From a backyard in Florida to a manufacturer in Georgia.

Keaton Smith's path into manufacturing didn't start in a boardroom. It started in a backyard in Valrico, Florida, where a kid with a tennis ball and a wall taught himself to switch hit. The same instinct, see the gap and build the thing that doesn't exist yet, has shaped every chapter since.

He earned All-Star honors in little league, led his Jackson High School team in home runs, and won back-to-back SIAC Championships (2003, 2004) at Albany State University. He was named to the Rawlings All-South Regional Team (NCAA Division II). An international tryout brought three pro offers in Europe. He signed with the Schwaz Tigers in Austria's Bundesliga, where a chance encounter with former New York Yankees outfielder Paul Blair planted the seed for a product company fifteen years later.

Back in Georgia in 2008, Keaton took an inside sales role at Thomco Specialty Products in Suwanee, a 3M preferred converter. A mentor named Bruce McPhilimy walked him through tapes, adhesives, films, die-cut components, and industrial abrasives. Nine months of training became the foundation for everything that followed.

He moved into outside sales at Hisco, another nationwide 3M converter, and was trained at 3M Converter College in Minnesota. He picked up adhesive engineering, label fabrication, and the whale hunter method: pursue the large accounts that sustain a business long-term. For three and a half years he called on manufacturing, distribution, electronics, and defense customers.

A headhunter brought him to Stratix Corporation in Norcross as Key Account Manager for labeling and barcoding. A natural fit. His father had been in the label and barcode industry since Keaton was a kid. The label division was sold to Tailored Label Products, and nine months later the new owners let him go.

Suddenly unemployed in 2013 with a wife and two young kids at home, Keaton drove around Georgia for two weeks with food stamp applications in his car. He never turned them in. He told his wife: if they could earn $35,000, they could keep the mortgage and the lights on.

He had quietly started Country Innovation & Supply in 2011, sensing trouble at his employer. By the time he was let go, he had two customers: a 3PL buying boxes and stretch film, and a food manufacturer buying labels. First-year revenue was $56,000. Barely enough to survive.

A customer at Bentley's Butcher Shop pointed him to the Small Business Development Center at UGA Athens. The free Start Smart program taught him the fundamentals his Bachelor's degree never covered. From that, Keaton built CIS one customer at a time.

Year 1: $56K. Then $232K, $415K, about $500K, $650K, $800K, and $1M+ in 2020.

When the pandemic shut down his customer base in early 2020, Keaton pivoted fast. He sourced alcohol wipes and pre-saturated sanitizer towelettes, locked in a co-packer, and sold more than $50,000 in pallet loads to Turner Properties and its portfolio, including CNN Center and Cartoon Network. A separate partnership produced a $180,000 sale of KN95 masks to the Global National Security Campus in Missouri, operated by Honeywell.

Meanwhile, the barcode-label side of CIS caught a tailwind supplying labels for COVID testing labs. The business didn't just survive. It grew.

In 2019, lying in bed talking with his wife about getting back into baseball, Keaton described the homemade training device he had used in Europe. She told him to build it for real. Now he had the manufacturing relationships and engineering know-how he didn't have at twenty-five.

Beast Hack was born. The core insight came from Paul Blair's ten-minute coaching session in Austria: train to the power alleys and let the spin of the struck ball tell you everything about your swing. The hitting station turns the ball's rotational angle into instant, self-diagnostic feedback. No coach. No balls to chase. Just clean reps and clean data.

Five years of prototyping with engineering partners produced a finished product by 2025, backed by:

• Five granted US patents (two utility, three design)
• Five granted US federal trademarks
• A 4.5-year federal trademark opposition successfully defended against Monster Energy Drink Corporation

All Beast Hack fabrication to date is done in Georgia, USA. A consumer pickleball swing-trainer variant is in development, with overseas samples in hand. The IP is owned by CIS and licensed to Beast Hack LLC, a deliberate firewall that protects the trademarks and patents from product liability exposure.

Today, Keaton runs CIS as a single-operator manufacturer and distributor. The company handles foam fabrication (die-cut, lamination, laser etching, waterjet, CNC routing), industrial labels, barcoding, tapes, adhesives, and packaging supplies. CIS is a Women-Owned Small Business serving customers across manufacturing, logistics, and life sciences.

After eighteen years on the industrial side, one pattern kept showing up. Owners did not need another deck. They needed somebody to walk their floor, name the customer they were not calling on, and pick up the phone.

The best moves were never dramatic. Bethlehem Church saved $3,000 on consumables by switching one line item. ISG Infrasystems saved $104,400 a year on thermal camera case foam by swapping the material. Luxottica saved $34,000 a year with biodegradable pillow packs and a 5S packing bench redesign. MCLB Albany saved $1.8M sourcing small arms weapon components during wartime demand. Minigrip saved $26,000 a year and 260 labor hours by retrofitting the shipping bench with thermal printing. Toyota TACG saved $3,000 on Kanban holder plates. Nisshinbo saved $4,608 with a 3x1 label pricing correction. Signature Foods saved $1,000 on rub-resistant labels and another $168 on ribbon width.

Individually, small. Stacked over a year, real money. That is business development done by somebody who has actually run the machines.

Two decades building, selling, sourcing, and protecting products. A practitioner's view of go-to-market, channel development, and operations, earned the hard way.

• Industrial sales across adhesives, labels, barcoding, packaging, and specialty fabrication
• Product development from napkin sketch through patent, trademark, manufacturing, and launch
• Sourcing and supply chain, domestic (Georgia, USA) and overseas (Asia, Latin America)
• Small business operations: pricing, vendor management, customer development, cash discipline through every cycle
• IP defense: five issued patents, five issued trademarks, a 4.5-year federal trademark defense
• Range: Marine Corps small arms components, frozen aerospace epoxies, PCB phase-change thermal materials, peelable windshield masking, thermal camera foam pivots, tool shadowing and ergonomic benches, retail barcoding compliance, pallet-scale PPE

Fundamentals first. Fill the gap. Build the thing that doesn't exist yet.

From Bloomingdale Little League to Albany State to the Austrian Bundesliga, from a $35,000 survival goal to a multi-product manufacturer with international IP, this is the operator's playbook. The same instincts that taught a kid to switch hit against the side of a house still drive every decision today.

Country Innovation & Supply, LLC, Winder, Georgia, innovationandsupply.com. Beast Hack, Made in USA, beasthack.com. More on both on the Ventures page.