The Pomp Podcast - #1189 Nick Huber On How He Built $100 Million Empire

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

Nick Huber is one of the world's most interesting entrepreneurs. In this conversation, we talk about his real estate portfolio, various companies he has started, challenges with scaling, hiring operators, when to pull-the-plug or reinvest, and the day-to-day struggles of being an entrepreneur on the internet. I always enjoy talking to Nick, and you can find him on Twitter at @sweatystartup. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 235,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people people. So let's get into today's episode. Nick Huber is one of the world's most interesting entrepreneurs. You've probably seen him on the internet at sweaty startup on Twitter.

In this conversation, we talk about his real estate portfolio, the various companies that he has started, what the challenges are with scaling, how he selects various operators, when he knows to pull the plug or continue investing, and many of the other nuances of the day to day struggle of being an entrepreneur on the internet in the modern society. I always enjoy talking to Nick and I hope that you guys enjoy this conversation. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you agreed with, what you disagree with, and how we can improve these conversations. I always appreciate the feedback and Nick will find it hilarious if you tell him all the things that he said that you think are dumb. Here is my

conversation with Nick Huber. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33 inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at CadillacCanada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for Calendar Year 2025 for the Cadillac Definition of Luxury. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments.

All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Nick here with me. I thought a great place to start is we're seeing tons and tons of people who have figured out this hack on how to build businesses. It used to be you build a product, then you go find the customers.

You, me, many of our friends are like, wait a minute. Why don't I go find the customers first, then build the company? Talk a little bit about your process. You've launched six different businesses in a short period of time. I think you've got a bunch of other ideas of things that you're going to go do. How are you thinking about this new way of building businesses, or is it just an old way that you're kind of replicating? Yeah, I started talking about real estate on Twitter.

Got a lot of followers. Turns out real estate is a business that fuels a lot of sub-businesses. It's expensive to buy a building. If you're going to buy a building, you're going to pay a slew of other people, lawyers cost seg studies um you know a bunch of people to do a lot of work and um my business was you know i'm trying to turn some of my cost centers into profit centers but yeah built uh 30 million eyeballs a month on on twitter uh newsletter with that's you know a couple months ago we were getting started 30 000 file you know subscribers now we're up to almost 50 000 folks

and they're people who do real estate deals and they own small businesses and they're interested in entrepreneurship management and turns out when you build an audience full of those people they need a lot of things they need you know websites they need you know seo they need pay-per-click they need landing pages they need cost segregation studies they need insurance they need a lot of different stuff so let's talk about the real estate component first then we'll kind of go to the other businesses so you previously had a business i will think of it as practice you may not think about that but i always look at like people who find a decent amount of success doing something, you usually can trace back somewhere where they learned some skills. I learned how to

be an operator. Yes. So talk a little bit about the first business that you had and how that fueled kind of what you understood when you launched the real estate business. Yeah. I like to say that I started in the hardest business in the history of the world, which is student pickup and delivery storage. We were literally driving box trucks in towns, picking up 7,000 students a year in a one week span during finals week. We were storing it in warehouses. We were delivering it. We had, you know, over 200 part-time employees in that business. We could only be in one city, but we were operating in 12 different locations at 25 different colleges. And we did that for 10 years, a hard business.

So people look at me on Twitter and think, oh, this guy's just in real estate, you know, whatever. No, I, in 2011, I was driving a cargo van picking up boxes and yeah, we learned how to hire people. We learned how to manage people and made a lot of mistakes. And, but you know, six, seven years into that, we had some serious operational chops. We can hire people, we can manage people, we can motivate them and leverage that to move up.

I always say business is about momentum. You know, you're not going to people. So many people want to just get rich, start a business, crank. Yeah. Doesn't work that way. So when you're building that business, why go into the real estate game? Is it just like, hey, that's easier. There's less competition.

I want to do something different. Like, what is the jump from like, I'm a day to day grinding operator to let me go do real estate? I think I looked at it as, hey, where are the dumbest people making the best money? there's a lot of dumb people in real estate, but there's also a lot of smart people. Well, there are a lot of, I'm not saying that most real estate investors are dumb. I'm saying that you don't have to be in the top 10% to make a killing. In the startup world, you got to be amazing at what you do because the cream rises to the top. The competition is incredible. I said, what industry can we go after here that the competition, we just got to be above average

and we can do really well. In a moving company, we could see that it was never going to scale to a 10 million dollar business it was never gonna give us the lifestyle we were on the road you know i was spending a month away from my family's going from college town to college town you know hauling boxes into dorm rooms so we said okay what's the next logical step um but that sweaty that sweaty startup had put half a million bucks in our bank account because we'd operated for five years we didn't spend any money and it turned us into operators so when you got a little bit of cash and you know how to operate a business you can tackle real estate and we looked at hey Hey, there's a self-storage business where mom and pop operators don't answer the phone,

their units are full, and they're making 20, 30, 40 grand a month from one location. Wow. That's the business to be in. So in 2016, we built a self-storage facility from the ground up, opened it in 2017, put our money in, raised money from friends and family, built a building for 2.9 million bucks, learned a ton. Development was not really the place to start, but we built it, got it up. And once we got it running, that's when we hit our stride. We're like, wow, this is a great business we answer the phone we do some basic stuff we can get a lot of customers um fast forward to 2021 that business that building's worth 8 million bucks that we built for 2.9 million today it's worth 10 or 11 million dollars so that one real estate project that was 20 of

our stress 80 of our stress was over in this moving company 20 of our stress was in self in self-storage it generated outsized returns and so we made a decision to sell the moving a storage company and do more real estate. So let's talk about the unit economics of a self-storage facility that you buy first, and then we can talk about the development side. So what is the average size deal that you guys will go do, and how do you find the right deal? So somebody's like, oh, cool. Self-storage sounds awesome. Nick's an idiot. I think I could do better than him. Where do they get started? Well, you can, because you find one deal and it can be life-changing money. We bought one little deal in 2018 with our own cash because

we ran out of investor money really quick. We didn't have any country club kids, didn't have big network to go raise a bunch of money which you got to do in real estate so we did a couple small deals a 472 000 deal that we did by ourselves with 100 grand of our own cash three years later is worth a million bucks so like that is life-changing money so you don't have to be that smart to do this but yeah you you can buy a small deal for half a million dollars lease it up you know operate it well cut expenses and just let time do its thing so if you buy something that's half a million dollars how many like storage units are coming with that and what what can you charge normally in one of these?

Yeah, this is a deal of ours in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It's 11,000 square feet, 66 units. We get two phone calls a day at that property. Our manager goes out and spends two hours once a week sweeping out units, picking up trash, making sure everything's okay. Got a little gate maintenance here and there. You know, you wash the buildings once every two years.

You paint them every five years, put new gravel down. Pretty low touch though. Okay. And so when you have 66 units, what are you renting those out for on average? The property was doing $6,200 a month of revenue when we bought it. Okay. So $100 a unit, 66 units.

Today it's doing about $11,000 a month in rent. Okay. So you basically just double prices. Yeah. Marketing, getting people in, just, you know, every time we filled up, we raised the prices and then we'd get a couple of units open and then we'd lease them at a higher rent and do that for a couple of years. And all of a sudden your buildings, you know, you've doubled, tripled net operating income

profit and the building's worth double. And so when you have one of these properties, how much of the value is derived by the cashflow that is driving versus just pure capital appreciation, inflation? Yeah. Here's the thing about commercial real estate and why entrepreneurs and operators love it. A house, you buy a house and it's worth whatever the appraiser says the house is worth based on what the house next door traded for. It's all comps. There's no cashflow coming in from a house. You live in it. So whatever the house traded for, that's what it's worth. So over time, houses start trading for more money in neighborhoods and it just naturally goes up or it goes down commercial real

estate is valued based on how much money it makes so you know it's called a cap rate so a percent return on on overall spend is what it's worth so if you can make the profit go up you can physically make the value of the building go up because much more valuable okay as you're doing this you're not doing it by yourself right you guys have both this entire team of I think like 45 people or so talk about what are those people doing somebody here's like oh you own real estate, you have 45 people, but they're not actually physically going every day and sitting there as a receptionist and taking orders or anything like that. What are these people doing?

People, when you hear people talk about real estate, they think passive. They think, hey, I'm going to get checks into my mailbox. Real estate is not passive at all if you do it well. We operate our own properties, meaning when the phone rings, our team answers it. When somebody doesn't pay their rent, we call them. When somebody abandons their stuff, we have to auction it off we got to do property improvements change signs do the gravel have all contractors come in we have a construction division and then we have an entire finance team that underwrites and goes out to try to acquire properties so yeah our team now 45 people we have 1.9 million square feet of storage 63 properties um we have an acquisitions arm three three folks who are full-time trying

to find deals to buy two folks who are underwriting deals meaning figuring out what they're worth our cfo then offers on these properties we have an investor relations uh employee who deals with our 280 active investors who have you know given bolt storage 40 million dollars and then you transfer over okay we bought a building then it goes into property improvement their jobs the signage painting the buildings getting it all cleaned up getting all the units ready to rent then we have a team of four folks who oversee all the vendors and contractors that we have on the site so when i say 45 employees that doesn't account the plow guy the lawn care all this um then you have uh the call center customer service that's eight full-time employees

you got collections you got auctions property improvements and construction which is another four folks who are building about um 3.5 million dollars worth of expansion on properties that we already own okay and so as you're going through this do you change the names of the properties that you guys end up acquiring or do you just leave them whatever you know joe blows yep we brand them all as bolt storage okay and what is the kind of pros and cons of doing that uh our domain authority is great our seo is great our you know the standard procedure about answering the phone hey this is bolt storage building a brand um yep it's it's ideal over you know operating it as a you raised 40 million what do you think everything's worth now we raised 40

million dollars put in another five or six of our own cash bought a hundred million dollars with the storage before interest rates started going nuts i mean right now with today's revenue and operating income and the old cap rates 180 190 million dollars um more realistically if we had to sell right now 140 150 million dollars um but yeah it's been three four three four x on the equity capital that you guys were able to it's been it's been a great well we've raised 40 and we got yeah between another 40 and 80 more of equity so yeah two to three x equity okay and And so when you look at this business, why just stay in self-storage? Why not go into other markets?

Is it just a focus thing? Is it, hey, we actually don't think we have an advantage somewhere else? Is it the people that are trying to sell those or lost their minds and they think it's worth more? Yeah. And the last year has been very hard. When I came on and spoke to you last time, you saw that fire in my eyes. I was like, let's go buy a ton of storage. I think I told you that I was going to buy $100 million worth of storage in 2022.

We bought $38 million of storage. And we were devoting way more resources, way more energy, way more time. The business got harder. rates started going up and sellers aren't going to take discounts now, but our returns go down when interest rates go up, the returns go down on the cash that you're putting to work in these businesses. You mean that Jerome Powell, when he said he was going to destroy consumer demand, he actually ended up destroying investor demand. He, the investors, yeah. Investor demand, investor returns, uh, the real estate business got really hard. And, um, luckily I have a guy

on my team, Kevin, who, um, super disciplined. And I was like, Hey, let's buy these buildings. And he's like, Hey, Jerome Powell is telling us he's going to raise interest rates 3%. This is not a good buy looking back on all those deals now he was right i was chomping at the bit i'm the go go go guy um i had some very disciplined people on my team who kept us from buying too much storage when how do you structure the debt is it floating rate stuff is it fixed rate how long do you it was floating it was floating uh we got burned yeah you know because i'm working on the promote the way all this stuff works is there's a preferred return that i give investors for seven percent annually goes the investors i get paid a chunk over that so if we're doing 10

12 cash on cash a year i'm getting paid i'm in the promote well when interest rates go up three percent that's an extra two million bucks a year of debt service that aided into almost our entire promote and now we're making prefs so um yeah we we locked the rates at five and a quarter five and three quarter between five and a quarter and five and three quarters depending on the properties um they're all in great shape we just need to let time do its thing and yeah and let rates come back down we don't over time we'll lease up the buildings and you know net operating income is continuing to grow so um we're not at risk of losing any property in any of our properties but it's a it's not an easy time to be a real estate investor right now there's a lot of chaos that

people don't see going on in the real estate business they had floating rate debt and more often it's it's loan maturities when you buy a house you have a 30-year fixed loan commercial real estate average loan term is five years and a lot of it's on three-year bridge debt and when that three years is up it's called a balloon payment you have to refinance with somebody else you got to go find some new debt the scramble is on right now from deals that were bought in 2020 that their debt is now maturing and the bank's saying hey we don't want this loan anymore you got to go find debt somewhere else and so the people in the business right now are seeing a lot of chaos so as you think about that portion of what you do how much of the time are you spending

a week on real estate uh in the growth phase building out this team i was i was grinding 2021 our team went from six people to 38 and in 2022 we added another 10 and then we had to lay off a couple people last year but um i was working 60 hours a week in the real estate business in 2021 um today i'm doing three hours a week because my team is really good a and b um it's my job to determine whether or not we're going to buy a property based on the purchase price and we're just not close yeah so okay so you've got the real estate and you continue to grow that most people would be like this is amazing i'm gonna go to the golf course i'll see you guys later thank you so much uh you're not like that you're like okay i'm gonna go start like a gazillion

other businesses um the cost segregate uh segregation study business i think is an interesting one to kind of highlight what you guys are doing so talk through like who came up with this idea how do you kind of put it together and is it something where like you are literally saying hey i'm paying this why don't i just create a business for other people or is there some more kind of sophisticated i think we got to back up to shepherd first because this is what opened my mind to this distribution model that you and i are both on to and several other influencers are doing a guy named marshall haas started a company called support shepherd i was a customer of theirs in early 2021 and he got me three filipino employees for customer service and call center

work i interviewed them and i hired all three on the spot because it just blew my mind that you can get this this quality of person for ten thousand dollars a year less than a thousand a month, I can hire somebody who can do this. Um, and then I went to Marshall and I was like, Hey man, um, I want to promote shepherd. Can you give me a little referral cut? If I tweet about the business, um, that was in April of 2021, the company was doing about 40 grand a month of revenue. Um, they were delivering a lot of bad-ass talent to business owners and the service was unbelievable. And I'm like, Hey, I could, I could sell the show to this. Like, let's do something. You fast forward a year of me tweeting and promoting shepherd online

and the business had seven X in size seven X seven times larger this is when I went this is when the light bulb starts going off in my entrepreneur head is like hey this is a good business I want to own part of it like Marshall let's make a deal where you cut me in and I said hey I want to own twenty twenty percent of Shepherd he's like what are you talking about you're getting a 15% cut on commission you just wanted me to give you an equity slice and it was a negotiation back and forth I was like Marshall I'm gonna go start a similar company and i know it's a hard business and it would have been a you know brain damage

i'm not sure if i would have fully went through with it but were you bluffing i don't know okay to be honest yeah part of me says no but building that company like he's got 120 employees and yeah a ton of hard it's an agency it's a it's a very hard business so he's finally we made a deal where i'm a 15 equity owner this is april of last year and he just gave you the equity gave me the equity in exchange for what you had already done my distribution in the future and for what i had done and you know what's the truth what of the growth is attributable to me and my twitter audience i don't know um but it didn't hurt it didn't hurt i think it was a good deal for him and i know it's a good deal for me fast forward to today and my 15 equity slug and shepherd is

50 plus thousand dollars a month to me that's massive this is a business worth almost 20 million dollars um some paid ads a lot of word of mouth because it's a badass service but a lot of it was my distribution so light bulb starting to go off in my head when i made this deal with marshall the company's going really well then i had another guy that was doing cost segregation things which a cost segregation study is an engineered report that basically when you buy a piece of real estate it it lays out your depreciation schedule for the irs um google cost segregation i don't know if you want me to explain it anymore but basically if uh you buy a piece of real estate you can depreciate things but you can actually accelerate some of it depending on what

it is so maybe the windows get higher depreciation than let's say the door handles or whatever and uh this business and other businesses like it go through and literally lay out every single thing in the piece of real estate that you can accelerate or things that you won't be able to yeah and if you buy a lot of real estate which i did in 2021 you can get massive accelerated depreciation and carry forward a multiple seven figure loss me personally on my personal tax return, a multiple seven figure loss. So funneling my small business income into real estate, buying that real estate, getting the depreciation, again, 2023, multiple seven figures of personal income last year, $0 of federal taxes for me, because it's all deferred. Like I will pay it, recapture

it later. But cost segregation is working miracles in what I do. Cost segregation guy on Twitter um reached out to me we made a very similar deal a year earlier um and it was going really well his business was doing about 350 grand a year when we started and then and now it's about 1.2 million eight or nine months in sending him a ton of cost segregation business and i went to him and said hey man i need to own like 40 of your company or i'm gonna go start my own business and he said no nick like i don't i don't necessarily want to grow i got a ton of clients this has been an amazing relationship you know you're you've been a blessing for me And obviously, this has been a great deal for me.

My company's large enough. The guy was making almost half a million dollars a year at this point. So we parted ways, shook hands, still very good friends to this day. A week later, me and Mitchell Baldridge, my CPA, who his internal office had done 100 plus cost seg studies. He's one of the smartest guys I know. His wife is an ex-KPMG consultant, a killer. She was kind of looking for her next gig.

Her kids were, you know, old enough and she was ready to go. We formed RE Cost Seg, a cost segregation study service. when you guys parted ways i know you guys are still friends but we're like i'm gonna bury this motherfucker i'm a competitive guy i just but it was also it was really i don't know who this guy is so like i can ask that question but i'm sure he's great it was a scary moment for me like i went from making 20 or 30 grand a month referring to him to then making zero and putting it all my eggs in a new basket of starting a brand new company this was a scary moment i jumped off a cliff that was kind of that was 11 months ago and now knowing what we know now yeah it was a great

decision because um how big is the new business re cost seg did 250 grand of revenue last month okay we have 23 employees um it's a business that's it's a 10 million dollar company in 11 months okay and is it 10 million dollars on its way to 12 or is it like 10 million dollars on its way to 50 to 50 yeah it's going to be a big business okay and most of that is coming off of like twitter it's the only thing that we've done so far for distribution yeah we're going to open up to some new marketing, some outside sales. We're going to grow the company the traditional way. But yeah, we've gotten from zero to over 700 cost segregation studies completed in less than a year. And we've tracked down a ton of the talents through Shepard. We've hired a lot through Twitter.

My distribution network has been fuel, but the team is amazing. Mitchell's a genius and so is his wife. So there's one other piece to this though, that I think people are like, okay, look at these fucking guys. They're just tweeting and they're making all this money. This is bullshit but there is some nuance to what you guys did because with the cost segregation business it used to be that you would call a person would drive to your physical location right they would walk around with like little clipboard take a bunch of notes go back to their office on their paper fucking do a bunch of stuff and then send you a report and you're like oh thank you very much here's your money you all were like well screw cars screw paper screw all this stuff like

if i understand it correctly you guys are literally just having the real estate owner on like facetime yeah just so a around and showing we have we have several different things that we can do and none of them are groundbreaking evolution okay world changing you know new idea stuff we have engineers that have been civil engineers and mechanical engineers for a long time in columbia and in the states all over the place but remote um we have a facetime method where hey you buy a property get on with one of our reps and walk around and he or she will literally point out and we'll take screenshots and we'll do this entire documentation process in 45 minutes i don't need to fly there so we can deliver a cost seg 40 cheaper and three times as fast as our

competitors and that's the real magic yes so like the reason why i call that out is i think that a lot of folks uh are like oh i don't have distributions i can't build a business but it's not just distribution like distribution is the gas that gets poured onto a fire but really the benefit that you guys did is just like any other business uh you have innovated whether it is a technological innovation or just a business model innovation you can now do this anywhere in the world you're able to do it remotely and you're able to do it cheaper and faster than everyone else is when you look at that it's like wait a second you're actually providing a better service which then when you put the distribution kind of spotlight on it then people like oh no shit i want

to use them versus someone else so another funny thing about this i've never met anybody in the company in person. We have one of our head engineers driving down from Tampa. We're in Miami for an offsite for Ari Kostick right now. First time you're meeting three folks flew in from Houston. We got two guys coming in from Columbia, the country in Latin America, one more driving down from Tampa. I mean, these are folks I've never met before that are building a company and crushing it in real time. When you think of that business, you said, you know, it's 10 on sway to 50 uh how much of the cash are you guys pulling out versus reinvesting and the numbers itself don't matter as much as like how you guys are thinking about each one of these businesses

because there's cash where a lot of tech startups like i know founders been working on their company for 10 years they've been getting a salary and that's it right and so when you drive cash it actually introduces a new decision framework that you have to have so uh coke industries famously you know the two brothers uh i think it was three but now it's two uh sat down and said hey look uh we're going to put 90% back into the business and we're never going to take out more than 10%. Some people say, no, actually when I put a dollar in there, I can't generate as much return on it as I can. If I go and I take it out and I put it somewhere else.

How have you guys thought about that across some of these businesses? Yeah. It's a, it's a tricky balance. We're investing a ton because we've hired fast and we're building software and we're building a lot of systems. But yeah, it's a, it's a, it's going to be a cash flowing business and we're pulling, we're pulling it out. So there's nothing like we're looking at it. Hey, what could we spend this money on inside the company and it's at a certain point it's like hey we have the people we need we're building the software we need and we're making these big

investments but we might as well send a hundred thousand dollar distribution because the money's piling up all right so there's like i'm gonna call them real estate adjacent businesses that you guys are building and then you get on twitter one day and you're like all right fuck it i'm just gonna do a landing page business and i was like nick has lost his mind like next time this guy's going to be like, I've got a bowling alley. I've got this like talk about daycares, like all kinds of stuff. Right. And so like real estate adjacent businesses, I think people are like, okay, got it. He's got a bunch of real estate. He knows what a good service or product looks like. He knows what the cost structures are like. He probably actually knows people who are good at doing this already.

Tighten risk. We got to talk about tighten risk because I think that could be bigger than what does that cost? Like it's a, it's a property and casualty insurance business. So you buy a piece property, you need insurance. The standard model of the business is a producer. Somebody who sells insurance goes to a golf course joins the country club and goes and talks to the real estate investors in the country club gets their policies makes it to where he's making two or three hundred grand a year and then just plays golf the rest of his life i mean that sounds cool that's what the business is though um when you take when you solve for distribution you can find folks who are used to the old school consulting models where we're going to work really hard to service these

policies a lot um so yeah we're flipping the property casualty insurance business on its head with Titan risk. My, my business partner, Dan is actually CEO of that company and he's the best operator I've ever met. Um, we partnered with, and look, all these things I'm doing are opportunistic. If I find the right operator with the right skillset and I can convince them to come on my team, that's what I'm going to hop on something. And that's when we can talk about web run labs. But yeah, I mean, last month was renewal for bolt storage. We had to renew our policy. 380 grand is what the quote came back at Titan risk, 280 grand in our umbrella. why can you do that we worked it like we're we just like hey uh the renewal's coming our brokers

always just sent us the renewal sorry guys insurance went up this year we're like uh-uh we are now the broker let's work it let's call all the freaking carriers we got we got a huge portfolio of 1.9 million square feet everybody wants our business let's get after this and then oh yeah when you work it hard you can you find good coverage okay so how much are you putting in to start these businesses uh we struck the check for 50 you know 100 we put 100 grand in the checking account to start re cost seg okay we put 50 grand in checking account to start titan risk i put 20 grand in a checking account to start web run labs um recruit jet was 25 grand um so you're putting let's call it somewhere between 20 and 100 grand that's right for each

one of these uh which it's like an angel check essentially but you're the only investor or only capital going in is 20 to 100 grand why is it that a tech startup needs 2 million or 3 million dollars to get going versus some of these businesses only need you know 25 to 100 grand these businesses are operating now like there's a market there's customers there's businesses that are making good money we're not reinventing the wheel like yeah we're doing little things to make it more efficient like the cost seg company but we're not saying hey we're trying to go out and train a market and flip an industry on its head i'm very lucky that people do that because i just got an Uber across Miami in two minutes. I'm lucky that there are people out there changing

the world and they should be handsomely rewarded. I'm not that guy. I'm going to be the guy who employs a lot of people, builds teams, and builds companies that produce cashflow. If Travis was still C of Uber, it might've been one minute. Just kidding. Just kidding. Just kidding. And so when you look at something like Web Run Labs, right? Now you start to get outside of the real estate adjacent businesses. Is that just like, hey anywhere that's distribution can help i'm interested or was there some sort of strategic thought process for some of these other businesses so i'm really running internet companies like my real estate is an internet company re cost seg is an internet company and what does an

internet company need is it needs a place where you funnel traffic it needs a really good form a really good landing page it needs when somebody fills out half a form you need to be able to hit them with email sequences to get them back in to fill out the rest of the form to become a qualified lead you need a beautiful landing page to be built i just happen to in my network have an operator who is one of the best ux designers that i've ever met so boom that's where web run labs came and if you go to sell.boltstorage.com or invest.boltstorage.com those are people who want to sell their storage facilities and people who want to invest in bolt storage those are both landing pages built by web run labs so like profit centers into and and re cost seg we're building

landing pages for them it's like all this traffic's got to go somewhere and we need it to be tight these sales funnels of winning people get emails where they get emails you know how important that stuff is so yeah landing page was a little bit outside of my zone but every one of my companies is a customer of webrun labs how much does it cost for a landing page three to five grand okay there's people who will say that's really cheap there's people who say it's really expensive which is it yeah one of the guys complained on the tweet about how expensive it is i mean it's a lot of freaking work the company's not profitable yet we're four months into building an agency and we can talk about building these companies in a minute if we have

of time. But like, it's messy building these businesses requires a lot of people that requires a copywriter, it requires designer, it requires the developer in the back end, putting the elements together, ton of research on the company, a lot of back and forth and the salesperson, doing these things right, and converting leads is worth hundreds of 1000s of dollars to these companies. And you got to do it. How do you know when to hire people full time versus use

outside contractors? Early on, I was this, my mindset has really shifted on this. Early on, I was, hey, if we don't need this, let's do it ourselves a little bit longer i'm now confident enough in my distribution and confident enough in my ability to sell customers that we're hiring ahead of revenue in almost all these businesses we're literally saying okay we're going to start this company right now and we need six people we need two designers we need two ux guys we need a salesperson and we need a copywriter and we're going to hire them all right now and build the team and when you do it that way you can grow

agencies faster okay so i don't give a shit about your companies uh i know that they're successful Well, I know that they're working, but I also have the insider perspective of, I know everything that goes into these businesses. So I want to dig into some of the details that other people might not know to ask you. Let's start with the content side. There's a bunch of different platforms. Are you posting shit on TikTok? Are you, you know, email's more important?

Like, how do you think about the various platforms and where you put most of your focus versus maybe other places where you're like, I could be there, but it's not really worth it. Yeah. I went to Mastermind in Cabo with Sahil and Nathan Berry from ConvertKit and some of these guys and they opened my mind to uh just building an organization around myself and you have done it very well so in the last three months i've hired a full-time copywriter he's very good i hired a uh an operator like a kind of a holding company operator he's the one who will set up all the internal workings of the business get the web page up like all the emails going to the right

people everything all set up like a kind of a ceo of my holding company um a designer that can do my, you know, little videos, um, copy editor for my newsletter. So yeah, the, the company on top of the companies is forming now just because I'm a, I'm a delegator. If I have a, if I have a job in one of my companies, I'm pissed. Um, I still write all my tweets. I recycle a lot of them with help. Um, and I still write my newsletter every single week. Um, my newsletter is kind of like my personal diary of how I'm thinking about the world. And I'm going to be really happy that i wrote that every week um when i'm when i'm 50 60 years old can you outsource the tweet writing or the newsletter eventually like forget it if you want to or not but is it something where it's

so unique and people will be like no that's not nick or is it something that you could train someone else you could find someone who writes well something like that real canadian superstore has everything you need this back to school season save on lunchbox savers like ziggy's sliced deli meat products for always 375 and get life brand pure vita shampoo or conditioner for eight dollars each at real canadian superstore when you're ready we're ready with a whole world and more if somebody if you what do you think do you think i could i don't know i'm not gonna tell you what i think until you tell me what you're thinking i don't know i think that's the one thing my writing that i might not be able to outsource i think it's the most it's the thing

that each one of us is so emotionally connected to but it's emotionally connected to not because we're like oh the audience is going to like notice because i actually think you can train someone to do it pretty, uh, easily. Um, I've been very surprised at how people can write in a very similar style. Um, but I think that it is, uh, less effective when you outsource it because you just said it's diary. It forces you to organize your thoughts. And so when I think about the things I write, actually I will then later reuse them. So I may write something, you know, in the first week of the month and three months later I'm on a television interview and I pull something how does he know that like because i fucking went and researched it and i wrote it and it's the same

thing as you know they say if you write notes or whatever you always remember stuff so i think there's that aspect to it the second thing is it forces you to collect your thoughts and like be really thoughtful and think a little bit deeper maybe than you would have just in conversation or whatever but then the third piece of it that's fascinating to me is like they put out in the world i'm sure you just like i get back you know hey you're an idiot hey you're a genius you know like okay which one is it right and you got to look at the feedback and you got to understand like oh actually this person who's being critical has a good point and yeah i should incorporate that more this person who's actually saying i'm a genius like they're just saying that to everyone

that sends them an email right and so you almost have to like think through again not just writing but now you gotta actually evaluate the feedback to know what's right what's not i look back and i look at what i do now inside my companies the written word is how i do everything the written word is how i lead other people the written word through text messages emails slack notifications is how i guide my employees the written word is how i convince and sell these operators to come partner with me to build companies the written word is everything that i do you said something when you were talking to sam on my first million or was it sean interviewed you you said like okay the the the business show that you did every morning for two hours for two years

okay looking back was it a use was it a useful you know dollar per hour value of my time maybe not but the skill that you built doing that now you can go on cnbc and argue with the biggest baddest fucker in the world and you're gonna hold your own every single time yeah it's like okay they don't like when you do that by the way it's it's building it's building that skill set and i can lean back on my writing i'm going to lean on my writing for everything that i do the rest of of you know my time and i was talking to it goes back to a sports story um a decathlete that i really respect when i was in the track days we were sitting on the side of a meet and he had his left hamstring was all taped up and we were at like usa championships he had to

get a certain you know time or score to to make sure that he had a spot not this year was going to withdraw but the next year and some events that he wanted to do and i was like why are you out here like limping like are you not in his you just had such a positive attitude he's like i'm better at 60 percent than the fourth place guy in america at 100 so i'm gonna be here and i'm gonna get this done and i just i'm confident enough that i can limp along and i can score my 8 900 points and i can do what i got to do that stuck with me like if i can do enough these interviews with you that if i come in here sleep deprived i'm gonna i'm gonna be able to hold my own you're gonna practice enough the way that you speak and the way that you you know do your media that even on your worst

day people won't even notice that you're off your game same with my writing my writing is going to be the skill that i lean back on to do everything that i want to do in my life whether it be books teaching giving back leading people building companies it's all right there is um one of the rules of twitter is the stupidest tweets are the most viral right as we all know so frustrating but but yeah i mean like literally for those that don't know kind of what what this unspoken rule is is like somebody can sit down and like think of the greatest tweet ever they can do a whole thread they do all this stuff and like it works literally you're taking a shit and you just fire off a tweet and it goes viral right uh we i'll give you two examples so we recently posted

something on instagram and uh it's an interview with a guy jason lowry from space force and it's not even me in the video at first it's my brother he's like what's the funniest thing about space right and uh and jason just goes uh when you look into space you're actually looking down right and then it's like me and my brother's all laughing whatever put it on instagram i go to sleep wake up it's got like 150 000 you know views on or something i was like what the hell best performing video that we've posted in like probably a year right and so i was like all right Now, when I was younger and less experienced, I'd go post 20 space videos, right? The next, but like, obviously, no, it's just an anomaly, whatever.

Okay, fine. Second thing is normally every Saturday we post an update on the kind of the week of Bitcoin, right? So I come in here, got the nice camera. These guys are all set up, got the lights on, you know, okay, let's do our fucking thing. All right, we may even do a little research, God forbid, right? And then we're ready to go. This past weekend, I got caught in a meeting on Friday, couldn't record it. so saturday morning woke my ass up grabbed my phone sat you know right on the couch ripped it

did a quick video send it to these guys like that's the best that we got right like post that shit double the views right and you're sitting there and you're like now again when i was younger i'd be like we're only doing phone videos right and you realize like some of this novelty right some of it's the change of pace some like there's a whole bunch of different things that go into it and so like you don't want to mess with the magic and you kind of just like just go about it and keep consistently creating things but also you start to realize like dude we can't predict this shit yeah right there's been interviews i've done with people i've been like there's gonna be a grand slam we're gonna do five million uh uh views on it nothing like literally 2 000 views you're

like it's not even like okay i thought we're gonna get 5 000 we got 2 000 right it's like no we literally thought it was gonna be our best and it was our worst how are we off so far the fluidity of this stuff is mind-blowing like how how it moves you can't predict it and that's why i think it's just about getting in the game and taking shots. I mean, I'm not a high risk kind of shot guy. Like I think almost all these companies will do some level of success, but you don't know which ones are going to go. You don't know which operators are going to be the operators to really take company to the next level. It's just about being in the game and producing and just doing, getting uncomfortable and doing shit. Everyone wants to talk about hiring employees, but that

frankly has played out in my opinion. When you're trying to hire these operators, they're like GM, CEOs, whatever. I've had great success. I've had great failures in doing this. What are you looking for and then what are the red flags when you're actually looking at these people it's it's it's more of an art than a science just like you said some of the interviews you think are going to be amazing and they flop some of the operators that i think are going to be amazing they're just okay but some people with just have that god-given ability to lead other people i think it's all communication it's all writing and it's all leading and putting together other people if you're good at your job like i don't necessarily want a very talented

technician i need somebody who can make other people good at their jobs i have a saying like if you want to make good money in this world get really good at your job if you want to earn great money in this world make other people good at their jobs and so if you can lead other people and enable other people and empower them and frankly a lot of it is just having the having the guts to delegate delegating is so uncomfortable because we know that you can do media the best i know that i can do self-storage the best it's really hard to give up control to other people to do those things but when you start doing it man magic magic happens so i'm looking for people who can delegate i'm looking for people who can empower others and you know make other people

good at their jobs when you're doing interviews are there any questions or anything that you really try to kind of get at some of this stuff the motivational interview is one of my favorite things just so that i know in my opinion it's all about expectations i'm very good at managing expectations and that's why i don't piss people off i don't let people down because i'm going to tell them like it is i'm not going to rose color you know put it through rose colored glasses so when i'm in an interview and you know you come in and say hey nick i want to start a company with you i'm like all right what's the best case scenario six months from now and if they say okay i want to be making you know i want to be doing a million arr i want to have you know 60

percent margins. I want to have a team of 30. Okay. Well, six months from now, no, that's six months into building an agency from the ground up is going to be that really, really frustrating time where you have your seven employees that you started with and you're just now, you're just now putting it together to break through and actually pump on some marketing and actually grow a company. There's that month two to month six. That's just a grind. It's not fun. Nobody's having fun. The operator's having bad weeks. You don't even know if it works yet. You're not sure if it works you're not sure if it works yet and then sometimes month six month seven it can just click and then boom you got your systems it's firing people are trained and it's rolling

so and then the five-year question is even more important hey we're in this room right now and you and i are building this business and we're five years in and things are going fucking awesome like you come in here and you're lit up you're having the most fun you've ever had all your career dreams are coming true tell me what's going on what's going on the company how big's the team what are you doing day to day who are you leading and they start and then i just shut up and i let them talk to me about what they see what position they see themselves in in four or five years and it's an it's amazing that that will kill 30 or 40 percent of relationships right there because i can't deliver what they need and want does that make sense it makes a ton of sense and

i guess when you're doing that you're looking for the right answer or you're looking for alignment in terms of what you think the business can do as well? This is past the point. I guess if we back up, I'm getting a look in their brain. How do they think about things? How do they talk about things? I'm really good at asking the questions

and reading how somebody thinks. It's just, I've hired enough people now that I have a natural ability to tell if somebody's got it, if they're an A player, if they're a 10Xer, if they can communicate really well, if they're clear, they're concise, they can think about problems the right way.

So I'm having conversations, I'm interacting with people and I'm saying, okay this person's an operator they got it like i think that they have it then it's all about look for the red flags that might fuck something up and that's what this is about so yeah the motivational interview is hey we're gonna we're gonna paint this picture and i'm looking for red flags that means that maybe this is not gonna work what i don't want that stress man i'm most time i'm trying to convince people to leave high-paying jobs the guy who's building web run with me had a four hundred thousand dollar a year job and i sold him on coming to build an agency

with me yeah he's gonna make way more money doing the agency probably than he will in that other job you don't think so we haven't made a dollar yet yeah three months in of course like if you can swallow the short-term pain right it it's basically if he was making 400k doing the same thing that means somebody else is making way more than 400k so if he can just replicate the same business but if i have a guy like that and he comes in and he starts talking to me and i'm all pump up i'm all like dude we're gonna get rich like this is gonna be awesome we got more business than we could ever hope for like all we gotta do is build these systems hiring the employees i got that solved through shepherd like we got all these ways that we can do this and then he gets in the

trenches in two months and he's like nick this is not what you told me like this is not the life like so it's more about hey we can do this and we can make a lot of money and we're going to learn a shitload and you're going to become a way more valuable manager delegator operator and i'm going to learn a lot and we're going to make mistakes and we're going to grow and it's going to be a journey we might get rich but it's going to be fucking hard you want to talk about someone's going to piss people off all right i stopped selling people on doing things because i know i can convince them to this point right if i want someone to do something i can be very convincing the problem is that they get two weeks four weeks two months four months whatever yep later yep and

they're like damn i fell for it yep right i i i was uh uh put under the spell and like it sounded amazing whatever and so in some way what you're describing is the same thing of like if you if you promise everything and you say, it's going to be this great thing. People actually believe it. Right. And that's why most people who can build a lot of organizations and things like that, they're very good at selling, whether they realize it or not. And so I've literally said to people that I've been trying to recruit, I am not going to sell you on this. Yep. Go think about it. I'm not going to reach out to you. I'm not going to do anything. You come back to me if you think that this makes sense, but like, basically you got to make the choice because if you're not

bought into this, then like, I'm going to trick you essentially. Right. Not me, not, not in a various way but like i will convince you to do this and it's just gonna be a train wreck in the future and i am surprised at how many people end up quote unquote getting it right they trust you well they just get it right in the sense of like that also can be people come back like hey it's not for me yeah and i'm like why right because i'm just as interested in why it's not for you as if it was for you and they'll say like two or three things and i'm like actually that's a that makes a ton of sense and like you shouldn't do this if those are things you're worried about and so i recently had a guy who it pissed me off a little bit um in that we were convincing

him to join one of our companies on a friday he's like i'm in verbally commits we spend all day saturday drawing up all the papers all this stuff and everything send it to him he's supposed to sign sunday don't hear from him now it's afternoon yep my hey dude like you know and i was very clear we move quick right uh sunday night hey what's up already kind of you know skating on ice backpedaling a little bit whatever he's like let's get on phone on monday morning you knew then well he just gets on funny so look my heart's not in it and i said to him by the way don't tell people you're in and be out but i'd rather you figure this out now than later and like i actually walked away respecting this guy right because i was like look okay cool he's younger guy you know

he he definitely kind of got caught up a little bit in the speed of everything or whatever but like man that's even harder once you've already like a lot of people would just be like cool i said i'm in so like i'm gonna do it but like i know my heart's not in it and i'll just like try to you know brute force it for a couple months you know but he had the discipline to just take a step back i actually don't want to do this right my heart's not in doing this specific task i want to do something else and so i think like it's all about that alignment or the buy-in that's really where the magic is and so you got to be careful because if you're good at selling right you can probably i learned early i learned early in my career that if you're really good at selling the

positives you're going to be stressed out because stress is a gap stress is a gap between reality and what you told somebody. It's a gap in expectations. Whether investors, employees, your spouse, whatever. If you set expectations here and you're here, that's stress. You told somebody you're going to arrive at 3 o'clock and you arrive at 3.15, that's stress, right? But if I tell somebody...

I'm laughing because Miami time, that's like this whole city operates on. I'll be there Tuesday at 9 a.m. I show up Wednesday at 3 p.m. Well, I fit right in then because you've interviewed me twice. I've been late both times. But look...

It's because Travis isn't running Uber. the way that i sell the way that i sell now is being a realist i have the experience i have the resume people know that i'm legit and when i sit here and tell them that hey this is not all rosy what you see on twitter is not real life building this business is going to be hard let's talk about the worst case scenario let's talk about how you and i are going to interact in 12 months if we're going to shut this business down let's have that discussion right now they walk away and they're like damn okay nick is like either hey he scared the shit out of me this is not for me that's great I wanted that to happen. Or he's like, I trust Nick. Like I, I know that what he's saying is

real because he didn't just talk about the awesome stuff and it's fun and great to sell with all the awesome stuff. But you know, that creates stress. So we talked about putting capital in initially. How do you know when to stroke another check? Cause the first check's fun. Cause it's optimistic. Hey, we're gonna go build a business. The second, third, fourth check that you may have to write. Now it's like, am I basically just lighting money on fire? because we're never going to get to the other side or it's like no i've got deep confidence in this and like i'm basically just you know getting bridging us there yeah how do you think about making additional investments into a business that might not be at kind of profitability yet

i these businesses are lean and the operator is a lot of times compensated on the first chunk of revenue meaning like the first 100k of profit or the first 50k of profit will go to that person for doing the work the operations and after that it's an equity split so a lot of times we're only burn in five, 10 grand a month. So we're going to be up. We got some runway. An example of this that I think is really interesting is I wanted to start a commercial debt brokerage company. Okay. Meaning if you're a big real estate developer and you're going to go get loans, you need a team of people to negotiate loans on your behalf. You need somebody who's has relationships with the bank. They're going to make sure the bank's not going to retrade and

they charge you a hundred basis points or 1% of your loan amount to do all the work for you, for your debt. It's a great business for everybody involved. I had a banker that has been working with Bolt Storage. I have a really close relationship with him. He is a killer. He's been in the banking business for 15 years, and he is very, very, very good at what he does. I wanted him to be one of my operators, and this is one of my recent failures. I wanted him to be one of my operators, and I was willing to stroke a big check and put my money where my mouth is because I know my audience needs this, and I know him, and I know he's great, and I know we can build a team to make money. And I said, look, I will pay you out of my pocket.

I'll sign a contract that says you're going to get 200 grand a year for the next 24 months, whether this works or not, I'm going to be paying you this money. And if it doesn't work, I'm going to pay you the money. And then I told him about the equity, told him how we're going to split the company up. And it was all fine and dandy. And he just said, look, Nick, I've spent 15 years in the banking business. I'm not an entrepreneur. I made 500 grand last year. I got two kids. Like, I don't need this. I don't need the stress. I don't need entrepreneurship i hope your business does really well and he told me no and that was a tough you know why right why bro i've been telling people for years short the bankers man these dudes

they're bankers they're bankers right i mean that as much as i joke about that stuff like it is a uh it's a different dna right lawyers are the same way uh a lot of it i can't get my lawyer to start a business with me either pomp so i have a concept for a 1031 title company combined great freaking business because when you start 1031 company you are the steward of the cash they put 10 million dollars in an account that you can go put in treasuries and you get the money from the treasuries like 90 days or something right yeah it's a business that if you get a couple 1031s going it's a couple hundred thousand dollar a year business he's like so uh i'll give you a couple these are all free gems for people from years of bashing my head against the wall which i'm sure

you guys please do i tried to buy a law firm in 2000 and early 2019 out because i was sitting there. And I've been doing a bunch of venture investing. And I was like, these guys are just cleaning up. Great business. I was watching the checks that we were writing. Yeah. But I was watching the checks we were writing from the asset management firms. And I'm like, dude, these guys are cleaning up. And then through the bear market of crypto, I was like, yo, these guys are still cleaning up. Like literally they may make more money than some of these companies are going to end up making. And so I got to own one of these. They make money in good times, bad times, whatever. And so I didn't know if you don't have a law degree, you can't own

law firm right so i was like okay cool later on i found out that you can actually own 49 uh in most states i believe this to be true arizona and texas well you can own 49 of an accounting firm in almost every state i believe and now there are a couple of these states that are saying well wait a second maybe we actually do want non-lawyers to own some of these law firms and so like things are shifting because i think people are starting to realize that wait a second it may not actually make sense to have only lawyers own these businesses like they may just have a different dna they may have a different skill set different interests whatever so as i kind of got further and further into this and then you start realizing like wait

a minute the entrepreneurs i'm not some genius they've been thinking about this for decades they start tax advisory companies they start you know 1031 exchange or marketing for like all these things in and around the services that say look if the regulation won't let me actually own the law firm there's 10 other businesses i can own that are right around it right and so what what's fascinating to me about this those i've gone and talked to a bunch of people like you guys should do this you should do this whatever it's not in their dna it's just not how they think like if you want to be an accountant especially at a big uh accounting firm you're taking zero risk your whole job is around killing risk right and mitigating that risk when someone's like hey

jump off this cliff you're like no dude hell no i'm not jumping off including if you literally give me a ladder a parachute a road 200 grand a year for the next two years no yeah because that's risk and i've been trained my entire life to kill risk so i think that's like one big piece but the other thing is uh and some people get mad when i say this but like if they leave those jobs and they want to go start companies major red flag yeah right now there are some people who are very successful uh entrepreneurs a lot of people actually did paypal mafia they got law degrees yep but they didn't practice law for 10 years around here in miami yes and so when you think about that it's like they had the the the mental frameworks the thinking like all the

communication that you learned in law school all of that from law school but they didn't go and bed themselves for 10 years in a law firm and so again it's not to say lawyers are bad or lawyers are good or anything it's just like sometimes you actually need the operator to have a very specific skill set and a dna that's hard for people to wrap their heads around unless they've talked to a ton of these people right which you have yep when you think about underwriting the operators that's on the way in how do you know when to pull a plug if it's the wrong person look i haven't had to do that yet okay um everybody thinks everybody thinks i got this i know i'll have to i know i will any of the ones you have right now no don't say who it is but let's scare

some of them maybe uh maybe ari kasek mel has gotta go she's gonna fire you nick you're out of here no i think one of the things that people don't realize when they're sitting here talking to me and you and they think about business and they think about entrepreneurship and they hear me talk about my companies, they think that we all have it all figured out. They think that we all have SOPs and everybody comes into work and they do their job and it just happens. Business is messy and it's chaos. So many people listening to this would be very, very surprised if they knew the big companies in their town, the big companies in their big cities nearby, big corporations that are traded on new york you know stock exchange that are total chaos on the inside you know what

i'm talking about i'm talking about companies where it's fires all over the place they have a few producers in each division that are holding the whole company together like like duct tape and it's chaos that is a very very common occurrence inside a business so if you don't and may be necessary for a business to be successful i think when they get to a certain size it's it's it's a testament to two things number one it's required being comfortable and uncomfortable situations is absolutely required an operator has to have it number two is that these businesses aren't as good as you think they are these managers aren't as good as they think they are there's people who are very good at certain types of businesses that would look

inside under the hood of some of my companies and been like damn nick is an idiot yes he's got these people doing that he's got no system connecting he's letting revenue slip away over here his leads aren't nurtured the right way over here they would look at my company and they would be able to give an education on it hire a consultant to tell you that you're dumb that's exactly what they do yes but what people don't understand is that all business is that way and as an entrepreneur you have to thrive under those chaotic environments you have to thrive under that unstructured uncomfortable and you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable so these operators that i'm finding i'm finding folks who okay the world is have you seen that little meme of the dog sitting

in the flaming house that is what running an agency and building an agency is like and other and many other types of small businesses why build agencies i i don't want to say who it is but i asked someone before uh before you came in here i was like what questions do you want to hear from them somebody that we know and they were like why does he keep building the agencies why doesn't he build one big company get some cash flow from it but build tons and tons of equity value why not do that you're trying to think right now no because because people tell me that i can't and i have have an ego like i'll just say like people tell me that i can't do all these things and also start companies are we gonna be late for dinner no i was just checking to make sure yeah

people tell me that i can't do this stuff people tell me nick focus on real estate nick you know don't get over your skis with all these side businesses you can't grow them all and i'm like dude i think i can i think i can empower these people i think i can just do handle distribution marketing for these companies i think some of them will still get very big i know i'm going to learn a lot and i'm uncomfortable i'm having a ton of fun and if one or two hit then yeah i'll get to keep piling on but i'm a i'm kind of a why would i put all my eggs in one basket when a business needs two or three years to mature anyway so sam par asked me this on my first million uh we've already promoted them too much so no one go listen um

but uh i i saw literally his eyes he was like oh wait actually pomp might not be a complete moron And when he asked me, he was like, why are you doing so many different things? And I was like, no, I'm just providing capital and distribution over and over and over again. I feel like you're doing a very similar thing in terms of helping to jumpstart these businesses. But is the long-term goal like you're not involved really? The playbook is the same. I'm not allowed to have a company email address. No direct reports except for the one operator to come to me if he feels like crying and needs to pick me up or he needs advice on something.

I'm coaching. I'm helping where I can. And obviously, I'm a tinkerer. I'm love getting involved in the businesses, but I'm, I'm enabling talented people. There are people who are really, really, really good at what they do. And I'm just giving them the fuel and the education, helping them go forward and providing the distribution and providing the capital. And it's really fun when you can do that. And after the, my first million episode that I was on a bunch of people reached out to me who were killers. They're killer operators. Like Nick,

I want to start companies. Nick, I want to start companies. I started talking to this guy from Cape town, South Africa, 26 year old building a little agency had about three or four grand a month of revenue. And he's a badass. It's like, Nick, I want to start a company. I was like, what kind of company is like a systems company? Like I want to come in and I want to set up a company from the ground up with the right emails, go to the right places. We've got the domains all set up. We're building the backend of the website where, you know, how does the CRM link, you know, what's happening automatically in the backend. And I'm like, damn, this guy's a badass. And we started talking, we started talking about potentially an SEO company. He worked at a firm

for a long time, knows it well. And eventually I was like, dude, just come and work for me. Just come into my company. I'll pay you a monthly stipend. And I want to see what you can do over the next 12 months and he's and he wrote writes me a long email like nick i'm gonna accept your offer and frankly i want to be you know i don't just want to be a uh you know a member of your holding company i'll be running your holding company and i'm like all right i'll give you that chance see what happens what could he mess up well right now like he's gonna have bank account access no well he's got a credit card with a limit um and again what what if he drains one of these $20,000 bank accounts. Um, no, I, I, uh, maybe I trust him to a fault, but I'm also

not going to let him totally screw me. It's interesting. I want to hear your thoughts on this. A lot of well-known influencers talk about how they were screwed a lot and how they've always like been robbed or messed with or something. Something has happened. Like they've just been wronged. And they talk a lot about how they've been wronged by so many people. Most of the successful folks that I know, I asked him, I was like, dude, have you ever been screwed? Have you ever been just totally, somebody fucking told you they're going to do something, you put money in and the money was gone

and they just disappeared? And maybe in the crypto space, yeah, that happens. But have you ever been like totally screwed over by somebody? I think that there's been situations that other people would look at and be like, I cannot believe that you dealt with that. Like crazy, crazy shit, right? Where there's somebody who, here's a great one.

There's somebody that has become well-known in the business world who, myself and a partner, were the first investors in this business. we invested via a convertible note and basically he waited the business exploded exploded and then he came back to us and said i'm not converting the debt into equity and i'm not paying back the debt good luck okay that's that house is getting screwed but i didn't think of it as being screwed you know what i took away from it i'll fucking never sign another document that said that it's not an auto conversion right and so like guess what we were able to uh kind of amicably figure

it out right we we whatever we got a decent return given how long we were invested whatever but like but technically he was allowed to do that by the documents 100 okay guess what guess whose fault that was that was my fault yeah i signed the paper yeah right like it was a learning lesson i could name like 10 different situations like that where like if you go into that like like there are people who'd be like i'm offended right like you're you're wrong to me yes i always look at it as like dude that's a learning lesson so i have this whole thing uh my wife and i always talk about like it's practice anything that goes wrong it's practice right and it's like because the thing that you're learning today is actually going to look like practice to the big thing

you're going to do in the future what's the big thing i don't fucking know when is the big thing coming i don't fucking know but i do know what is that when the big thing comes it's going to be all these little lessons we learned along the way and so i do think like when you said you know people are screwed like loser mentality because literally you go around all day long being like that person screwed me that person screwed me that person screwed me right and so it's the same thing i have like this like tip rule anytime you're at a restaurant whatever you look at the bill whatever you think that the tip should be at a dollar one dollar yeah right the average you know meal that you go to which is the average meal you go to like let's just say that you're

like okay it's 50 bucks it should be uh uh 20 you know 20 bucks um or i'm sorry 10 dollars right add one dollar now it's 11 guess what that person's like oh damn that was nice and i always say the same thing it's like they it means more to them than it does to me yeah right and now you extrapolate it out if the bill's bigger or whatever but like the same mentality of just like if you're constantly going around like trying to pick up pennies you miss all the fucking value same thing with the way you interact with people it's like you're like oh man that passive aggressive email fuck this person right like dude yes it's business like people send all kinds of crazy shit right people are very emotional i mean yes but if you just look at it as like you see it

for what it is like that's fine and so the other thing is um when you deal with people sometimes you have to realize like a planet will very much uh sometimes look at it and be like i don't want to like be around that person because of abc whatever right and i'll be the same person i'll be like look i understand exactly who that person is i know what i'm gonna get yeah i know exactly the pros the cons the risks you know all this stuff if i see them for who they are that's fine i can still learn something from them i can still you know do stuff with them whatever but like you just kind of have to be like eyes wide open try to be as real as possible and if you then go through life and every time something quote-unquote bad happens you're like what's the lesson in it

becomes a lot different so a great example is uh when i told you that one employee or potential employee backed out yep we called a couple of other employees of the business said hey we're hiring this person whatever so that my partner in that business as it was happening i literally we were texting back and forth what are the lessons and so now it's every time anything bad happens i just immediately think what are the lessons i can learn from this situation and i write them down and so you just build this almost like internal you know kind of book of lessons again does that make me better than anyone else no it just makes me like hopefully have one less potential mistake i'll make in the future so it's like when i hear people say like i'm screwed i'm

just like yo that's a loser mentality and somehow in society like you're not supposed to say that shit anymore but like no you're a fucking loser you didn't get screwed you probably contributed just as much yeah and people like no they stole from me i'm like well you're the moron who gave them access to steal right if you leave your shop open and somebody comes in and steal shit is that their fault or your fault like yeah you could argue that they shouldn't do that okay fine that's society has agreed on that but like lock the door i don't know like is that like crazy to think that way yeah oh you look like you disagree no i agree with you 100 i just worry that i'm gonna eat these words because what goes on youtube let's go no i mean i may get fucking screwed at some point yeah

And I'll, and it'll be my fault. It just hasn't happened yet. So maybe I am unnecessarily trusting or maybe it's that I don't give people access to my bank accounts. So the bank account stuff is like super simple. Right. But I also think there's this element of, um, all of these like critical bad situations, they all happen on the fringes, right? It's never like, uh, Hey, I gave money to Nick and Nick then, uh, said that he was going to do X and he did something different. if you if you get the big things right in business and your core and your foundation is solid yeah all the stuff that happens is not that critical like you're saying it's on it's on the edges 100 and the other thing too i think a lot of people uh naturally jump to is like uh hey this

situation that doesn't look great is coming right and what they want to do is they're like how do we bring as much firepower as possible let's sue let's do this let's do this and what i've learned over time, it's just like, dude, it's literally never worth the fight. Right. And so in those situations, there's always some way to solve the problem. And if it looks like it's not solvable, then there's something that you're missing in the equation. And so like, when you take that mentality of just like, you are a problem solver, solve the problem. I found that you usually can find some way to kind of get out of these situations. It's communication too. Cause you can see this stuff coming. People don't want to admit it, but anytime a business is failing,

it's a slow train wreck especially in real estate because it happens really slow you can see all these problems coming you can see the problems with people brewing you can see when people are upset you can read them you can you can get a feel for this stuff you just got to have those uncomfortable conversations right away and people aren't willing to do it people don't want to have those hard uncomfortable conversations all right last thing i want to talk about is uh the way that you interact not with the operators but with other people in the businesses do you tell them good job oh yeah i'm i am i am a big complimenter yeah okay i i uh i will definitely provide harsh feedback but never in a disrespectful way never in public um one of my operators wants to

go start a side business on on top of one of them i'm like dude you haven't proven to me that you can run this business so like we got to have this hard conversation now that okay probably not yet um but yeah a lot of compliments man a lot of compliments so how do you feel about this i think it's the number one it's one of the top issues that people struggle with when they get in this situation because there's an element of like i'm trying to motivate these people i'm trying to you know keep them focused and all this kind of stuff versus when there's too many compliments right people sort of kind of believe their own bullshit and so like there is this very delicate balance and i don't think that there's a perfect science to it but the people who get it right are way more

successful than the people who aren't i can just see and feel who's really laying it on the line for my companies i can see the people the employees because i'm tinkering i'm looking at all the reports i can see what engineers are doing what and i know who's really busting their ass to to make the company better and sending them an email that says hey i know how much you're working like keep it up thank you that's that goes such a long way bosses don't do that which is which is insane to me what reports do you get is it daily weekly monthly i like i'll go out for beers on friday night and my wife will come home and flip on netflix i'll go to my computer and look at every single self-storage facility at how many move-ins we have that month at what prices you

know how many people are moving out but that's real-time reports that's real time yeah okay what about the other businesses already cost say i look at leads because my job is distribution so i'm looking at how many leads came in how many propers do they have i'm looking at sales reports so this is more like you're looking at like dashboards you guys have not necessarily like somebody's compiling a report to send you every week or anything yeah your table dashboards yes something yeah okay and do you ever change your behavior i ask hard questions that's what i do like they get one compliment for every five hard questions i'm gonna say hey uh here's a potential problem brewing what are we doing to think about this and it drives them nuts but they're always

really good questions and we always have some takeaways not always like okay maybe we just gotta wait this out i'm the kind of guy who imagine a company is a is a globe i'm the kind of guy who like just like a basketball you keep it spinning keep it rolling forward i'm the kind of guy who jerks it so i kind of i've learned over the years that i can't just come in and wreck shit you know turn shit over and make it i want it all to happen right away and shit happens really fast in my companies but i also know that i can't my employees are all going to quit and leave if i'm up there up their ass every day we have uh somebody works for one of our businesses that recently was basically telling me like uh hey i have a lot of things like they were distracted

right and so uh i kind of took a leap it was one of the first time i'd done it but i said listen here's what i want you to do every single day i want you to wake up and i want you to send literally when you wake up get on your computer and you send me what are your priorities for the day and i'll agree or disagree right and uh i recently had a one-on-one i bet you didn't even have to really respond because him thinking through that strained it right out yeah and and so like i was like you know at first there's going to be five or ten things and maybe we agree on 20 or 30 percent right but over time like we'll learn each other and we'll actually get to 100 alignment every single day and i recently had a one-on-one with this person and they told me uh yeah it's crazy

i get so much more done and uh i'm so much more efficient and i was like what do you mean and they were like well before like i didn't i wasn't clear on the priorities so like i had all this extra time and like the work expanded to fit the time right and so now i'm like wait a minute maybe actually the driving factor isn't you know uh anything more so than just like the more you put on their plate you can drive the efficiency and actually i think the best people that's what they want because i feel like they're getting a lot of wins in a day right and so you go from like i got one thing done every two days to like maybe get three things on the day it builds momentum right kind of where we started the conversation so you're ahead of me in this game you've been at

it for longer your reach is bigger your distribution is more you've made a lot of investments only for now what blind spots do you see like you talking to me you're getting a look into my mind for an hour now what do you think should be something i'm more aware of that maybe i'm not as focused as i should be on or something that you could see messing all this up and if you're watching this comment and let me know email me nick sweatystartup.com you've just got to look in online for an hour there's three there's three areas that everyone up uh one um it's all the personal reputation stuff like your personal reputation will get destroyed over time for things that you don't even do right and what i mean by that is like the percentage of people in your

audience, let's say 1% are haters. Well, it used to be one person. Then it was 10, then it was a hundred. Then it was whatever. They're the loudest. Right. And so what will end up happening is they will start to, um, kind of like lionize or really go after things that you do that you don't think are a big deal. And do they sway those folks who aren't necessarily loudest? Right. And so like that, that ends up happening. And so like, you got to get really, really comfortable just being like, I literally don't give a fuck what you guys think. Right. So I think that happens to everyone. and i see like there's some people who came out of nowhere um i'll use andrew huberman as an example i love his content right he's done a fantastic job you're like how could anyone ever

get mad at that guy yeah recently i saw he's like in the comments he's having to respond to people and stuff right and it's like once you cross that line into like okay now now i'm in the fray that you just can't win right because somebody's always gonna have a problem whatever so like in some weird way like the more authentic you are the more people expect you to respond and so like you got to like kind of figure that out i don't know what the solution is but i think that's is a huge risk for people i never felt good after getting in those comments you're right nothing good ever happened never came of that but like you have part of the audience because you were authentic you responded to comments and like you know i mean so it's like this like catch 22 so i

think that's like a huge thing no one really talks about the second thing is uh your natural reaction will be to do more and more and more and there is some equilibrium one company is probably not the right answer 100 companies is not the right answer where is that balance and like what people don't like to admit is like on monday it may be five companies on wednesday it could be 10 right and like it depends on what else you have going on in your life like you know uh cash flow uh and you ask the question about pulling an operator even shutting down a company because you yeah i'm gonna have to do that at some point you're gonna have to do it but also uh it's easy like some of these questions are connected and like okay cool we're you and i're gonna start a business in six

months if we're not doing a hundred thousand dollars in annual recurring revenue then we're gonna shut the business down great we get there we're at 90k all right you gotta put another 25 000 in okay if we're not at 200k we'll make it up at the one year mark then we're gonna shut it down we're at 185 right or at or at 195 top decisions right and so like some of it's like hey i'm a bet on myself i'm a you know i'm a believer i'm courageous i'm all this stuff and where's the line to you cross over stupidity this is the nitty-gritty of all this stuff right so I think like that piece of like starting a lot of stuff is like fun and exciting and all that but like when you have to start

killing things then what do you do with that person if they're good maybe you can put them somewhere else you know inside of the organization they're not good you gotta get rid of it like this again nitty-gritty right and then the third thing is self funding versus external funding if it's successful you're an idiot not to raise tons and tons of money and pour gas on the fire and make it explode right in like a positive way but like man it's nice when you're getting distributions and kind of all this stuff and so like it doesn't necessarily have to be an either or i've seen people who have raised money and it's like under the guise of hey we're going to take distributions

here's the formula or whatever but usually what ends up happening is the self-funding everything kind of like caps out at like five to ten million dollars of revenue very few businesses like convert kit i think uh they do like 30 million dollars in revenue bootstrapped right um butcher box they do 550 to 600 million dollars a year in revenue bootstrapped right so you can do it but it's still like even convert kit right if you were to talk to nathan like could they be bigger with funding maybe maybe actually would have killed them right you can suffocate a business with capital just as much as you can starve it and so you start getting into like again like okay what am i actually trying to accomplish here am i optimizing for cash flow am i optimizing for

equity that's both is this a 10 million dollar a year uh uh revenue business that throws off three million dollars of cash and like if we get there let's not trick ourselves into thinking there's a hundred million dollar opportunity there's no like hey avoid this one pothole right i will say it's been you talk to guys like you know xavier and sieva with enduring ventures i know you see brent be sure you see these folks who buy companies and that's sexy man like it's easy for me to say damn what am i doing starting these companies from nothing when you can go out and raise a little bit of money buy these businesses grow them um yeah it's uh there's there's just so many ways to do this stuff so many ways to do this stuff not one of them's right

that's the hard part of all this the you know the people i think are most scared of kind of the world we're talking about these private equity guys are gonna get their faces smashed you think so 100 because guess what how are you gonna win a deal over kim kardashian she had a private equity firm you are screwed you are not winning yeah mark walberg is a better private equity ventures or uh matt mcconaughey just yeah uh what ryan reynolds ryan reynolds matt mcconaughey uh mark walberg rob dreardak right uh george clooney kim kardashian the rock the rock's a fucking billionaire right like y'all are all laughing the dude's got a billion so you see what we're talking about here just accelerating the distribution and the name and the trust that

comes along with a personal brand whether you're an athlete an actor or or a media personality like us that can accelerate entrepreneurship which we haven't seen a lot of the kardashians and and these folks we're talking about now but there's also a lot of influencers with millions of subscribers that don't make any money i think a lot of those people haven't yet realized it but they will and so it's you know early adopters people are a little later whatever um but also you're going to see a rise of entrepreneurs who are like, dude, I don't give a shit about content, but I can operate. Let me go partner up with somebody who's got a big content piece. If you're listening, you have a couple of guys. No. Yeah, you're right. I mean,

the operations is the hard part and finding these operators is the tough part. The distribution is the stuff that comes naturally to you and I, the nitty gritty of running these companies is the hard, uncomfortable work. Yeah. And so if you asked me, like, in the investing world, I think there are four themes. There may be more, but like four themes that I think are really, really big themes over the next 20 years. The first is there's going to be a complete debasement of fiat currencies around the world. It doesn't mean hyperinflation or anything like that. It just means that there's going to be alternative currencies, Bitcoin specifically.

The second thing is that there's going to be a rise of automation. Bitcoin kind of falls under that, but also the artificial intelligence. And not because people are going to go build AI companies. It's because they're just going to automate things inside of their company. I have been pitched 500 different projects and features and all this nonsense. The things where I see the most value occurring right now are people just using the technology inside their companies to go faster. So similar to the gas powered lawnmower revolutionizing lawn care companies just made them more efficient and more powerful and better. Yeah.

So like, okay, how do I use this to write my blog post? Still need a dude behind the mower. Correct. So then the third thing is this idea of like, go find the customers first and then build the businesses. So whether that is actually private equity type backed with funds, et cetera, whether it's individuals or whatever, just like finding the customers first is now possible. And then you can go build a product. And so like, there's a whole bunch of technologies and nuances that have changed that allow that to happen. But then the fourth one is I actually think a lot of people

are just going to say dude i don't need the job that i had but i don't actually want to be like a true operator that has like a whole company with people that report to me yeah do you know how many single employee uh multi-millionaires are going to get created in the next 20 years it is going to be insane i mean we know several of them already but yeah a ton i agree with that you're going to sit in front of your little portal into the fucking internet with these tools the leverage is exploding yeah and so like now you're gonna be a single person and you're gonna make millions of dollars a year using these tools living wherever you want yeah but you just got to like figure out what the angle is and so like i don't even know if we can sit and identify like

oh here's 10 different ideas of like how to do that yet but there are example after example after example and i look at like the line of progress it is not linear it is exponential in terms of how many people are figuring this out and so like everyone's like oh i want to go build the next you super sexy app or whatever. Sure. Maybe you can do that, but guess what is actually going to be more likely. So you're going to figure out some way to take your consulting skills. You're going to put up a landing page, right? People are going to hit you up and you're going to charge them a reasonable rate. And you're going to do it from anywhere in the world behind your computer. And you're going to make $350,000. You're going to do that for a decade. And you're literally going to

go flex at your kid's school and be like, I'm rich. Yeah. Right. And you guys are all going to an office. And so like, as that theme plays out, you then can see how easily how like these four themes start to converge too right and so you have like this whole automation thing you have uh kind of the solo you know uh folks and then you're also going to have the audience like guess what you're doing you have the audience you start out as an individual right but you're like pushing down and delegating and then you're building all these automated systems like that's the future of the world yeah i love it man where can we send people to find you i write a newsletter every week that i've been putting a lot of time into all right what's it called it's called nick huber's newsletter

it's at sweatystartup.com and you can sign up for it sweatystartup.com yeah i'm gonna start a little business brokerage company i'm excited about and through nickhuber.com where we're gonna invest in one company a year partner with one or two companies a year and broker three or four companies a year that are you know in the audience buy box excited about that but yeah man twitter at sweaty startup send me a dm my dms are open i read most of them don't respond to most of them but uh i'm gonna send nick a dm after this we'll see if he responds all right thank you for doing this very very appreciative for you having me man this is this is amazing I just got a master class

this is amazing alright we'll do it again thanks