How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things With Nick Huber

In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we are going to talk to  Nick Huber about  how to get rich doing boring things Watch this Episode on Youtube How Andrew Can Help You: Listen to The Business Show here. Don't let another year pass by without making significant strides toward your dreams. "Master Your Money Goals" is your pathway to a future where your aspirations are not just wishes but realities. Enroll now and make this year count! Join The Master Money Newsletter where you will become smarter with your money in 5 minutes or less per week Here! Learn to invest by joining Index Fund Pro! This is Andrew’s course teaching you how to invest! Watch The Master Money Youtube Channel! , Ask Andrew a question on Instagram or TikTok. Learn how to get out of Debt by joining our Free Course Leave Feedback or Episode Requests here. Car buying Calculator here Thanks to Our Amazing Sponsors for supporting The Personal Finance Podcast. Shopify: Shopify makes it so easy to sell. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/pfp Chime: Start your credit journey with Chime. Sign-up takes only two minutes and doesn’t affect your credit score. Get started at chime.com/ Thanks to Fundrise for Sponsoring the show! Invest in real estate going to fundrise.com/pfp Thanks to Policy Genius for Sponsoring the show! Go to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quote. Go to https://joindeleteme.com/PFP20/ for 20% off! Indeed: Start hiring NOW with a SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com/personalfinance Turn your business dream into reality! Apply now at www.oneday.org/pfp Go to Acorns.com/pfp and start automating your investments and get a $5 bonus today! Shop Data Plans and Save Big at mintmobile.com/pfp Links Mentioned in This Episode: From Sweaty Startup to an 8-Figure Net Worth With Nick Huber The 5 Types of Wealth With Sahil Bloom Connect with Nick Huber: Email:  [email protected] Website Twitter Instagram The Nick Huber Show Podcast The Sweaty Startup Podcast Sweaty Startup Course Connect With Andrew on Social Media: Instagram TikTok Twitter Master Money Website Master Money Youtube Channel Free Guides: The Stairway to Wealth: The Order of Operations for your Money How to Negotiate Your Salary The 75 Day Money Challenge Get out Of Debt Fast Take the Money Personality Quiz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Giancola?

  Longtime listeners know, one of the best ways to build wealth is to increase your income. And one way to do that is by starting a side hustle. And that's one reason why I absolutely love Whatnot. Now, my son and I, we love collecting sports cards. And we've used Whatnot to buy and sell cards. It's been a really fun way to enjoy something we love together. Now, Whatnot is a live shopping platform where people sell everything from sports cards to clothing, electronics, and collectibles. And what's really cool about it is you can turn something you're passionate about into a business. And you could do it right from your phone. You don't even need a storefront or a website. So whether you're looking to make some extra money or find great deals on your next shopping trip, check out Whatnot.

• 0:44Andrew Giancola?

  Search Whatnot, that's W H A T N O T, in the App Store. Download and start selling right away. When I started the Personal Finance Podcast, I had no idea how big it could become. I just knew I had something I wanted to share, so I started putting it online. And looking back, I definitely wish I would have started a decade earlier. One of the horror parts about building something online, though, is making it look professional. A website used to mean hiring a developer, figuring out design, and potentially spending thousands of dollars. In fact, on my website, I spent tens of thousands of dollars. That's what impressed me when playing around with Hostinger's AI website builder.

• 1:27Andrew Giancola?

  I told it what kind of website I wanted, and I built the first version in minutes. No coding, no designer or developer needed. And Hostinger doesn't stop at launch. Their AI can help with SEO, website copy, email marketing, and more. Plus, your domain, website, email, and marketing can all live in one account, with plans starting at just $3 every single month. Hostinger builds your vision step by step. Create your website today. Go to hostinger.com/pfp and use code PFP for 10% off now. On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, how to get rich doing boring things with Nick Huber.

• 2:23Andrew Giancola?

  What's up everybody and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of MasterMoney.co. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to 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 MasterMoney.co/newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, 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 Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Now, today, we're going to be talking to Nick Huber about his brand-new book called Sweaty Startup,

• 3:04Andrew Giancola?

  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, 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 going to 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,

• 3:47Andrew Giancola?

  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.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Have me.

• 4:18Andrew Giancola?

  I am so excited to talk to you today because 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 like in the time of life that I'm in. But I think so many people are going to really, really get value out of 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 that you talk through 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. So 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 kind of said, Hey, that's an amazing idea. That's a genius idea.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:12Andrew Giancola?

  I just had a friend who bought a fire protection business, basically. And 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, especially.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  High risk, high reward, right? If you mess up, if you don't know what you're doing, 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.

• 5:46Andrew Giancola?

  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?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  I think, look, my book is never going to sell a million copies because the message that I'm going to 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 against all odds. 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. Almost all of them started boring, old fashioned businesses and I'm no different. I started a pickup and delivery storage company when I was in college. And I, you know, went to my first entrepreneurship class where everybody had their business idea and they were going to pitch their business idea to the class.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:01Andrew Giancola?

  And 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 start that you kind of just talked about a little bit when it was a storage squad, I believe. So how did your first sweaty startup, you know, what did it teach you, you know, more than any college class could or anything else like that?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  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 it 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.

• 8:06Speaker 01

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

• 8:19Andrew Giancola?

  I remember you talking about this last time. You had a marketing tool. Basically, you took chalk, you went and bought chalk from 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 sidewalks there and people would walk by. So there's so many cool, efficient ways that you just start with this, you know, write on brand with the sweaty start, which I think is really, really cool.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  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 we watched them sign up and they walked over it, looked at their phone and signed up and they became our customers.

• 9:04Andrew Giancola?

  I love that. I love that. Like those guerrilla marketing tactics are just so cool, I think, because they work. They really, truly work. And every time I've done one, I'm like, "Man, this has got to 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've just got to get out there and you've got to make connections, which is really, really cool. You talk about execution beats ideas. So why do so many people still chase the perfect idea instead of starting, do you think?

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Because execution's hard. Hiring people, delegating, making decisions, solving problems all day. I mean, the life of a business owner and entrepreneur, yes, they get wealthy if they do it right, but in general, I think they're almost underpaid for what they do because it's so hard. So the idea is one thing, but, and yes, 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 got to 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 the one with a fax machine sitting on the desk and other inefficient processes inside their company. And that's where you might be able to carve out a piece of the pie.

• 10:10Andrew Giancola?

  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. 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. And if someone is in that boat where they are just getting started, maybe they have their first $10,000 saved up and they want to start doing something today. What would you do if you were in their position?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 going to 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.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  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 $100 an hour. Trading $100 an hour 20 hours a week on the side, on the weekends and after work, you know, you can pretty quickly earn more money than you're making at your job. Then 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.

• 11:54Andrew Giancola?

  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 want to 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 want to get to those higher levels, 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 out of 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. 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 spotting easy to win games in business.

• 12:39Andrew Giancola?

  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?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think entrepreneurs look at themselves again as a gladiator in an arena. 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 going to climb that mountain. When 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.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  And I am about to turn on a fire hose of water. And when I turn on that fire hose of water at the top of the mountain, what is it going to do, Andrew? It's going to 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 Buffett said, you can get paid really well for jumping over one foot bars over and over and over again. So why would you not shift the mindset to think of, hey, what can I do with the weakest competition?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  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 say I have those chips stacked in front of me and I'm choosing how to invest them. Am I going to put that chip on Netflix? Am I going to put that chip on going to my daily job? Or I'm going to put that chip on a tech startup with one in a million odds of success? Or am I going to 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 of 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 want to go deeper here.

• 14:56Andrew Giancola?

  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. 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?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  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 and he goes, Nick, I have a business idea that I want to 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, and we're just talking about business. And he says, okay, I want to start a house painting business. I've looked at two franchises that I potentially want to buy. You know, here are the details of each franchise. I bought a web domain for cheap. I built a WordPress website myself. I got a logo on 99designs. I've priced out the rigs. I've done business analysis, financial planning on what it's going to cost me per job on in material and labor, and what I think I can charge per job and all this stuff.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  He had 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 Sway 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 want to do. It doesn't matter what you want to do. We're going to look at this totally unemotionally. I pick up my phone, and I go to Google Maps, and I type in house painting. Bunch of house painting companies show up on Google Maps. I click the one closest to me and I hit call. This is Sunday afternoon, probably 3pm. 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's done, he did Athens church, he did a local gas station, he's done all these big jobs, he's

• 16:46Speaker 01

  super professional, he's 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. Okay, 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. 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's 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.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  I'm like, what do you think of this business idea?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Can you guess what he said, Andrew?

• 17:37Andrew Giancola?

  He was out.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  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 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. 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's Stakes.

• 18:13Andrew Giancola?

  And that, I think, is the perfect way to do this because a lot of people, like your friend did, will go do all this analysis. 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. And at the same time, they also, there's just way too much competition.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  If you want to dip your toe into this, like, I'm going to give you the 30-second spiel on how to do this, the whole thing, because that's a part of it. First step is to go to sweatystartup.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 and 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 going to be pretty heavy investment. Like they're going to take some work, some research. You need to get a degree. You're going to need to get some special insurance, whatever it might be. Then you do what I just said.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  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're actually get it whittled down to three or four business ideas that you might want to start, you get real pricing on what they do. And you figure out how many days it's going to take and how much material it's going to take. And generally they'll tell you this. And you put a price per man hour on the time of the work you might want to 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 going to 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.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  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 and 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.

• 20:31Andrew Giancola?

  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 want to do. But that really is, I think, a huge key asset for a lot of people. My relationship with money has changed a lot over the years. Early on, I thought building wealth was about making more money. Now I know it's really about having clarity. When you know exactly where your money is going and whether you're on track, you make better decisions. That's one of the reasons I love Monarch. It's the personal finance app that tracks everything from your accounts and investments to your savings, goals and spending. So you can see your entire financial picture in one place. One habit that's made a huge difference for me is my five minute drill every single.

• 21:14Andrew Giancola?

  Morning. I open Monarch, check my spending, investments, cash flow and net worth, and I'm done in just a few minutes. It gives me confidence that nothing is slipping through the cracks. I also love the AI weekly recap because it'll flag spending changes, upcoming expenses, or shifts in my net worth before they become a problem. Instead of reacting after the fact, I can make adjustments early. It really feels like having a financial advisor in your pocket. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code PFP at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code PFP. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know it's not just me anymore.

• 21:59Andrew Giancola?

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• 22:41Andrew Giancola?

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• 23:24Andrew Giancola?

  The year before, and it reminds me that while we can't predict the future, we can prepare for it. That's one of the reasons I like PolicyGenius. See, PolicyGenius isn't an insurance company. They're an online marketplace that lets you compare life insurance quotes from some of America's top insurers, side by side, for free. And their licensed team helps you compare coverage, prices, and terms, answers your questions, and even handles the paperwork so you can get the right policy without the hassle. For me, having life insurance isn't about expecting something to happen. It's about knowing my family is protected so I can actually enjoy these moments together instead of worrying about what comes next. And with PolicyGenius, you can find 20-year life insurance policies

• 24:08Andrew Giancola?

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• 24:37Andrew Giancola?

  I want to talk through some skills as well because skills are obviously one of the most important factors for you to be able to build wealth over time. And you've talked about sales being the most important skill, or one of the most important skills in order to be able to even build a business. And I can't think of someone who is more qualified to talk about this because you have an entire company that teaches people how to build sales skillsets, and you guys do some really cool things. So what are some of the most impactful ways to build that skill of sales?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Man, this was an eye-opener for me. My first day as an entrepreneur, I was excited. I was at Cornell, and I sent an email to the entrepreneurship professor. 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. 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 asks 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?

• 25:47Speaker 01

  And I could tell that I needed to say, yes, I love sales and I'm good at sales. And 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, 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 was what you got to understand, Nick. Right now, you got no employees, right? I was like, yeah, you got no equipment. He's like, yeah,

• 26:32Speaker 01

  you got no warehouses. Yeah, you got, hell, you just got a business partner, but like you got no customers. How are you going to go get an employee to trust you? Like, why would they want to come work for you? Do you realize how risky it is? You got to sell them. How are you going to 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 going to convince a real estate owner to lease their warehouse to you? You got no credit. You're 23 years old. How are you going to convince that? It's sales. How are you going to convince your box manufacturer to give you credit to sell you boxes? How are you going to 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 he's like, so you have two choices.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  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 of 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.

• 27:32Andrew Giancola?

  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?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's an entire two-chapter 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 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.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Like if you want to build muscle, are you going to 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, you know, decision making. It's all practice and they're all muscles. So you gotta do the work.

• 28:52Andrew Giancola?

  Exactly. And they're all, 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? And it's one of those things that, you know, the more you do, the easier it becomes over time. But like your mentor said, it is so 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.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  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 ACT. 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 YouTube and all that getting pumped into our kids, starting at the age of about two.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:20Andrew Giancola?

  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 started 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, 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 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?

• 31:02Andrew Giancola?

  And 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?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's 10 a.m. right now and at 9 a.m. 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 going to 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 are some tactics that I talk about in the book to manage stress.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  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 going to 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 going to be an easy job, and they're going to make as much money as they want, and everything's going to be perfect. They start their job, and they're going to 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.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  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 have 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.

• 33:05Andrew Giancola?

  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. For me at least, this is how it worked. It kind of started to level up, you know, over time, where I could just handle pretty much most things that came my way. It's those little things like that where, like you're saying, you just, it's like, if you get a flat tire, it's like, who cares? Literally, this is the smallest thing in my day that I have to deal with. It's nothing at all. 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, because I think, you know, some of your exercises that you talk about dealing with stress in the book are amazing. But another big one is even delegation. Now, delegation, I'll admit, is a tough one for a lot of people. And for most, it's really hard to delegate because 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

• 33:50Andrew Giancola?

  over time. But what are some tips?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. We're not born or taught how to do any of this stuff.

• 33:55Andrew Giancola?

  Exactly. And I think that's the key.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  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 going to 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 is going to say, you're going to 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 getting

• 34:40Speaker 01

  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 want to say this. 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

• 35:25Speaker 01

  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 no how to book on this stuff. People are very complex.

• 35:39Andrew Giancola?

  Exactly. It is one of those things where, you know, for me, like over the journey, I'd read books to go through traction or the E-Myth had kind of, you know, implement SOPs, but then like they didn't do the SOPs that 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 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 going to love that portion of it for sure.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  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 $5 or $6 an hour instead of $20 an hour for somebody in the United States. It is a totally different risk ballgame if you're a bootstrapping entrepreneur. What am I going to 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% of 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.

• 36:54Andrew Giancola?

  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 to work. I think it's just a huge impact on your business. I mean, we have them, you know, across the board. We have a whole customer service team. We have all, you know, just, you know, assistants and all these people throughout of our businesses. And it's just so incredible how much they can actually do.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly.

• 37:15Andrew Giancola?

  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 want to buy myself a day job. Or I don't want to 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?

• 37:33Speaker 01

  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 want to be working, where you want to 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.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  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're 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. And 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?

• 39:01Speaker 01

  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 to be sales because I'm not good at sales. Those are the ones that don't work 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.

• 39:28Andrew Giancola?

  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 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 want to shift gears to some of your companies because you have such a cool story of how this has kind of grown into a much larger empire on your end. And we talked a little bit about Bolt Storage last time and just how you kind of invest in storage and some of the things that you're doing. But how is that evolving over time? And is there any, you know, things that are happening behind the scenes that people don't know? Are there any things that you're doing new at Bolt Storage?

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, the real estate business had a really good run in 2019, 20 and 21, and even early 2022, right before we spoke. 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 seven percent. It doubled. So it has been a brutal ride for all real estate PE groups, 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.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  It's been slow for acquisitions, but our operations have been fine tuned and we're rocking and rolling. So we have 2 million square feet, about 63 self-storage facilities today.

• 40:57Andrew Giancola?

  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.

• 41:06Andrew Giancola?

  And then the big one that has happened since the last time we talked is you acquired Somewhere.com, which is for $52 million. And so what is the biggest surprise that you've had in year one of acquiring that? And kind of talk about why you acquired it?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  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. A salesperson in the United States is $100,000 plus per year. A salesperson in South Africa is $2,000 per month for a super high-quality salesperson is a closer. So yeah, the trend is only going to accelerate as there's never been a labor surplus in the United States. 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 companies utilizing a lot of this. South Africa, Latin American, Colombia, Brazil,

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Mexico, Argentina, and then obviously Philippines, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India. We're sourcing now in 12 countries. So it's been a crazy ride.

• 42:10Andrew Giancola?

  That's incredible. And I think it's one of those things where if you have not worked with someone 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 want to 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 definitely check out Somewhere.com for sure because it is really cool what they do and they help you find and source those folks.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  It's been a crazy ride because I mean, I have 320-plus employees across my portfolio and I have 22 Americans.

• 42:45Andrew Giancola?

  That's incredible.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  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, all out of South Africa. Yeah, I have an operations lead in Colombia, 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.

• 43:10Andrew Giancola?

  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. 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 cash flow versus equity? Like, are some of these, you know, I know, real estate, obviously, a lot of people go for cash flow, 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?

• 43:38Speaker 01

  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. And 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 of years old. I want to have a house that's $300,000 that I can, you know, carry a mortgage for two grand a month.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  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, and 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 and 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 of things here and there. If people did that exercise, they would be really, really surprised at how little money

• 45:07Speaker 01

  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 my goal at that time was five hours a week. I want to make 20 grand a month on five hours a week. So now it's, the machine has grown much larger than that now. But 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 is the most capital intensive business in the world. So RE Cost Seg is getting really large. RE Cost Seg, it's a cost segregation firm for real estate investors, tax, tax service firm. And then Somewhere is massive

• 45:49Speaker 01

  and 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 a, generally speaking, I'm taking the cash flow from RE Cost Seg and Somewhere and making investments in real estate.

• 46:02Andrew Giancola?

  And that's really, I love that because 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 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 want to 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 going to take me to get there? I think for you, it took, like you said, five years. And it's just so powerful to do that exercise and have that goal in place because 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 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.

• 46:45Andrew Giancola?

  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.

• 46:55Andrew Giancola?

  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?

• 47:04Speaker 01

  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 am 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.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  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 is 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,

• 48:32Speaker 01

  whether it be e-commerce or anything like that is just a brutally hard business.

• 48:37Andrew Giancola?

  I couldn't agree more. Those skills early on are just so incredibly important and 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?

• 48:51Speaker 01

  I think if you can buy real estate, real estate is 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, 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.

• 49:36Andrew Giancola?

  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?

• 49:49Speaker 01

  You know, 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 if I have something great, I don't really want to 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 going to 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.

• 50:18Andrew Giancola?

  Right.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  I have never sold a piece of real estate, never sold one. I own 63 buildings plus a couple of residences. I mean, like other asset classes and 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.

• 50:33Andrew Giancola?

  And that's awesome because I've never heard of you selling anything either. So I thought it was, 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 is 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 going over that thought process, too. Now I want to switch gears to kind of just some quick rapid-fire questions here, here at the end, and just kind of see what your answers are. So what is your favorite book that kind of changed your mindset?

• 51:03Speaker 01

  I think 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, 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.

• 51:21Andrew Giancola?

  And I couldn't agree more for sure. And Sahil was here two and a half months ago or so. And it and really great, really great episode there too, which is awesome. But it is a fantastic book for sure. What is the weirdest business idea you almost started, if there is one?

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Almost started, man, I've almost started a ton. I tried to start a track and field apparel company in college because I ran track. My coaches, my two coaches at Cornell founded and owned let'srun.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 at the last second.

• 52:06Andrew Giancola?

  Are you glad they turned you down or you wish you did, they still did it?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Might have 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 if how it's worked out for sure.

• 52:17Andrew Giancola?

  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?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I think it's a sales manager from South Africa. 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.

• 52:42Andrew Giancola?

  Amazing. And what do people misunderstand most about what you do, you think?

• 52:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:05Andrew Giancola?

  And what is one uncomfortable truth that entrepreneurs need to hear, but no one wants to say out loud?

• 53:11Speaker 01

  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 of 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, you're at a massive disadvantage. And also, you have to move incredibly fast in business.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  If you move slow and you make decisions slow, you will get passed behind by your competition.

• 54:00Andrew Giancola?

  And if, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And if you don't learn that lesson, you're going to learn the hard way. And I think it's one of those things that I have learned many times over, 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 you want them to buy it? And everything you have going on as well?

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, you can search the Sweaty Startup on Amazon. I read the audiobook. 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 sweatystartup.com/ideas. I also, if you want to discount it somewhere or are you cost that you're in my companies? You can email me [email protected] or if you just have feedback on the book. So I'm pretty available.

• 54:43Andrew Giancola?

  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 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.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  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, you know, give me the audience and for hearing me out. So thank you.

• 55:06Andrew Giancola?

  Thank you.

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