We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chad Watts. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chad below.

Chad, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you recount a story of an unexpected problem you’ve faced along the way?

Building a website and understanding what is truly needed for your idea to work. You want to build your company with the end in mind and if that relates in part to a web based program then you want to understand the different revenue points and what is needed to make that be successful. Our mission is and will always be to Empower Veterans to become Entrepreneurs via a starting point of a 100% veteran-only salesforce. Just because you have big dreams to be a 100 Million dollar company plus means you will start as a 1 dollar company and the website you need will be achieved easily with a plug and play “box” website. I learned the hard way of going from a Shopify website to a completely custom website to now a modified box website with some coding (WordPress). Understanding this from the beginning would have saved me literally 10’s of thousands of dollars.

Chad, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

At Scars and Stripes Coffee, we are “empowering” veterans to start their own business and our core pillar is that only veterans can sell our products. Utilizing a single-level direct marketing sales model, we use military rank structure to gain team, mission, purpose and accountability. When a veteran joins the sales team they are assigned a unique code for tracking their sales. Most importantly, they are assigned to a Squad Leader (SL) and that leader is now accountable to their new team member. Each week the SL has to conduct “Monday Morning Muster”, which is a conversation with their team member to ascertain their mental status and help them with their business development. The SL also has leadership in a Platoon Leader and finally there is a Company Command. Each position has specific rank structure that is detailed in order to keep or advance in rank. There are 2 ways that a veteran team member gets compensated: 20% commission on the gross sale of products and performance based bonuses. There are 3 ways that leaders get compensated: 20% commission on the gross sale of products, performance based bonuses and being entered into the “veteran generator”.

The veteran generator is an exclusive software that will revolutionize what is being done in the veteran space. Our new first in-class website will not allow a customer to buy a product WITHOUT empowering a veteran. In addition, at check out the customer will be invited to follow the veteran leader that they are empowering via the veterans Instagram and Facebook page. Here the customer will be able to see how “their” veteran is empowering their team. Never before has this nation had the opportunity to empower an individual veteran so quickly and easily as well as follow their veteran by visually seeing how they are impacting the lives of their team members. This mission is incredibly powerful by filling the transition gap from active duty to veteran/civilian life.

Currently, the State of Oklahoma is number one in veteran suicide and although we are not a suicide prevention company, a reduction in suicide will be a by-product of the company. In fact, this past week we had a situation that supports that when one of our SL during Monday Morning Muster sensed something wrong and found that her team member was having serious difficulties. She reported it to leadership and proper steps were taken to assist her team member. We are 4 years in and we have over 300 affiliates in 40 states and continuing to grow. Simply put we are building a company specifically designed for Veterans. We will soon be launching our coffee containers which will command the attention of the nation.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

The game of social media is changing considerable with ads being canceled or censored for reasons sometimes not truly known and the fact that it is very expensive at certain times of the year. There is also a fatigue in the industry with so many new online coffee businesses. At one point we were getting great return on ad spend (ROAS) but with so much noise, it is difficult to get your signal to the potential customer. However, if you have an authentic message the resonates and not only is a great product but is also mission driven then you will create raving fans for your company. Currently, you need to build your specific customer email list meaning if you capture an email of a customer that resonates with your mission/product then you are 20 times more likely to convert that customer into a purchasing customer. So we focus much of our ad spend on increasing awareness in the Veteran community to let them know what we do and how we empower Veterans. If the the veteran does not join the team they will then be put into advertising email group. This is achieved via a Facebook ad, email marketing program and finally the website portal. As an owner, the most important task I have is managing our shoestring budget of capital. You have to be very careful on your marketing dollars because it can drain your company super fast if you are “fishing in the wrong pond”! Never sign a contract that doesn’t have a 30 day out clause and don’t put ad dollars towards anything you can’t track.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

I think the lesson here is that be very clear with yourself that if the idea for the business is yours meaning you thought through the structure and execution then there may be a day where you need a different partner. This was difficult for me to understand at first because you have high hopes for your partnership and you love being with your biz partner but if both of you have never truly grown a ground up business then you may need to pivot to a different partner. In my case, I had a very good childhood friend that was like a brother to me and during his career he built and sold a high tech consulting program that involved million dollar contracts with the department of defense. His knowledge and investment has been exactly what we needed to grow our platform. Not everyone has this type of opportunity from a friend you know extremely well but the point is that you have to seek out people that has been there and knows what you are going through to not only give you guidance but to give you encouragement as well. If your goal is to just go make a lot of money then I think you will have hard time succeeding because there is going to be hours and years of not making much money before maybe you “make it” but if you love the mission and you continue to be authentic then you have a chance.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.scarsandstripescoffee.com
• Instagram: scarsandstripescoffee
• Facebook: scarsandstripescoffee
• Youtube: scarsandstripescoffee