Meet Top Class Actions Founder and CEO Scott Hardy

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At first glance, you’d likely see Scott Hardy as a gregarious six-foot-seven guy who probably played basketball. In reality, the president of Top Class Actions is more akin to a cunning veteran prizefighter — always finding a way to get back up (though he did play basketball through junior high).

Hardy started his career at AOL in tech support. Hardy was at AOL when that company  reached 100,000 subscribers, all the way to 30 million plus. Remember all those CDs and floppy disks AOL used to send out, everywhere?!?! Yes, he was there for that. In time he worked his way up to become an IT Operations Manager, managing the computer networks and desktop computers for three 55,000-square-foot facilities. 

Thanks to the dot-com bubble bursting in the early 2000s, he was left without a job. Needing a position with benefits, Scott went to work cargo for Delta Global Services at Tucson International Airport. How sobering of an experience was it?

“I went from making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year thanks to stock options and a hot market, to 15 bucks an hour,” Hardy said. 

Put most any person in the same situation, and they’d struggle after getting knocked down. Hardy looked at it as “a great experience for me, after I accepted that I had to start my career over.”

Instead of laying down for the count, Scott rebooted his career in Las Vegas.

A year later, he landed an offer to manage a call center team for a little device called the BlackBerry for the upstart company Nextel Partners. Promising a startup company feel with big growth potential, Hardy eventually grew his team from 10 people to 200 across different customer care and technical support teams at Nextel Partners.

Round Two! Fight! 

Eventually, Sprint bought Nextel, prompting another setback (or “opportunity,” as Scott calls it.) He and his now-wife Barbara found themselves at a precarious crossroads within four years. They could stay in Vegas, where career prospects weren’t promising for a mid-level manager, or move to Atlanta to stay with Nextel/Sprint and be thousands of miles away from family.

In the end, they chose the third option, moving to Phoenix, Arizona, where Hardy worked for Limelight Networks — another awesome company in the technology sector. It’s here that he had an excellent idea of his own.

“While I was there, I had the idea for Top Class Actions, and that came about from when I was just flipping through a magazine on a plane, and I saw an advertisement for the Airborne health supplement settlement,” he said. 

Intrigued by the prospect of claiming up to 63 dollars without proof of purchase, Scott took to the Internet expecting to find a website tracking easy-to-claim settlements. 

“Well, there wasn’t,” Hardy said. “So I built it.”

It’s here where Scott built the No. 1 news sources for class actions and mass torts in the world. And just like anything in his professional career, he fought with his entrepreneurial spirit to found his 50-million dollar business.

It Only Takes One Good Punch… or Investor 

In the beginning, there were three partners involved with Top Class Actions — Scott and two of his friends. He tried to keep the band together, but it wasn’t to be.

“I said to each of those guys, ‘Hey, let’s each put in 10 grand so I can get started on this,'” Hardy said. “They both went, ‘What? Ten grand? We’re out.’ So, they both dropped out. I kept pushing.”

Undeterred by his friends backing out, Scott’s vision for Top Class Actions remained crystal clear — an online repository for class action settlements. 

Administrators for those settlements weren’t exactly knocking his door down to advertise on his site.

“That first year, I sold one advertisement and was like’ oh boy, this isn’t good,’ but I kept plugging along because I still thought it was a good idea,” he said. “Nobody gave me any money except for my father-in-law. He was the only one who believed in it and gave me a small seed investment to get the business moving. I pitched to investors literally hundreds of times, with no takers.”

Hardy maxed out all his credit cards to put every last dime he had into the business with his father-in-law on board. Home equity line of credit? Yep, maxed that out as well. Marketing is expensive, and it costs thousands of dollars to exhibit, let alone sponsor, any conference where lawyers are the focus. Scott wrote every TCA article by himself, all the while holding down his day job, to make sure the business was cash flow positive before bringing on any help.

“(Once) I would get home from my day job at Limelight Networks, I would write all of these articles and go to bed around 11 p.m. to wake up at 5:45 a.m. the next day, go to work, and do it all over again, weekends it was all day on TCA focusing on IT improvements or more articles.” Hardy said.

This grit and determination to stay the course can be traced to Scott’s father, an entrepreneur in the financial planning industry.

“My Dad was a great husband and father. A wonderful example for me to grow up with,” Hardy said. “Dad, fresh out of the Vietnam War, turned down the CEO job at Safelite Auto Glass so he could move the family to Tucson, for my Mom’s health. My Mom couldn’t handle the cold weather in Kansas. Family came first, always. Dad struggled for years, unbeknownst to us, until he was able to grow his own financial planning business big enough to support our family. I always thought we drove everywhere for our yearly vacations because Dad liked to drive. Nope, we couldn’t afford airfare…”

Dazzle with Brilliance, Baffle with… 

In the beginning, much of Top Class Actions’s expansion was more in tune with Richard Branson than W.C. Fields. 

How do you make a feisty startup look bigger than it is? You fake it till you make it! To give the appearance of having a staff of writers, Hardy used pseudonyms for the articles he wrote. The appearance of having a team of writers and editors no doubt impressed. Calling in to TCA? You would get an actual person, who would put you on hold and call Scott directly, making you think there was an actual office and staff. And nobody ever paid attention to that behind the curtain. 

A Simple Question Leads to Grabbing the Champ’s Belt 

In a room full of attorneys during a conference, someone told Scott that it’s great he’s finding claimants, but “I need clients.”

“Can you find me potential plaintiffs for class actions?” that person asked.

Hardy recalls: “The entrepreneur in me went, ‘Yes, absolutely, no problem, I’m on it. I turned around and went, ‘huh, now how do I do that?'”

Fast forward a few weeks, and Top Class Actions launched an “investigations” section. And to his joy, it worked. The company started making money as site traffic continued growing.

Hardy eventually moved from Limelight Networks for a company offering him “a big raise and new stock options.”

Unfortunately (or fortunately as it turns out) after just a year, he lost his job, putting Scott and his wife back at square one. That “world’s biggest startup” ended up being another tough lesson leading to a big decision. 

It’s Just Our House, So No Pressure 

During a conversation on their back patio, Hardy decided to put all of his focus into making TCA what it is today. Barbara supported him but didn’t neglect to mention that “if you fail, we lose our house, so no pressure.”

His wife offered to go back to work full-time to make sure bills were paid, but Scott said, “not yet, let me see if we can pivot and make this truly work.”

Organic traffic to the site kept improving, giving him the confidence to launch investigations for mass tort (bad drug and medical device) advertising campaigns.

“All of a sudden, the revenue went up, up, up, and we did like 375 (thousand) in revenue that year, and I was able to bring on full-time employees,” he said. “Then, we doubled it again the next year, and we doubled it again the year after that.”

Leading with Love into the Future 

Now almost 14 years later, Top Class Actions thrives with 20 full-time employees and 20 contracted writers, editors and IT staff. 

And what about Scott? He’s a husband, father of two girls, a dedicated son, and friend to many. 

Given all of that, it shouldn’t come as a shock that when his leadership team selected their core values, he chose love to be the very first.

“I think it’s important that you love what you do, who you work with, and that you love your customers and viewers,” Hardy said. 

After consistently being told that the idea for Top Class Actions was too much of a risk, Hardy’s vision proved to be a much-needed conversation in today’s society. 

“We need class actions as a way to hold corporations accountable,” he said. “That’s why I’m here and will continue to be here. When I started Top Class Actions the claim rate for broad consumer class action settlements was often less than 1%. Now? 10, 20, 30 and even 50% in some of the cases we get involved with help advertise on TCA. Our goal is to help consumers around the world, and we’re well on our way.”

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