BYU attracts students with its highly ranked academic programs, commitment to undergraduate teaching, blend of study and faith, and opportunities to follow in the footsteps of parents and grandparents.
But for Kevin Smith, something else drew him to Provo from California: “There was really good skiing,” he says with a laugh. “When you’re 18, you don’t make rational decisions. You just make decisions based on what feels like the most fun.”
He did find fun at BYU—plus friends, family, faith, and new skills from his marketing degree. These components ultimately helped him craft a flexible career that allowed for family time and plenty of skiing, mountain biking, and especially surfing.
“My philosophy throughout life has really been about balance,” says Smith, who retired in 2021. He spent his career entirely at AT&T, much of it working from his home in San Diego, with a front-row seat to the telecom industry’s evolution from dishwasher-sized fax machines to smartphones. He moved from sales to marketing to customer experience, always adapting his skill set so he could stick with one employer and keep his family rooted. “Even though I was at one company for almost 40 years, I feel like I had five different careers,” Smith says. “My job was the means to an end. And the end was family, faith, and fun.” In that order.
Longtime friend and fellow surfer Jeff Odom admires Smith’s ability to get work done while focusing on his priorities. “I’ve always known Kevin to excel at his job,” Odom says, “but it didn’t define him.”
Smith has never shied away from working hard—or playing hard. “A famous surfer once said that the best surfer is the one who is having the most fun,” Smith shares. “I have just about always been the best surfer in the water.”
Shoring Up
No one taught Smith, who grew up in Malibu, California, how to surf. Surfing was just the kind of thing you learned on your own with a beat-up board, he says, trying until you got it right. Smith got into skiing on a family trip to Park City, Utah. After he received his driver’s license, he was known to drive six hours from his home to ski at Mammoth Mountain. “I also played soccer and got into bluegrass, and I just had way more fun than any adolescent should be allowed to have,” he says.
These passions came with him to BYU. Smith bought a Sundance season pass his first day in Provo and “skied my brains out” almost every afternoon. He made the BYU soccer team and formed a bluegrass band by advertising with a 3" x 5" index card on the Ride Board in the Wilkinson Student Center: “Bluegrass flatpicker looking for a banjo player.” Amid the skiing, soccer, and jamming, did he get any studying done? “Enough to keep me off of probation,” Smith says with a laugh. “Let’s put it this way—I was not on academic scholarship.”
His bandmates were all returned missionaries, and their testimonies nudged Smith toward a mission himself. “They were a good influence on me when I needed a good influence,” he recalls. The group played for the BYU International Folk Dance Ensemble, touring Europe with the dancers for six weeks. “I was actually in England when I got my mission call,” Smith remembers. “My parents sent me a telegram saying where I was going: Argentina.”
Smith’s priorities ironed out again when he met Laurie, a BYU–Hawaii student, at a young single adult dance in California soon after his mission. He was shocked to run into her again in Provo—she had transferred. “After that, I don’t think we left each other’s side,” Smith says. “We were engaged and then married just four months later.” At first, he had rose-colored glasses: By golly, we’ll just live on love, he thought. But after the honeymoon, it became clear that he needed a plan.
“I wasn’t going to be a professional skier,” Smith says. He wanted a career that would not only allow room for his hobbies but also support Laurie in her goal to stay home with their kids when they started a family. Smith asked his brother-in-law, a CPA, which career he would pick if he could choose again. He said marketing. “That was good enough for me,” Smith says. He hung up his skis for a time and hit the books.
Testing the Waters
The ocean soon called the Smiths back to their home state. Skiing was too expensive for the young family, which now included two children. “Surfing is cheap,” Smith says. “And that’s the honest answer to why we ended up in California.”
After his graduation, Smith took a job selling attic insulation door-to-door in
Los Angeles. “It was great motivation to go back to school,” he says. He attended California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for his MBA with an emphasis in finance. “That school is one of the best California state schools,” he says. But after his rigorous undergrad at BYU, “the graduate program seemed easy. I felt very well prepared.”
An institute teacher connected Smith to the company where he would spend his entire career. Smith’s first gig with AT&T was selling private branch exchange systems—internal telephone networks for businesses. He kept his surfboard in the back of his car as he drove between customers, stopping at beaches during lunch breaks.
After about a year, “an opportunity came up that would require us to move to the Bay Area, which we were not happy about,” Smith says, noting that the waves were colder up north. “But they made me a great offer to work in finance.” He took it—the position aligned with what Smith had studied in graduate school—and the job shifted his career trajectory.
At the time, the Bell Telephone Company, led by AT&T, held a monopoly in the telephone industry. The US government broke it up, and Smith worked in restructuring capital management for AT&T, reprioritizing its budget for a new competitive environment. “I became a strong contributor to that whole effort,” he says.
The project opened doors for Smith. After three years in the Bay Area, he found an opening in project management within the company and was able to move his family to Encinitas in San Diego County in 1987—and they never left.
Developing a good reputation within a large organization “allows you to sometimes dictate the circumstances under which you will work,” Smith says. He was granted remote work arrangements for the rest of his career, even at a time when it was mostly unheard of. “I was able to raise my family without moving them all over the place.”
A solid personal brand, Smith says, is something that he’s carried from one part of the company to another. The brand Smith built is “to always pitch in and help,” says Catherine Gibson, a former supervisor. “He’s very much a team player—collaborative, competitive, fun to be around. He takes his work seriously, but he doesn’t take himself seriously.”
Staying Afloat
After a few years as a project manager, Smith moved into corporate sales: first as sales manager, doing much of his business along the Mexico–US border, then eventually as sales director for business services over Latin America. In both roles, his Spanish skills came in handy.
At one point, a colleague at AT&T Mexico was slated to give a speech at World Trade Center San Diego; when she had to back out, she tapped Smith to cover for her. He hesitated but figured that if he “blew it, they’d never ask me back. No biggie.”
Instead, it went so well that Smith was asked to participate on a committee; a year later he was appointed to the board, and after a few more years, in 1996, he was elected chair of World Trade Center San Diego. “I had five little kids at home, and my quota didn’t go away,” he says. “It was a busy time, but it was so cool.” His work solidified him as a leader in the local business community.
In 2005, Smith moved from managing sales to leading customer advisory councils, bringing AT&T’s biggest corporate accounts together to discuss their needs and seek feedback. Smith took charge in Canada and Latin America. “He was so easy to talk to, so good at getting the customers to open up, and then good at resolving concerns,” Gibson says.
Smith often brought his guitar to customer advisory councils, breaking up long, multiday events by leading the customers in song. “Which is not what you’re thinking of when you’ve got gigantic brands like Mastercard and Kimberly-Clark together—sitting around and singing in a hotel in São Paulo,” says Gibson. “But that just exemplifies Kevin. He wanted to bring everyone together as a true community.”
The role as director of customer advisory councils, Smith says, was his best gig at AT&T. But in all big organizations, things change. Gibson explains, “There’s a reorganization every year. Kevin has had to take steps back in his career.” After Smith’s customer advisory role was dissolved, he took a role as marketing lead, technically down a rung on the so-called corporate ladder. However, he was excited to stay on the cutting edge of the industry in working with mobile products—and to stay in a role at AT&T that preserved his personal priorities.
According to Gibson, Smith’s career move reflected his commitment to maintaining a well-rounded life centered on his family. “What was really important to him? That he could go surfing, that he was active in his church,” Gibson recalls.
For Smith, climbing the corporate ladder was not worth the sacrifices. “It’s not what I wanted,” he says.
After a year, Smith did move back up to a director position when the regional vice president for Latin America asked him to manage a partnership with América Móvil, the largest telecom company in Latin America. “It was very rewarding,” Smith says. “We were able to really grow that business; we’d doubled it in a year.” But the politics of international business eventually shattered the alliance in 2015, and “all of a sudden, I’m looking for a job,” Smith remembers.
He wasn’t ready to retire, so he scrambled to find another role inside AT&T. After reaching out to everyone in his network, Smith landed a position in customer experience, “which was something new to me entirely. But they liked that I had so much experience in the company.” Smith reviewed customer processes and noted superfluous and expensive service calls for technicians. Instead of sending in the big guns for minor equipment issues, suggested Smith, why not create technical training videos for salespeople? A day or two later, he got a call from his boss: “How soon do you think you can have the videos ready?”
Smith downloaded some editing software and got to work. Eventually he built up a video-production team that made trainings on topics such as new products or installations. “There was a definite learning curve,” he says. “But I hired some very creative people and just made sure I didn’t hold them back.” Smith became the head scriptwriter. “By the time I left, we had made well over 400 videos,” he says. “It was a crazy way to finish my career at the company.”
Lifting Where You Surf
When Smith’s longtime friend Odom was a teenager growing up in Encinitas, Saturdays started at daybreak. Smith, Odom’s Young Men leader for a time, saw to that. Odom recalls, “I could tell you story after story of him dragging me out of bed at five in the morning to go surfing.” Smith taught Odom how to surf, tracked him down when he missed church, and “was involved in my life in such a positive way.” Odom also credits Smith for helping him prepare for a mission, career, and parenthood.
Odom’s parents had sacrificed relationships with they joined the Church, and the Smiths became Odom’s extended family. “For me, being on the straight and narrow, even later in life, was because of Kevin’s influence,” says Odom, now a lawyer in Seattle.
Surfing brought Smith and Odom together through the years as they traveled with friends through Latin America, seeking out quiet beaches and tall waves. Surfing has always been social for Smith; he’s taken colleagues, friends of his kids, and new acquaintances out to the waves. When his daughter Calli brought her then-boyfriend, Matt Kelsay, home for the first time, Smith welcomed him to the family by inviting him to surf. “Kevin enjoys sharing what he loves with other people,” says Kelsay. Eventually, Kelsay took the missionary lessons and joined both the Church and the Smith family, becoming a son-in-law. “Kevin was always there to answer questions and be helpful and share his testimony in short, simple ways,” Kelsay says.
When Smith paddles out in the ocean alone, the waves are meditative. “The exhilaration, being close with nature—some of the best prayers I’ve had in my life have been when I’ve been out somewhere surfing by myself, not unlike Joseph Smith in the Sacred Grove,” Smith says.
Smith’s most-treasured surf spot remains pristine and untouched, mostly because of its remote location in Baja California, six hours south of San Diego across the Mexico border. “The waves are great,” he says. After finding the location with friends, “I started taking my family camping there every year for Christmas.” Eventually, Smith and his surfing buddies leased the land and built a beach house. “We have great surfing in our front yard and nobody else around,” Smith says. “That’s my happy spot.”
Smith built connections in the local branch of the Church in San Quintín, the closest city to the beach house. Kelsay describes giving a family a ride home from church one Sunday in Baja California and dropping them off at a tarp propped up by pallets over a dirt floor. “It was the roughest display of poverty you can really imagine,” Kelsay recalls. Smith grabbed the family some groceries, and when he returned to California, he coordinated an Eagle Scout project to build them a home.
On another trip, Kelsay helped Smith build a playground on the seashell-strewn lot outside a cinder block school. For several years, Smith enlisted members from his home stake to donate clothing and toys for people in San Quintín for Christmas. He also found a way to help an underfunded San Quintín fire station. A friend of Smith’s happened to be a fire captain, and Smith learned that California law requires fire stations to replace equipment every 10 years. “We filled my Yukon to the brim with firefighting jackets and hoses and stretchers and nozzles and all kinds of stuff,” Smith says, hauling it down to be used in San Quintín.
None of Smith’s service was formal. “Lift where you stand, help where you can,” Kelsay says to describe Smith’s efforts.
“It’s our way of giving back,” Smith adds. “By blessing the lives of the people who actually live in San Quintín, I think we’ve done a lot of good over the last 30 years.”
Enjoying Endless Summer
After reviewing their finances, Smith and his wife decided it was time to retire from AT&T in 2021. Smith dabbled in consulting work for a year and a half before settling fully into retirement. Now, “the first thing I do when I wake up is take a look at the surf cameras,” he says. Or he’ll get out his mountain bike, often taking along a grandkid or two. All five of his children and 13 of his grandchildren live within 15 minutes.
“Kevin is the Energizer Bunny,” Kelsay says. “He just goes and goes, and he loves his family; he’s always trying to help the grandkids feel involved and active. He’s a good example to my children by displaying his faith and helping them grow theirs while doing all these fun things together.”
Smith and his wife now volunteer as stake service missionaries at a hospital in Encinitas. They check in with patients who list The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as their preferred religion, helping them get the sacrament or a blessing, if needed. “We’re just there to let them know that somebody cares,” Smith says. “Every Sunday we leave there with big smiles, knowing that this is what we’re supposed to be doing.”
A few times per week, Smith joins local bluegrass jam sessions. “It keeps my mind sharp,” he says. “Once the music gets in your blood, you’re always going to play it.” In November 2024 he reconnected with two former BYU bandmates who flew in for a bluegrass competition.
His greatest friendships and joys, Smith says, have come from being an active member of the Church, serving several times as the kind of bishop who was right there moving boxes with the elders quorum and bringing meals with the Relief Society.
Smith’s retirement reflects the kind of life he’s tried to carve out for himself ever since he and Laurie began their journey together: faith, family, service, and outdoor adventure. “That fun component made me a better, well-rounded person,” Smith says, “and gave me opportunities to serve in creative ways.”
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Written by Sara Atwood
Photography by Bradley Slade
About the Author
Sara Smith Atwood is an associate editor at Y Magazine. Though she now lives in Orem with her family, she grew up in San Diego and loves the waves—but has not tried surfing.
