Chip

Chip Smith is the president of SOAR Communications.

As a California native, Chip developed an early love for outdoor sports through water and snow skiing, road and mountain biking, surfing and a few years of football and cross-country running.

His passion for sports helped him develop into a successful marketing professional with more than 15 years of experience in the sporting goods, healthcare, software and communications industries. The majority of those years were spent with sporting goods industry leaders Shimano American Corporation and Specialized Bicycles, Inc.

Chip began his career in 1988 with the Los Angeles office of Ogilvy & Mather advertising, where he spent three years as a billing supervisor. He then spent seven years in sales and marketing positions with Shimano American Corporation, the world’s dominant leader in bicycle components. As marketing manager, Chip directed the company’s strategy and execution of advertising, collateral, point-of-purchase, trade show, advocacy efforts, governmental outreach and promotional efforts, as well as product launches to the trade, government and consumers in the U.S. market.

Specialized Bicycles recruited Chip away from Shimano to become its global marcom manager, a position he held for nearly three years as he directed a team in all aspects of Specialized’s international marketing communications efforts. Chip then spent the next four-plus years in a variety of marketing and sales consulting engagements with firms both inside and outside the recreation marketplace before joining SOAR Communications in 2005.

Chip earned his bachelor’s degree in Business Management from Brigham Young University, and his MBA from Pepperdine University. He has also lived in Tokyo, Japan for a year and a half, where he learned the Japanese language.

He moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2004 where he lives, skis and rides with his wife Debbie.