New Block, Same Chop

Welcome back to On the Job. On today's episode, we're going back up to eastern Pennsylvania to check in with Scott carry who, at the height of the pandemic, left his cushy computer job to fulfill a passion for butchering. So let's get to it and hear how Scott Carey's gamble played out. When Scott Carey was first on On

I knew pretty early on, Like I was like, man, this is exactly what I didn't want to do. It didn't feel like me personally, Like I feel really antsy when I like sit down and I'm just sitting on a computer.

And while Scott was making a nice living in that line of work, he craved chain, but he couldn't quite figure out what that chain should be.

I was kind of more like like a entrepreneur.

A entrepreneur, Yeah, you ever hear that that phrase?

That's the first time I've ever heard that.

Yeah, Like you want to be like a business owner. But you really don't.

Have, like, you don't know what it takes to do that. Yeah, you don't know what it takes.

So Scott tried his hand at a bunch of different side hustles, all of which didn't pan out, but at least he had barbecuing, because at that time, Scott was really into cooking barbecue. He loved the entire process of it, the different cuts of meat, the dry rubs, getting the smoke just right, and how all that coalesced into flavors

I cooked a brisket and I had no idea where the on the cow where it came from. I got cooked the pork button. I thought it came from the pork's butt, and the actually he is the pork shoulder.

So Scott reached out to a couple of butchers in the area to see if they'd show him the ropes, and one of them, a guy named Mike, took a chance on him and brought him under his wing, teaching Scott about the cuts of meat and the craft of butchery itself, and that's when things clicked for Scott. This is what he was meant to be doing. So in twenty twenty, Scott Carey and his mentor Mike became business partners when they opened Slate Belt Butchery, a wholesale meat

We had one customer, and then like the next month, we got two customers.

In time, though, Scott signed on some bigger accounts and words started to spread about this young new butcher and his passion for the craft.

It was during the pandemic.

A lot of processing plants were shut down, a lot of people were, you know, trying to get processing and find a processor, and so we were just getting inundated with calls like, hey, can you help me?

Can you help me? And we were taking people on as much as we could.

Business grew so fast in that first year that Scott and Mike had to hire five employees and soon they were bumping up against the confines of the space they were renting.

We were there a year and it was just very clear that if we were going to grow this business and become something substantial or offer anything to the farm community, like we were going to have to have like our own space.

So Scott starts looking around for larger, more suitable properties. But as you can imagine, not everyone loves the idea of a whole animal butchery sprouting up next door to them.

It's very difficult to just like build brand new, you know, with red tape and.

Dealing with townships and getting an.

Approval for a butcher shop. So the other idea was like, okay, we could find a butcher shop that actually has what we need. It might not be the most ideal set up and stuff like that, but at least it's already grandfathered in with the township.

Fortunately, the butcher community is pretty tight, so Scott had a good lay of the land and before long he heard about a butcher over a new Tripoli Pa who was looking to retire.

Him and his wife. They had a butcher shop for many years.

It was in their family and no one in the family wanted to take it on, and he put the business up for sale. And when we saw it was like, man, this is like perfect, has the rail system and has the coolers.

It was a previous butcher shop.

And the added bonus of this shop was that it had a retail store front, whereas Scott's first shop only did wholesale.

Our customers were farmers.

We were processing for them and they would take it back and they would sell it at their farm market or on their store or on their website.

So this new space offered Scott the ability to expand his business to retail, which would not only offer a whole new revenue stream, but really peaked his creative side. Now instead of just breaking down animals behind the scenes as he'd been doing for the last year, Scott could now start doing what he calls the more glamorous aspects of butchery, coming up with new products, making visually appealing displays, interacting with customers who shared his same passion for food.

Yeah, that was like a no brainer for us.

Like and then we look for financing and we talked to some lenders and they liked our business plan, they liked what we were able to do in such a short period of time, and so we were able to buy that property.

But while the facility Scott purchased was an existing butcher shop, it still needed months worth of serious renovations to make it fit their needs. And of course people can't hold their hunger for a few months, nor could Scott's clients stockpile their animals until he had the new place up and running.

In my mind, I wanted to continue business as usual at the old location. I didn't want to have any interruptions. I thought that that would have been very jarring for a lot of our customers, a lot of our employees. So the idea was to continue operations at the original location in Saylorsburg, and then we were traveling to Neutropoli in the evening, and we were doing the remodel ourselves.

The only problem was that new Tripoli, where the new shop would be, was a forty five minute drive from their current location, which, while not super far away, was just far enough to pose some problems. When we come back from the break, Scott carry moves the butcher shop down the road and hits a few speed bumps along the way.

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We're back with Scott Carey, who, after a successful first year as a wholesale butcher in Salorsburg, Pennsylvania, took the leap of purchasing another facility in the town of New Tripoli.

So that was very challenging just because it was very physically taxing to be working all day processing and then you know, working all night like doing construction and taking walls down and fixing things.

You know.

Well, those double days and forty five minute commutes were taxing, and Scott will be the first to say they were. He'll also confess that he loved them.

And sometimes, like when you're butchering, like when you're just on the block all day long for eight hours a day, just cutting beef for cutting pork like cold, it's mononyous.

It's like the same old stuff, day in day out.

Scott Carey has never been one for the mundane. In fact, it was that aversion to doing the same thing over and over again that got him out of his previous career in marketing. But what he came to learn over the course of his time as a butcher is that what the job keeps you on your feet and moving around. Like most jobs, a lot of it is just doing the same tasks over and over again. During the renovations,

It was nice to have that break in my day where I wasn't just butchering all day long and then that was it. It was like kind of like an exciting thing for me because it was just a different part of my brain than I was using.

Yet as much as Scott enjoyed the excitement and variety that comes with turning and existing building into the shop of his dreams, he always kept in mind that despite the fun he was having with renovations, at the end of the day, he was a butcher and it was butchering that paid the bills.

I think as an entrepreneur, it's very easy to get like this shiny ball syndrome where like you see something and it's just like, oh, that's like cool, Like I could have basically dropped everything at the butcher shop and just focused all my time just renovating this new location. But like that would have been doing a disservice to the business. Number one, the culture would suffer, the employees would suffer.

So ultimately I felt.

Like my responsibility was keeping my current business operating with no hiccups.

And even if Scott enjoyed bouncing back and forth between the two shops, it's never wise to fight a war on two fronts. So the sooner he could get the new shop up and running, the better, and fortunately he knew how to kick things in overdrive.

There's no breaks in the butcher shops sometimes because we're processing under inspection, which we can only process so many hours during the day, so there's this sense of urgency. We make a plan to break three beef down or four beef down in a day, like we gotta get that done by two thirty. So yeah, there was definitely like a sense of urgency to get that shop open.

Then one day, after months of tireless work, Scott looked around and realized that after all that hard work and hustling, they were done.

It was surprising to me because it wasn't like I was looking at like an Excel sheet and I was like, okay, I you know, five more things, four more things, three more things. It was just like one day, just like I had this realization was like, oh man, we did what we set out to do. I just remember like looking up and seeing like everything that we kind of accomplished, and it was just like, man, we're opening in like two weeks. Like everything's pretty much taken care of.

And with the new shop ready to go, Scott did his best to move everything that was working at the old shop over to the new operation, including his employees, but unfortunately the forty five minute commute took its toll.

The one left within a month. The drive just became too much for her. I understood that that was a conversation we had. I knew she was leaving. And then I had my one of my main butchers. He stayed with us for about a year and a half. He was doing that drive, and it just became pretty like apparent after a year that that drive was getting to him, you know, working the whole day like butchering.

It just physically, I think wore him down.

Despite the loss of two very good employees, Scott says, moving his whole operation to the new facility went surprisingly smooth.

Our customers didn't notice much.

The culture we created, the processes we created, it was all the same.

It was just a different room.

If Scott has any regrets about moving his business, it's only that he didn't do it sooner the.

Things that in my mind that were going to be a big issue. I thought like the whole thing.

Was gonna collapse on us because we were moving to different location. And once we actually did it, and when we pulled the bandit off, I was like, actually, that wasn't that bad.

It's been two years since Scott closed down the Salorsburg facility and focused on the new Tripoli store, and already he's seeing that gamble pay.

Off, seeing the numbers come in. I'm seeing the employees that are staying. I'm seeing the employees were hiring, and I'm creating jobs and like owning a bit small business in a small community, like I'm super proud of that.

Not only does his business still serve the farmers in the community, Scott is getting to exercise his creativity with the new retail side of the business.

You can't just like make the same twenty products all the time, you got to expand and do new things to get your customers to keep coming back. Every once in a while, we'll like come up with a new product, or we'll be working on a new product or a new recipe or something like that, and like I get really excited doing that.

Still, Scott admits that there are tasks and even days of being a butcher that aren't as exciting.

Say about twenty percent of the jobs in a butcher shop instagrammable, looking clean behind a counter selling meat that has like the green and the kale.

And it looks beautiful.

But there's a whole world, the whole agricultural world, that just focuses on getting animals ready to be put in a case like that.

The other eighty percent of the job, Scott says, the stuff the customers typically don't see is far from glamorous. It's taking out the trash and sharpening knives. It's sanitizing surfaces, fulfilling work orders and dealing with equipment repairs. But five years in, Scott knows that's just what it means to be a butcher, and he wouldn't have it any other way.

It's it's it's wild because like I took a pay cut to do this. I think the first like three months I never even paid myself. I just lived off savings and then like I'm still like not where I used to be, but like that's okay.

Oftentimes we think of work as a means to acquiring money, something we do to pay the bills and support the life we want to live, and there's nothing wrong with that. Frankly, that's probably the majority of the workforce. But sometimes the lucky ones among us find work that offers them more than an income.

I never like felt like super excited to talk about like what I did in the past. Yeah, I worked for some good companies like Crayola and like Rhadale and stuff like that. But like it became like very apparent immediately after I graduated college and I got a job and I was in a cubicle that I was just like, yeah, this is not what I think I'm going to do for the rest of my life.

So while it might have taken Scott carry a few tries and years of sitting in a cubicle before finding his life's calling, what matters is he.

Got there, and I'm we're proud that I'm like carrying on this trade and this craft because there's not many of us left, and the ones that are left, they're getting up there in age. I don't know who they're passing it on to. And I have like a tremendous amount of pride in that because it's it's a tough job and I'm glad to

Do it for On the job, I'm Afrey Thompson.