SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
The Smart Way To Quit Your Corporate Job with Kevin Lavelle Ep 7
26 Feb 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million.
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. In the last episode, number six, you saw how best-selling author Bob Berg sold 2.1 million books and went from zero to $20,000 per keynote, all in the spirit of being a go-giver. Our guest today is Kevin Lovell. Now, Kevin was a numbers guy working as a strategist in Washington, D.C., when a big idea hit, which we're going to talk about in a second.
Now, during the hot summer days, he got sick of sweaty dress shirts and got the idea for a fashion brand called Mizzen and Main. He since raised capital, opened locations around the country, and kept production in America by veterans. Kevin, are you ready to take us to the top? We are ready. Thanks, Nathan. Appreciate it. Good, good.
Well, first off, anything that you feel like my audience needs to know, the Top Tribe needs to know before we jump into more of your story?
No, just that I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had a great corporate gig and was ready to work alongside some of the brightest minds that I could have imagined being able to work with, but this idea that I had while I was working as an intern in DC for a performance fabric dress shirt just stuck with me and I couldn't let go of it.
So we launched that in July of 2012 and here we are, ready to take on the world.
Now, I will never forget writing at Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch. Now, this had to have been in 2012, I believe. We were out there. We met you guys at a dude ranch, an amazing family. You know, your parents, I still think, are really close with our parents. In fact, I know that you guys are sending care packages to my sister in Africa.
She's serving in the Peace Corps, and I got to visit her about two weeks ago. And I will tell you here live, thank you, thank you, thank you. She's loving those care packages, and I consider myself blessed to be able to call you a friend.
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Chapter 2: How did Kevin Lavelle transition from corporate life to entrepreneurship?
You don't have to iron them or dry clean them. They have four-way stretch, a great fit, unlike a Brooks Brothers baggy cut or a European skinny cut. And you can take them out of the washing machine and throw them on in about 15 or 20 minutes. Don't even put them in the dryer. And so that was what we started with. And we've since expanded to performance fabric Henleys, denim, and blazers.
And we're going to keep growing from there.
And I have to tell you, we've raised a lot of money at Hayo, and a lot of our investors are in Austin. And the summers down there are blistering hot. And my mom actually, several Christmases ago, bought me the Blackman 2.0, I believe it was.
Chapter 3: What inspired the creation of Mizzen and Main?
It was a white dress shirt. I'm pretty sure it had the spread collar. And I'll tell you what, I throw that thing in a gym bag. And I pop it out when I got to get to a business meeting, right? And I throw it on, no wrinkles, run to my VC pitch, no sweat. It works fantastic. So I am a big fan of the product. It's one of the reasons I'm having you on. So congrats there.
So walk us through what is selling. Let's just focus on last month. You mentioned blazers, denim, the shirts you started with. What's selling the best?
The other products really are complementary. And just to sort of expand the collection, it's our dress shirt. That's our bread and butter. That's what we've been selling for several years and has just been extraordinary. To give some concrete numbers, and we don't disclose exact revenue figures, but just to give some concrete numbers, we've been growing
four to five X year on year since we started. And as of the first week of June, we had surpassed all of 2014's total revenue. And so we are growing tremendously. It's hard for us to keep our product in stock. Every time we restock it, we're sold out within a short period of time. And we introduced a new collection of dress shirts about nine days ago.
And within an hour, one of them had sold out entirely. And then within two days, another one had sold out. And I would imagine by tomorrow, we'll be completely sold out of all sizes. It's been an exciting ride and that flywheel is spinning, I won't say out of control, but almost out of control. And so we're just working to make sure that we manage our growth effectively and appropriately.
And Kevin, for the top tribe listener that's tuning in right now, and they might be thinking about getting into retail or they're selling, you know, a bow tie or they're selling a shoe or something. And maybe they're looking to get their first sale. Can you take us back to July 2012? How do you, you know, you get your first product manufactured. How did you get your first sale?
The first sale, honestly, was not selling through Facebook, but selling via Facebook to existing friends and family. And so it's been a long time. I have a love-hate relationship with social media, but have built up a really great network of friends and family and mentors and Colleagues and associates. And when I said on July 19th was when I hit publish on our site, you know, we are here.
I'm ready. That first day, I think we sold probably 20 shirts, which was huge, right? I mean, you have no idea what's going to happen. And to get, you know, 20 shirts out the door in that first day was really exciting.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How does Kevin's product differ from traditional dress shirts?
So, okay, great. Let's move forward now. Kevin, you know what time it is? It sounds like it's time for something super exciting. Dude, famous, famous five time. Let's jump in. What is your favorite business book?
My favorite business book is not so much a business book as a life book, and it's 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.
Classic. We'll put that in the show notes for sure for those of you that have never heard of Tim Ferriss or 4-Hour Workweek before. Okay, number two, Kevin, are there any CEOs that you're following or studying right now? Elon Musk. Awesome. Number three, what is your favorite online tool, like Evernote?
It's really hard for me to pick a favorite, so I'm going to combine, I'm going to cheat on this and combine Evernote, Slack, and Todoist.
Great. Evernote, Slack, and Todoist. Is it todoist.com? It's Todoist.
Todoist.
Great. Okay, perfect. And again, we'll link to all those in the show notes at nathanlacka.com forward slash the top. Okay, Kevin, yes or no, do you get eight hours of sleep every night?
Absolutely not, and I really wish I did.
Yeah, you're up there in New York right now. You had a hugely successful pop-up shop there in New York, and we were talking beforehand. I'm sure that you are sleeping very little, so I hope you get caught up soon. Working on it. Working on it, yeah, cool.
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