Interview of Scott Davis, November 7, 2020

Scott Davis, transcript, November 7, 2020

Jenna Yordy: All right, so it is November 7th at 11 a.m. I am here with Mr. Scott Davis. Thank you so much for doing this interview with me. I really, really appreciate it. So, to get started, could you first just describe what your career is and what you, what you kind of do? Scott Davis: Well, I think I've been a cook the longest, I've been an athlete, a tradesman, a shopkeeper, a consultant, a merchant and a landlord. Jenna Yordy: All right. And what specifically, like what would you say you specialize in? Scott Davis: Currently, I specialize in coffee. And being a landlord. Jenna Yordy: OK. Scott Davis: So now I'm a consultant and coffee, I own a coffee shop. I've been studying and done research on coffee and coffee products for about forty seven years, so that's probably the thing I've done the most of my last fifty years of whatever I've done. I've always done coffee through that. So, I started studying coffee in 1977 and I'm still studying it today. Jenna Yordy: Wow. So, what made you decide to start studying coffee. Like what part of your personal background or childhood maybe led you to what you're doing now? Scott Davis: Well, I think the main thing is that coffee is a subset of being a cook. I took an interest in cooking when I was four years old. I was lucky enough to be able to cook with my grandmother who lived across the street and my mother. I had a family, there was eight people in my household, four brothers, mom and dad and a grandfather. So, I decided to help my mother at a very early age in the kitchen because I thought she might need help. And I think that experience going in there and helping her and helping in the morning for my grandmother on what cooking was about. And it wasn't just to solve a problem, it wasn't just to have food on the table. My grandmother taught me the only thing that you really needed to know about cooking is, when you are cooking, you got to think about the relationship between the ingredients. And so, her telling me to look at the ingredients and understanding the relationship of those ingredients. She gave me an example that said if anybody can take seven things and put them in a mixing bowl and make a biscuit, and that might be good, it might be bad. But if you actually think about the seven ingredients and understand the relationship between those seven ingredients in that bowl, your biscuits might tell a story. So, when I started cooking at four and started making biscuits, my family thought my biscuits told a story. They weren't just biscuits. So, from that, I was learned that relationship in the room relationship between two people, eight people, three people is more important than anything else. So cooking was that for me. And as I did more and more cooking and I started doing more things as an athlete, I realized the relationship of those athletic events between those people on the team were very, very important. So, team was automatic for me, by thinking about relationships and then becoming an individual in sports, I decided to go to an individual sport which taught me a lot about my own accountability differently than on a team. And as this group, everything I did in my businesses and all of the stuff I've done in consulting in the merchants and plan will always try to do that. What's the relationship between myself and my tenant relationship between myself and my team players? What's the relationship between me and my coffee world? So basically, I became a cook, started selling coffee in 1977 and decided that I needed to understand the relationship of coffee as well. What is, what are we really doing here? We're drinking coffee. Yes. Can we sell a lot of coffee. Yes. Can we sell coffee beans. Yes. But what's really going on in that cup? So, as I started looking into what's really going on in a cup of coffee versus what is going on in a cup of coffee, what might be happening in a cup of coffee. So is and might are the two big things in my theme of what makes me who I am. And so, I started studying coffee much differently, started on trying to understand it differently. And that's where I stayed in the coffee world. Jenna Yordy: OK, that's very interesting, so I'm kind of going off of that a little bit, would you say that kind of being an entrepreneur and going into the coffee and like really understanding it comes from that desire of like understanding how things work, like with people, but also with the coffee and just in general, kind of how all of that goes together?

Scott Davis: I think, I think what I was able to learn at a young age and when I played organized sports is you, you can join the team and learn how to play baseball and your coaches taught you here's the basic techniques and the principles of baseball. I mean you knew where you're out of bounds were, you knew where the base is, you know where you were supposed to stand. And they taught you the basics of what the game was and football, basketball, all the above, because you have lines and you have rules. Then there were some coaches that said, OK, here's the technique. Here's the thing. And a lot of players learn how to play basketball. They learn kind of an inner direction. So how can I be a better, better, better, better basketball player versus saying, how can I be a different basketball player? Because most people want you to stay in that structure. So, what it was, was can you learn the structure and narrow yourself is like, who are you? And then the question is, who might you be? So, in sports, in food, in anything that I do, it's studying both of those things. You have to learn kind of the basic foundation of the thing you're trying to learn. And then you've got to say, OK, how am I independent of that? Because if you're not independent of that, you'll just keep doing what everybody else does. And you'll kind of, you kind of go to a finiteness versus what I try to do in the coffee world and the sports world and all the things I do, that relationship makes it important. Yes. How do we work together as a team, but also how do we expand? How do we bloom into something else? So, it's really important that we do both those things? So, coffee for me was I learned it. I was taught how to think about it. And that's what else does it have to be narrow like that? We get down to three tastes, which a lot of people do now in coffee. They go, well, what does it taste like? Tastes like three things on a bag and so if you'll notice. Almost all coffee people today are telling you to find the three things, whether it's the apple, the blackberry, or the honey in that bag. I'm trying to find the eighteen hundred compounds that are in that bag and all the combinations of those eighteen hundred. So, you do both to go in and then you go out. Jenna Yordy: Nice, so kind of branching off a little bit into a different topic. What does leadership mean to you and do you believe that leadership and an expertise in something go hand in hand or are they separate? Scott Davis: Well, I think first we've got to define expertise a little bit and in leadership on always big on that. People ask me a question, I go, what you mean by that? What do you mean by leadership and what do you mean by expertise? Certainly the psychologist and the author who came up with the idea it was a psychologist, a psychologist and an author that came up with the idea that ten thousand hours make you an expert. That's a kind of a random number. And for some of us that are passionate and do what we do, some people think that's ten years, that ten thousand hours for ten thousand hours for me is about three and a half years. So, and for somebody like you who is passionate about what you do you know singing and the music I think that you do. It's probably about three and half years for ten thousand hours not ten. I think three and a half years gives you an idea that whether you might want to go forward and something I certainly don't think you're an expert just because of that. So, when we say an expert, we have to kind of know what that means. And for me, an expert is a person who's willing to put ten thousand hours without even thinking about it. They don't even collect the hours without thinking about it. They doesn't even know how many hours they've done. That's just what they do, they're passionate. So, an expertise expert to me is a person who's passionate. They have to have the passion as well as the hours. And people like Tiger Woods, certainly he has the hours, but his passion toward golf is what makes him different. The best players in the world, Michael Jordan, it's their passion for the game that makes them the experts that they are, not just the hours they put into it. And in leadership, often the same thing a teacher is a leader often. But the teacher is trying to teach you into a narrow situation. So, you've got to learn this first. Very few teachers I came across wanted to take this information and expand it. So, leadership can also be for me, it means how can I give you access to something? How can I give the room access to something? So, a good leader to me means you're trying to get everybody in the room to understand their position in that room and how those relationships all bind together. So, a good leader gives access and an expertise, an expert, so-called, is somebody who's been able to have done that a lot of times and very passionate as well. So, it's really how do I get you or whom I'm trying to lead but give you access to something so a good leader is somebody who can figure that out and help you find out where you need to be. And an expert is a person who's done it over and over again and can learn the intuition of how to do that. That was your question, right? What is a leader and what's an expert? Jenna Yordy: Yes, so and then kind of do you think those two things, like being a leader and being an expert, go hand in hand, or do they have their different, their different jobs and... Scott Davis: It's very hopeful if they went hand in hand, but most people I know, plenty of leaders that aren't very good at being an expert. And I know a lot of experts that aren't very good at leading, and I think that takes a very special dynamic. I think it's very rare. I mean, I've taken tennis lessons from experts that were much better than me. I taught in college I was taking a tennis lesson from a guy that would probably [be considered one of the top players] in the nation. And when I was taking the lesson from him, he broke his racket twice. He was so upset about the situation that was going on between me and him, and he was, he was an expert, but he wasn't a very good leader and what I was looking for. And then I've had leaders who are not necessarily experts. I actually took classes in Florida State to go into resort management. And we actually took classes on how to teach people how to bowl, how to teach people how to play tennis, how to do gymnastics. And we weren't gymnasts, and we weren't bowlers necessarily. I mean, we were, we could all but we weren't experts. So, some people can actually lead quite well without the expertise because they, they can see the relationship. That's what a good leader does. So, to me, a good leader sees the relationship between something. He doesn't have to necessarily be an expert himself in the field, but he can be a good leader in. And I think that some people who are experts, typically, they're so narrow they can't be very good leaders. So, you find great violinists and great potential experts in their field, but they're not necessarily good leaders. So leading and being an expert, that is probably one of the hardest things in the world to find. Jenna Yordy: Yeah, I know I played soccer and I think, I don't know if this is a saying across multiple sports or music as well, but I know there's a saying in the soccer world that's like the best players are the worst coaches because they, I mean, they can be incredible at what they do, but they're not necessarily good at then going back and teaching it. And I do think that's very interesting. And also, in the class that I'm currently taking, Global Leadership Studies, which is what this interview is for, we're also learning a lot about how a leader doesn't necessarily mean that that person is good per se, like leaders can be bad as well. It's not, it's just kind of relative. Scott Davis: I think it's very different, because it's two different structures as to become an expert at something you have to go to practices and you're basically taking a piece of wood and you're sanding it down and sanding it down and sanding it down and getting all the blemishes out, and so that takes a lot of effort. So, it's hard to do that and then be able to translate that to showing you how to do it. Right. So, I can do it myself. It's really hard to translate because you're going to do it differently anyway. You're going to take that same piece of wood and make it a different shape and you're going to sand it a different way. So, the basic thing I can do as a, as an expert, if I am an expert at something, and show you this is I'm very good at this. I mean I've made over a million and a half espressos in my lifetime. And so, I'm quite good at it and I can do it kind of blindfolded. The question is, can I give you access to doing it? And am I going to tell you to do it my way or am I going to tell you to do it your way? The way I lead is to let you do it and give you the options of here's what you can do. Here's what can do. You can do. You can follow my instructions to the T. But you have to put yourself into it. So, to me, a good leader is not just somebody that can lift the weight, let's use that as the hours of soccer, hours of tennis, hours of piano, the person who's a good leader, can go up to someone and say, where is your fulcrum? And fulcrum means where you take a seesaw and you put something under that piece of wood right in the middle. You have you on one side and me on the other side it's equal. Now, if you weigh one hundred pounds and I weigh two hundred pounds then it's going to go like this if I wait two hundred pounds. So, what we do to get that, that seesaw to get balanced is I would say I need to move more forward so that it will balance out. Most people only see forward or backwards. They only to see that's how you get it to be even. If I move the fulcrum though, the little thing that holds the seesaw toward you, that's different than me moving toward you. And I can lift up with one finger, ten thousand pounds if I put the fulcrum in the right place. So, a good leader is telling you to move your fulcrum and finding out where that is, helping you discover where that is. So where are you to leverage? Not where am I to leverage, it's where are you to leverage. So that's what I think a good leader does, is they need to show the person and the persons in the room, where are your fulcrums? And most people, they don't know how to do that. Jenna Yordy: Yeah, that's a really good point of like kind of also saying that a leader's job isn't necessarily to, I mean, it isn't their job to promote themselves. It's to help the person they're leading become successful in what they're doing. Scott Davis: We use the word a lot, I'll use the word a lot, giving you access. A good leader, a good salesperson is not even a salesperson to me. A good person, that if you're a merchant you should be giving access to someone, to the cookware to purchase, the shoes to buy. The access to do that. Not this is what you need to buy. Let me show you what to buy. Yes, you can have that expertise of somebody just tell me what to buy. But that's, that's something that we get caught up in that as a cookware person when you come into our cookware shop, people just say, tell me what to buy. And I go, well, what are you trying to cook? How often do you cook? Are you cooking for your husband and your family? What are you doing? I can't answer that question till I have more data. So, it's easy to just say, yes, do this, it's a shorter amount of time and here's a one hundred dollar skillet here's a thirty dollar skillet. But the question is, do we want to really understand? So, the win/win situation in a leadership role and an expertise role is are we a team? Are we together on that? So, if I'm trying to help you or give you access to something, why? What access my trying to give you? Well I'm trying to give you access for you, not access for me. So, I good leader typically is just trying to put the ring or the people as a whole, the whole team as the most important thing versus their idea. Or translating it from some other book or something with them. Jenna Yordy: Yeah, since you mentioned your cookware shop, what do you think running a family business taught you about teamwork and just working with different kinds of people? Scott Davis: Well, you know, there's different sayings, and one of the sayings in retail is whatever you do, don't do it. Don't go into a family business. I think if read a book on businesses, no matter who wrote them, Chapter 13, it's not, that's not, it's a joke. But, Chapter 13 should be, cause Chapter 13 is often bankruptcy. [Chapter 13 says do not do a family business.] The problem with a family business is that it's hard to be, that relationship is hard to understand because you've got dynamics. You've got brothers and sisters and moms and dads. And it's hard to, it often has to be run more socialistically versus democrat, democratically. So, but what did I learn? I certainly learned more about my family, my loving family. I love them to death. But obviously doing a business is completely different than being a part of a family. And you have to decide as a business, are you in business to make money as a primary thing or you are in business to give people opportunity to learn about the product that you're selling? Are you giving people job opportunities? I mean, you have to make those balances all the time to say, what are you really in business for? Now, most people misunderstand business. I think they think most people just want to make money. I just don't think that's true. I think most small businesses like us are because we were showing a passion and a love. So, one of the things that we love to do as a family, we did love to cook and we loved to eat. My mother loved to do needlepoint, so she had a needlecraft shop. My brother he loved to use his hands, so he had a hardware store. And I happen to love clothes, so I had a clothing store as well. So, we had four or five stores. That was really an extension of our love for passionate things it really wasn't to make money. I mean, we want to make money. We want to have a living. But it wasn't our primary goal. It was to share our passion. And you'll find that the Michael Jordans in the world, often, in those guys often are passionate about they want to share it. Yes. They get famous and then they get wealthy, et cetera, but I still think their drive most of the time when they get to the top like that is their passion for golf. And they really do want other people to learn about it too. Not every single person wants to do that, but most of the people I've met, most people in the music business that I've met, not all, but most want to share that music that they've learned how to do and they want to share the passion of that. So, in a family run business, it was great because you automatically have the public thinking that you're a passionate, well-loved family, because why would you go in business if you weren't? So that was kind of tricky, because there was times the doors were locked and we had our fun having family squabbles. So that was the hard part. We were a team, clearly, but sometimes you need to think about what your team is and do you need to be on that team. Is it healthy for you? So, one of the things that anybody needs to do in any business and one of the things I try to teach as a leader, if I want to call myself a leader, is are you here for the right reason? Are you coming to this job for the right reasons? Do you really want to be here? And if you are really wanting to be here, is it for the same reason I want you to be here? Are we on a team or are we just kind of getting to the next, you know, I'm going to do this until the next step. Well, in a family run business, that was the big question. Why are we here? You know, are we here because we're all under house arrest and we have to pay debts to each other? Or are we here because we really want to be here and we're passionate toward [helping the public more than anything.] In a family run business, you learned a lot about that, I think more than most businesses do. Jenna Yordy: Yeah, so kind of since we're on the topic of teamwork a little bit, do you feel like it is important to delegate or do you think that as a team you should kind of be able to figure stuff out? Scott Davis: Well, yeah, I think it depends on the situation. So if I'm, if I'm getting ready to do a catering event with my coffee and we've got five hundred people to wait on and we've got a way that it's going to happen, and there's going to be a marriage, and at the end of that marriage, there's going to be a reception, and in that reception, in that forty five minutes, there's going to be three to five hundred people coming to get coffee. I don't think that's the time that you can discuss team building and a time to discuss kind of the nuances of being in business. You need to kind of have already gotten that down the road. So, I've become much more of a dictator type person in a catering event where this is how we're going to do it, follow my lead, and then it may change because I'm going to have to see the room to see what's going on. I might change something right in the middle of it, but at that point, you cannot have that kind of, hey, you going to take a turn here? I mean, you can't, you can't be as open. However, I do think the team needs to discuss, obviously, you got to practice five days a week in most teams and that's where you're practicing the team building...basketball or football or whatever you're playing. That's not the time to discuss. You're supposed to have practiced that team effort and that team trust. So, you have both in all circumstances. So, team building is very, very important, but at some point, you have to just go, OK, this is where we are and here's how much of a team we do have but let's play. And you can't demand both at different times. I mean, it's just amazing how you can't just there's not one answer. It's also, it's always depends on the circumstance. So, there is no way to always be a team builder. There has to be, you have to look at the situation you're going up against. I mean, I've done this in corporate where we were in a room with fifteen people with Cigna Insurance that were the big muckety mucks and then we had fifteen from Cigna Insurance that were the level, a lesser level, and they were fighting each other in Philadelphia. And we had a woman that was critical on the representing the people from Macon, Georgia. And she got so overwhelmed, she was having a basically a nervous breakdown on the floor. She was laying on the floor. This is in a professional meeting with 30 people all getting paid probably two hundred thousand dollars more in their job and there's a woman lying on the floor having a nervous breakdown and they're calling an ambulance. So, I went up to her and I layed, I was lying on the floor with her and I was the outcast, I was the guy who didn't have the college degrees and I wasn't getting paid two hundred thousand dollars a year. I lay on the floor with her and said, look, it's really OK that you feel the way you do. She goes, what? I said, it's OK to feel uncomfortable. So, you need to feel OK about feeling uncomfortable. If you can do that, maybe you'll feel better. But it's OK. It's you have every right to be a nervous and be, you're being beat up on by these people. You need to let go of that if you can and you need to take a deep breath and realize that's just, it's OK that you're scared, it's OK that you're, there's a liability of what you say could ruin three hundred jobs, whatever. That's OK. Just, but be OK with that uncomfortableness. So, at that moment, you can't, there's no way to say here's the five ways to handle that situation. And I would handle the next one a different way, because that was a person that might have heard that and she did. And she actually stood up, went to the bathroom, cleaned herself up, came out, slammed dunked the meeting for the next three and a half hours and it all went forward. But it's all, it was just a moment. So, every moment is different in business. Every moment is different in the sports game. Every moment has to be thought about. What's the relationship right now between that milk, that buttermilk, that flour, that butter? Because at critical moments, it's five hundred fifty degrees in that oven, you better start thinking quicker than if it's two hundred degrees in that oven because everything is going to be a quicker response. So, you have to be on your toes all the time. So, a good to me, a good leader or a good an expert, if you want to call that, because it seems to be expert leadership here, is to understand the basic rules that you've got, the basic training that you have, but be prepared to realize that you might be in a situation, not what is, but what might be. That's the whole thing here. What is the situation and what might be the situation? And that's the whole critical thing on teams and building and working together and not working together. Jenna Yordy: Yeah. So, I feel like you've kind of been touching on this in several different places. But. How would you specifically characterize your personal leadership style? Or do you have a leadership style? Scott Davis: Well, if you talk to ten different people, you might get ten different answers. And that's why I think I'm different slightly with almost every single person. I don't have a fixed one. I mean, I do sort of have one. I guess my basic leadership style is to give you access. I mean, I keep that as my main theme is how do I get you access? And most people teachers want to kind of cram down your throat. I mean, I was in third grade and my third grade teacher said, Scott, I wish I could take a drill, drill a hole in your head and just put it down in there. And that way you... instead of challenging me all the time. You challenge me on everything I try to teach you, can I just cram it down in your head? I go, well, I do it both ways. I definitely want you to give me the information. Be great if you can just download it. We didn't have the computers and stuff back then, but a hole in your head with a drill, that might've worked. But the question is the my, the leadership styles, I like the word, I remember a story. There's a very famous photographer named Richard Avedon, he is probably one of the most famous black and white photographers in the world that did people, he did the Beatles. He had a wife named Dovima and she was in Paris and she was in a situation where she's in the fashion capital of the world. And in Paris, they said, fashion is everything. And she goes, fashion, fashion is nothing. Your style is everything. So, they're having this debate. Now, here's one of the most famous people in the world. Well the wife of, and she's quite infamous herself. And she's saying, no, it's not, it's not fashion, it's style. Fashions is what you put on the rack and what you did and it's the all the selling and all that kind of style is how you wear it. So, she made a point. So, she said, I'm going to prove that tomorrow. So, she went the next day, went into her hotel room, took the drapes off of her, curtains, curtains off of her windows. She put a leotard, a black leotard on, she walked across the street, put this curtain around her body, stood in front of four elephants and did a pose. It's the most famous black and white photograph in the world next to maybe Ansel Adams, Half Dome. Vogue has published it one, over one hundred times. And when you look at it from a distance, it looks like this woman's in this beautiful dress and you look at it really closely, you're looking at a lady in a leotard with a curtain. It's all about the style of what she did with the elephants behind her. So, in the question of what's the style, my style, my style is obviously giving you access. As a leader I want to give you access to what it is you really are looking for. So... what you're trying to do, so it's not just follow my instructions. Yes, follow my instructions and practice. This is an A, this is a B, this is a C on this violin. This is how you play the piano. Yes. Here's how you make coffee. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So, I'm going to one stylist to give you the information that most people know, and this is the recipe to follow. But the next thing is, what's your version of that recipe? What's your version of that chocolate cake that I've just shown you how to make. What are you going to do and how are you going to put yourself in it? So, my style is to make sure you have ownership in whatever it is that you're doing for me. So, if we're working together, I want you to be a salesperson, I want you to follow my instructions, I want you to sell the prices for the, you know I want you to sell the things that are marked according to the labels. But at the same time, I want you to add your own self into it. I want you to be a part of it. So, I want you to sell it or to give access to in your own way to that customer. And I want you to have the freedom to know that I trust you in that. So, I don't know if that answers the question on my, on style, but that's, that's my style is to let you have ownership. Jenna Yordy: Yeah, no, I think you answered that perfectly, and I've heard you say a couple of times about your teacher in third grade who really just tried to cram that information in. Do you, do you have any other experiences that maybe helped shape you as a leader in the sense of wanting to help give people access and learn in their own way, as opposed to like cramming in information? Are there any other experiences like that? Scott Davis: Influences in my life have been my grandmother who taught me what a good relationship is doing. My mother, who was teaching me patience, because she raised five sons and she had five boys in a four year period of time. Jenna Yordy: Oh wow. Scott Davis: And she had her husband and she had her, her father living in this house. So, I learned a humbleness and a kindness from my mother. So, I learned in that kind of awareness of ratios and what makes, what is this buttermilk really doing with this flour, from my grandmother. I watched the kindness and the patience of my mother, who just was an angel. Of course, most mothers are, but mine in particularly I thought just had a particularly interesting job in life. And then I had a brother. I have four brothers and they're all different. But I had one particular brother that was just this, he just sucked in information and he wanted to... all over me the next day. So, he was one year ahead of me, loved him to death, but he could not, he wanted to take information and actually convert it to information to me. So, I had a guy telling me at three years old, hey, man, let me show you how to tie your shoes. And I said, well, I don't need to know how to tie my shoes yet I'm only three. I said, well, you're four, so I need another year. And so, we had these fights our whole lives. And then he would read, read, read, read. He was a big reader. He read, read, read. And there's a great, little story once, he's on the roof of our house and he goes, Scott, come read a book with me. And I said, OK, well what? And he goes well it's a Mark Twain book. And I said alright, how many hours is it going to take me to read this book? He goes, that's going to take three or four hours for you to read the book. It takes me about two hours because I'm a reader. And I went OK. Because you read a book and you learn so much. And I said, well, I tell you what, if you'll, I'll read this book for three hours with you, if you'll climb a tree with me for three hours. And he goes, well it won't take three hours to climb a tree. I said it won't take me three hours to read that book either. If you're not willing to spend three hours in the tree with me, and you think you're going to learn more in that book, I don't think so. So, the big dilemma is do we read in books and learn and then how we learn, do we look at Google and learn or do we actually roll our sleeves up, put our fingers out there? And drop the Google baby and go make a biscuit twenty times and you'll learn a whole lot more about it than reading about twenty recipes. So, my big thing was both. So, you can't ignore the book, yes, he went to my tea and yes, he was very highly educated. And yes, he became a consultant. Yes, he did a business later, twenty years of being consultant and then fifteen years of being in manufacturing. And he's very successful, if you call successful, having money to go out, never having to work again. Now, that's, that's one of the questions of what successful is. But has he been as many places? He's the same guy that says I could have a flat tire in any city in America, and I'll just have a call AAA. I could have it ten miles from my house, have no one to call. Because you could be anywhere in America, in any city, make a phone call, you know somebody in that city and they'd come help you and you wouldn't have to call AAA. Now, I'm not saying that's good or bad. It's just different. I mean, AAA might be easier. It's probably faster that calling up somebody you know. So, there's just two sides of almost everything, but both heads and the tails, a coin is not a coin unless it has heads and tails. It's just, you cut that coin in half and just have heads, it's no longer valuable. You have tails, it's not worth a quarter. You've got to have heads and tails, so you can have both. So, a good, in my opinion, a get leader and a good expert says it's the entire coin that makes the difference. You got to have both sides of it. And that's how a team really works. One of the things I talk about in leadership in that and expertise is liability. You have assets and we have liabilities. And I tell people all the time, am I investing in your life, your assets? Jenna when you come work for me am I going to invest in your assets or am I going to invest in your liabilities? And you're going to say, well assets, Mr. Davis, and look at what I can provide for you. And I go, well if I don't invest in your liabilities, I'm making a mistake because I am not investing in all of you. I need to invest in your liabilities as well [as your assets]... that's only negative. If I hand you a suitcase with a million dollars in it and tell you to walk down the street, you might be excited you have a million dollars in the suitcase, but don't tell anybody else you do because they'll hit you over the head with a baseball bat and steal it from you. So now, liabilities, a million dollars can be just as big of a liability as it can be an asset. So, invest in the liabilities as much as the assets of anybody. That's my suggestion as a leader. And if you can do that, you're investing in the whole package. Jenna Yordy: Yeah, that's a really good point about the money. I didn't, I didn't really think about it like that. You also kind of just mentioned this a little bit ago as well, but, so how would you measure success and failure and how can you learn from both of them? Scott Davis: Well, I think the first thing you have to do is success again, if you think success is monetizing something, I was, I was asked one time in a very big moment about monetization. I got these professional guys some on the radio, he's a big talk host and he talks about monetizing, monetizing, monetizing. How do you monetize this and how do you monetize that. And I've seen people that are out of debt and I've seen people that have no debt, but they're not very happy people. I've seen people that are majorly in debt, that aren't happy people. So, I don't think you're going to be a happy person and a complete person whether you're in debt or out of debt. I don't think you're going to necessarily you know; you have to decide what is success. So, if my choice or my love is to cook more and to have more people in the kitchen with me, I can stay in that little business for forty five years. My success was the amount of time and amount of time I got to share with people. My success wasn't successful according to the stock market people, the people that do money for a living. Even the bank would say, Scott, you, you've, you've never, you've paid your bills, you've done your stuff, but you haven't really you don't have all these things. Well, that's not necessarily what success is. So, the first thing you have to decide is what is success for you and what does that mean? And so, without, you can't, I mean, you can you can let the books tell you what success is. You can let the house on the biggest house on the hill decide whether you're successful or not. You can decide whether you've got a car every year is success or not. I don't think that's success at all, never did. So, my success has a different approach. So, my success is to get more people access to more things. And I want more people to cook at home. I want more people to when they go to a restaurant, understand what it is they're eating. So even if you don't cook at all, you can still come in my cookware shop and still learn something and I can still learn something from you even if you never buy a skillet from me. So the question is when I'm in the cookware business, am I successful because I sold 100 hours to that day, or because I got somebody access to something, or I was kind of somebody that just felt like, you know what, I'm going to go in there just because that guy was nice to me. And guess what, that's successful for me. So being in the village for forty five years where I was being working for my brother, who was a consultant when he was a consultant, working for my brother when he owned a manufacturing company. My success, the reason I was hired by him and the reason I felt my jobs were successful when I worked for him was because people felt better about where they worked. And before I was there, they felt better after I left after three months than they did before I got there. Was that successful because I got paid more money working three months for a consulting firm than I did all year working in retail. No, the success wasn't the money. The success was that I got people to feel better about their jobs. I worked on a project and that Macon, Georgia project, they were going to close the factories down. They were going to close this particular part of this company down. And our job was to not have that happen, so we were successful in keeping three hundred people employed. That was more valuable to me and more successful to me than getting paid that cash that I got paid at the end of my three months profit. So, we have to understand, we have to focus on what it is success is for ourselves. And I'm not saying that it's not successful to have a million dollar home or two million dollar home and three cars. I'm not saying that's not successful, but it's not if you're not, in my opinion, if you're not excited about being alive and passionate about being alive and passionate about sharing what you have done in your life. So that to me is, that's why I think a lot of people in Third World countries, I see them very successful. I don't see them as a third world country. They're rated that way because of their economics. I've seen much, I see more often in the families that I've met, the successful family, than I do here as a ratio, because they're just happier people. They're happy with being with their family. They're happy with what they have. That's the main thing. So, can, success to me is can you be happy with within your means? Jenna Yordy: Yeah, absolutely. Um, let's see, moving on a little bit. What would you say your professional strengths and weaknesses are? Scott Davis: They're the same thing. My passion is my strength and my passion is my weakness. Passion can be great because you can always love it and you can be, my passion gets things done and people have, people have bought from me things that they said, I remember a lady came in and she was going to buy one skillet. She was asking me about one ten inch skillet and I was making a joke with my employees. I said, let me show you how to have an experience with a customer and I'll show you what a successful experience is. So, I kind of went over to this woman who happened to be Russian, and she was buying one skillet. And I said, well, what are you buying this skillet for? And you know I was talking to her. And she goes for this and this, and I said, well, you seem to like, in that fifteen minutes I learned that she probably liked to cook. So, I said, well, what you need to do is if you're going to cook like this and I was showing her why and how and giving her recipes, etc., I'll make this story short. But anyway, at the end of it, she goes, an hour later with ice cream in the bag that we've now put in the freezer because she's afraid it's going to melt, so we put it in the freezer. We've had an hour conversation and she walks up and she goes, you know what, I've been thinking about this, but I'm going to do it today because you're, you're so passionate about cooking and you've made me like be more, you know, I'm passionate too, but you're telling me it's OK to be passionate. So, I'm going to go ahead and buy this whole set and she spent thirteen hundred dollars after she was going to buy a ninety dollar skillet. Now, I wasn't trying to get her to spend hundred dollars. That was not my goal. My goal was to get you to feel loved, you feel welcome to my store and say we want we want to cook together, come in the kitchen, we'll cook some together. And in that passion, she ended up spending thirteen hundred dollars. Well, my employees were like going, we'll never be able to do that, and I'm going, just be yourself. It doesn't take, it just, I didn't teach her anything that ya'll didn't know. I didn't go into the models. I didn't even go into the how that the structures of the skillets and how it was put together and all the science behind the cookware. I was just talking about recipes and having a good time. So that can be very successful, but also you're so passionate that you don't really sometimes get caught up in but what it cost to do business, and what it costs to do so, that same passion, because you're wanting to do this so passionately, like a lot of artists can create something, but they're really not very good at selling their products. That's why they have art galleries, because somebody's going to sell that artist's passion, because passionate, artistic people often aren't very good at running businesses. So, the part of, that weakness of my same strength is that I can be passionate. Well, sometimes my brother would say, Scott is passionate for about three hours that's great, the room feels a lot better, but now we got to get them to get that done. I said, but you're going to do it better if I get them in the right spirit. And of course, they would, they always came through. We hit our deadlines. But it was nerve wracking sometimes for somebody because I go, why can't you just tell them how to do it, I go, it won't work the same. So, the main thing is passion is very big on when I think successful, but also, it's my, it's a weakness too. Jenna Yordy: Yeah! All right, so as we're starting to wrap up a little bit, what advice would you have for future leaders for building relationships and trust around them or in the organization they're working for? Just what, what's some advice you would give them? Scott Davis: Well, I think the biggest problem that I see in small businesses and big businesses is giving the people you work with some type of ownership. Now, a lot of people go ownership, ownership. You know, you talking about equity, you talking about this? There's so many ways to give somebody ownership of something without giving them... business. You could get some people, I promote all the time to say you should give them at least some sort of profit sharing. However, even if it's not necessarily even in money, one of the things I learned from the big job with Cigna was I was trying to be the liaison between a professional consulting company, very, very high valued consulting company, and a very, the second largest insurance company in the world. And they were having issues getting these, the stuff done down in Georgia. And they, what they did is they took applications in and they had to take in three thousand applications a day for car insurance and stuff like that. And they had by law to give it out in thirty days. So, you have to be able to tell the person applying that in thirty days. And they were ninety days behind. And the government was coming in saying this is against the rules we're going to start fining you. So, the question is, why can't the second largest company in the world, what do they need me for? What do they need my brother for? Well, he's a consulting company. So, what do you need him for? Well he realizes there's a gap between them and the Cigna people. They need somebody that's going to be able to break the wall between the Cigna upper company and the Cigna, just regular people making twelve bucks an hour. They brought me in, the uneducated guy, and my job was to break the link between those two. So, the first thing I did when I got down there, I said, do ya'll go bowling, to the three or four leaders, and they went, bowling? And I went, yeah let's go bowling, you can do all kinds of stuff going bowling. And the woman that happened to be the main girl, she was about, she's probably about three hundred pounds. She goes, Scott, do you think I bowl? I said, I don't know, but maybe we could go bowling. And she goes, no, let's go eat some fried green tomatoes. So, we went to lunch with her three best people in the company that she liked. And I tell them, I said, look, here's the gig. There's always a gap between management and the regular people you want to call that whatever you want to call that gap. I said we're here to break that gap. If we don't break the gap, it won't work. So, what do y'all need? Well, why would you're a consulting company ya'll come in and fire people, ya'll do this stuff. And I said that's not why we got here. You're an ear between me and my brother. Let me let you know that we want to hear what you have to say. What are your problems? What are your things that you wish would be different? So, you all have a better time down here. And so, we did this in a three month period. And guess what? We were able to figure that out. That's the end of the story with lady on the bottom of the floor having a nervous breakdown. She was representing the regular people down there. We finally got that thing bridged, they were going to change this factory and pretty much close it. And they actually ended up out of this whole deal, I said, do ya'll want more money? What do ya'll want? They said, well, you know, we don't want paper turkeys. We want a real turkey. They used to give us turkeys at Christmas. Now they give us a coupon to go pick the turkey up. So, the first thing we did at the end of the month that I was there, we got a hundred and twelve turkeys and put them in a truck and delivered them to every single person that was there. A real turkey. That's all they wanted was a real turkey versus the coupon for the turkey, because that meant the company cared about them a little differently. They said, and we want a childcare center. I said, you want a childcare center? So, I go to the company, go, hey, let's get a childcare center. And they said no, that's going to cost us two million dollars. So, I went back to the people and I said, would ya'll pay for it? Would ya'll take it out of your own money? And they went, yes, we will. So, they weren't even looking for more money, they just wanted a family setting. This is a professional, this place was huge it was like a state park. Buildings, billion dollar, million dollar buildings and then we were going to give them a shot. So finally, we put this in there, got it, put it as part of the package and guess what, Cigna ended up doing. They actually gave them the childcare center which cost them two million dollar, but they did it without the people paying for it. So, some people all they want is more ownership. All they want to say, are we being recognized for who we are? Yes, we're only fifteen dollar an hour, twelve dollar an hour people, but we have a value. So, the main thing and the way we want to get, I want to teach leaders or help leaders to understand something, make sure the person that you're teaching understands their value, OK? And that you understand their value. That's the biggest problem with most leaders. They don't understand the value of the individual. That their work, that they're there, they've got three thousand people in a room and there's no way they can understand their value. I could, they cannot understand Jenna's value. How can I? If you don't try, it will not work as well as if you do try. You've got to drive. You've got to get everything and you've got them to understand your team. You got to get them to understand who they are in the link, what's their value? So, you've got to give them ownership. You've got to teach them what that ownership is. That's all it is, it's just an awareness. Ownership is an awareness. It's not a certificate necessarily. Who owns the house I'm in? I don't. They say I do. The bank does. The certificate says they do it. This is my house though, this is my home. But they own, until I pay off the debt. I don't own it yet, but I'm not acting like that. I own this house. I get to paint the walls the way I want to. I get to do whatever I want to do to my sinks or not. I get to have people over. That's ownership, even though I technically don't own it, not till I pay the debt off. So, companies, please give these people a home. Leaders, make sure these people are feeling welcome. If they're part of not just a team rah rah rah, you know, with the cheerleaders and you know, capital J. It is give them ownership. Make sure they understand that they are part of and that you can't do it without them. That's a good leader. That's a good expert. I can't do it without you. Jenna Yordy: Yeah, that's a good point. That just as we've been studying leaders in my class as well, looking at how the successful leaders, as to put it one way I guess, they, they're not doing it by themselves, it's all, they're surrounded by lots of other people who are helping them in some way or that they've worked with. It's not they like they didn't get to where they are or where they were by themselves, so. And so, for the final question, what do you want your legacy to be and not necessarily I mean, you can answer this however you want, but not necessarily to the world, but maybe could just be to your family or the people, the close people you surround yourself with. But what would you what do you want your legacy to be? Scott Davis: I remember in like fourth grade, one of my people maybe and one of my statements was, to be or not to be? That's the question. I learned that, you know, Shakespeare or whatever. And I was running around saying that all time, people are going what are you talking about? So that was a big win for me, for my legacy when I was younger was going to be to be or not to be. And I wanted that on my tombstone. Right. Well, I've converted that a little bit to, to be or what, or what might to be. So, to be is to be. You're kind of told here's your lines, here's your structure, here's your basketball court. That's a be. What to be? A basketball player. You know, a hundred twenty feet long, sixty feet wide, whatever it is, ten feet high on the goals, you got all that stuff. That's what's to be. What might to be is who might you be on that court? So, I'm writing a book, I think you know that. But I'm writing a book that says, what does the ocean taste like? Versus, what might the ocean taste like? So, what does versus what might. So, what I want my legacy to be, if you want to call it that, is for every single person I've ever met to remember the question, who are you? Or who might you be? You need to make that decision every single day. Who are you and who might you be? Well, who are you? Right. You might be doing pretty good and you might just settle for it. But who might you be? Hopefully you're still reaching. So, my hopeful, but for, if anybody gets to know me, when if they ever do remember me, whoever does my family, says, who might I be? Not who am I. And that's it, it's pretty simple. Jenna Yordy: I really like that. I love how that stemmed, like, from so early on in your childhood and then you kind of like, tweaked it. Well, thank you again so much for doing this interview with me.