Today we’d like to introduce you to Sam Emami.
Hi Sam, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
Growing up, I’ve always been selling. Whether that was selling myself or selling my ideas and dreams- I’ve always been selling. Coming from an immigrant background with a father that immigrated from Iran in the 70s, life was exciting. Besides hard work, perseverance, and persistence, only a little was hammered home. From a chemical engineering background, my father dived into the world of chemical sales and began climbing the corporate ladder. I had a nice childhood. I grew up in sunny Southern California and was a stone’s throw away from Disneyland, “the happiest place on earth.” Life was good. However, I knew that the life my parents had created for my sister, and me was unique. While America was the land of opportunity in the eyes of our parents, and their end goal was escaping a brutal regime in Iran, it was the start of a brand new journey for my sister and me. My childhood in California was full of sports, sunshine, and opportunity. I remember upon entering high school, I saw the movie The Social Network and instantly wanted to become the next Mark Zuckerberg. Drunk on the excitement of creating businesses and ideating from a college dorm, I envisioned what I would become shorter. Early on in high school, I got involved with someone on my golf team that was an artist and T-shirt designer and helped him create a sales order process for him to sell his artwork for custom prints. We were talking to as many people during school as possible, drafting up order forms, and on the weekends, we would go to Staples to print the designs on transparency film and go straight back to his garage and start printing T-shirts on Gildan and Hanes shirts. This was before Instagram and Twitter were the means of commerce, and we were running a business off word of mouth with no digital marketing at all at the age of 15. The money was good, but the excitement was short-lived as we needed help scaling the business in school, and college applications became priorities.
In my last year of high school, my best friend and I decided to give entrepreneurship another shot, filed an LLC in the state of California, and released a mobile game application to the App Store. This was too short-lived as we realized it cost more to operate a business specifically on mobile app games than we thought. The summer before college was also beginning. I was lucky enough to attend San Diego at San Diego State University, where I got a degree in marketing and could live amongst palm trees and beaches for 4 years. This is where I found my calling for entrepreneurship and creating. I quickly got involved on campus with many different parts of student life, from Greek life to student government and club sports. Within the zone organizations, I found commonalities between those who participated in leadership. Ironically the motto for San Diego State University was ‘”Leadership Starts Here.” At this same time, SDSU happened to be a top 50 entrepreneurship school in the country, given the vibrant SD location and the up-and-coming technology in the area. In the first couple years of my college career, I dedicated myself to leadership, getting involved, and trying to lead groups to results. Given my past feats, I knew I was capable of this. I found my home at the Lavin School of Entrepreneurship, where I completed 3 internships during my sophomore/junior year in various industries (real estate, insurance, non-profit) from ex-SDSU graduates. During this time, I knew SDSU was creating some of the world’s finest entrepreneurial talent. As my senior year began, I knew I needed to get practical. I needed to pick a “career” that agreed with me. Naturally, sales were in my blood, and I knew I would be just fine if I applied myself. I started to export lists of all open sales jobs in America. I began to apply. 130 applications later. I was allowed to sell marketing software for a private company in Manhattan.
New York City was the dream for many, but not for me. I never once thought I would ever interact with New York, let alone live on the busiest island in the country. Yet something drew me to the city. It was in the last week of my senior year that I excepted a job offer. I had committed to moving across the country all by myself. Two months later, I hopped off the Q train in Herald Square, aimlessly walking around Midtown to find my office. Moving across the country by myself set the tone for the rest of my actions as it took work to put all my life and two suitcases and depart from LAX on a one-way. It would be a habit that would follow me for the rest of my early 20s. I spent over a year in NYC’s Upper East Side living the Manhattan dream- rooftop bars, evening strolls in Central Park, commuting everywhere on the subway, the rats, etc. That was when Covid happened. While I was still new to New York, and it was hard to leave- I knew that it didn’t make sense to stay cooped up in a shoe box apartment when the entire world was shut down. I retreated to California, naturally. With the world operating remotely, I started to think of life differently. I began to question living in one area and being loyal to a region. As everything became accessible digitally, there were new ways to go about your daily life. With work being remote and the world shutting down, I needed to change the environment.
I moved to Northern England for the remainder of 2020 to get a new worldly perspective and the environmental change I needed. This experience not only opened my mind up to the world but gave me different perspectives on business and a newfound clarity for life. In 2021, I returned to the US, where I then moved to central PA to live with a friend and remain close to NYC and my sales team. As a Cali boy, the east coast winters were not cutting it for me, and given the indefinite remote nature of my job, that same year, I went on to finally move to Austin, TX. In early 2022 my life changed for the better. I was let go of my sales job and was put in the ultimate place of power. For the last 20+ years of my life, I had always been chasing a goal and moving towards something (high school diploma, college degree, internships, summer jobs, career, promotions). I realized I never had time to ask myself what I wanted. I found myself talking to many businesses in my time being “unemployed” and realized one common trend: sales was a pain point for every business. Either business needed a stronger mold of how sales were being run, or businesses would try to outsource the sales process, leading to decreased conversions and handover. I took advantage of this gap, which led to the birth of Salezie.
I hope this story is inspiring to someone 🙂
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
– Being a first-generation Iranian American child growing up in a post 9/11 world was challenging, with a lot of bullying and name calling.
– Moving to NYC all by myself with less than $1500 to my name, living paycheck to paycheck, living in the city, and experiencing life.
– Working 50+ hours a week during the college summers to afford to live in a crappy college area house in San Diego.
– Starting a business (Salezie) during the beginning of a recession and delaying gratification/personal payment to move the business forward in the short term.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next, you can tell us more about your business.
Salezie is a boutique sales agency that provides organizations with little to no sales infrastructure with sales solutions. We aim to be the one-stop shop for all sales strategies and talent when trying to scale product/offering revenue.
We love surprises, fun facts, and incredible stories. Can you share something that might surprise us?
I have been learning about stocks since high school, but during the pandemic, I truly learned the ins and outs of trading professionally. During the pandemic, I got increasingly involved in trading equities/stocks and turned a personal account from 4 to 6 figures in less than a year which kickstarted my love for the markets. I am currently partnered with a colleague running his hedge fund that trades unique strategies. I plan to become more involved in this line of work shortly as I learn and grow as a trader.
Pricing:
- Contact Sam to find out more!
Contact Info:
- Website: salezie.com
- Instagram: @notsamemami
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-emami/
- Twitter: @everythingemami
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/sammmiam
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/show/53NoKtLvhW4uHowFCyfnG1?si=5f3414453ac44cf8
