Scott Jordan, Founder of SCOTTeVest

Business Brain, episode 615 for Casual Friday, January 17, National Customer Service Day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show by, for and about small business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton, and out here in.

Lafayette, California, I'm still Shannon Jean. How's it going, Dave? Happy Friday.

Happy casual Friday indeed, Shannon. I am so stoked to have someone on the show. Has been running at least this one business for, I believe, 25 years. He's been running Scottevest along with his wife, Scott Jordan. Thank you for coming on the show.

How you doing? Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. It's great to have you here. Yeah. Did I get that right? 25 years with Scotty Vest, Is that. Is that right?

I believe it's 24.

Okay.

Amazing, man.

I think 25 is in December of this year.

Okay. We've done this show for getting close. Yeah, we've done this show for 10 years. And I think Dave has talked about having you on the show someday for maybe eight of those. Eight of those years. So it's awesome. Thank you very much.

Well, I mean, you have an interesting story, and it continues to evolve. Like, you have not your business, the form of your business, what you do with the business. None of it has stagnated. And I love that you're always trying new things. How you were. You studied to be an attorney. Right. And then. And then got sick of that. Or. Or did that lead you to something that was like, I can do better this way. What was that initial path like?

So I was practicing law. I graduated law school in 1992, and I went to work for a very large law firm in Chicago that turned into dla, which is the largest law firm in the world by far. And I found myself dotting I's and crossing T's and arguing over condemnation provisions and contracts that were never going to see the light of day. And. And working my ass off. And after doing that for a number of years, I decided that I needed a way out and I started looking for another job. And what I found is, as a lawyer, you're perceived as a lawyer forever. You can never. You have a scarlet L on your forehead and you start looking for a job, and they're like, you're a lawyer, you know? And so I went to work in house counsel first. And. And it was even worse than a law firm because a variety of reasons. But then I went to work for a startup company, and lo and behold, they hired me as the lawyer. There were three of us of course. And they would only let me do legal stuff. And there's not a lot of legal stuff in a three person startup, Internet startup. It was called the Next 50, for the next 50 years of your life, Portal for seniors. And in doing so I was commuting. I commuted to Princeton, New Jersey from Chicago four days a week. So I had to go travel, you know, many hours and sit in an office doing nothing and then travel home, you know, for the weekend. And it was, it was miserable.

But those are traveling for people who don't know that those are airplane rides. Those, those are, that's just not like short little ride in the car or anything. Yeah, yeah.

And I shared an apartment with another guy and I would just go, go to work, shut my office door and start practicing law for other people, to be honest with you, because, I mean, just sitting there doing nothing, I would go into his office and say, I have an idea, you know, you know, let's get whoever saw the first version of Survivor with Rudy. Yeah, cantankerous old dude. I said, let's get him as our spokesperson for our show. And you know, I'm in touch and thought it was an awesome idea. He was, he was the star of the first season and he's like, listen, lawyer, do your lawyer things. Like, there's no lawyer things to do.

Stay in your lane.

Yeah, yeah, stay in my lane.

So that would have been a great idea. Did you get, did you get Rudy from Scott?

I was in touch with him, but, but, but of course the business guy thought I was a lawyer and it must be stupid.

So I think they might have missed out, Scott.

Well, I think so too. But long story short, you know, one, my, my boss, one of the three people, went to Ireland for three weeks in the summer and I'm like, I'm not flying to, to Princeton, New Jersey to show FaceTime, you know, when he's in Ireland. So I stayed at home and he found out I was at home and didn't fly back and forth saving his company a lot of money. And he, you know, big to do and I just said, this ain't working out. So I just quit. And, but what I did discover was, is in those travels, you know, I, I had a number of devices on me. This is your, you know, 1999 ish. And you know, big Walkmans and camcorders and you know, there were, there were cell phones, but, you know, there were, you know, you had to use a DPC to attach it to your pocket PC to get connectivity. Yeah. You know, and then fuel cells to get additional battery and all the different cords that we add.

And those, those phones required a lot of power. You needed like a nuclear reactor with you. You needed the Enron egg.

Yeah, it's a lot of stuff.

So it was, it was through the, that, that experience I said there's got to be a better way of, you know, carrying all your devices. And I looked at the, you know, what was on the market and what people were using, you know, fisherman's vest, travel vest and you know, big bulky vest, the Banana Republic vest, and put all your stuff in there and say, why doesn't someone design that with conduits for the wires and, and a better looking design with not external pockets but internal pockets. And I came up with the idea of ScotteVest and ScotteVest was initially just a proof of concept because I didn't know anything about apparel. But I filed for a patent for the incorporation of wires and clothing. And I thought if I use scottevest as an example for other companies showing them what technology enabled clothing could be as sort of Gore Tex or Intel inside ingredient branding or YKK for clothing, that I can come in to North Face and show them how to incorporate a pocket design that would allow you to carry your devices and multiple other things and add the brand technology enabled clothes.

I've seen that on my Scotty vest stuff and I knew what it stood for. But now hearing that the evolution was really, this was just sort of the, the, the thing to, as an example and, and hopefully somebody else would pick it up. Got it. Yeah.

And I filed for patent. It took many years for the patent to come. And, and, and lo and behold, while I was, you know, preparing the website, you know, which was a brochure website at the time, you know, Remember it's year 2000 and E commerce was really just starting. I think this was pre Amazon, if memory serves me, and, or maybe simultaneously with Amazon and my web designer said, do you want me to e commerce enable that website for you? I was like, what? How much is that going to cost? There's a plugin this and that, $700. I'm like, I don't know. And they said yes. And it was the very first clothing company to start on the Internet 20 years ago.

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That's. That's funny. Of course. Sure. I think every entrepreneur, when they first start, they think I'm going to just go public and.

Yeah.

You know, growth, growth, growth. And, you know, and all these concerns of grow or die.

Yes.

You know, you have to innovate. And I could not emphasize enough how stupid all that thinking was.

So before we get into that, and I want to get into that emphasis, but just to show people the arc here, how. What was the largest in terms of staff? What was the largest number of employees you had at Scottevest? At the biggest point, I think we.

Had 21 under this roof.

Got it.

And. And a number of contractors outside, but most of them were. Were here. And where I'm located, Sun Valley, Idaho. Which is.

Were you making the clothes here or. Yeah, yeah, that's how I figured out. So you're offshoring in China stuff. Bring in China. Bringing it over. Okay, got it.

Yeah. But we were fulfilling here for some time, which was costly and, you know, warehousing here, but we outsourced that as well.

Yeah. So 21 in place. I mean, that. That's That's a lot of people to carry, and you need a lot of revenue to support that. And infrastructure, just to support the infrastructure. I mean, you get above three to five people and things change real fast. With any.

Yeah, I mean, we had someone, just chief of staff, another person doing hr, the onboarding and off boarding, and all the drama that comes with all the employees. And I mean, it just was never ending.

I mean, so, yes, we know. We've been there. But then you had. Oh, go. Sorry, Shannon.

No, no, you go, you go. You get the path. Go ahead.

Well, then. Then you. And this is. This is what I reached out to you about, because you talked about this on Facebook a little bit. You were sort of forced to rethink things because it turns out you were running a travel clothing company. And then we had a global pandemic, but that created that. That opportunity to rethink things. And I use the. I use the word opportunity, you know, with air quotes. But that. That. That moment where you had to rethink things really gave you some perspective that I think is informing you today. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, no, completely. I mean, so, you know, through the course of the pandemic and a couple years or a year prior to the pandemic, you know, we. We tried to double down and get, you know, we were at about 18 million and in sales. And then I thought, okay, let's get to 50 million. And I handed the reins over to someone to do so, having just doubled the business with a formula that I thought would work. And sure enough, they managed to get from 18 to 17 million instead. And in doing so, you lost $2 million in advertising, all in the course of probably two weeks over the holidays for not ensuring that every dollar spent produced a $25 or so of sales. And so we lost $2 million in real money, and we have no outside invest. So when we lost $2 million, it was me that lost. Me and my wife lost $2 million. Right. You know, there was no one to look to. And so after having recovered from that in 2018 and becoming profitable and thought we had a path of a smaller, you know, tighter shop and maybe, you know, eight, 10 employees. And rethinking at that point, it was survival. It wasn't, you know, grow for the sake of growth and IPO and whatnot. It was just.

It is wonderful when something causes one's ego to get out of the way. And I say this personally, you know, you. You think you're all that you're growing a business, and then you hit A wall. And suddenly you realize, okay, the most important thing is to survive. That's it. And, and that's a wonderful.

It's freedom. 100%. It was freedom. It was survival.

Yeah.

And you looked at everything. You looked at everything on a clean slate. You looked at, you know, in fact, you know, we moved to shopify your. Your sponsor from a legacy platform that we were using previously called Meva Merchant. We, we looked at every decision we made over the prior, you know, 19 years and decided, you know, was that a smart decision? You know, and we, we also figured out where the break even point was, how much we needed to advertise and all those things. And then the global pandemic came and we're like, oh, my God. I was seeing sales levels that were less than our first year of business for a single day. Of course, people, you know, if you're not listen, whether you're traveling or elsewhere, you're sitting in your basement. You don't need the pockets that Scotte Best offers to fix it because you're.

Not mobile to go from the basement upstairs and back down. It's probably not your priority to make sure you can do that with everything in one trip.

Yeah. So to cut to the chase, as a result of the pandemic, we lost all of our employees. Not because we terminated any of them, we didn't. Just through attrition and people moving. And we're like, all right, well, what did they do? Not much. And after a while, we were down to one. And we're like, okay, this is a tight ship. And we had people doing customer service and overseas that were doing a really good job. And we had our fulfillment center and our factories and we were still doing a legitimate business. But then this guy quit. We're like, holy crap. We're down to just the husband and wife team here. What are we going to do? And my wife said, we'll figure it out. We figured it out. And as luck would have it, two years later, we have zero employees and we're doing really well. I mean, we're not focused on the top line. Our focus all along has been the bottom line. But I can't count figures, but I'm sure faster. And we're not focused on the growth. We're focused on just profitability. We kind of took that mentality. Look around, go outside, go for a walk, walk down the street, identify stores left and right, businesses left and right. And do you think that they need to get to $100 million to go on a really n. No. And Have a really nice life. I mean, you don't.

We can all tell you the answer is no. Yes.

No. You. You just build a profitable business. You want to call it a lifestyle business, have at it. I live a pretty freaking good lifestyle. I have a.

We say that all the time.

We gorgeous Penthouse and I ski. And now I just. My title now is I Gallivant. I don't even really traditionally work anymore. I just. I'm testing the travel clothing, because what I discovered is the more I work, the more I drive business to the top line, the more my wife has to work, and she can't work anymore. So, you know, I just stop doing anything that causes more friction. And now I'm a professional gallivanter or travel clothing tester.

I like that term. I stop doing anything that causes more friction, and that's that getting out of the way kind of thing.

Yeah.

I imagine that the business is simplified, that, you know, the money hits your pocket much sooner than it maybe ever has before. Right.

That is more predictable. Yeah.

I love it, man. Good for you.

I'm living my best charm life.

There you go.

Hey, there it is. And here on this show, the term lifestyle business is absolutely not a. A derogatory term. And I. The people that are out there that say, oh, stupid lifestyle businesses, I just laugh at them because they don't get it. They don't get it. You shared the, you know, the parable of the Mexican farmer or the Mexican fisherman, right?

Yeah, fisherman.

On Facebook. And. And it's true. If you can. If you pick what you want to do when you retire and figure out a way to do that while you're still earning money, and then that's. If that's a bad word or if that's a derogatory way to live your life. Derogatory term. I want it. That's who I want to be, and that's who I am. We get to be those people. It's amazing. It's great. Yep.

Yeah, 100%. I wish I had known that going in, because I think that the perception of media and you look at all the unicorns and the Facebooks and the Elon Musk, and you're like, oh, you know, if it's possible, I want to get it. You know, I can, you know, But. But to what end? It's just. It's just a headache. And. And I learned. I learned early on, I can't manage people. I just don't understand it. I. I don't want to figure out what 20 people need to to tick. You know, some people need money. Some people need affirmation. Other people, you know, need to be making more than the other person.

I don't know.

I just, you know, I. I have.

I have often said, Scott, that I am a terrible manager, but it turns out I'm a. I'm a decent leader. But that means then I wind up having to manage people that I wind up leading. And. And so it has to be the right people, or I just. I. I can't sit here and figure out what it takes to make somebody tick. It's. I'm like, I'm just not wired that way. I'm the same as you. You know, there's people who are. And that's great. I love them for it. Petting me.

Yeah. I remember taking an HR class at the Ohio State University, where I went many years ago, graduated in 87. And I. I sat down there, and they were explaining all these, you know, what motivates people. I'm like, wait a second. You give them a salary, you give them a task. They. When they finish that task, you give them another task, and maybe you give them 10 tasks. And in order to do that. Well, I. I don't. I just don't understand it. I do, you know, and I. I've learned. I understand it now. I understand. It's so kind. You know, we did all these personality tests, and we, you know, we use one. We had something called Skype gate. We didn't know this entire. Everyone, all the 20 people were all busy on their computers all day long and typing away. And one day, I looked over once, one person's shoulder, they were Skyping each other as though it was a water cooler. The whole company, all 20 of them, were involved in discussions about when to get coffee. And when I saw them, they looked busy. And so we had to shut down Skype and take cell phones away. It was hilarious. That's brutal.

Yeah. That sucks, though. Yeah. Go ahead.

Sandra, I want to ask you a question about working with your wife, because I think that's. I've worked with mine as well. And tell us about the system, because it can be a little sticky, how it works, and you got your personal relationship and different. What system did you guys come up with that works for you?

Oh, we don't have enough time. But.

In a nutshell.

Well, when we started working together, she made it clear to me that I was so difficult that there's no way she could work with me beyond what is necessary to get the company up and running. And then she was going to go off and do her own thing. My wife is a remarkable human being. There is no one like her. The reason this business is successful is solely because of her. The reason why we have really effectively one employee doing, you know, as much business as we're doing is only because of her. She goes to work at 11:00 clock every single day, 11:00pm p.m. you know, and she, and she, she, she works straight through until nine and then she'll go skiing for a few hours and work some more. And work some more and where she, she just loves working. Love sleeping. Puzzle.

Nice.

A few hours here and there.

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. And she just doesn't need it. That.

Yeah.

So, you know, I, an evolution to realize just how lucky I was to have someone so freaking dedicated. And you know, I, I, any employee who did what she did would, would consider it abusive. I don't force her to do that. I can't force her to do anything. She's mental level, smart. She, her, her dream job that she described to me when we were first married, it was, you know, in a, in a room by herself, solving puzzles. She can't stand talking to people. So she does our newsletter. I mean, think of what's involved with running an entire apparel company.

Yeah.

You know, from top to bottom from, you know, all the promotions and the newsletters and everything else and new products and you know, I just set up all the vendors and stuff. So yeah, it was an evolution, but it was firstly understanding a mutual respect and not treating her as a subordinate, treating her as a partner and the best partner ever. One that will never leave, you know, unless, unless I am abusive, which I'm not so sure. But you know, and you have shared interests. And when, when we came down to the pandemic and we started thinking we could go bankrupt. And you have that person that you look in the eye and said, no, we're not going back. We're going to suck it up. This is what we're going to do. And it can be really amazing if it works. It's uncommon though, and I wouldn't recommend it for most people.

My friend Shannon Jean likes to say that having the right spouse is a force multiplier. And you just epitomized that.

Exactly. I've had a similar experience and you know, for us is the division of duties. And I think you nailed it. Nobody's subordinate to each other. Your partners and that mutual respect, the way you talk to each other and everything. And if you do it right, man, it's, it's exponential. It's, that's great. So, you know, kudos to you for recognizing that and finding the right person.

Well, it wasn't easy. And early on in our work relationship, you know, I turned her and I said, listen, honey, sweetie, you know, which didn't go over well. I was like, you know, just, just until, you know, I just need you here until we get up and running at this, you know, in Sun Valley, and, you know, once we do, you know, go off and do your charity things and eat your bonbons and let me, let me do the big boy business stuff. And she turns to me and she says, no way. I'm not going to relinquish that much power to you, because if you, if you are coming home, working your ass off, and I'm just finished a sweaty tennis game with my girlfriends, eating bon bons and talking about this, that and the other thing, you know, I, I, she didn't say it in this, these words, but you have the power.

Interesting.

And I, I did not, I don't. I saw what your father, how your father treated your mother. I don't want to be a part of that, that template. And, you know, I'm an equal. And, and, and another thing she said to me that I didn'. Sitting. When we started doubling the business year over year, we went from 2, 2 million to 4 million, 4 million to 8. I said, Honey, we got something here. We're, we're, we're getting to 50. And she says, no, we are only going to do that if we remain, you know, delivering excellent quality of customer service in everything we do. And I said, there is no way. We're not going to make mistakes once we start, you know, scaling at that level. Get used to it. It's just, it's just a fact of life. You cannot grow at this rate. And she said, I don't want to be a part of it. And I bullied her into accepting my vision for what success was. And in doing so, we hit roadblocks and failures and, and now we're, we don't make any mistakes. Zero. We're at a zero. You know, we do everything as perfectly as can be done, and if we can't do it perfectly, we just don't do it.

Wow.

I love that she was right. That was our one fight in our entire marriage. You know, truly, I, I remember we're sitting when we had that discussion, and I, I remember the tone that I used to explain to her that she was so wrong. And, you know, and it gets back to that smaller but profitable lifestyle business. And, you know, when you have all these vendors, all of which make more money based upon how much. How much advertising you buy or, you know, whatever no one else makes. No one else's compensation is tied to profits except yours. None of your. Most of your employees aren't. Most of your vendors are. Not everyone makes money regardless. But you, yeah, only make money when you make money.

And they make money by getting you to spend more money. Right. So they're constantly motivated to get.

That's why we lost $2 million in advertising. Grow, grow, grow.

And yeah, growth is incredibly expensive, man. That's for sure. And it's. I like for me, it's like a, you know, work. It. It's also was kind of wrapped up in my ego in the sense of growth and growth. And I built this big company and this kind of thing, and it took, you know, probably a decade for me, my first business, to realize that bigger is not necessarily better and I wasn't making any more money. You know, we just had a bunch more people and a bunch more headaches. But our bottom line that came into my. My bank account was the same. So it's an evolution. Yeah, definitely.

Well, kudos to you for. For figuring it out and keeping the business alive and obviously very healthy throughout it. That's. I mean, that. That not everyone is able to do that. And kudos to you and Laura for. For making that happen. Scott. That's awesome.

What's. What's your favorite product that you guys are. Are selling right now? What do you like?

Yeah, I, I love the qzip shirts. You know, it's just a simple performance T shirt with three pockets that, you know, I, I love our whole line. We have 80 some products now for men and women and you know, and, and they, they all fit a niche. The travel vest is the. The most popular, as you would expect. You put vest in your name. But, you know, I just, I just would anyone listening to my words, intellectual property is not nearly as important as you. You would think competition is not nearly as important. Just focus on the fundamentals. Do them really well. Focus on making money every single day. Not waiting for Christmas or this, that or the other thing. And don't look at. I was so fixated on the bonobos of the world who entered into this space and seemingly were making a tremendous amount of money. I think Andy Dunn sold more stock than he did pants. I mean, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean that, you know, but he, you know, he was successful in his own right, but he wasn't successful in the true sense of what I think is, is commerce, you know, making a product for a profit, selling it, you know, to a customer who wants to come back and buy more and not just for the sake of growth. Growth.

So that's our sage words. That's great. We really appreciate you coming on talking to us. I always love the shows where my mouth is shut the most because I learned the most. So that's perfect for me, man.

Yeah, it's good, Scott. Thank you. This is amazing. Tell people where they can find you, my friend.

Scottevass.com that's S C O T T E V e S T or you can't remember that. Just search the word travel vest and we'll come up first.

There you go.

That's awesome.

Thank you for this, Scott. So much fun. And I learned some things that I didn't know about you, and then there was all the advice that I really learned. Thanks so much, folks. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Keep living that charmed life.