PHOTO COURTESY OF RETAIL AWARE
KEITH FIX, CEO OF RETAIL AWARE
Business prodigy Keith Fix MAKES GOOD AS YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR Looking back, it’s relatively easy to see the makings of Keith Fix the entrepreneur. Long before any of his previous ventures — including his latest startup, client and investor favorite Retail Aware, of which he is CEO — his path started with a precocious childhood. Emboldened by technology, fascinated by the gig economy and not afraid to sink or swim, Fix usually swam.
ENTREPRENEUR AT AGE 10 “I’ve always been a bit of a hustler,” he said. “I sold sports erasers at school and did all sorts of things like that. When I turned 10, I started building websites, which got me $300 on my first website, which was a lot of money then. I also had an internet radio station and sold ads for $5; it was crazy to me that I could get people to buy it.
“We had a computer lab at school with the latest Macs at the time. In first grade, I asked to volunteer in the lab. I remember having a laptop, I was playing Minesweeper and Oregon Trail and I had a setup playing Microsoft simulator. So, I always had a fascination with technology and then I learned there was a whole economy around it.” At the age of 17, Fix landed a job with what is now Concentrix, a Fortune 500 digital customer relationship management company. This gave him an in-depth understanding not only of the challenges that companies of all sizes face, but how they pivoted to meet those challenges and opportunities in a rapidly changing market landscape. “That experience, little did I know, was my intro to retail data at scale,” he said. “Every customer interaction that came in, I had a
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