In this second of my entrepreneurial profile series I’m going to profile Scott Griffiths, a buddy and enterprise colleague from my executive MBA plan at the UCLA Anderson organization college.
My last profile was of Matt Remuzzi, owner of CapForge. Matt is a quiet, thoughtful, understated man with a dry wit, a very good listener who generally opines when he feels he has one thing essential to say. In contract to Matt, Scott is a lively, gregarious, boisterous man given to loud aloha shirts and lengthy sea, interesting stories. My level in drawing this distinction is that I’ve noticed all types of personality sorts in productive entrepreneurs, from introverts (on the Myers Briggs scale I go as far on the introverted scale as it goes) to extroverts, charismatic revenue individuals to people with various degrees of Aspergers syndrome.
Scott has been an entrepreneur for nicely over twenty many years. He has a quite powerful advertising and product sales background, and his newest and most productive gig has been as the co-founder of the 18|eight chain of men’s hair salons. Scott started this venture in 2001 right after the MBA system and had a series of problems and setbacks, but his business has dramatically taken off by means of his choice to group with a franchise group and franchise out his companies. In 2013 his goal was to promote thirty franchise retailers and he doubled that objective by offering 60 merchants. In buy to begin this business Scott invested his retirement money and did a close friends and household fundraising.
Like nearly every entrepreneur, Scott has had his successes and failures. His successes have included the 18|eight idea and execution, the Mitch for Guys brand, the Crystal Cruises brand, and the Vertu brand for Nokia. His failures have included a microbrew known as Rhino chasers. He had clear lessons discovered from this failure, nevertheless, and notes that the speedy growth of the Rhino Chasers brand triggered him to burn up via all of his friends and household funds and go to a Venture Capital company for money. The VC firm demanded that he place in an “MBA CEO”, who very rapidly drove the company into bankruptcy, a story that I have heard from several entrepreneurs more than the many years. This failure prompted Scott to go to the UCLA plan and get an MBA, to which he attributes significantly of his reason for accomplishment in his most current venture.
Scott is a brand and marketing guy by nature, but also counts as his core strengths a robust correct-left brain balance, (he describes this idea in his guide “Beyond Genius”), his tenacity, the capability to visualize one thing in his head as well as the information of how that picture will perform out in time, a “strong enough” capability in finance and math to be capable to construct numbers all around situations, the ability to articulate these situations in a compelling way to others, and the capability to stimulate and orchestrate other people.
His weaknesses are typical of a lot of entrepreneurs I’ve met. In his words he “doesn’t endure fools”, can be impatient and arrogant. Numerous successful (and unsuccessful) entrepreneurs I’ve met have these same weaknesses, although many would not label them as weaknesses.
With respect to his success with the 18|eight brand, Scott credits currently being a pupil of Starbucks and Apple – he tries to emulate and bring characteristics of people icons into 18|eight, specifically Steve Jobs’ layout genius and Howard Schultz’ revenue and advertising genuis. Scott states that “Jobs was a enormous fan of style ‘design helps make a difference’, and that Schultz practices “retail and detail” to develop a merchandise that is better than the sum of the components, generating an expertise all around a commoditized cup of coffee. Scott credits his success with 18|8 with emulating the two of those iconic firms.
“Men shouldn’t be going to a women’s salon” – with that as a premise, Scott came up with a organization idea. “A guy spends $ 40-60 every single two-3 weeks to go to a women’s salon and really do not want to be there, so I decided to conceive what a guy would want to locate in an best men’s salon.” Scott invested 10 many years creating and proving his notion, and the final couple of years perfecting the model for franchising. Howard Schultz continually looked at the buyer knowledge and enhanced upon it, a practice Scott also emulates. Scott’s self stated fashion of entrepreneurism is to create a brand. He started out doing this as a advisor, made the decision that he desired to do it for himself, and now has had a amount of successes and setbacks in the approach, and a very profitable ongoing enterprise.
In future blogs I’ll concentrate on other entrepreneurial profiles. My purpose in carrying out this is to give enough examples to aspiring entrepreneurs to inspire them to comply with their own ideas to produce their own organizations.
Entrepreneurial Profile - Scott Griffiths, 18|8 Hair Salons
