Noah Kenneth Smith

My Story

In high school, my first job was managing a Smash Burger franchise in Chesterfield, MO.  but my as my "side hustle" and ideal career path, I started and managed a pop punk band called Get At Me. (https://getatme.bandcamp.com)  Over the 4 years as a band, We to self funded 1 EP and 2 Full Length Albums, produced by professional music producers/studios in St. Louis, Springfield, and Los Angeles, California.  We went on two tours taking us as far as Buffalo, New York! I love playing guitar, I love writing music, I love connecting with others through music, but most of what "being in a band" entailed was anything but loving to play guitar and writing music, if you wanted to make a career out of it.  As many times as my father told me I had to think of the band as a business if I wanted to succeed, I did not want to believe him. So obviously, we never made any money, eventually broke up, and I had to figure out another career path..

​

While managing Smash Burger one night, I was approached by a very cool looking dude.  He was impressed with how young I was and how well I managed to take the orders of him and his 16 friends that came in 5 minuets before we closed with only one other person in the restaurant to assist. He gave me the name and number of the owner of Chris Cakes Of St. Louis, a well known pancake catering company.  He told me I deserve to be making way more money than what Smash Burger could ever pay me and boy was he right!  I worked with Chris Cakes for about two years before I quit to live in my car to explore the United States and follow the first summer Dead & Company Tour.

I was living mobile for a solid year.  After the Dead and Company tour, I lived and worked on a marijuana farm in southern Oregon. During this time, I met a lot of really awesome people that accomplished really amazing things with their time on earth.  For example, I met young man that showed me an entire resort his their grandfather built of tree houses of all heights and sizes. The tall tree houses had rope bridges connecting them all together.  He built it for fun but his family ended up turning it into a business of Airbnb's years after he died.

In addition, I worked with another guy on the farm that gutted a cargo van and built it out as a very sweet camper.  I had purchased a van at one point in that year. My buddy helped me build a simple bed frame to live on, but it was nothing fancy.  I had no building experience what so ever.  not even a simple high school shop class, but after meeting all of these people who built all of these amazing structures, homes, vehicles, and businesses, I was inspired to start over back in St. Louis, where i had the opportunity to live cheap, and have the time to learn new skills. 

​

My older brother worked at popular St. Louis tourist restaurant, Fitz's Root Beer.  He got me a job and gave me a place to stay while I got back on my feet, after spending an entire year basically homeless. I ended up working At Fitz's off and on for over 5 years.  During the middle of my time at Fitz's, I worked full time as a union carpenter's apprentice, framing newly constructed homes.  I still worked at Fitz's on the weekend because the union did not pay be very much at all. My intention going into the Carpenters Union was to learn as much as I could about construction from them.  After 6 months into the apprenticeship, I quit to put what they have taught me to the test and help my twin brother flip a house he just bought for dirt cheap! Through working on his house, I was able to learn the entire building process, rather than just framing.  We demoed and cleaned out his entire house, reframed all of the interior walls, hung, taped, mudded and painted all of his wall and ceiling drywall, refinished all of his original flooring, tiled his kitchen and bathroom, hung the cabinets, reran all of the electric and plumbing, built a deck with pool! After this experience there was no home improvement project I did not feel comfortable taking on. 

​

During the 2020 pandemic, I obviously lost my job at Fitz's.  Losing this job so out of the blue and so easily was a very strong reminder that I did not want to be an employee in the food industry for my entire life and I actually do have a lot of skills now between building and customer service.   I started posting my home projects on my personal facebook page and got a lot of handy work from people I knew and people they knew. My twin brother worked for our friend Will, who had a fence building business, and would help me with my larger projects when needed. We had a good thing going on for awhile doing a bunch of random projects from seal coating to finishing basements. We always talked about narrowing down a niche to start a brand and business, but could never narrow something down that we felt strongly enough to go for.

​

In October 2020, my brother and I took a surfing trip to California for an extended weekend. On our way home, in the airport, my phone was being blown up by various people informing of me of our friend Wills death.  He was killed by gunfire in a traffic altercation. This was incredibly hard for us as friends and employees.  We talked to a few people that we has involved with about taking over his business but it was too hard to communicate with anybody in the probate court, so we started our own fence building business instead.  With our building experience through the carpenters union and my brother's house, we wanted to offer decks as well as fences to Will's business model. He got asked all of the time to work on decks and never wanted to mess with it because of the high expectations that clients have for a new deck.  Fences are pretty easy to please someone with. it's either there or not there. But I thought we could make a decent amount of money also building some easy decks in the city, and we were good enough with people to be able to please whoever we built a deck for. 

​

We started Exterior Experience in December 2020.  It was kind of a slow start but we had no issues finding work when we needed it.  In all of 2021 Exterior Experience sold and built $150K worth of fences and decks in the St. Louis Area.  As i write this in November 2022, we have built and sold over $500K worth of fences and decks so far. 

​

One of the key growth factors was hiring enough people so that I did not have to spend my time physically building any fences or decks. My days were free to generate leads, send out estimates, go to city hall, collect deposits, schedule jobs, build a website, draw blue prints for permits, etc..  Being able to actually focus on the business side of the business really helped me understand what actually went on behind closed doors of all businesses and how I can apply it to pretty much any service or product out there to help me further my career as a salesman and entrepreneur.  

​

Here we are going into 2023.. I have a few large goals with Exterior Experience. Like a sales goal of $1,000,000! But as exciting as it is to work with really large numbers and act like a big construction contractor throughout my day is, it's never really what I thought or wanted to end up doing with my life.  Running a construction company is a lot of work and requires long hours and making really difficult decision every single day. I am left with little time to spend with my Fiancé or pursuing other interests of mine like traveling, writing music, making videos, starting a blog, etc. 

​

Now that I have a good understanding of how to run a pretty complicated business model.. In 2023, I am going to apply everything I have learned about business in my life to build an online business that allows me the freedom to spend all of my time doing things I actually enjoy.  Time is very valuable to me and I would love to spend less of my time worried about my south city construction hustle, and more time doing things I love with people I love.

​

I appreciate you taking the time to get to know me on a professional level.  Feel free to email me or follow me on social media to connect.  I'd love to hear about you and the business ventures you are working on, what you future goals are, and how you are going to accomplish them! 

​

-Noah Kenneth Smith

​