ROGERS — It seems Cameron Smith is always pitching.
As a youngster, he pitched peanuts at the famed Forum in Los Angeles to help support his family. As an adult with kids of his own, he pitched for the Hollywood All-Stars softball team to help pay the bills.
As the founder and president of Cameron Smith Associates, he pitches companies on the benefits of using his firm to find employees. And he’s continually pitching high school athletic directors on the idea of — what else? — fast-pitch softball.
The thing about pitching is that it involves substantial risk. Once the ball leaves the hand, what happens next is largely out of the pitcher’s control. There is a significant element of chance.
“I’m definitely not afraid to take risks,” says Smith, 54. “But I’ve known what I was doing. I had control of the situation.” Looking through the prism of his success, it’s evident that Smith has been rewarded for his intrepidity. The former one-man show operating on borrowed money from the basement of his house is now the president of the largest executive search firm in the country specializing in Wal-Mart vendor teams.
“Cameron has always done a great job helping us fill our team here,” says Wayne Callahan, head of the H.J. Heinz office in Bentonville. “And I think it’s because he really understands what it takes and what’s needed in this area.” In effect, Smith has made a living riding the crest of the area’s Wal-Mart-driven economic wave. In some cases, he has helped push it along. While he earns a living helping vendors find employees to fill key spots in their local offices, he has also become active in enticing companies to come to Northwest Arkansas.
“Cameron and I both think we’ve got to work on the top of the funnel,” Callahan continues. “We need to get more qualified people and offices into this area.”
“There are almost 30,000 Wal-Mart vendors, and we couldn’t handle it if they all had offices here,” Smith says. “But I can show those who want to come how it will be good for their business.”
Smith and his wife, Monica, migrated to Rogers from Fort Smith two years ago. Before that, he was a voice on the phone to many of the folks he did business with.
“I was up here a lot before, but since we’ve moved, the business has grown 40 percent,” Smith says.
His involvement in the community has also blossomed. Once an interested observer of Northwest Arkansas’ growth, Smith is now involved in projects as varied as the Single Parent Scholarship Fund of Benton County and the core supplier group for the Mercy Health System of Northwest Arkansas Capital Campaign.
“I have a hard time saying no. But I enjoy it. It’s good to be able to do these things because there have been plenty of times when I couldn’t.”
“I think he’s just embraced this community,” says Patti Burcham, donor relations coordinator for the St. Mary’s Hospital Foundation. “When he says he wants to help, he really means it. He’s not just talking.”
‘MY HERO’
Smith was born in 1951 in Long Island, New York, but most of his childhood was spent in California. His parents divorced when he was 6, and his mother, Phyllis Marie Smith, was left to rear her three children on her own.
“She was a dispatcher for the Inglewood Police Department, but she would work three jobs to take care of us,” Smith says. “We all lived in a one-bedroom apartment. For Christmas, the police used to take the bikes they had confiscated and clean them up for us to have.
“She really worked herself to death. She had a stroke when she was 49 and died when she was 52. Really, she was my hero.”
Smith tried to parlay his football ability into an education. He was injured his first year at El Camino College, took a season off and then went to Linfield University before graduating from California State-Long Beach in 1975.
In 1976, he went to work for Champion Spark Plugs, selling windshield wipers to gas stations. He later worked for Gulf & Western Industries and was eventually promoted to regional sales manager.
At a time when most would be considering their next corporate move, Smith decided to chuck it. By then he was divorced and the father of two boys. He decided to go to acting school and pay the bills by playing professional fast-pitch softball.
“It sounds like a midlife crisis, but I knew what I was doing,” says Smith. “People in my family were in the entertainment business [his sister, Kathy Forbes, was a member of the Groundlings improvisation comedy group and has appeared in films and television shows], so I thought I’d try acting. I was making $300 a game pitching softball, and I knew if I wanted to go back to business, I could.
“I was on the rosters of 17 teams, and they’d fly me all over to pitch in these tournaments. I was really a hired gun.”
It was a far cry from his first exposure to softball, when the hired gun was more of a pop gun.
“I got a bunch of friends to play in this league, and I got us sponsors and uniforms. We didn’t have anyone to pitch, so I said I would. I walked 15 people the first game. I was so humiliated.”
Determined not to be embarrassed again, Smith drew a target on a fence, moved in a bar stool to simulate a batter and pitched five hours a day until he was able to find the strike zone.
“Fear of failure is a great motivator,” he says.
He wound up playing for the Hollywood All-Stars and the King and His Court traveling exhibition softball team, recording 26 no-hitters and six perfect games.
Though Smith was successful on the diamond, he wasn’t all that happy with his acting career.
“You’d spend two weeks on a movie and in the end they’d cut your scenes. You could tell people you were in a show, but they’d never see you. So, who needed that?”
TIME TO MOVE ON
Smith had worked with Career Consultants, a Southern California recruiting service, and enlisted two colleagues to form the Cameron Agency, an executive search firm, in 1990. They were equals, but Smith did most of the work.
“My partners got interested in buying racehorses,” says Smith. “So every time I starting looking around for them, they were off somewhere with the horses.”
About this time, Smith went with some friends on a golfing trip to Las Vegas. They were in line for breakfast when he looked up and saw “the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life.”
“We were going to play golf; I hadn’t even showered and I was wearing a baseball hat,” he says. “There was no way I was going to meet her.”
As they hit the greens, he couldn’t get the woman out of his mind. He got her name — Monica Tucker — from the restaurant sign-in sheet, and on a lark he called the front desk and asked to be connected to her room.
“She answered and I just panicked,” Smith says. “I fell back on my acting, and I used this accent and told her I was from the front desk and we needed some information before she checked out, and she wound up giving me her home phone number.”
When he got back to California, he called her and told her how he’d gotten her number. Not surprisingly, she hung up on him. He called back. She hung up again.
“I thought I’d blown it,” says Smith. “I just put her number in my briefcase. I figured I’d never hear from her.”
Then, out of the blue, she called and left a message on his answering machine.
“She said, ‘This is Monica in Arkansas, and I just wanted to see how you were doing.’ But I didn’t have Caller I.D., so I didn’t have her number. I was tearing up my briefcase trying to find it.”
When they finally did connect, a two-month, long-distance relationship ensued. And while Smith is not from the South, he instinctively knew one of the first rules of Southern courtship: If you want to win over the girl, first you win over the mother.
“I know it sounds bizarre, but he was charming and funny on the phone,” says Monica Smith. “He got to know my whole family. He called my mother and talked to my older brother, so we all got to know him.” The two finally met face-to-face in Las Vegas.
“I’d seen her, but she’d never seen me,” Smith said. “So as soon as she agreed, I was hitting the gym and the tanning booth. I must have lost 10 pounds getting ready.” Monica was impressed.
“I agreed to go, but I brought my mother so if things weren’t right, we could just leave,” Monica says. “But it was like Elly May coming to the big city. He just swept me off my feet.”
The two married in a wedding chapel in Las Vegas and settled in Fort Smith, where Monica has family. Cameron’s sons were a plane ride away in northern California, and he figured it was just as easy to fly from Arkansas.
“Even in Fort Smith I had to get him to slow down,” Monica says. “I had to remind him that, if someone does something to you in traffic and you want to say something, that might be your daughter’s teacher.”
Smith kept his clients from his executive search operation in California while he built his client base in Arkansas.
“I had all these phone lines installed, and I had long hair and was driving a red sports car,” he says. “The neighbors would see me when they left for work in the morning, and in the afternoon when they came back, I’d be watering the lawn. I’m sure they were wondering just what I was doing.” He and Monica were living on a $5,000 bank loan when he landed a contract with Entergy Corp.
MOVING ON UP
It was actually a neighbor who led Smith to upper Northwest Arkansas. The neighbor had been turned down for a job with Huffy Bicycle Co., a Wal-Mart vendor that had established a local office to better serve the retailer.
After seeing the rejection letter, Smith called Huffy. After some probing, he discovered there was a need for an executive recruiter in Northwest Arkansas. Intrigued, he came north to investigate. His first stop was the Beau Terre office park, home to dozens of Wal-Mart vendors.
“At the time there were 48 vendors there, and I started working with 24 of them,” he says.
Smith soon came to realize the value of the seasoned executive.
“Vendors need experienced people for some critical roles on their teams, and if you don’t have that experience and that skill set, they’ll look for someone else. Wal-Mart is their single biggest customer, and the cream of the crop are on these teams.”
“I’ve been fortunate,” Smith says. “We got here at the right time, and we were able to get out front.”
Smith and his firm have been able to stay out front, thanks in part to a mammoth, closely-guarded database that includes private information on literally thousands of vendors and potential employees. Within minutes, he and his staff can provide a business with resumes from experienced workers whose background and skill sets match the company’s needs.
He’s proudest of his staff, which has grown to a crew of 15 in offices in Bentonville and Minnesota, with talk of expansion to Atlanta and overseas.
Smith is the consummate hands-on manager. He meets with his staff every week to discuss forthcoming opportunities, to celebrate successes and to commiserate over failures. He’s quick to give advice or provide insight or provide a phone number that might help swing the deal.
KEEPING IT BALANCED
Monica has played a considerable role in her husband’s success. With the move north, she has assumed an even larger role as gatekeeper to a man who is in demand and may not know when to quit.
“I try to keep him balanced,” Monica says. “Since we’ve moved up here, people have wanted him to do so many things, and I know it’s just not good for him to take on too much.” In fact, Monica handles much of the business, leaving Cameron to make deals and coach associates.
“I don’t even have a checkbook,” says Cameron. “She takes care of the bills and the taxes and all that. When the sales people send their invoices in, I don’t even see them. They go straight to her.”
The arrangement leaves Cameron time for the business and community involvement he so readily embraces. He serves on the board of directors for RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Global Solutions and Bentonville Software Associates, companies in the process of developing computer programs to work with the existing sales-tracking programs used by Wal-Mart and its vendor partners.
He’s also a co-founder of Doing Business in Bentonville, a monthly speaker series aimed at educating suppliers and retail analysts, and is involved with the Cancer Challenge and the St. Mary’s Hospital Foundation’s fundraising projects. He has recently become active in Arkansas Athletes Outreach and has been inducted into the Towers of Old Main for his contribution to the University of Arkansas’ fundraising efforts.
His childhood and the sacrifices his mother made for him and his siblings led him to embrace the Single Parent Scholarship Fund of Benton County, a decades-old organization that gives single parents a leg up financially so they can get through school.
“That’s my life,” Smith says of the group.
“Because of his background, I think he really wants to help single women give their children a better future,” says La-Donna Penner, executive director of the fund. “He just seems to have a heart for what we’re doing.” Through a program he calls “Street Smarts,” Smith and members of his staff coach scholarship recipients on the ins and outs of interviewing, resume writing and the hiring process.
“He really wants to help them help themselves,” Penner says.
When Smith gets involved, it becomes an obsession. A few years ago, he noticed girls in Arkansas high schools were playing slow-pitch, rather than the fast-pitch softball played in colleges and in high schools in surrounding states.
“There’s nothing wrong with slow-pitch, but these girls couldn’t go on to college and have to learn to play fast-pitch,” Smith says. “It’s like suddenly making the high school football teams play flag football.”
Smith became a one-man crusader for the game and traveled from town to town in Arkansas to put on exhibitions and clinics for high school girls. He rallied support, lobbied the Arkansas Activities Association and helped ramrod the effort that eventually led the transition from slow-pitch to fast-pitch in state high schools.
“I’ve been to tournaments where there would be four games on four different fields, and my pitchers would be pitching in all of them.” It was a gratifying experience, considering Smith’s appreciation for a good pitch.