A Founder's Story

The Builder.

Steven Scott Milano Jr. co-founded a supplement manufacturing company in 2019 with no funding, no investors, and no loans — financed entirely off customer deposits, and started while he was in an active lawsuit with his former employer. Seven years later, that company has grown to nearly $50 million in annual revenue and 100+ employees. Every dollar was earned. None of it was borrowed.

He grew up in Franklin Square on Long Island, New York. Today he runs the operation out of Tampa Bay, Florida — the state he moved the entire company to in 2024. He is a builder at heart.

The Build

Founding SMP Nutra meant building the back office himself before he could afford to hire for it. Accounting — he acted as CFO, then trained the one he later hired. Inventory and cost-of-goods logic. And an Excel/VBA rig that served as the company's first operational software: quoting, stock, order flow, bridging every gap QuickBooks left open. That VBA work is where his coding started.

He also ran HR — hiring, firing, people management — and early sales, before handing both off. Deemed essential in 2020, he ran production through the pandemic. The lawsuit that had loomed over the founding forged a commercial-legal fluency that would prove useful again and again.

Every function followed the same arc.

Open it up, learn how it works, build it well enough that someone else can run it.

Florida

By 2024, the operation had outgrown New York. He found the Largo, Florida building. He and his co-founder toured it, and once the decision was made, he was the first one on the ground. He managed the buildout and hired the new floor from zero. It was starting over — only this time, with the leverage of experience behind him.

Then came the equipment. A wave of new machinery for the Largo floor, none of which he'd operated before. He was hands-on through every installation, learning the machines as the crates opened and managing the builds himself.

Then he went further. Bought 3D printers and started designing tooling with the team — custom parts to make the machines faster and better fit for the operation. If the equipment came factory-generic, he engineered it into something specific.

Software

Then came the ERP call. The QuickBooks-and-VBA rig that had held the company together since day one had outgrown itself. Time for a real backbone. He spearheaded the implementation with the operations team.

Then came AI. The VBA hacks that had bridged QuickBooks gaps had grown up. Python. Custom Odoo modules. And eventually a whole system of AI software agents — his Confidants — one per function. Marketing. Sales. Operations. Label compliance. Legal. Website building. Engineering. Whatever the operation needed, he built the agent for it. He didn't hire an engineering department to make any of this happen. He built it himself.

The Mission

He believes in hard work, constant learning, and building things that last. Everything he does is about creating a legacy that outlives him. That's the mission.

Nothing satisfying falls in your lap. You work for everything. You learn what you need to learn. You push forward, never look back, and you build something that lasts.

Long Island roots.
Tampa Bay based.
Still building.