 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Katharine Noor. Today, my guest is Travis Smith, the CEO of Take Back Control GGS. Our topic is 15-year-old eSports entrepreneur, Take Back Control GGS. Welcome Travis. Hi. Thank you for having me. All right. It's great to be here, and so you are the 15-year-old entrepreneur. That's fantastic. Congratulations on what you're doing, Travis. Thank you so much. Tell us about your business. My business is an eSports team, mainly based in Chicago to register LLC in the state of Illinois. We mainly start the business to give more opportunities to minorities such as myself, but over time we branched out to give them more opportunities to everybody in the world. Fantastic. So, what made you interested in starting your own team? I'm going to be honest. What made me interested in starting my own team is I wasn't good enough at regular games to go professional in those, so I was like, what's the other way to do something good and that can actually kind of move the eSports scene where I don't have to lose my mind playing the game all day? So I felt eSports teams was the best thing I could do, and after a few connections hooked me up with a few people that could help me start it, that's exactly what I did. All right. So, what games does your team play? We mainly prioritize in Fortnite, Call of Duty, Rocky Lee, Apex Legends, sorry, and Roblox and Content Creation. Okay. How did you pick those games? My favorite games growing up as a kid, I like to play Fortnite, obviously, just like every other teenager, Roblox, Apex Legends, I like watching the content on YouTube. That's mainly how I picked the games, but I mostly looked at higher tier eSports teams and also got inspiration from those. And so, how many people are on your teams? Right now we have around 67 members. Wow. And you're the supreme ruler of your team. It's over everything, over everything. So, how did you get so many people involved in this? It started out really slow. We had around five members when we first started, but as soon as I started branching out and actually sending more to the community on how and why we are trying to change the eSports scene every day, a lot of people started to reach out and a lot of them were great choices. They helped the community kind of aspect of the team and overall the growth of the team. And so, what are the age ranges of your team members? If I'm going to be honest, it goes from my age all the way up to 30 at most. So, you're actually, you have a company at age 15 and you have people that are on your team that are much older than you. How is that? It's a little bit kind of crazy just because I'm like, I'm controlling you kind of, not like that, but technically it kind of is like that just because it's a little bit weird for me because I've never been in a position to kind of be over 67 people. I've kind of been over myself my whole life only. So, it's been a weird journey, but it's definitely been working out for me. And what held were you when you started this? Fourteens, turn 15 last year. All right. And so, what do your parents think of all this? Mainly they support it. They're one of my biggest supporters. That's definitely one of the reasons why my eSports team has succeeded so much is just because of my parents and my family support financially and overall mentally, because it's a lot on me as a 15-year-old, obviously. So, they definitely support it. They just want to see what's going to happen in a few years and how I'm going to do it. So, what have your biggest challenges been? My biggest challenges are mainly trying to push the team more into public events. And also my other biggest challenge is financially just because I am 15. So, I'm not a millionaire. I don't have a lot of money. So, it kind of starts adding up over time just because I can't keep asking this person or a sponsor or something for money when everybody doesn't have it like that. Okay, so, I would imagine that you would really like some sponsors. Is that right? Yes. Okay. So, let's just, I hope everyone who watches this who is interested in your path will think about sponsoring you. And at the end of this, we'll provide information about how to connect with you. So, I know you're in Chicago, Travis. Are your team members mostly in that area or are they in other parts of the country? Actually, we only have around 10 team members in Chicago only. Most of my friends and a few other people that are actually just trying to make a name for themselves in the eSports team. We have a lot of players in Dallas, Seattle, just bigger places. It's not mainly only Chicago. And we can go out to different countries. We have somebody in Serbia. You know, it's everywhere right now. Well, that's kind of amazing. So, you not only are a 15-year-old entrepreneur, but you have a global company where you even have at least one player in Europe. That's very impressive. So, how do you balance school and running a business? I'll go be honest. I don't. I just try to go every day and do as much work as I can at night after I get my homework done, after I play a little bit of basketball for my team, do a few other things around the house, and then I get to work on my eSports team, take a few days off just to play and just be by myself. But overall, mainly at night, that's how I kind of do my eSports work. And during the day, I focus more on school. Well, that sounds like a good thing. What are your aspirations with school? Are you planning on going to college? Yes. I actually am planning on going to college. I don't know what college I have two more years to decide, but I definitely figure it out soon. They sure have a lot of eSports programs in universities right now. Are you kind of thinking about that, or are you thinking about another area? I was actually, yeah, I was mainly thinking about that, and I was going to try to master and probably something around arts or singing, just because that's another thing that I like to do on the sidelines. You're definitely a talented guy. And you mentioned playing basketball. Are you on a team at school? Yeah, I'm on my varsity team at school. All right. So you are just incredibly motivated, an amazing inspirational person for all of us. So what advice would you give to other people your age or even other young adults about starting and running an eSports business? My advice would be mainly to make a plan and kind of work towards that over time. I wanted to start in the eSports team just because of knowledge I have learned from other big eSports teams and just overall going through the scene. I didn't know how to make a business plan until four months after I started the company. So my advice to younger adults and or people around my age is make a plan on what you want to do, how you're going to do it, what makes you different from all the other opportunities throughout the market, and just work towards that overall. So let's kind of dive into your company, your team. What really makes you different than others? Mainly what makes us different is I like to keep the family aspect throughout the team. So whenever you see someone throughout the team, they're going to be nice. They're going to be nice to you. They're going to be like, hey, you want to do this? You want to be in this opportunity? You want to play the game? I like to keep it around that area. And also another reason that makes us different is just overall the opportunities that we give to people around the city. We host more events and we like to host land events just to give people that professional gaming aspect that they probably have never understood or felt throughout their whole gaming career, which is why a lot of people turn to things like the streets and stuff like that. This is why one of the main reasons I started the team is to help stop things like that, just so people can start playing the game and doing what they love for a little bit of money like 200, 300, something like that. But it adds up over time if you become more good. So you talk about keeping people off the street. Do you think is that one of your fundamental missions to keep youth and young adults engaged? And something important like playing competitively rather than turning to other much more damaging things? Yes, that is one of the fundamentals that we have kind of grew into over time. I know when we first started it wasn't really doing anything. It was pretty slow business just regarding that certain aspect. But over time, as we started to grow bigger, we started to host more events in Chicago. We plan on hosting another one in Dallas soon. Just overall going around the world just to help younger youth just do something positive with their life instead of kind of throwing it away. That's definitely something that we like to push every single day throughout anything that we do. And I know we like to push through other races and anything to be honest. But that's mainly our target is targeting younger youth, such as myself, to kind of get into the professional gaming and not into the streets. Sure. So what, how has this impacted your own personal development? It definitely matured me way more than I originally was when I started the business. You know, I was more like thinking like, I'm going to do this for like five months, six months, and I'm going to be done. I don't want to do this no more. But over time, it definitely becomes something that I love and I love doing and waking up to every single morning and just waking up to the team messages saying, what's up? Good morning, chat. Love y'all. Have a good day. It's just so awesome being the CEO of my team. And it's definitely took more of a mental toll on me because I also feel on another side that I'm doing a little bit too much for my age sometimes. Just because, you know, I'm still young. I do want to kind of start living my life a little bit more. But I know that that comes over time as I do more work so I can get more free time. And yeah, that's definitely something I like to talk about, just the mental toll that it's had on me. But it's definitely matured me in more positive ways than negative. Sure. Well, you know, I have to tell you, Travis, that, you know, you're the youngest person that I've had on my show and the only teenager. And I have to tell you that all of our engagements have been very professional. You've responded to every single email very quickly and very professionally. And you have such a professional presence on LinkedIn. And every single thing you've done, you showed up on time today. You presented well on camera. Everything you do shows professionalism well beyond your age. So you certainly are someone that, you know, are a rising star in business and in sports. So I think that's impressive. And I definitely hope we'll have lots of viewers to this so that they can be introduced to you. Have you, so you hear my compliments to you. Do you hear that a lot from people? Honestly, I actually do. They're like, you know, you're doing a lot for your age. Where did you learn this from? Where did you learn all this professional talk? How are you doing this? How are you doing that? You know, it's more a lot of doubt that I've heard be just because of my age. But mainly when I hear good things, it's like, you know, you're awesome. You're doing a lot for your age. I've never seen this before, just regarding people around your age. And it definitely motivates me a lot to keep doing what I'm doing because it brings more connections. It brings people to kind of more understand where I'm from and how I'm trying to impact the game scene in a positive way. So when you were a little kid, at what age did you think, oh, maybe I'll, you know, own my own business someday or maybe I will, you know, have an eSports team? If I'm being honest, I never thought that. I always thought I was going to be going pro in Call of Duty, cranking 90s and Fortnite, you know, just going crazy, going professional in those games. And I guess owning the eSports team never came to my mind until maybe three years ago when I tried to do it. But that, that failed horribly. And then in 2022, when I officially made up the name, made up the logo, kind of figured out what I'm going to do to make this team succeed, I kind of put that all into play and it definitely worked out. I never thought this would happen, though. So during COVID, like 2020, 2021 and going into 2022, how did that impact your kind of development towards starting this business and your game playing and your interaction with people? Definitely 2020 kind of ruling my interaction. To be honest, I wasn't talking to too many people. I was in the house on online school, Zoom, playing the game during class, stuff like that. Going into 2021, I definitely started to open up more to talk to more people, but I've never been a type of guy who kind of goes out and talks to other people, which is why another reason why I say the team has definitely helped me develop in a positive way. Because ever since now, I would stay in the back of the class, back of the corner, just watching everybody else have fun while I'm sitting there trying to think. Should I go up to them and then the class ends up being over or the event ends up being over? Going into 2020, oh, sorry, going into 2022, definitely I started opening up a lot more, more than 2021 and 2020, but it never got to the point that it has been now. All right, yeah. I know that for a lot of people and companies, especially in eSports, they really changed things. And I know that because traditional sports was shut down, that eSports did kind of develop more during that time. And so interestingly, you're kind of one of those businesses that came out of COVID, like it was post-COVID. So that's kind of interesting. Yeah, it's pretty cool to me. Definitely things didn't start going into really effect until 2022, because I was so young in 2020 and 2021. I was mainly just worried about playing with my Legos, just going to school, trying to do my grades good. But it definitely started to warm up as I got older and definitely in 2020 too, I was like, I want to do this. So I'm going to do it, it's basically my mindset. So what kind of business skills did you have to acquire that were kind of challenging? Networking. Is the number one business skill that I had to acquire, especially as I started to go through this, I would go to events and I try to talk to people, but it just would never come out. But as soon as I started to meet more connections, they would be like, I'm going to connect you with him, I'm going to connect you with him, so they would kind of be with me while I'm introducing myself, giving my LinkedIn out. And that definitely helped so much, because now I can just go to an event. I see you, I'll say, what's up? How are you doing? How's your day going? But before now or before last year, I definitely would never do that. Another skill I definitely learned is to keep a strong mental set, because being an entrepreneur is not going to be 100% all the time. Your mental state is definitely going to go down, especially if you don't see things going your way. And I know that's a lot of reason why a lot of entrepreneurs quit, and is a big reason why I was going to quit is just because I wasn't seeing any growth in February to maybe like June at most. That's when we hit our first 1000, from 1000 to 5000. That's definitely where I started to become more motivated. I'm like, oh, it's actually happening. So definitely that's two big skill sets I've learned and kind of acquired. But I don't think about too many other things. That's mainly the two things I'm proud of myself for is just having a strong mental set because I didn't have one growing up. I definitely went through a lot growing up and also just talking and getting out of my comfort zone and networking. All right. So what are your future goals for the eSports industry and personally? Personally, I do want to also, like you said earlier, go to college, do some things in there. Maybe around eSports, I have to look more into that. Keep my grades up. Probably try to do anything around singing. I want to try and do a little bit of art stuff, just as a side gig, I guess. For eSports especially, I like to grow this team into something like, I'm sure you know, X sets, phase plan, big teams like that. I'm still kind of in the process of making my 2024 business plan. So I definitely have updates on that. But it's definitely a lot of plans that I have. I definitely want to grow this team into something where people know what the brand is. You know, that's the main thing I want to grow into in this coming year is brand recognition. Sorry, couldn't get that word out. All right, fantastic. And so what are your upcoming projects and ventures for your business? We plan to release a lot more merch in the coming months. Plan to host the LAN events in Dallas next month. Multiple events should be hosted in Chicago if I do things right, to be honest. But if I don't, I definitely plan to host at least two or three online, just because I don't know how many times we were going to be able to come out to an event. So online is definitely another way how people could just stay at home and do what they love. Events, probably if I do this right, more giveaways, more merch, obviously. We plan to drop merch releases every single month, as we just did for our 2024 collection a few days ago. That's really all as of now, as I said, my business plan is kind of still in the works right now. But it definitely will be finished soon, so I can definitely have more updates. So I've heard a lot of people say that there's challenges with parental approval of game playing. Have you ever had any situation where your parents did not approve of you playing games? Actually, my mom, a few times she would be like, get off the game, go take out the garbage, go wash dishes. But other than that, mainly she was very supportive of my gaming career. Even now, she still kind of understands if I'm like, Mom, please, can you hold on? I got to get on this meeting. I got to do this real quick. It's never been like, I don't believe in you. I don't believe in this. She's definitely supported me this whole way and kind of is one of the main reasons my team is even still going, at least financially. Grandmother, she helps me a lot. Overall, my family is very supportive of my career choice and they definitely want to see me succeed in it and they definitely want to see where it can take me in the coming years and how it can give me more opportunities in the real world. Sure, and I think it will. So how about your friends? Do they complain to you ever about not getting to game as much as it like or having their parents put controls on them? Yes, they actually do. My friends are more game heads than me to be honest. They actually like to play the game all day and as soon as their mom's like, you know, you're not supposed to be on the game this late. They get mad and start yelling and stuff. But I definitely have a more like half mature friend group where they're like, okay, Mom, I understand, not as getting mad, but definitely they're more into the gaming, professional gaming and playing the game all day than me personally. Definitely I would do it if I could, but to see how I have school basketball, doing a little singing, you know, trying to do the businesses. It's not much gaming that I can actually do. So in light of the fact that you're a basketball player, do you play like NFL? I mean, excuse me, NBA too and stuff like that? Sometimes I do play 2K. I mainly just play competitive games. That's what kind of keeps me going. You know, just Fortnite arena, stuff like that. The finals, the new game. Yes, just mainly competitive games. I don't find too much enjoyment in playing sports games just because like, why can I do this online? I could just go in real life and just go to a court or something like that. So that's mainly the reason why I don't play too much of NBA 2K or like NFL or stuff like that. Yeah, so do you, looking at the future of traditional sports, because I know that you're a basketball player and you're also an eSports player and team owner, do you see that traditional sports have a future in light of the fact that so many kids are moving to eSports? If I'm going to be honest, I'm sorry, I love eSports, but traditional sports definitely kind of beats it out in terms of viewership. I know the eSports team has been a little bit dry this last two, three years because of we're just getting out of COVID. There wasn't too many events that was able to be hosted. I know it's definitely been starting to light up soon. So I definitely still see a future in traditional sports. I don't think my grandpa is going to come to eSports if he could just watch some basketball or the Bulls or something at home. So I don't think eSports is going to kill it too much, but it's definitely going to be something as a big competitor in the coming years. Do you think your friends feel the same? Are they into traditional sports, or do they like games more? They definitely like games more. That wouldn't mind watching the Bulls lose, but they're definitely more into games and just watching big tournaments in Fortnite, college duty, stuff like that, instead of watching NFL or something like that. Right, right. So what skills do you think from traditional sports, like as a basketball player, can be transferable to gaming? If I can think about it for a few seconds, one main skill that I can definitely see being transformed from traditional sports to gaming is the drive. Definitely pushing yourself to keep improving and doing more is definitely something I see in professional gamers and also NBA players like LeBron. You know, he's not stopping. He's pushing himself to keep going. And for, let's say, a tier one player like Faker, he keeps going and he's been playing for so long. A lot of the things that I see in esports can definitely be transformative sports. And that's the main thing that I see is just the drive of just improving yourself and trying to improve your gameplay every single day. Sure, absolutely. And do you have coaches for your team? No, at this moment we do not. We have had coaches for certain rosters, such as our Valorant roster. We had a coach that we had to pay. You know, it depends on really what game we're in. Like for games like Fortnite, we don't really see the purpose, but it's definitely something we can look into because I know that's a big thing that a bunch of esports teams do. But at this moment, we don't have any coaches throughout the team. Okay, so we're getting to the end now. And how can people find you if they're interested in being a sponsor and being on a team on your team or helping you in any way? So on all social medias, it's my name Travis Smith. Double T throughout all social medias, Twitter, Instagram. Also on LinkedIn, you can find me as my name Travis Smith. You can find the team at twitter.com, take back controls GGs, and or take back control ggs.com. Website should be up soon. All right, fantastic. Well, Travis, you've been a fantastic guest and I really wish you great luck in the future and that you excel in everything that you do, and particularly with this venture. Thank you so much. That means a lot. You've been a great host. All right, thanks so much and thank you to our viewers today. And we'll see you in two weeks. Aloha.