How Nick Huber Built a $100M+ Empire with "Unsexy" Businesses

In entrepreneurship, in life, you get to choose your competition. The good thing about business is that it's not an Olympic gymnastics routine where you get extra points for the degree of difficulty. And we were doing storage for students. We knew where these students walked. We knew where they lived. We knew, we knew where they went to class. So I wrote an ad. If you're just listening, need storage? storagesquad.com, $29.99 per box all summer. I would hire students to go in their dorms and slide a flyer under every single door in a dorm. We didn't spend any money, so we had some cash aside. We're like, okay, let's get into a better business. Where are the dumb people making money? I don't want to go compete with a Stanford computer scientist. What business can I get into where dumb people win? Because if dumb people are winning, I can probably win. And so self-storage was a pretty easy choice. We had to convince the bankers that our business plan was going to work. We had to convince the investors that our business plan was going to work. I met with 10 banks. 9 of them told me that it wasn't going to work. Nobody's ever going to give you permission. You have to give yourself permission. If you're an entrepreneur, literally every single aspect of your life is sales.

Hey, I'm Justin Gordon and welcome to Just Go Grind. On today's episode, we have Nick Huber, who is an entrepreneur and investor and the author of the new book, The Sweaty Startup: How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things. Nick should know, Nick has done it. He has a real estate portfolio of more than $100 million and his businesses are generating more than $30 million a year of revenue, which is why Ro is the perfect sponsor for this episode. If you've ever ran a business, you know how painful an experience banking can be. But Ro makes it easy. They have a single pane of glass you can use to run and scale your business from day one. That's bank accounts, corporate cards, expense management, and much, much more. Ro is trusted by thousands of companies ranging from 2-person YC companies to brands like Perplexity, Cal.com, Splitwise, and more. So just like how Nick Huber has his companies doing tens of millions in revenue, those are types of companies that Ro would work with. Also ones much, much earlier in the process. The big thing though with Ro, Every customer has a person at Row that's 24/7 customer support, phone, text, email. They will be with you at every critical milestone in your startup's journey. To learn more about why startups choose Row, visit row.co today. That's R-H-O dot co today. Row has been a great partner of the show. They are very much so worth checking out. So head on over to row.co. Let's get to it. Nick, welcome to the show.

Justin, thanks for having me.

There is so much to discuss with what you've built over the last decade. Plus, you have companies now doing like $30 million in revenue annually, $100 million plus portfolio of stuff, self-storage, and like way more than that that we're gonna get into. For people who don't already know, like, where did this all get started? And I want to go through this whole journey and also talk about some ideas to get started today. But where did this all get started for you?

Yeah, man, I was a country kid from southern Indiana, a little town called Tell City. I got put on a lawnmower when I was 13 years old to take over some commercial properties. Learned real quick that business is very hard, but the first paycheck came and I was addicted ever since. Went to college at Cornell, ran track and field, met my wife, started a company called Storage Squad, which does pickup and delivery storage for students. We grew that into 12 states, 25 major colleges. It was a hard business, man. Box trucks driving around towns picking up boxes. We got up to a little over $2 million a year of revenue at our peak. We sold the business for a modest 7-figure exit in late 2020. Actually, very first couple weeks of 2021, we closed on that deal. So, yeah, man. Now, I'm Doing several other things. I own controlling interest in somewhere.com. Bolt Storage is our self-storage business that we've kind of built that first building. We can talk about that a little bit if you want to. But yeah, man, I think I'm just an opportunist. I love boring, old-fashioned businesses. And I think people get the wrong idea on entrepreneurship all the time. So, kind of, that's where I come from.

Have you always had that perspective though of these type of businesses? They're phenomenal businesses. And most people who are wealthy in the US especially have these businesses. Have you just always had that perspective? Did you ever get tempted by like tech world back in the day? Like, tell me more about that.

So, luckily, I stumbled upon entrepreneurship from an angle where I wasn't addicted to studying and reading about entrepreneurship. If I think— I think if I would have gotten sucked into the media version of entrepreneurship, you know, the big idea, raise money, go to California. If I would have gotten sucked into that, I don't even know if I would have gotten excited about Storage Squad in the early days because it wasn't scalable. It was hard. I was sweating. But 3 weeks after starting Storage Squad, we had $3,000 cash sitting on the bed of our dorm room. So, you know, we were just energized and excited about that.

Which is more than many startups will ever get to in revenue, which is, which is pretty wild to think about what you've done with that. I want to dive into that story a little bit more because I know there's a lot to that, obviously. Just take me through your mindset at the time when you have even like your, your track and field like teammates back in the day being like, yeah, I don't think this is gonna work? Like, what, where was your mind at that point in time? Did you always have this kind of like, not fuck you attitude, but almost like, I'm just gonna do it anyways. Like, take me through that in the early days.

I think I got, I got the difference.

I don't know.

I compare it to, I just got a puppy, right? And a ball rolls down a hallway and a puppy wants nothing more than to go get that ball. An old dog is laying on the couch and a ball rolls through the living room and, you know, might get up and might sniff it, but definitely not gonna like jump up and attack it, right? I just had that energy and drive to go make money, man. I got excited about the fact, like, get off my couch, make $50 an hour for my time. I got excited by that. Most people scoff at it, especially if they think about, you know, billion-dollar startups. So I don't know, man. I just got excited and got after it a little bit.

Let's talk about growing that business. How'd you get your first customers? Because there's some scrappy ways you went about this.

You want me to share my screen here? I can pull up a picture for you. Basically, let me see if I can find it. This is my marketing plan, my entire marketing plan that took us to $2 million a year of revenue.

Yes.

This is my wife. This was back when she was my girlfriend. This is Boston. This is on the streets. I mean, we were doing storage for students. We knew where these students walked. We knew where they lived. We knew where they went to class. So I wrote an ad. If you're just listening, need storage? StorageSquad.com, $29.99 per box all summer. I personally wrote this ad myself over 5,000 times. Oh my God! And look, like there's an 8:40 class in the morning in Ithaca. That's me on the left. I bought a box truck. On the right, that's a cargo van. $1,500. We used student loan money to buy this. This is the one that my college track athletes made fun of when we were in that locker room. But man, we stored a lot of boxes, dude. This is a warehouse, 70,000 square feet, filled it up with boxes. So yeah, we got scrappy, man. We did the things that did not scale, sidewalk chalk being one of them.

What were some of the growth levers from that? Because obviously that worked tremendously well to get you to even like a couple million revenue. Anything else as you got bigger and bigger that You obviously expanded to more schools. Same strategy or a different playbook at the time?

We, um, flyers under doors. Uh, we knew where they lived, we knew what rooms they were in. Like, I would hire students to go in their dorms and slide a flyer under every single door in a dorm. Um, we didn't run Google Ads or Snap— actually, our first paid ad was actually on Snapchat in 2017, but we were already over $2 million of revenue. So yeah, man, like Scraping away.

6 years in, $2 million in revenue already through basically chalk and flyers, which is phenomenal. It doesn't have to be complicated. With that as well, at what point did you think more about the kind of self-storage angle of this? I know obviously it was like 10 years in, you said 2021, when you ended up exiting this, but at what point in time was it you thinking through, okay, well, we don't want to be necessarily just in this part of the business? Forever.

That was exactly my thought process. Justin was like, this is a hard business, man. My— we had 200 part-time employees, 6 full-time employees. Every April through May was hell, and August and September was hell because like all of our students moved at the same time in all these cities. I couldn't be everywhere at once, so we basically didn't sleep. We abused our bodies. We had a lot of very stressful situations. And by about 2015, we had $500,000 in the bank. from operating this company. We were extremely frugal to the point of like rationing our Keystone Lights on Saturday nights and shopping at Aldi and never getting guacamole at Chipotle. It's like we didn't spend any money, so we had some cash aside. We're like, okay, let's get into a better business. Where are the dumb people making money? Like, I don't want to go compete with a Stanford computer scientist. I don't want to compete with people anywhere in the world on the computer. What business can I get into where dumb people win? Because if dumb people are winning, I can probably win. And so self-storage was a pretty easy choice.

Of course, the logical next step is self-storage. At the time, did you think of other— what were other ideas you were thinking about at the time, like pursuing? Obviously, you went this route and it worked out really well, but I'm just curious.

Yeah, I think— I mean, I'm a I'm a tinkerer. I'm an opportunist. So, we had a lot of harebrained schemes of businesses. We were going to build websites. We were going to start a house painting company. Self-storage was the one that we ended up choosing. Turns out real estate is the most capital-intensive business in the world though, and we ran out of money really fast.

Tell me more.

Built that first building. I mean, I raised $500K from— man, it was brutal. Spent a year and a half going from kitchen table to kitchen table to people who actually didn't have money. So, I was kind of at the wrong kitchen tables. Scrapped together $500K to invest in that first deal. Built the building for $2.9 million. Luckily, today, it's worth over $10 million. I've bought out my partners. It's been, you know, life-changing wealth for me and several people who are involved in the deal. So, but yeah, we ran out of money to buy the second one and the third one and the fourth one. We kind of used some refinance proceeds to buy 3-property portfolio in Erie at public auction for $600K. We bought a little $500,000, $415,000 property in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just kind of scraped it together. Bought a little deal in Shippenville, Pennsylvania with a little bit of outside capital. And then we just, you know, finally started meeting people with some cash and raising money and growing the business. But today we've raised about $40 million. We've bought $100 million worth of storage and, you know, got 55 employees and 2 million square feet.

Crazy, crazy, crazy. I can't just gloss over that $500K though, because I know it's the stuff I'm most interested in. Tell me more of like that pitch at the time when you had not raised anything money yet. You obviously are trying to raise from people at the time who weren't— didn't really have much money, as you mentioned. And you're pretty— not unproven, but unproven, I guess, in this way. Yes.

But like, yeah, very, very unproven in real estate. I'd never raised capital before. Um, and, and I think people— there's, there's a difference between venture capital and real estate private equity even on a very small— we were on a very, very small scale. But we raised money to build a real estate asset where we got some of the upside, right? That's how it works. So, we had to convince the bankers that our business plan was going to work. We had to convince the investors that our business plan was going to work. And I met with 100 people and 94 of them told me that it wasn't going to work. I met with 10 banks, 9 of them told me that it wasn't going to work. So, I think a theme, a theme throughout my entire career is that I've never really had the pedigree or the permission or the resume to do any of the things that I've done and that's a pretty important concept in the Sweaty Startup book as well. It's like nobody's ever going to give you permission. You have to give yourself permission.

Did you know, like you said, 100 investors, you know, it's a lot of pitching. At what point were you At all thinking like, okay, this is not going to work. We could maybe do something different. Maybe go back to that painting business or something because people get rejection and they're like, well, some people keep going. Some people don't. Am I crazy? Is this a bad idea? Like, take me through the mindset.

Yeah, we used the first hundred grand. We raised about 100k and we put in 150k to close on the land. We bought the land, so there was no turning back. Like the project had to get done. We bought. We brought in the last investor. I brought in the last investor who was actually the realtor who sold me the piece of land. He put in the $125K that allowed us to like pay the last bit of the earthwork contract before the bank draws started kicking in on the loan, like in the middle of the project. So, it was very uncomfortable, very uncertain. And I'm really glad that guy invested that last $125K or we would have had to find somewhere to borrow. I'm sure we would have figured it out, but it would have gotten stressful because we were out of cash. Like, we had less than $100 grand to our name. And we were trying to do a big-ass development, which is not easy.

Take me through more with that. To that point, you keep mentioning we. Obviously, your partner in this, uh, in your business as well with the self-storage, uh, tell me more of like meeting him, how you guys decided to work together. Obviously, you've been very successful with him so far. Tell me more about him.

Yep. Um, I think a business partnership is very, very important. Partnerships go wrong in 2 areas. Either they don't have your best interests in mind, they're going to literally be a morally unsound individual, I think that's fairly rare if you pick people right. The more likely scenario is that they just— there's an imbalance of the value added to the business. That's the second. Really, those 2 reasons are the only reasons why partnerships fail. I didn't think about any of that. Him and I were co-captains on the team. We were roommates in an apartment. I needed the basement of his place to store a bunch of stuff in Storage Squad. So, I went in and shook hands with him. We went 50/50 on the business. Not a lot of thought, not a lot of consideration, but it turned out to be an amazing decision because he just happened to be a badass.

We love that. We love it working out like that. So you sold in 2021, and then I think you said in the book or the notes I have from your book, which we'll talk about in a bit too, I think it was like 2 years before that you were already removed from kind of like the services side of things and already in self-storage. What was that conversation like? Was it just pretty clear between you and your partner? You're like, all right, I'm going to go do the self-storage side of it. Tell me more of that.

Yeah, we, we realized really quick that Storage Squad at scale was not— never going to make us millions of dollars, and it was always going to be a hard business. It was always going to be risky. You saw the picture of the warehouse, like, that is chaos. So we had to figure out what are we going to do, um, and it just happened to work out that I was the guy who was tasked with raising the money and convincing the banker to loan us the money. While Dan was tasked with, you know, running our main business and putting cash in our accounts. So, it was a great partnership in those early days. And Dan co-signed on the loan, was very involved as well with raising money. So, yeah, it's a— and then during the busy season, of course, I was still in the warehouses. So, it was, you know, a division of power but still working on the same things.

I've worked at an e-commerce company before, Clark Toys, for a couple of years and in the warehouse in winter during busy season, done all of that, like the craziness of that and seeing and then you go back to your computer job and you do the marketing and stuff, but then you go back for packing boxes and you're like, oh, this is the business. Like, all these sales we do, like, there's always pressure between the two of them where it's like, you do a big sale, can we deliver on it in the warehouse? Like, it's just chaos constantly, which is fun, but also—

Many times in Storage Squad, we got more customers than we could handle and we had to find a way to get extra warehouse space or, you know, find more people. It's madness. The seasonal businesses are tough.

I know you said from that, doing the self-storage route, the raising funds, obviously the first $500K tricky, but it was always kind of running out of money and trying to do more of these deals. Take me through the evolution of being like you, getting better at fundraising. What's helpful in terms of the fundraising piece of that in terms of these types of deals? What helps?

Yeah, I mean, I had to fine-tune my pitch for sure. And I talk a lot about sales in the book. And if you're an entrepreneur, Literally every single aspect of your life is sales. Everything you're doing all the time is sales. So I had to convince people that what I was going to do was going to work, which was not always easy. I had to convince people that they should trust me. I had to convince people that I was looking out for the right potential downfalls and risks in a deal. So yeah, but once you have a deal that's went well, and this deal went very well, by 2019 we had Doors open in 2017. By 2019, it was worth $5 million. We cash-out refi'd over almost $2 million tax-free for us and our investors. Once you have that on your resume, things get way, way, way easier. Way easier.

Yeah. Able to leverage that for the next deal and the next deal and the next deal. Did you at that time— so even though that first deal went really well, you're going to raise more of these. Was the thought already at that time Yeah, we're going to build this kind of self-storage empire. We're just going to keep doing the same thing forever. Or where did you see this going at that time?

When that refinance happened and my partner and I got 7 figures wired into our bank accounts tax-free, we decided right then— and we looked at our businesses and we're like, hey, this business over here, Storage Squad, of course it's been important. It taught us a ton about business. We learned everything that we know today. And it also gave us the cash to fuel this first self-storage deal. But Storage Squad is 80% of our headache, 90% of our stress. And this one deal just generated like 3 years worth of profit. And it's been 10% of our stress or 20% of our stress. And we realized like, let's do more of this.

This is great. We like that.

Yeah. So we just— we decided in 2019 that we were going to sell our company. We got close in 2019 and then COVID hit and we had a, we had a good year with the storage, with this pickup and delivery storage business at that time. And then we sold it kind of at the very beginning of 2021.

So how was that process in terms of selling that at that time? Say anything more of that?

We didn't use a broker. We approached our competitors, found one that was interested in acquiring us. And yeah, man, they wanted to know They wanted to know a lot, and it took 4 or 5 months, and it's always a negotiation down to the very end. They needed a key employee of ours to stay on, so the deal was for $1.75 million, and we signed 10%, you know, we kind of gave 10% of that sale price to the main guy to stay on for at least, you know, a year at the new business.

And you've done obviously way more deals since then. So in that deal, in hindsight looking back, Anything would have changed? That was a few years ago already. Have you done more since?

No, it's, it's been a great deal. I think Storage Squad is still— it's bigger. They've done a good job with it. I think they're making really good money, and I don't have to sleep in warehouses anymore. So it's a win-win all the way around.

We love that. So it's probably this similar time frame, maybe a year or two later. When did you get more on Twitter? I'm trying to think of the timing of that because I started seeing you and see your tweets and everything kind of blow up, which led to We'll get into a lot more opportunities for you. What even got you into doing that more?

2020, early 2020, I started tweeting.

Okay.

And being pretty open about my storage deals, meeting people, meeting investors, meeting private equity groups, meeting bigger limited partners. And I kind of blew up on Twitter in 2021.

Was that what got you to do that? Just in terms of like getting more, taking Twitter more seriously? And then what did that look like in operation? Like, you're just like, oh, I just tweet more shit out. Like, what does that look like?

I was— so my strategy on Twitter was like, just be radically open about how I do business and how our business works. I'm gonna tweet pictures of my profit and loss statements of my self-storage facilities. I'm gonna tweet, you know, pictures of my warehouses that we're running, you know, our student storage business out of. I'm gonna talk about— I'm gonna share everything, everything with no regard for competition or anything like that. And at first, my partner was like, Nick, like, what's the— what is the endgame here? Um, so then we started like seeing a lot more opportunities, seeing more deals, making some hires, and raising some capital through the network that we met online. And, and he was kind of happy, happy then.

He's like, wait, wait, this is actually working, Nick. This is genius. Let's do more of that. How do we double down on that? What did that lead to? Like you said, 2020 you started, 2021 you blew up, which was the same time you sold the business as well. What was the impact? Like, give me some numbers if you have it, and just in terms of like Twitter impact on your business.

Yeah, we very shortly after, by early 2022, we had 750 investors in our database who wanted to— accredited investors who wanted to invest in self-storage. We had raised $20 million to buy $50 million worth of storage in 2021. Our team was growing fast. We went from 8 employees to 25 employees by the end of 2021. Yeah, man, it changed, it changed everything. Started hiring internationally. I got involved in somewhere.com in 2021. That was a life-changing moment because I now have, you know, Almost 350 employees and 25 Americans; the rest are international. So it's just changed everything about the way I do business.

To that point, because I've seen it like from afar, I've seen it and I've listened to podcasts before, and I've seen like how this has progressed the last few years, which is pretty remarkable. How have you like decided in terms of your focus and how you leverage the Twitter audience, but also just in terms of thinking about the opportunities that are coming to you, which ones you take advantage of, like how you use this audience you have? Because you've Done a great job obviously with it, but I'm just curious on your mindset around, okay, we have all these accredited investors, how many deals can we do? Which deals should we do? Like, what else can we do? Like, just take me through your mindset even at that time as you're blowing up.

Yeah, I think the— I've always been a business operator at heart, not really a media person. So I don't have a super structured approach. Obviously I have a media team, I have a head of content, I have a video editor, I have 2 admins, I have an audio, you know, person, a graphic designer. But, you know, nowadays, a couple years ago, I decided, like, I had— I was at a crossroads. Like, do I, do I invest more heavily in my business and spend a lot of time inside my companies, or do I try to build a media empire? It's hard to do both.

Yeah.

And I kind of have still focused on media. It's a passion of mine. The book was a project that was taxing. We can talk about that process. Oh, we will. But for the most part, like, I wanna build companies and I started a lot of companies. I took a lot of opportunities. 3 of them are really big businesses now. Like, you know, 2 of them are over $1 million a month of revenue. One is knocking on the door. RE Cost Seg is that 3rd business that's really growing fast. So, it's a power law, right? Start 11 companies, go after 11 opportunities, 3 of them get really large. And then, you know, I've shut 3 of them down and the rest in the middle are, you know, kind of have some promise and looking forward to the future. But almost all my time and energy goes into writing, Somewhere, Bolt Storage, and RE Cost Seg.

How's that time split then? Or how do you even think about that? Because it's all leverage.

Yeah, wherever the lowest hanging fruit is inside of each company, I just make sure the management teams are focused on those. Like, hey, from a sales perspective, what's one thing that we can do to increase our conversion rate from 25 to 30%? Let's do it. What's one thing that we can do to get more leads? Let's do it. What's one thing that we can do to be more efficient from a recruiting perspective or from an acquisitions perspective? Let's do it. So I'm very in tune with my key departments inside of each company about what needs to be done. Like, what is, what is the primary focus? What's the lowest hanging fruit for us to That makes sense.

So with, you said 2021, you started working with Somewhere. It wasn't called that at the time, but somewhere.com is now what it's called. There's a huge story we're going to get into with that as well. But even starting to hire kind of offshore talent, what got you to do that first? And what were the results from that in terms of how you then thought about, okay, wait, this amazing talent's available for like 70%, 80% less. I need to like go all in on this. Take me through more of that thought process too.

Yeah, so I think, Yeah, it's been a 4-year journey with international talent for me. At first, it was hiring some Filipinos to answer calls. Then, it was hiring project managers, operations managers in Latin America who could run branches of my companies. Then, it's hiring software engineers in Latin America or a financial analyst in Egypt or a head of, you know, chief of staff in Sri Lanka or building a full sales team in South Africa or heading, hiring head of revenue operations, you know, head of sales, COO-level talent in South Africa. So, it's evolved to, you know, crazy heights for sure. But 2021, I had never hired internationally before. Marshall Haas, who owned supportshepherd.com at the time, it's now somewhere.com, Approached me and said, "Hey Nick, like let me find you a couple international employees." I he put me on interviews with three Filipinos. I hired all three of them because I could get them for eight hundred dollars a month. It blew my mind. I was used to hiring Americans who were pain in the ass for fifty grand a year or more. So yeah, it changed everything for me.

It is pretty remarkable that the pushback you've gotten in tweets. Obviously, you're being like. There's a reason those tweets are getting pushed back around hiring like remote workers and all like offshore talent, international talent. But yeah, I have like a phenomenal writer on my team who's from Latin America, in Latin America, video editor in the Philippines. Like, yeah, it's like they're incredible. It's pretty insane that what you can do in terms of your business. I know that you had, so I think you took a small stake. Take me through that process of you ended up taking a piece of somewhere.com. Take me through that and into then obviously eventually acquiring more than half the business.

I think when you're like, it's a— there's 2 advantages you have early on as a founder. Like, if we back up, the competitors, the in-place businesses have almost every advantage. They have the brand, they have the money, they have the network, they have the employees, they have the marketing, they have everything in place to run a big successful company. You as a startup have almost no advantage. You have 2. Number one is you can move faster than them. You can like move very, very quickly. You can make a decision in the morning and that can be interact— like it can be in place inside your company before launch. Big companies can't do that.

Yeah.

And another thing that many, many companies in America don't quite do yet is they grow with international talent for 70% lower cost. So those are 2 things that you can do to start to grow your company. Those are the 2 things that I do. But I made those first couple hires and I was like, damn, this is a really good business. Marshall said, okay, why don't you start talking about it to your friends and talk about it on Twitter and I'll do a revenue share with you. You know, a couple months later I was making $20,000, $30,000 a month talking about Somewhere on X. And a year after that, the company had 5x'd in size doing a quarter million dollars a month of revenue.

Insane.

And I was like, dude, I wanna own some of this thing. And so, I bought in, 15% ownership stake, wish it was a lot more. And then, yeah, you know, a year later it was $600K a month of revenue. Year after that it was $1 million a month of revenue. So, yeah, crazy journey.

Tell me more of that just in terms of thinking through the rev share versus the kind of owning equity in the business, your thoughts on that and why 15%? Why wasn't it 10%? Why wasn't it 20%? Why wasn't it 5%?

Well, Marshall wanted to do 5% and Marshall wanted to do 5 and I wanted to do 30, and it was a negotiation, obviously. So, yeah, but, but I, I was at least smart enough to know that, hey, I'm not, I'm not going to talk about this business anymore unless I own part of it. So, I'm either going to go start my own company or I'm going to get involved in this one. So, it was, it was a win-win for me and Marshall. It's been a life-changing deal.

Let's talk about the deal. We'll just get right to it. You actually buying somewhere. Anything more, more of that? Because you had to basically outbox Andrew Wilkinson, I think it was, for this, for this deal. Like, how did you end up getting the deal?

Yeah. And look, Andrew Wilkinson didn't have— he didn't have a signed offer on the table. He, you know, it was a— it was vocalized as something that he wanted to explore. But Marshall calls me in the fall of 2023 and says, hey, like, I got an offer to sell 51% of Somewhere for $47 million. And I'm like, holy shit. But it makes sense. Like, I'm looking at the numbers like, that, that makes sense. Um, and he goes, do you want to sell half your shares? I owned 15%. Do you want to sell half your shares? Um, at that number, I'm doing some math. I'm like, holy shit, that's more than $3 million. I, uh, that's— I'm— that's not generational wealth. It's not like I never have to work again, but that's life-changing money from a kid from small town southern Indiana.

Absolutely.

But then, I kind of talked him over the next couple of weeks into selling the business to me instead of Andrew Wilkinson. And over the next couple of months, the business grew. I mean, when I told him that, his first question was like, how, Nick? I like you and all, but where are you going to come up with this money? How are you going to put the deal together? He had a lot of questions and I didn't know the answer, but I figured it out very quickly. We ended up striking a deal and what I was trying to solve for was, hey, how can I, you know, okay, I actually— Sean Pari had come in as an investor, so I'd been diluted down to 12.75%. How can I do a deal where I get a lot of— get enough upside to make it worth it for me to raise a bunch of money, put this whole deal together? And I realized very quick in the private equity world The money calls the shots, especially when it comes to operating companies. Like with real estate, there's a building there, there's a physical asset. This business, we had 3 Americans and a bunch of people in the Philippines and Latin America and South Africa. So it's a risky deal. It's a new business. Of course, it's growing fast, it's got a lot of tailwinds, but it's a new business. And, uh, so a lot of the investors said, hey, I'll give you some money, but like I'm getting the majority of this upside, rightfully so. So I realized that I could raise a big chunk of money, but after I get all these investors paid back, I can't really justify more than about 20% of the upside from there for me, for Nick. So if I go buy, you know, 57% of the company and raise all the money, it's kind of my thought process. 57% times 0.2, I get an 11— I get an additional 11.4% equity. if I do that deal and I get every— and it's a huge win. So, 11.4% plus 12.75%, I own 22%, 23% of the company. Is it worth putting my name on the line raising $40 million to do that? No, it's not for me. That just wasn't worth it. So, I had to think of a different way to structure it. So, we did 39% of the business with a private equity tranche where I raised $20.3 million from From 39 people, average check size a little over half a million bucks. Marshall got that cash at closing, and then the, um, an additional 18% of the business I bought from Marshall in the form of a seller note directly to me outside of the private equity tranche. So if I get that seller note paid back and I get all my investors paid back, I'll own about 39% of the company. It's all said and done.

I don't know if you've talked much about that deal since in terms of how everything is going. So I am curious because that was a year or two ago already. Like, what's the deal? What's happening? We're somewhere today.

Yeah. So March, we increased revenue 40% year over year in March. Blended, it's more like 30% across the board. We're obviously investing pretty heavily in the growth. So It's going really well. I'm excited.

At what point in this journey then does RE Cost Seg? Because I've heard about that on, I think Eric Jorgensen's podcast with Mitchell Baldridge, probably an episode with David Senter as well, because those are the best episodes I feel like. But I know that business and they talked a little bit about you being involved as well. How did that come about? Why that business is doing very well? Like take me through more of that.

Yeah. So right when I was being an affiliate partner for somewhere in the early days, meaning I was talking about it and getting a revenue share. I was doing the same for a cost seg firm, and the business was really growing fast, exploding actually. And I went to him right after I went to Marshall and said, look, man, like, I need to own— I think I told him I wanted to own 35% of the business or I'm going to walk and I'm going to start my own cost seg firm. Like, no harm, no foul. Like, you've built an amazing business. But like, I'm sorry, like, I have to have equity, or—

Yeah.

Or like, I'll walk away and look, your business is in a much better place because of you. It's been an amazing partnership. We can still be friends, um, and I'll walk away and start my own company. He said no. He's like, Nick, there's no way I'm gonna do that. There's no way I'm gonna give you that equity. And within a few hours of that conversation, we had an operating agreement in place between me, Mitchell Baldridge, and my business partner Dan Hagberg is involved in that business as well. To start RE Cost Seg. That was June of 2022, and it has been a wild ride in that business ever since. And I'm really glad that it worked out the way it did.

A wild ride. How so?

My equity in RE Cost Seg is worth much more than my equity in somewhere.com, to put it in perspective.

You love to see it. What is it about that business? What was— just tell me more about the opportunity and why that business is crushing so much.

It's a tax service business that not just anybody can do. Like Mitchell was the expert, right? He was the guy who knew how to put together the cost segregation studies on a piece of real estate. And our deliverable is a PDF. So, we can use people all over the world to build these PDFs. We can use engineers, highly qualified engineers to build these. And all of our competitors were doing in-person site visits. Meaning we're going to fly somebody who makes $150 grand a year to a building. They're going to stay in a hotel. They're going to walk your property with cameras, and they're going to get the engineers what they need to do the study. We do a virtual site visit on a FaceTime call and we record it. And then we have everything we need to do the studies without putting somebody on an airplane. So we can, you know, we can do it. We can do the work for less money.

So basically finding the right expert, lowering the cost of actually performing this. How is this growing in terms of, are you just leveraging your audience and Mitchell's audience or how are you growing this business?

We actually haven't been able, we haven't been able to leverage our— so Twitter changed, everything about Twitter changed.

It did change, yeah.

And I can't send business to any of my companies anymore at scale. Just the fact of it. Luckily our ads are working okay. Word of mouth is taking place. We have some partnerships with some CPA firms, so it's kind of got a mind of its own at this point. But our advantage there is that we hire all over the world. Like, our competitors, they're hiring engineers in New York City for $150 grand a year. We're hiring engineers in Bogotá for $40 grand a year. It's a massive, massive advantage. We pass that savings right on to the customer.

Which, that's how you get a business that grows very quickly. The value is clearly there. The Twitter change, tell me more of that in terms of the, obviously you still have a big audience, so you still get views, but it's maybe not the multimillion views on every post type of thing.

Now, if anybody listening to this wants to grow on Twitter, I'll just say good luck because it's Almost impossible now. There was a time when I could write a thread in 2021 and I would add 3,000 to 5,000 followers if a thread went off, and they went off all the time. That's— it's now much more about news, it's much more about politics, it's much more about sports. They don't push the business stuff at all. So yeah, it's, uh, it's way harder to get followers and to get reach. And even at scale, I'm on almost 400,000 followers. I add 50 to 60 followers a day.

It's a much different environment.

Yeah. Yep.

Okay. With all the opportunities, so Ari Kasse crushing, Somewhere obviously crushing, Bolt Storage is— so those are your big 3. There's other ones you have involved as well, but I want to make sure we mention the book and how this fit in because there's so much that you have going on. When did you decide to write a book in the first place, Nick?

So I sold my book to HarperCollins and got my advance. 2 weeks before Marshall called me about this Somewhere deal. Amazing. I committed to writing— I committed to writing a book. I committed to, uh, you know, telling all my stories and putting my entire business philosophy when it comes to sales, management, delegation, opportunity in order. And in a— like the book I wish I would have read before I started my first business, basically. I committed to doing that project a couple weeks before the Somewhere opportunity fell in my lap. That's just, it's such an, it's just such a, it has so many parallels to every area of life. It's like you're never ready. The timing is never right. Timing's never right to have kids. The timing's never right to start a business. There's always a bunch of reasons not to do something. I had just signed my book deal and that was a huge reason not to do the deal with Marshall because it was gonna take a ton of my time. But writing a book was, It's been an amazing journey, man. Like, the hardest part of writing— so most business books, you're gonna get— you're gonna be lucky if you walk away with 3 or 4 good ideas that can— that you can put in your, in your, in your business. I wanted to get 3 or 4 good ideas across the reader per chapter. I wanted to tell a ton of stories. Like, I've, I've had, I've had a lot of experiences in the trenches of running these companies, a lot of stress, a lot of things that worked, a lot of things that didn't. But I've also talked to thousands of other entrepreneurs because I— my network has exploded over the last, you know, 5 years. So one of the hardest parts of writing the book was telling all their stories and either saying their name or finding a way to tell the story so that they weren't identifiable because they didn't want to be identifiable. But yeah, man, it's like there's some basics of running a company and operating and hiring and selling and Managing people and, you know, tell the stories to back it up. So I think it's gonna be a great book.

Why that time in terms of like deciding then that you wanted to write a book? Because you could, could have waited 5 more years, could wait 10 more years, you could have done it earlier. Like, why that timing?

I, I had been thinking about it for 3 years. Um, I wanted to do it back in 2021. I talked to a couple publishers. Um, first of all, publishers, like, yes, they want you to write a good book, and the win for them is a book that sells for a long time. But when they give a book deal, they only care if you can sell a book. So luckily I had 200,000 people on my email newsletter. I had my Twitter following. I had my podcast. Like, I can sell books. So I got— I had the book deal on the table, but they told me it was going to take 18 months. And I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. I can write really fast. Like, I can write 60,000 words in a weekend. Like, this is, this is a no-go for me. Like, I'm used to Writing a piece of content, putting it on Twitter, and getting feedback three minutes later. Yeah, I mean, thirty seconds later. I don't want to write something and get feedback eighteen months later. So I put it off. I put it off. I put it off. And finally, I realized like Nick, you have to do this. Like you, you're gonna start forgetting these stories, and your future self will be really glad that you wrote a book.

How long did it take to actually write the thing?

Well, I thought it was gonna be easy. So I put all my tweets, all my most popular tweets, my two hundred most popular tweets. They all had over a thousand likes. Put them on a spreadsheet and hired a ghostwriter. I was like, hey, write the book. He wrote a chapter. He was amazing. He wrote a chapter and I just realized, hey, the easy button's not going to work here, Nick. Like, this is your legacy. This is your book. You have to write this. So, I had a conversation with him like, man, I'm going to write this book. I'm really sorry I led you on here. Paid him what I owed him and moved on. Then, I spent 3 months writing the book and it was 90,000 words instead of 60. which my editor, you know, they wanted to— most business books do great if they're really digestible and really to the point. 220 words, 240 words. I wrote 320 words and the editor is like, first of all, Nick, like, it's too long. Second of all, this book sucks. Like, you can't write a book like you tweet. This doesn't make any sense. It's not cohesive. It doesn't tell a story. Rewrite this. And by the way, you got to go hire this other editor who knows the structure and how to like coach you along on writing a book. So it's July of 2024 and the book is due in September and I rewrote the book in July and August. So it was a pain in the ass, man. It was tough. There's highs where you write a chapter and you're like, holy shit, if I could have read something like this when I was an early entrepreneur, this would've changed everything for me. And then there's times where I am just like, who am I to write this book? Nobody's gonna wanna read this book. And I just had anxiety around, like, didn't have permission, right? So it was a— working on something for 18 months with no feedback is really, really tough.

Brutal.

None of your friends have time to read a book. Like, they're not gonna get—

Yeah. Especially when your friends, as you become an entrepreneur, are a lot of other entrepreneurs. Who are even more busy and have less time.

They're like, Nick, can you send me an audiobook?

Well, funny enough, I got a copy from your team and I actually Speechify— I just dropped the PDF in Speechify and I was like, hey, good, I can actually listen to this book. To your point, because I'm just going on a long walk, which was phenomenal. I am curious though, with your stuff you're building as well, obviously these businesses that are crushing, like you've made plenty of money with these. How— where does the email list The podcast, the book, the media side of it. How do you think about the time you spend on that? Because obviously that's the leverage you have. You knew that was going to be a big part of what you do spend time on. But like, you don't have to create more podcasts. You don't have to do much of the newsletter, but you have just how you think about those assets.

My media team is spending more time in my companies operationally than on my media. Like Colin is my head of media. He's an ex-Gary Vee guy. He's a one of the best growth marketers I know. He's spending a third of his time in Somewhere, a third of his time in RE Cost Seg, 10% of his time in Bolt Storage, and the last 20% managing, you know, the team at, at the media business. I think I'm at a crossroads of like, hey, am I going to build a media empire or am I going to build a business empire? And while I don't want to stop doing the media because I'm super passionate about it and I want to Reach as many people as possible with this message that I think is very important. I, I love building businesses, and it's way more lucrative to build businesses.

True, very true. I mean, just look at like always a good example. I think about founder of Mailchimp at one point in time. I think when the company, I don't know, it may have been when it sold, or maybe a little before then. It was like sold for billions of dollars. He had like a thousand Twitter followers.

People were like, "Wait, this is the guy who just sold this company?" And like, and then the guy who bought the guy who bought the Boston Celtics didn't have a Wikipedia page until the day he closed on the move.

Right. Yeah. Like Ben Chestnut from Mailchimp. And yeah, that, yeah, exactly.

There are some people, there are some people who are unbelievable at doing both, like Hormozi and Cody Sanchez and Gary Vee and Grant Cardone. And those folks can build a media empire while they're building massive companies. Um, I hope to maybe do that, but look, I'm, my message is, my message isn't that sexy. Like you gotta work really hard doing boring things for a long time.

You're telling me sweaty startups aren't sexy? That's crazy, Nick. What do you have on your media team? Like, I know Gary Vee, I went to a conference from his like a long time ago. And then eventually I was like, oh yeah, he has like 20 people on his individual team. And I was like, holy shit, that's insane. How do you think about that for yours? Because you have the size of your audience already. You could hire writers, you could do more. Like, what's your media team look like?

Yeah, I have a web developer who's almost full-time inside of my companies. I have a video audio editor, I have a graphic designer, I have another video editor, I have an executive assistant, and then I have kind of a sales assistant. So my team is— what's that, 6 people? My media team is 6 people. Overhead annually, $350K a year. And my media income does not cover that.

Right.

It's overhead for me to like grow my companies as well. So I, yeah, that's my media team and yeah.

Do you think other business owners should do the same or like how should they think about it? Is that not should or shouldn't? It's always, it's a, you know, case dependent, but in terms of other, obviously other founders are listening to this episode, like how should they think about that media side of it in terms of like maybe putting assets?

Well, I think there's 2 benefits. The one is the monetary benefit of being able to grow your companies. And you can do that with 1,000 followers if they're on LinkedIn or if they're in your niche. And I see a lot of people doing it. And then there's the skill you gain— your ability to speak, your ability to sell, your ability to get your messages out clear and concisely. Those things drastically improve over time the more media you do. So the more short-form video you do, the better speaker you're going to be. The more writing you do, the better writer you're going, you're going to be. And to run a company, you're either speaking or you're writing. There's nothing else that you're doing. You're not swinging a hammer. So it's made me a much better communicator, a much better leader when I can get my ideas across clearly in Slack, when I can pick up the phone and I can make a good case to an employee or a vendor or whoever that a certain decision should go a certain way. So I think there's Those side benefits are really important and kind of not measurable.

Yeah. So obviously you've leveled up your skills since being in business, but also doing the media piece of it with the Somewhere deal. You raised money for that. That was— was that your biggest deal then? Somewhere was your biggest?

Yeah, by far. By far our largest self-storage deal. We raised about $4 million. This one was— and I have a partner, but this one was just me and I raised $20 million.

Do you want to announce your TikTok bid or should we wait for that?

I don't like TikTok.

I don't use TikTok either, but I am curious when someone like you has an audience and reach and these skills to raise capital, it's like, where else do you apply that? Like, do you have other types of companies that you want to buy or how are you thinking through that now? You know, you've kind of already levered up a little bit. Like, how do you think about that?

Yeah, I think, right, there's different seasons of an entrepreneur's journey. There's seasons where frankly, I'm kind of bored. And my businesses are doing what they need to do, and I'm just sitting back and letting time do its thing. Especially in the real estate business, like well-managed real estate, the best thing that you can do is wait 10 years. Like time just helps everything in real estate. Then there's sprints inside of my businesses to capture opportunity and change things and get after it. Um, but then there are other times where you're on the lookout for a new opportunity. You're like, okay, maybe My time is best spent on something new, whether it's an acquisition. So right now, with the Somewhere deal, with RE Cost Seg blowing up, with Bolt Storage starting to grow and doing really well, I have a ton of exciting things to work on, on just those 3 companies. So I'm not super excited about going out and buying a new company, but I'm sure I'll do something like that in the next 10 years.

You know how that as soon as you say that, then you're gonna get this fucking massive deal that comes to you that's like perfect. You're like, Oh, I can't help it. The timing, it's just like, we gotta do it. But that's just how entrepreneurship works, I feel like.

It is. It is. You can't— you definitely can't time things.

Yeah. And I do want to get into for other people who are looking at starting businesses as well. So, this book is going to help people a lot with starting companies. Tell me the opportunities today you see as far as like sweaty startups that are interesting to you that you would pursue if you were starting over from scratch even today.

Yeah. So, the most visited page on my blog of all time is my list of 200+ business ideas.

Of course.

And it's not like AI startup or, you know, new app idea. Not— no marketplaces are on there. Very few web-based businesses. But if people wanna download the list, it's now like 400+ businesses. It's at sweatystartup.com/ideas. That's a good place to start just to get your head thinking a little differently that everything doesn't have to be on the internet. Geography is actually a really good moat, meaning looking at my town and looking at the opportunity in my town is actually a really good moat. So I think, you know, the book works you through how to analyze an opportunity with the 10-minute drill that we discussed and some of the other things. So yeah, I think just resetting and recalibrating the way you think about business and the way you walk around your actual town and the way you think about how businesses make money, that's one of the kind of most powerful concepts in the book.

You know, one thing that reminded me of, actually, I was in Austin, Texas for this newsletter marketing summit and met a woman who has a local newsletter for Austin. It's like, it's called Selling Austin. Cortana is her name. And she also is like a realtor part-time on the side. And she said she sold half her houses from the newsletter directly. And I'm like, that is so mind-blowing. If you do the numbers, you're like, how much is your commission? Okay, so you sold 3 of those off of a newsletter you do weekly. It takes you like 5 hours. Like, so combining like a sweaty startup almost with like the digital thing, like there's probably something there as well in terms of combining. That's just one example I saw, but I saw some of the ones you listed as well. I'm like, yeah, if you can manage both, like you're willing to do the work a sweaty startup takes in terms of being in person and then combine that with digital marketing skills or other things, it's a pretty interesting combo.

Yeah. I like to look at it as you get to choose in a sweaty startup, you get to choose your competition in entrepreneurship, in life, you get to choose your competition. And the lucky thing, the good thing about business is that it's not an Olympic gymnastics routine where you get extra points for the degree of difficulty. You don't get extra money if it's like a David Goggins workout and you're just killing yourself for 30 days or something. You can literally get— you can get paid. Warren Buffett says you can get paid really well for jumping over 1-foot bars over and over and over again. So you get to choose your competition. I had a book, a part of my book where the editor, that the editor wanted to remove where I say, okay, do you want to compete against LeBron James in basketball or do you want to compete against a 5th grade girl in basketball? Which one of those 2 do you want to do as an entrepreneur? You get to pick. Like, there's software engineers with Stanford degrees and $20 million of venture capital funding who got perfect scores on their SAT, their ACT, and all 15 AP courses that they took. Do you want to compete against that person or do you want to compete against the person in your town who has a fax machine on their desk and a private jet at the airport? You tell me. So, it's kind of a reset of just the way to think about entrepreneurship.

To that point, with someone starting today, let's just say they have $10K, like what is the process you would use to even find, evaluate a business idea, Get started, get rolling, because you, you've done it so many times. You've done it already multiple times.

Like, yes, chapter 4, chapter 4 of the book lays it out. Like, you're gonna make a list of 10 businesses that you could potentially start. First 5, I like them to be very low risk. You can bootstrap them. It's usually clean something, move something, wash something, repair something. Um, then there's 3 more businesses that are a little bit higher skilled where you gotta, you gotta have some kind of specialty or you're taking a little bit of risk. You're buying a piece of equipment potentially. And then the last 2 should be like the dream businesses where yes, you need capital. This is like where self-storage falls in. You got to raise a half million bucks, you got to buy a tree removal truck, you got to buy a franchise, you got to do something like that, right? And then you're going to assess your local market for all 10 of those businesses. You're going to call all the competitors, figure out how busy they are, and then potentially start one of those companies. So I think you work through the framework of just assessing a market and you can start these things in a very low-risk way and then you go out and start trading your time for money. Everybody tries to skip that step. They want to hire a bunch of people. Go out and trade your time for money. Hopefully it's $30, $50, $100 an hour. Then when you're too busy to sell more work, you hire somebody. And when you're— again, when you're too busy to sell more work, you hire another person. You hire a couple international people to help you in your back office to run the business. And next thing you know, you have a, you have a business that can make you a couple hundred grand a year. And I think a huge part of entrepreneurship in general It's just like, where is your end zone? Like, what's— where are the goalposts? People think they have to have a billion-dollar startup to win. I needed $20 grand a month, man. Like, if I had $20 grand a month coming in, I could put my family in safe vehicles, I could send them to a good school, I could play golf at a decent golf club, and I could go to a restaurant without looking at the price. And I could, if I could do that while working 5 or 10 hours a week, I had ultimate freedom. So I encourage people to do that exercise. What is your goal? Sometimes if you play LeBron James, you might make a billion dollars, but what are the odds you're gonna beat LeBron James in basketball? If you play against the 5th grade girl and 20 grand a month is on the line, if you pick the right business, it's a little bit higher odds.

It reminds me, so I know we're almost out of time here, but it reminds me of two different things. One's Sean Sheik, who I had on the show before. He had a growth agency, Pivot CMO, so like running growth for startups basically, so very much services. Now he's doing like a holding company. He has businesses that are worth, I think, $300 million over time, just cash flowing, find new ones, cash flowing, and stack forever. And it's just so perfect. And another one reminds me of with what you've done is Ryan Peterson from Flexport. He had Imports Genius, which Very much so profitable business that took basically all the risks then for his next thing to then go the home run route with Flexport, raise the money, go big. But he's already making millions from Import Genius. He doesn't have to worry about anything else like this. The way it like to do what you're saying in terms of doing a service business, make some money, stack that. You can always pursue more opportunities beyond that. It seems just like a smarter idea.

Your first business, and look, if you look at almost all the successful tech titans. very rarely was their first business the one that was the one. Okay? Yes, Bill Gates. Yes, Steve Jobs. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg. But other than that, you look at all the other billionaires, they all had a previous win, man, because a huge part of business— Elon Musk— a huge part of business is having the cash flow coming in the bank. It's very hard to do business if you're broke. Period. So, your first business is not necessarily about acquiring a billion dollars or changing the world. Your first business is about acquiring the skills, acquiring the capital, making a little bit of money so that then you can operate on a higher level and momentum takes over. And yes, it's your second business or your third business or your fourth business that you do get to screw around, take a moonshot because you're financially set.

Way different environment than what— that's the case. One last thing I'm curious about So obviously you're going to say like this is going to go live. I think when the book is live, which is very exciting. So check out the book for sure. Where can people find the book once it's live?

Obviously, so we'll drop an Amazon link in the show notes. But yeah, it's called *The Sweaty Startup: How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things*.

The other thing I want people to think about then is okay. So with you've worked with partners like Mitchell, obviously other partners as well. What do you need? What do you want help on? Who do you who do you want to reach out to you? They're like. Okay, you have opportunities I'm sure coming in all the time, but who do you actually wanna work with?

I love interacting with people who aren't afraid to take a chance. Like there are people I know who make unbelievable money simply because they're not insecure. Let me, I wanna say that again a different way. Like there's a lot of average people, even below average people I know who make phenomenal money. And the only difference between them and maybe somebody who's very smart and broke is that they are not insecure. So, if you can go through life— I don't want to say like cocky or arrogant or, you know, have blinders on and be, you know, not open to changing your mind because that's a very dangerous way to do business. But, if you can go through and just not be afraid to take the risk, you can get something done. You can get something done. And that's the people that I'm attracted to their stories. I'm attracted to their problems. And I can relate because they get stuff done.

So people who are building the next Ari Kossegg and Somewhere, reach out to Nick. He may be partnering with you.

The way to— a way to reach out is by email, nick@sweatystartup.com. I read— me and my team read every single message. So it's a— somebody wants a discount at Somewhere, somebody has feedback on Somewhere, on the book, like Just email me. I'm around.

Perfect. Nate, this was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for the time, man.

Justin, love your message, man. Thanks for having me.