Today we’d like to introduce you to Nathan Davenport
Hi Nathan, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
The best way to share my business story is to start with where I am now, and then share my beginnings. I have now been operating Nebu Summit, aka Nebu, an outdoor apparel brand that focuses on hiking, climbing, and biking clothing–we create high tech products at affordable prices–for over 3 years now. The first 2 were all product and business development, and the last year and a half has been selling, marketing, fulfilling, developing, and logistics.
There are 2 major events in my life that brought me to where I am today, shaped my perspective, and provided the skills needed to build Nebu Summit.
The first major event was spending my high school years in Peru as an expat. This was my first experience outside of the US, and the contrast was stark. What stood out to me the most was the vibrant small business community… there were so many vendors, diverse specialties, and fierce competition, that you just don’t see in the US. Scale of economies doesn’t really apply in Peru due to the difficulties of creating an legitimate legal business. Hernando DeSoto, a Peruvian economist did an experiment to see how long it would take to create a legitimate legal business in Peru, a T-shirt company. This meant no bribing, although he ended up having to do 2 or face shutting down. He followed the legislative code to a T. It took him 9 months with a team working 8 hours a day. There were 11 different permits, and they had to deal with 7 different government departments. He states in his book “The Mystery of Capital” that even for highly educated minds, it was still extremely complex and bureaucratize to establish this business. So difficult that rarely anyone does in Peru, except for the ultra rich. The downstream effect of this was a lot of small illegal businesses, which limit how much you can grow. Access access to capital and the traditional banking systems is limited, and there is fear that your business assets could be seized at any time. This taught me that you can accomplish a lot while being lean, and the smaller you are, the more nimble you can be. It also helped me understand how to stand out in a crowded market where everyone is selling the same thing.
The second major event in my life, was joining the Marine Corp Infantry during war time. I joined in May of 2004, and was shipped off to Afghanistan within 9 months of my start date. Although I was stationed in Hawaii, I only saw the beach 2 times during those 9 months, spending almost all of my time training and preparing for the rugged mountains of Afghanistan near the Pakistan boarder. I then went on to Iraq in 2006 to Haditha, shortly after the Haditha Massacre that our sister battalion had done. Although both deployments had different landscapes, they were both full of hardship and harsh conditions. This really taught me the idea that you create your own normal, and that hardship is a gradient of ones own recent experiences. If I wanted to accomplish difficult tasks, I had to create my own normal of what is possible and what effort I was willing to put in. I also learned the importance of good quality gear and clothing, which still shapes how I think through our products at Nebu.
Early in my career before Nebu, I worked in finance, and then corporate finance. Both taught me the the drivers of business. Finance taught me the importance of capital and capital stacks, and how those can impact return on equity (or your investment), and effects on cashflow. Corporate finance taught the operation side of those drivers, and how to look at the role of marketing, operations, as well as the important of understanding where your sales volume needs to be based on your cost structure, or what they call operational leverage. Working at Amazon, I was able to witness the effects of high operational leverage with high fixed costs and the impact that declining sales had on one of their subsidiaries.
After almost a decade working in Finance, I was itching to create my own business. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, and I wanted to give my daughter a similar experience that I had. A family business brings so much of what I learned the long, and hard, way under one roof. Our family motto is we are a team, and everyone contributes what they can.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The biggest struggle in starting and operating Nebu are focused on a partnership. I started Nebu with a partner, and we both were 50/50 when we started. I am not sure I would recommend a 50/50 partnership, although I do know a few that have worked well. The key issue with any partnership revolves around perceived contribution, and I would define contribution as money, time, talent, and assets. Contribution needs to be balanced in aggregate over time, or difficulties arise. In our case, we were overly optimistic in the amount of money, time, and risk that would be needed to grow Nebu. That forced us to end the partnership. It ended amicable, but it was an extremely emotional and stressful event that took almost 5 months to resolve.
In the end, I think both parties are better off, but I know we both lost a lot of sleep, and probably a few years of life from it. What really helped me through all of it was reaching out to different mentors and people I respected who had been through similar experiences. This helped me maintain my ground, and ultimately negotiate from a perspective of what was best for Nebu over the long term. I learned more in negotiations than the 2 semesters I had in my MBA!
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Nebu Summit?
Nebu Summit is an outdoor apparel brand that’s built in the mountains, for the mountains. We create functional, thoughtful clothing that wears effortlessly from trail to town and everything in between. Home based in Ogden, Utah, situated below the Northern Wasatch range, providing unparalleled access to the mountain life to recreate and connect with nature, which inspire our products and brand.
Nebu Summit products are made with thoughtful designs where we start with functionality and work backwards. We want our products to look good but not by sacrificing performance. Materials are not just selected but perfected! Each product uses custom material to enhance its specific functionality. Finally, fit is the core feature above all else.
Finally, our not so secrete secrete, is that all our products are named after fancy drinks with interesting stories–just google any of our product names!
More at nebuclothing.com/pages/about-us.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
Luck has played a large role in my life, and it has helped me in my own personal development.
When I was in the Marines, I learned that luck was something that you can create and capitalize on. In the Marines you made your own luck by being what they call a hard target. This meant decreasing the areas that can cause bad luck, wearing all your protective gear properly, staying alert at all times, and more. You capitalized on luck by running scenarios in your head and training actions of those scenarios. A great example of how this benefited me was, I had read early one in my Afghanistan deployment about how the Germans utilized scouts on skis to spot ambushes. They essentially would send scouts ahead on high flanks in difficult terrain which allowed them to spot any enemy ambushes before the main troops got there. In Iraq, the enemy changed tactics and started running IEDs with long wires to safe detonation locations, usually to the flanks of major roads. We decided to use the same scout strategies, minus the skis, to detect the wires and detonation locations ahead of the main convoy. The result: no one in my platoon was killed by an IED, and this strategy was later adopted by our battalion.
Personally I was able to create the wealth needed to start and continue to build Nebu from luck. I had read more books on financial crisis, business books, financial history, fixed income, and investing than I can count, and that allowed me to grow wealth and capitalize on 2 major crises–housing and covid.
In my business career, I’ve created my own luck through networking and learning. I spend time broadening my network so that I am ready to capitalize on luck as it appears. I also spend at least 1-2 hours a day learning, mostly reading, so that I can capitalize on luck in more ways as it appears. At Nebu we have had both good and back luck. So far the good and the bad have been about equal, but I am hoping to change that to majority good luck.
Pricing:
- Core Product the Rob Roy $95 vs. competitors at $125-$150
- Mojito Shorts $72
- Tom Collins Shirts $34
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nebuclothing.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nebu_summit/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NebuSummit
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebu-clothing
