Robert Morcos’ career as an entrepreneur goes back a long way. When he was just eight years old, he started his first entrepreneurial endeavor by recruiting neighborhood kids to work for his car wash business.

A few years later, when he was 15, he began buying old cell phones from classmates, and even teachers at his school, working with a friend’s father who refurbished the devices and exported them to Latin America.

Back then, pre-smartphone, only a few phone models were available, and there weren’t many options for what to do with old phones.

“I basically had an entire school of people, 1,000 people. Teachers, and even the principal, would sell me phones,” he recalls.

The oldest of five siblings, Morcos was always eager to help his family out. His mother supported the business, too, driving him to pawn shops where he made a deal with the owners to purchase all their phones every week.

Forging a path

Morcos’ entrepreneurial ambitions kept growing after he finished school, when he began Social Mobile, an application  that allowed people to easily access social media on devices with the click of a button. The company pivoted a number of times over the years, and today, the company is known as NEXA and Morcos is the CEO.

NEXA focuses on fully customized, scalable enterprise mobility solutions, with more than 15 million devices around the globe in a wide range of industries, including healthcare, retail, transportation, public safety and defense.

The company provides custom design, manufacturing, deployment, managed services, lifecycle management and more, supplying solutions for the world’s biggest companies.

“They’re completely different businesses in completely different industries, and all of those companies have the exact same problems,” he says.

Some of the solutions NEXA provides include increasing product availability and producing devices that companies will be able to utilize for multiple years in a row that meet global regulatory and compliance requirements.

It also focuses on customizing each solution, from physical design elements like colors and logos, to specific software needs and more. Devices include everything from handhelds, tablets, wearables, IoT devices and more.

“We’re essentially industry agnostic,” Morcos says, noting NEXA’s enterprise-grade solutions work in all industries, including education, healthcare, retail, defense and for first responders.

Indeed, the company has worked with companies ranging from vaccine logistics company VaxCare to food delivery business DoorDash, providing hardware and purpose-built devices to streamline workflows and improve each company’s efficiency.

Connected to community

Growing up in Miami, Morcos is still deeply involved with his South Florida community. He particularly enjoys serving on the Junior Achievement board where he can support young people and help them thrive.

“Being able to give back to an organization that educates on financial literacy is quite important,” he says. “No-one ever once told me what a balance sheet is, or what a profit and loss is – when I was in high school or elementary school, you never even heard of these things.”

He says being able to work with an organization educating kids about things like balance sheets, running organizations and how credit works is important.

Morcos is also dedicated to NEXA’s work with Mobile School Pantry, a nonprofit that provides food for the local community. The company also helps provide families with holiday turkeys and meals, helping 1,000 families for Thanksgiving, as well as providing groceries other times during the year.

Morcos’ connection to others doesn’t end there – since 2016, he has also been a member of YPO, which offers executives the opportunity to be part of a global business leadership community.

“Whatever you need, someone in YPO has been there or done that,” he says. “It includes a lot of entrepreneurs in a massive network. I love the fact that you’re like one degree of separation or connection from anybody you need to speak to in business.”

He says getting involved with YPO provided him with access to resources and entrepreneurs.

“There’s plenty of consultants that will tell you how to do stuff, but I’d so much rather get the information from some other person that actually does it for a living, and it’s definitely opened that up for me,” he says.

And Morcos himself can offer some advice to others, having already been recognized with various honors, including EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2025 Florida. He was also named Solution Innovator of the Year by Google’s Android Enterprise team in 2023.

Along the way, he’s faced many challenges, from industry changes to regulatory and governmental hurdles, but he’s most proud that he’s been able to do it all without outside investments.

“We took this company from a startup with no business plan to where it is today without a single dollar of outside institutional investment,” he reflects.

“We stayed agile, we pivoted, we did it again. It just shows that we’re nimble and making the right decisions.”