Know and grow
what it's worth.

Yates Advisors builds and harvests enterprise value for owner-operated businesses. Not a menu of services — one question, answered properly: what is your business worth, what would it be worth if you fixed these four things, and who eventually buys it.

Get in touch

Pat Yates, founder of Yates Advisors — Pat Yates

Founder

Operator first.
Advisor second.

The premise

It costs you nothing to find out what your business is worth. It costs you everything to find out too late.

Ask me now, while there's still time to change the answer. That's the part I actually want to help with.
Pat Yates · Founder, Yates Advisors

The approach

One shape,
three doors.

A firm that sells eleven services sells nothing. Three ways in — and behind every door, the same three-tier shape. Nobody skips the paid diagnostic. That look is the product.

Owners

1–5 years from an exit — or not thinking about one yet.

TIER 1 Diagnostic

Sellability Snapshot

Your value range, the real multiple, SDE with addbacks — and the three things suppressing value, priced in dollars.
TIER 2 Sprint

Value Sprint · 90 days

A written Value Roadmap, one lever executed with you, and a re-scored valuation showing the delta.
TIER 3 Recur

Value Partner Retainer

Ongoing execution, quarterly re-score, first call on anything.

Buyers

Searchers, ETA buyers, HNW individuals, small family offices.

TIER 1 Diagnostic

Buy-Box & Readiness Intensive

Thesis, target profile, financing reality check, and an honest go/no-go.
TIER 2 Search

Retained Search Mandate

A living pipeline of named off-market targets — fit-scored, contacted, vetted.
TIER 3 Close

Success fee at closing

Retainers credit against it. Never pure contingency.

Operators

Growing, not selling — yet. Value is being left on the table.

TIER 1 Diagnostic

Enterprise Value Audit

Operational, financial and growth diagnostic. Which lever actually moves value.
TIER 2 Build

One lever at a time

Licensing Program Build · Channel Rebuild (Amazon/DTC) · Systems & Ops Install.
TIER 3 Recur

Value Partner Retainer

Same product as Door 1. That's the point.

Why Pat

The proof stack.

Advice is cheap. What's rare is the person who has been on both sides of the table — built it, licensed it, financed it, and then sold other people's for a living.

“I've launched multiple businesses, built and scaled several, licensed with the biggest brands there are, gone into the Shark Tank, and built a software company — with more to come.”

Built one from nothing

A single mall slipper cart, bought from his family in 2002, grown into a multi-million-dollar ecommerce brand — from $22K in web sales to well over $3M.

HappyFeet

Landed the licenses

Disney, Marvel, DreamWorks, NFL, NBA, MLB, NCAA — plus Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi at the height of Jersey Shore. He knows what a real royalty structure costs.

The licensing playbook

Sells them for a living

Advisor at Quiet Light since 2020, seller-side only. Hundreds of P&Ls a year, and a working knowledge of what buyers actually pay — not what a calculator says.

Quiet Light

Ships software, not slides

TraceLot — live SaaS for batch, lot and expiry tracking. Native Veeqo and Shopify integrations, paying customers, published pricing.

TraceLot

The record

Multiple businesses.
Thirty years.

Each one is a different half of the same job: build the value, prove the value, then hand it to the right buyer.

Advisor · 2020–now

Quiet Light

Seller-side M&A for online businesses — ecommerce, content, SaaS, digital services. Where every Yates client who's ready to sell ends up.

Operator · 2002–now

HappyFeet Slippers

Mall cart to Disney licensee. Kiosks, Amazon, DTC, 5,000+ SKUs, and a licensing program that took a year of work before the first pair shipped.

Founder · 2025–now

TraceLot

Batch, lot and expiry tracking for Veeqo and Shopify sellers. FEFO allocation, recall readiness, audit-proof records. Live, priced, and shipping.

Connect

Start with
the number.

The first conversation is thirty minutes and it ends one of two ways: a Sellability Snapshot, or a clean no. Both are useful. Neither costs you a pitch deck.

pat@yatesadvisors.co

Direct: 502.533.0876
Based in: Louisville, Kentucky (ET)

LinkedIn Quiet Light TraceLot HappyFeet

Send a note

Name

What's this about

Message

Opens in your email client, addressed to pat@yatesadvisors.co.

Pat Yates

Thirty years of buying, building, licensing and selling businesses — most of it learned the expensive way, running one.

He started his first company at 22 — an office coffee service in Columbus, Ohio — and sold it two years later. In 2002 he bought the family's mall-cart slipper business and spent the next two decades turning it into a multi-million-dollar ecommerce brand: 300 seasonal kiosks at peak, 16 SKUs grown to more than 5,000, and licensing deals with Disney, Marvel, DreamWorks, the NFL, NBA, MLB and NCAA. In 2014 he took it on Shark Tank and struck a deal with Robert Herjavec.

Since 2020 he's been an advisor at Quiet Light, representing sellers of online businesses. Along the way he shipped TraceLot, a live SaaS product for batch and expiry tracking.

Yates Advisors tells owners what their business is worth while there's still time to change the answer.

Get in touch

Pat Yates shaking hands with Robert Herjavec on Shark Tank

1990
First business, at 22. Sold it two years later.: 300
Seasonal mall kiosks at peak — one of the largest programs in the US.: 7
Major licensors landed — Disney, Marvel, DreamWorks, NFL, NBA, MLB, NCAA.: 2014
Shark Tank Season 5 — deal with Robert Herjavec.

Core expertise

Five things he can do that most advisors only talk about.

Valuation & exit readiness

SDE workups, addback defence, sellability scoring, and the honest multiple — not the one from an online calculator. Hundreds of P&Ls a year through the Quiet Light book.

Brand licensing

Advances, minimum guarantees, royalty rates, recoupment, marketing fees and audits — from the side of the table that writes the check. Seven major licensors landed personally.

Ecommerce & channel

Amazon and DTC economics, catalogue architecture, inventory and cash cycle, marketplace mix. HappyFeet runs roughly 50/50 Amazon and owned site — he rebuilt that mix himself.

Systems & owner-dependency

The single biggest multiple killer in Main Street M&A. Process mapping, SOPs, WMS selection and install — and a SaaS product built because the tooling didn't exist.

AI workflows & automation

Not theory — shipped. He built TraceLot's automated outreach engine: sourcing, sequencing, qualification and follow-up running end to end, so a one-man software company sells like a team.

Career highlights

Thirty years,
in order.

Not a résumé. The decisions that actually changed the value of something.

Pat Yates presenting HappyFeet on Shark Tank

1990
First business at 22
Launched an office coffee service franchise in Columbus, Ohio. Sold it roughly two years later, then started a second coffee company in Tennessee. First lesson in what a buyer will actually pay for.
2002
Bought HappyFeet from his family
The Yates family had been running plush slippers off mall carts since the mid-90s. Pat bought them out and took it a different direction — online. Web sales that year: $22,000.
2003–08
30 kiosks to 300
Scaled the seasonal mall-cart dealer program roughly tenfold in four or five years — one of the larger seasonal kiosk programs in the United States, alongside a growing direct site.
2010
Signed Snooki at the peak of Jersey Shore
Cold outreach on Twitter during her second season turned into the first licensed product Nicole Polizzi ever put her name on. She tweeted about it twice and crashed the server both times. The leopard-print slipper is still the best-selling product the company has ever had.
2014
Shark Tank, Season 5 — deal with Robert Herjavec
Filmed September 2013, aired 10 April 2014. Four sharks engaged, three made offers. Pat countered Herjavec and shook on it in front of 6 million people — then spent the following decade with Robert's team as an actual working relationship, not a TV moment.
2015
DreamWorks Animation license
Shrek, Madagascar, How to Train Your Dragon and more. The first major studio deal — and the template for everything that followed.
2018
Disney
A six-figure license, a year of development, 30+ styles at launch across Mickey, Minnie, Nightmare Before Christmas, Winnie the Pooh, Princess, Frozen and Toy Story — and 250–300 SKUs bought before a single pair sold.
2020
Joined Quiet Light as an advisor
A relationship with founder Mark Daoust that started in 2015 became a seat on the advisory team in October 2020. Seller-side only, online businesses, $250K to $30M+.
2025
Launched TraceLot
Batch, lot and expiry tracking for Veeqo and Shopify sellers. Live to the Veeqo ecosystem in fall 2025 with published pricing from $29/month.
2026
Founded Yates Advisors
The advisory practice the whole record was building toward — enterprise value diagnosed, built, and eventually harvested, for owner-operated businesses.

Stages

On stage.

Seller summits, SaaS conferences, national trade shows and university lecture halls — four continents' worth of rooms, talking about licensing, ecommerce operations, and what a business is actually worth.

Seller & ecommerce

Billion Dollar Seller Summit

Iceland · Puerto Rico · Hawaii · Austin

ST/Reunion

Las Vegas · Tampa · Los Angeles

Amazon Accelerate

Amazon

EVO LATAM Expo

Panel — ecommerce operations

Seller Summit

Fort Lauderdale

Veeqo

Customer feature & stage

SaaS

MicroConf Europe

Dubrovnik, Croatia

MicroConf US

New Orleans

Trade shows

PGA Merchandise Show

Orlando

National Hardware Show

Las Vegas

Inspired Home Show

Chicago

SuperZoo

Las Vegas

Universities & civic

Yale University

Columbia University

University of Michigan

Western Kentucky University

Entrepreneur Speaker Series

Brescia University

Return to the Arch — alumni series

Rooster Booster Breakfast

Owensboro Chamber of Commerce

Click any frame to enlarge.

Selected media

Television, podcasts and press.

Three ABC appearances, nine podcast interviews, a year and a half hosting The Quiet Light Podcast, and twenty-five years of print — all catalogued with links.

Volunteer & philanthropic

The work that doesn't invoice.

Two commitments, both close to home: junior golf in Kentucky, and a children's hospital in Louisville.

01 · AJGA

The Justin Thomas Junior Championship.

Pat served as Media Chair on the tournament committee of the AJGA's Justin Thomas Junior Championship — an American Junior Golf Association event hosted at Harmony Landing Country Club in Goshen, Kentucky, with proceeds benefiting The First Tee of Louisville and the AJGA's ACE Grant.

The tournament programs alongside are his — concepted, produced and shipped, year after year, for a field of the best junior golfers in the country and the sponsors who fund their entry.

Role: Media Chair,
tournament committee
Committee years: 2019 · 2022
Host club: Harmony Landing CC
Goshen, Kentucky
Benefiting: First Tee Louisville
AJGA ACE Grant

The tournament

Programs produced

Justin Thomas Junior Championship 2021 tournament program cover — Championship program · Harmony Landing, August 2021

Justin Thomas Junior Championship program cover presented by Phocus — Presented by Phocus · benefiting First Tee & the ACE Grant

Justin Thomas Junior Championship 2019 program cover — 2019 edition

Woodford Reserve full-page advertisement produced for the championship program — Sponsor full-page, produced in house

02 · Norton Children's Hospital

HappyFeet Giving Back.

HappyFeet Slippers has spent years putting slippers and costumed characters in front of kids at Norton Children's Hospital in Louisville — which is, for the record, the most fun anyone has ever had wearing a Jack Skellington suit to work.

Connect

Start with
the number.

The first conversation is thirty minutes and it ends one of two ways: a Sellability Snapshot, or a clean no. Both are useful. Neither costs you a pitch deck.

pat@yatesadvisors.co

Direct: 502.533.0876
Based in: Louisville, Kentucky (ET)

LinkedIn Quiet Light TraceLot HappyFeet

Send a note

Name

What's this about

Message

Opens in your email client, addressed to pat@yatesadvisors.co.

ABC · Season 5, Episode 23 · 10 April 2014

Eight minutes
that rewrote
the next decade.

Pat taped for well over an hour. ABC cut it to eight minutes and put it in front of 6.85 million people. Three sharks made offers. He shook hands with Robert Herjavec — and then, off camera, tore up the deal and built a better one.

The HappyFeet Slippers display on the Shark Tank set — The set, September 2013. The episode aired seven months later.

6.85M
US viewers on first broadcast.: 75min
In the Tank. No breaks. Cut to eight.: 3
Offers on the table — O'Leary, Greiner, Herjavec.: 2×
Return appearances — the Season 7 update and Beyond the Tank.

The pitch

$375,000
for 15%.

A $2.5 million valuation, walked into a room that had already decided plush slippers were a novelty. ABC framed the episode as a showdown — "Barbara and Lori team up against Robert, Mark and Kevin over an enticing product." The enticing product was HappyFeet Slippers.

He also did something you're told never to do: he asked to tell a story before taking questions, and talked about his late mother and why he does this at all.

The ask: $375,000 / 15%; A $2.5M pre-money valuation.
Trailing three years: $6.5M; Cumulative sales presented in the Tank.
Prior year: $2.6M; Roughly $600K of profit on it.
Unit economics: $5 → $25; Landed cost against a $24.95–$29.99 retail.
Live storyline in the room: A signed Snooki license — her first licensed product, sourced off a cold Twitter message.

The negotiation

Two outs, three offers, and one counter he didn't let anyone answer.

01
Barbara Corcoran — out
Thought the company had already peaked.
02
Robert Herjavec — out (first pass)
Couldn't see where he added value. He came back.
03
Kevin O'Leary — offer
$375K, a $3-per-pair royalty until repaid then $1.50, plus 5% equity to wet his beak.
04
Lori Greiner — joins Kevin
Two sharks, equity up to 6%. She compared them to Moon Boots.
05
Mark Cuban — out, but
He delivered the line that turned the room. See below.
06
Herjavec re-enters — $375K for 30%
Kevin matched at 30%. Suddenly there was a market.
07
Pat counters at 25% — Robert takes it
He closed it before Kevin or Lori could respond. On camera, that's the deal.

“You're the real deal and you have a great business — but it isn't a fit for me.”
Mark Cuban, on air

Cuban passing was, counterintuitively, the moment the deal got made. Pat's read on it:

“It changed more of them, because at the end of the day Mark controls more money than most of those people put together.”
Pat Yates · The Quiet Light Podcast

The part nobody puts on their website

The deal you saw on TV is not the deal that got done.

Every Shark Tank recap site still reports it as $375,000 for 25%, closed. Pat has said, repeatedly and on the record, that it isn't true — and that he's glad.

“The deal changed after the fact. It wasn't exactly the same on the show. It really wasn't anything near that.”

“We did not do the financial terms we showed on the show — we just did a relationship, a small equity portion, and no money transfer.”

“Honestly, I'm happy it didn't close at what it was before. It would have changed things for both of us — a lot more expectations on both sides.”

What Robert actually said, after taping

“You told me you didn't necessarily need the money — why do you want to do this?… Look, let's just do a small deal without the money. If you need something in the future I'll try to help you, but I want you to work with my Shark Tank group.”

They signed that instead. Pat has worked with Herjavec's team ever since — which turned out to be worth considerably more than $375,000.

As recounted by Pat Yates · The Quiet Light Podcast

Worth saying plainly: a deal was signed. Not the televised one. Anyone telling you the Shark Tank handshake is the transaction has never been through a closing — which is roughly the point of everything else on this site.

Return appearance one

The Season 7 update.

Aired Friday 4 December 2015

ABC's own framing of the segment: “Robert invested $375K for 25% of Happy Feet, a novelty slipper company. Entrepreneur Pat Yates wanted a Shark's help growing his international sales and retail presence.”

Sales up to roughly $4.2 million
Against a $2.65M baseline going in. Pat's own description: “we jumped up 40 to 50% over the period from the baseline.”
$135,000 on the night the episode aired
In an off-season month, on a product people buy in December.
Grown to sixteen employees
And a complete website rebuild that Robert's team pushed.
DreamWorks came to him
Shrek and Kung Fu Panda first. Marvel followed. Then everything else.

Return appearance two

Beyond the Tank.

ABC · Season 2 · Aired 29 March 2016 · One of the few

The spin-off that follows what happens after the handshake. For HappyFeet Slippers, the story ABC chose to film was Robert Herjavec personally walking into the DreamWorks Animation meeting alongside Pat — and the executives on the other side of the table saying yes.

“This is better than good enough. It's exceptional.”
DreamWorks Animation executive, on camera

On choosing Robert

“Robert was definitely the top in who I wanted a deal with.”

Pat Yates · Beyond the Tank

Also in that episode: The Oilerie, Scratch & Grain Baking Co., and Treasure Chest Pets.

What it was actually worth

The cheque was never the point.

No money changed hands. What did change was that a slipper company from Louisville became a company that studios returned calls to. Herjavec is credited by name in both major licensing announcements — he is quoted directly in the Disney release.

9 November 2015

DreamWorks Animation

Shrek, Madagascar, How to Train Your Dragon, Home. Announced by the Herjavec Group. Pat, in the release:

“Robert helped us secure a deal that will take our business to an entirely new level.”

DreamWorks' Head of Global Licensing Partnerships: “Like so many viewers, our team fell in love with the Happy Feet slippers after Pat's appearance on Shark Tank.”

10 October 2018

Disney

30+ styles at launch. Mickey, Minnie, Nightmare Before Christmas, Winnie the Pooh, Princess, Frozen, Toy Story. Robert Herjavec, quoted in the release:

“A collaboration with Disney is the perfect fit for a company like Happy Feet. At Happy Feet, we're not just selling slippers — it's all about fun.”

Six figures to enter, a year of development, and 250–300 SKUs bought before the first pair shipped.

“We got so much press. It led us to DreamWorks. It led us to basically every license we've won in the United States — or the world, for that matter.”
Pat Yates

Inside the Tank

What it's really like.

He applied in Season 2 and got turned down. Producers came back years later and asked him to reapply.

“It's like 50 or 60 pages of disclosures.”

On the application.

“You get no break rights. There is no break.”

Over an hour in the room, standing.

“I was in there an hour and 15 minutes and they cut it to eight.”

You don't choose which eight.

“You can't see it till it airs. You're not allowed to watch it.”

Seven months of not knowing.

“Probably for the first 15 minutes to an hour, it just wasn't going well.”

Two sharks were already out.

“It was exciting, it was stressful, it was fun — and it was really scary to watch.”

The verdict, a decade on.

“My plea on Shark Tank is exactly who I am as an entrepreneur. Passion. Excitement. And getting people engaged to where they feel excited about what they're gonna do.”
Pat Yates

Watch and read

ABC · YouTube

Happy Feet — Shark Tank Update

The official ABC clip.

Podcast

The full story, told by Pat

Application to aftermath, on The Quiet Light Podcast.

PR Newswire

The DreamWorks announcement

November 2015, issued by the Herjavec Group.

Shark Tank Blog

Episode and update coverage

Note: still reports the aired terms as closed.

Season 5, Episode 23 streams on Disney+ and is available to buy on Apple TV and Amazon Video.

Connect

Start with
the number.

The first conversation is thirty minutes and it ends one of two ways: a Sellability Snapshot, or a clean no. Both are useful. Neither costs you a pitch deck.

pat@yatesadvisors.co

Direct: 502.533.0876
Based in: Louisville, Kentucky (ET)

LinkedIn Quiet Light TraceLot HappyFeet

Send a note

Name

What's this about

Message

Opens in your email client, addressed to pat@yatesadvisors.co.

Operator · 2002 – present

One mall cart.
Then everybody called.

Disney. Marvel. DreamWorks. All 32 NFL teams. The NCAA, the NBA, MLB, Bluey — and a reality-TV star nobody else thought to call. HappyFeet Slippers went from a folding cart in a shopping mall to a licensing portfolio most consumer-products companies ten times its size never assemble.

buyhappyfeet.com

Where it started

A container of slippers started it all.

Pat's father and stepmother were working mall kiosks in the mid-90s, hunting for something to sell. At the Atlanta Gift Mart they found a vendor with plush slippers and agreed to buy a container of them. That was the whole strategy.

In 2002 Pat bought them out and took it somewhere they hadn't: online. Web sales that first year were $22,000. He then scaled the seasonal dealer program from about thirty carts to roughly three hundred in four or five years — one of the larger seasonal kiosk programs in the country — while the direct site compounded behind it. By the time Shark Tank came calling the brand was in 190 retail locations across 40 states and three countries, with a catalogue that had grown from 16 SKUs to more than 5,000.

“We went from $22,000 to about $100,000, to about $400, and we capped a million — and now we're well over three million.”
Pat Yates · web sales, 2002 through 2015

The licensing program

Seven major licensors. One of them took a year before a single pair shipped.

Licensing is the whole reason a slipper company from Louisville ends up on a shelf next to a studio's theatrical release. Pat built the program himself — pitching, negotiating, funding the advances and buying the inventory before a single unit sold.

DisneyMarvelDreamWorksNFLNBAMLBNCAADisney · PixarBlueySnookiDisneyMarvelDreamWorksNFLNBAMLBNCAADisney · PixarBlueySnooki

Studios

Disney · Disney·Pixar · Marvel · DreamWorks Animation · Bluey. Mickey and Minnie, Nightmare Before Christmas, Winnie the Pooh, Frozen, Toy Story, Stitch, Lightning McQueen, Captain America, Black Panther.

Leagues

NFL — all 32 teams. Plus NCAA across the major programs, MLB and the NBA. Slippers, booties and throw blankets in team colours.

Talent

Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi — her first licensed product, sourced off a cold message and run at scale through roughly 300 mall locations.

Own IP

Zlipperz™ — the patented zip-on, zip-off interchangeable system — plus U-Color Zlipperz, Flipemz, sneaker slippers, clogs, sherpa slides and blankets.

What it actually takes

A major studio license is a six-figure commitment before you sell anything: an advance paid up front, a royalty on every unit, a marketing fee stacked on top, a year of product development, audits to verify what you report — and 250 to 300 SKUs bought and sitting in a warehouse on launch day.

Most people who ask Pat about licensing have no idea what the entry fee is. He's signed enough of them to describe the mechanics without flinching — which is exactly why founders now hire him to look at theirs.

Detail in the Ecomm Breakthrough interview.

2010 – 2012 · The partnership that changed everything

Snooki.

Jersey Shore was the biggest show on cable and Nicole Polizzi was its breakout. She had no licensed products. Pat sent her a message on Twitter — and HappyFeet Slippers became the first product Snooki ever put her name on.

How it actually happened

01
A cold message on Twitter
Season two was airing. Every consumer-products company in America wanted her, and most of them were going through agents. Pat went direct.
02
Her first licensing deal, announced October 2010
Reported by Gift Shop Magazine on 16 October 2010 and later described by Louisville.com as “her inaugural licensed product.” Before the perfume, before the books, before HSN.
03
She designed them herself
Leopard, zebra, sequins, crocodile — her taste, not a licensor's style guide. That's why they sold.
04
Two tweets, two outages
She promoted them to her own audience. Pat, to Wholesale Central in May 2011: “Snooki tweeted about them twice, and both times our server crashed.”
05
Into roughly 300 mall locations
The kiosk network turned an internet moment into physical retail across the country, in the fourth quarter, at full price.
06
Onto HSN, November 2011
Showcased alongside her fragrance launch — the slippers on air next to the perfume that came after them.

“All-time the greatest selling product we've ever had.”
Pat Yates, on the leopard-print slipper — still on the site today

The deal, in numbers

Signed: Oct 2010
Sourced via: A cold tweet
Retail footprint: ~300 locations
Server outages: 2
Still selling: 17 years on

Documented

Gift Shop Magazine — 16 Oct 2010, announcing the deal and quoting Pat by name.
Louisville.com — 1 Sept 2011, full feature: “her inaugural licensed product.”
Wholesale Central — 1 May 2011, “Snooki Slippers From Jersey Shore Huge Sellers.”
HSN — Nov 2011, showcased with the fragrance launch.

Why it still matters

Every licensing deal Pat has signed since — DreamWorks, Marvel, the leagues, Disney — traces back to being able to say “we've run a celebrity license at scale and it worked.” It's also the cleanest illustration of the thing he now sells for a living: value isn't created at the moment of sale. It's created years earlier, by somebody paying attention and sending the message nobody else bothered to send.

Connect

Start with
the number.

The first conversation is thirty minutes and it ends one of two ways: a Sellability Snapshot, or a clean no. Both are useful. Neither costs you a pitch deck.

pat@yatesadvisors.co

Direct: 502.533.0876
Based in: Louisville, Kentucky (ET)

LinkedIn Quiet Light TraceLot HappyFeet

Send a note

Name

What's this about

Message

Opens in your email client, addressed to pat@yatesadvisors.co.

TraceLot LIVE

Batch + expiry control for expiring goods

Never ship expired stock again.

TraceLot splits your stock into tracked lots, assigns the earliest-expiring batch to every order, and holds back anything expired — automatically, inside the tools you already use.

Start free Book a demo

Built and shipped by Pat Yates. First month free, no card required.

tracelot — lots

LOT-26098-CS

FEFO

Expires: 2026-11-04
On hand: 1,240 units
Bin: A-14-3
Supplier: Northshore Labs

Expiry risk · next 90 days

$4,180 at risk in 90 days

2 expired units held back from order #48210

The problem

Three sentences no operator wants to hear.

“We wrote off $12,400 of stock last quarter.”

“A customer just opened an expired jar.”

“Send us the lot history by Friday.”

Shopify doesn't track batch numbers, lot numbers or expiry dates. Neither does most of the mid-market stack. So it lives in a spreadsheet until the day it can't.

How it works

Life of a lot.

STAGE 1
Goods in
Lot code, expiry, supplier, bin, custom fields and certificates captured on receipt. Bundles trace back to their component lots.
STAGE 2
On order
FEFO assigns the earliest-expiring batch automatically. Expired stock is blocked — it can't be allocated.
STAGE 3
On the floor
Bin-sorted printable pick lists per warehouse, with lot number and expiry printed on the packing slip.
STAGE 4
Ahead of expiry
Velocity-based risk forecasts at 10, 30, 60 and 90 days, daily email alerts, and reorder suggestions.
STAGE 5
Audit-proof
One-click recall CSV and a full ledger per lot. Trace any lot to every affected customer in under five minutes.

Capability

What it does.

FEFO allocation

Earliest-expiring lot on every order, automatically.

Recall readiness

Every affected order and customer, one click, one CSV.

Expiry risk forecasts

See write-offs 90 days out, priced on real velocity.

Bulk & repackaging

Drum-level lots by weight, packed to any size.

Pick & pack lists

Bin-sorted lists and slips with lot + expiry printed.

Warehouse transfers

Move stock between sites without losing the lot.

Passports & custom fields

Any parameter your industry demands, on every lot.

Audit-ready records

The lot ledger USDA organic certifiers and FDA audits ask for.

Integrations

Inside the tools
you already use.

Veeqo

LIVE

Native OAuth with two-way sync. FEFO on every order line, expired units removed from sellable stock automatically, and batch, lot and expiry written straight into Veeqo order notes so the picker sees them.

Shopify

LIVE

Products and inventory import automatically. Levels sync bidirectionally — receive new stock or mark a batch expired and Shopify updates on its own.

WooCommerce · Etsy · Amazon · eBay

Coming

Amazon FBA inventory is already traceable today through the Veeqo connection — lot-level visibility across FBA and your own warehouse.

Veeqo has featured Pat in its Seller Voices series. Their pull-quote: “We were paying $8,000/yr for the other system, which went to zero.”

Pricing

Published, not quoted.

First month free, no card required. No setup fees, cancel anytime.

Mini

$29/mo

Up to 500 orders
1 warehouse
First month free

Starter

$69/mo

Up to 1,000 orders
1 warehouse
First month free

Growth

Popular

$99/mo

1,001–2,500 orders
Up to 3 warehouses
First month free

Pro

$149/mo

2,501–5,000 orders
Up to 5 warehouses
First month free

Enterprise

Custom

5,001+ orders
Unlimited warehouses
First month free

Every tier includes FEFO auto-allocation, batch and lot traceability, at-risk SKU identification, recall-ready traceability and audit reports. Pricing as published on tracelot.com.

Built for

Anyone whose stock has a date on it.

Vitamins & supplements

FDA 21 CFR 111 and cGMP batch records, without the spreadsheet.

Food & beverage

FSMA and the FDA Food Traceability Rule, satisfied on normal fulfilment.

Beauty & cosmetics

EU 1223/2009 and period-after-opening tracking per lot.

Pet food & supplies

FDA and AAFCO lot records across every warehouse.

Specialty chemicals

OSHA and EPA documentation, plus drum-level bulk handling.

Medical & lab supplies

FDA and ISO 13485 traceability from goods-in to customer.

Why Pat built it

Two decades of running a real warehouse taught him that the software gap most operators live with isn't glamorous — it's a spreadsheet holding together something a regulator will eventually ask about. TraceLot is the answer he wanted and couldn't buy.

Connect

Start with
the number.

The first conversation is thirty minutes and it ends one of two ways: a Sellability Snapshot, or a clean no. Both are useful. Neither costs you a pitch deck.

pat@yatesadvisors.co

Direct: 502.533.0876
Based in: Louisville, Kentucky (ET)

LinkedIn Quiet Light TraceLot HappyFeet

Send a note

Name

What's this about

Message

Opens in your email client, addressed to pat@yatesadvisors.co.

Quiet Light

Advisor · 2020 – present

The day job that keeps the advice honest.

Pat represents sellers of online businesses at Quiet Light — ecommerce, Amazon FBA, DTC, content brands, SaaS and digital services. Deals from roughly $250K to $30M+. Seller-side only.

Advisor profile

At a glance

Joined: Oct 2020
Side represented: Sellers only
Deal range: $250K – $30M+
Categories: Ecommerce · FBA · DTC
Content · SaaS · Services
Also: Host, The Quiet Light
Podcast (2023–24)

What sellers actually get

An operator
on your side
of the table.

Most brokers have never run the kind of business they're selling. Pat has taken his own company through the exact diligence he now puts sellers through — inventory, addbacks, channel concentration, owner dependency, and the awkward questions a buyer's accountant asks in week six.

“In 2015 he struck up a relationship with Mark, the founder of Quiet Light, and continued — eventually leading him to becoming an advisor.”
Quiet Light advisor profile

Valuation you can defend

SDE built properly, addbacks documented and confidence-scored, and a multiple grounded in comparable closed transactions.

A buyer pool, not a listing

Quiet Light's buyer database plus direct outreach — competitive tension is what moves price, not a nicer PDF.

Structure, not just price

Earnouts, seller notes, working-capital pegs, SBA eligibility, indemnification. The headline number is rarely the number that matters.

Through to close

Diligence management, lender coordination, and the calls nobody wants to make in week ten of an LOI.

Sellers

In their words.

“I would like to start by saying that while the whole process was bumpy at times, at no point did I feel pressured to make any decisions. Pat made the entire process painless.”
P.K. · Seller

“I wanted to personally thank you for your services in selling this business for my brother. You were the only brokerage firm that was willing to take a chance on us.”
E & A · Sellers

“When I was deciding to sell my business, it was like jumping into the deep side of the pool without any swimming experience.”
L.Y. · Seller

Published on Pat's Quiet Light advisor profile. Sellers are identified by initials at their request.

2023 – 2024

He didn't just guest on the podcast. He hosted it.

Pat took the host chair on The Quiet Light Podcast for roughly a year and a half, running thirty-plus episodes with sellers, buyers, operators and specialists across the online-business market. Guest credits are common. A year interviewing the people who actually close these deals is not.

Browse the archive

Selected episodes he hosted

Stages

On stage.

Most of it carrying the Quiet Light banner. Seller summits, SaaS conferences, national trade shows and university lecture halls — the rooms where the next generation of online business owners are working out what their companies are worth.

Seller & ecommerce

Billion Dollar Seller Summit

Iceland · Puerto Rico · Hawaii · Austin

ST/Reunion

Las Vegas · Tampa · Los Angeles

Amazon Accelerate

Amazon

EVO LATAM Expo

Panel — ecommerce operations

Seller Summit

Fort Lauderdale

Veeqo

Customer feature & stage

SaaS

MicroConf Europe

Dubrovnik, Croatia

MicroConf US

New Orleans

Trade shows

PGA Merchandise Show

Orlando

National Hardware Show

Las Vegas

Inspired Home Show

Chicago

SuperZoo

Las Vegas

Universities & civic

Yale University

Columbia University

University of Michigan

Western Kentucky University

Entrepreneur Speaker Series

Brescia University

Return to the Arch — alumni series

Rooster Booster Breakfast

Owensboro Chamber of Commerce

Click any frame to enlarge.

Connect

Start with
the number.

The first conversation is thirty minutes and it ends one of two ways: a Sellability Snapshot, or a clean no. Both are useful. Neither costs you a pitch deck.

pat@yatesadvisors.co

Direct: 502.533.0876
Based in: Louisville, Kentucky (ET)

LinkedIn Quiet Light TraceLot HappyFeet

Send a note

Name

What's this about

Message

Opens in your email client, addressed to pat@yatesadvisors.co.

Press · Television · Podcasts · Video

Thirty years of
showing up.

Network television, national press, a hundred stages and a long run of podcasts — most of it earned the hard way, by having something worth putting on camera.

3
ABC appearances — Shark Tank, the Season 7 update, Beyond the Tank.: 9+
Podcast guest appearances across the ecommerce and M&A circuit.: 30+
Episodes hosted on The Quiet Light Podcast, 2023–24.: 6.85M
Viewers on the first Shark Tank broadcast alone.

Television

On the networks.

Three ABC appearances built around one business — including Beyond the Tank, which only a handful of Shark Tank companies ever got.

ABC

The View

14 December 2018

Zlipperz™ featured in the “Favorite Gifts Under $50” segment, presented by Joy Behar. Custom pairs were made for the cast.

“The first zip on, zip off, interchangeable slippers. How do you like that?”
Joy Behar, on air

Also broadcast

NBCThe Tonight ShowJay Leno
CBSThe Late ShowLetterman
NBCLate NightFallon
ABCGood Morning America
NBCThe Today Show
SYNDThe Wendy Williams Show
HSNSnooki lineNov 2011
ABCBeyond the TankS2

Video

On camera.

Long-form interviews, vendor films and the ABC clip — all external links, all free to watch.

Deluxe Corporation

Deluxe — Behind the Business

A full documentary-style profile shot on location for Deluxe's Behind the Business series, the programme Deluxe ran with Robert Herjavec. A professional crew spent a day filming the business, the warehouse and the man who built it.

Watch the film

ABC

Happy Feet — Shark Tank Update

The official network clip from the Season 7 update segment.

Veeqo

Simple Done Right

Veeqo's customer film on HappyFeet Slippers — the operations story, told in the warehouse.

Veeqo

Saving Time as Well as Tangible Costs

The second Veeqo film — where the $8,000-a-year line comes from.

Quiet Light

Tracking Metrics to Grow Your FBA Business

With Jason Chan. The numbers that actually predict what a buyer will pay.

What Would U Ask

Ep. 34 — Pat Yates, Happy Feet

Long-form founder interview covering the whole Shark Tank arc.

Ecomm Breakthrough

The Art of Profitable Licensing

Video edition of the licensing masterclass with Josh Hadley.

Build Assets Online

A $652,050 Website Sale

Anatomy of one closed transaction, from the advisor's seat.

Podcasts

Guest, and host.

Nine confirmed guest appearances since 2014 — plus thirty-plus episodes in the host chair at Quiet Light.

Show	Episode	Date	Subject
The Quiet Light Podcast	Shark Tank Alumni Joins the Quiet Light Team	Oct 2025	Operator to advisor; how he counsels sellers on exits
Ecomm Breakthrough	8 Million+ Viewers for Free	Apr 2025	Earned exposure, clean books, preparing to exit
Wild Business Growth	#246 — HappyFeet Slippers and Quiet Light	Aug 2023	Coffee, kiosks, slippers; positioning a business to be sold
Ecomm Breakthrough	The Art of Profitable Licensing	Jul 2023	Advances, royalties, recoupment, what Disney costs
Build Assets Online	#238 — A $652,050 Website Sale	May 2022	One closed deal, start to finish
The How To: Business Show	#3 — How to: E-commerce	Feb 2022	The full ecommerce build, 42 minutes
The Quiet Light Podcast	How Happy Feet Became a Shark Tank Success	Feb 2022	The definitive origin story
What Would U Ask	Ep. 34 — Pat Yates, Happy Feet	—	Long-form founder interview
Shark Tank Podcast	Happy Feet Update — the Herjavec deal	Jul 2014	The first post-Tank interview

2023 – 2024

Host, The Quiet Light Podcast

Pat took the host chair for roughly eighteen months and ran thirty-plus episodes with sellers, buyers, advisors and specialists across the online-business market. Guest credits are common. A year and a half interviewing the people who actually close these deals is the differentiator.

Press & print

In print.

Announcements

Trade & case studies

Local & regional

A Louisville company and a Jersey Shore star
Louisville.com · full featureSep 2011
Shark — Brescia University speaker series
Owensboro LivingOct 2016
Louisville Business First · The Boston Globe · The Oldham Era
Early coverage, held in the company archive2003–11

Lecterns

EVO LATAM Expo — featured speaker
Best Operational Practices of Ecommerce BrandsFeb 2023
Western Kentucky University
Entrepreneur Speaker Series, Grise HallNov 2015
Brescia University — Return to the Arch
Alumni Speaker Series, Taylor Lecture Hall. Pat, class of 1990Oct 2016

Also on the record

PR NewswireGift Shop MagazineWholesale CentralLouisville.comThe Rock FatherLinnworksOwensboro LivingBrescia UniversityWestern Kentucky UniversityLouisville Business FirstThe Boston GlobeThe Oldham EraSpecialty Retail ReportPR NewswireGift Shop MagazineWholesale CentralLouisville.comThe Rock FatherLinnworksOwensboro LivingBrescia UniversityWestern Kentucky UniversityLouisville Business FirstThe Boston GlobeThe Oldham EraSpecialty Retail Report

Booking

Looking for a guest who'll say something true?

Pat speaks on licensing economics, ecommerce operations, exit readiness and what actually happens after a Shark Tank handshake. He'll tell you the deal didn't close as aired, and he'll tell you what a Disney license really costs. Producers and hosts, get in touch.

Media enquiries

Connect

Start with
the number.

The first conversation is thirty minutes and it ends one of two ways: a Sellability Snapshot, or a clean no. Both are useful. Neither costs you a pitch deck.

pat@yatesadvisors.co

Direct: 502.533.0876
Based in: Louisville, Kentucky (ET)

LinkedIn Quiet Light TraceLot HappyFeet

Send a note

Name

What's this about

Message

Opens in your email client, addressed to pat@yatesadvisors.co.

Know and growwhat it's worth.

One shape,three doors.

Owners

Buyers

Operators

The proof stack.

Built one from nothing

Landed the licenses

Sells them for a living

Ships software, not slides

Multiple businesses.Thirty years.

Quiet Light

HappyFeet Slippers

TraceLot

Start withthe number.

Pat Yates

Five things he can do that most advisors only talk about.

Valuation & exit readiness

Brand licensing

Ecommerce & channel

Systems & owner-dependency

AI workflows & automation

Thirty years,in order.

First business at 22

Bought HappyFeet from his family

30 kiosks to 300

Signed Snooki at the peak of Jersey Shore

Shark Tank, Season 5 — deal with Robert Herjavec

DreamWorks Animation license

Disney

Joined Quiet Light as an advisor

Launched TraceLot

Founded Yates Advisors

On stage.

Television, podcasts and press.

The work that doesn't invoice.

The Justin Thomas Junior Championship.

HappyFeet Giving Back.

Start withthe number.

Eight minutesthat rewrotethe next decade.

$375,000for 15%.

Two outs, three offers, and one counter he didn't let anyone answer.

The deal you saw on TV is not the deal that got done.

The Season 7 update.

Beyond the Tank.

The cheque was never the point.

DreamWorks Animation

Disney

What it's really like.

Happy Feet — Shark Tank Update

The full story, told by Pat

The DreamWorks announcement

Episode and update coverage

Start withthe number.

One mall cart.Then everybody called.

A container of slippers started it all.

Seven major licensors. One of them took a year before a single pair shipped.

Studios

Leagues

Talent

Own IP

What it actually takes

Snooki.

How it actually happened

Start withthe number.

Never ship expired stock again.

Three sentences no operator wants to hear.

Life of a lot.

Goods in

On order

On the floor

Ahead of expiry

Audit-proof

What it does.

FEFO allocation

Recall readiness

Expiry risk forecasts

Bulk & repackaging

Pick & pack lists

Warehouse transfers

Know and grow
what it's worth.

One shape,
three doors.

Multiple businesses.
Thirty years.

Start with
the number.

Thirty years,
in order.

Start with
the number.

Eight minutes
that rewrote
the next decade.

$375,000
for 15%.

Start with
the number.

One mall cart.
Then everybody called.

Start with
the number.

Inside the tools
you already use.

Start with
the number.

An operator
on your side
of the table.

Start with
the number.

Thirty years of
showing up.

Start with
the number.