We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Curtis Scott a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Curtis , appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Coming up with the idea for the product (The Orbit Performance Harness) that I’m hoping serves as the backbone of my business (Orbit Performance Solutions LLC) was really a deeply mental process brought about from the physical work I do on the gym floor as a coach. During the summer of 2022 while working at Willis Performance Training I was constantly challenged and inspired by my mentor and boss Armond Willis to really test industry truths and find ways to optimally train our athletes and general population clients. Throughout the training sessions I always had it on the back of my mind that certain movements and certain muscle groups could definitely be trained more efficiently, but how?

This is where I began constantly day dreaming and going to sleep at night thinking of any possibilities that haven’t been used before to really target and train the core and hips of our athletes.

From there I began to slowly piece togethers ideas of a training harness that can be used for a very vast amount of training modalities while also directly solving the problem I had been seeing. The hips and cores of athletes are trained in a very not sport specific and inefficient manner, and I began to believe I had the right design for a harness that could be used to solve that very problem.

Curtis , 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?

Many readers of this may be people I know or have read about me in my previous article on VoyageATL, but for those that are reading about me for the first time I am a sport performance coach, inventor, entrepreneur and strength and conditioning coach as well as a college student.

Those are my pretty basic titles for what I do. My everyday work often varies. One day I will be the entrepreneur and inventor who is researching and developing plans for my business and my product. Other days I am a sport performance coach and trainer who is training athletes. Beginning this year I will be a strength and conditioning intern for Georgia Southern Football.

My in depth story is pretty long and detailed, you can read it if you’re interested in the VoyageATL magazine article I was interviewed for. But a basic rundown is: I was born in Dallas, Texas and raised in Kennesaw, Georgia. I was an avid athlete my entire life, and football and a weight room basically dominated my life and goals up until I suffered a career ending injury and surgery that took me out of competing in football forever. My life basically got flipped upside down and turned sideways. Through the many hardships I faced with life after football I began to fall in love with the weight room all over again through various gyms and mentors such as Jacob Pierce at X3 Sports-Athens and Armond Willis at Willis Performance Training. Finding that love for the weight room for myself led to an epiphany, that I want my life to be serving other athletes just like me through the weight room and to be a rock for them in their lives outside of sports.

From there I went on to gain my certifications for personal training, nutrition coaching, fitness coaching, as well as sport performance coaching. I’m also in pursuit of my C.S.C.S. and bachelors of sport management. I’ve been coaching, training, and building my harness invention ever since and have loved ever bit of it, good and bad!

Any advice for managing a team?

Although currently my business is ran by just myself there are many people I have had to work with as a team to bring my product to life. From other coaches and business owners helping me test the product to the athletes I coach and work with to the engineers who put together my final blueprints and 3D designs to the manufacturers. Working alone in this world just isn’t possible so if you don’t like working with others, you better start learning how to like it if you want to succeed.

I don’t know if I’m the best person for advice considering I am young and new to this myself, but I would say you absolutely must build relationships and have great communication with those you work with. A favorite quote of mine I’ve read is “Rules without relationships lead to rebellion.” If you work with others and expect positive outcomes you better put work into positive relationships being built, not just because you HAVE to but because you WANT to. I think the difference in many successful teams compared to unsuccessful ones is that those who WANT to build strong relationships succeed while those who build relationships just because they HAVE to don’t succeed.

As for team morale, this is a conversation that could go on forever and is extremely nuanced. In my case I work to keep morale high among those I work with by constantly being positive and ensuring communication is honest, trustworthy, and real. If you can establish trust and realistic communication within a relationship I believe you can work through anything and keep each other moving forward towards success.

Eliminate outside noise, trust your process, love who you work with, love the work you do, work relentlessly and success will find you.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I have had to learn, which took me many “eat s–t” moments to find out was that at times you must work smarter, not harder. Everyone at this point has probably heard that advice, but the real challenge is finding when to apply it. There are many times you must simply work harder; as a coach, a business owner, a student, etc. But there are equal amount of times you must work smarter. When you run into a wall and have hit a plateau in progress, sometimes the best thing is detach from the situation and evaluate if the task you are facing is necessary and worth it. If it isn’t, put it on the back burner and tackle it later, if it is but you still are struggling with it, delegate the task to someone more suited for it, or work with others to find a solution.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.orbitperformancesolutionsllc.com
• Instagram: @curtis.scottt @orbitperformancesolutions
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtis-scott-816124160/