What’s More Important to You? Craig Smith on Career Pivots, Connection, and What Actually Lasts
Craig Smith has spent more than fifteen years on live television, representing brands like Hewlett-Packard (HP), Google, and Samsung on QVC. If you have ever flipped past a shopping channel and wondered who that guy is trying to get you to buy a computer, there is a decent chance it was Craig. But the through-line of his story is not television. It’s the slow, honest work of figuring out what success is actually supposed to feel like, and being willing to change the answer more than once.
He started in sports broadcasting, bounced around the country as a weekend sportscaster, then walked away from a career he loved because the money was not where he wanted it to be. That decision led him into sales, and sales is where the real story starts.
Chasing the money into the golden handcuffs
"I went into sales as a ‘chase the money’," Craig said. "That is 100% the reason I got into sales." It worked, at least on paper. He made good money and had great benefits. He was also, in his own words, miserable. "I wasn’t growing as a human. I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing." The golden handcuffs were on, and he wore them for years.
What eventually loosened them was not a raise or a new title. It was a lesson about himself that took a while to land. "As I’ve gotten older and I’ve moved through my career, I found out that I really have to do something that I really enjoy," he said. "The making the money’s great. I love the material things like a lot of other people do, but doing something I love is so much more important."
The awards ceremony that changed everything
The turning point was at a year-end sales ceremony after Craig and his sales partner had crushed it, the top-performing team for ten of twelve months that year, winners of nearly every quarterly award. He walked in thinking this was it! The recognition, maybe a promotion, the next thing and the next thing.
They won nothing. No recognition.
He was so thrown and frustrated that he almost got himself fired, going off on his manager at a national sales meeting. But the lesson arrived later, quietly, in the weeks after. "This non-check of this box is probably telling me that this isn’t where I’m supposed to be," he remembered thinking. "Instead of trying to make these people happy and trying to cram myself into what I think is success in this world, why is that validation so important?" He stopped trying to force the square peg into the round hole, and he started looking around.
Finding QVC, and finding out what really sells
The next chapter came through connection, not a job board. Craig’s wife worked in QVC’s marketing department. He had a television background, he was watching more and more of the network, and one day it clicked that his two worlds could meet. He sent in a demo reel, went to an audition that looked like something out of a Hollywood movie, and walked out sure he had given it his best. They called him back.
Live shopping taught him something he now builds his whole message around. The feedback is instant. "When you put a product on the air, the audience is telling you immediately if they love it or they hate it." Insiders jokingly call QVC "quick volatile change," and Craig means it as a compliment. A product does well and your ten minutes on air becomes fifteen. It flops and you know right away. There is nowhere to hide, and that is exactly what makes it honest.
The people who thrived in that world, he noticed, were not the hardest sellers. They were the ones who connected. He points to Joan Rivers, who was wildly successful on QVC not because she pushed product but because she told stories, made fun of herself, and treated the customer like a person. "We’re not really selling products," Craig said. The brands that win build a connection and community, not just a transaction.
Losing his father, and learning who he really was
Craig’s father passed away in August of 2020, diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and gone within 17 days. It was not COVID related, but it happened during the lockdown, which meant there was no formal funeral. Craig found himself at his dad’s desk in the basement, working through post-it notes stuck to the wall, calling old business contacts to share the news.
Those calls uncovered a version of his father he had never met. One name on the wall was Frank. Years earlier, Craig’s dad had been offered the top sales job at his company, based in Texas. He turned it down because it would mean uprooting the family from New Jersey (a place they loved) to Texas (a place they weren’t very excited about). Craig’s dad knew his wife and children’s happiness was more important than a Director of Sales position. After he turned it down, he was demoted and eventually pushed out of the company. Craig knew that part of the story. What he didn’t know was that the company then offered the same job to Frank, and that Frank had called Craig’s dad for his blessing.
"You’re gonna crush this job," his dad told Frank. Then came the question. "What’s more important to you, Frank? The job, the money, the clout, the title, or those women that are the most important thing in your life?" Frank lived in San Diego with his wife and three daugthers. They all loved the beach. Frank turned the job down. Forty years later, he told Craig it was the best decision he ever made.
"So much of who he was, was trying to make other people better, and to help other people out," Craig said. His dad never told him these stories. Craig only heard them after he was gone, one phone call at a time.
Grief, and the compassion that came out of it
Craig is candid that he did not navigate the loss gracefully at first. "I learned what didn’t help me," he said. Avoidance, denial, deflection, and too much drinking. He put the blinders on and just kept grinding while his mother moved in and his family sold his parents’ house. Eventually he hit a moment of clarity that he could not keep going that way, and that grief needed room he had not been giving it.
What came out the other side was a deeper compassion for people. He talks about the social-media "crash-out," the videos of someone melting down in public that get passed around for laughs. "It’s probably not because somebody cut them off. It’s probably not because they forgot to include the ketchup with your french fries," Craig said. "There’s probably a lot of other stuff that person’s going through." He would rather people meet that moment with kindness than a camera.
Clear, real, and repeatable
All of it feeds into the framework Craig teaches now as a professional speaker. If you want a message that connects, he says, it has to be three things: clear, real, and repeatable. "If it’s clear, you understand me. If it’s real, you believe me. And if it’s repeatable, you’re gonna remember me, and that’s probably the most important of the three."
He is quick to add that the work is never finished. "When you’re working on your message, it’s never over. You’re never done. It’s never perfect." The same is true of a career. "Change is gonna be the norm," Craig said, "not just today, but also in five years and 10 years." The pivots are not detours from the path. They are the path.
Which brings it back to the question his dad asked Frank, the one that quietly runs under this whole conversation. What’s more important to you? Craig spent a long time answering it before he answered it honestly. His story is a good reminder that most of us will get more than one chance to.
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