By Ashley Portero – Senior Reporter, South Florida Business Journal
Dec 27, 2022
Robert Morcos was in the cell phone business long before he launched Social Mobile a decade ago.
He started as a 15-year-old with a simple goal: Make some extra cash. To do that, the North Miami native looked to one of the most financially successfully people he knew.
“I had a friend who’s stepdad had a private jet, a yacht, expensive cars,” Morcos said. “I asked him, ‘What do you do, man?’ And he said he bought old cell phones, repaired them and resold them to clients in Latin America.”
To Morcos, it seemed impossible that someone could get rich by selling old cell phones. This was in the 1990s, a time when it wasn’t easy to offload old devices, he said. If a person bought a new phone, the old one most likely went into a drawer to collect dust.
Morcos began to buy old cell phones from friends, classmates, teachers and local pawn shops. Then, he sold them to his friend’s stepdad at a profit.
After graduating from Florida State University, he started his own cell phone company under the Social Mobile brand. It was pretty much a disaster, said Morcos, who admits he “had no idea” what he was doing.
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