How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things With Nick Huber

Transcript:

On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, how to Get Rich Doing Boring Things with Nick Huber.

Ooh, what's up everybody? And welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of Master money.co, and today on the Personal Finance Podcast. We're gonna talk about how to get Rich doing boring things with Nick Huber. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the Master Money Newsletter by going to master money.co/newsletter.

And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, apple Podcast, YouTube, or whatever your favorite podcast player is. And if you want to help out the show, consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or. Your favorite podcast player. Now, today we're gonna be talking to Nick Huber about his brand new book called Sweaty Startup, and it's How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things.

This is a book that I read in two days. I read it in 48 hours because once I started it, I could not put it down. It is a fantastic book for. Anybody looking to start a business, maybe you're even looking to start a side hustle. You are running a business and you need to learn how to become more effective when it comes to sales or delegation and or you need to become effective in other skills that help you build that business to the next level.

This is a fantastic book for you, even if you are someone who is just looking for different skills to build up in your career that are gonna help you make more money. This is also a fantastic book for you. Now in this episode, Nick and I talk about some of his favorite ideas. Right now we talk about some of the most valuable skills in business and some of the ones that you want to build up over time.

We talk about how to reduce your stress and anxiety in business, and then we talk about his strategy on how he uses real estate and how he utilizes his businesses to help him buy more real estate as well. We go through some common myths in wealth building and we talk about some of his philosophies when it comes to building a business.

I'm really excited for you guys to hear this one. So let's welcome Nick Huber back to the Personal Finance Podcast. So Nick, welcome back to the Personal Finance Podcast. I. Andrew, thanks for having me. I am so excited to talk to you today 'cause you wrote this incredible book and like I was just telling you before the show, I finished this book in two days because I absolutely enjoyed it.

It was so incredibly powerful, kind of in the time of life that I'm in. But I think so many people are gonna really, really get value outta this book and it's called The Sweaty Startup. And it's basically how to get rich by doing boring things and kind of going through the book. I think there's so many valuable lessons.

Things that you talk through when in business and some of the skills that you need to be building, but in addition, just even how to delegate and how to grow your business over time. Yeah. So, uh, really, really thought it was absolutely amazing and I want to kind of dive right into some of the thoughts and the topics that you talk about in there.

Is there an underrated, boring business idea that you have seen lately that you've kind of said, Hey, that's an amazing idea, that's a genius idea. Sprinkler install and repair and maintenance. These water suppression or fire suppression systems in these buildings, you just have to pay an ungodly amount of money to maintain them and to install them, which makes it a good business.

I just had a friend who bought a fire protection business basically, and they, so they do a ton of that and they, he was kind of going through some of the numbers with me, and they're absolutely incredible. Just the profitability of some of those, um, especially the high risk, high reward, right? If you mess up, if you don't know what you're doing, uh, it can go south very quickly, but.

Yeah, you get the right people in the right positions, I think it can grow. And that's the same kind of across the board with sweaty startups. Varying levels of risk. Varying levels of skills. You can start cleaning something, repairing something, you know, washing something, moving something. Those are the simple ones.

And work your way, all the way up to doing pretty complex things. I completely agree. So take us back a little bit, you know, in the very early days, I know we kind of talked about this a little bit when the first time you came on, but what was the impetus of you realizing that boring businesses could be the ticket to wealth?

I think, look, my book is never gonna sell a million copies because the message that I'm gonna deliver here in the next hour with you is not sexy. It's not get rich quick. It's not the underdog gladiator story, you know, succeeding amo against all odds. Um, we hear those stories. We hear the stories of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and.

Bill Gates starting the business in their garage and then becoming billionaires a few years later. But the wealthy people that I know, the wealthy people in my life, the ones who have the nice houses and live a great quality of life in my town, um, almost all of them started boring old fashioned businesses and I'm no different.

I started a pick up and delivery storage company when I was in college, and I. Went to my first entrepreneurship class where everybody had their business idea and they were gonna pitch their business idea to the class. And there were 24 new app, new invention, new technology ideas, and then my moving company.

And I think almost all those folks got jobs. And here I am still at it. So it's selection bias, obviously, because it's me. But yeah, it's a pattern across life. Is that the boring stuff? You know, the common stuff. If you can do that stuff uncommonly well, you can win. Typically, most people, you know, don't gravitate towards that boring stuff like you're talking about here.

And I think most people want to go towards that tech startup or do those other things and this is the spot where you can really do a lot of cool stuff. And so I love that. So how did your first sweaty startup that you kind of just talked about a little bit when it was Storage squad, I believe. So how did your first, uh, sweaty startup, you know, what did it teach you, you know, more than any college class could or anything else like that?

I think it's what I learned is that you can innovate in small ways that are less risky. So instead of flipping a business model on its head, you look at the operations of the company and you find a way to operate more efficiently than your competitors. And if you do little things better and differently than your competitors, but you offer the same service, but the service is either faster, cheaper, or higher quality, one of those three things, you can carve out your piece of the pie and you can make some money.

You don't need the whole pie, you don't need a monopoly, you don't need a patent. You can do something everybody else is doing, just doing a little bit better. And that's what we did in our business. All of our competitors were running around with clipboards and printed schedules, and we used iPhones and Google Sheets to live, update our schedule.

Um, we were taking pictures of orders and somebody in the Philippines was, you know, building our invoices instead of doing it on site. We just did a lot of things to make our business more efficient and, uh, we could pick up more boxes per man hour than any of our competitors. And so we made a good living.

I remember you talking about this last time. You had a marketing tool. Basically you took chalk, you went and bought chalk from, you know, Walmart or wherever else, and you just started to kind of write, Hey, this is our business. And you'd go to college campuses and just kind of write it on the sidewalks there and people would walk by.

Um, so there's so many cool, efficient ways that you just start, you know, with this. Right on brand with the sweaty start, which I think is really, really cool. I love things that don't scale. People want to pay more on Google Ads or find viral marketing ways to do things, and that stuff works, but it's catching lightning in a bottle, and it's not as approachable for bootstrapping entrepreneurs without a lot of cash.

We knew where our clients walked. We knew where they lived. We knew where they went to class because it was college students. So we wrote Sidewalk Chalks on the, you know, ads on the ground, and, uh. We watched 'em sign up, man. They walked over it, looked at their phone and signed up and they became our customers.

I love that. I love that. Like those gorilla marketing tactics are just so cool. I think. 'cause they work, they really truly work. And every time I've done one I'm like, man, this has gotta be a waste of time. But every single time I do one, it seems to work every single time. So I think it's one of those things, you just gotta get out there.

You gotta make connections, which is really, really cool. Yeah. Um, you talk about execution beats ideas, so why do so many people still chase the perfect idea instead of starting, do you think? 'cause execution's, hard hiring people, delegating, making decisions, solving problems all day. I mean, the, the life of a business owner, an entrepreneur, yes, they get wealthy if they do it right, but in general I think they're almost underpaid for what they do.

'cause it's so hard. So the idea is one thing, but, and yes, um, I talk a lot about, even in the book, about picking the right opportunity and how to look at a market and figure out where there might be, you know, holes in it so that you can compete. But. Everybody thinks they gotta have a new idea and protect that idea.

All you have to do really is look at what's working. Like look at the companies that are out there in your real life making money and find one with a fax machine sitting on the desk and other inefficient processes inside their company. I. And that's where you might be able to carve out a piece of the pie.

Exactly. A lot of times it's just really the common sense stuff that is kind of sitting right in front of you that most people don't gravitate towards because like you said, it takes a little bit more work and a little bit more grease to get it working. Um, but it's usually the common sense stuff that's sitting right in front of you.

So say for example, someone's listening. And the interesting thing about this podcast is we have people who are really, really wealthy that listen to the show and we have people who are just getting started who listen to the show as well. Yep. And if someone is in that boat where they are just getting started, maybe they have their first $10,000 saved up and they wanna start doing something today, what would you do if you were in their position?

Yeah. It's a, it's a two-sided equation. You can get wealthy one of two ways. You can save enough money to get wealthy or you can earn more money and get wealthy. And I think it's always a combination. I'm extremely frugal to this day, and it was a superpower of mine in the early days of being an entrepreneur, but it's very hard to save your way to serious wealth.

So if you focus on the other side, that's what I've always focused on is the other side of the equation. How can I make more money? It's a process and what people don't want to hear again, another piece of bad news for people is that it's a five year journey generally to get something of value created.

So I like starting by trading your time for money. If you don't have like, people skip that step, they try to scale, they try to think about how they're gonna get big, they think about who they need to hire. They're building their business plan, their marketing plan. It's much simpler than that. Go out and trade your time for money.

Hopefully you can trade it for 25 bucks an hour at first, and then 50 bucks an hour. If you're doing something, you know, specialty, you can trade it for a hundred dollars an hour, trading a hundred dollars an hour, 20 hours a week. And aside on the weekends and after work, you know, you can pretty quickly earn more money than you're making at your job, than you quit.

And then you hire somebody to do admin work and while you focus on sales, hire somebody to deliver the thing you're doing and then wake up five years later and you have something of value. I. I couldn't agree more. And your income is probably the most important factor when it comes to building wealth.

And there is a lot of statistics that have come out even as of recent where, you know, people are saying, you know, they wanna save their way to money. But if you look at the stats, it's the people with the higher incomes are the ones that really build true wealth. If you wanna get to those higher levels, uh, you absolutely need to increase your income and it makes.

Life so much easier if you just increase your income. I remember even, you know, early on, uh, when I was, you know, my first job outta college, I was making $30,000 a year. And when I had that first job, I remember just like thinking, man, I don't even know how people get by doing this. Mm-hmm. And you know, over time I started to increase my income and all of a sudden life got a little easier and a little easier and you were able to save more and grow your wealth more just because, uh, you increase your income.

And so. Something you talk about a lot too is, you know, spotting easy to win games in business, and I think that's a really, really cool concept to think of. So what are some easy to win games that a lot of people often overlook? Yeah, so I think entrepreneurs look at themselves again as a gladiator in an arena.

I. They're fighting against 20, 30 other gladiators, lions, whatever it might be. And the odds that Russell Crowe came out on top were astronomically low, right? But that's how people think about entrepreneurship. They think about themselves in a valley and they look up at business opportunities as mountains.

Oh my gosh. Look at that Very high treacherous, icy mountain. I'm gonna climb that mountain. Win nine out of 10 times. There's no way to get to the top, but at the top there's a billion dollars. There's a billion dollars. If you get to the top of that mountain, I have this entire thing flipped on its head.

I'm already on top of the mountain because I'm in America and I have opportunity and I am about to turn on a fire hose of water. And when I turn on that fire hose of water, the top of the mountain, what is it gonna do, Andrew? It's gonna find the simplest way, the quickest way, the path of least resistance to get to the bottom.

That's what water does. So as an entrepreneur, you are finding the path of least resistance. You're doing the easy things. Business is not a David Goggins workout. It's not a gladiator movie. It's not an Olympic gymnastics routine where the degree of difficulty. Makes you score more points in business you can get.

And Warren Buffet says you can get paid really well for jumping over one foot bars over and over and over again. Yeah. So why would you not shift the mindset to think of, Hey, what can I do with the weakest competition with the most money out there that is a good opportunity in my town, and how can I go do it?

So I like to think of business as if I'm a poker player. And my chips are time. I only have so much time. I get 24 chips every single day, and I don't know how many hours you're in a week or a year. I'm not good at public math, but let's just see I have those chips stacked in front of me and I'm choosing how to invest them.

Am I gonna put that chip on Netflix? Am I gonna put that chip on going to my daily job, or am I'm gonna put that chip on a tech startup with one in a million odds of success? Or am I gonna put that chip. On an area on a hand that gives me the best opportunity to potentially win. So that's my method. And in chapter four, the book we go through how to analyze an opportunity and how to figure out if it's a good opportunity.

We can talk about that a little bit if you wanna go deeper here. Absolutely. I'd love to go deeper into that, just talking about opportunities, because I think a lot of people will look at opportunities and maybe try to figure out if it is a good opportunity. And if you make a mistake and you take advantage of an opportunity that is something where you're doing business.

I call it business on hard mode a lot of times. Um, if you're doing business on. Hard mode. That is not a fun place to be in. It's stressful. There's a lot of anxiety involved in there. So how do you analyze opportunities? I had a friend call me and my friends and I talk business all the time. It's just in our culture, every time we get together to play golf or drink beer, we're talking business as well.

He calls me, he goes, Nick, I have a business idea that I wanna start. I'm really close to doing it. Can I come over? Let's talk it over and let's see, like let's, I want your advice. So we come over, we sit on my back deck. It's Sunday afternoon, we crack a beer. We're just talking about business and he says, okay, I wanna start a house painting business.

I've looked at two franchises that I potentially wanna buy. You know, here are the details of each franchise. I've bought a web domain for cheap. I built a WordPress website myself. I got a logo on 99 designs. Um, I've priced out the rigs. I've done business analysis, financial planning on what it's gonna cost me per job on in material and labor and what I think I can charge per job and all this stuff you done.

Three months worth of work. Nick, what do you think? And I look at him, I'm like, it doesn't matter what I think. And he goes, what do you mean you're supposed to be the guru? You're the guy who wrote the book on sweaty startups. What do you think? And I'm like, okay, first of all, it doesn't matter what I think.

It doesn't matter what I wanna do. It doesn't matter what you wanna do. We're gonna look at this totally em emotionally. I pick up my phone and I go to Google Maps and I type in house painting. A bunch house painting companies show up on Google Maps. I click the one closest to me and I hit call. This is Sunday afternoon, probably 3:00 PM I put the phone on speaker.

The guy answers on the second ring. He is very professional on the phone. Tells me that he can get out there tomorrow morning, come out to my house tomorrow morning to quote the job, and he has a crew ready on Wednesday to do the job and that he is done. He did Athens church, he did a local gas station.

He is done all these big jobs. He is super professional. He is got the best crews, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I say, okay, thanks. And I hang up. Call number two, same thing. Answers on the second ring on Sunday. He pulls up Google Maps, looks at my house. Figures out the square footage, asks if there's a third row in the back.

He's looking at it on 3D mode, and he gives me a ballpark price to paint my house on the phone and says that he can have a crew there on Tuesday morning to start. I hang up, call the third person, answers the phone on Sunday, super pushy, trying to get my email, trying to get my phone number. Hey, I'll beat any price in town.

You tell me the price and I will beat it. I again, I can be there this week, like, let's go. Like I want to earn your business. Tell me what I need to do. He is bragging about the projects he's done, whatever. I hang up. The third call, this took 10 minutes. It took less than 10 minutes to do this, and I'm like, what do you think of this business idea?

Can you guess what he said, Andrew? He was out, so he did three months worth of work and I actually called competitors. In 10 minutes and I learned, you know, five times more, I needed to, on the other end of that spectrum, I, I bought a property recently. It was a commercial property here in Athens. We needed a survey.

I called the person who wrote the original survey. They're no longer in business. I called 10 other surveys in town. One of them answered the phone and I was able to get one price through calling back and emailing. I was able to get one price in four business days to come out and do a survey. A guy made $2,000 to come and spend one morning at my property in Mark Stakes.

And that I think is the perfect way to do this. 'cause a lot of people, like your friend did, will go do all this analysis it, they will go through analysis paralysis really, to even do all this research. And they'll do all these spreadsheets and they'll put all this stuff together. And what you're doing is you're just making simple phone calls to see how competitive is this landscape?

Can they be out that day? Well, if there's a bunch of people who are willing to come the next day, 24 hours later, and they have a full crew ready to go. That means they don't have a lot of business going on in, and at the same time, they also, there's just way too much competition. If you wanna dip your toe into this, like I'm gonna give you the 32nd spiel on how to do this, the whole thing.

'cause that's a part of it. First step is to go to sweaty startup.com/ideas. There's 200 plus business ideas. Actually there's probably 300. I've been working on it for five years. It's a ton of boring, bootstrapping businesses where you're either repairing something, building something, cleaning something, moving something, whatever, right?

Then you make a list of 10, you make five that are very simple. Easy to bootstrap, low risk. This is power washing, house painting, window cleaning, things like that. Pick three more that are a little bit more higher skilled. You gotta invest five, 10, $15,000 in it. You gotta have a little bit of a talent. You gotta know how to do something.

Then the last two are gonna be pretty heavy investment, like they're gonna take some work, some research. You need to get a degree, you're gonna need to get some special insurance, whatever it might be. Then you do what I just said. You call competitors in every single one, and you make a Google spreadsheet of, Hey, do they do digital marketing?

How professional are they on the phone? Do they answer the phone? Then if you actually get it whittled down to three or four business ideas that you might wanna start, you get real pricing on what they do and you figure out how many days it's gonna take and how much material it's gonna take. And generally they'll tell you this and you put a price per man hour on the time of the work you might wanna do.

My lawn guy makes $23 per man hour out here on my lawn. Three guys show up, they charge me 50 bucks. They work here for 40 minutes. That's not a good business because they're making $23 an hour. How are you gonna find somebody who wants to work for 10 after workers' compensation and unemployment and all the downtime and all the travel, plus equipment, plus fuel?

I don't know how he makes any money charging me 50 bucks to mow my lawn. On the other hand, I paid somebody three grand to remove two trees in my backyard and two guys showed up and they were here for six hours. Their man hours were like $320 an hour, even if you count amortization and you know the big bunch of equipment that they had in the payments.

So that's the process you find opportunity in your town. Everybody thinks the moat is something special technology, something innovative. No, the moat is geography. The moat is geography. I love that. I think that is the key that most people don't look, that's not where they look is they don't look geographically.

They look at things that they can scale, you know, nationwide or whatever else they wanna do. But that really is, I think, a huge key asset for a lot of people. I wanna talk through some skills as well, because skills are obviously one of the most important factors I. For you to be able to build wealth over time.

And, you know, you've talked about sales being the most important skill, uh, or one of the most important skills in order to be able to even build a business. Uh, and I can't think of someone who is, uh, you know, more qualified to talk about this. 'cause you have an entire company that teaches people, uh, how to build sales skill sets and you guys do some really cool things.

So what are some of the most impactful ways to build that skill of sales? Man, this was an eyeopener for me. My first day as an entrepreneur. I was excited. I was at Cornell and I sent an email to the entrepreneurship professor, um, his name's Dan Cohen. He had sold a foundation repair, sweaty startup for almost $10 million a few years earlier in like 2005.

And he was at Cornell in 2007 as the entrepreneur in residence. I was there, I was a junior in college. Um, actually this is like 2011. I got my years wrong. He sold the business in 2007. And I had this meeting with him in 2011, right when my journey started. I was like, I need to pick your brain like I'm an entrepreneur now.

Let's get breakfast. We sit down at this breakfast shop, it's called Aladdin's, in Ithaca, New York. I don't know if they're still open. It was a little Greek place. Very first question. He asked me, okay, Nick, you're an entrepreneur now. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I am. He goes, do you like sales? Are you good at sales?

And I could tell that I needed to say, yes, I love sales and I'm good at sales. I could just tell by the smirk on his face. But I decided to be honest with him, and I said. No, I actually don't like sales. It's uncomfortable. I'm the visionary. I'm the person on the whiteboard. I'm the guy making the decisions.

I'm the CEO, the leader of the business. And he kind of looks at me, what lets me finish talking. And he goes, Nick, if you don't like sales and you're not willing to get good at sales, you had best get a job right now. And my heart sank. I'm like, what? What are you talking about? And he goes. Every single part of the rest of your life will be sales.

If you choose this path as a beginning entrepreneur, he's like, this is what you gotta understand, Nick, right now you got no employees, right? I was like, yeah, you got no equipment. He's like, yeah, you got no warehouses. Yeah, you got how you just got a business partner, but like you got no customers. How you gonna go get an employee to trust you?

Like why would they wanna come work for you? Do you realize how risky it is? You gotta sell them. How are you gonna convince a guy who has a warehouse in Boston or in Ithaca or in, you know, state College, Pennsylvania, or Philadelphia, or Washington, dc How are you gonna convince a real estate owner to lease their warehouse to you?

You got no credit, you're 23 years old. How are you gonna convince that it's sales? How are you gonna convince your box manufacturer to give you credit, to sell you boxes? How are you gonna convince your customers to buy from you, your blah, blah, blah. And he just listed every area of my business, of all the people I had to sell because I had nothing.

I had no respect, I had no trust. And um, he's like, so you have two choices. It's like go get a job or get good at sales, and I'm very lucky that I took that meeting to heart. I walked out there dejected and down, but. You know, I had an open mind and I accepted it as fact, and I've kind of dedicated the rest of my career to getting good at sales.

Are there any things that you did early on that were really impactful for you to learning how to sell? Are there books you read or are there specific things that you did? Or did you just go out there and start to practice? What are some of the things that you did to actually make a huge impact? Early on, I.

Yeah, so the, there's an entire two chapters section in my book about sales because I think it is some of the most important things, and there's tactics that we can talk about, like building trust, how to frame the conversation, you know, how to get a lit, as much leverage as you possibly can. In the early days, you have very little leverage, but if somebody feels that you are super needy, it's not a good place to be in from a sales environment.

But the truth about sales is, yes, you can read the books. Yes, you can study the tactics and yes, you can practice and you should practice, and you should review your own calls and like listen to yourself talk. That's a great part of it. But sales is a muscle. People think they can listen to me talk, and you and I talk on this podcast or watch YouTube videos of whoever on sales and go to training classes and study and read and read books.

It doesn't work. Like if you wanna build muscle, are you gonna write the workout plan and buy the protein powder and think about building muscle and watch shows of Arnold Schwarzenegger and hang out on YouTube and go to, you know, get in the Reddit group with muscle people and go to the gym and stand around and talk to people.

No, you gotta lift the weight. You gotta lift the weight. So same with delegation, unfortunately, same with uh, you know, decision making. It's all practice and they're all muscles, so you gotta do the work. Exactly. And they're all just, you just really have to get out there and start doing it. I realized I was the person who thought you could read the books and kind of go out there and learn the skill by doing or by just reading and you know, I practice all these different things and someone would ask me a question that just kind of threw me off.

And every single time I'd freeze. And it was all practice because I had to figure out, hey, how do you actually handle situations and make this look natural also. Yeah. Um, and it's one of those things that, you know, the more you do, uh, the easier it becomes over time, but it, like your mentor said, it is so incredible.

Incredibly powerful, how impactful this is in every single thing in business, and I think most people need to learn how to build up that skill if they haven't already. Half of it's just communication and the other half of it's just not being insecure like a fact of life. If we just zoom out and talk about life now, I know a phenomenal amount of people who are not very smart, but are massively successful in all areas of life.

They've found an amazing wife. They have a great job. They're fit, they're happy, they're healthy, simply because they're not insecure. They're not above average human beings. Their IQ is not high. They did not get a 30 plus on the a CT. They did not get into Harvard. They are successful simply because they're not insecure.

And I think that's a massive part of life. And unfortunately with, you know, social media and, and YouTube and all that, getting pumped into our kids, starting at the age of about two communication and just security, being in, you know, interactive environments where you're interacting with people is at an all time low.

So if you can master this stuff, the world is your oyster because people as a whole are getting worse and worse at it. I couldn't agree more. And I think another muscle that a lot of, well, I see it as a muscle at least that you kind of need to exercise is stress. And you talk about stress being a prerequisite to success.

Uh, and it is something, I'll tell you like a quick little story for me. Even when I first start, my first little business that I started was just buying, you know, single family home rental properties. And I remember the third one that I bought, um, you know, all the tenants started calling me. And one day all three tenants called me in the same day.

And I was like, this is the most stressful thing I've ever had to deal with. I lost sleep over it and all these different things. And then now, like every. Stressful thing in business doesn't bother me at all. And I feel like it's because I exercise that muscle, uh, over time and it was something that I could just kind of learn to manage over time.

So how do you personally manage the stress that comes with building your, you know, $30 million per year companies? I mean, you have tons of different companies, so you have things probably coming left and right at you all day long. How do you manage that stress? Yeah, I, it's 10:00 AM right now, and at 9:00 AM I had to let somebody go and know one of my companies, somebody who at the end of the call was crying because they don't know how they're gonna feed their families or pay rent when the phone rings.

As an entrepreneur, when the phone rings as a business owner. It's very rarely good news. It's very rarely a customer calling you to thank you. It's very rarely one of your employees calling to say, oh, Nick, I'm just so happy you're my boss. Everything here is absolutely perfect. Doesn't work that way. So you have to find a way to get comfortable being uncomfortable, whether it's sales, hiring, delegation, decision making, problem solving.

And handling stress. Now, there's some tactics that I talk about in the book to manage stress. I think stress is almost every stressful situation is an unmet expectation. So if you get very good at managing expectations, and this is literally, this can be telling your wife when you're gonna be home from playing golf.

Some of my buddies don't know how to tell her that a round actually does take five hours by the time you load up the car, you know, even up in the clubhouse and get home. So on the 17th toll, she's pissed. She's pissed, and that creates a stressful environment. Same with your employees, who you tell them it's gonna be an easy job and they're gonna make as much money as they want, and everything's gonna be perfect.

They start their job and they're gonna come to you like, Nick, this is not what you told me this was going to be. That creates a stressful environment. Same with sales, same with delivering. Same with operations, same with hiring. So every area of life is varying levels of stress, and some people are much better at handling stress if they've exercised the muscle.

There are people who a flat tire on the way home from the grocery store would ruin their week. They would pull over on the side of the road, they would cry. They would've a panic attack. They'd call their mom. These are grown adults by the way. They would freak out. There are other people who would have a flat tire on the way home from the grocery store, and they would forget to tell their spouse about it at dinnertime because it was a non-issue.

That's the best comparison I can make. I completely agree and I think it's one of those things after you deal with, you know, stress over time and you can kind of just handle it kind of, for me at least, this is how it worked. It kinda started to level up, you know, over time where I could just handle pretty much most things that came my way.

I. It's those little things like that where like you're saying you just, it's like a, if you're, you get a flat tire, it's like who cares? Literally this is the smallest thing of my day that I have to deal with. It's nothing at all. Um, and I think it's just exercising that muscle. And so when it comes to some of these other muscles that we've kind of, you talk about in the book, 'cause I think, you know, some of your exercises that you talk about dealing with stress in the book are amazing.

Um, but another big one is even delegation. Now, delegation, I'll admit is a tough one for a lot of people. Uh, and for most it's really hard to delegate 'cause we're not born. To understand how to delegate. It's one of those things that you have to, you know, test and iterate and try over time. But what are some tips we're, yeah, we're not born or taught how to do any of this stuff.

Exactly. And I think that's, we're really not, that's the key. And most of our parents, if they're great parents, they try to keep us from feeling pain as a kid. And that's not how life works. So like you get worse at handling stress. All the things compound, right. But. The thing about delegation is that as a kid coming up through school, there's no teacher that's gonna say, Hey, look, I know you have a bunch of this homework to do.

Why don't you find a freshman in the class to write this paper for you? There's no sports coach who's gonna say, you're gonna show up to practice. Hey Nick, you know we got four circuits today and then we got weight room. Why don't you find somebody else on the team who can do this work for you? There is literally no part of school or athletics where we delegate.

Of course there's teamwork, there's uh, getting other people to work with you, but there's no exercising that muscle of telling other people what to do. No practice. You get none of it. The only way to practice it and then prove it is to do it and see if you have what it takes, and then you start rising up very quickly through an organization because very few people can actually lead and properly communicate and delegate tasks to other people.

So yeah, it's a brutal thing. I tell college students all the time, like. I talked to, I don't even know if I wanna say this. I, I'll walk into, you know, an auditorium at University of Georgia and I'll talk to 200 kids who are about to graduate. And the very first thing I'll say is, look, nobody wants to hire you.

Nobody. You guys have absolutely nothing to bring to the table right now, except your energy and your will to like get after it. So take advantage of those things. And then we talk about some of the skills that you start to build, which we're talking about right now. But delegation is a massive one because.

There's how to book on this stuff. People are very complex. One, those where you. For me, like over the journey, I'd read books and go through traction or the E myth that kind of, you know, implement SOPs, but then like they didn't do the SOPs. Then I gotta go back. It's just one of those things over time that you just start to kind of, again, build that muscle.

It's kind of learning these different skills and for people listening right now, these are tough skills to learn. So this is why a lot of people don't build big businesses is because these skills are hard. It's stuff that over time you need to make sure that you are doing, and if you don't do it, it's really hard to build that business up.

So. Um, I think it's a really, really cool way and the way that you break it down in the book is just so incredibly helpful. I think people are gonna love that portion of it, for sure. The most tactical delegation piece of advice I have is. To hire somebody internationally for $1,200 a month and start telling them what to do, you're spending five or six an hour instead of $20 an hour for somebody in the United States.

It is a totally different risk ball game. If you're a bootstrapping entrepreneur, what am I gonna hire an American for? $15 an hour, $20 an hour, and tell them what to do and practice delegating and make all these mistakes? Or can I do it for, you know, 25% that price? And delegate a lot of my admin tasks and invoicing and billing, and then I can, you know, keep doing the high value stuff on the ground, like sales and executing.

I couldn't agree more. And I think that's a huge portion for a lot of entrepreneurs that, you know, once they realize that's possible and how willing folks overseas are, are work. I think it's just a huge impact on your business. I mean, we have 'em, you know, across the board. We have a whole customer service team.

We have all, you know, just, you know, assistance and all these people, uh, throughout of our businesses and it's just so incredible how much they can actually do. Yep. Exactly. So how do you know when it's time to replace yourself as the operator? So say you're operating a business and you, you know, started to kind of get delegation down and you started to see that, hey, this is something where I don't wanna buy myself a day job, or I don't wanna be working in this all the time.

Is there a point in time that you see that someone will know that they need to replace themselves as an operator? Yeah. So the Eisenhower Matrix, are you familiar with that? I can explain it very briefly here. It's basically there's four areas that you can spend your time. Things that are urgent and important.

Things that are urgent and not important. Things that are not urgent, but important and things that are not urgent and not important. The not urgent, not important. That's the video games, that's the sitting in traffic. The urgent and important is solving a customer problem, like doing things that have to be done right now.

Then there's the urgent and not important things. That, try to draw your time that you know, suck your time, but aren't necessarily adding value to your company and the place that you wanna be working. Where you wanna be spending at least 25, 30% of your time as an entrepreneur is the stuff that's not urgent, but is important.

This is sales, this is business development. This is things that you do today that make your business better tomorrow and next week. Now, an entrepreneur, you can't spend all your time there because you gotta go trade your time for money, right? You gotta go execute. You gotta go mow the lawn or wash the window or do the actual work and get paid for that work, right?

But as soon as you are not spending about 25% of your time on urgent or not urgent, but important things, it's time to reassess and it's time to make a hire. I like to delegate and hire the admin, the billing, the back office stuff first. Keep doing the work and keep doing sales. The second hire is the operator, like the executor who's actually doing the service, whether it's web development, somebody on the lawnmower, somebody on the mulcher, whatever it might be, right?

And then I still, at this scale in my companies, I still make time for sales and business development. So that's the last thing that you should delegate. We have people I own somewhere.com. We have people all the time coming to us saying, oh, I need to make my first hire. I want it to be sales because I'm not good at sales.

Are the ones that don't work. Uh, because building a sales organization that's not you is the last step. It's the hardest step. I like to delegate back office first. Then the on the ground work and sales last. I love that word and I think that is a really powerful way to kind of think about this. You can almost reverse engineer it as you're building your business too, where you can, you can start to add some of those folks, uh, and then be able to still, you know, work on practice sales of the big ticket things that you need to be working on.

So I love that for sure. So I wanna shift gears to some of your companies, 'cause you have such a cool story of how this has kind of grown into a much larger empire. Uh, on your end, and we talked a little bit about bolt storage last time and just how you kind of invest in storage, uh, in some of the things that you're doing, but how is that evolving, uh, over time and is there any, you know, things that are happening behind the scenes, people don't know?

Are there any things that you're doing new at bolt storage? Yeah. Uh, the real estate business had a really good run in 2019, 20 and 21, and even early 2022 right before we spoke, um, right after our conversation last time, which I think was in the summer or fall of 2022, interest rates. Which is the lifeblood of real estate.

It's our number one line item. As an expense went from three and a half percent to 7%. It doubled. So it has been a brutal ride for all real estate PE groups, uh, people who raise money to buy real estate over the last three years. But no, it's gone surprisingly well. Like we've operated really well. We executed all of our refinances without calling capital from our investors.

So we're in a really good spot. It's been slow for acquisitions, but our operations have been fine tuned and we're rocking and rolling. So, um, we have 2 million square feet, about 63 self storage facilities today. That's amazing and I think it's so cool just kind of how you built that business up, I think, early on, and just some of the things that you can do with that is just so incredibly amazing.

And then the big one that has happened since the last time we talked is you acquired somewhere.com, which is, you know, for $52 million. And so what is the biggest surprise that you've had, you know, in year one of acquiring that and kind of talk about why you acquired it. Yeah. It's a company that hires folks all over the world to work for US based businesses.

And there's a massive cost arbitrage there. You know, a salesperson in the United States is a hundred thousand dollars plus per year. A salesperson in South Africa is $2,000 per month for a super high quality salesperson who's a closer. Um, so yeah, the trend is only going to accelerate. As you know, there's never been a labor.

Surplus in the United States. Every anybody in the United States who has a job, wants a job, has a job. So there's just frankly, not enough people to do the work for all the remote businesses and all the backend services that are required. So yeah, it's a big bet by me on, um, companies utilizing a lot of this, you know, South Africa, Latin American, Columbia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and then, uh, obviously Philippines, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India.

Um, we're sourcing now in 12 countries, so it's been a crazy ride. That's incredible and I think it's one of those things where if you have not worked with someone you know overseas, like we were talking about earlier, I think it is just one of the most powerful points of leverage that you have because it is, especially if you're just getting started in your business, it is a cheaper way to hire employees that will help you stop trading time for money in certain areas that you do not wanna be trading that time for money.

I think it's just one of those things that it is so incredibly impactful what you can do there. So, uh, definitely check out somewhere.com for sure, because it is really. What they do and they help you find and source those folks. It's been a crazy ride because, I mean, I have 320 plus employees across my portfolio and I have 22 Americans.

That's incredible. So 300 folks in, I think South Africa. We're over 120. And we're building executive teams internationally too. Like Chief Revenue Officer, revenue Operations, head of sales, head of finance, a lot of South Africa. Yeah. I have a operations lead in Columbia, south Latin America, who will be. He will be the CEO.

He's got equity in one of my businesses today. So it's just unbelievable talent. It truly is. I cannot vouch for it enough, just how talented, you know, the overseas talent is and how hard they work and it's really, really cool. Mm-hmm. Um, so big picture stuff. So you have some of these big companies now that you're kind of working through.

How do you think about the value of cashflow versus equity? Like, are some of these, you know. I know real estate, obviously a lot of people go for cashflow, but you also have some equity, you know, in there. And then when you think through this, you know, you have somewhere now, how has your opinion changed over time as you've kind of grown into these companies, or how do you think about that?

Yeah, so at the beginning, and I think this is a massive concept that's not talked about enough and it's perfectly aligned with your audience. When I was 25, so 2014. I was a new entrepreneur. I was trying to set goals. Hey, where do I want to be? Where do I want to head? And a mentor of mine had me literally write down my ideal lifestyle, what I was doing, where I was living, what vehicles my family was in, and how much it cost per month to do that, I.

I did all this work about, okay, I need to join the local country club for $300 a month so I can play golf. I need to put my wife in an expedition. I need to have a F-150 that's a couple years old. I wanna have a house that's $300,000 that I can, you know, carry a mortgage for two grand a month. I need $20,000 after tax per month to live my dream life.

This is Nick going on vacations when he wants having the vehicles that I want. Not looking at the right side of a menu when I walk into a restaurant. Just no stress about the little things of life, right? $20,000 a month. So I was at the water at the top of the mountain, finding the path of least resistance to get to that number.

It took me two years. So 2016 about is when I was actually pulling enough money in from the real estate in the business to get there. But it's not as much as you might think. And my expenses since then have actually not went up that much. Almost all of my additional money is in new ventures, new business, a couple things here and there, but.

If people did that exercise, they would be really, really surprised at how little money they need to live a phenomenal life. And of course then there's the side of the equation of how much work are you putting in to get that money? And uh, my goal at that time was five hours a week. I wanna make 20 grand a month on five hours a week.

So now it's, uh, the machine has grown much larger than that now, but, um. It takes the stress and pressure off business when you have cash flow coming in, and that's just the truth of it. So I firmly believe that cash flow is, you know, the lifeblood of an entrepreneur. It allows you to invest, it allows you to buy real estate.

Real estate's the most capital intensive business in the world, so re costs eg. Is getting really large re costs. It's a. Cost segregation firm for real estate investors, tax, tax service firm. And then somewhere is massive in bolt storage. So those are kind of my three largest businesses and the rest of them are kind of still in their infancy.

But I'm, uh, generally speaking, I'm taking the cash flow from re cost EG. And somewhere and making investments in real estate. I. That's really, I love that 'cause that's just, you're basically creating a wealth flywheel where it's just kind of reinvesting back in and I think that's really, really powerful.

And the exercise that you did early on, I remember you talking about that, uh, exercise. I heard you talk about it somewhere and it is just such a great way. And most, I encourage every single person to go do that. Make sure you go through that exercise, figure out how much you wanna live on every single month, and then figure out what it would take to get there.

And associate that with your time so that you can figure out, you know, how long is it actually gonna take me to get there? I think for you it took, like you said, five years. Um, and it's just so powerful to do that exercise and have that goal in place. 'cause that could be your North Star for the next, you know, five years.

Your five year plan is to try to get to that number, uh, so that you can have this freedom and this flexibility. I mean, it is such an amazing feeling once you have that freedom and flexibility and it truly does change your life. It reduces your stress, it reduces your anxiety, and really does make this.

You know, just a much better situation overall for most people. Now, when you look at this, you know, is there anything in that you believe, you know, in business or in life that you get the most pushback on? Is there anything out there that a lot of people are just pushing back when you talk about some of this stuff?

I think raising money. I think raising venture capital money is a fool's errand for a first time entrepreneur. Now, I have a lot of friends who are venture capitalists. I do have friends who have raised money and had successful exits. And I'm very thankful that they exist and that this ecosystem exists in America because we get innovation.

We get things like Uber and Uber Eats, and the technology that we have today to make our lives better. Frankly, venture capital helps make our lives better, period. I don't think it's the best path for first time entrepreneurs because if you have no skills, if you have no network and you have no cash. You are at such a severe disadvantage in business, and we just talked about my journey, how my first goal was 20 grand a month.

An unbelievable thing happened when I hit 20 grand a month. The pressure came off and I started making more and more and more money because my leverage increased my skills, increased my ability, my capital, my network. All of it started to compound. And business is about momentum. It's a snowball rolling down a hill.

So like now where I am now, if I have a world changing idea. I'll go chase down venture capital to do it. I'll have somebody else take the risk to do it. But I have my personal situations like under control. I have my own skills, my own assets, my own business. So I think as a second time entrepreneur, as a somebody who's had previous success, venture capital's amazing, but there's nothing worse for a brand new college grad or a fresh entrepreneur.

And I also think product development, like trying to sell a physical good, whether it be e-commerce or anything like that, is just a brutally hard business. I couldn't agree more. Those skills early on are just so incredibly important in building those first, I think is the most powerful thing by far that you could be doing.

But I couldn't agree more. What are some common myths about wealth building that you've seen, you know, long, especially long-term wealth building that you've seen? I think if you can buy real estate, real estate's not a get rich quick scheme, and on social media you'll see the wholesalers, the flippers.

It's hard, man, that's a very hard, very risky business. It's capital intensive and I think more people lose money than make money in those businesses. So unless you already have cash from an operating company, stay away from real estate. That's my advice. Um, but there is no better tool to grow wealth in a tax efficient way over time than real estate.

So I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth there. But real estate's not a great place to start if you don't have the skills and the capital to do it. So, but then there's nothing better for your long-term wealth than taking good care of great real estate and just waiting 10 years, letting 10 years pass.

And I love businesses. That time is on your side. Exactly. It's just waiting. That long term is the huge key there, for sure. Now, you have bought, and you have started several businesses, how would you approach selling that business if the time came, or would you ever sell any of your businesses? That's a really interesting thought, and I don't know that I'll be able to add anything to the audience who's listening.

But the way I'm thinking about this is, is if I have something great, I don't really wanna get rid of it. Some of my operating companies like somewhere, even if somewhere reaches scale, meaning like 250 plus million a year of revenue, it's still gonna be worth five times earnings. So would I trade it for 20%, you know, for five times for what I make in cash flow in five years?

I don't know. Um, right. I have never sold a piece of real estate, never sold one. I own 63 buildings, plus a couple residences. I mean, like other asset classes in industrial building a house I've never sold one. So, yeah, that's a really good thought exercise that I don't necessarily know the answer to. And that's awesome.

'cause I've never heard of you selling anything either. So I thought it would, it's an interesting thing to kind of think about, especially if you're a long-term investor. It is one of those things that, you know, as you kind of go through this, it is tough to even know when. You know, it's one of those things, especially if something's doing well, it's a really valuable asset.

It is tough to ever know when or if you ever want to. So I think it's really, really cool, uh, going over that thought process too. Now I wanna switch gears to kind of just some quick rapid fire questions here, uh, here at the end and just kind of see what your answers are. So what is a, your favorite book that kind of changed your mindset?

I think, uh, the Five Levels of Wealth by Sahil Bloom. It's a new book that came out. It really puts in perspective what this is all about because it's really easy to get laser focused on business and the money I. But when you zoom out on life, it's just something that's so easy, so important, but so easy to forget about in day-to-day life.

And that's, I couldn't agree more in for sure. It's, Sahil was here, uh, two and a half months ago or so, and it, and really great, really great episode there too, which is awesome. Uh, but it is a fantastic book for sure. What is the, uh, weirdest business idea? You almost started, if there is one? Uh, uh, almost started, man.

I've almost started a ton. I tried to start a. Track and field apparel company in college. 'cause I ran track, um, my coaches, my two coaches at Cornell founded and owned Let's run.com and they, it was phenomenally popular. Still is very popular among the running community, but they didn't monetize it. And so we were, I tried to talk them into starting a let's run clothing brand on the back of it.

And I, they almost did it, but they turned me down to the last second. Are you glad they turned you down or you wish you did? They still did it. Might've been an easier business to start than storage squad, so I'm not sure. No, I can't, I can't be, I can't be unhappy about anything. How it's worked out for sure.

Absolutely. What is one hire, and you're the perfect person to answer this question. What is one hire that completely changed the trajectory of your company? I think it's a sales manager from South Africa. Um, you can find somebody who can not only sell themselves high ticket items, but they can train onboard and manage and performance, manage sales teams.

For $4,500 a month, we pay this guy. So game changer. Amazing. And what do people misunderstand most about what you do, do you think? I think it's hard to see in the background, the level at which we're operating. A lot of these companies, I think it's easy to look at the media and think, oh, Nick's just a media guy.

And I am like, I love sharing, I love writing, I love teaching. But we're doing some pretty big things on the backend that I don't think people are realizing as far as how large some of these companies might get. What is one uncomfortable truth that entrepreneurs need to hear, but no one wants to say out loud?

Change your mind. Often if you start winning and you get arrogant, it's the worst thing that can possibly happen to you. That's why so many people make their first million dollars and end up losing it because they. Think they know everything. And as I get more experienced in business, not only do I realize that it will humble you and what you think, you know, you will have a totally different mindset on a couple years later.

But also things change really fast. And there's windows in time. The same thing that other operators did and other entrepreneurs did even 12 months ago, or 24 months ago probably, or might not work today. So if you don't have an open mind to an extreme, um, you're at a massive disadvantage. And also you have to move.

Incredibly fast in business. If you move slow and you make decisions slow, you will get passed behind by your competition. And if you, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And if you don't learn that lesson, you're gonna learn the hard way. And I think it's one of those things, um, that I have learned many times over, uh, over time, which is I think a lot of entrepreneurs have too.

So Nick, this was absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for coming on here. Where can people learn more about your book and where do you want them to buy it and everything you have going on as well? Man, you can search, uh, the Sweaty Startup on Amazon. Um, I read the audio book. Um, I think that's an easy, approachable way for people if they get some, you know, if they're driving or working out or something like that.

But you can also download that list of business ideas from sweaty startup.com/ideas. I also, if you want to discount it somewhere or EG in my companies, you can email me, nick@sweatystartup.com or if you just have feedback on the book. So I'm pretty available. Absolutely, we will link all those down below in the show notes, including, you know, where to find the book in addition to all of Nick's companies as well, because, uh, it is really cool to kind of see all the things that you're building and it's absolutely amazing what you've been doing.

So Nick, thank you again so much for coming on. We truly appreciate it. Andrew, I love the mission. I love what you're doing, and it's positively impacting a ton of people. So thanks so much for having me here to, and, you know, giving me the audience and, and for, uh, hearing me out. So thank you. Thank you.