Jonathan Cotten on The Business of Character

Why Character Is the Ultimate Business Strategy

In the rush to scale fast, dominate markets, and chase the next big exit, the word “character” often feels like an afterthought in business circles. Jonathan Cotten, however, believes it belongs at the very center of any business worth building.

Cotten, CEO of Easystep Enterprises and author of The Business of Character, has turned a single retail store into a 42-location enterprise spanning Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Ohio, and Florida. Yet he insists that success wasn’t driven by growth hacks or financial engineering—it was driven by an unwavering commitment to values.

“People think you have your personal life on one side, and your business life on the other,” Cotten told American Dreams. “But the truth is, there’s only one you. Who you are shows up everywhere.”

From the Ranch to Retail

Cotten’s entrepreneurial journey didn’t start in a boardroom. It began on a cattle ranch in Virginia, after he left public school in ninth grade to work full-time. He finished high school by correspondence at night while learning the ropes of business during the day.

“I didn’t have a college degree, so I knew my only leverage was performance,” Cotten said. “I had to be a sponge for learning.”

That mindset would ultimately propel him into entrepreneurship. In 1992, suffering from debilitating plantar fasciitis, Cotten walked into a Good Feet Store—and walked out with a life-changing idea. After discovering firsthand how arch supports relieved his pain, he bought the store. That single leap of faith marked the start of a business that now employs hundreds and serves thousands of customers seeking pain relief.

Culture as Competitive Advantage

Cotten’s formula for growth sounds deceptively simple: put employees first, customers second, and profits third.

“We’re in the hope business,” Cotten said. “People don’t just buy arch supports. They buy the possibility of living without pain.”

For Cotten, business culture isn’t an HR buzzword—it’s a strategic asset. He credits much of his success to an insight he gleaned from Bill Fromm’s book, The Ten Commandments of Business and How to Break Them, which argues that the customer isn’t king—the employee is.

“If employees aren’t taken care of, they can’t take care of customers,” Cotten explained. “We built our entire business on that principle.”

This focus on culture shows up in Cotten’s business playbook, which revolves around a clear vision that defines how the business connects with employees, customers, and the community. His mission centers on helping communities live active, healthy lives one step at a time. And everything is guided by core values: radical integrity, passionate persuasion, unwavering positivity, and persistent diligence.

“These aren’t just posters on the wall,” Cotten said. “They’re the guide rails for accountability and decision-making.”

Scaling with Integrity

Despite the impressive footprint, Cotten is candid about the challenges of scaling a character-driven business. Retail, especially health-focused retail, faces intense pressure from e-commerce giants and shifting consumer habits. But Cotten argues that human connection remains a powerful moat.

“AI can systematize the predictable. But it can’t humanize the exceptional,” he said. “People crave authentic relationships. That’s what creates loyalty.”

Cotten also emphasizes that character-driven businesses can be more resilient during crises. When COVID-19 disrupted retail operations nationwide, Cotten leaned on transparency and trust to keep his team aligned. “Our employees knew we’d do everything possible to protect them and the business. That trust was priceless.”

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

So, is “character” just a feel-good slogan—or a real business strategy? Cotten firmly believes it’s the latter.

He advises entrepreneurs to start small but with purpose. In his own business, the initial goal was simply to pay the light bill, but he insists that even the smallest ventures should define their purpose and values from day one.

Investing in culture early is also essential. Cotten believes that culture scales—for better or worse—and toxic cultures grow just as fast as healthy ones. Building the right foundation from the beginning can save countless challenges later.

Above all, he urges business owners to see their companies as platforms for impact. In his view, businesses influence far more than profits and products; they shape lives, communities, and society at large.

A Legacy Beyond Business

For Cotten, business success and personal values aren’t separate pursuits—they’re intertwined. And he’s clear about the ultimate credit for his journey.

“All glory in my life goes to Jesus Christ,” Cotten said. “And my wife Catherine and our children are my foundation. None of this would be possible without them.”

As Cotten continues to expand his business, his core belief remains unchanged: in the end, character isn’t just good ethics—it’s good business.

Key Takeaway

Character isn’t a soft skill—it’s a hard advantage. For entrepreneurs seeking sustainable success, Cotten’s story is a reminder that building a business on integrity might just be the smartest strategy of all.

Jonathan Cotten’s book, The Business of Character, is available on Amazon and major booksellers.

 

Transcript:

Alan Olsen  0:00

John, welcome to American Dreams. My guest today is Jonathan Cotten. He’s the CEO of Easy Step Enterprises and the author of The Business of Character. Jonathan, welcome to today’s show.

Jonathan Cotten  0:15

Thank you so much. Alan, it’s truly an honor to be with you

Alan Olsen  0:19

As we start out, for the benefit of the listeners, can you share a little about your background and how you got started in your career?

Jonathan Cotten  0:29

Yeah, I will. And Alan, we’ll do, try to do the elevator speech on that, but I’m going to take you way back. Okay, I’m going to take you way back to January, July 25 1863 How about that? My fourth great grandfather and some cowboys in West Texas were heading on their way down to Mexico. Contingent of the Confederate Army stationed at a fort near San Antonio, heard about it, went out and intercepted them. We’re going to bring them back to the fort to for trial for basically avoiding the draft, and decided halfway back that they would avoid that and just execute them all on the prairie, which they did. And his name was was Sawyer, and last name was Sawyer. And his grandson, MB, Sawyer was about four years old at the time, and he later came to be a Texas Ranger, and then got into ranching in West Texas, and by 1915 had about 21,000 acres in the Permian Basin in West Texas. My grandfather moved from West Texas out to California in 1944 Can you imagine a better place in America in 1944 to live in Southern California, to move to in Southern California, my dad, in 1955 having been married about five years, decided to move from California to Charlottesville, Virginia, get into the business. The construction business. Started that in 1960 so if you think about all of those things, you would think that this would be the perfect equation for generational wealth. However, throughout my lifetime, I would say I have benefited, maybe to the extent of $5,000 from inheritance and gifts or anything like that. What I did inherit from all of those that that generational aspect was a mindset that was very much a hard working can do, type of mindset was raised with that was raised around people that I learned a ton. I sitting around dinner tables and hearing stories from a variety of people, and so I left the ninth grade myself. I left public school after the ninth grade and went to work on a beef cattle farm for three years during high school, I did my high school at night through a correspondence course, and my graduation from American High School in Chicago, a correspondence course. That’s the highest level of educational achievement that I have. I went into sales, and by the time it came an opportunity for me to become a business owner, I’d worked about 25 years in corporate sales and being able to interface with a lot of major corporations and learn about them. And through that process, I realized Alan that I could not rely on a college degree. I could not rely on the network that being an alumnus of a college or university would provide. What I did have to do is to realize that it would be performance based in what I did, and also to always be learning, and try to be a sponge of just learning wherever I could. And so I did that. And by the time that I came into the Good Feet store in 1992 as a customer having plantar fasciitis and seeking a remedy for that plantar fasciitis, got the art supports, ran my first marathon that year. Came in the next year after having embarked on a very difficult health journey with our youngest child, our daughter, Kayla, at the time, 15 years old, she was diagnosed with gastroparesis, but I walked into this store having run my first marathon and having gone started on this very difficult journey being in and out of the hospital with Kayla and I told the owner of a Good Feet store in Richmond, Virginia, I’ve never had a product transform my life like these art supports. She literally turned around looked at me Alan, and said, Do you want to buy the place? Okay, so I think that the sum total of all of that that I just told you is having a DNA of entrepreneurs and risk takers in my DNA, having a mindset of you’ve always got to be looking for opportunity, and then also finding, through my daughter’s health journey, an infusion of. Wanting to, well, everything that I did, I wanted to be about purpose. I wanted to be about how can this have meaning? Not just how can this make money, but how can we have meaning in this? And that really was the foundation of our business, and really was the foundation of the story, called the business of character.

Alan Olsen  5:20

Now taking one step forward further with with The Good Feet Store and your venture and with Easy Step Enterprises you scaled that, haven’t you?

Jonathan Cotten  5:33

We started off with that one store and one employee, starting off January 2, 2014, and today we have 42 stores from Cleveland down to Destin, Florida. And I didn’t that. Did not set out with that as a goal. Alan, I really didn’t. The first goal when you go into business is, can we make this viable, you know, can we actually pay the light bill here and and not have to work a second job, you know, to supplement and if you look at the statistics of the failure of businesses in the first few years, is about well over 50% and then you go to seven or 10 years, it’s even that much higher. So to be at 11 years where we are, we’re incredibly thankful it certainly didn’t come from this masterfully executed strategic plan from day one. That’s not what we had, but it was definitely a thing of working with purpose and mission, and just saying, let’s apply some of the things that we’ve learned along the way.

Alan Olsen  6:36

Going to the second story is probably a monumental step. You know, after, after Biden was for what, what inspired you to say? You know, I got to move to multiple locations. What was the, what was the process you were thinking through there?

Jonathan Cotten  6:51

Well, I think that’s a lot of that was, I didn’t want to just buy a job, okay, so I was, I was wanting to again. It was about that mission and purpose. I had seen what happens and the way it can influence when you can develop a good structure, and particularly the employees. And I wanted to be able to provide that type of environment for them. And I wanted to get out from it, even before I read Michael Gerber’s that you may have three visited and the concept of working on your business, not in your business, even before that, I had that vision. But then once I started reading books like that, and you know what I did, Alan? It wasn’t actually sitting and reading with them, it was running, preparing for races. And that would be a lot of how I’d let those miles goes, is listening to books like that, but I realized that that was that was something I wanted to do more and more. And the second store was actually not as big as a challenge as as the subsequent stores were, and especially as we move into larger markets, then it becomes complexity and cost structures change and everything else. And I think there’s always that aspect too, just as a challenge, right? It’s just kind of the next hill to climb.

Alan Olsen  8:06

Now, Peter Drucker once said, culture is a strategy, and how has that concept impacted you, and how did that lead to you writing the book, The Business of Character?

Jonathan Cotten  8:19

I think I always looked at and again, this comes from kind of the my family background that I laid out for you, of of not coming at it from a more of a classical educational background and and so probably felt like I was a little bit deficient when it came to strategy. And it wasn’t until I realized I was challenged on that actually, and said, Hey, wait a minute. Do you realize that culture is strategy, as Peter Drucker said, and it’s actually a framework that many, many very large businesses ignore, because they’re, they’re about, you know, figuring out how to create an ROI on something and and so then I began to think more intentionally about that, and say, Okay, I agree with this. I agree that it is strategy. And so there needs to be a cultural framework and more specific cultural framework that’s more explicit, you might say, that we can operate from. And so that was probably four or five years in to where we completed, what I would say was kind of the real cultural framework of what we were doing

Alan Olsen  9:31

now. Culture can sometimes be viewed as shop aspect of business and maybe even optional. Well, the hard things, such as sales, performance, finance operations are seen as the drivers of the results. Does a business, a character, address these hard drivers of business, or is it more conceptual? Yeah,

Jonathan Cotten  9:53

and that’s a great question. I think it has to always if it’s not driving at. Results. If it’s not driving profitability right, that’s a viability of a business, then there’s something wrong. And the thing is, every business owner should not have to apologize for being profitable. Every employee should want their employer to be profitable. Every customer should want their favorite establishment to be profitable. The community should want the company to be profitable. So to feel like there’s this diametrically opposed thing of profitability and kind of doing the right thing as it would be expressed through culture, I believe that’s a false dichotomy, because it’s something that we can we can get there both ways. So if you think about it, that in our case, the vision, mission and value should all be three very distinct things, and they should all drive results and and be hard drivers of business metrics

Alan Olsen  10:57

you previously see mentioned at your up to 42 stores, no easy undertaking and trying to, as you scale out of vision, mission and values factor into the culture creation and how can they be relevant over time, not just relegated to words on the wall.

Jonathan Cotten  11:21

Yeah, I think that the thing is, is that it can, there’s different iterations, obviously, in growth, when you’re small, it’s, it’s, you might say it’s easier to kind of naturally let that culture be created. Because if, if you’re the culture, let’s say as a CEO, or any of the other business leaders, if there can be ambassadors of the culture. People have the opportunity to directly interface with them, talk to you, see what you do, and as long as you’re consistent with that, it’s easier. As you scale, it becomes a little bit more challenging. So if we go back to the the that framework as expressed in the vision, mission of values. In our case, what we what we wanted to do is to establish first a priority on the employees. And so we started off with that, as an employee, easy step. Enterprises is committed to the wellbeing of our employees by providing a safe, respectful environment full of opportunity for anyone willing to embrace our mission of values, and that was influenced a lot by a book called The 10 Commandments of business and how to break them, by Bill Fromm. And Bill Fromm said that the first commandment you need to break is that the customer is king. And I think if we think about that, and we can process that, we can relate to experiences where we’ve been in a business establishment, and we see people fawning over a customer, and then if you happen to go in the back, you see them talk very differently to employees. Well, that’s not sustainable. It’s not scalable long term, because if the employees are not properly taken care of, then how are they going to then care for their customers. So we focus on employees first, then they care for the customers. And as we say, as a retail business, we sell more than solutions and comfort. Our customers are buying hope. So if you think about our people are not just in a transactional environment, they’re engaged in this hope delivery business, which is it is transformational, right? If both of those things get we get both of those things right, then all things being equal, we should have a profitable company. We’ve taken care of our employees. We have a good relationship with them. They’re inspired then to take care of our customers, and we should be profitable. What I see in that is that there’s this huge opportunity for businesses to have an outsized impact in their communities by then figuring out, how can we engage with our communities in a positive way? And so while we say that in our vision statement, as members of our community. We walk beside people on their journey, regardless of their their need, because we’re people who love our neighbors. We believe it’s more blessed to give than to receive. What happens then that becomes a full circle moment, as we engage with the community, as we encourage our customers to engage, that then feeds into our relationship with our I’m sorry, as we, as we engage with the community and encourage our employees to engage with them, that feeds back into our relationship with the employees, because now they feel more inspired. They have more mission and purpose about what they’re doing. Then they could, then that’s going to be picked up by the customer, and they didn’t. It’s just kind of this, this continual circle, then as we go to the mission, so the vision, you think about it, that’s your GPS settings. How do we want to relate to our employees? How do we relate to our our customers? How do we relate to our community? Never fully attainable. It’s an ideal, but it’s a setting. It’s where we’re heading. The mission is the fuel in the tank. So we have the GPS setting with the vision. The mission is the fuel in the tank, and in our case, helping our community live an active and healthy lifestyle one step at a time. That’s where we can get up every day and not have to dread going to work, because we know it’s not something that we’re taking from people. That’s why I kind of resist the phrase of giving back. We feel like every day that we’re in business, we’re helping people. We’re engaged with them in that way. And so that’s the why, that’s the fuel in the tank. And then you address the values, and the values, in our case, I won’t go into each one of these you can read about in the business of character, but radical integrity, passionate persuasion, unwavering positivity, persistent diligence. Those are the guide rails, and they really define all of our relationships. And so within all of that, are things that we tie, all of our processes, our accountability, all of those things take on a very tangible form to say, Are you aligned with our vision, mission and values, and when we do those things right, we believe we will have a high performing company that will also be a profitable company that will be making an outsized impact in the communities?

Alan Olsen  16:15

Yeah, I love that, the way that, as we started this interview today that you talked about your family story going all the way back to 1863 and your, your, I guess was it your great granddad or your second great granddad over in

Jonathan Cotten  16:33

fourth grade, fourth, by the way, that’s called, that’s called the tragedy of Bandera County, the historical account that, yeah,

Alan Olsen  16:42

well, no, knowing your heritage, I think, is important and but let’s list with that to how that family story impacted your business journey, and how did it influence your business of character?

Jonathan Cotten  16:57

Well, I think that within that is a lot of this is around belief Alan. It’s around a belief that, as Dan Selva likes to say, that your futures can be bigger than your past and and I think when I look back on that family story, whether or not that always worked out for all of them in there, because in some cases, it didn’t meaning the reason for the lack of generational wealth there, right? But there was still a belief, an optimism, optimism, and a belief that that they could do this. And I think that inherent in a healthy culture is belief. It is belief that we can do something that matters, we can work together, that we can find people, that we can have healthy relationships with our customers, all of those things, I think that that all kind of melds together into a practical expression in business.

Alan Olsen  17:56

You know, you alluded to that the second story was easy, that or stated. The second story was easy, but it was going out of the area that was hard. I want to, I want to turn page here, because I think oftentimes, with people scale, and they scale into new markets. You know, you’re stepping into an area that you may not know a lot of people. In your book, you talk about the principle of networking, and what does it mean to network with

Jonathan Cotten  18:30

character? Yeah, I think it’s finding and aligning with people in doing things that you can truly be bonded with them in that. And I think that the trap can be when we start doing things for either purposes of window dressing, and especially think of things on a charitable level. I believe that companies can do that. Sometimes. I believe companies can take positions on things, and in particular over time, they’re seen as being not very kind of disingenuous, really. And you’ll see them back away from a position, because now it’s no longer in favor to take that, that position, all of those things, when they start to come up, they start to fracture the character of a company. And when we think about character on an individual level, it’s that we can trust. There can be a relationship of trust. And so I think that finding those opportunities in whatever community that you’re in to whether it’s with employees, establishing that reputation with each group of customers in that location, and then with the community at large, where are the people in the community that are doing work that we could lend our resources as a company to help them? And that doesn’t always Alan have to be money. There could be a lot of ways do that. And you. Yeah, and so when those networks are formed, I believe they become very powerful, even if they’re hundreds of miles away from where you happen to have your base of operations.

Alan Olsen  20:11

Chapter 10, you asked the question, can business of character compete? What’s your honest answer is character and driving business performance at opposite ends of the spectrum?

Jonathan Cotten  20:24

Yeah, I think it comes does come back down to that when you think about competition. And again, I believe that when you think about competition as being adversarial, and you win, I win, you lose, or you win, I lose, type of thing when, in reality, I believe today, especially in the world today, collaboration is such a critical part, and it’s finding ways that we can carve out our slice of the pie. But it’s not always have to be a loss for someone else to do that. One of the things that I think about when I think of things like recruiting employees and and you think about, sometimes the price war that can go on within that of you know, who’s going to pay x, and then can you hang on to them? Well, a culture, a culture that addresses things other that are non monetary, and maximizing those things, that’s a strategic advantage, if a company can figure out how to do that, because there’s study after study, especially in the younger generations, Alan that people want more than just the paycheck. They want that purpose. They want that mission. They’re giving so much of their lives to this thing called work, then how can be more than just about how can we extract as much money as we can out of our customers or out of the market? There’s got to be more to it than that, and there’s got to be more of a holistic approach to it. And so the answer yes, you can be competitive and and I believe it is not looking for shortcuts, sometimes putting in the work, whether it’s relational work or strategic work, to think about how to do that. And I believe it definitely can be done. It can be highly competitive.

Alan Olsen  22:17

So when people read the business of character, what is your hope that people will take away from from from your message? If I had

Jonathan Cotten  22:29

to just sum it up, it would just say to realize the outsized impact that a business of any size can have. I believe Alan that there are people that have millions and millions of dollars that they could want to deploy in a philanthropic way, and a business can match that in its impact. When you look at the sum total of all of the impact, employee, customers, community, suppliers, whoever it might be, and when we think about the overwhelming problems that confront America today, I would hope that we would look at it and say, Maybe we should stop relegating so many of our problems to either business or philanthropy or churches or whatever else, and say, what if we as business owners took responsibility for some of those? Well, what if we said, instead of a someday aisle, someday when I retire or someday when I sell my business someday, then I’ll get involved with these instead of looking at it that way? What if today, we deployed and launched the full leverage of impact that a business can have. That’s what I hope people get.

Alan Olsen  23:47

Now the concept in the business of characters are largely non technology focused, and are not centered on AI, among other things. How do you see them faring as our world becomes even more technology driven.

Jonathan Cotten  24:01

One thing that I believe it’s, it’s critical, is that we all understand what our unique flavor is, and to bring that into the world, and when the whole world is kind of rushing to a certain structure as an AI or anything else that we have to all do all this stuff, which I believe we should to the degree that we need to implement it and make our business more efficient. It’s not that, but I believe human beings crave human relationships, and as we lose personalized types of approaches and things that really relate to these things, then that’s a loss that that many people are concerned about. So if we can provide that use AI, use technology, but have it augment the things that are, what was it that the Four Seasons Hotel said to systemize the predictable and humanize the exceptional? I think that was the cool. Uh. Right there. Then Sullivan says, As the founder of strategic coach, as we get more into technology replacing so many human elements, we need to be in the wisdom business. And I believe that’s, in essence, the business of character. I haven’t, I haven’t attained this mountaintop called the business of character. It’s an aspiration, and I want, as time goes on, I want to be more and more in the wisdom business. And I believe that’s what the wisdom, the business of character, truly is. It’s an ongoing process.

Alan Olsen  25:35

You know, I love the I love the analogy there, the business of wisdom, the business of character. They say that wisdom is the application of knowledge, and that’s really something that I think it translated, that AI can deliver us facts, but it has a tough time delivering us emotion. And essentially that’s where wisdom comes in, is that application of the knowledge and the things that are provided to us. Great, great content here. This Business of character, Where can a person find that?

Jonathan Cotten  26:11

The Business of Character is on Amazon and other booksellers. I would also say, before we close, Alan, that all glory in my life goes to Jesus Christ, because that’s really where the ultimate wisdom comes from. I think about the people that have engaged and helped me along the way. My wife, Catherine, for believing in me, letting me take the risk as a non risk, as a very risk averse person. My sons, Jaron, Jennings and Gentry, who are all involved in the business. Jaron is our president. Jennings is our vice president of marketing development, and Gentry is as an early investor who was willing to invest when I couldn’t hardly get $5 from someone and those relationships, my oldest son, Joseph, my daughter Kayla, with her journey and her courage, we wouldn’t be where we are today without all of that. So I just have to add that. Thank you, Alan,

Alan Olsen  27:05

That’s beautiful. Thank you, Jonathan, for being on today’s show you.