Jon Zacharias knows all too well that building something great is never easy. Before the success of his company, GR0, Zacharias spent years trying to break into Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Along the way, he hit one of the toughest obstacles a person can face: substance abuse.
With the support of residential drug rehab center CRI-Help, Zacharias got sober in November of 2016. It was a difficult stumbling block in the long, unconventional career of a man who’d made great progress since his law school graduation.
While working at a class-action law firm, Zacharias realized he was more interested in bringing new cases to the firm than the judicial process that followed. This discovery led to a years-long fascination with SEO. Zacharias worked as a contractor for several companies across the country, improving their online presence while generating traffic and revenue. While all seemed well on the surface, Zacharias was facing deep internal struggles.
Amidst this adversity, Zacharias found a silver lining in the form of Kevin Miller, a former employee of Google and various Silicon Valley start-ups. Zacharias connected with Miller during his time in rehabilitation and says his entire life shifted the moment they met.
“We immediately became best friends, talking every single second,” Zacharias recalls. “I was showing him how to grow traffic through SEO, and he loved it so much that he wanted to start a business to help as many direct-to-consumer brands as possible use this powerful channel.”
Zacharias and Miller were able to exchange ideas about online search, learning from each other’s expertise.
“Everyone trusts Google,” Zacharias explains. “Obviously, if you can rank highly on Google for certain words, it's incredibly valuable to the client.”
Zacharias and Miller founded their company, GR0, at the end of 2019. Since then, they’ve brought on more than 70 employees and worked with dozens of top brands, including Theragun. GR0 has built out SEO portfolios to expand their clients’ audiences efficiently and affordably through organic search. GR0 also gives smaller-scale brands access to celebrities and influencers they never thought would be possible. The response has been profound.
"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."
Of course, Zacharias wouldn’t want anyone working alongside him besides Miller.
"Our personalities were perfectly matched to quickly become best friends, and our skill sets were perfectly matched to become business partners,” says 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."
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