Bintz an entrepreneur in ecommerce
MINOT, N.D. – Scott Bintz has always had an entrepreneurial side.
“Even at 12, I was selling greeting cards door to door,” Bintz said.
Originally from Minot and as well as the Bismarck area, Bintz graduated from Minot State in 1993 with a Bachelor in Economics degree while enlisted in the National Guard. He had experiences at Minot State that have benefited him over the years.
“I realize you learn stuff at college, but the greatest thing that I got at Minot State was the exposure to many different walks of life – and I learned how to learn,” Bintz said. “You have to know when get into the workforce or start your own business, most jobs, they’re not going to teach you everything, so you have to know how to learn.
“To get a college degree, you have to do some things that you don’t necessarily like for the greater goal. You have to take classes you don’t really like, and I think it taught me that when you have a greater goal, sometimes you got to do some things you don’t like.”
After college, he ventured into selling cell phone accessories while working at Western Wireless.
“I started a company called Cellular World, it sold cellular accessories because you couldn’t really get many cellular accessories from cellular providers at the time,” Bintz said.
Cellular World is one of many endeavors that Bintz has pursued. He also owned a manufacturer’s representative firm, called NW Reps, whose clients were generally involved with manufacturing pickup accessories like bed liners. After being introduced to the business, Bintz founded RealTruck, an ecommerce company that sells pickup accessories.
“I ordered some office supplies online for my northwest reps company. I thought it was cool, and I had the idea of, hey, this pickup cover that I’m selling, would it be possible to put a video online and people would buy it online from a company they’d never heard of?” Bintz said. “There had to be an easier way to connect people to this really cool pickup cover for your truck better than the way were currently doing it, which was going to a lot of home and garden shows and ag shows and roll up and down all day long. That’s how RealTruck was born.”
The company began in a duplex basement and quickly grew. A success that Bintz, who lives in Jamestown, attributes to positive work culture. He wrote a book in 2018, Principles to Fortune: Crafting a Culture to Massively Grow a Business, detailing how to craft a work culture.
“By crafting a culture, we massively grew. RealTruck grew from 8 million to about 100 million in sales,” Bintz said.
Bintz eventually sold RealTruck is now involved with several business ventures – marketing, coffee, and an ecommerce racing part company, RHRSwag – that branch off of his company Red Headed Rebel LLC.
Bintz also has speaking engagements related to his book, which was published this year. Throughout the month of October, he speaks at several towns in North Dakota.
“I think my message, especially in the student realm, is that you can do a lot more things in life than you think you are capable of when starting out,” he said. “In my case, I started many businesses over the years, raced a race car, wrote a book – just a lot of different things that when I was going to Minot I didn’t expect to do.”
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| Published: 10/12/18 |
