Starting Small To Make Big Moves w/ Nick Huber

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. As promised from the reboot of the show, I have two things that I am focused on with Founders Journal. The first is to continue to deliver great content that helps entrepreneurs build better businesses, and the second is to try a lot of new formats and see what resonates with the audience so we can keep doing more of it. Today, I am trying a new format, and I want to hear what you think. So shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com once you listen to the episode. And let me know if this is a format I should do more of. The format I am testing is a guest journal. Think about it as a celeb shot where if you're playing some, I don't know, doubles tennis or some beer pong and you call over a friend who's a ringer in the game so you can start winning. That is what I'm doing. I am calling over to the show some of my good friends, amazing entrepreneurs who can deliver their craziest stories from building businesses. Some tangible strategies and lessons that you can take with you to build your own business. And I feel incredibly privileged to introduce today's first ever guest journal, Nick Huber, better known as Sweaty Startup on Twitter. And Nick is an incredible entrepreneur. He started a storage business for students in college. He sold that business, and now he has a portfolio of self-storage units, 1.9 million square feet of storage. He has 44 employees. I think the entire portfolio is 9 figures of real estate. But what's remarkable about Nick is how he's built an incredible career as a creator on the internet, in addition to building a great real estate business. As of recording this episode, Nick has 305,000 followers on Twitter. He has an email list of 100,000 subscribers, and he's adding 500 per day, and he's getting 90 million impressions on his social posts per month. What that's allowed him to do is, in addition to his storage business, he's basically started to think about What are other businesses that touch his world of self-storage and real estate? And he has either built or taken stakes in eight other businesses, from an offshore talent business to a performance marketing business to an SEO and link building business to a cost segregation study business. And so in this episode, you're going to hear Nick tell his story and share how he's thinking about the future of his little empire as both a creator and an entrepreneur.

My name is Nick Huber and this is a guest episode of Founder's Journal. I was born in Southern Indiana, went to school in Upstate New York, and when I was there as a junior, I started what is, looking back, one of the hardest businesses in the world, a pickup and delivery student storage company. When the kids went home, we drove around box trucks, picked up their stuff and took it to warehouses, stored it for the summer, and then took it back to wherever they moved next year. It was a very seasonal business, a difficult business. We had 4 to 6 full-time employees at any given time. We operated in 12 states at 25 major colleges and we had upwards of 150 part-time employees working for us every busy season and it was tough. That was 2011, worked in that business, grew it over the years to 2015 where we were doing about $2 million a year in revenue and the business had pretty well peaked. My partner and I had some money set aside and we put that money into a self-storage development. Went into the deal with a $1.9 million budget. Ended up spending $2.4 million to get the building built and done. And in 2018— 2017, we got the building open for operation. 2018, we bought the property across the street, added it into the same entity. That deal went really well, changed our lives forever, and we realized really quickly right after that that we did not want to be in the moving business anymore and real estate was the future. But we had learned a ton about business. We had learned about hiring, managing, firing, solving problems, making decisions with incomplete information. We were pretty good at running companies. So once it came time to scale our real estate operation, we hit the ground running and did so. And by the time 2018 came around, we bought a couple more properties, 2019, a couple more, 2020, 3 more bigger properties. And then in 2021, we really took off and raised a lot of capital and bought a lot of storage. We bought $50 million that year, raised over $20 million of outside capital. And in 2022, the real estate market started to slow down. We acquired $38 million worth of storage. Our team grew. We ended up with 45 employees. still work with us today. Here we are now in 2023, a much slower environment, but that business is still chugging along doing well. In 2020, I got on Twitter and started tweeting business advice, profit and loss statements, being radically open about my business. You may know me from Twitter @SweatyStartup, but what happened was my life kind of changed forever and I got distribution and the access to capital for the very first time. So I made a couple investments in some other small businesses, one a recruiting company for Filipino and Latin American talent, which we staff a ton of at our businesses. And another one was a cost segregation firm. And then into 2023, earlier this year, I founded several other agencies and businesses that all kind of work together and grow my core competencies. So now we have 300+ employees across all these companies. Our real estate portfolio is valued over $150 million. And here I am today to talk to you about a couple key takeaways that you might be able to put into place in your company. I think the first one is something that I call who, not how, and this concept has been talked about by many different entrepreneurs, but the way it works is when something needs done, anything needs done, you're looking at your business and you have a job that you need to do, whether it's service a customer or work on the backend of your business, the instinct of an entrepreneur is to think about how can I do that? How can I do it? And I'm going to tell you to reframe that. And if you really want to scale your business, if you really want to grow your company, you got to reframe that question to who. Who can I get to do that? So it's not how can I do that? If I'm a lawn mowing company, how can I mow this lawn? No, it's who can I get to mow this lawn? How can I do this bookkeeping? No, it's who can I get to do this bookkeeping? You're leveraging other people. So what happens is you step back and you as a business owner become nothing more than a gatherer of people. You are pulling people together to do things. You are not doing things yourself. You are getting people to do them. So if you shift your mindset from how can I do this to who can I get to do this for me and pay them and bring them on my team or hire them as a subcontractor, your world will open up and you will begin to be able to leverage other people who are better at those tasks than you. They can do those repeatable tasks while you can focus on other things like growing your company. So if you really wanna be a business owner, and this is what it comes back to, if you want to be a business owner and not just own a job, because most business owners, frankly, they simply own jobs because they are stuck in the weeds, they are on defense, they are running their companies, and if any decision comes through their company, it goes straight through them. If you wanna get away from that and own an asset, a business where you can go on vacation for a week or a month and your business thrives and grows and your customers get serviced and everything happens inside of your company You have to shift that mindset from, how am I gonna do this, to, who am I gonna get to do this?

We're gonna take a quick break, but more from Founders Journal when we get back.

Another thing that I want you to take away is that entrepreneurship culture, as you follow people online, as you watch Shark Tank, as you read articles about entrepreneurship, it's all kind of geared toward massive, change-the-world, big idea stuff. That's great. I mean, those entrepreneurs should be celebrated. They're like gladiators against all odds, changing the world and bending reality to kind of meet their will. But it's not as approachable and not as realistic for you and me as normal people without massive amounts of capital, without major networks, and without a skillset. So entrepreneurship, if you kind of shift your thinking around this to, hey, how can I go make a couple thousand dollars? It becomes a lot more approachable. And let me tell you something about entrepreneurship. It's about momentum. Okay? You look at somebody who's very wealthy, they're dabbling in many businesses, they're running large companies that they founded. That didn't happen overnight. That was generally a 5 or 10-year journey to get to that point. So if you try starting with that end goal in mind, it's gonna really struggle. You're gonna really struggle to find those initial goals and those initial steps that you need to take approachable. So I would say, Hey, don't try to change the world. Don't think of a giant big idea. Go out, try to make your first dollar. Learn how to manage, learn how to hire, learn how to fire, learn how to delegate, learn how to sell, learn how to do the things that you can replicate and build on as you grow as an entrepreneur. Another thing is that you should kind of be like water. And this sounds so simple, but imagine you're an entrepreneur, you're at the top of a mountain, and you're holding a cup of water. You pour out that cup of water, and let's say the bottom of the mountain is the goal. Bottom of the mountain is sustainable business, lifestyle design. You know, you're making money, you own an asset, you are officially an entrepreneur. You're not working for anybody else. You pour out that water, it's going to find the simplest, easiest way, the path of least resistance to get down to that goal. It's not gonna go uphill. It's not gonna do hard things. It's gonna find the path of least resistance to get to that goal, which is a sustainable business. Maybe $20,000, $30,000 a month is what you need to live your dream life. Now, a lot of entrepreneurs don't think about getting to that goal as the path of least resistance. They're trying to do the hard things. They're looking around saying, wow, look up there. That is such a tough challenge. I'm passionate about XYZ. I'm gonna make irrational decisions. They're gonna go compete in areas that are really hard to compete. They're gonna go do things that are hard just for the sake of doing things that are hard, 'cause it's glorified in our culture today to do hard things as an entrepreneur. No. My advice to you would be to do easy things, find good businesses, and take the path of least resistance. Look, you're not going to win any bonus points for doing really hard things. As Warren Buffett says, entrepreneurship is not like the Olympics, where the higher the bar that you jump over, the more points you get. Warren Buffett says, I'll hop over 1-foot bars time and time and time again. They're the easiest things to potentially get there. So if you can look at business unemotionally, If you can find the path of least resistance, if you can put aside what you want and your own feelings, you can really find some amazing things and some good businesses to start or to get involved in. And the last thing I'm going to leave you with is you hear a lot of entrepreneurs talk about their journey. They talk about all the things they've been through. They talk about the glory days, and the interviewer will ask them, you know, what's the key to your success? And many of these great successful entrepreneurs, they'll sit there and they'll say, I hired great people. The key to my success is that I surrounded myself with amazing people. Hire great people and you're gonna build great businesses is what they'll tell you. And let me tell you that as an introductory entrepreneur, that is not actionable advice at all. Okay. Hiring great people as one person who has an idea, no capital, no network, no operational chops, that's not approachable. Okay? I'm gonna challenge you to build a business, find a business where you can make money and you can do really impressive good things. With normal people. You don't have to hire great people to get rich. You don't have to hire great people to build a great business. So go out there and instead of focusing on hiring great people, yes, absolutely hire as good of people as you possibly can, but no, you don't need unicorns to build a great business. You can build a business that's good enough to thrive with normal people. Now, that's all I have. Again, my name's Nick Huber. You can find me on Twitter @SweatyStartup, and I appreciate you having me on as a guest on the show.

And that was the first ever guest journal from Nick Huber. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I hope you learned a ton from Nick. Now shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com. Let me know what you think about the guest journal format and if you want more of them. Reply with an entrepreneur that would be on your wish list, your Mount Rushmore of entrepreneurs that if I can swing it, you would love to see do a guest journal on Founders Journal in the future. So shoot me an email and I look forward to seeing you next time on the show. Thanks, Alex.