Dad Started $100M+ a Year Business Inspired By Smelly Home

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Key Takeaways

- Dancy officially launched Azuna in 2019 and saw sales accelerate during the pandemic.

- For the first couple of years, Dancy handled everything himself — all the way to $3 million in sales.

- Now, Azuna has a team of 50, nearly $100 million in annual sales, and is eyeing an eventual sale.

Serial entrepreneur Scott Dancy has only had an employer for about three months in his entire life — and that’s fine by him.

Image Credit: Azuna. Scott Dancy.

In 1995, a new college graduate of University of Rochester in upstate New York, Dancy moved to Atlanta for a job as a recruiter. Around 90 days into that role, he thought, I could do this myself. So he and a colleague did just that. They started their own staffing business, which made millions within four years.

Other ventures followed, including an information security software company, which sold, and a second staffing business. After that, Dancy got involved in the oil and gas industry, managing limited partnerships and ultimately raising more than $500 million to be the largest driller in the Illinois basin. Then he invested in a sand and gravel pit — which “was a complete disaster.” “We lost everything,” Dancy says.

Dancy’s smelly apartment leads to a business idea

By 2017, Dancy, a father of two, was going through a divorce and living on his own in Buffalo, New York. His washing machine broke one day, and the smell from the standing water was “horrible.” His friend gave him an odor-elimination solution: tea tree oil, which has natural antibacterial and antimicrobial properties.

“It got rid of the smells,” Dancy recalls. “I was like, This is amazing — how do we market this?”

A couple of years later, Dancy set out to turn the vision into a reality, motivated by the idea of developing a line of odor-eliminating tea tree oil products in a category of their own.

“ Other products just mask what the smell with fragrance,” Dancy explains. “While we do have fragrance, the tea tree oil, basically in layman’s terms, is effective against mold, mildew and bacteria — and that’s the source of all your smells.”

Image Credit: Azuna

Starting a business selling tea tree oil: Azuna

Dancy officially launched Azuna in 2019. The friend who had introduced him to tea tree oil worked in contract packaging, so they forged a partnership on that front.

Another friend of Dancy’s worked in the domain industry. Dancy asked him for a name, and he came back with “Azoona.” Dancy liked the sound of it, and when his designer swapped the double “o” out for a “u,” spelling it “Azuna,” the name stuck.

Next, Dancy put the product online and took a hands-on approach to building his business.

“ No idea what I’m doing, literally writing the ad copy myself,” Dancy says. “For three years, I set an alarm every day for two hours to wake up to see if there were things I needed to respond to, whether it was customer service questions or Facebook comments.”

Dancy tracked the number of orders received, then picked up the product from the warehouse and went to the post office to ship it off. The product cost about $10 and sold for $20, so between that and the labor required to fulfill the orders, it was a rough profit margin, Dancy admits.

Image Credit: Azuna

The business goes from $12k to $105k in the span of 1 month

But he wasn’t deterred. The business saw $12,000 in monthly sales by April 2020. With the pandemic underway and millions of people staying in homes they wanted to smell better, sales only accelerated. In May 2020, Azuna pulled in $105,000 in sales.

At that point, Azuna secured its own third-party logistics (3PL) as business operations shifted to keep pace with demand. But it was still two years before Dancy hired anyone to join the team. “I got us up to about $3 million in sales for the most part on my own,” Dancy says.

Over the last several years, Azuna’s sales have continued to skyrocket. The business hit $53 million in sales last year and is on track to see more than $100 million in sales this year.

What’s more, the initially bootstrapped business has taken on little investment along the way compared to competitors, Dancy says, noting that to reach Azuna’s level, most companies would have taken about $50 million in equity. Azuna has raised less than $10 million to date.

Navigating operations amid the business’s rapid growth

One of the biggest challenges Azuna has faced over its growth trajectory is the sheer speed of its scale.

“ I’m not an operations person,” Dancy admits. “I’m an entrepreneur. They just put up a job description for an executive assistant for me, and someone wrote in there, ‘Cleaning up after the Tasmanian devil.’ So that puts it in perspective. That’s me.”

When a business goes from making $500,000 a month to $3 million a month within four months, it requires a significant operational shift, Dancy says. It’s crucial to go beyond thinking about having enou