#1189 Nick Huber On How He Built $100 Million Empire

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

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Nick Huber is one of the world's most interesting entrepreneurs. You've probably seen him on the internet, @SweatyStartup on Twitter. In this conversation, we talk about his real estate portfolio, the various companies that he has started, what the challenges are with scaling, how he selects various operators,

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 1:14Speaker 01

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• 1:43Speaker 02

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Nick here with me. I thought a great place to start is we're seeing tons and tons of people have figured out this hack on how to build businesses. It used to be you build a product, then you go find the customers. You, me, many of our friends are like, wait a minute, why don't I go find the customers first, then build the company? Talk a little bit about your process. You've launched six different businesses in a short period of time. I think you've got a bunch of other ideas of things that you're going to go do. How are you thinking about like this new way of building businesses? Or is it just an old way that you're kind of replicating?

• 2:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I started talking about real estate on Twitter, got a lot of followers. Turns out, real estate is very, a business that fuels a lot of sub businesses. It's expensive to buy a building. If you're going to buy a building, you're going to pay a slew of other people, lawyers, cost seg studies, you know, a bunch of people to do a lot of work. And my business was, you know, I'm trying to turn some of my cost centers into profit centers. But yeah, built 30 million eyeballs a month on Twitter newsletter with, it's, you know, a couple of months ago when we were getting started, 30,000, you know, subscribers. Now we're up to almost 50,000 folks. And there are people who do real estate deals and they own small businesses

• 3:16Speaker 03

  and they're interested in entrepreneurship, management. And turns out, when you build an audience full of those people, they need a lot of things. They need, you know, websites, they need, you know, SEO, they need pay per click, they need landing pages, they need cost segregation studies, they need insurance, they need a lot of different stuff.

• 3:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about the real estate component first, then we'll kind of go to the other businesses. So you previously had a business. I will think of it as practice. You may not think about that, but I always look at like people who find a decent amount of success doing something, you usually can trace back somewhere where they learned some skills.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  I learned how to be an operator.

• 3:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. So talk a little bit about the first business that you had and how that fueled kind of what you understood when you launched the real estate business.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I like to say that I started in the hardest business in the history of the world, which is student pickup and delivery storage. We were literally driving box trucks in towns, picking up 7,000 students a year in a one week span during finals week. We were storing it in warehouses, we were delivering it. We had, you know, over 200 part-time employees in that business. We could only be in one city, but we were operating in 12 different locations at 25 different colleges. And we did that for 10 years, a hard business. So people look at me on Twitter and think, oh, this guy's just in real estate, you know, whatever. No, in 2011, I was driving a cargo van, picking up boxes. And yeah, we learned how to hire people. We learned how to manage people and made a lot of mistakes. And but, you know, six, seven years into that, we had some serious operational chops.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  We could hire people, we could manage people, we could motivate them and leverage that to move up. I always say, business is about momentum. You know, you're not gonna, people, so many people want to just get rich, start a business, crank.

• 4:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Doesn't work that way.

• 4:53Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you're building that business, why go into the real estate game? Is it just like, hey, that's easier, there's less competition, I want to do something different? Like, what is the jump from like, I'm a day-to-day grinding operator to let me go do real estate?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  I think I looked at it as, hey, where are, where are the dumbest people making the best money?

• 5:13Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot of dumb people in real estate, but there's also a lot of smart people.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Well, there are a lot of, I'm not, I'm not saying that most real estate investors are dumb. I'm saying that you don't have to be in the top 10% to make a killing. Like, in the startup world, you gotta be amazing at what you do. Because the cream rises to the top, the competition is incredible. I said, hey, what industry can we go after here that the competition, you know, we just gotta be above average and we can do really well. In a moving company, we could see that it wasn't gonna, it was never gonna scale into a $10 million business. It was never gonna give us the lifestyle. We were on the road. We, you know, I was spending a month away from my families, going from college town to college town, you know, hauling boxes into dorm rooms. So we said, okay, what's the next logical step? But that sweaty, that sweaty startup had put half a million bucks in our bank account because we'd operated for five years, we didn't spend any money, and it turned us into operators.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  So when you got a little bit of cash and you know how to operate a business, you can tackle real estate. And we looked at, hey, there's a self-storage business where mom and pop operators don't answer the phone, their units are full, and they're making 20, 30, 40 grand a month from one location. Wow. That's the business to be in. So in 2016, we built a self-storage facility from the ground up, opened it in 2017, put our money in, raised money from friends and family, built a building for 2.9 million bucks. Learned a ton. Development was not really the place to start, but we built it, got it up. And once we got it running, that's when we hit our stride. We're like, wow, this is a great business. We answer the phone, we do some basic stuff, we can get a lot of customers. Fast forward to 2021, that building's worth eight million bucks that we built for 2.9 million.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Today, it's worth 10 or 11 million dollars. So that one real estate project that was 20% of our stress. 80% of our stress was over in this moving company. 20% of our stress was in self-storage. It generated outsized returns. And so we made a decision to sell the moving and storage company and do more real estate.

• 7:06Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about the unit economics of a self-storage facility that you buy first, and then we talk about the development side. So what is like the average size deal that you guys will go do? And how do you find the right deal? So somebody's like, oh, cool, self-storage sounds awesome. Nick's an idiot. I think I could do better than him. Where do they get started?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  Well, you can, because you find one deal and it can be life-changing money. Like, we bought one little deal in 2018 with our own cash, because we ran out of investor money really quick. Like, we didn't have any, not country club kid, didn't have a big network to go raise a bunch of money, which you gotta do in real estate. So we did a couple of small deals, a $472,000 deal that we did by ourselves with 100 grand of our own cash. Three years later, it's worth a million bucks. So like, that is life-changing money. So you don't have to be that smart to do this. But yeah, you can buy a small deal for half a million dollars, lease it up, you know, operate it well, cut expenses, and just let time do its thing.

• 7:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you buy something that's half a million dollars, how many, like, storage units are coming with that? And what can you charge normally in one of these?

• 8:01Speaker 03

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

• 8:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And so when you have 66 units, what are you renting those out for on average?

• 8:26Speaker 03

  The property was doing $6,200 a month of revenue when we bought it.

• 8:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  So $100 for a unit, 66 units. Today, it's doing about $11,000 a month in rent.

• 8:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So you basically just double prices?

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Marketing, getting people in, just, you know, every time we filled up, we raised the prices. And then we'd get a couple of units open, and then we'd lease them at a higher rent, and do that for a couple of years, and all of a sudden, your building's... You know, you've doubled, tripled net operating income profit and the building's worth double.

• 8:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you have one of these properties, how much of the value is derived by the cash flow that is deriving or driving versus just pure capital appreciation, you know, inflation?

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, here's the thing about commercial real estate and why entrepreneurs and operators love it. A house, you buy a house and it's worth whatever the appraiser says the house is worth based on whatever, what the house next door traded for. It's all comps. There's no cash flow coming in from a house. You live in it, so whatever the house traded for, that's what it's worth. So over time, houses start trading for more money in neighborhoods and it just naturally goes up or it goes down. Commercial real estate is valued based on how much money it makes. So, you know, it's called a cap rate. So a percent return on overall spend is what it's worth. So if you can make the profit go up, you can physically make the value of the building go up.

• 9:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, because it's much more valuable. Okay, as you're doing this, you're not doing it by yourself, right? You guys have built this entire team of, I think, like 45 people or so. Talk about what are those people doing? Somebody hears like, oh, you own real estate and you have 45 people, but they're not actually physically going every day and, you know, sitting there as a receptionist and taking orders or anything like that. What are these people doing?

• 9:59Speaker 03

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

• 10:44Speaker 03

  CFO then offers on these properties. We have an investor relations employee who deals with our 280 active investors who have, you know, given Bolt Storage $40 million. And then you transfer over, okay, we bought a building, then it goes into property improvement. Their jobs, the signage, painting the buildings, getting it all cleaned up, getting all the units ready to rent. Then we have a team of four folks who oversee all the vendors and contractors that we have on the site. So when I say forty five employees, that doesn't account the plow guy, the lawn care, all this. Then you have the call center, customer service, that's eight full time employees. You got collections, you got auctions, property improvements and construction, which is another four folks who are building about

• 11:30Speaker 03

  three point five million dollars worth of expansion on properties that we already own.

• 11:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and so as you're going through this, do you change the names of the properties that you guys end up acquiring? Or do you just leave them whatever, you know, Joe Blow's?

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Yep, we brand them all as Bolt Storage.

• 11:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and what is the kind of pros and cons of doing that?

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Our domain authority is great, our SEO is great, our, you know, the standard procedure of answering the phone, hey, this is Bolt Storage, building a brand. Yep, it's, it's ideal over, you know, operating it as a.

• 11:58Anthony Pompliano?

  You raised forty million, what do you think everything's worth now?

• 12:00Speaker 03

  We raised forty million dollars, put in another five or six of our own cash, bought a hundred million dollars worth of storage. Before interest rates started going nuts, I mean, right now with today's revenue and operating income and the old cap rates, one hundred and eighty, one hundred and ninety million dollars. More realistically, if we had to sell right now, one hundred and forty, one hundred and fifty million dollars.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  But yeah, it's been.

• 12:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Three, four, three, four X on the equity capital that you guys were able to raise.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  It's been, it's been a great, well, we've raised forty and we got, yeah, between another forty and eighty more of equity. So yeah, two to three X equity.

• 12:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and so when you look at this business, why just stay and sell storage? Why not go into other markets? Is it just a focus thing? Is it, hey, we actually don't think we have an advantage somewhere else? Is it the people that are trying to sell those or lost their minds and they think it's worth more?

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the last year has been very hard. When I came on and spoke to you last time, you saw that fire in my eyes, I was like, let's go buy a ton of storage. I think I told you that I was going to buy a hundred million dollars worth of storage in two thousand twenty two. We bought thirty eight million dollars of storage and we were devoting way more resources, way more energy, way more time. The business got harder, rates started going up and sellers. Aren't going to take discounts now, but our returns go down. When interest rates go up, the returns go down on the cash that you're putting to work in these businesses.

• 13:12Anthony Pompliano?

  You mean that Jerome Powell, when he said he was going to destroy consumer demand, he actually ended up destroying investor demand?

• 13:17Speaker 03

  He, the investors, yeah, investor demand, investor returns. The real estate business got really hard. And luckily, I have a guy on my team, Kevin, who's super disciplined. And I was like, hey, let's buy these buildings. And he's like, hey, Jerome Powell is telling us he's going to raise interest rates 3%, this is not a good buy. Looking back on all those deals now, he was right. I was chomping at the bit. I'm the go, go, go guy. I had some very disciplined people on my team who kept us from buying too much storage when.

• 13:42Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you structure the debt? Is it floating rate stuff? Is it fixed rate? How long do you?

• 13:46Speaker 03

  It was floating. It was floating. We got burned. You know, because I'm working on the promote. The way all this stuff works is there's a preferred return that I give investors. First 7% annually goes to the investors. I get paid a chunk over that. So if we're doing 10, 12% cash on cash a year, I'm getting paid. I'm in the promote. Well, when interest rates go up 3%, that's an extra 2 million bucks a year of debt service. That added into almost our entire promote. And now we're making pref. So, yeah, we locked the rates at 5 and 1/4, 5 and 3/4, between 5 and 1/4 and 5 and 3/4, depending on the properties. They're all in great shape. We just need to let time do its thing and.

• 14:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, let rates come back down.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  We don't, over time, we'll lease up the buildings and, you know, net operating income is continuing to grow. So we're not at risk of losing any of our properties. But it's not an easy time to be a real estate investor right now. There's a lot of chaos that people don't see going on in the real estate business. They had floating rate debt and more often it's loan maturities. When you buy a house, you have a 30-year fixed loan. Commercial real estate average loan term is five years. And a lot of it's on three-year bridge debt. And when that three years is up, it's called a balloon payment. You have to refinance with somebody else. You got to go find some new debt. The scramble is on right now from deals that were bought in 2020, that their debt is now maturing and the bank's saying, hey, we don't want this loan anymore. You got to go find debt somewhere else. And so the people in the business right now are seeing a lot of chaos.

• 15:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So as you think about that portion of what you do, how much of the time are you spending a week on real estate?

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Uh, in the growth phase, building out this team, I was, I was grinding. Two thousand twenty-one, our team went from six people to thirty-eight. And then two thousand twenty-two, we added another ten. And then we had to lay off a couple of people last year, but I was working sixty hours a week in the real estate business in two thousand twenty-one. Today, I'm doing three hours a week because my team is really good, A, and B, it's my job to determine whether or not we're going to buy a property based on the purchase price, and we're just not close.

• 15:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, okay, so you've got the real estate and you continue to grow that. Most people would be like, this is amazing, I'm gonna go to the golf course, I'll see you guys later, thank you so much. You're not like that. You're like, okay, I'm gonna go start like a gazillion other businesses. The cost segregation study business, I think is an interesting one to kind of highlight what you guys are doing. So, talk through like, who came up with this idea? How do you kind of put it together? And is it something where like, you are literally saying, hey, I'm paying this, why don't I just create a business for other people? Or is there some more kind of sophisticated?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  I think we gotta back up to Shepherd first, because this is what opened my mind to this distribution model that you and I are both on to and several other influencers are doing. A guy named Marshall Haas started a company called Support Shepherd. I was a customer of theirs in early two thousand twenty-one, and he got me three Filipino employees for customer service and call center work. I interviewed them, and I hired all three on the spot because it just blew my mind that you can get this, this quality of person for ten thousand dollars a year, less than a thousand dollars a month, I can hire somebody who can do this. And then I went to Marshall, I was like, hey, man, I want to promote Shepherd, can you give me a little referral cut if I tweet about the business? That was in April of two thousand twenty-one,

• 16:52Speaker 03

  the company was doing about forty grand a month of revenue. They were delivering a lot of badass talent to business owners, and the service was unbelievable. And I'm like, hey, I could, I could sell the shit out of this, like, let's do something. You fast forward a year of me tweeting and promoting Shepherd online, and the business had seven Xed in size, seven Xed, seven times larger. This is when I went, this is when the light bulb starts going off in my entrepreneur head, is like, hey, this is a good business, I want to own part of it. Like, Marshall, let's make a deal where you cut me in. And I said, hey, I want to own twenty, twenty percent of Shepherd. He's like, what are you talking about? You're getting a fifteen percent cut on commission, you just want me to give you an equity slice? And it was a negotiation back and forth, and I was

• 17:33Speaker 03

  like, Marshall, I'm gonna go start a similar company. And I know it's a hard business, and it would have been, you know, brain damage, I'm not sure if I would have fully went through with it, but-

• 17:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Were you bluffing?

• 17:44Speaker 03

  I don't know, to be honest.

• 17:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Part of me says no, but building that company, like he's got 120 employees and a ton of hard. It's an agency. It's a, it's a very hard business. So he's, finally we made a deal where I'm, I'm a 15% equity owner. This is April of last year.

• 17:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And he just gave you the equity?

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Gave me the equity.

• 18:02Anthony Pompliano?

  In exchange for what you had already done?

• 18:03Speaker 03

  My distribution in the future and for what I had done.

• 18:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  And, you know, what's, what of the growth is attributable to me and my Twitter audience? I don't know.

• 18:13Anthony Pompliano?

  But it didn't hurt.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  It didn't hurt. I think it was a good deal for him and I know it was a good deal for me. Fast forward to today and my 15% equity slug in Shepherd is 50 plus thousand dollars a month to me. That's massive. This is a business worth almost 20 million dollars.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Some paid ads, a lot of word of mouth because it's a badass service, but a lot of it was my distribution. So the light bulb's starting to go off in my head when I made this deal with Marshall. The company's going really well. Then I had another guy that was doing cost segregation things, which a cost segregation study is an engineered report that basically when you buy a piece of real estate, it, it lays out your depreciation schedule for the IRS. Google cost segregation, I don't know if you, you want me to explain it anymore, but.

• 18:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Basically, if you buy a piece of real estate, you can depreciate things, but you can actually accelerate some of it depending on what it is. So maybe the windows get higher depreciation than let's say the door handles or whatever.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 19:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And this business and other businesses like it go through and literally lay out every single thing in the piece of real estate that you can accelerate or things that you won't be able to accelerate.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. And if you buy a lot of real estate, which I did in 2021, you can get massive accelerated depreciation and carry forward a multiple seven figure loss. Me personally, on my personal tax return, a multiple seven figure loss. So funneling my small business income into real estate, buying that real estate, getting the depreciation. Again, 2023, multiple seven figures of personal income last year, zero dollars of federal taxes for me. Cause it's all deferred. Like I will pay it, recapture it later, but cost segregation is working miracles in what I do. Cost segregation guy on Twitter, um, reached out to me. We made a very similar deal a year earlier. And it was going really well. His business was doing about 350 grand a year when we started and then, and now it was about 1.2 million,

• 19:59Speaker 03

  eight or nine months in, sending him a ton of cost segregation business. And I went to him and said, hey, man, I need to own like 40% of your company. Or I'm going to go start my own business. And he said, no, Nick, like, I don't, I don't necessarily want to grow. I got a ton of clients. This has been an amazing relationship. You know, you're, you've been a blessing for me. And obviously, this has been a great deal for me. My company's large enough. The guy was making almost half a million dollars a year at this point. So we parted ways, shook hands, still very good friends to this day. A week later, me and Mitchell Baldridge, my CPA, who his internal office had done a hundred plus cost seg studies. He's one of the smartest guys I know. His wife is an ex KPMG consultant, a killer. She was kind of looking for her next gig. Her kids were, you know, old enough and she was ready to go.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  We formed RE Cost Seg, a cost segregation study service.

• 20:46Anthony Pompliano?

  When you guys parted ways, I know you guys are still friends, but were you like, I'm gonna bury this motherfucker?

• 20:51Speaker 03

  I'm a competitive guy.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  But it was also, it was really uncomfortable.

• 20:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know who this guy is, so like, I can ask that question, but I'm sure he's great.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  It was a scary moment for me. Like, I went from making twenty or thirty grand a month referring to him to then making zero. And putting all my eggs in a new basket of starting a brand new company. This was a scary moment. I jumped off a cliff. That was, that was eleven months ago. And now, knowing what we know now, it was a great decision because.

• 21:15Anthony Pompliano?

  How big is the new business?

• 21:16Speaker 03

  RE Cost Seg did two hundred and fifty grand of revenue last month. We have twenty-three employees. It's a business that's, it's a ten million dollar company in eleven months.

• 21:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And is it ten million dollars on its way to twelve? Or is it like ten million dollars?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Ten million dollars on its way to fifty.

• 21:31Anthony Pompliano?

  To fifty?

• 21:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's gonna be a big business.

• 21:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And most of that is coming off of like Twitter?

• 21:37Speaker 03

  It's the only thing that we've done so far for distribution, yeah. We're gonna open up to some new marketing, some, you know, outside sales. We're gonna grow the company the traditional way, but yeah, we've gotten from zero to over seven hundred cost segregation studies completed in less than a year. And we've tracked down a ton of the talents through Shepherd. You know, we've done a, hired a lot through Twitter. My distribution network has been fuel, but the team is amazing. Like, Mitchell's a genius and so is his wife.

• 22:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's one other piece of this, though, that I think people are like, okay, look at these fucking guys. They're just tweeting and they're making all this money. Like, this is bullshit. But there is some nuance to what you guys did. Because with the cost segregation business, it used to be that you would call, a person would drive to your physical location. And right, they would walk around with like little clipboard, take a bunch of notes, go back to their office on their paper, fucking do a bunch of stuff. And then send you a report and you're like, oh, thank you very much. Here's your money. You all were like, well, screw cars, screw paper, screw all this stuff. Like, if I understand it correctly, you guys are literally just having the real estate owner on like FaceTime.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so A, we have, we have several different things that we can do and none of them are groundbreaking evolution.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  World changing, you know, new idea stuff. We have engineers that have been civil engineers and mechanical engineers for a long time. In Columbia and in the States, all over the place, but remote. We have a FaceTime method where, hey, you buy a property, get on with one of our reps and walk around and he or she will literally point out and we'll take screenshots and we'll do this entire documentation process in 45 minutes. I don't need to fly there. So we can deliver a cost tag 40% cheaper and three times as fast as our competitors. And that's the real magic.

• 23:16Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 23:52Speaker 03

  So it's like funny thing about this. I've never met anybody in the company in person. We have one of our head engineers driving down from Tampa. We're in Miami for an offsite for Ari Costig right now.

• 24:03Anthony Pompliano?

  First time you meet.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Three folks flew in from Houston. We got two guys coming in from Columbia, the country in Latin America, one more driving down from Tampa. I mean, these are folks I've never met before that are, are building a company and, and crushing it in real time.

• 24:17Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think of that business, you said, you know, it's 10 on its way to 50. How much of the cash are you guys pulling out versus reinvesting? And the numbers itself don't matter as much as like how you guys are thinking about each one of these businesses. Cause there's cash where a lot of tech startups, like I know founders have been working on their company for 10 years. They've been getting a salary and that's it, right? And so when you drive cash, it actually introduces a new decision framework that you have to have. So Coke Industries famously, you know, the two brothers, I think it was three, but now it's two. Sat down and said, hey, look, we're going to put 90% back into the business and we're never going to take out more than 10%. Some people say, no, actually, when I put a dollar in there, I can't generate as much return on it as I can. If I go and I take it out and I put it somewhere else. How have you guys thought about that across some of these businesses?

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a tricky balance. We're investing a ton because we've hired fast and we're building software and we're building a lot of systems. But yeah, it's a, it's a, it's going to be a cash flowing business and we're pulling, we're pulling it out. So there's nothing like, we're looking at it, hey, what could we spend this money on inside the company? And it's at a certain point, it's like, hey, we have the people we need. We're building the software we need and we're making these big investments, but we might as well send a hundred thousand dollar distribution because the money's piling up.

• 25:30Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So there's like, I'm going to call them real estate adjacent businesses that you guys are building. And then you get on Twitter one day and you're like, all right, fuck it. I'm just going to do a landing page business. And I was like, Nick has lost his mind. Nick Sanos guy's going to be like, I've got a bowling alley. I've got this like.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Talking about daycares.

• 25:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Like all kinds of stuff, right? And so like real estate adjacent businesses, I think people are like, okay, got it. He's got a bunch of real estate. He knows what a good service or product looks like. He knows what the cost structures are like. He probably actually knows people who are good at doing this already.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Tighten risk, we gotta talk about tighten risk because I think that could be bigger than.

• 26:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that?

• 26:03Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a property and casualty insurance business. So if you buy a piece of property, you need insurance. The standard model of the business is a producer, somebody who sells insurance, goes to a golf course, joins the country club and goes and talks to the real estate investors in the country club. Gets their policies, makes it to where he's making two or 300 grand a year and then just plays golf the rest of his life.

• 26:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, that sounds cool.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  That's what the business is though. When you take, when you solve for distribution. You can find folks who are used to the old school consulting models where we're going to work really hard to service these policies a lot. So yeah, we're flipping the property casualty insurance business on its head with Titan Risk. My, my business partner, Dan, is actually CEO of that company. And he's the best operator I've ever met. We partnered with, and look, all these things I'm doing are opportunistic. If I find the right operator with the right skillset and I can convince them to come on my team, that's when I'm going to hop on something. That's when we can talk about Web Run Labs. But yeah, I mean, last month was renewal for Bolt Storage. We had to renew our policy. 380 grand is what the quote came back at. Titan Risk, 280 grand in our umbrella.

• 27:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Why can you do that?

• 27:05Speaker 03

  We worked it. Like, we're, we're just like, hey, uh, renewal's coming. Our brokers always just sent us the renewal. Sorry, guys. Insurance went up this year. We're like, uh-uh, we are now the broker. Let's work it. Let's call all the freaking carriers. We got, we got a huge portfolio of 1.9 million square feet. Everybody wants our business. Let's get after this. And then, oh, yeah, when you work it hard, you can find good coverage.

• 27:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so how much are you putting in to start these businesses?

• 27:31Speaker 03

  We stroked a check for 50, you know, 100, we put 100 grand in the checking account to start RE Costig.

• 27:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  We put 50 grand in checking account to start Titan Risk. I put 20 grand in a checking account to start Web Run Labs. Recruit Jet was 25 grand.

• 27:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're putting, let's call it somewhere between 20 and 100 grand.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 27:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Right for each one of these, uh, which is like an angel check essentially. But you're the only investor or only capital going in is 20 to 100 grand. Why is it that a tech startup needs 2 million or $3 million to get going versus some of these businesses only need, you know, 25 to 100 grand?

• 28:06Speaker 03

  These businesses are operating now. Like, there's a market, there's customers, there's businesses that are making good money. We're not reinventing the wheel. Like, yeah, we're doing little things to make it more efficient, like the Costig company. But we're not saying, hey, we're trying to go out and train a market and flip an industry on its head. I'm very lucky that people do that because I just got an Uber across Miami in, in two minutes. I'm lucky that there are people out there changing the world and they should be handsomely rewarded. I'm not that guy. I'm going to be the guy who employs a lot of people, builds teams and builds companies that produce cash flow.

• 28:39Anthony Pompliano?

  If Travis was still CEO of Uber, it might have been one minute.

• 28:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Just kidding, just kidding, just kidding. And so when you look at something like Web Run Labs, right? It now you start to get outside of the real estate adjacent businesses. Is that just like, hey, anywhere that's distribution can help? I'm interested. Or was there some sort of strategic thought process for some of these other businesses?

• 29:00Speaker 03

  So I'm really running internet companies. Like my real estate is an internet company. Ari Kosteg is an internet company. And what does an internet company needs? It needs a place where you funnel traffic. It needs a really good form, a really good landing page. It needs, when somebody fills a half a form, you need to be able to hit them with email sequences to get them back in to fill out the rest of the form to become a qualified lead. You need a beautiful landing page to be built. I just happen to, in my network, have an operator who is one of the best UX designers that I've ever met. So boom, that's where Web Run Labs came. And if you go to sell.boltstorage.com or invest.boltstorage.com, those are people who want to sell their storage facilities and people who want to invest in Bolt Storage. Those are both landing pages built by Web Run Labs.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  So like Profit Centers into, and Ari Kosteg, we're building landing pages for them. It's like, all this traffic's got to go somewhere and we need it to be tight. These sales funnels of when do people get emails? Where are they getting emails? You know how important that stuff is. So yeah, landing page was a little bit outside of my zone, but every one of my companies is a customer of Web Run Labs.

• 30:01Anthony Pompliano?

  How much does it cost for a landing page?

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Three to five grand.

• 30:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, there's people who will say that's really cheap. There's people who say that's really expensive, which is it?

• 30:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, one of the guys complained on the tweet about how expensive it is.

• 30:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw him.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a lot of freaking work. The company's not profitable yet. We're four months into building an agency and we can talk about building these companies in a minute if we have time, but like it's messy. Building these businesses requires a lot of people. It requires a copywriter, it requires designer, it requires the developer in the backend, putting the elements together, a ton of research on the company, a lot of back and forth. You need a salesperson. Doing these things right and converting leads is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to these companies. And you got to do it right.

• 30:36Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you know when to hire people full time versus use outside contractors?

• 30:40Speaker 03

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

• 31:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so I don't give a shit about your companies. I know that they're successful, I know that they're working, but I also have the insider perspective. If I know everything that goes into these businesses, so I wanna dig into some of the details that other people might not know to ask you. Let's start with the content side. There's a bunch of different platforms. Are you posting shit on TikTok? Are you, you know, email's more important? Like, how do you think about the various platforms? And where you put most of your focus versus maybe other places where you're like, I could be there, but it's not really worth it?

• 31:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I went to Mastermind in Cabo with Saho and Nathan Barry from ConvertKit, some of these guys, and they opened my mind to just building an organization around myself. And you have done it very well. So in the last three months, I've hired a full-time copywriter who's very good. I hired an operator, like a kind of a holding company operator. He's the one who will set up all the internal workings of the business, get the webpage up, like all the emails going to the right people, everything all set up, like a kind of a CEO of my holding company, a designer that can do my, you know, little videos, copy editor for my newsletter. So yeah, the company on top of the companies is forming now, just because I'm a delegator.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  If I have a job in one of my companies, I'm pissed. I still write all my tweets. I recycle a lot of them with help. And I still write my newsletter every single week. My newsletter is kind of like my personal diary of how I'm thinking about the world. And I'm gonna be really happy that I wrote that every week when I'm 50, 60 years old.

• 32:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you outsource the tweet writing or the newsletter eventually? Like, forget if you want to or not, but is it something where it's so unique and people will be like, "No, that's not Nick"? Or is it something that you could train someone else? You could find someone who writes well, something like that?

• 32:53Speaker 01

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• 33:22Speaker 03

  If somebody, if you, what do you think? Do you think I could? I don't think-

• 33:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Nah, I'm not gonna tell you what I think until you tell me what you're thinking.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  I don't know. I think that's the one thing, my writing, that I might not be able to outsource.

• 33:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it's the most, it's the thing that each one of us is so emotionally connected to, but it's emotionally connected to not because we're like, "Oh, the audience is gonna like, notice." Because I actually think you can train someone to do it pretty easily. I've been very surprised at how people can write in a very similar style. But I think that it is less effective when you outsource it, because you just said it's a diary. It forces you to organize your thoughts. And so when I think about the things I write, actually, I will then later reuse them. So I may write something, you know, in the first week of the month, and three months later, I'm on a television interview and I pull something up, "How does he know that?" It's like, "'Cause I fucking went and researched it and I wrote it." And it's the same thing as, you know, they say if you write notes or whatever, you always remember stuff. So I think there's that aspect to it.

• 34:19Anthony Pompliano?

  The second thing is, it forces you to collect your thoughts and like, be really thoughtful and think a little bit deeper maybe than you would have just in conversation or whatever. But then the third piece of it that's fascinating to me is like, they put out in the world. And I'm sure you just like, "Ah, get back, you know, hey, you're an idiot, hey, you're a genius." And you're like, "Okay, which one is it?", right? And you gotta look at the feedback and you gotta understand like, "Oh, actually, this person who's being critical has a good point and yeah, I should incorporate that more." This person who's actually saying, "I'm a genius", like, they're just saying it to everyone that sends them an email, right? And so you almost have to like, think through, again, not just writing, but now you gotta actually evaluate the feedback to know what's right and what's not.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  I look back and I look at what I do now inside my companies. The written word is how I do everything. The written word is how I lead other people. The written word through text messages, emails, Slack notifications is how I guide my employees. The written word is how I convince and sell these operators to come partner with me to build companies. The written word is everything that I do. You said something when you were talking to Sam on My First Million, or it was Sean that interviewed you. You said like, okay, the, the, the business show that you did every morning for two hours for two years. Okay, looking back, was it a use, was it a useful, you know, dollar per hour value of my time? Maybe not, but the skill that you built doing that? Now you can go on CNBC and argue with the biggest, baddest motherfucker in the world and you're going to hold your own every single time.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  It's like, okay.

• 35:41Anthony Pompliano?

  They don't like when you do that, by the way.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  It's, it's building, it's building that skillset and I can lean back on my writing. I'm going to lean on my writing for everything that I do the rest of, of, you know, my time. And I was talking to, it goes back to a sports story. A decathlete that I really respect when I was in the track days, we were sitting on the side of a meet and he had, his left hamstring was all taped up. And we were at like the USA championships. He had to get a certain, you know, time or score to, to make sure that he had a spot, not this year was going to withdraw, but the next year and some events that he wanted to do. And I was like, why are you out here like limping like, are you not, and he was just had such a positive attitude. And he's like, I'm better at 60% than the fourth place guy in America at a hundred percent. So I'm going to be here and I'm going to get this done.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  And I just, I'm confident enough that I can limp along and I can score my 8,900 points and I can do what I gotta do.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  That has stuck with me. Like if I can do enough of these interviews with you, that if I come in here sleep deprived, I'm going to, I'm going to be able to hold my own. You're going to practice enough, the way that you speak and the way that you, you know, do your media, that even on your worst day, people won't even notice that you're off your game. Same with my writing. My writing is going to be the skill that I lean back on to do everything that I want to do in my life, whether it be books, teaching, giving back, leading people, building companies. It's all writing.

• 36:57Anthony Pompliano?

  There is, um, one of the rules of Twitter is the stupidest tweets are the most viral, right? As we all know.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  So frustrating.

• 37:04Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but yeah, I mean, like literally for those that don't know kind of what, what this unspoken rule is, is like, somebody can sit down and like, think of the greatest tweet ever. They can do a whole thread, they can do all this stuff and like, it works.

• 37:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Literally, you're taking a shit and you just fire off a tweet and it goes viral, right? We, I'll give you two examples. So we recently posted something on Instagram and it's an interview with a guy, Jason Lowery from Space Force. And it's not even me in the video at first. It's my brother. He's like, "What's the funniest thing about space?" Right? And, and Jason just goes, "When you look into space, you're actually looking down," right? And then it's like me and my brother's all laughing, whatever. Put it on Instagram. I go to sleep, wake up, it's got like 150,000, you know, views on it or something. I was like, "What the hell?" Best performing video that we've posted in like probably a year, right? And so I was like, "All right." Now, when I was younger and less experienced, I'd go post 20 space videos, right? The next, but like, obviously no, it's just an anomaly, whatever. Okay, fine.

• 37:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Second thing is, normally every Saturday, we post an update on the, kind of the week of Bitcoin, right? So I come in here, got the nice camera, these guys are all set up, got the lights on, you know, "Okay, let's do our fucking thing." Or we may even do a little research, God forbid, right? And then we're ready to go. This past weekend, I got caught in a meeting on Friday, couldn't record it. So Saturday morning, woke my ass up, grabbed my phone, sat, you know, right on the couch, did a quick video, sent it to these guys, like, "That's the best that we got," right? Like, post that shit, double the views, right? And you're sitting there and you're like, now, again, when I was younger, I'd be like, "We're only doing phone videos," right? And you realize like some of this novelty, right? Some of it's the change of pace, some, like, there's a whole bunch of different things that go into it. And so like, you don't want to mess with

• 38:42Anthony Pompliano?

  the magic and you kind of just like, just go about it and keep consistently creating things. But also you start to realize like, dude, we can't predict this shit, right? There's been interviews I've done with people, I've been like, "This is gonna be a grand slam. We're, we're gonna do 5 million, uh, uh, views on it." Nothing. Like literally 2,000 views. You're like, it's not even like, "Okay, I thought we were gonna get 5,000, we got 2,000," right? It's like, no, we literally thought it was gonna be our best and it was our worst. How are we off so far?

• 39:08Speaker 03

  The fluidity of this stuff is mind blowing. Like how, how it moves, you can't predict it. And that's why I think it's just about getting in the game and taking shots. I mean, I'm not a high-risk kind of shot guy. Like, I think almost all these companies will do some level of success, but you don't know which ones are gonna go. You don't know which operators are gonna be the Operators to really take company to the next level is just about being in the game and producing and and just doing getting uncomfortable and doing shit.

• 39:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone wants to talk about hiring employees, but that frankly has played out in my opinion. When you're trying to hire these operators, they're like GM, CEOs, whatever. I've had great success. I've had great failures in doing this. What are you looking for? And then what are the red flags when you're actually looking at these people?

• 39:47Speaker 03

  It's it's it's more of an art than a science. Just like you said, some of the interviews you think are going to be amazing and they flop. Some of the operators that I think are going to be amazing.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  They're just okay, but some people with just have that God given ability to lead other people. I think it's all communication. It's all writing and it's all leading and putting together other people. If you're good at your job, like I don't necessarily want a very talented

• 40:15Speaker 03

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

• 40:56Anthony Pompliano?

  When you're doing interviews, are there any questions or anything that you really try to kind of get at some of this stuff?

• 41:01Speaker 03

  The motivational interview is one of my favorite things, just so that I know. In my opinion, it's all about expectations. I'm very good at managing expectations and that's why I don't piss people off. I don't let people down because I'm going to tell them like it is. I'm not going to rose color, you know, put it through rose colored glasses. So when I'm in an interview and you know, you come in and say, hey, Nick, I want to start a company with you. I'm like, all right, what's the best case scenario six months from now? And if they say, okay, I want to be making, you know, I want to be doing a million ARR. I want to have, you know, 60% margins and want to have a team of 30. Okay, well, six months from now, no, that's six months into building an agency from the ground up is gonna be that really, really frustrating time where you have your seven employees that you started with and you're just now, you're just now putting it together

• 41:44Speaker 03

  to break through and actually pump on some marketing and actually grow a company. There's that month two to month six, that's just a grind, it's not fun, nobody's having fun, the operators having bad weeks, you know.

• 41:55Anthony Pompliano?

  You don't even know if it works yet.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  You're not sure if it works, you're not sure if it works yet. And then sometimes month six, month seven, it can just click and then boom, you got your systems, it's firing, people are trained and it's rolling. So, and then the five year question is even more important. Hey, we're in this room right now and you and I are building this business and we're five years in and things are going fucking awesome. Like you come in here and you're lit up, you're having the most fun you've ever had, all your career dreams are coming true. Tell me what's going on, what's going on in the company, how big's the team, what are you doing day to day, who are you leading? And they start to, and then I just shut up and I let them talk to me about what they see, what position they see themselves in in four or five years. And it's, it's amazing that that will kill thirty or forty percent of relationships right

• 42:40Speaker 03

  there because I can't deliver what they need and want. Does that make sense?

• 42:45Anthony Pompliano?

  It makes a ton of sense and I guess when you're doing that, you're looking for the right answer or you're looking for alignment in terms of what you think the business can do as well?

• 42:54Speaker 03

  This is, this is past the point, I guess if we back up, I'm looking, I'm getting a look in their brain, how do they think about things, how do they talk about things? I'm really good at asking the questions and reading how somebody thinks, it's just a, I've hired enough people now that I have a natural ability to tell if somebody's got it, if they're an A player, if they're a 10xer, if they can communicate really well, if they're clear, they're concise, they can think about problems the right way. So I'm having conversations, I'm interacting with people and I'm saying, okay, this person's an operator, they got it, like I think that they have it, then it's all about look for the red flags that might fuck something up and that's what this is about. So yeah, the motivational interview is, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna paint this picture and I'm looking for red flags that means that maybe this is not gonna work.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  I don't want that stress, man. Most of the time I'm trying to convince people to leave high paying jobs. The guy who's building Web Run with me had a $400,000 a year job and I sold him on coming to build an agency with me.

• 43:47Anthony Pompliano?

  He's gonna make way more money doing the agency probably than he will in that other job. You don't think so?

• 43:53Speaker 03

  We haven't made a dollar yet, three months in.

• 43:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, like if you can swallow the short term pain, right? It's basically if he was making 400K doing the same thing, that means somebody else is making way more than 400K. So if he can just replicate the same business.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  But if I have a guy like that and he comes in and he starts talking to me and I'm all pumped up, I'm all like dude, we're gonna get rich. Like this is gonna be awesome. We got more business than we could ever hope for. Like all we gotta do is build these systems, hiring the employees. I got that solved through Sheppard. Like we got all these ways that we can do this. And then he gets in the trenches and two months in, he's like, Nick, this is not what you told me. Like this is not the life. Like so, it's more about, hey, we can do this and we can make a lot of money. And we're gonna learn a shitload and you're gonna become a way more valuable manager, delegator, operator. And I'm gonna learn a lot and we're gonna make mistakes and we're gonna grow and it's gonna be a journey. We might get rich, but it's gonna be fucking hard.

• 44:38Anthony Pompliano?

  You wanna talk about someone that's gonna piss people off?

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 44:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I stopped selling people on doing things because I know I can convince them. To this point, right? If I want someone to do something, I can be very convincing. The problem is that they get two weeks, four weeks, two months, four months, whatever, later. And they're like, damn, I fell for it. Right? I was put under the spell and like it sounded amazing, whatever. And so in some way, what you're describing is the same thing of like, if you, if you promise everything and you say it's gonna be this great thing, people actually believe it, right? And that's why most people who can build a lot of organizations and things like that, they're very good at selling,

• 45:20Anthony Pompliano?

  whether they realize it or not. And so I've literally said to people that I've been trying to recruit, I am not gonna sell you on this. Go think about it. I'm not going to reach out to you. I'm not going to do anything. You come back to me if you think this makes sense, but like basically you gotta make the choice because if you're not bought into this.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 45:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Then like I'm going to trick you essentially, right? Not me, not, not in a nefarious way, but like I will convince you to do this. And it's just going to be a train wreck in the future. And I am surprised at how many people end up quote unquote, getting it right.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  They trust you.

• 45:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, they just get it right in the sense of like, that also can be people come back and like, hey, it's not for me.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'm like, why? Right? Cause I'm just as interested in why it's not for you as if it was for you. And they'll say like two or three things. And I'm like, actually that's a, that makes a ton of sense. And like, you shouldn't do this if those are the things you're worried about. And so I recently had a guy who it pissed me off a little bit, um, in that we were convincing him to join one of our companies. On a Friday, he's like, I'm in verbally commits. We spend all day Saturday, drawing up all the papers, all this stuff and everything, send it to him. He's supposed to sign Sunday. Don't hear from him. Now it's afternoon.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 46:24Anthony Pompliano?

  My, hey dude, like, you know, and I was very clear, we move quick, right? Uh, Sunday night. Hey, what's up?

• 46:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Already kind of, you know, skating on ice, backpedaling a little bit, whatever. He's like, let's get on the phone on Monday morning.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  You knew then.

• 46:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, he, he just gets on the phone. He's like, look, my heart's not in it. And I said to him, by the way, don't tell people you're in and be out, but I'd rather you figure this out now than later. And like, I actually walked away respecting this guy, right? Cause I was like, look, okay, cool. He's younger guy, you know, he, he definitely kind of got caught up a little bit in the speed of everything or whatever. But like, man, that's even harder. Once you've already like, a lot of people would just be like, cool. I said, I'm in. So like, I'm going to do it. And like, I know my heart's not in it and I'll just like, try to, you know, brute force it for a couple of months.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 47:07Anthony Pompliano?

  But he had the discipline to just take a step back and like, I actually don't want to do this, right? My heart's not in doing this specific task. I want to do something else. And so I think like, it's all about that alignment or the buy-in. That's really where the magic is. And so you got to be careful because if you're good at selling. Right? You can probably convince a lot of people.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  I learned early in my career that if you're really good at selling, selling the positives, you're going to be stressed out. Because stress is a gap, stress is a gap between reality and what you told somebody. It's a gap in expectations. Whether investors, employees, your spouse, whatever, if you set expectations here and you're here, that's stress. You told somebody you were going to arrive at three o'clock and you arrive at three 15, that's stress, right? But if I tell somebody.

• 47:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm laughing because Miami time, that's like, this whole city operates on, I'll be there Tuesday at nine AM. I show up Wednesday at three PM.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  Well, I fit right in then because you've interviewed me twice. I've been late both times. But look.

• 47:55Anthony Pompliano?

  It's because Travis isn't running Uber.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  The way that I sell, the way that I sell now is being a realist. I have the experience, I have the resume, people know that I'm legit. And when I sit here and tell them that, hey, this is not all rosy. What you see on Twitter is not real life. Building this business is going to be hard. Let's talk about the worst case scenario. Let's talk about how you and I are going to interact in 12 months if we're going to shut this business down. Let's have that discussion right now. They walk away and they're like, damn, okay, Nick is like either, hey, he scared the shit out of me. This is not for me. That's great. I wanted that to happen. Or he's like, I trust Nick. Like, I, I know that what he's saying is real because he didn't just talk about the awesome stuff. And it's fun and great to sell with all the awesome stuff, but you know, that creates stress.

• 48:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So we talked about putting capital in initially. How do you know when to stroke another check? Cause the first check's fun because it's optimistic. Hey, we can go build a business.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:47Anthony Pompliano?

  The second, third, fourth check that you may have to write. Now it's like, am I basically just lighting money on fire? Cause we're never going to get to the other side.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Or it's like, no, I've got deep confidence in this and like, I'm basically just, you know, getting, bridging us there.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:00Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about making additional investments into a business that might not be at kind of profitability yet?

• 49:06Speaker 03

  I, these businesses are lean and the operator is a lot of times compensated on the first chunk of revenue. Meaning like the first hundred K of profit or the first 50 K of profit will go to that person for doing the work, the operations. And after that, it's an equity split. So a lot of times we're only burning five, 10 grand a month. So we're going to be up, we got some runway. An example of this that I think is really interesting is I wanted to start a commercial debt brokerage company.

• 49:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Meaning if you're a big real estate developer and you're going to go get loans, you need a team of people to negotiate loans on your behalf. You need somebody who has relationships with the bank. They're going to make sure the bank's not going to retrade and they charge you 100 basis points or 1% of your loan amount to do all the work for you for your debt. It's a great business for everybody involved. I had a banker that has been working with Bolt Storage. I have a really close relationship with him. He is a killer. He's been in the banking business for 15 years and he is very, very, very good at what he does. I wanted him to be one of my operators and this is one of my recent failures. I want him to be one of my operators and I was willing to stroke a big check and put my money where my mouth is because I know my audience needs this and I know him and I know he's great. And I know we can build a team to make money. And I said, look, I will pay you out of my pocket.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  I'll sign a contract that says you're going to get 200 grand a year for the next 24 months. Whether this works or not, I'm going to be paying you this money.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  And if it doesn't work, I'm gonna pay you the money. And then I told him about the equity, told him how we're gonna split the company up and it was all fine and dandy. And he just said, look, Nick, I've spent 15 years in the banking business. I'm not an entrepreneur. I made 500 grand last year. I got two kids. Like, I don't need this. I don't need the stress. I don't need the entrepreneurship. I hope your business does really well. And he told me no. And that was a tough, tough.

• 50:45Anthony Pompliano?

  You know why, right?

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Why?

• 50:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Bro, I've been telling people for years, short the bankers, man. These dudes, they're bankers.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  You're right.

• 50:52Anthony Pompliano?

  They're bankers, right? I mean, as much as I joke about that stuff, like, it is a, uh, it's a different DNA, right? Lawyers are the same way.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can't get my lawyer to start a business with me either, Pomp. I have a, I have a concept for 1031 title company combined. Great freaking business. Cause when you, when you start 1031 company, you are the steward of the cash. They put 10 million dollars in an account that you can go put in treasuries and you get the money from the treasuries.

• 51:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Like 90 days or something, right?

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a business that if you get a couple 1031s going, it's a couple hundred thousand dollar a year business. He's like, ah, nah, nah.

• 51:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, I'll give you a couple, th- these are all free gems for people from years of bashing my head against the wall, which I'm sure you guys know these do. I tried to buy a law firm in 2000 and early 2019. I, cause I was sitting there and, uh, I've been doing a bunch of venture investing and I was like, these guys are just cleaning up.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Great business.

• 51:41Anthony Pompliano?

  I was watching the checks that we were writing. Yeah, but I was watching the checks we were writing from the asset management firms and I'm like, dude, these guys are cleaning up. And then through the bear market of crypto, I was like, yo, these guys are still cleaning up. Like literally, they may make more money than some of these companies are gonna end up making. And so I gotta own one of these. These, they make money in good times, bad times, whatever. And so, uh, I didn't know if you don't have a law degree, you can't own a law firm, right? So I was like, okay, cool. Later on, I found out that you can actually own 49% uh, in most states, I believe this to be true.

• 52:11Speaker 03

  Utah, Arizona and Texas.

• 52:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you can own 49% of an accounting firm in almost every state, I believe. And now there are a couple of these, uh, states that are saying, well, wait a second, maybe we actually do want non-lawyers to own some of these law firms. And so like, things are shifting because I think people are starting to realize that, wait a second, it may not actually make sense to have only lawyers own these businesses. Like, they may just have a different DNA. They may have a different skill set, different interests, whatever. So as I kind of got further and further into this, and then you start realizing like, wait a minute, the entrepreneurs, I'm not some genius, they've been thinking about this for decades. They start tax advisory companies, they start, you know, 1031 exchange or marketing for like, all these things in and around the services that say, look, if the regulation won't let me actually own the law firm, there's 10 other businesses I can own that are right around it, right?

• 52:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what's fascinating to me about this though is I've gone and talked to a bunch of these people. Like you guys should do this, you should do this, whatever. It's not in their DNA. It's just not how they think. Like if you want to be an accountant, especially at a big accounting firm, you're taking zero risk. Your whole job is around killing risk, right? And mitigating that risk. When someone's like, hey, jump off this cliff, you're like, no dude, hell no, I'm not jumping off, including if you literally give me a ladder, a parachute, a rope.

• 53:22Speaker 03

  200 grand a year for the next two years.

• 53:25Anthony Pompliano?

  No, because that's risk and I've been trained my entire life to kill risk. So I think that's like one big piece, but the other thing is, and some people get mad when I say this, but like if they leave those jobs and they want to go start companies, major red flag, right? Now there are some people who are very successful entrepreneurs. A lot of people actually did PayPal mafia, they got law degrees, but they didn't practice law for 10 years.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  A lot of them are running around here in Miami.

• 53:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. And so when you think about that, it's like they had the, the, the mental frameworks, the thinking, like all this stuff.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Communication that you learn in law school.

• 53:58Anthony Pompliano?

  All of that from law school, but they didn't go and bed themselves for 10 years in a law firm. And so again, it's not to say lawyers are bad or lawyers are good or anything. It's just like, sometimes you actually need the operator to have a very specific skillset and a DNA that's hard for people to wrap their heads around unless they've talked to a ton of these people, right? Which you have. When you think about underwriting the operators, that's on the way in. How do you know when to pull a plug if it's the wrong person?

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Look, I haven't had to do that yet.

• 54:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  Everybody thinks, everybody thinks I got this. I know I'll have to. I know I will.

• 54:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Any of the ones you have right now?

• 54:31Speaker 03

  No.

• 54:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't say who it is, but let's scare some of them.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe, uh, maybe Ari Kosik.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  Mel has got to go.

• 54:40Anthony Pompliano?

  She's gonna fire you.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Nick, you're out of here. No, I think one of the things that people don't realize, when they're sitting here talking to me and you, and they think about business and they think about entrepreneurship and they hear me talk about my companies, they think that we all have it all figured out. They think that we all have SOPs and everybody comes into work and they do their job and it just happens. Business is messy and it's chaos.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  So many people listening to this would be very, very surprised if they knew the big companies in their town, the big companies in their big cities nearby, big corporations that are traded on the New York Stock Exchange that are total chaos on the inside.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  You know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about companies where it's fires all over the place. They have a few producers in each division that are holding the whole company together like duct tape and it's chaos. That is a very, very common occurrence inside of business. So if you don't-

• 55:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And maybe necessary for a business to be successful.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  I think when they get to a certain size, it's a testament to two things. Number one, it's required. Being comfortable in uncomfortable situations is absolutely required. An operator has to have it. Number two is that these businesses aren't as good as you think they are. These managers aren't as good as they think they are. There's people who are very good at certain types of businesses that would look inside under the hood of some of my companies and been like, damn, Nick is an idiot.

• 56:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  He's got these people doing that. He's got no system connecting. He's letting revenue slip away over here. His leads aren't nurtured the right way over here. They would look at my company and they would be able to give me an education on it.

• 56:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Hire a consultant and they'll tell you that you're dumb.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  That's exactly what they do. But what people don't understand is that all businesses that way. And as an entrepreneur, you have to thrive under those chaotic environments. You have to thrive under that unstructured, uncomfortable, and you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. So these operators that I'm finding, I'm finding folks who, okay, the world is, have you seen that little meme of the dog sitting in the flaming house? That is what running an agency and building an agency is like and many other types of small businesses.

• 56:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Why build agencies? I don't want to say who it is, but I asked someone before you came in here. I was like, what questions do you want to hear from them? Somebody that we know. And they were like, why does he keep building the agencies? Why doesn't he build one big company, get some cash flow from it, but build tons and tons of equity value? Why not do that?

• 56:58Anthony Pompliano?

  You're trying to think right now who-

• 57:00Speaker 03

  No, because people tell me that I can't and I have an ego.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  Like I'll just say, like, people tell me that I can't do all these things and also start companies. Are we gonna be late for dinner?

• 57:12Anthony Pompliano?

  No. I was just checking to make sure.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  People tell me that I can't do this stuff. People tell me, Nick, focus on real estate. Nick, you know, don't get over your skis with all these side businesses. You can't grow them all. And I'm like, dude, I think I can. I think I can empower these people. I think I can just do handle distribution and marketing for these companies. I think some of them will still get very big. I know I'm gonna learn a lot and I'm uncomfortable. I'm having a ton of fun. And if one or two hit, then yeah, I'll get to keep piling on. But I'm a, I'm kind of a, why would I put all my eggs in one basket when a business needs two or three years to mature anyway?

• 57:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So Sam Parr asked me this on my first million. Uh, we've already promoted them too much, so no one go listen. Um, but

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Suck a podcast.

• 57:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I saw literally his eyes. He was like, oh, wait, actually, Pomp might not be a complete moron. When he asked me, he was like, why are you doing so many different things? And I was like, no, I'm just providing capital and distribution.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 58:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Over and over and over again. I feel like you're doing a very similar thing in terms of helping to jumpstart these businesses. But is the long-term goal, like, you're not involved, really?

• 58:14Speaker 03

  The playbook is the same. I'm not, I'm not allowed to have a company email address.

• 58:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  No direct reports, except for the one operator to come to me if he feels like crying and needs to pick me up or he needs advice on something.

• 58:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  I'm coaching, I'm helping where I can, and obviously I'm a tinkerer. I love getting involved in the businesses, but I'm, I'm enabling talented people. There are people who are really, really, really good at what they do, and I'm just giving them the fuel and the education, helping them go forward and providing the distribution and providing the capital. And it's really fun when you can do that. And after the my first million episode that I was on, a bunch of people reached out to me who were killers. They're killer operators, like, Nick, I want to start companies. Nick, I want to start companies. I started talking to this guy from Cape Town, South Africa, 26-year-old. He's building a little agency, had about, you know, three or four grand a month of revenue, and he's a badass. He's like, Nick, I want to start a company. I was like, what kind of company? He's like, a systems company. Like, I want to come in and I want to set up a company from the ground up with the right emails, go to the right places. We got the domains all set up. We're building the backend of the website where, you know, how does the CRM link?

• 59:09Speaker 03

  You know, what's happening automatically in the backend? And I'm like, damn, this guy's a badass. And we started talking, we started talking about potentially an SEO company. He worked at a firm for a long time, knows it well. Eventually I was like, dude, just come and work for me. Just come into my company, I'll pay you a monthly stipend and I want to see what you can do over the next 12 months. And he's and he wrote writes me a long email. I was like, Nick, I'm gonna accept your offer and frankly, I want to be, you know, I don't just want to be a, you know, a member of your holding company. I want to be running your holding company.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  And I'm like, alright, I'll give you that chance. See what happens.

• 59:41Anthony Pompliano?

  What could he mess up?

• 59:43Speaker 03

  Well, right now.

• 59:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, he's gonna have bank account access?

• 59:45Speaker 03

  No, well, he's got a credit card with a limit. And again, what, what, if he drains one of these $20,000 bank accounts?

• 59:53Speaker 03

  No, I, I, maybe I trust him to a fault, but I'm also not gonna let him totally screw me. It's interesting. I want to hear your thoughts on this. A lot of well-known influencers talk about how they were screwed a lot and how they've always like been robbed or messed with.

• 1:00:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Loser mentality.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  Something has happened, like they've just been wronged and they talk a lot about how they've been wronged by so many people. Most of the successful folks that I know, I asked him, I was like, dude, have you ever been screwed? Have you ever been just totally, somebody fucking told you they're gonna do something, you put money in and the money was gone and they they just disappeared? And maybe in the crypto space, yeah, that happens, but have you ever been like totally screwed over by somebody?

• 1:00:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that there's just been situations that other people look at and be like, I cannot believe that you dealt with that, like crazy, crazy shit, right? Where there's somebody who, here's a great one, there's somebody that has become well-known in the business world who myself and a partner were the first investors in this business. We invested via a convertible note. And basically, he waited, the business exploded, exploded. And then he came back to us and said, I'm not converting the debt into equity and I'm not paying back the debt. Good luck. Okay.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  That's that counts as getting screwed.

• 1:01:04Anthony Pompliano?

  But I didn't think of it as being screwed. You know what I took away from it? I'll fucking never sign another document that says that doesn't have an auto conversion, right? And so like, guess what? We were able to kind of amicably figure it out, right? We, whatever, we got a decent return, given how long we were invested, whatever. But like.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  But technically, he was allowed to do that by the documents.

• 1:01:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:01:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Guess what? Guess whose fault that was? That was my fault. I signed the paper, right? Like, it was a learning lesson. I could name like 10 different situations like that where like, if you go. Into that like like there are people who'd be like I'm offended right like you're you're

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  You're wrong to me.

• 1:01:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, I always look at it as like dude that's a learning lesson. So I have this whole thing. Uh, my wife and I always talk about like it's practice. Anything that goes wrong is practice. Right? And it's like, because the thing that you're learning today is actually going to look like practice to the big thing you're gonna do in the future. What's the big thing? I don't fucking know. When is the big thing coming? I don't fucking know. But I do know what is that when the big thing comes, it's going to be all these little lessons we learned along the way.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:01:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I do think like when you said, you know, people who are screwed, I'm like loser mentality. Cause literally you go around all day long being like that person screwed me, that person screwed me, that person screwed me. Right? And so it's the same thing. Uh, I have like this like tip rule. Anytime you're at a restaurant, whatever you look at the bill, whatever you think that the tip should be at a dollar, one dollar, right? The average, you know, meal that you go to was just the average meal you go to. Like, let's just say that you're like, okay, it's 50 bucks. It should be, uh, uh, 20, you know, 20 bucks, um, or I'm sorry, $10, right? Add one dollar. Now it's 11. Guess what? That person's like, oh, Dan, that was nice. And I always say the same thing. It's like they, it, it means more to them than it does to me.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And now you extrapolate it out if the bill's bigger or whatever, but like the same mentality of just like, if you're constantly going around, like trying to pick up pennies, you miss all the fucking value. Same thing with the way you interact with people. It's like, you're like, oh man, that passive aggressive email, fuck this person, right? Like dude, yes, it's business. Like people said all kinds of crazy shit, right?

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  People are very emotional. I mean,

• 1:02:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, but if you just look at it as like, you see it for what it is, like, that's fine. And so the other thing is, um, when you deal with people, sometimes you have to realize like, uh, Plana will very much, uh, sometimes look at it and be like, I don't want to like be around that person because of A, B, C, whatever, right? And I'll look at the same person and I'll be like, look, I, I understand exactly who that person is.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  I know what I'm gonna get?

• 1:03:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I, I know exactly the pros, the cons, the risks, you know, all this stuff. If I see them for who they are, that's fine. I can still learn something from them. I could still, you know, do stuff with them, whatever. But like, you just kind of have to be like, eyes wide open, try to be as real as possible. And if you then go through life and every time something quote unquote, bad happens, you're like, what's the lesson in it? Comes a lot different. So a great example is, uh, it when I told you that one employee or potential employee backed out.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:03:43Anthony Pompliano?

  We called a couple of other employees of the business and hey, we're hiring this person or whatever. So that my partner in that business, as it was happening, I literally, we were texting back and forth, what are the lessons? And so now it's every time anything bad happens, I just immediately think, what are the lessons that I can learn from this situation? And I write them down. And so you just build this almost like internal, you know, kind of book of lessons. Again, does that make me better than anyone else? No, it just makes me like, hopefully have one less potential mistake I'll make in the future. So it's like, when I hear people say like, I'm screwed. I'm just like, yo, that's a loser mentality. And somehow in society, like you're not supposed to say that shit anymore. But like, no, you're a fucking loser. You didn't get screwed. You probably contributed just as much.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And people are like, no, they stole from me. I'm like, well, you're the moron who gave them access to steal, right? If you leave your shop open and somebody comes in and steals shit, is that their fault or your fault? Like, yeah, you could argue that they shouldn't do that. Okay, fine. That's, society has agreed on that, but like, lock the door. I don't know. Like, is that like crazy to think that way?

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, you look like you disagree.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  No, I agree with you 100%. I just worry that I'm gonna eat these words because what goes on YouTube.

• 1:04:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's go.

• 1:04:50Speaker 04

  It's me, the.

• 1:04:53Speaker 04

  We don't need the jingle twice. Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights and rental cars.

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  Fine. No one deals more deals than. Please stop. Touche.

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  Priceline.

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I may get fucking screwed at some point.

• 1:05:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  And I'll, and it'll be my fault. It just hasn't happened yet.

• 1:05:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  So maybe I am unnecessarily trusting, or maybe it's that I don't give people access to my bank accounts.

• 1:05:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So the bank account stuff is like super simple, right? But I also think there's this element of, um.

• 1:05:37Anthony Pompliano?

  All of these like quote-unquote bad situations, they all happen on the fringes, right? It's never like, uh, hey, I gave money to Nick and Nick then, uh, said that he was going to do X and he did something different.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  If you, if you get the big things right in business and your core and your foundation is solid, yeah, all the stuff that happens is not that critical, like you're saying, it's on, it's on the edges.

• 1:05:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Hundred percent. And the other thing too, I think a lot of people naturally jump to is like, uh, hey, this situation that doesn't look great is coming, right? And what they want to do is they're like, how do we bring as much firepower as possible? Let's sue, let's do this, let's do this. And what I've learned over time, it's just like, dude, it's literally never worth the fight, right? And so in those situations, there's always some way to solve the problem. And if it looks like it's not solvable, then there's something that you're missing in the equation. And so like, when you take that mentality of just like, you are a problem solver, solve the problem. I've found that you usually can find some way to, to kind of get out of these situations.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  It's communication too, because you can see this stuff coming. People don't want to admit it, but anytime a business is failing, it's a slow train wreck, especially in real estate, because it happens really slow. You can see all these problems coming. You can see the problems with people brewing. You can see when people are upset. You can read them. You can, you can get a feel for this stuff. You just gotta have those uncomfortable conversations right away and people aren't willing to do it. People don't want to have those hard, uncomfortable conversations.

• 1:06:59Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Last thing I want to talk about is, uh, the way that you interact, not with the operators, but with other people in the businesses. Do you tell them good job?

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. I'm, I am, I am a big completer. Yeah.

• 1:07:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  I, I, uh, I will definitely provide harsh feedback, but never in a disrespectful way, never in public.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  One of my operators wants to go start a side business on, on top of one of them. I'm like, dude, you haven't proven to me that you can run this business. So like, we gotta have this hard conversation now that, okay, probably not yet.

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  But yeah, a lot of compliments, man, a lot of compliments.

• 1:07:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  How do you feel about this?

• 1:07:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it's the number one. It's one of the top issues that people struggle with when they get in this situation because there's an element of like, I'm trying to motivate these people. I'm trying to, you know, keep them focused and all this kind of stuff versus when there's too many compliments. Right? People sort of kind of believe their own bullshit. And so like, there is this very delicate balance, and I don't think that there's a perfect science to it. But the people who get it right are way more successful than the people who aren't.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  I can just see and feel who's really laying it on the line for my companies. I can see the people, the employees, because I'm tinkering, I'm looking at all the reports, I can see what engineers are doing what. And I know who's really busting their ass to, to make the company better. And sending them an email that says, hey, I know how much you're working, like, keep it up. Thank you. That's, that goes such a long way. Bosses don't do that, which is, which is insane to me.

• 1:08:28Anthony Pompliano?

  What reports do you get? Is it daily, weekly, monthly?

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  I, like, I'll go out for beers on Friday night and my wife will come home and flip on Netflix. I'll go to my computer and look at every single self-storage facility, at how many move-ins we have that month, at what prices. You know, how many people are moving out.

• 1:08:43Anthony Pompliano?

  But that's real-time reports.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  That's real-time, yeah.

• 1:08:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, what about the other businesses?

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  RE costs say, I look at leads, because my job is distribution, so I'm looking at how many leads came in, how many proper's do they have? I'm looking at sales reports of.

• 1:08:53Anthony Pompliano?

  So this is more like you're looking at like dashboards you guys have, not necessarily like somebody's compiling a report to send you every week or anything?

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, airtable, dashboards, yeah, some, yeah.

• 1:09:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and do you ever change your behavior?

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  I ask hard questions. That's what I do. Like, they get one compliment for every five hard questions. I'm gonna say, hey, uh, here's a potential problem brewing, what are we doing to think about this? And it drives them nuts, but they're always really good questions. And we always have some takeaways, not always, like, okay, maybe we just gotta wait this out. I'm the kind of guy who, imagine a company is a, is a globe. I'm the kind of guy who like, just like a basketball. Keep it spinning, keep it rolling forward. I'm the kind of guy who jerks it, so I kind of, I've learned over the years that I can't just come in and wreck shit, you know, turn shit over and make it, want it all to happen right away, and shit happens really fast in my companies. But I also know that I can't, my employees are all gonna quit and leave if I'm up their, up their ass every day.

• 1:09:47Anthony Pompliano?

  We have, uh, somebody works for one of our businesses that recently was basically telling me like, uh, hey, I, I have a lot of things, like they were distracted, right? And so, uh, I kinda took a, a leap. It was one of the first time I, I'd done it, but I said, listen, here's what I want you to do every single day. I want you to wake up and I want you to send, literally when you wake up, get on your computer and you send me what are your priorities for the day? And I'll agree or disagree, right? And, uh, I recently had a one-on-one with them.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  I bet you didn't even have to really respond because him thinking through that, straightened it right out.

• 1:10:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and so like, I was like, you know, at first there's going to be five or 10 things and maybe we agree on 20 or 30%, right? But over time, like we'll learn each other and we'll actually get to a hundred percent alignment every single day. And I recently had a one-on-one with this person and they told me, uh, yeah, it's crazy. I, I get so much more done and, uh, I'm so much more efficient. And I was like, what do you mean? And they were like, well, before like I didn't, I wasn't clear on the priorities. So like I had all this extra time and like the work expanded to fit the time, right? And so now I'm like, wait a minute, maybe actually the driving factor isn't, you know, uh, anything more so than just like, the more you put on their plate, you can drive the efficiency. And actually I think the best people, that's what they want. Cause I feel like they're getting a lot of wins in a day, right?

• 1:10:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you go from like, I got one thing done every two days to like, maybe get three things on the day. It builds momentum, right? Kinda where we started the conversation.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  So you're ahead of me in this game. You've been at it for longer, your reach is bigger, your distribution is more, you've made a lot of investments as well.

• 1:11:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Only for now.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  What blind spots do you see? Like you talking to me, you getting a look into my mind for an hour now. What do you think should be something I'm more aware of that maybe I'm not as focused as I should be on? Or something that you could see messing all this up? And if you're watching this, comment and let me know, email me, [email protected]. If you've just gotta look in my mind for an hour.

• 1:11:30Anthony Pompliano?

  There's three, there's three areas that everyone fucks up. Uh, one, um, it's all the personal reputation stuff. Like your personal reputation will get destroyed over time for things that you don't even do, right? And what I mean by that is like, the percentage of people in your audience, let's say 1% are haters. Well, it used to be one person, then it was 10, then it was a hundred, then it was whatever, they're the loudest, right? And so what will end up happening is Is they will start to um kind of like lionize or really go after things that you do that you don't think are a big deal.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  And do they sway those folks who aren't necessarily?

• 1:12:05Anthony Pompliano?

  They're just the loudest, right? And so like that that ends up happening. And so like you gotta get really, really comfortable just being like, I literally don't give a fuck what you guys think, right? So I think that happens to everyone and I see like there's some people who came out of nowhere. I'll use Andrew Huberman as an example. I love his content, right? He's done a fantastic job. You're like, how could anyone ever get mad at that guy? Recently I saw he's like in the comments, he's having a response to people and stuff, right? And it's like, once you cross that line into like, okay, now now I'm in the fray. That you you just can't win, right? Because somebody's always gonna have a problem, whatever. So like in some weird way, like the more authentic you are, the more people expect you to respond. And so like you gotta like kind of figure that out. I don't know what the solution is, but I think that's always a huge risk for people.

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  I never felt good after getting in those comments. You're right. Nothing good ever happened came of that.

• 1:12:51Anthony Pompliano?

  But like you have part of the audience because you were authentic, you responded to comments and like, you know what I mean? So it's like this like catch 22. So I think that's like a huge thing no one really talks about. The second thing is uh your natural reaction will be to do more, more and more, and there is some equilibrium. One company's probably not the right answer. A hundred companies is not the right answer. Where is that balance? And like what people don't like to admit is like on Monday, it may be five companies on Wednesday, it could be 10. Right? And like it depends on what else you have going on in your life, like, you know, uh, cash flow, uh.

• 1:13:25Speaker 03

  And you asked the question about pulling an operator, even shutting down a company because you, yeah, I'm gonna have to do that at some point.

• 1:13:31Anthony Pompliano?

  You're gonna have to do it, but also uh it's easy. Like some of these questions are connected and like, okay, cool. We're you and I are gonna start a business in six months. If we're not doing a hundred thousand dollars in annual recurring revenue, then we're gonna shut the business down. Great. We get there. We're at 90K.

• 1:13:45Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. You gotta put another $25,000 in. Okay. If we're not at 200K, we'll make it up at the one year mark, then we're gonna shut it down. We're at 185, right? Or at, or at 195.

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  Tough decisions.

• 1:13:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so like, some of it's like, hey, I'm a bet on myself. I'm a, you know, I'm a believer. I'm courageous. I'm all this stuff. And where's the line? Do you cross over stupidity? This is the nitty gritty of all this stuff, right? So I think like that piece of like, starting a lot of stuff is like fun and exciting and all that. But like, when you have to start killing things, then what do you do with that person? If they're good, maybe you can put them somewhere else, you know, inside of the organization. If they're not good, you gotta get rid of them. Like, just again, nitty gritty, right? And then the third thing is self-funding versus external funding. If it's successful, you're an idiot not to raise tons and tons of money and pour gas on the fire and make it explode. Right? In like a positive way.

• 1:14:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, man, it's nice when you're getting distributions and kind of all this stuff. And so like, it doesn't necessarily have to be an either or. I've seen people who have raised money and it's like, under the guise of, hey, we're gonna take distributions. Here's the formula or whatever. But usually what ends up happening is the self-funding, everything kind of like caps out at like $5 to $10 million of revenue. Very few businesses like ConvertKit, I think they do like $30 million in revenue. Bootstrapped, right? ButcherBox, they do 550 to 600 million dollars a year in revenue, bootstrapped, right? So you can do it, but it's still like, even ConvertKit, right? If you were to talk to Nathan, like, could they be bigger with funding? Maybe. Maybe actually it would have killed them, right? You can suffocate a business with capital just as much as you can starve it.

• 1:15:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you start getting into likes, again, like, okay, what am I actually trying to accomplish here? Am I optimizing for cash flow? Am I optimizing for equity? If it's both? Is this a $10 million a year revenue business that throws off $3 million of cash? And like, if we get there, let's not trick ourselves into thinking there's a $100 million opportunity? There's no like, hey, avoid this one pothole, right?

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  I will say, it's been, you talk to guys like, you know Xavier and Sienna with Enduring Ventures?

• 1:15:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I know.

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  You see Brent Bishore, you see these people, folks who buy companies, and that's sexy, man. Like, it's easy for me to say, damn, what am I doing, starting these companies from nothing? When you can go out and raise a little bit of money, buy these businesses, grow them. Yeah, it's a, there's, there's just so many ways to do this stuff, so many ways to do this stuff. Not one of them's right. That's the hard part of all this.

• 1:16:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, the people I think are most scared of kind of the world we're talking about? These private equity guys are gonna get their faces smashed.

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  You think so?

• 1:16:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Hundred percent. Cause guess what? How are you gonna win a deal over Kim Kardashian? She got a private equity firm. You are screwed. You are not winning.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Mark Wahlberg is a better private equity.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  Ventures or Matt McConaughey.

• 1:16:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Just.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, Ryan Reynolds.

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  Ryan Reynolds.

• 1:16:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Matt McConaughey, uh, Mark Wahlberg.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  Clooney.

• 1:16:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Rob Druerdeck, right? Uh, George Clooney, Kim Kardashian. The Rock. The Rock's a fucking billionaire, right? Like y'all are all laughing. The dude's got a billion dollars.

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  See what we're talking about here just accelerating? The, the distribution and the name and the trust that comes along with a personal brand, whether you're an athlete, an actor, or, or a media personality like us. That can accelerate entrepreneurship, which we haven't seen a lot of. The Kardashians and, and these folks we're talking about now. But there's also a lot of influencers with millions of subscribers that don't make any money.

• 1:17:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I think a lot of those people haven't yet realized it, but they will. And so it's, you know, early adopters, people who are a little later, whatever. But also you're gonna see a rise of entrepreneurs who are like, dude, I don't give a shit about content, but I can operate. Let me go partner up with somebody who's got a big content piece.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  If you're listening.

• 1:17:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Together.

• 1:17:25Speaker 03

  You have a couple of guys. No, yeah, you're right. I mean, the operations is the hard part and finding these operators is the tough part. The distribution is the stuff that comes naturally to you and I. The nitty gritty of running these companies is the hard, uncomfortable work.

• 1:17:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so if you asked me like,

• 1:17:42Anthony Pompliano?

  in the investing world, I think there are four themes, there may be more, but like four themes that I think are really, really big themes over the next, you know, 20 years. The first is there's going to be a complete debasement of fiat currencies around the world. Doesn't mean hyperinflation or anything like that. It just means that there's going to be alternative currencies, Bitcoin specifically. The second thing is that there's gonna be a rise of automation. Bitcoin kind of falls under that, but also the artificial intelligence. And not because people are gonna go build AI companies. It's because they're just going to automate things inside of their company. I have been pitched 500 different projects and features and all this nonsense. The things where I see the most value occurring right now are people just using the technology inside their companies to go faster.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  So similar to the gas. Lawn mower revolutionizing lawn care companies just made them more efficient.

• 1:18:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  More powerful and better.

• 1:18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so like, okay, how do I use this to write my blog post?

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  Still need a dude behind the mower.

• 1:18:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct. So then the third thing is this idea of like, go find the customers first and then build the businesses. So whether that is actually private equity type back with funds, etc., whether it's individuals or whatever, just like finding the customers first is now possible. And then you can go build a product. And so like, there's a whole bunch of technologies and nuances that have changed that allow that to happen. But then the fourth one is I actually think a lot of people are just gonna say, dude, I don't need the job that I had. But I don't actually want to be like a true operator that has like a whole company.

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  With people that report to me. Yeah.

• 1:19:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you know how many single employee multimillionaires are gonna get created in the next 20 years? It is going to be insane.

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  I mean, we know several of them already, but yeah, a ton. I agree with that.

• 1:19:21Anthony Pompliano?

  You're gonna sit in front of your little portal into the fucking internet.

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  With these tools, the leverage is exploding.

• 1:19:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so like now you're gonna be a single person and you're gonna make millions of dollars a year using these tools.

• 1:19:31Speaker 03

  Living wherever you want.

• 1:19:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but you just gotta like figure out what the angle is. And so like, I don't even know if we could sit and identify like, oh, here's 10 different ideas of like how to do that yet. But there are example after example after example. And I look at like the line of progress. It is not linear. It is exponential in terms of how many people are figuring this out. And so like, everyone's like, oh, I want to go build the next, you know, super sexy app or whatever. Sure, maybe you can do that. But guess what is actually gonna be more likely? So you're gonna figure out some way to take your consulting skills. You're gonna put up a landing page, right? People are gonna hit you up and you're gonna charge them a reasonable rate. And you're gonna do it from anywhere in the world behind your computer and you're gonna make $350,000. You're gonna do that for a decade. And you're literally gonna go flex at your kid's school and be like, I'm rich.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And you guys are all going to an office. And so like, as that theme plays out, you then can see easily how like these four themes start to converge too. Right? And so you have like this whole automation thing. You have kind of the solo, you know, folks. And then you're also gonna have the audience. Like, guess what you're doing? You have the audience. You started out as an individual, right? But you're like pushing down and delegating. And then you're building all these automated systems. Like, that's the future of the world.

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. I love it, man.

• 1:20:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people to find you?

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  I write a newsletter every week that I've been putting a lot of time into.

• 1:20:48Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. What's it called?

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  It's called Nick Huber's Newsletter. It's at sweatystartup.com and you can sign up for it.

• 1:20:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Sweatystartup.com?

• 1:20:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm gonna start a little business brokerage company that I'm excited about through nickhuber.com where we're gonna invest in one company a year, partner with one or two companies a year, and broker three or four companies a year that are, you know, in the audience buy box. I'm excited about that, but yeah, man, Twitter at SweatyStartup. Send me a DM. My DMs are open. I read most of them. Don't respond to most of them.

• 1:21:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna send Nick a DM after this. We'll see if he responds. All right. Thank you for doing this.

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  Very, very appreciative for you having me, man. This is amazing.

• 1:21:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I just got a master class. This is amazing. All right. We'll do it again.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  Thanks.