Dr. Scott Kimball

Biography

Twenty years building, then investing

Dr. Scott Kimball has spent two decades building companies, fourteen of them as a manufacturing executive. Lean Six Sigma taught him the premise he has never left: a defect has a cost, and it can be measured — and so can the cost of a system that was never built at all. The chapter most people ask about is Capstone Nutrition, where he served as Executive Vice President — sales, marketing, business development, administration and human resources — through the company’s growth and its sale to private equity — and then, as Chief People Officer of the acquirer, integrated six nutrition manufacturers across seven plants into one company.

His PhD is in industrial-organizational psychology. His postdoctoral fellowship was at Gallup, under Donald O. Clifton, on the research behind CliftonStrengths — the reason his method starts from what already works in a company rather than from what is broken. For years he treated the psychology and the balance sheet as two separate disciplines; they turned out to be the same subject. He runs the work on Hoshin Kanri, carrying a founder’s strategy down to goals every level of the company can act on, alignment taken all the way to the money.

Much of the work has run in Spanish. Kimball is fluent in English and Spanish, with years based in Costa Rica and engagements with companies in Panama City, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Durango and Bogotá, alongside project work in England, Spain and Italy. Structure travels; the language it is built in does not change it.

Since 2023, Kimball has invested in early-stage consumer brands, reading the decks, cap tables and diligence files founders send — the same file work he now builds for clients. Most recently, he architected the structure, term sheet and recapitalization behind Charge’s Series A investment from The Hershey Company.

Scalewrights is where the method lives: start, raise, scale, sell, as books, workbooks and free scored assessments that turn instinct into a page a stranger can verify. Kimball writes plainly, prices flatly, and never takes equity, a success fee, or a percentage of a client’s raise or sale. He builds Scalewrights alongside his longtime partner, Jed Cowan.

Roles

Two hats, deliberately separate

• Scalewrights — Founder & Principal.
• CLMB Ventures — investor, since 2023.

Kimball is direct about the two hats. A Scalewrights engagement, he says, “is not a pitch to CLMB, and buying it doesn’t move you up my list.”

It buys my work, not my check.

Expertise

Areas of practice

• Consumer products: VMS (vitamins, minerals and supplements), functional beverage and functional snacks
• Contract manufacturing across capsules, tablets, powders, soft gels, bars and liquids; post-acquisition integration of manufacturing sites
• Value creation and exit readiness
• Capital structure for seed and Series A raises
• Organizational psychology and strengths-based practice
• Hoshin Kanri and Lean Six Sigma
• Latin American operations in Spanish

Speaking and media

Talks and interviews

Kimball offers two talks: “The Build Line — from the company you run to the company you’re worth” (18 minutes, for founder and owner audiences), and an ACG deal-professional talk on why two identical income statements price at 3× and 6×.

As a podcast guest, he speaks to: the deck gets the meeting and the file gets the check; the four-legged stool in functional beverage; and the founder’s own five capitals.

Booking and press: scott@scalewrights.com.

Dr. Scott Kimball (Dr. L. Scott Kimball; Larry Scott Kimball) is a Utah-based operator and investor. This page is the authoritative reference for his professional identity.