I was ten when the Chinese table tennis team of ping-pong diplomacy fame came to Long Island. It was 1972, a year after the American team's visit to China, and the Chinese national team was touring the United States. My father, Mort, was one of the people who helped bring them to us. I was made a delegate and interviewed on Chinese radio, my answers translated into Mandarin.
That was also the year I beat nine-year-old Eric Boggan at a Long Island tournament. Eric and I had already been fierce competitors for three years. While we both hated losing, he despised losing to me. And on that day, he took the loss so hard that he left the building and began walking down the highway, on his way home (twenty miles away). Some time later, a State Trooper brought him back to the tournament site. His father tells the story in Eric's Table Tennis Hall of Fame profile. In it, I am the "another kid." Two years later, at the 1974 U.S. Open in Oklahoma City, he and I won the under-13 doubles national championship. Four years after that, at age fifteen, Eric became the youngest U.S. men's table tennis champion in history. As for me, I moved on to tennis, becoming a tournament-level junior journeyman.
For my parents, my brother Jeff, and myself, table tennis had become our family's business. Jeff later wrote it all down in a memoir, Family Pong: A Table Tennis History of the Zakarin Family.
I graduated from NYU in 1984, spent a few years working in financial services, then two years producing independent films with my cousin Scott Zakarin. One of them, a children's musical called Creating Rem Lezar, has over the years become a kitschy cult classic. Another, The Gifted, screened in the market at Cannes, where Roger Ebert promised to watch the whole thing and told me not to ask what he thought. In 1989, I started American Automotive Equipment, and over the next twenty-three years, I built it into a distributor and importer selling throughout North America. That was supposed to be my last job.
Then, in 2009, inaccurate information about me appeared online. Before long, it had become the first thing people found when they searched my name. I hired a firm to help. When that did not work, I hired another, and eventually a third. By 2012, I had spent roughly fifty thousand dollars, with very little to show for it.
It was difficult to accept that people who knew nothing about me could search my name and walk away believing something untrue. I had spent more than two decades building a business, and now this was how someone might first encounter me.
In 2013, a year after selling 51% of the company, I decided to see whether I could solve the problem myself. I learned how search engines evaluate information and why certain pages keep appearing ahead of others. I also learned how difficult, and sometimes impossible, it can be to get something removed from the internet. Eventually, I was able to change what people found when they searched my name so that the results gave a more accurate account of who I was.
I thought that would be the end of it. But people began asking what I had done, and then whether I could help a friend or family member. I had no intention of starting another company. Still, the calls kept coming. The circumstances were different, but I recognized the frustration of being judged by something online and not knowing what to do about it.
I began helping people as a solo consultant, and in 2018, I formed RMG Digital Solutions. Today, there are eighteen of us at RMG, and we work with individuals and companies whose online records may be inaccurate, incomplete, or too thin to tell people much about them.
I still remember what it felt like to be the person asking for help, spending money, and wondering whether anything would change. That experience shapes how I work and what I am willing to promise. I cannot promise every client the outcome they want. But I understand why they are asking, and I take that responsibility personally.