We recently connected with Chas Metz and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Chas thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, let’s start with a hypothetical – what would you change about the educational system?

Our educational system is failing to teach our youth the importance of personal finance and mental health. I believe these should become core subjects taught in school to all ages of students. Many of the problems our country is facing today are a direct reflection of our lack of education. Unless students are disciplined enough to teach themselves, or are lucky enough to have parents to teach them, important life skills like planning for retirement and overcoming past trauma are simply never learned. Serious issues like poverty, homelessness, drug abuse, depression, suicide, domestic abuse, and an increasing wealth gap can be solved through education. Happy, healthy, and wealthy individuals are not committing suicide, developing drug addictions, and beating their children. This behavior is typically caused by financial stress, past trauma that hasn’t been dealt with, or a combination of the two. By giving ALL students a thorough education on personal finance and mental health, our children can start on a more level playing field and have a much higher chance of finding happiness and success as an adult. The best way to begin fixing the educational system is to start with ourselves. Since we cannot depend on schools to teach us all of the skills we need, we all need to prioritize self education. Through self education we can become better parents, better spouses, better friends, and positively impact everyone around us. Simple things like teaching your children how to invest for their future can change the course of your family for generations to come. Let’s all pick up a book and do our part!

Chas, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

The question “what do you do?” has always been a difficult one for me because there is no short answer. I work a full time job, own two small businesses, and am an active investor. It’s safe to say I like to stay busy. My day job is Director of Marketing for a large tour and rental company where I have helped to scale up the business and 3x sales over the past 12 months. My evenings and weekends are spent working on my own businesses.

727 Designs is a marketing & graphic design agency I started in 2018. This business has allowed me to take on side projects, sponsor athletes and fundraisers, and to assist other local business with their marketing and graphic design efforts. You can learn more about this business by visiting 727-designs.com or emailing [email protected].

My most recent business venture has been co-founding a CBD company called Run Lab CBD. Growing up I found a passion for extreme sports including snocross, motocross, snowboarding, BMX, and cliff diving. With hobbies like these, injuries became part of everyday life. Countless sprains and broken bones led to more than a few prescriptions of powerful and addictive painkillers. The endless cycle of injuries, prescriptions, and withdrawals was not leading to a healthy lifestyle. Eventually, I gave up some of these more extreme sports and turned to running as a safer alternative and a hobby I could share with my father Todd Metz. While less severe, running came with its own set of injuries. Not wanting to repeat the same cycle as before, I turned to CBD as a healthier, more natural, approach to recovery. I had great results and realized that CBD was very underutilized by the running community. My father and I made the decision to change this by starting Run Lab CBD. CBD products created by runners, for runners. You can learn more about Run Lab CBD by visiting our website runlabcbd.com.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

The best source of new clients for me has always been referrals. Thanks to referrals, I have had to do very little sales and marketing for my marketing and graphic design agency. Taking the extra time to fully connect with clients and to deliver better than expected results almost always pays off. When people like you and like the work that you do, the referrals come flooding in. A close second would be social media. Social media is a powerful marketing tool and is still very underutilized by most small businesses.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

For those just starting out it can be difficult to gain traction on social media. One very important thing to remember is that social media is meant to be SOCIAL, it is not meant to be the place where you spam ads all over. You will see much better results when you use social media the way it is intended to be used, by engaging with others, sharing thoughts and comments, sharing great photos, etc. You are unlikely to see results if you treat facebook or instagram like you do an ad in the news paper. If you are just starting out, getting featured by another account, working with influencers, and running paid ads can be great ways to gain some exposure. From there, create interesting content your audience is likely to engage with, post regularly, and engage with other creators on the platform.

Contact Info:

• Website: chasmetz.com
• Instagram: @chasmetz
• Other: [email protected]