during that low time, a light bulb went off in my head. I thought, although her business at the time, Shameless, was not doing well as a business what she was able to do was build an amazing brand. So that’s when I presented the idea to her that we start a social media and branding company. My idea was we take her ability to build brands and my management, sales, and marketing background to run a profitable business. Also, because I put All About It on hold, we decided to change the description of the company and rebrand it to being our Social Media and Branding business. Within the first five months of the business running, I was able to quit my job, and now we are on year 3, with the business continuing to grow and operating better than ever.
Post-college graduation, I also fell into the world of modeling. As we built the social media and branding company, we, of course, used ourselves as guinea pigs for what we were teaching and was able to grow our social media followings significantly. This resulted in the content director for Shea Moisture reaching out to me via IG and asking me to model for their new advertisement. A month later, the ad went viral, which propelled me into a modeling career. I am now signed to an agency in D.C. named Kingsley Model Management, where I have modeled for and worked with nationally notable brands such as OpenTable, Wawa, Capital One, and much more.
Lastly, my introduction to public speaking has come from a lot of different things. Whether it’s about my success in business or my relationship with my fiance where we have a popular YouTube and blog where we take people on our journey of waiting for marriage, people always ask me to speak. However, I feel my purpose is to help as many people as I can live the best life they possibly can, so public speaking is probably the thing I enjoy the most. I plan on starting a life coaching business in the future to help fuel what I am passionate about and operate in my purpose.
Has it been a smooth road?
Like, everything in life, there are ups and downs; however, we have been incredibly blessed to have been in business for three years now while growing the business revenue by 50% every year! So the road has been smooth, relative to what the journey is for most entrepreneurs.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the All About It story. Tell us more about the business.
So All About It is a social media, branding, and digital marketing company owned by myself and my fiance Breanna Aponte. We are your one-stop-shop for branding and marketing. We can do everything on the branding side, such as build your website, design your business cards and logo, and discovering your brand identity, while also creating content for your social media, helping you build and grow your following. Our specialty is personal brands. I always use this example when explaining it to people. With our company, we would not manage the social media of Hilton Hotels or Mcdonalds; however, if the CEO of Hilton or Mcdonalds wanted to build their personal brand for speaking engagements or anything else, then that is where we would come in.
We also have All About It University, which is our online learning platform. On that platform, we have blog posts, videos, cheat sheets, and online courses all geared toward helping you build your brand and social media following. We wanted to offer this option as a more affordable way to still get people the results they need at a much more affordable rate. We always like to give people the option of being able to teach them how to do it or them paying us to do it for them. This allows our services to be affordable for just about anyone.
We believe in building a brand or business; everyone is in 1 of 3 Stages, Think It, Brand It, or Build It stage. And our goal is to get you from one stage to another successfully through proper branding and strategy.
What we are most proud of is helping hundreds of people who were just like us when we started, bring their physical branded vision to life. We have helped so many entrepreneurs get their business off the ground, and its the most rewarding thing ever. We really pride ourselves on building relationships with our clients that go beyond just a “regular” working relationship, and I think that is what also sets us apart. Aside from us being a one-stop-shop, meaning we can take care of everything in house, we also are really hands-on with our client work and want them to feel comfortable that the work that is being done is not only cared for but that we care about them too.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
From the social media side, of course, lol. We do not know where it will be in six months to a year, let alone 5 – 10 years. Luckily for us, branding and digitally marketing are aging at a much slower pace. I believe that in the next few years, you will see a shift, not necessarily in how marketing is done but where it is done. I think we will see a decline in TV ads and commercials. Sports are really the only live television event that people consume regularly, and you can even stream that. Everything else can be streamed online through an app. Social media and streaming platforms will be the new place to advertise, which is already starting to happen. This will be great for our business because more and more people will be trying to understand how to take advantage of this free platform to grow their brand or business. So they will be looking to experts for guidance and assistance. But if you are in this industry, as long as you understand the basic principles of marketing than then anyone in this line of work should not have any issue adjusting to the new times that lie ahead.
Pricing:
- Online Course On How To Grow Your Instagram For Under $100.00
Contact Info:
- Address: 10411 Motor City Drive, Suite 750, Bethesda, MD, 20817
- Website: allabout-it.com | allaboutituniveristy.com
- Email: dresmith@allabout-it.com
- Instagram: itsdresmith (personal) business (allaboutitllc)
Image Credit:
All About It llc
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