Today we’d like to introduce you to Jacob Smarkusky.
Hi Jacob, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
In the year leading up to graduating high school, I worked a lot of blue-collar jobs—carpentry, renovation work, that kind of thing. I’d often have time before shifts started, so I’d browse thrift stores, find things that needed some TLC, fix them up, and sell them online for extra money. One day it would be an industrial tomato slicer, another day it would be some wooden coffee table decorations. On one of these trips, I stumbled across a broken graphing calculator. I could tell it was repairable, so I bought it, fixed it, sold it online, and made a small profit. That sale was a proof of concept. It showed me this was actually possible—that I could build something by finding broken calculators, fixing them, and giving them new life.
I graduated high school in December of 2017 and took a six-month break from school between January to May of 2018. During this time, I continued to hunt down every broken or sad looking calculator I could find, repairing them, refurbishing them, and giving them a second life—all from my bedroom. Five calculators became ten. Then twenty. Then fifty. Then one hundred. The numbers just kept growing.
In February of 2018, I formed Lost Mountain Commerce, LLC. I kept the name purposefully ambiguous because I wasn’t entirely sure where things were headed. My childhood home sat on the foothills of Lost Mountain, and whatever I was doing fell somewhere under the umbrella of e-commerce, so I combined them: Lost Mountain Commerce.
Now with an official name, the company quickly outgrew my bedroom. Calculators were literally spilling into the hallway. My parents (bless them) let me take over the entire den so I could reclaim my bedroom. Within a month, the den was too small, so I started using sections of the garage in addition to the den for inventory storage. When the garage became insufficient for storage, I rented a small storage unit. Then a bigger one. Then an even bigger one.
At this point, I had thousands of calculators in inventory. I was repairing and refurbishing them, paying neighborhood kids and friends to help me list them online. I offered warranties, created extremely detailed listings and had very detailed photographs, had custom corrugated mailers made around the sizing of the calculators to make shipping them more efficient, and even had tooling constructed overseas to manufacture small replacement parts to add value to the refurbished units.
During all this commotion, I briefly attended Kennesaw State University during the Summer and Fall of 2018, but I left once I realized I was going to college to learn the very thing I was already doing. Sure, I didn’t know all the ins and outs, but I felt I could learn more by building and doing rather than sitting in a classroom working through theory. So, I terrified my father by telling him that I was dropping out of college and went all in on growing the company.
Quickly after dropping out of school, I realized I needed to diversify away from only selling refurbished calculators, so I reached out to a company located in Michigan by the name of Underwood Distributing to inquire about selling new calculators. And before you know it, I was selling new calculators as well!
On March 1st of 2020, the company finally moved out of my parent’s den (plus my storage unit) into a formal office space. Yes. I switched from working from home to working from an office when everyone else switched from working from offices to working from home. As with all other businesses out there, COVID was extremely tricky to navigate, but I came out the other side of it still chugging along and growing.
Then, in December 2021, the owner of Underwood Distributing communicated that the company was going to be for sale and asked if I was interested in purchasing it. I had never purchased someone else’s company before, so my answer was “Yes, but let me figure out how to do it first.” By that point in my journey, navigating the unknown and learning on the spot had become second nature. After some due diligence (where I discovered that I was actually the largest customer of the company), a letter of intent, and a few phone calls, we agreed on the pricing and terms. Five months later, in May of 2022, we signed the final contract.
After the contract was signed, the whole experience felt surreal. It hit me that you can just… do things. The merger was a significant shift for the business—I went from dealing with a mix of new and used calculators to almost exclusively new products, along with entire product lines I was completely unfamiliar with. But that had become the pattern: dive in, figure it out, learn as you go.
Since the merger in 2022, a lot has happened. Underwood Distributing moved all remaining assets from Michigan down to Georgia. The company has introduced several new brands to its line card. As of recently, in August 2025, the company ranked #1694 on the 2025 Inc 5000 list of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies. In Georgia, the company ranked 72nd.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
I’m proud that Underwood Distributing stands out among educational vendors. We help schools and teachers save money by giving them options other than just buying new calculators. Because of the company’s history in refurbishing and repairing calculators, if schools have old ones that can be fixed, we can repair them at a fraction of the cost. We also offer a trade-in program where schools can send us their old calculators and receive credit toward new ones. Being practical and meeting schools where they are, especially when budgets are tight, is critical in today’s economic climate. When teachers do need new class sets of calculators, we have many options at extremely competitive prices.
We actively collect feedback from customers to understand how we’re doing, and certain themes come up repeatedly. Customers consistently praise our flexibility, ease of collaboration, and deep product knowledge. They also value our ongoing support throughout a product’s lifespan, as we don’t disappear after the sale. And they consistently praise our fast delivery speeds, and the fact that our website is incredibly detailed, with tons of information about each product.
Underwood Distributing is a member of the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce, a certified Disability-Owned Business Enterprise (DOBE), and an awarded supplier of the Equalis Group purchasing cooperative. Over the past seven years, we’ve fulfilled more than 100,000 orders, serving over 75,000 customers nationwide, including some of the largest public school districts, universities, private schools, charter schools, financial institutions, bookstores, and resellers across the country. We accept tax-exempt orders, offer competitive quotes, accept purchase orders, and we’re good at meeting the specific needs of educators.
Ultimately, I want Underwood Distributing to be educators’ top choice for classroom technology—not for being the largest, but for our unmatched reliability, expertise, and dedication to their success.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://underwooddistributing.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/underwooddistributing/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/underwooddist
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/underwooddistributingco/
- Twitter: https://x.com/underwooddist
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@underwooddistributing
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/underwooddistributing/
