#49 Ben Grossman

Grossman Marketing Group (asi/215205)/SwagCycle – Co-President

2022 Rank: NR

Industry Experience: 17 Years

Previous Appearances on Power 50: 0

Ben Grossman has always had the heart of an entrepreneur.

As a senior in high school in the late 1990s, Grossman and a friend launched their own line of T-shirts, bringing the fledgling brand with them when they started college. A variation of the then-popular No Fear and Life Is Good brands that dominated tee culture, Live Big ended up in 15 stores across six states. The teens also designed – and coded – an online store at a time when e-commerce tools like Shopify were barely a gleam in the eye of Silicon Valley tech bros.

The Live Big brand didn’t survive much beyond college – Grossman and his friend received a serendipitous offer from a company that wanted to buy the phrase to use as their corporate slogan right as the two were ready to move on from their undergrad side hustle. Still, Grossman says he’s never forgotten the lessons learned during his first foray into the world of branded merch.

“That was such a valuable experience to get to go and generate sales from scratch,” Grossman says. “I’ve always been excited at the possibilities out there – coming up with an idea and trying to figure out how to make it happen.”

Grossman brings that same energy to his role as co-president of Grossman Marketing Group (asi/215205), the Somerville, MA-based distributorship he runs with his older brother, David, and to sustainable sister company SwagCycle, which helps recycle or rehome obsolete or unwanted promotional products.

A fourth-generation 113-year-old family-owned business with a roster of household name, blue-chip clients, Grossman Marketing Group has remained on a growth-focused path with about $45 million in total revenue in 2022 – including promo business and other revenue streams. That’s thanks in large part to a string of what Grossman calls “compassionate M&A” – acquiring nine companies over the last decade.

“We don’t aim to cut costs to the bone of the companies we acquire,” Grossman says. “Rather, we aim to build a really good team and add strong talent to our company and potentially add good clients.”

Most recently, Grossman Marketing Group acquired Sarasota, FL-based Links Marketing Group, which connects them to a client base that includes the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) and gives the distributor a strategic toehold in the Southeast.

Meanwhile, it’s Grossman’s sustainability work that’s really resonating, and making him a go-to industry voice on the subject. The 43-year-old father of three and 2022 Bess Cohn Humanitarian of the Year recipient has been a passionate environmentalist for years; he used to hold breakfast events with top clients to discuss green marketing trends and has been blogging about sustainability for more than a decade and a half.

Expanding on those efforts, Grossman and his team launched SwagCycle in 2019 – to help brands and the promo companies that service them deal with unwanted merch in an ethical and sustainable way. Over the last four years, he says, they’ve kept around 1.8 million items out of landfills and facilitated $3.12 million in charitable donations.

“When companies rebrand or get acquired or change marketing messaging, it leads to the creation of obsolete products, and finding a home for those products can be very labor intensive,” Grossman says. “We set out to build SwagCycle to be a frictionless platform to make it really easy to divest of these goods in a responsible way either through charitable donations or recycling and upcycling initiatives.”

Demand for SwagCycle’s services – including the “bespoke waste management” it offers to underwrite the free charitable donations it facilitates – continues to grow, and Grossman says he’d like to allocate more resources and expand SwagCycle further into other countries.

“We’ve had some folks expressing interest in almost franchising SwagCycle, kind of taking over and running a European arm of SwagCycle or a South American arm of SwagCycle,” Grossman says. “It’s something we’re exploring.”