#101 Nick Huber — Building Wealth in “Boring” Businesses

People get addicted to gambling because they put, they put chips in the middle of the table and they don't know what's going to happen. And they get to see what happens and it's either good or bad. And they get the different feelings if it's good or bad. And there's a lot of psychology around the bad being more enjoyable than the good. Even with gamblers, business will punch you. It'll punch you, it'll beat you up, and then you'll win. And it is a roller coaster of amazingness. I love it. I'm addicted to it. I'm addicted to putting energy and decisions in and having uncertainty, but the odds in my favor and then watching good things happen. That's a, that's an amazing feeling.

Welcome back. This is from Startup to Grown up. My name is Alyssa Cohn and today I'm thrilled to welcome Nick Huber to the podcast. Nick goes by Sweaty Startup on the Internet and he is a fun and spicy Twitter personality. He's the founder of multiple businesses and he's now the author of a new book called the Sweaty Startup how to Get Rich Doing Boring Things. We discussed why Nick loves what he calls boring businesses. And Nick shared his journey and how he bootstrapped a pickup and delivery storage service straight out of his dorm room, scaled it to 12 states, and began to carve his path to freedom and serious wealth. We talk about the emotional rollercoaster of startups, including his experience with a mental breakdown on Boston Storrow Drive. We talk about how people can increase their stress tolerance, as well as his philosophy of hiring, including how he nabbed one of his best hires directly from a Walmart parking lot. We covered the importance of sales skills and why every founder needs them and his monkey on the back method for delegation. We also get into the provocative Twitter Persona he's cultivated and why that works for him, and the simple math exercise that convinced him he didn't need a $50 million net worth target to live a rich life. This is a meaty and practical conversation, so please enjoy my fantastic discussion with Nick Hubert. Nick, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you.

Alyssa, long time coming. Thanks for having me.

Long time coming indeed. But I'm sure worth the wait. And I want to just sort of set the scene for everybody because today we're going to talk about the exciting world of boring businesses because we have Nick Huber who's discussing his book Sweaty Startup. And I just want to say that, Nick, you've been known also as Sweaty Startup on The Internet. So maybe just like, let's dive right in. What is exciting about boring businesses? And what do you mean by boring?

Yeah, it's become a noun, almost. A sweaty startup is a thing and it's a boring, sweaty business that is the same as other businesses. It's not new, it's not innovative, it's not groundbreaking, it's not going to change the world. And frankly, I think Internet culture, the Internet culture around startups leads a lot of young and aspiring entrepreneurs the wrong direction. They think they need to go on Shark Tank. They think they need a new invention. They think they need an app, a new idea. They need to innovate. Innovate, change the world. And I'm all about innovation and improvement and making life better. But the wealthy people I know, the people who have balance, do what they want to do with their time. They live great lives. They're building generational wealth. 99 out of 100 of them started regular boring, old fashioned businesses. They have competitors, they do little things better than their competitors. But some of their competitors are larger than them. Many of them make more money than their companies. So I think people need to kind of take a step back and realize, hey, I don't need to be spectacular to be a successful entrepreneur. That's my mission, that's my goal with the sweaty startup book. And yeah, it's a reframe. It's a different way to think about business.

You know, I love that. But I have to, I just feel like you've been doing this, reframe, this sort of different way of thinking about it actually since you sort of started. I mean, I just feel like you had this idea that this was the way to do it early on. Where did that come from?

I, I didn't consider myself an entrepreneur. I wasn't chasing Silicon Valley. I wasn't watching the TV shows, I wasn't reading Steve Jobs or Elon, you know, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk doc, you know, biographies. I got excited about making a little bit of cash and I ran, ran around in a, in a car, started a little pickup and delivery storage business. Two weeks after I thought of the idea, we had $3,000 cash on the bed, we were profitable and we bootstrapped and built a little business over the years and it became a really big business over 15 years and several different opportunities that I'm ch. Facing now. So yeah, it was everybody speaks their book, right? And while you're listening to this, just realize I'm just a guy, I have one point of view. There's a lot of ways to win. That's the beautiful thing about entrepreneurship. But I think a lot of people don't give this way enough attention.

Yeah, when you say a lot of ways to win, I think that's so important. But like, talk a little bit more about the genesis of that business. You were in college, right?

Yep. It was a student pickup and delivery storage business for when they went home for the summer.

And where did that idea even come from? That was not a world changing idea.

But actually I had a craigslist ad up for my apartment and somebody's mother reached out to me and said, hey, can I store my son's stuff in your apartment? And I said, well, I can't really find anybody to rent it, so I might as well. And I'm like, okay, well now that I got his boxes sitting in the corner of my room, I might as well fill this place up with boxes because nobody's going to rent it now. And so it was just an. It's an opportunist. I think the best entrepreneurs and the most successful entrepreneurs, they don't set their mind on what they want to do. They don't chase their passion. They don't, you know, have, have tunnel vision on looking at the world and saying, me, me, me, me. What can I do? They are aware of what other people need. They're aware of holes in the market. They look at the, you know, the world unemotionally and, you know, just make little bitty decisions for years and years. And amazing things happen.

Yeah, and amazing things happen. But at the same time, let's face it, there are difficult times. So in your book you said, I had a mental breakdown on the side of the road in Boston. So talk about sort of the. Do you have the genesis of this sort of self storage in your apartment? Which I think is brilliant. And then where did that all go and where did that lead you? That was a little more stressful.

Yeah, we got very ambitious very fast because we were about to graduate. I was lucky enough to go to an Ivy League school, Cornell, to run track and field. I got in because I could run, not because I was smart, but a lot of our friends were going and getting jobs for 70, 80 grand a year. And this in 2012 was big money. Still is really good money. And so we realized that there was opportunity costs for us chasing entrepreneurship. Time is of the essence because hey, I could, I could be going out and starting a career, a successful path, or I'm going to move boxes around if I'm Going to choose this sweaty startup mentality. I'm going to move as fast as possible and get uncomfortable. So me and my partner, we bought three cargo vans instead of one. We went to, you know, four schools instead of just one. And we started running these locations remotely. We talked to a friend in Illinois to run a business, a branch of our business, Indiana and Iowa. And you know, three years later we had 12 states, 15 major colleges, 14 big warehouses rented. We had 200 part time employees during our busy season, we were doing $2 million of revenue during our busy season. It was, it was total madness. And we threw ourselves at the fire. We didn't know what we were doing. We were learning how to operate a company along the way. And there were some very, very, very stressful moments. And one of those was during a delivery seat. We're trying to deliver boxes to 7,000 students and we had a lot of things go wrong all at the same time. One of our employees crashed a vehicle, ripped the top off of a truck on steroid drive in Boston. Another one of them put diesel fuel or gasoline in a diesel engine and totaled the engine. And another one sideswiped a BMW and left that vehicle on the side of the road in Cambridge and just abandoned us and quit on the spot all during our busiest day of the year.

Wow.

And yeah, we weren't sure, we weren't sure we're going to make it. So I, the stress welled up and I had a tough hour there on the side of the road in Boston.

You had a moment, I'm sure. Yeah. And I guess I'm just curious because, you know, the people who are listening are either founders, either of either of venture businesses or of sweaty startups themselves or coaches or ambitious professionals. And they want to start something. They want to be like, they want to be like you, frankly. And they have like things that they want to get done in their lives, by the way. It is uncomfortable. But what would you advise people who are starting out based on your own experiences of kind of getting over your skis too early?

I think getting comfortable, being uncomfortable is the key to life. So nobody likes stress, nobody likes uncertainty. But everybody has a different level of stress and uncertainty and risk that they can handle. And it's not natural, it's not innate. You're not born with that stress threshold. You build it over time. You work it out, you exercise it. It's a muscle. So if there's two different people in the world, imagine somebody who gets a flat tire on the way home. Two people who get a Flat tire on the way home from the grocery store. One person, it's a non issue, they pull over, they fix the tire, they go home to dinner with their family and they forget to tell their spouse about the flat tire because it was just a no big deal. The other person on the other end of the spectrum gets this flat tire and it is the end of the world. They're having a panic attack in their car, they're crying, they're trying to call their parents, they're calling their spouse over and over and over again and it ruins a six hour chunk of their day. And they're thinking about it and having, you know, flashbacks on this issue. Every time they're in a car for a month. There's two different thresholds, you know, stress thresholds that are, you know, showing there. Everybody knows the people who get rid of really worked up about things that are generally not very stressful. Then there's people who are very cool, calm and collected even when things are very stressful. Business and entrepreneurship is no different. And one of the things I don't like about generally entrepreneurship media is nobody shares the tough stuff. Alyssa like this is hard. Business is freaking hard. It's stressful all the time. You're hiring, you're firing, you're negotiating salaries, you're talking with vendors and having very difficult conversations. Being the, being an entrepreneur is difficult conversation after difficult conversation. So if people think it's all going to be fun and easy and amazing like the media portrays it to be, many times, it's not. It's not for you. And five years ago, I thought entrepreneurship was for everybody. Today I don't think it's for everybody at all. I think it's for a very small subset of the population.

Yeah, who, who is it for?

I think it's for the people who are good decision makers and are reasonably competent people. That cuts out half the population, unfortunately, because a lot of people just don't have their crap together in life, unfortunately, then to run a business, you have to be able to make these decisions every single day. What am I going to pay this person? There's no textbook. We're raised in a world where you turn the pages a couple pages back and there's an answer for everything in life. Or if you don't know what to do at work, you call your boss. Or if you don't know what to do at the store, you go and find an attendant to help you. There's nobody to help you in entrepreneurship, you are the boss. So you have to make a Lot of decisions, high impact decisions with incomplete information that's very, very uncomfortable and foreign to a lot of people. Hey, I don't have all the data, I don't have the information. I got to make the best decision that I possibly can. So if you're a really good decision maker, I think you can really do well in entrepreneurship. But being an entrepreneurship for 15 years now, I'm constantly blown away by how poor most people are at making decisions.

That's true.

Not saying I'm great at making decisions either. There's two ways to do everything, but. But yeah, you get constantly let down by employees and other people in your general competence.

Well, one other thing I would say is to the founders that I coach, when they're frustrated about their people, the truth is that if their people had an owner mentality, they'd be owners. They wouldn't be working for you.

So that's part of the mantra. There's this mantra around employees and media that they want autonomy, they want to be their own boss, they want dynamic environment. All that's wrong. Like employees want structure, they want to know how to win, they want to be told how to win. They want to be. They want to go home at 5 o' clock and feel good about the work that they did that day. If they wanted uncertainty, difficult conversations, people problems figuring out as they go, unstructured environments, they'd be entrepreneurs.

Yeah. Yeah. It's so true. By the way, no disrespect, I was just listening to a bunch of. I was just watching. I went for some reason down the Jamie Dimon rabbit hole and Jamie Dimon is Excell CEO. Obviously an excellent executive. I'm not sure if he would be an entrepreneur. Like, I just don't see that in him and the way he talks.

Really interesting.

Yeah.

What is it? What is it?

Well, by definition, he's done so he's been so successful in the corporate environment. And I do think that he is an excellent leader. I just don't know if he's a build something from scratch and kind of wing it as you go kind of guy. No disrespect to Jamie Dimon either. It's just that like, actually I think there is a mentality of some people who will do well and thrive in a more structured and let's say, corporate environment. Even a large company, let's say. And that there's some people who embrace the things you just talked about. Difficult conversation, stress, and I would even say the chaos of the extreme work environment which is known as a startup.

So there's decision making and there's like appetite and an ability to handle stress. What would you add to that, Alyssa, as far as like successful entrepreneur versus and, and look, I think there's also also a lot of similarities between being very good at your job and being a high performing employee and being an entrepreneur. Like this book, I wrote this book kind of like almost for both parties. Like people who want to make more money at work, like be more valuable inside their organization. But what are the patterns that you see that separate kind of the entrepreneurs, the risk takers from the people who thrive in the more structured environments?

Well, the more structured environment, I mean they just want to, they want more direction, they want more clarity. And I want to say that like within reason, they want to be told what to do in light of all that. They also want, I would say, some sort of safety, like knowing that their environment's going to be there and a lot of things are going to be done for them. And I would say, you know, going back to entrepreneurs, sort of an entrepreneurial mindset is also around being proactive and kind of, you know, figuring things out moves in advance, by the way.

Almost like a resourcefulness, almost like a.

I think that's right.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think the successful employees have that same quality. It's just that entrepreneurs need to have that to be successful.

I think there's a big difference between a big business and a small business. And a big business is so much better. Early in my career I thought, oh, a startup is the way to go. Like, you can be nimble, you can make decisions quick, you can change things. And as I mature and as I get older, I realized that a big business with years and years of history and employees who know what's going on and revenue and profit, there's a lot of safety that comes with those big things.

Yeah, it's really true. It's really true. I want to go back to stress because you talked about people sort of like either having or not having. I think that people have an innate stress threshold. Like they have an innate happiness threshold. Innate. A lot of sort of traits, but that they can definitely grow their stress threshold. What specific advice do you have for people, for employees or for entrepreneurs to be able to tolerate stress? And frankly, the change that we are dealing with right now in the world.

Yeah. So there's decision making, there's comfort, being uncomfortable, and then there's sales. Are the three got a core, one of the three core skills inside my book. All three of those can be practiced and Trained and people don't even realize it.

Yeah. So give us some advice.

I'm bad at sales. I'm bad at sales. And I do want to talk with you a little bit about sales after this. But the way that you get comfortable in uncomfortable situations is progressively put yourself in more and more stressful environments. And I think it starts with like, I'm really into parenting and I know Alyssa, you have a lot of, a lot of your content and work is around not just making good money, but like having a really good life. And I think it stems from the way that you parent. And if you're willing to let your kids endure just a little bit of stress, that's healthy. Instead of just solving every problem, like making sure they never have pain, never helping them or encouraging them to do uncomfortable things. The same goes through the rest of life. If you constantly shield yourself from these hard conversations and from these little bit of uncomfortable things, it gets really hard to change that around. So I like to challenge my kids in little small ways to get them just comfortable being uncomfortable when the stakes are very low.

Yeah, I love that. I'm very into weight training and so there's a concept of progressive overload where you add a little bit more, a little bit more. And so that's really what you're talking about, progressive overload with stress. How do you do? I had Bob Glaser on my podcast who is a very well known entrepreneur and also into parenting himself. And so he talked about it, talked about this with his kids, how he raises more resilient kids. What are your specific strategies for helping your kids be more resilient and more stress tolerant?

I just think it's a mindset. First of all, too many parents put their kids in a bubble and try to protect them from all pain and hardship because they think that if I protect my kids from pain and hardship, obviously they will be able to, they won't have to experience that. And that's positive. In reality, life is really, really hard for everybody. All income levels, it's all different levels of hard. Obviously there's people who have a lot harder life than I do, but life is not easy. Like you're going to get sick, you're going to have car accidents, you're going to be late, you're going to have flight delays, you're going to have all these little stressful things. And if you can't handle that, you're not going to be a competent human. I love to challenge my kids to pick up the phone. My eight year old, he can pick up the phone and call to set a dinner reservation. I know a lot of it's on resi now, but he can put it on speaker and he can talk to the lady. And if we're playing golf and he wants a piece of candy at the halfway house, he's got to go up to the lady and say, hi, my name's Tim. My member number is, you know, three three two. I would like to see what candy you have, ma', am, and like ask and have that conversation. And the first time we drove by the halfway house, he's like, dad, I really want Starburst. Can you go get it for me? And I said, no, I'm not going to. And I said, you got to walk up and ask that young lady if you can have some candy. And he's. And he cried and he didn't want to do it. And we drove on and he was very, very upset. Like it was a. It was a catastrophe for him. That little small amount of stress was a very big deal for him. Obviously I consoled him and a couple of hours later we got his candy for him. I think there's a difference between trauma and like putting your kids in these little uncomfortable situations. But it's hard work in the near term. Just like employees, enabling employees to make decisions and grow and do better. It's always easier to just do it. And with kids it's always easier to just do it. But my 6 and 8 year olds can shower themselves, they can dress themselves, they can get their own waters, they can make a couple of their own little meals that they eat a lot of times. And that has taken a lot of work and stressful situations for the kids.

Yep, I love that. I love that you're sort of giving them these little moments of stress without trauma, as you said. And also the tie in to employees. Can you talk a little bit about how you, let's say push, let's say in a kind way, but also in a firm way, your employees to help them grow. And then I definitely want to talk about sales because that's a massive place of discomfort for people.

There's. I hired one of the best hires I ever made. Her name is Amanda. She was a public school teacher. And it turns out if you can manage 35 year olds, you can absolutely manage 35 year olds. There's a lot of similarities between the communication required, how to set clear guidance, you know, how to have boundaries with kids and with employees. So I. I love the parallels between being a good manager of people and being A good parent. I think there's a lot of them.

Yeah.

But I have a, I have a, a kind of a strategy that's described in this book. And it, and it's kind of a play on one that Dave Ramsey. And one of my favorite books, there's a book called Entre Leadership by Dave Ramsey. I recommend people read that. But there's this concept of the monkey on the back as a boss. And there's two levels of delegation. There's delegating tasks, which is just telling somebody what to do, and there's delegating decisions, which is harder. And that's when somebody else is going to make a decision for you, the owner of the business. Many people grow very large companies without ever delegating decisions. Everything comes to them, but their lives are miserable. They can't go on vacation. They can't play golf without getting blown up on the golf course. They can never take a one hour Pilates course or whatever. Right? So, so when, when people come, when your employees come to you with decisions or problems, I call a decision and a problem the same thing. Because you have a problem that needs solved, they come to you. They walk in your office, and let's just paint a visual. Alyssa, I'm the employee and you're the boss. I walk in your office with a problem. Or we could do it the other way around. I own a storage facility. Alyssa, you work with me. You come in and say, nick, I have a problem. I'm trying to rent this storage unit to one of our clients, but they're at the door and they can't open the door. The lock is on it like, we have a problem. Okay? Boom. The monkey, the problem jumped off of your back and went onto my desk. Now it's my problem. You just vocalize it to me. And I have an option. As a business owner, I have two choices. I can take that problem and solve it, which is the easy way, or I can send you out of my office with the monkey and you on your way to solve the problem yourself. It sounds super, super simple, but the natural, easier response is that I am going to solve these problems that my employees bring to me. But what happens is at 5 o', clock, you end up with an office full of monkeys. And you are the bottleneck in your entire business. So what I like to do is not solve their problems ever directly. I'm going to ask them questions.

Yeah.

Say, Alyssa. Okay, yeah, we got a problem. We can't rent this storage unit. What's our goal? What's our what's our goal here? Like, what are we trying to do? And you're going to be like, well, we're trying to rent more storage units, because that's good for the business. Okay. If we're trying to rent more storage units and this person can't get in this one storage unit, what should we do? What do we need to do? And a smart employee will start to work through the problems, and you'll get two things happen. They get practice. They're flexing that muscle. They get practice building this muscle of making decisions. And you get to look into their mind. You get to see how that employee thinks, and you get to say, ooh, can't really handle more problems. Like, this did not go well. Or, wow, impressive thought process. I'm going to give them more and more and more and more and more until one day they're CEO of my company if they show that they can do that. So basically, you work through, ask questions, and send them on their way with their own monkey. And a lot of really good things happen because they get practice and you get to look into their mind, and eventually they stop coming to you with the monkeys.

Yes. I love that. Nick. Nick, you'd make a great coach. That's exactly what I do as a coach and what I teach, certainly the executives I work with to do because it's so easy and normal to want to jump in and solve the problem. Do you end that little interaction with any kind of, like, pep talk? Like, what I like to do is have a little script at the end to say some version of in the future. Right. This is the kind of thing you can maybe talk through yourself and also talk through with your own employees. How do you work that out with people?

Yeah. So my, my. Then my next level of this, and I love that you're going deeper. Come to me with a problem and a solution. Don't come in my office with a problem unless you have already thought of the questions I'm going to ask you. And you know the questions I'm going to ask. What are your. What are our goals? What's a potential solution? What are the downsides of it? What are the upsides? And what's the best solution to this problem?

Yeah.

So. So now they know that Nick is not going to help me. Nick is not going to solve my problem for me. And there's a. I think there's a fine balance. I'm going to say that there's a fine balance in this. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty. Sometimes your employees do need your help. And you do not want to over delegate too fast and just tell people something one time and send them on their way and just be the ultimate delegator. A lot of business owners, they read these books or they listen to these podcasts and like, oh yeah, I'm, I'm an expert delegator. I'm just going to tell everybody to do everything and, and things go downhill very, very fast. So I like the framework of it's my job first, it's Nick's job first. Like I, when we started our storage business, I was the only employee. It was my. Everything was my job, then it was our job, I hired somebody and it was both of our jobs. And then when they're ready and I've done the quality control and I have performance management in place to make sure that they continue to do a good job, then it's your job. So it's my job, our job, your job. And that's the better way to delegate than constantly being absolutely not helpful to any of your employees. So I think I'll preface it with that.

That's a great framework. I think that people, I think very experienced leaders have trouble knowing when to lean in and when to lean out. And that's kind of one of the ways to get there, because you really want to have people kind of, you want to do it together so that you know that they're able to do it with something that's new to people. Although if you have senior people who've come and have done it before, I think the expectation should be they should be able to do pretty quickly without you.

I think getting your hands dirty and jumping into big problems inside your company is a necessary trait of every leader. If you can't spot problems and if they're big enough problems and only you can solve these problems, if you're not willing to do the work, which many people aren't, they get above doing the work. Whether it's CEOs, CFOs, middle management at companies, or a business owner. That's when your culture can, can really take a, take a dive. And I think the other half of people management is understanding that people don't change. And that, that sounds heartless. And every time I post it on social media, people are like, Nick, people do change. You're. You're mean. Okay, yes, people do change. One in 10 times, somebody will change. But I'm a, I'm a business owner, which means I'm a poker player sitting at a table playing odds all day. I'm a gambler, I'm playing odds. Obviously, we hope the odds are in our favor and we can build a healthy company that produces, you know, more upside than risk and more profit than loss and all these things. But I'm still, again, I'm still playing odds. And why would I take those odds? Why would I take 1 in 10 so early in my career I would, an employee would mess up and I'd say, okay, my fault. I'm going to take ownership of that. And I think that's step one if it would an employee. Every single time an employee messes up, it's your fault. As a business owner, there's no blaming the labor market, blaming how hard it is to hire people. Nobody wants to work hard, whatever it is. Getting that cell phone, getting that extreme ownership over your business is step one. But step two is understanding that people aren't really going to change. And so when early in my career, I'd say, okay, somebody comes in, they mess something up, oh, it's my fault. Like all I need is a little bit more training. I can, I can fix them, I can help this. And then they'd mess up again. And then I'd say, okay, you know, oh man, that was really bad. It's costing me money. But I can't afford to lose them. Like I got to train them even more. And it's. And I would just keep working with them and I would drag on these people who statistically never change. Statistically they don't. Dave Ramsey also, he's one of the folks that I follow quite heavily. His business stuff is really good. He says, okay, somebody called in, I'm going off on a little tangent here, but somebody called in and said, I'm really unhappy in my marriage. The finance is just not there. This guy, he spends all of his money. We got a $30,000 side by side out. We have a thousand dollar truck payment. Now he wants to get a jet ski. We don't even have our emergency fund. And Dave goes, what was this guy like before he married him? And she says, well, he had a jet ski, he had a side by side, he had no money and he spent all his money. Okay, well you married, you know, you married a goldendoodle and you want a pit bull or you married a pit bull and you want a golden doodle. Like what did you expect? You expect him to like, change once you got married? Okay, same with employees. People do change and you can absolutely develop people as a leader, but when you start to realize that they don't have the capability to make decisions. They can't handle stress. They make bonehead moves a lot. One of the most important things you can do in your business is to. Is to get those C players out of your organization.

Yeah. I'm just going to say that we're not going to do this. We're not going to do this. But we could spend this entire rest of this podcast talking about change and people changing or not changing. Right. We're not going to do that. I promise. But I just have to go one level deeper, actually. Nick, have you changed?

I have learned from a lot of my mistakes. And I have a. I have a. And I know. And I've. I'm humble. I've been humbled enough by business now to know that I don't know everything. Yeah. Early on, and I'm. I'm kind of lucky that early on in that journey, I thought I knew everything and everything was going to work. And I had that ambition because if I didn't have that, I don't know that I would have made it so that that ego served me in the early days. But now I've been humbled enough to know over the last three years and five years and so in business that I have a lot to learn and there's a lot of people better than me at a lot of things. I think it was two years ago, I called one of my mentors and said, like, man, I'm really frustrated with this employee. I don't know what to do. I'm too busy to let him go because he holds too much power inside the company. I can't possibly fire him. But these are the three things that are just, like, not normal that happened that we. I don't know what to do. And he said, nick, like, you gotta let the guy go tomorrow. You gotta, like, let the guy go right away. And I was like, I can't. Like, I can't do it. And then I hemmed and hawed. And he eventually said, nick, look, if you do not get rid of your C players, you will watch your A players walk away, and you will be left with an entire organization of C players. So you choose, like, you can fire this guy or you can watch your good people walk away. Because competent, amazing A players do not like working with C players. I mean, they can handle the B players, the role players, you need those. But if somebody is actively dragging down the culture, the production, the profitability, their bonuses, whatever it might be, you got to let them go. And that was a wake up call conversation for me.

Yeah, very powerful. And I also think the point about being humbled by your businesses, that's where I stand on people changing. Right. They change not because you want them to change. They change because they want to change, because they've had experiences that drive them to change, because they've had an awakening of some sort or because they're the kind of people who grow and change and learn and, you know, read books and are interested in this. But by the way, builders.

And there's. There's definitely builders and people who get very complacent. There's two types of people. There's people who always want to improve and there's people who are very happy to keep things the same.

Totally. And so I think that's the. So the nature of change, I think comes down to, like, people can change quite a bit, but not because you want them to, unfortunately.

As a business owner, I think you have to have a radical open mind. You have to realize that, hey, the way you think the world is or the way you want the world to be. A lot of us have this, A lot of us driven people. We have this, this mindset that we can impose our will on the world, that the way we see things is right and we are going to make it happen. And a lot of times we're able to, like, look at what some, some of these entrepreneurs are accomplishing today. It's unbelievable. But if new information arises, if one of your smart employees approaches you and says, nick, you're wrong, or if your customers aren't paying you for that service that you thought was what everybody needed, you have to be, you have to accept that new information. You have to step out of. Step your ego and your emotion out of it, and you have to be able to change course. I have this little sticker on my mirror above my sink where every morning when I'm brushing my teeth, I look at this little sticker. It says, change your mind often because I have an ego. I have. I've had a little bit of success. So I get thinking that I'm really good at this. And then that's when you get blindsided by a blind spot. And so, yeah, you got to be radically open minded.

Yeah, I love that. I think that's so important to not have it. Life is not the way you wish it were. Life is actually the way it is, and that's the way. And that's it.

So many people would be way happier if they realize that they can't change the world. They need to accept it the way it Is.

I know. Because then they wouldn't have that drama of the flat tire, right. Like you talked about earlier. Now I want to move to sales because we have talked about being uncomfortable. So it's about being uncomfortable with stress, being uncomfortable making decisions. And then do you have like two chapters in your book about sales? I think you have two chapters you make about sales.

I tried to make the whole third, last third of the book about sales. And my editor was like, nick, like, we need to write a second book that's about sales. Try to get, try to get the most important stuff in here. But I had this kind of life. I've had several kind of life altering conversations where I was trying to figure something out. I had some. Somebody tell me something that was really powerful and it stuck. I've also had a lot of conversations where people told me a lot of really idiotic things, by the way. So picking and choosing what advice. Picking and choosing what advice to follow is really hard.

Be careful with sticks.

But I was, I was a, I was a new, fresh entrepreneur. And I, it was senior, early senior year at Cornell. I had just started my business and I'm like, okay, I'm an entrepreneur now. This is big. Like, I totally new mindset. Like, I never considered myself an entrepreneur. I was just, you know, trying to hang out with my friends and do track and make a little money. So I set up a call with, with. I sent an email to Dan Cohen, who was the head of entrepreneurship at Cornell. He's at Wake Forest now, still a mentor and friend of mine. Like, Dan, you're the entrepreneurship and entrepreneur in residence at Cornell. I'm an entrepreneur now. Like, let me pick your brain. So we get, we get lunch at this place called Aladdin's in Ithaca. We sit down and two minutes into our conversation, he goes, nick, do you like sales? Would you consider yourself a good salesman? It was the first thing he said after pleasantries. And I'm like, in my head, I'm like, we're not really talking about sales. We're talking about entrepreneurship. So this is weird. And I go. And I'm like, okay. I think he wants me to say yes, but I'm going to be honest. And I was like, no, I don't like sales. I am super. I don't like confrontation. I do not like getting rejected. And I'm more of the visionary. I'm the guy at the whiteboard. I'm the operator. I'm the marketer. I'm really good at marketing and growth. And I, I did this. You know two or three minutes of word vomit to him to try to tell him why sales was not important. And he just kind of started to roll his eyes. And I, and he's like, as soon as I got done, he goes, nick, if you don't like sales, you need to go get a job now. And I'm like, what? He goes, every single part of entrepreneurship is sales. He goes, nick, you're starting a storage business, right? You're, you're 23 years old, you got no cash. How are you going to convince somebody in Boston to lease you a warehouse? How are you going to convince somebody at U Haul or Ryder to give you credit to rent trucks? How are you gonna convince somebody at American Package to sell you $20,000 worth of boxes when you got no money? How are you gonna convince 20, 30 employees to take a job with you when they don't even know you can make payroll, you're brand new, when they could go get a job waiting tables for 20 bucks an hour plus tips or 30 bucks an hour if they're good. How, Tell me how. How are you gonna convince investors to invest with you if you need money? How you get to convince a business partner to like, trust you with their career and that you can bring more to the table? And he just went on and on. Vendors, vendors, employees. He did not even talk about customers. He's like, every single part of entrepreneurship is sales. So you have two choices. You can go get a job or you get good at sales. Yeah. And I was, I was shook. I was shook to the core. I walked out of there like I wanted to crawl in a little hole and I was like, first I was a little bit stubborn. I'm like, he's wrong. Like, that's not true. Luckily, over the two weeks following it, like, it clicked. Everybody in the world is selfish. My wife is with me because I can provide for her and I can, I treat her well and we have a mutually beneficial relationship. My business partner is with me for one reason. It's because I can add more value to the company and than profit than I take out. As soon as that dynamic is not there, I'm not a good partner anymore. My investors invest with me to make them money. My friends are friends with me because I bring a positive attitude. Whatever it is in life, everybody's selfish in a way, right? Of course there's mutually beneficial relationships and people want to see each other win. And there's people who are morally sound and people who are not. But that was a very eye opening foundation that Was built very early on in my career and it served me phenomenally well. It's very thankful to Dan for doing that to me.

That's so powerful. I love all the mentors that you've had, you've listened to. How specifically did you first of all get comfortable with sales and what specifically did you do to build your sales. Sales skills? And then tell us also about mistakes you made in building your sales skills?

Yeah, so there's a chapter in the book. I don't know what chapter it is about sales. Let's see. I think it's. Yeah, chapter. The sales is the foundation of every business. It's chapter. Chapter six.

Chapter six.

I lay out a. I lay out a. Just a framework of like the old school sales. So to get super tactical just for a minute. But the old school mentality of like getting the. Getting the pen really close and like moving their hand towards the pen and like the manipulative sales approaches that were some of these old school sales teachers taught, that stuff doesn't work anymore. Like there's too many options. People are educated. So my framework is around building trust and telling them what can go wrong and making sure they're a good fit. Almost playing hard to get a little bit. I like that method of sales. But how to get better at it? You practice. Yeah, people wanna. People wanna build muscle like Arnold Schwarzenegger. There's two options. Do you watch Arnold Schwarzenegger videos? Do you build your workout plan? Do you take all the protein? Do you study muscles and biology? Or do you go to the gym and lift weights? Yeah, go to the gym and lift the weights. So the best way to get good at sales is to put yourself in a very difficult sales role very early on in your career and make sure you hack it. Like instead of going home and quitting like 70% of people do in sales, you keep going. Yeah, that's how you master it.

Yeah. I think Practice is everything 100%. The, the thing you were talking about in terms of the old. The old school tactics, like, you know, so sign here, you know, whatever. Like you sort of see this used Carl salesman. I think that's why people hate sales. I think that's like literally why people don't like can't see themselves as salespeople. What specific practice did you do early on and what mistakes did you see yourself in? Like if you look back now, did you see yourself making in sales and how did you then kind of use that to get better?

It's. If I could say that one thing that most People get wrong about sales is energy and yeah, people, people have a very negative connotation about sales. They think used car salesmen, they think we're going to sell some scammy life insurance over the phone or telemarketers or whatever it is. And that's not true. Like great salesmen are a joy to work with. They help find win win scenarios. They disqualify people who are not the right fit. They don't rip people off. So I would say bring energy, be likable people do business with people they like, show genuine interest in other people. Read the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Do the basics of just being a, being a human who is nice to be around. That's a very tactical and easy way to get better at sales is smile, bring energy and like generally genuinely care about the other person. Those are things that are lost in my opinion.

I love that. That's so good. And what about, did you when you were doing this early days, like do you have an example of something that you try early days that worked or didn't work?

So I raising money for my first self storage deal was my first like six month sales journey. I was trying to raise half a million bucks. So to put in perspective now we have a private equity arm of our business that's raised $60 million to buy companies and real estate and it's easier than ever now. But when I was 23, actually I was 25 when I was raising money for that first deal. I had no assets. I'd never done real estate before and I didn't know wealthy people. Those were three really bad things when you're trying to raise a bunch of money to do storage deals. So I went dinner table to dinner table trying to raise capital for these investors. And at the beginning I was all about the positives. Like self storage is amazing. This is why we're great operators. This is why this is going to work. And I didn't make very many sales when I shifted towards hey look, this is what we're worried about. These are the things that can go wrong in a storage deal. What if these, these are the things that are out of our control. Like what if interest rates go way up? What if a lot of supply is built across the street? What if another competitor builds across the street and cuts rent on us? All these things that can happen that I don't have control over. This is what we're afraid of. Don't do this deal if. And then kind of ask a question. My, my favorite tactic is to ask A question then. Okay. So knowing what you know now about the negatives and what we're afraid of and the, you know, what makes you want to. What makes self storage interesting to you? Like, why do you think you might be a good. Why do you think you want exposure to self storage? And then I shut up. And a lot of times the investors then would either disqualify themselves, which I wanted anyway, because they'd be more stressful for me in the future, or they would talk themselves into doing business with me. So it was a very interesting way to kind of flip the script. And one of my favorite sales books is Flip the Script by Oren Claff. Highly recommend people pick that up.

Yeah. That. It sounds like it's more about asking questions and also showing them what's in it for them.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's. I think that's such an important. It's really an important life skill, to be honest with you. And I think that sales is about communications more than anything.

And then you, you expand. Sales is, of course, it's every part of entrepreneurship when you're trying to get people to join your company, when you're trying to sell customers. But it's every part of life. I have to sell my 6 year old on getting in this, you know, the expedition to go to school and eating the broccoli instead of the Oreos. It's. It's every part of life.

Yeah, totally. Now I want to go back to employees because I saw a Twitter post that you did on lessons for hiring. So I'd love to hear you riff a little bit on hiring and how you find the right people and hire the right people. And how do you get great? How do you suggest people get great at hiring? Entrepreneurs get great at hiring.

So I guess let's start. I'll ask you a question to start. Like, are we talking about somebody who has a mature company and isn't trying to attract like, like pretty serious talent, or are we talking about a. A new entrepreneur who's in the very, very early stages and needs that first person to help them sit on a lawnmower?

Let's do sit on a lawnmower. Let's do both separately. Let's do the early stage first.

Let's do the early stage first. So everybody, everybody thinks to hire you need. Well, first of all, everybody thinks that employees are just going to rush in the door and want to work for you. No marketing, no word of mouth. One job post, and all of a sudden, you know, a unicorn is Going to come in the door that thinks it and cares about the business like you do and can make decisions. And all this as a business owner. You need to reset expectations that you're marketing for employees just like you're marketing for customers. It's the same. Would you, would you post one little ad with a low budget or a free Craigslist or Facebook marketplace post and expect a flood of customers to come in the door? No. So why is it that people posted job posting? We used to post them on Craigslist. It's not really a thing anymore. Why would you expect to make a Craigslist jobs post and people who want to work for you to flood in the door? It's not going to happen. So you have to change your mindset to I'm hunting. I'm not fishing, I'm hunting. So I found one of my best employees in a Walmart parking lot. I was sitting in a Walmart parking lot. My fiance, now wife, was inside picking a couple things up. I was answering customer service emails in the car and I see out of the corner of my eye a guy like a flash of blue vest across the front of the car running. And I'm like, whoa, that's crazy. He's running. He's running across Walmart parking lot. I'm looking like, wow, he's a Walmart employee. He's got a blue vest on and he's running. I have never seen a Walmart employee so much as walk fast, let alone run. Something's weird. This guy must own this Walmart. And he sprints across and he's picking up a bunch of carts and he's, he, I watch him for five minutes on this parking lot hustling around like he's sweating and he's pushing a long row of carts back to the front. And a Walmart bag is like tumble weeding across the parking lot. And he scoops it up and puts it in his back pocket and throws it away at the entrance. I'm like, whoa, this is crazy. So I make sure I find a way to meet him. I go up to him and I'm like, hey, what's going on? And he goes, oh yeah, it's crazy. Like the varsity basketball game is about to get out. It's, you know, that game started at 7. It's almost 9:30. My manager's not here. The person who's supposed to be doing these carts, they're out back. They're somewhere they're not supposed to be. So nobody was here. I'm actually supposed to be in produce. But I'm over here out here running around because when this game gets out, 30 or 40 people are going to show up to Walmart to run errands before they head home. And we got no carts. And I'm like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. This guy's built different.

Totally.

So I pull out a business card and say, hey, like if there's anybody like you, I know you're you, you know you're taken. But if there's anybody like you, we pay 20 bucks an hour. I run a moving company plus tips. Like it's a really high paced environment. Would love to, would love to talk to them. We're hiring right now. We got some cool stuff going on. Well, the guy, not his friend, sent me an email that night. We hired him and he's one of our best employees of all time. Ran, ran a branch down in Philadelphia. He would travel up to Ithaca, he'd roll over to Boston, worked with us for four seasons. So yeah, just have radar, like figure out where the good people are. Again, like the school teacher. School teacher thing is another one.

Yeah, that's an untapped market. School teachers, I think that's very powerful. But just when you say have a radar. Yeah. And also know what you're looking for because you know, if you were looking for quote unquote qualifications and like I don't know, two years of experience in storage or whatever you want to say or if like you were looking for, I don't know, like book some bookkeeping experience or whatever, I think that that's. You would, your radar would have been off. So I think what you were looking for is hustle. Right.

There's, there's two different positions you're hiring for at every company. There's the person you need experience for, you absolutely have to have it. And there's positions where you think you need experience, but you can really train somebody how to do it all in two weeks. So if I can train somebody how to do it all in two weeks, I'm going after the things I can't teach, which is they care, they move quick, they have this sense of urgency. They have energy mainly. Sense of urgency and energy is what I want in almost every employee. So yeah, I own a recruiting company somewhere.com and a lot of my friends and I interact with a lot of the clients there. A lot of times they'll say, oh, I need a data analyst to work inside of a very specific multifamily software and I want 5 years experience in that multifamily software and I start digging deeper, I'm like, hey man, like, if we limit, if we limit this candidate pool to Only people with 5 years experience in this software, I'm not gonna be able to show you that. Impressive people, like the people. But like, so tell me a little bit. How, how fast can you show somebody what to do in here? Like how, how complex is this? Is there a course in two weeks where we can get them up to speed and it turns out that they're just moving cells around in something that works just like every single other thing?

Yeah, two hours. Two hours to get up to speed.

Yeah, exactly two hours. I can get this person valuable if they, if they work hard and they care. So yeah, I like going after the people who care.

I love that. What about for a more mature business? Is there something else you would add in terms of like how to hire, how. Because I have to say leaders and certainly entrepreneurs in general, most people are just bad at hiring. So I think they're always looking for the wrong thing. They're testing the wrong, they don't know what to ask. What other advice do you have for people?

So first of all, hiring is the hardest thing in business. You will, you can do it all right? You can do the personality tests, you can do everything. You can, you can have 10 rounds of interviews, you can have thousands of candidates and narrow it down to one person and still they could be a bad fit. You really don't know until they get in and start working. But if they're an all star, you'll know in the first three weeks, guarantee you. Yeah, but so with, with the more advanced positions, I think I don't have as, as tactical of an approach. We. I hunt again like I'm on LinkedIn looking for people. I want to find somebody with a job. So that disqualifies anybody who's going to apply for my job. Because I have a theory, and this is again, sounds a little brash. Maybe just picture the workforce as a hundred percent. The whole workforce, Everybody working is 100%. The top 5% have, they're in career nirvana, they have a job, or maybe it's 10%. They have a job they love so much that they would not leave even if a better opportunity came. They have a boss that really likes them, they're super happy, they're on a perfect comp plan. You cannot get these people to leave even if you had, you know, two hour a week job for an unreasonable amount of money, whatever it is, they're in career nirvana. Then there's another 80% in the middle or there's a 10% at the bottom. Let's go down to the bottom. Now they're the 10% who are either unemployed or actively looking because they're unhappy. They're going to be the ones to apply for your job. There's 10%, there's 80% in the middle, Alyssa, that are somewhere in between. They have a job that they have, they're good at their job, they have a boss that likes them, they're content, they can pay all their bills and they are not actively looking for work, but they would leave if they found something better. That 80% is where your All Stars are. So if you're just going to post a job on monster indeed LinkedIn and expect, and expect these really high performing people to apply. Yes, it happens. But really you got to go hunt them, you got to figure them out whether you're going to use a recruiter or you're going to do it yourself and go figure out position people in similar positions. Got to go get them.

How do you do it? How do you go get them?

I have LinkedIn recruiter and I send, my team sends a, a ton of messages and I also hire a ton through referrals. So I hire two or three all Stars. They're, they're having fun. We're building a business. They understand the opportunity at hand. They start to tell their friends and their friends are like holy cow, I want to work there. And before you know it, you know they have, we, they, they brought 10 people to the company. It's pretty wild.

Yeah, yeah. Referrals are so powerful. Especially as you say, your A players who are referring A players.

Unfortunately that's not practical advice for people trying to make that first all star hire. But, but yeah, we find almost all of our all Stars from either outreach or referrals.

I love that. Or hang out in Walmart parking lots. Right. And look for the hustle. Now I want to shift gears a little bit and I want to talk a little bit about your sort of thoughts around finances. But I want to start by asking to talk about. You have an exercise. You talked about this in your book that one of your mentors had you do, which is describe your ideal lifestyle and figure out how much it would cost. So do you remember that exercise and talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. So I think, I mean you ask the average person about their net worth goal, especially a very ambitious entrepreneur or an ambitious person who works in corporate America, somebody who's ambitious. Ask an Ambitious person, their net worth, goals. They will overshoot the actual amount of money they need to live a happy life by three times.

Three times.

That's. That's just a true fact I made up. So take that for once more. My theory is that people will overshoot the amount of money they think they need to live the life they want to live. So I had a mentor very early on, and he said, nick, how much money do you want to make? And he. And I was like, oh, I want to. I want to have a $50 million net worth. And he's. He laughs. He's like, first of all, do you realize how hard that is? Like, everybody on the Internet makes it sound like making money is easy. That's very, very difficult. He's like, second of all, what the hell are you going to spend it on? And he just kept asking more and more pointed questions, like, what are you going to do on, you know, what country club do you want to join? What school district do you want to be in? How big do you want your house to be? And when he started asking these very pointed questions, I realized that I don't need an Escalade. I don't need a 10,000 square foot house. I don't need a membership of the nicest country club in town. I have no desire to do the VIP pass at Disney. I don't need a private jet. So we started doing the actual math on what I needed and what I wanted. And I needed $20,000 a month. If I had $20,000 a month coming in and I was working a reasonable amount, you know, 10 hours some weeks, 50 hours the other weeks, whatever, you know, entrepreneur's life, where I have some flexibility to live the life I want to live and do what I want to do. He's like, okay, what's your day? Like, what are you doing? He's like, okay, well, I'm the type person who, I got to be productive. I got to be working on something. So I definitely want to still work several days a week, but I want to play golf on Thursday morning with my friends and I want to take a week long vacation with my family once a month if I want to. Like, I want to ride my mountain bike, I want to get really fit. I want to have a great relationship with my kids. And he's like, okay, and, and why do you need $50 million? And it turns out I didn't. I needed 20 grand a month coming in. So when you reset and figure out what is wealth to you? And the question I'll pose to your audience is what does wealth look like to you? Not a number that you think you need to go after because you think it's cool and it sounds big. What kind of life do you actually want to live? Put it on paper, make a spreadsheet. Fill out your monthly expenses. Do you want a private school? Okay, put it on the list. Do you need a nanny? Okay, put it on the list. Do you need an Escalade? Okay, put. Put 700amonth of car payment on the list, whatever it is, and then work backwards. How much money do you need coming in every single month to spend? Spend two thirds of it, save a third of it, make investments, do whatever you want to do. My number was mind blowingly low, and it turned out I did not need a $50 million net worth even close to that to accomplish the life and live the life that I wanted to live.

Yeah, I think it's so powerful just to have the facts on the, you know, facts on the ground in a spreadsheet. And I would just add a companion idea of that is the other things you were talking about is like, what does my life look like in narrative form? You know, like bullet points or paragraphs about what am I doing and not doing every day, who am I spending my time with? Right. What's meaningful to me? And if you put those two things together, you have more of a chance of like actually living your values.

And I think there's. So a friend of mine, Rock Thomas, he has these seven gardens that he talks about. There's the financial garden and the career garden. There's the marriage, there's the parenthood, there's friends, there's hobbies, and there's physical fitness and there's spirituality. I think that's. That's eight. But I'm messing it. I'm messing it all up. But there's basically seven areas where you can choose to put your energy. And when you put energy into those buckets, it's water. So you, you only have so much water because there's 24 hours in a day. Which gardens are you going to water? If you put all of your water into your career garden, your career garden is going to get massive. You'll be wealthy. You could be Elon Musk. But does Elon Musk have a healthy garden? When it comes to his fitness, his spirituality, his parenting, I don't know him, so who am I to judge? But there's a lot of people who have very beautiful careers and they have the fancy things and they have the house in the Outer Banks, and they have the jet. But their other gardens, their physical health is failing. They don't have spirituality. They don't have hobbies. They don't have friendships. They don't have a great marriage. They don't know their kids. So I would just encourage entrepreneurs to realize that, hey, what's this all about? This is not all about who dies with the most money. Money is a very important tool. I am very motivated by money, as are you, and as is everybody. But you gotta have a little bit of balance. You gotta have balance.

It's so wise. But I would just come back to you. So it's like, I can tell from you, our conversations, our conversation, what I've heard from you. You on the Internet. You're a very ambitious guy. And actually, money is important to you. Money is important to me. Money's important to you. And you're a very ambitious guy. And you want to build big businesses, or maybe not even big, but successful, thriving businesses. But it's equally clear that actually, your marriage is really important to you. And you just talked a little bit about your parenting is really important to you. How do you manage to sort of keep those, let's say, gardens in balance or in perspective? Because it's easy to let one, especially business, kind of pull you aside.

I'll say that I'm not perfect at it, and it's really hard. I think the idea of having a perfectly balanced life is great until you realize that, hey, I'm super ambitious. I think there's also, in society, there's a little bit more pressure on some men as well, that. That this career and money becomes their identity. And I would be lying to you, Alyssa, if it wasn't mine. Like, frankly, I think if I went broke and stopped making all the money, it would break me as a man. Like, I'll admit it. But then, like, what do you have to fall back on if something like that happens? You have a lot of very other awesome things to pull you out and to. And to. I don't know where I'm going with this, really, but I think it's very hard to not have your identity tied up as an ambitious person in your businesses, in your career, and then trying to keep that from evolving into stuff. And what you're collecting and the property and the houses and the cars and the airplanes is another, I guess, first world problem.

Yeah, first world problem. But I think it is the sort of never enoughness disease.

Yeah.

How do you guard against that for yourself?

It's not. You can't I mean, I'm ambitious. So, like, I rewind a year and a half to December end of 2023. Was working very little. Business was going very, very well. I was making way more money than I needed to make to do to live the life I wanted to live. And I still decided to ratchet up the pressure and the stress to buy a $50 million company and raise $20 million. Why? My wife said, like, Nick, why? Like, well, because we can make this a $200 million company and it's going to change the trajectory of all of our family. And she's like, Nick, we've already done that. And I didn't. I couldn't really answer. This is who I am, I guess.

Well, that's interesting. So, I mean, you're a work in progress yourself.

I am, I am. Do as I say, not as I do.

Well, like all of us. I mean, it's interesting to sort of, I think, go deep into sort of see what you' triggers are. I mean, do you have a sense of what is that inside of you that drives yourself to build and put that kind of extra stress?

I think it's a fun thing. People get addicted to gambling because they put chips in the middle of a table and they don't know what's going to happen. And they get to see what happens and it's either good or bad. And they get the different feelings if it's good or bad. And there's a lot of psychology around the bad being more enjoyable than the good. Even with gamblers business, we'll punch you. It'll punch you, it'll beat you up, and then you'll win. And it is a roller coaster of amazingness. I love it. I'm addicted to it. I'm addicted to putting energy and decisions in and having uncertainty but the odds in my favor and then watching good things happen. That's a. That's an amazing feeling that unfortunately a lot of people never get to experience is, hey, I'm. I'm putting energy into this business. I'm putting decisions into this business. I'm putting capital into this business. And then there's uncertainty and then it can go really well. That's an amazing feeling. So I think what drives me is just the fun of that, like, and impacting the people's lives is amazing. The, you know, just the productivity. I feel really good when I've been productive. My best. I feel the best at the end of the day when I got a great day's work in and I worked out and I spent time with my kids and I watered a little bit of every garden. Not when I'm just got done with a seven day cruise. Like, that's a nightmare to me.

Cruises are nightmares, let's face it. Let me shift gears and talk about Nick Huber on the Internet. So just to say, you know, I followed you on Twitter for a little while and you're a little salty, a little spicy on the Internet, you know, and I meet you in person here and you are a direct human being, but I have a feeling you kind of push yourself to be a little provocative on the Internet. Is that right?

Absolutely. And you should too. Everybody should.

Okay, so talk more about that.

Everybody on the Internet is. When they're scrolling. Twitter is selfish. Just like the sales conversation. Everybody on the Internet's selfish. So when you're tweeting or writing or doing anything on the Internet, you have to add value to somebody, whether it's making them think hard about something, which is my goal with a lot of these provocative tweets. Teach them something. Make them better, or make them laugh and entertain them. Those are your options. If you're going to be nuanced and super balanced and boring. What are you delivering? What are you delivering to the, to your, to your followers? So I, I don't lie. I. I genuinely, even if it's a strong opinion that's very loosely held, I've changed my mind on a lot of things. I tweeted in 2019, 2021. But I prefer to take a strong stance and spark engaging conversation with people about things. And then also I like to pick on people who are emotionally weak.

Okay, like who?

I mean, people are getting all upset at me right now, right this very moment on X. Let me pull it up.

Okay.

In about an hour.

Okay.

I made a tweet, said I met a guy recently who took a $20,000 loan to do a bunch of orthopedic surgeries on a German shepherd that was born with messed up joints. He's. I know that he's a police officer in upstate New York who makes $65,000 a year. Like, stop, pause. That is totally irrational. Totally irrational and illogical and doesn't make any sense. It sets him back in a major way. It is a negative, a bad decision in Life. But yet 9 out of 10 comments agree with the guy that they would spend anything to heal a pet. I thoroughly disagree with. Maybe call me heartless, but I don't think that that's a decision that somebody who's starting out in their career should make.

So you're a stand for rational decisions in general, but on Twitter it sounds like you are interested in fomenting. I mean, just sort of like you want to say what you have to say and actually get people to respond. Get people to think and respond. Is that your tactic?

It's a little bit. Engagement's good because that means people are interested enough to talk about it. Yeah, I don't think nuance. If you want to be nuanced, don't open Twitter, don't tweet.

Right, exactly. But Nick, can you make the case for both entrepreneurs and then everybody listening why they should quote, unquote, build their brand? I know that's an important topic for.

You, so I think not everybody should because there's the downside too. There's the hate. There's the fact that every one of you look at the top 20 most followed people on the Internet and nine out of 10 comments on every single one of their posts is super hateful, super negative. Like, that's just the way people are. They're crabs in a bucket. They get jealous. They don't have anything good to say about LeBron James, Barack Obama, you know, Taylor Swift, anybody who's at the top, top, top, top of their game in the world. Nine out of ten people are haters. That's just the way it is. So if you don't, if you are going to get offended when somebody with a NFT profile picture comments something hateful on one of your tweets, then social media is not the place for you. But if you want a network that scales and being able to reach, you know, 26,000 people in one hour with your words and thoughts and that could be valuable to you. Like it's been massively valuable to me.

Yeah.

Then it's definitely for you.

Yeah. I think I was just looking at the time. We'll edit this out. I was just realizing, like, I want to make sure I'm respectful of both of our times and make sure that I'm sticking the landing here. Okay, we're going to not edit that out. I think that that is very powerful because that's the point, that you have really a broadcast channel for yourself and that you're able to then garner what you need by way of resources and what you once called easy mode.

Yeah. Being on social media and gaining a following. I'm 400,000 followers on X. I have 200,000 people on my email newsletter, 200,000 people on Instagram that has accelerated my career by 30 years or 40 years. Because I found investors, I found partners, I found customers, I found friends to make my life better. So the positives have drastically outweighed the negatives for me in my life.

I love that. Nick, just a few more questions. Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome or severe self doubt?

Every single day. I don't think there's anybody who doesn't. If they say they don't, they're lying. Maybe there's somebody who's so narcissistic and so confident, man, I think people are gonna even know who I'm talking about right now. That has zero self doubt, no awareness of what people are thinking. I think that's pretty ridiculous. I think even, and even Rafael Nadal and Messi and LeBron and Michael Jordan before game seven, they are about to step out into the spotlight. They're about to have all the pressure on them to either win or lose. And millions of people watching, they're absolutely going to have that doubt creep in of, can I do it again? Can I make this happen? Am I good enough? When you're taking risks, when you're pushing yourself from an entrepreneurship perspective or career perspective, you're about to take a new job, you're about to buy a business, there's always doubts. There's always those, those. I think the, the cortisol levels go up in the evenings and that's when the doubts come in. For me, when I'm laying in bed, I'm trying to fall asleep and I'm like, oh my gosh, can I really do this? This could go wrong. That could go wrong. This could, this could turn into a nightmare. I think that's. If you don't have that, it's, it's.

Not healthy, then how do you deal with that?

Practice? There's no easy way. I think there's, there's strategies that I employ. Like, I don't try not to look at my phone for about an hour before I fall asleep. I don't open my work email or slack, you know, after about 7pm yeah. There's the nervous system. How to balance the nervous system is a skill. Like there's the, there's the main level of the nervous system where you're logical and you're calm. Then there's the roof where you're afraid, you're angry, and then there's the basement where you're depressed or withdrawn. And the bigger you can make your main level and the stronger you can be emotionally and the healthier your nervous system is, the better you can handle this business stress. So I think, yeah, if you have some mental things going on, it makes it really hard.

Totally. I think that actually what you said earlier around, sort of like we talked about progressive overload of stress. I think the more you kind of, you have the imposter syndrome and then you're able to counter it with, you know, more realistic thoughts and then also solve challenges, improve to yourself every day that you can solve challenges, it's like proven to your nervous system that you could take it.

And it's also, I'm. I'm coming from a unique area in that I've never had a big loss. It's easy for me to say, hey, just handle the stress. Just go to bed when I've never went bankrupt. I've never had a business go up in flames. I've never made a big investment and lost a ton of money. So, yeah, coming back from those things, it'd be much, much harder. I can only imagine.

Yeah. Nick, what do you wish you had known earlier on your journey, man?

It's all right here. This. It sounds really corny. Like, it's. I wrote this book. I wrote the Sweaty startup for like what I wish I had in my hands when I was just shifted gears and that ambition kicked in and I wanted to make more money. I wanted to, you know, get better at the skills that make me more valuable in the workplace.

So give us one example.

Oh, one tactical thing. Yeah. It's the comfort in uncomfortable situations. It's the decision making framework. It's surrounding yourself with the right people. It's sales skills. All those things that I've learned through hard knocks and experiences and making mistakes. And if I'd have learned that stuff faster and earlier, it would have only made things easier for sure. But I also think businesses, like, they have this saying in track and field. I ran track and I was a 400 runner. And they're like, oh, the 400 sucks. And I'm like, well, what if you get good? It doesn't suck when you get good. And this senior on the team goes, oh, no, it always sucks. You just get faster.

That's great. I love it.

So I think business is always a challenge. You just make more money.

That's great. And last question. What advice do you have for other founders as they embark on their journeys to grow into leaders?

I would say try your best to build that emotional resilience and that really strong nervous system. Try your best to make decisions without using your emotion. Try your best to stop trying to change people and change the world and accept the way it is. And play the game. Don't hate the game. Play the game. Play the game the way it is. Don't try to change the rules. So I think trying to find that the important stuff to work on is really hard. Get better and better at making those decisions. And also don't try to do it all right now. Don't try to do it all fast. It's easy to listen to some of the high performing people that you have on your show and think, man, I just want to be there. I want to do that. I deserve that. When you don't realize that I spent the first five years of my career lugging boxes up and down spiral staircases and sweating and having mental breakdowns on the side of the street in Boston and getting nowhere. Business is so much about momentum and the people who want it all right now are pretty much destined to fail. Unfortunately, you have to have the resilience to keep at it for a long time.

I love it. So important. The book is called Sweaty Startup. Everybody should also follow Nick on Twitter. You can hear a spicy take on things. And thanks so much for talking to me today, Nick. It was really great to have you.

Thanks for having me. Alyssa. I think the we had a couple hiccups during the scheduling and you were super, super graceful. So thank you. You're welcome.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grown Up. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website. Alyssacone.