R. Scott Edwards started working at 15 after his parents' divorce. At 17, working as a motel janitor, he overheard a conversation about parking-lot striping and saw a business opportunity. With $500 borrowed from a friend and a borrowed van, he and two high-school buddies launched A&A Restripe, landing contracts with McDonald's, Safeway, and a Northern California airport.
Actually, I probably—
it's because of my excitement with the, uh, the comedy. But let's start, um, earlier on. So you— we do have a lot of people, uh, that have been on the show, as you know, and that listen to the show for business type of things. So, uh, you know, 12— a dozen companies is pretty insane. So what were you doing before? What was your first company? Actually, let's start there. What were you doing before that? Like, how did your entrepreneurial path start?
Well, thanks for asking, Tyler. I was the product of a divorced family and was kind of pushed into working at the age of 15. In fact, I was allowed to get my driver's license early because I was helping to support my family financially. And by the age of 17, while just finishing high school, I started my first small construction company. The quick story was I was working as a night janitor at a motel, cleaning floors and bathrooms overnight. And I was hanging out in the bar, and again, I was 17, so I was underage. And I was kind of hiding from the boss, and I overheard these two guys talking about making money on the weekends by painting the lines in parking lots. It's called striping. And I go, well, crap, I could do that. So I went and did some research. I went around and talked to the owners of other striping companies, asked them how they got started, how do they charge, and I put together what basically would be called a business plan. But I didn't ever have any money, so I found a friend that had just come into a small amount of money, and he used $500. We bought our first paint machine, but we needed to get from job to job, so we brought in another high school buddy that happened to own a van. And the 3 of us formed A&A Restripe, and that was my first company. It was, uh, we striped all the McDonald's and Safeways in Northern California. We did a furniture chain, we did an airport. It was pretty exciting for 17.
