We caught up with the brilliant and insightful J.R. Smith a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

J.R., thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

My wife and I are proud patriots meaning we are the 99% that support the 1% that wore the uniform, and my Father is a Vietnam Veteran of the United States Navy. We were all trying to come up with something that we could do to assist his fellow Veterans. We were sick and tired of reading stories about the Veteran suicide rate going up and the lack of care that they were getting after serving their country honorably.

Now, from the time I was about 15 years old, my Father had taught me to keep a legal pad by the bed in case you got an idea in the middle of the night. You can imagine that from 15 to about 45 I went through many legal pads. Some of the ideas were good. However, most looked good on paper and never really went anywhere. Fast forward to October of 2017. There is a fresh legal pad on the nightstand just waiting for a new idea. At about 3 a.m. I woke up and literally chicken scratched the word RANCH in the middle of the page and went back to sleep.

Now, we are a faith-based family so I was doing a lot of praying about this one word and looking at the ceiling and then the paper like, “You gonna explain what this word means?”

About two weeks later, my wife and I were going to Bass Pro Shops. Yes, I am that guy that can spend all day in there and never get bored. We stopped at a nearby Chilli’s for lunch. As we were just talking ideas started hitting me like a flood. I do not believe in coincidences. To me, those are “divine downloads” coming from the good Lord himself. I asked my wife if she had a pen and something to write on. The funny part is that I had been in sales for about 20 years at that point and NEVER left the house without a pen, but I sure did that day.

Laughing, she gave me a pen but didn’t have anything to write on. Chilli’s napkins are kinda small, so I asked the waitress for more, and then some more after that. Good, and bad ideas, I didn’t care, I just had to get them down on paper. My wife was asking me what I was doing and I just started handing her napkins. That is how The Veterans Ranch was born. That idea was to provide free equine therapy to our Veteran and Gold Star Family communities.

This all now made perfect sense. It was like the light bulb just turned on. You slap yourself in the forehead like a V8 moment. See, my wife and I are the horse people. I didn’t grow up on a horse ranch, but any time I could get out of the county and get out to the country be it Boy Scout trips or deer hunting in Central Missouri, I would be the first one in line. I would get on any horse I could. Looking back on it, even though I didn’t really realize it then, there was just something special about horses. My wife’s family were originally tobacco and dairy farmers from Kentucky. They had moved to Florida and my wife was the first Floridian born. She had been into horses from a young age. She had a pony when she was a kid and was just struck by the horse bug. Now it all had come into crystal clear focus as to what needed to be done.

By 2017 there had been a ton of data for equine therapy in the special needs space so we thought that we would be getting in a pretty busy lane even with the specialty of just dealing with Veterans and Gold Star Families. Turns out that the lane was very empty and we could do top speed in it from the jump. This also meant that we had to do a lot of education right off the bat as to what equine therapy even was and how it could really help these great Americans who gave so much for us. Then, by the middle of December 2017, we got our paperwork back and we were an official 501c3 charity. Now, the real work had just begun.

J.R., 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?

I have ben in the sales arena since I was a teenager. I was blessed at a young age to be able to see and learn from people like Jim Rohn, Tom Hopkins, Larry, Thompson, and so many others. I was just a sponge trying to soak up everything that they would fire hose at you. That is where the legal pad started. My dad said to take one with me and take notes. I asked him what should I write? He said, whatever you think is important. Well, at about 15 or so, whatever you see your dad writing must be important, so I wrote when I saw him writing. Little did I know that now at almost 51 years old, all of those lessons and talks are still being used today in my day to day life.

I learned that life is the greatest sales job that you can have. Some people say that they don’t like sales. What they don’t realize is that they had to sell themselves to get a good job. You had to sell yourself to the person that you were asking out in high school. Even though that one may have seemed tough, the toughest one is that you had to sell yourself to the person that you are now married to.

People need to understand that sales in general is a process. No a process of “how to close a person”, or some high pressure till you buy kind of thing. Being in sales is a transactional process, and yes, they are buying you. In todays day and age of everything being online, when someone walks into a store they are buying you. They already know 95% about the product. People think that it is an over used phrase, but people truly don’t care how much you know till they know how much you care. The best thing in sales that you can do is just be yourself. When you are being genuine and authentic, people will pick up on that you don’t have to “close the deal” 9 times out of 10 it will just close itself. That is how I have been my entire sales career. It “didn’t pay” to try and be someone else.

That is what I want people to see with our non-profit that we run today. My team and I want people to see just how much we care about the Veteran and Gold Star Family communities. We want people to see how much we care about horses and show these amazing communities that they are truly God’s majestic animal and that they can do great things for them. From now on, instead of saying that you are “in sales” tell people that you are in the passion business. Find something that you are passionate about. Find that thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. Read about it, study it, and learn everything you can about it. Go do whatever that is for you, and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t. My dad and I always say that we are going to the top of the mountain or you will see us dead on the side from trying because we are not coming back down. Take that kind of approach to something that you are so passionate about that it just burns like a huge fire on the inside of you and you are going to make it happen.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I get asked the question about this all the time especially since 2020. All the people that thought they didn’t need their business on social media, or the ones that “get round to it” one of these days 2020 changed that whole game for everyone.

I am old enough that we grew up in a world without much (if any) technology. I am Generation X. We played outside and couldn’t run in and out of the house. The street lights were our curfew, and if we were thirsty, by God we just drank out of someone’s water hose and we are all here to tell about it.

We are also that generation that started to get video games LONG BEFORE the now younger generations did. We got to play things like PONG on an ATARI. Not a thousand buttons mind you like todays controllers. This was a joy stick and a single red button. I take you that far back to give you the comparison of what my mindset was when social medial became a thing.

In the early 2000’s what we now call social media was becoming a thing. Dating myself again, I called it the VHS and Beta wars all over again. As a sidebar, for everyone not old enough reading this, that was a compact reel to reel machine that played movies. Just ask your Gen X parents about a place called blockbuster. All kidding aside, I was that guy in the early days that said, I don’t need this Facebook and Myspace garbage. I don’t need to take pictures of my food or tell anyone when I’m going to bed, and if I want to speak with one of my friends I will just pick up the phone. I know, I actually sound more like a “Boomer” than a Gen X right. Well, that is who we were raised by.

Now, as time went on, I slowly started coming around to the idea of putting more than just your whole personal life for everyone to see on there and started putting business stuff on there. What do you know, people started responding. You could be a huge fish in a small pond, because in the mid 2000’s social media was not nearly what it is today. So I started putting more business stuff on there. If I was working at a car dealership, I would put the “whip of the day” and showcase a car I wanted to sell, or a cell phone deal that was going on at the time. I wanted people to reach out to me. So I could get the sale. It was a matter of choice vs chance. I could take my chances with the promotions that the company was doing at the time and “hope” that I could get some business out of it, or as I said before, take some passion and make your own path.

Before you know it, people are asking for me. People I had never met. These were not referrals from previous sales. These were people that liked what I was putting out there and they came and asked for me. There would be times that I would outsell the “old salts” and they could never figure out what I was doing to get so much business to come in. Of course, my boss would love it because I was making sales. I took the road less traveled, and yes, I had to learn how to do it. I had to learn what worked and what didn’t, but I was willing to take that ounce of passion and put it towards something that took me to another level.

So, fast forward to 2017 when we started The Veterans Ranch. Now the social media world has exploded. Facebook won the VHS and Beta war. You now had Instagram, YouTube, and so many others out there. I had that 20 years of experience with putting business on social media so it just came natural to me. We had to put that business online as well.

Now, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t work. It was actually more work in 2017 then it was in the early 2000’s. Now, you had to work harder to be that big fish because now the pond had gotten a lot larger. What you did in the mid 2000’s no longer worked in 2017. I had to “go back to school” and learn what an audience wanted and how to affectively deliver it to them.

Fast forward again to 2020. The world is in turmoil, lots of people are stuck at home with this computer in their hand that we call a phone. By the way, a study was done that says the phone is actually the “least used app” on the phone (isn’t that funny). Back to the story. All of a sudden people are not coming in to small businesses to buy anything and you are not in a desperate need to show people what you have for sale. So what do you do? You join the tidal wave. The tsunami of people that are now on Facebook, Instagram, X (the artist formerly known as twitter), YouTube, and now this new one. The one that was called “a kids app” the app that when Boomers and Gen X got on it at first you were looked at funny. That’s right, I’m talking about TikTok. The app that seemed to have nothing but and endless plethora or young women in bikini’s dancing to the same stupid song, doing the same stupid dance that the last thousand people did right.

However, if you studied how algorithms worked you would see that what you clicked like on, you started seeing more of that and less of the stupid dances. So, I figured what the hell and we added the non-profit to TikTok. We spoke very passionately and quickly mind you, as you didn’t get as long to do videos then as you do now to get our passionate point across about who The Veterans Ranch was and what we do.

Remember when I said that originally I didn’t like the idea of social media because I was old fashioned. I was now managing 10 different social media platforms. I was and am still a member of over 70 plus Facebook groups and post our message anywhere they will let me. Why you ask? What did I say just a little bit ago? It was not a lot harder to be the big fish because EVERYONE was now trying to be that fish. All of those small businesses that didn’t think they needed social media for their business or they would get around to it when they got around to it were now ALL on social media just trying to make their business survive.

Fast forward to today. Now that everyone realizes that you MUST have your business on social media it is more important than ever to have passion. Remember before when I said take something that you are passionate about and say that you are in the passion business and not just “sales”. You must take that same passion and learn everything you can about social media. Believe me when I tell you that the goal posts are moving constantly. By the time you read this, what worked for you on social media in the past will not work as well today.

Go get you a legal pad. Even if it is on your tablet or phone with an S Pen instead of a real pen and go back to school. Go learn everything you can. Go read, listen to people’s podcasts, become that sponge that I was listening to all of those great speakers and taking notes. I had to have 100 times the passion that people do today when it comes to social media because we didn’t have the tons of information that we do today. Back then, it was a lot of trial and error.

Sure, there is still a little of that today, but you have more information at your fingertips then ever before, yet we have less knowledge then ever before. Find you some passion, go get some knowledge, and take your business online to the next level and then learn how to take it to a level beyond that. There is ALWAYS something to learn. If you are not learning something new you’re dead so you may as well keep learning. Let everyone know about your business everywhere you can. Get up before the sun and learn. Hone your craft of getting your business noticed on social media. Take the time to get a good social media scheduler to post everything you want. Don’t think that I manage 10 different platforms and all those groups without one. There are lots of them out there. One that I use is Hello Woofy (www.hellowoofy.com) they are not a sponsor and they don’t pay me to recommend them. I just think that they are one of the best ones out there that is easy to learn, use and apply so go check them out.

Last, but not least on this topic, make sure that you shout your business to the mountain tops. Don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t, or that you should only post once a day or twice a week. Sure, as you are building your following you may not post quite as much, but as people start following you post like there is no tomorrow. Remember that the tsunami of new business and maybe some like yours are getting online everyday and they are hungry for the business. Always be the hardest worker in the room. NEVER let anyone outwork you. This is your business. This is your passion. Take that same passion by God and let everyone you can know that you exist, that you are a great person, and that your business deserves to have their hard earned dollars spent at it. I said it before and I will continue to say it and you need to make it your mantra. You are going to the top of the mountain or they are going to find you dead on the side from trying because you are not coming back down.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Never quit, we hear that phrase all the time, but what does it mean. “You have no idea what I have gone through” or “I finally just gave up” are phrases that I have heard in my 51 years of life. The first phrase I will partially agree with. I may not know what you have gone through exactly. Maybe it is something specific that I haven’t gone through, but we have all gone through something in life, and the empathy is what helps get each other through the touch times.

Now, let’s go back to 1989 shall we. The place is St. Louis, Mo my home town. It is my Junior year of High School. at Lutheran North (GO CRUSADERS) and I am playing football there. For four years I played with an amazing group of young men with a coaching staff that instilled values and work ethics in us that I still use to this day. We had won the 3A state championship the year before in 1988 and we looked like we were on a glide path to get back to the finals again here in 1989. Then the unthinkable happened. We lost a crucial game. We were devastated. Is our season over? There was still hope. A slim chance to make it through and continue if another team won their game. Even with a win, that team wouldn’t move on, we would because of the team that lost. A lot of us showed up to that game with our Jerseys on (yes we were ballsy back then) to watch the game. They team that needed to win did and we were elated and back on to the path of going to state.

So, we make it to the 3A state championships again. We are in Springfield, Mo at Southwest Missouri State. It was a sunny, but cold and windy day. It was a very close game. Here is where it gets interesting. With just a little over 90 seconds to go we are down by a little less than two scores. They had already walked the trophies and medals across to what was going to look like the winning team. Now we were pissed. We had come back from the adversity of loosing the one game to make it here. We were not going to quit.

Welcome to my “If there is still time on the clock” theory. WE SCORE!!! Now, we are only down by one score. A touchdown and we win the game. We go for the onsides kick. Everyone knows it’s coming. The ref blows his whistle and the kick off squad starts to move and here’s the kick. WE GET THE BALL BACK! We are elated, but there is still work to do. We get one play in, a beautiful pass to get the ball down field, but we still have time to run one more play. Our quarterback had a great arm, and we had very tall and fast receivers that could catch anything you threw their way. So, what do our coaches do? The lineman lineup on the ball and the quarterback gets under center. Ball snaps on two and HOLY CRAP ITS A DRAW PLAY! Nobody saw it coming. Everyone was in the endzone looking for the pass. The left guard pulls out and literally flattens his guy and our full back hits the hole and at the one yard line dives into the endzone like superman. WE JUST WON OUR SECOND STATE TITLE IN A ROW. You never saw so many young men crying on a field at one time in your life. Ours from elation and theirs from devastation. Other than watching our full back dive across that goal line, the sweetest feeling was watching the officials walk those medals and trophy back to our side of the field. It still gives me goosebumps to tell the story. Now you know what I mean by “If there is still time on the clock”.

Now, you might catch yourself saying, “Well J.R. that is a great story, but that was high school, what about the real world after you graduated?” You have to understand that like math, everything that we learn in life is cumulative. We take what we learn in the early days and apply it to later in life. Just to go back to the previous story for a second. Even though we had gone through all of that to win that game, after we watched the film of the game, we still had to run sprints for the penalties that we had that game. NEVER STOP LEARNING!

Now, it is coming up on 2008. I am now living in Florida, have been married for 8 years, have a beautiful 4 year old daughter at the time and a business that is thriving in the tourism industry. We all know what happened next. We find out that bankers, brokers, hedge fund managers had all been writing loans on homes that people couldn’t afford and trading the “bad paper” on it back and forth and it all came crashing down. The market had collapsed. “I’m in the tourism industry we are good.” Are we really? As some of you know, Florida was one of the hardest hit states by all of that mess. Now, I had purchased my home back in 2003. I wasn’t a part of all that mess. However, it affected every aspect of our economy including tourism. At one point Florida had more people leaving the state since 1945 and that was because men were going off to war. We were able to hold onto the business for a while, but it was going down and going down fast. People weren’t traveling nearly as much as they had before, and some quit traveling period. Little by little employees were leaving because they didn’t have the gas to come to work because they weren’t making any money as it was a commission job to put gas in the tank. Eventually, the business closed. A business that saw no end in site and had nothing to do with the housing market was collateral damage after 10 years. Now what was going to happen? I tried to find other jobs, but with an economy that just exploded and being self employed for the last 10 years, well let’s just say that it was a little hard to find a job that would pay the bills.

Now y’all know me by now, I don’t quit or give up, but the odds and the bills were stacking up against me fast. We ended up loosing the house. They repossessed our SUV (luckily we had one car that I had owned since 1999 and had the title to) as well. As a man, father, husband, provider, this was devastating. I had never gone through anything like this personally before. I will tell you this, keep more in the “rainy day fund” then you think you need, because I can tell you from experience that you will need more than you think. Admittedly, I didn’t always make the best financial decisions as a young man, and we were tapping into what savings we had quickly.

What did I do next? I made the hardest decision, but the necessary one. I picked up our life, put everything in a U-Haul truck and moved my family back to my home town of St. Louis, Mo. It was hard to leave behind friends of ours, as well as the only area that our daughter had known, but bills had to be paid and what had to be done had to be done.

I got a job back in the car business. “Couldn’t you get one of those jobs in Florida J.R.?” Sure I could have and did try to, but when people were getting evicted out of their homes at a record rate, not to many people were coming in to buy new and used cars. Not that the 2008 crunch didn’t affect Missouri, it just didn’t hit it nearly as hard as it did Florida.

Now, I have a job, my wife got a part time job, but we are literally starting over from scratch. We found an apartment that we could afford, and we carpooled taking each other to our respective jobs. It was usually my wife taking me because the car business is an 80 hour work week still to this day and don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that it isn’t. I was starting to make some money and my wife had hear job, but we were just trying to keep our heads above water at this point, but again NEVER QUIT. We were on any and every type of assistance that we could be on to help pay rent, get groceries, you name it. We weren’t trying to make a living off of welfare, we were just trying to survive.

Now, you might think that I’m Mr. tough guy and nothing bothers me right, WRONG. As a man and a provider, this was killing me on the inside. This is not who I was. I was a strong, successful business owner that now had to start all over. To say that this was a “hit to the ego” was an understatement. Now, let’s touch on that for a moment. What is “ego”? It is that little thing inside of you that makes you stick your chest out and sometimes try to make people think that you are more than you are. There is a major difference between confidence and ego, but that is a topic for another article. EGO to me stands for Edging God Out! You can do it all right. You don’t need any help. “I’m Good” is a phrase we hear a lot from people these days and I was no different. I was going to fix this problem by working as hard as I could and I was going to make it happen.

Now, I am a Christian man and I have faults just like everyone else. There was only one perfect man to walk this earth in the last few thousand years and it sure wasn’t this guy for sure. So, what did I do? I got back into my bible. We found a local church to go to that we liked and we got back to what was important in life and let me tell you something folks, STUFF is not what is important in life. Sure, stuff is fun, and stuff is great, but folks, I have never seen a hearse with a luggage rack. You can’t take it with you. So decide what is important and move forward from there. Okay, so just because I got back into my bible and was going to church regularly doesn’t mean that everything turned around overnight. However, I started getting back to what was important, and remembering that all things are possible through God and not just me alone. So with that, I lined up on the field to make that onside kick after we just scored (reference championship football story). Between God and I we were going to win. We were going to make it to the top of the mountain again. Why, because I don’t quit and success leaves tracks. All you have to do is follow them.

So, I picked myself up (mentally), dusted myself off and got back to work with a new mindset. Again, there were still struggles and hurdles to overcome, but I was doing it from a mindset of strength in Christ Jesus and not the defeated mentality that I had previously. Through God, prayer, determination, and a willingness to learn you can truly accomplish anything that you put your mind to. You are going to take some arrows along the way. People are going to tell you to take the easy path, and for some that is fine and okay, but not you. You are a fighter, you have dreams, goals, and things that you want to accomplish in this life. You are not here for a long time, you are here for a good time. So go out there and make a difference it that dash. “Whoa J.R., you had me there till you said the dash. What dash are you talking about”? I’m talking about that dash between when you are born and when you die on your headstone. That dash is your life. That dash is what you will be remembered for by your fiends, family and others that you help. With God’s divine grace and mercy I was able to pull myself out of that hole. Get rid of the depression and darkness that I thought was overwhelming me at the time. I got rid of the fear (btw stand for False Expectations Appearing Real) and set new goals and a new mission in life.

Now, I am one of the co-founders of a Veteran owned Non-Profit that provides free equine therapy services to Veterans and Gold Star Families. I found my purpose in life, I am filling in that dash with as much positivity and giving back as I can. There are still challenges from day to day sure. A non-profit is a business of a different kind. The “C” in 501C3 stands for Corporation for everyone that didn’t know. Just now I come at things from a point of strength from God that keeps me going every day. It doesn’t mean that I never have a bad day. It just means that I come at it from a completely different perspective to get back on track faster.

I will end this part with this. Be a rhino. A rhino is one of the strongest animals in the jungle. It has thick skin and can take a lot of punishment. Be that rhino today. Go start the business you always wanted to. Go become the person that you always wanted to be. The how’s don’t matter when your why’s are in place. Go out there and crush it today and and every day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.theveteransranch.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_veterans_ranch
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100055829202154
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-r-smith-58578b30/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/PJJR_Ranch_Corp
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theveteransranch

Image Credits
The Veterans Ranch