Episode Summary
In this Prime Talk Podcast Sponsored by GETIDA – Scott Needham – Founder & CEO of SmartScout talks about how SmartScout is a tool with roots that go back to the creation of the company BuyBoxer, a highly successful Amazon third party company, Scott also talks more about his life’s journey. #scottneedham #smartscout
About Scott Needham of SmartScout – a tool with roots that go back to the creation of the company BuyBoxer, a highly successful Amazon third-party company. Scott Needham founded BuyBoxer in 2011 and has become of the highest-reviewed sellers on Amazon. BuyBoxer is selling over 300k ASINs through the FBA process. One of the secrets was this very tool to help find diamonds in the rough. SmartScout has allowed us to have a birds-eye view of the workings of Amazon. We continue to see success and invite you to experience what we have.
Find the Full Episode Below
Yoni Mazor (0:06)
Hi, everybody, welcome to another episode of primetime. Today I’m having a really special guest; I’m having Scott Needham him. Scott is the founder and CEO of sparks gap, which is unique analyzing suite of tools that help you with getting a bird’s view analysis of exactly what’s going on Amazon. It’s really unique and different. He’s going to elaborate more than later on the show, but he’s also the host, the host, rather, of the popular show called The smartest Amazon Seller podcast, so many things. I think I also left a few things out we’re going to touch on some more in the body of the episode. But in the meantime, Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott Needham (0:39)
Yoni thank you so much. It’s awesome to be here and you’re not going to talk.
Yoni Mazor (0:44)
All right, I’ll pleasure to have you. So today’s episode is really going to be the star view. Right the story of Scott Needham. We’re going to jump into Who are you Where are you from? Where’d you grow up? Where were you born? Where you’re going to school when they weren’t? And how did you begin your professional career? This is the station till we get to where you are today with the world of E commerce. So I guess without further ado, let’s jump right into it.
Scott Needham (1:07)
It’s not every chance I get to actually tell me more of the backstory. Because there are a few things that will surprise most listeners. So I am I was born in a small town Logan, Utah without an hour north of Salt Lake. I have 10 siblings. So in my family there’s eight boys and three girls. And so you know I growing up I was always good with you know subjects like math and science. I ended up studying engineering, computer engineering.
Yoni Mazor (1:45)
Hold on; let me understand on the family framework. You said there are so many children 11. Or what’s your number?
Scott Needham (1:53)
I am number 10
Yoni Mazor (1:55)
Oh wow, that is pretty good number Okay, um, number four out of six. I thought that that were a lot but I guess you guys beat us but I guess being in Utah, on the Mormon side of things.
Scott Needham (2:05)
Yeah. Yeah. That’s I mean, like, that’s, there was a lot of large families, you know, and so,
Yoni Mazor (2:13)
Were your parents were involved with the church at all?
Scott Needham (2:16)
Yeah, they are. And let’s see others 11 kids, and eight of us ended up serving you know, LDS missions more of admissions.
Yoni Mazor (2:28)
LBS What’s that for? LBS? What’s that? Sorry, LDS.
Scott Needham (2:31)
That’s Latter Day Saints. That’s the church is called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and Mormons. It’s kind of a nickname. And so we usually like when we’re talking to other people in Utah. I think LDS is like a more common abbreviation.
Yoni Mazor (2:49)
God, oh thank you for that. I’m going to pick that up I didn’t realize that’s good.
Scott Needham (2:54)
Yeah I mean, I have siblings, you know, went to France, went to Korea, with various parts around the world to, you know, to teach about the church and I ended up going to Houston, speaking Spanish. So I learned Spanish over the course of three years, and got to really meet a ton of people that have entered the United States and all these bigger Spanish. And I mean I really got to find appreciation of Mexican food by the end of my time, so much. Some of my favorite Mexican food for before serving admission. I don’t touch it anymore. It was just like not authentic. I just can’t do this. Now that I know what the good stuff is.
Yoni Mazor (3:47)
The higher the percentage of people going to China having real Chinese food and then American Chinese food, it’s kind of a different realm. But I want to put that aside for now just I’m curious about your parents what were they like involved with what kind of industries this is backstory.
Scott Needham (4:00)
Yeah, my dad was actually a third generation jeweler, and my brother has taken over that. So we’ve had a family. We’ve been in retail that’s always what we’ve been doing.
Yoni Mazor (4:16)
On the jewelry side of things?
Scott Needham (4:20)
No, he actually started other retail shops. And I think when I was born; he had eight different retail shops.
Yoni Mazor (4:28)
So the different retail stores for different categories are saying?
Scott Needham (4:32)
Yeah, wow. I mean, it was all over the place. And most of the time, people roll their eyes when they hear about those because they were moderately successful. I mean, he’d never had to go bankrupt by he by no means made a lot of money in retail.
Yoni Mazor (4:50)
Touch a few categories if you don’t mind just watching, yeah.
Scott Needham 4:57
So started in jewelry, build a gift shop, a bookstore, that was kind of like a few other categories. We’ll talk about that. The general, like a general good store, kind of like I think a grocery store was like this was before I was born. And art and framing store.
Yoni Mazor 5:23
It’s pretty spread out. Sorry, to drag this to another dimension. What was the evolution of that? What compelled them with this opportunity shark or fires or what was what was behind that?
Scott Needham 5:36
Oh, it’s really about his vision. So of Logan, so I was raised in a town of about 60,000 people. My dad always wanted to invest time and ever into downtown Logan. You know, keep it like you know, a lot of towns across the US have like have like an old downtown. And some of them they have decayed and a kind of like just too long. And you know, he just did not want that to happen. He felt that a good downtown would have to have a lot of good retail stores and I mean, he’s at now and he still feels the same today as he did 40 years ago.
Yoni Mazor 6:23
That’s so noble. You want to kind of rejuvenate the downtime and keep it alive on a cultural level so he said let me bring the shops. That’s so unique you.
Scott Needham 6:31
You know he usually owns about two or three shops at a time in our downtown but that has changed which shops he owns. I’m not kidding, he’s probably gone through about half of the let’s say there’s about 50 shops in downtown Logan. He’s gone through about half of them and owned them at one point or another.
Yoni Mazor 6:53
Got it. He was never in politics? He was never mayor on the board of the council?
Scott Needham 6:56
He was on the city council for a little while. And I don’t know if he was very effective, but like he really he joined the Council with one mission. He wants to revitalize downtown Logan.
Yoni Mazor 7:10
Got it great stuff so I can see soraka on this but I can clearly see the entrepreneurial spirit I guess of you from your father’s days, you know he has a mission. The mission is more cultural and community approach but involves a lot of business and dynamics and moving around. That’s pretty unique and I guess I have a feeling it’s going to reflect into your story but go ahead.
Scott Needham 7:30
Oh, for sure. Like actually, you don’t even have to connect a lot of dots for it to like reach out into my story. So I have an older brother, Jeff, who actually took the bookstore called wooden table, which had like a toy department, a music department, and obviously a bush Department and in about 2009 He had had the business for about four or five years by that time, and was really, you know, anxious to grow. And it’s hard it’s really hard to grow a retail shop in a small to medium sized town. And so he started this you know, Amazon FBA thing. He had a lot of good relationships with toys, suppliers and reps and just started sending a lot of toys into Amazon FBA.
Yoni Mazor 8:26
They’re saying the evolution or the head of the legacy of your father’s retail businesses eventually brought the penetration of you guys into Amazon, which we’ll touch in a moment because I think we skipped a few components here. So hold on, so you were up. I just want to capture your story. Your children, you’re heading into your Jeff’s trail. He said, well, your brother’s name is Jeff was it? It’s not your business. Right bookstore, Amazon. Yeah, just making sure so so that’s his trail, which y’all you’ll probably enter soon. I want to kind of set the tone back into your trail. You grew up with this, I guess, you know, large family downtown Logan. You know, retailing. You grew up doing your setting. We did. You were very techie. Also you’re coding and writing?
Scott Needham 9:05
Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, I mean, before all of that I worked at my dad’s shops. You know, I pushed books around. I like you know, I was just you know, I worked at either as a callback just as I worked after the till…
Yoni Mazor 9:29
You hit the register, or the stalking everything, a little bit of everything.
Scott Needham 9:32
And but like, you know, that was always with my school schedule. So some summers I would work a lot and then I would, you know, during the school, not nearly as much and yeah, that really set like I started working a lot when I was 14. So you know, fairly early, not super early. I did push back I was a little stubborn as a kid to really embrace you know, work, but, you know, after about four or five years of this, like part time, I did start to catch it. You know, I was like, okay, like this can be kind of fun. And so started to do more of the management and the vision setting of these businesses. But you know, I had plenty of distractions. I did my mission. I was at the local university, Utah State University. And then when I was 25, I actually went to go do a master’s degree in at USC in Los Angeles. And so University
Yoni Mazor 10:41
So University of Southern California?
Scott Needham 10:43
Yes.
Yoni Mazor 10:44
So like California, okay, so I want to start stamping chronology into the mix. So you graduated high school, and then you went to college and USC or I know you mentioned you studied in Utah
Scott Needham 10:54
Right, yeah. I studied in Utah.
Yoni Mazor 10:58
And then how many years?
Scott Needham 11:00
For four years.
Yoni Mazor 11:00
And what’s the year started? So once you graduate to make it easier.
Scott Needham 11:05
I graduate 2009.
Yoni Mazor 11:08
Oh, yeah, young guy there. Those are younger. Okay, so, so it sounds like you started you graduated when your brother Jeff was heading into Amazon. So we’re going to connect the dots were very soon so 2009 you graduate. Go ahead.
Scott Needham 11:20
Yeah 2009 I graduated from university.
Yoni Mazor 11:21
Yep. And then you head into your master’s and USC. Yeah. Now here’s how my name is in USC?
Scott Needham 11:29
That was just one that was just one run.
Yoni Mazor 11:31
So kind of all in 2010 you graduate with your masters and you got your education and then you hit into the business world or all along between the lines already in the business world, what you own something that you did on yourself and not just working for others?
Scott Needham 11:46
No, I did a few other jobs for others. I think I actually ended up working for three other software companies.
Yoni Mazor 11:54
During school or even before that? Right after school right after your masters?
Scott Needham 12:00
Yeah, after that.
Yoni Mazor 12:00
So in 2010, you graduated you would think I’m going to head into the business world, not family related, not amazon related. What’d you take a school programming or anything?
Scott Needham 12:09
I didn’t want to touch the family business anymore. I was thinking like big companies. I actually I worked for Qualcomm. They did a lot of cellphone communications. I interviewed with like Google and Facebook. I thought that was my career track.
Yoni Mazor 12:31
The Qualcomm was the right after college? What was your first time so qualcomm it’s a microchip right and processors?
Scott Needham 12:38
I was working actually decided just doing software. They were building an app that they were trying out that was close to Twitter. It didn’t go too far, but it was a lot of fun to work on it and, you know, I knew I was always going to be doing some involvement with software.
Yoni Mazor 12:58
Talk to me about languages in a nutshell. What kind of language they’re doing?
Scott Needham 13:00
I was doing a lot of Java C sharp and this language is called groovy on Grails. Yeah.
Yoni Mazor 13:16
There’s also Rudy on Rails was good other. There’s also
Scott Needham 13:17
Rudy on Rails on rails. Someone on top of that built another language called groovy on Grails.
Yoni Mazor 13:24
Very cute. Okay, so how long would you stay in Qualcomm?
Scott Needham 13:28
I was actually only there for about four months.
Yoni Mazor 13:33
No, no worries. And what was the next station?
Scott Needham 13:36
The next station I worked for a company called the corporation services company like corporations. Yes. CSS
Yoni Mazor 13:47
CSS. The corporate services company
Scott Needham 13:49
What they actually do is they are the Delaware Company that incorporates people 1000s of businesses that they incorporated Delaware. That was their survey.
Yoni Mazor 14:02
And he also did code for them.
Scott Needham 14:05
Yeah, I did. And then the third job, I was actually working for a contractor for the Department of State. So I was doing I was building Android apps for government agencies.
Yoni Mazor 14:20
Okay, and then across the country are just more or less a Utah based.
Scott Needham 14:24
Now I was actually living in Virginia at that time. I moved out I really just I just didn’t want to be I wanted you know, sometimes I chosen the hard choice.
Yoni Mazor 14:37
So on the geographical level, so you move to California for a year?
Scott Needham 14:41
For actually about 18 months moved back to Utah for about a year and then just tired of Utah. I moved to Virginia and that’s where I’d have the government job. I was actually in the DC area. And
Yoni Mazor 14:56
It wasn’t Langley was it?
Scott Needham 14:58
No, I was in Arlington
Langley is really close to Arlington. And so there’s twice I actually say both my move to California and DC I didn’t have to do it. You know, I had opportunities. I could have a master’s program more locally, and I could have I had a job.
Yoni Mazor 15:26
You wanted to get out. You wanted the experience. You want it to break out a little bit. Yeah,
Scott Needham 15:30
Yeah. And I mean, it was totally worth it. Like I loved jumping into a new city, learning all about it and meeting new people and kind of establishing myself there.
Yoni Mazor 15:43
I guess you’re a bit more comfortable with this because you’re on a mission with us. And you mentioned we did about a year or two over there used to and also picked up a new language that’s pretty serious.
Scott Needham 15:52
Yeah, there’s you know, one of the hardest things to do for I think almost anyone is really just to like, is to move and to start all over. It’s both good and like, just difficult.
Yoni Mazor 16:11
Sounds like you you’re very comfortable making yourself uncomfortable.
Scott Needham 16:15
Yeah, I would say, you know, it’s easy to make acquaintances in this world. I mean, you and I were business acquaintances like we worked together before and you know, there are probably going to be plenty of chances for us in the future but like, but to take it to the next level to like really become friends. It’s not easy.
Yoni Mazor 16:37
Especially today nowadays, because things are so flat. You can reach out to anybody anywhere. It’s hard to go in depth and create common experiences which you, you know, you’re unique and they’re meaningful, especially in a hard time. That’s really to community a family and friends, when you’re really being challenged, not going to go into business acquaintance, to get mental health unless somebody is really unusual; by the way if you’d ever needed I’m here for you. But just so it’s, I guess you were very successful in establishing yourself in new places. It was in Houston or California or Virginia. We able to have a community approach, I assume also coming from a large family. It’s also something that it’s they’re prevalent for your family as a core as a family.
Scott Needham 17:18
Yeah, even the last month, I have talked to someone that I met for each of those places that I lived. It’s so hard for me and like it’s not easy, but it’s worth it, you know, to, to just to see, you know, to challenge yourself. And but even here, here’s the truth even when I moved out to DC, I still knew that I was like, okay, my brother told me about this Amazon opportunity. And I think I could do something here.
Yoni Mazor 17:54
So now let’s talk the telco. You mentioned your brother entered in 2009. You are already graduate 2010 and then you’re in Virginia which year is that already or which point in 2012.
Scott Needham 18:05
I’m there Virginia working 2012 but I knew that I was like okay, your end of the New Year. I’m sorry end of the year. I’m going to quit this and I’m going to join my brother in 2013.
Yoni Mazor 18:136
And while joining me and also working with him but also moving back to homestead Utah.
Scott Needham 18:21
I actually stayed in that region I ran I stayed in DC and I worked from home just building software me and him on we’ve called for about an hour every day and to say like, Hey, you know the here’s the different problems. Here’s what here’s how the software’s working. Here’s what’s not doing for me. So we really refined some inventory management, and we touched every part of the business with software
Yoni Mazor 18:50
You got a lot I want to reconnect your brother into the loop back into the story because you already two to 12 but he survived through three years before that. So what was the evolution for him? Yeah, 2009 you mentioned the bookshop and all these subcategories.
Scott Needham 19:01
Yeah, I think about this. So when he was slowly growing in Amazon and about 2012 it became his like full time. We’re going to scale this and
Yoni Mazor 19:14
And he’s still physically a brick and mortar in Logan or not.
Scott Needham 19:17
And the brick and mortar was a huge part of being able to grow because he’s talking to these brands as a wholesaler and say like, Hey, I’ve opened a mortar. We’d like to buy your products, and so can open up accounts. And you know, create these purchases, and they wouldn’t ask a ton of questions because he had a brick and mortar. So that was an advantage that he started with. But it was really challenging. There was no software to make this Amazon business work. So when it came to making a purchase order, it would take him 10 hours.
Yoni Mazor 20:00
To put them in one that he paid, just to forgive them more depth here to make a purchase or what did he need? I mean, can you just say just give me everything you have? Brand XYZ?
Scott Needham 20:09
Yeah, yeah. So imagine you have no tools that help you understand what’s happening on Amazon. That means you have to go through your reports and see, okay, I sold, you’re guessing a lot of the time you’re like I sold 15 units, and it looks like I sold it in five days. Maybe I sold it in 10 days. I don’t know. But I sold you know, 15 units. How much do I order next time? Do I work 30 to 45 or 60 and did I even make money off this? Every SKU you’re analyzing the reports to just make a guess on how much to order and whether to order or not.
Yoni Mazor 20:59
And how many cases back in a day. I don’t know if you remember this at all. Yeah, knowing the scale at that point.
Scott Needham 21:05
About the 1000s Got it. But I do by going through these reports just to create a purchase order of say 200 skews it would take him hours, hours to do this. And it’s stressful in q4 of 2012. Like he’s, you know, working 20 hours a day.
Yoni Mazor 21:32
So you come in and you bring magic into the game. What do you do?
Scott Needham 21:34
I mean, it didn’t happen overnight. But I will say most valuable programming that I did, I did in the first year, you know, we spent about a year and we kind of really pieced out the different parts and we accomplished a lot of what it would take to manage this type of business to help him grow. And I think by the by the end of 2013. We hit about 12 million in sales on Amazon.
Yoni Mazor 22:10
So it’s about a million a month. Yeah, and revenue and that was probably substantially more than what he was making a brick and mortar right. And it was mostly heavily based on FBA or a hybrid FBM. FBA the way the store became almost like a warehouse center or what was what was infrastructure
Scott Needham 22:32
At that time, even before I joined he took the risk of flying out to Indianapolis and setting up a fulfillment center.
Yoni Mazor 22:46
He bought it?
Scott Needham 22:49
No, he leased a small you know, 1200 square foot spot, because everything that we were doing was shipping to Indianapolis, that’s where all that fulfillment centers were, that he should be due at the time and so he leaned into that to save money. And yeah, that’s so that decision was made before my time, but that’s where we really grew our distribution.
Yoni Mazor 23:21
You remember the space how big it was in square footage.
Scott Needham 23:24
Oh, yeah. The first one was 1200
Yoni Mazor 23:27
1200. Okay, pretty modest. Yeah, and then the second one, just to make some context here. 12000 or 120000?
Scott Needham 23:35
It is probably about 9000. Yeah, then we grew another 9000.Then another 9000
Yoni Mazor 23:47
Elements in same vicinity area or different states already?
Scott Needham 23:51
No, no all in the same area. And, you know, we actually got to about 60,000 square foot feet. Then in just last year, I mean, I’m jumping over a lot of details here, but we actually opened up 100,000 foot 100,000 square foot facility in March.
Yoni Mazor 24:18
Also Indianapolis or Indiana? You guys don’t give up. You guys are wondering this time we’re still leasing.
Scott Needham 24:26
No, we’re still leasing. I fly out tomorrow. I got I’m checking in again.
Yoni Mazor 24:31
With retail you want to tell me? What do you call this outfit? What do you call this business?
Scott Needham 24:38
Buy boxer.
Yoni Mazor 24:31
Buy boxer, got it. Okay, so you’re flying tomorrow and the show must go on. So you see on the retail side of things, which is really cool. So let’s go back to I guess 2012 and you come in and use the first year you lay out the infrastructure, the foundationally I especially on the coding writing side. So that’s already 2013. So inventory management projection. Purchase Order Management, what else what other components?
Scott Needham 25:01
We built a product scanner that ship products into Amazon FBA. So we coded in a way to do that without jumping on Seller Central. So we can have all of our employees working together in a more efficient way.
Yoni Mazor 25:22
So what happens? I scan this aside I mean or the UPC and what happens?
Scott Needham 25:28
Well, it pings our database and it peaks Amazon’s database, you’re like, Okay, I scan this UPC, which products should we send in and then you decide and then create that shipments on, on Seller Central but without ever jumping into Seller Central. One reason we like this is it allows people to be working on different shipments at the same time.
Yoni Mazor 25:58
And typically what happens is a purchase order that comes in a few pallets and does something and they want to do some packaging, they scan it, they label it and keep moving on and they knows where it’s going to go. That’s pretty much the flow.
Scott Needham 26:09
Yeah, that’s the flow. We do we have about 100 employees that do this.
Yoni Mazor 26:19
Yeah, it doesn’t matter which employee gets a chance to scan and scan the infrastructure of the software, it knows where it’s all the bricks are laid. They’re going to take care of that for them so they don’t have to think too much. Just scan and go and touch and go.
Scott Needham 26:30
Yeah, that’s right.
Yoni Mazor 26:32
Super cool. Yeah, never heard of that.
Scott Needham 26:35
We we’ve been doing this for a fair amount of years and, but a lot of things have stayed kind of the same. We can make adjustments here there. Let’s see, in 2016, we started to really target exclusive partnerships with these brands. So we have, you know, about 20 to 30 brands where we were by boxer is the exclusive and we are the only seller and we provide marketing services and all that
Yoni Mazor 27:13
So that’s probably a good template for free to mature instead of just keep on competing on the buy box level without major party sellers. You sell which an exclusive relationship. You bring them to the market and you expand the marketplace, especially on Amazon. You think of all the fulfillment or logistics or the Amazon types of headaches, and you know that that’s pretty much the reward for them staying you know who’s with you and then I guess the pricing also, the pricing structure stays stable, so there’s no there’s no craziness going on race to the bottom.
Scott Needham 27:40
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It’s nice when you get those relationships. They’re not easy to get. It’s a sale of its own and you do a lot of trust to get there. But let’s see, there are a few other companies that have really done that really nailed this. I think that people like net rush pattern, Caspian, these really awesome, you know, businesses where they do this fairly well.
Yoni Mazor 28:12
By the way along the lines did you ever create your own brands at all or the data?
Scott Needham 28:16
We can go into that room and that’s more recent, we’ve done efforts in our own brands, but okay, you’re going to like this part. So in 2017 we know we were entrepreneurs, we keep trying to start new businesses. And we actually we connected in retail acts. In 2016, I came across a service company name on refunds manager, and we use them with other really good and we’re like, Okay, this is this is awesome. We’re getting some money back. And then in a year later, my brother, my other brother, JL, who joined the business. He sort of pushed me to lie, hey, there’s something here. It’s going to be like another, another business. And so you know, I did what I did. I wanted to create something new for coding. We build a reverse position, similar to response manager called statements. And that was very much just a side project for me. I was actually a very minority owner of that business. And but it was nice same space.
Yoni Mazor 29:37
But this was a family effort, right? Because it seemed like you guys really wanted. Does he know your brother Jeff is hardcore into the retail? You’re hardcore into the software tech side of things. JL was I guess more in charge of Valence But was he also in charge of retail jail?
Scott Needham 29:50
JL is actually in charge of the partnerships,
Yoni Mazor 29:54
Partnerships, oh, securing the relationship with the brand and stuff like that. So selling very, very big oriented, builds business development, or as also as a persona. I met him I think also the shows, at some point of time; I remember we’re friends with Ethan Weiner our CEO and our investor. So he’s very, very much in robust. So he’s super sharp guy.
Scott Needham 30:14
I mean, he actually, he said he worked at Google for about eight or nine years doing those relationships. Where he was, you know, partner in Google with the US government and help them understand how to use Google search algorithms to like put together their website so he’s always had a mind for strategic relationships. And, and then a mind for, you know, creating spin offs. He loves the first stages of a business and kind of figuring out how it’ll work. And so that’s, you know, by the time a business gets to its third stage, first stage or second stage, your third stage when you’re starting to like stabilize, as usually when he wants to leave.
Yoni Mazor 31:11
Why is that? What do you find that?
Scott Needham 31:12
That’s a good question.
Yoni Mazor 31:14
I might have to have his own episode again.
Scott Needham 31:16
I think that’s just what he likes. I’ve heard him say this a few times himself. So that’s what happened with valence. You know, we got stage one.
Yoni Mazor 31:27
Stage two, you said you’re you started kind of 2017 you saw 2018. You kind of launched it and then 2019 I believe it’s sold two versions, which today is sifted. So it’s kind of the bundle together just another leg for them.
Scott Needham 31:41
Yeah, now it’s sifted and he has joined and then he actually left. He left to come back into Amazon and to kind of his own brands. So yeah, for selling this.
Yoni Mazor 31:55
After selling this brands like setting up relationships with brands or more than we are getting those acquisitions side or launching.
Scott Needham 32:02
Acquisition side. They’ve now purchased four brands.
Yoni Mazor 32:08
And what it was he dubbed to give a name to that group or the portfolio companies?
Scott Needham 32:15
Ascendant brands and he really hasn’t raised any money. He’s buying these on his own dollar. Turning them around, and he kind of sees Ascendance to be you know, you buy the brand, fix up their direct to consumer and then sell them 12 to 18 months later.
Yoni Mazor 32:41
Okay, so it’s more like a greenhouse. You get it, you optimize it, but yeah, once again, that stage three that he’s very fond of, you know, detaching and then doing it again. I like I guess he likes the things are at the initial stage, the more scrappy bolted together making more professional enterprise level and then give it to the next enterprise we can do you know, blow it up even more even more intense with it.
Scott Needham 33:01
Right. And this story just isn’t about you know, I’m kind of diverted to talk about my brother jail like and I’ve been involved with this to help these things happen, yo
