Austin Gray:  Here thought that we were gonna talk business, but we're just gonna talk RJ Hunt.

Nick Huber: Nice. Do you all count with a bow out there?

Austin Gray:  I do. 

Nick Huber: It's epic. 

Austin Gray:  Yeah. I have.

Nick Huber:  Amazing.

Austin Gray: Yeah, I've killed a couple nice six points 

Nick Huber: Oh man,

Austin Gray:  It was good.

Nick Huber: Those are beasts. 

Austin Gray:  Cool man. Thanks for being on. I appreciate you making time for this.

Nick Huber: No problem. I'm excited.

Austin Gray:  So tell me about the book.

Nick Huber: Yeah, man I wrote a book that is the anti-tech startup book because I'm tired of entrepreneurs thinking that, starting a tech change, the world new idea of business is the only way to do entrepreneurship, which I know you're in agreeance.

Austin Gray:  Yeah, I definitely am. I've been following your content for several years now, and whenever I came across it, I was like, man, finally there's somebody who's talking about it.

Nick Huber:  Yeah, it's becoming a little bit more mainstream, luckily we have some folks like Cody and Chris Corner and some others putting the message out there. But yeah, man, look I've been operating companies for 15 years and it's been a brutal grind and I've learned a lot. And it's a book that shares the good and it shares the bad, which very few of 'em do.

Austin Gray: What are some of those bad things? I saw you make a tweet about this other day, want to talk about.

Nick Huber:  Yeah, it's going $600,000 over budget on our first development and having to call all the investors for 25% more money and having to call the bank for 25% more money. And, stressed if we can pay the, earth work and slab bills because our checking accounts running low.

It's, your driver's ripping tops off your truck. It's warehouses, flooding. It's the chaos of just a busy season during my student storage business that, puts you through physical and mental health. Frankly. Yeah, , everybody acts like businesses. All about, private jets and making money's easy, making money's not easy. And I frankly don't think that everybody should become an entrepreneur. I thought that five years ago. I disagree now.

Austin Gray:  Why is that?

Nick Huber: I don't know. When I first started this, I just thought, the only way to get, very wealthy is to have equity in a company. It's the only way. But I was sitting here five years ago telling everybody that all they need to start a company.

You gotta start a company. Everybody should be an entrepreneur. It's the best. And now I realize that, most people aren't like me. They don't thrive on chaos. They don't like uncertainty. They don't like having children and not being sure if their next, month is gonna be a profitable month.

When the phone rings as an entrepreneur it's very rarely a good thing. It's very rarely a customer saying, oh, thank you so much, I'm very happy. Or a customer saying, you know what, Nick, I just wanted to call and thank you for being my boss. I'm making more money than I need to make. This is amazing. That doesn't happen as a business owner. So if you don't like uncomfortable conversations, it's not for you.

Austin Gray:  It's so true. Nobody ever says, thank you so much for charging me $35,000 to come clean up your property.

Nick Huber: I am very happy

Austin Gray:  Yeah.

Nick Huber: And you can treat a, 97 customers out of a hundred can have a phenomenal experience and you're still gonna have a three star, rating on Google. And the three unhappy clients are gonna be the loudest.

Austin Gray:  What's the rule for that? Like I'm curious to hear if you've come up with any frameworks, like one in every X amount of people are just gonna be a really tough customer to deal with and they're gonna find something to leave you a bad review about.

Nick Huber:  You get better as you get more leverage, as you get more cash flow, as you get a larger company. You need those crappy customers less and less. Early in my career, I had no choice but to bend over backwards for anybody who had money because I needed their money more than they needed me.

As you build a sustainable business and as you're making the kind of money you need to make on a monthly basis, you get more leverage I wouldn't say you get full autonomy in the ability to not have any stress in your life, but you get to really pick and choose some of your customers and you get to fire some your bad customers.

I hate these books that are saying the customer's always right. Look I'm all about the customer experience. I obsess over it. I want a very good product, and I always wanna treat people fairly. But there is a small subset of the population in the United States of America that their number one goal is to take advantage and mistreat any company that they come in contact with.

They're gonna be the ones who order the Halloween costume and return it the next day on Amazon. They're gonna be the ones who go back to Walmart and get a replacement or a refund on something that their child broke and dropped, right? There's customers that are just out there trying to take advantage of the system, and there's a truth in business that 80% of your profits are gonna come from 20% of your clients. There's another truth that 80% of your stress is gonna come from 20% of your clients. The clients that generate the stress are not the same as the clients who generate the profit. 

Austin Gray:  I, I'm in agreement.

Nick Huber: So there's a truth in business that 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your clients and 80% of your stress also comes from 20% of your clients. Those 20% are not the same. So the sooner you realize that, hey, the majority of my stress is coming from this very loud, unreasonable group of clients and they're not actually my profitable clients, the sooner you can fire them, move on and let them be somebody else's problem.

Austin Gray: : Agree. Yes. And the concept is something I agree wholeheartedly with. And for listeners, here's the example. Those of you who've been listening to the podcast, we started snowplow on this last year. We had one customer in our residential plow accounts who just kept emailing it. I have jobber automation set up.

We send out the email automations reminders when we go out to plow in the mornings. But this guy just kept emailing in, kept calling, always had a problem on the deal. And it was finally like, we just can't. We cannot please this guy. And so we fired him. And to Nick's point, that's part of the 20% who's causing 80% of my stress, whereas the 80% of my profits were coming from, the rest of my clients who weren't calling in every single time. And so thanks for hitting on that, Nick. I appreciate it.

Nick Huber:  Yeah, but look, in the early days, you have to do what you have to do. Like I've been yelled at, basically emotionally and mentally abused by clients. The larger the clients, the more leverage they have. It's an unfortunate part of life that not everybody's reasonable, and you're gonna be dealing with some crazy people

Austin Gray: : Yeah, so look, you've got this book here and I'm really excited to read it. Thanks for sending it over. I can't wait to dive into it. 

Nick Huber: Here.

Austin Gray:  There you

Nick Huber:  Oh, it's called the sweaty startup. How to get rich doing boring things. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done, but it's what I wish I had in my hands when I was, in the early days of that first company. And frankly, it's a bunch of reminders to myself today on how to operate a business better.

Austin Gray: What I want to do is, let's start with this. You just give like the quick outline overview of the book, tell people where they can go find that book, and if they want to read it, you should absolutely go grab it. I have a copy that Nick and his team emailed over to me. I can't wait to dive into this. I was thinking about it, I was like, man, what would Nick and I talk about if you and I went archery, elk conning

And so I thought about this what were some of the questions , that I would ask you in the early days of growing a business, so a lot of our listeners are in that zero to 1 million phase. The interesting thing about you is if you've had massive success, right in real estate, private equity, buying storage, you just raised a ton of money. What was it? 52 million for? An acquisition 

Nick Huber: Yep. somewhere.com.

Austin Gray: You started bootstrapping a moving company. 

Nick Huber: Yeah. The hardest business in the world.

Austin Gray:  So I have some questions specifically for you, for our listeners, in that zero to one phase. If you're starting a business in 2025 can't be real estate, has to be local service base. What are three businesses you love?

Nick Huber:  So I actually, it's funny 'cause the most viewed piece of content of all time is a list of 200 plus business ideas that I have. So if folks don't wanna buy the book, they can go to sweaty startup.com/ideas and look at 200 plus local service businesses, all of varying degrees of risk, skillset, upfront investment and so on.

Generally my opinion is that people get way too far ahead of themselves with business. They read the books about Steve Jobs. They read the books about Elon Musk. They listen to people's stories like mine, where I'm buying a big company, installing an operator, raising a bunch of capital to buy storage.

That's not where anybody started. I started by trading my time for money. Okay. I found an opportunity. I got excited. I went out in my car and I drove around and picked up boxes and put 'em in my room, stored 'em for the summer and three weeks after I. Thought of the business idea. My partner and I had $3,000 cash sitting on our bed.

Okay? Way too many people get ahead of themselves. They think about scaling a team. They think about a marketing plan. They think about, online ads. They're buying web domains and building websites. I love getting out and mixing it up and trading your time for money. Trade your time for 20 bucks an hour, then trade your time for 50 bucks an hour, then trade your time for a hundred bucks an hour, and as soon as you are too busy to sell.

Grow your business and do the things that you need to do for future planning is when you make that first hire. And that first hire is either, a remote employee in the Philippines for 700 bucks a month who can answer your emails and run logistics for you and do your billing. Or it's a technician on the ground to actually execute and do the work.

And then you start to grow. And the next thing you know, when you have, 10 grand a month coming in, you make another hire. And then when you have. 20 grand a month coming in, you think about some management help, and you grow a business over time. So that's what people get wrong about entrepreneurship. They study Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and  Steve Jobs, instead of getting excited about going out and trading their time for money at the beginning.

Austin Gray:  I'm gonna press into this a little bit because I hosted, I don't know if Shannon Jean on X. And he said, man, I've made millions of dollars, but like I still get excited about chasing the next a hundred dollars bill. And I think there's way too many people who read the Steve Jobs story and want to go create the next billion dollar tech startup. And it's why your content resonates so much with me, but it's like I grew up mowing lawns for cash and

That still excites me as an entrepreneur. And so I think having that. chase of just like, where can I go make the next a hundred dollars was something I took away from Shannon. Now my question for you specifically here, when you're starting, you mentioned something very specific there when you get too busy to sell, it's time to go hire that next person can we dive in there?

Nick Huber: Yeah, when you're not first of all, sales. I had a very influential moment in my career in I was brand new. I just made that three grand. I was an entrepreneur now, and I was all in on being an entrepreneur. I was at Cornell University in Ithaca. I put an email into the head of entrepreneurship at Cornell, entrepreneur in residence name's Dan Cohen.

Luckily, he wasn't a tech startup guy. He had sold a foundation repair business for almost 10 million bucks a few years earlier, a sweaty startup. And I'm like, Hey, let's get lunch. We sit down at the table, very first question before anything else. He says, Nick, do you like sales? Would you consider yourself a good salesman?

And I'm immediately shocked. I'm like, okay, where's this going? I know what you want me to say, but I'm gonna be honest. No, I don't like sales. I'm uncomfortable with sales. I'm more of the operator. I'm the visionary, I'm on the whiteboard, I'm the leader, and I just, word vomited for a couple minutes about all the things I like that are not sales and why they should be important.

And he looked right at me and said, Nick, if you don't like sales, you need to go ahead and get a job right now. And I'm like, whoa what do you mean? What are you talking about? And he goes Nick, the entire life of an entrepreneur's sales, no matter what business you are in. You are selling nonstop 24/7 if you're running your business let me, lemme just run a hypothetical for you.

You're in the storage business. Who is gonna lease a warehouse in Boston or State College or Ithaca or Syracuse? Who's gonna trust you guys to pay the rent? gonna come work for two college kids instead of go get a job with a more established company? Who's gonna sell boxes to you and how are they gonna trust you that you're gonna be able to pay the bills? Who's gonna rent trucks to you? It goes on and on, and I haven't even talked about customers yet. It's like you are selling nonstop 100% of the time, 24/7 as an entrepreneur. So if you don't like sales, go get a job.

And then he went on to tell me that everybody in the world is selfish, and if there's not a win-win environment in every single interaction, then. It's not gonna work. So you have to bring something to the table. You have to sell yourself. You have to tell people or show people what they can gain by working for you, buying from you, interacting with you, partnering with you, investing with you, anything along those lines.

So I walked outta that meeting dejected and scared and unsure of my future. But luckily I had an open mind  and I took it to heart over the coming weeks, and I decided. I was going to make myself a great salesperson, which I have over the years, but he is right. I'm selling myself 24/7.

Austin Gray:  What are some things you did to make yourself a great

Nick Huber: So the good thing about being a great salesperson is that anybody can be a good salesperson because it's a numbers game and it takes practice. Everybody wants to read a book on sales. Take a sales class, listen to a podcast on sales, listen to an audio book on sales study sales watch YouTube videos on sales.

But that's like trying to build muscle without going to the gym. If you want to have muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger, are you gonna watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts, write your plan, and do all that stuff? Or you're gonna go to the gym and lift the weights. So the only way to get good at sales is to make yourself good at sales and tell yourself every morning that you're a great salesperson and getting used to rejection, getting used to that uncomfort.

And then you get better over time. It's a beautiful thing, and that's the unfortunate truth about my book, is that it's gonna tell you a bunch of things that you probably don't want to hear because that's not a fun answer. There's no shortcuts in this book.

Austin Gray:  Yeah, and I love it, and I think it's the harsh truth for most people. And it's stating what most people need to hear. I had a guy pay me for consulting and he wanted to hear what's the digital version that I can launch a business, without actually having to go out.

And on those calls, I was encouraging them just go find the neighborhood you want to sell your service to and knock on the doors, drop flyers, yard signs. Who cares if people get upset? Like you have to just figure out a way to get of people and have the conversations.

Nick Huber:  people don't wanna do the hard work of actually even running a business. They wanna create a marketplace. They wanna generate leads, they wanna do the online version where they can sit on their couch and travel to Bali and good luck. Some people do it and they do it well, but we need more people to get out and do the work. 

Austin Gray:  I'm with you and somewhere, Nick, how old are you, if you don't mind me asking? 

Nick Huber:  I turned 36 

Austin Gray:  Somewhere along in the millennial and Gen Z generation, like the boomers had this work ethic. 

Nick Huber: And you know what they're good at they have charisma. They can talk to people, they can lead. And they can sell. A lot of people say, oh, I just wanna, start a business and compete with the boomers, or I wanna buy a boomer's business and add a website and add jobber and add, digital marketing. Good luck. These old boys are pretty good at what they do.

Austin Gray: They're real good at what they do, and there's a lot of pages we need to be taking outta their playbook instead of everybody just bashing 'em on X.

Nick Huber: Kids are raised now on, YouTube shorts and TikTok and Instagram and video games, and the average 16-year-old can't look an adult in the eye and, they get uncomfortable ordering for themselves at a counter, let alone, trying to lead people or, solve problems or do anything valuable in today's economy. I worry about the next generation for sure, but they've been saying that for years. But I'm bearish on it for now. 

Austin Gray: It's gotta be like, there has to be some truth to it this time because everybody is literally raised, glued to their screen. And so like the content you're putting out, the reason I resonated with it so much was like, is the real stuff. This is what it's like to actually go get out and sell some services and deliver five-star service, right? Like it's very simple, the service and you deliver the service.

And then you just keep repeating. I want to go back to sales though, because whenever you were talking about that, it's like you just had to put in the reps. I think so many people get caught in this trap of, oh, I went out and I tried sales and I didn't get a sale. And one of my friends framed it differently for me early on whenever I was doing sales, where it's dude don't focus on the sales. Focus on the amount of reps you put

Nick Huber:  Yeah.

Austin Gray:  If you're knocking doors, you shouldn't be looking at how many sales you got at the end of the day. You should look at how many doors you knocked that day.

Nick Huber: Yeah it's Hermozzi puts it really well. Like you can get anything you want in life. If you look at the volume required to do what you need to do, and you look at, are you willing to do that? Sales is a hundred percent a numbers game. A hundred percent.

Austin Gray:  So something you did and I've seen in your content is early on whenever you're starting Storage Squad, you did some gorilla marketing tactics. Not a lot of people are either willing to do or they just overlook it because they don't think it's applicable.

Nick Huber: Yeah.

Austin Gray:  I saw you get out there with some chalk on some sidewalk. It's that's just a repetition game, right? Like how many times do you think you put that ad out there?

Nick Huber:  I probably went through 500 plus boxes of chalk, 20 pair of jeans that I wore holes. And I started wearing knee pads towards the end. 'cause I was tired of wearing out pants. Thousands of times. And it was a very simple message. I knew where my clients walked, I knew where they lived.

I knew where they went to class. I was servicing students. So at eight 40, I knew they were all gonna walk across the bridge to go to class. So I got on the bridge and I wrote down, need storage question mark, storage squad.com, free boxes, free pickup, free delivery. And I wrote that same message thousands of times on Cornell's campus, on Penn State's campus, on Syracuse's, all around Boston, DC we put flyers under doors. We didn't run our first digital marketing ad on Google until 2017 when we were doing 2 million plus a year revenue.

Austin Gray: It's crazy. What are some other things that you did early on to market your business 

Nick Huber: Yeah. My brother runs a landscaping company and he puts out bandit signs. And that's his number one driver of new clients Bandit signs. He puts him out in April until his schedule is busy and he is grown 20% for the year and then he doesn't mess with marketing again 'cause he got his, a hundred plus thousand dollars of recurring revenue for the year in his lawn care business.

So yeah, it's the stuff everybody wants to sit back and post, just tell their digital marketing company to increase ad spend. There's some other really great ways, high, ROI, ways to drive clients. Also in these service businesses, you're very limited to the amount of people that you have.

So honestly, throughout my career in the service businesses, I've spent as much or more energy on recruiting talent as I have on recruiting clients and trying to sell clients, for example. Everybody wants to post a job on Indeed or Craigslist, and I have a saying about hiring that, the top 10% of people are in career nirvana, and they have a job they absolutely love, and you cannot recruit them away from that job. The bottom 10% are unemployed and they're gonna be the ones who apply to your job. Middle 80 is not going to ever apply for a job post, but they are open to new opportunities If something better comes, but they have a job they like and they have a boss that likes them, you gotta go hunt and find them.

So one of the best employees I ever found was in a Walmart parking lot in Ithaca, and I saw my wife inside my girlfriend at the time, wife now was inside running some errands. I was pretty close to busy season. Doing customer service responses in the car on my laptop at 8:00 PM and I just see outta the corner of my eye, Walmart employee, sprint by, and I thought I saw a ghost because I've never seen a Walmart employee walk fast, let alone run.

So I did a double take and saw the Walmart vest on him, and he is hustling around the parking lot, picking up loose carts. I'm watching him. He's hustling, and a couple [00:19:00] minutes later, and this is 8:00 PM in early May in Ithaca, where it's 30 degrees and crappy and half raining.

I remember it vividly, and he is hustling and pushing about 30 carts back to the main entrance. A Walmart sack is like tumble weeding through the parking lot, and he like scoops down and swipes it up and jams it in his back pocket. I'm like, all right, I gotta figure out more about this. So I closed my laptop.

I figured out how to make our paths cross, walk up to him, say, Hey man what are you doing? Why are you going so fast? Tell me more. I just made conversation with him and he goes, oh man. I'm actually supposed to be in the deli, but , the manager. Is not here. The cart guys are not here.

Nobody showed up. And the varsity basketball game gets out in 30 minutes and when this basketball game gets out, it's gonna be a mad rush here. And we don't have any carts. Look, there's no carts, so I gotta figure this out. So I'm like, holy shit, does this guy own this Walmart?

Like, why does he care? This was 2013, making 12 bucks an hour. So I pull up my business card and I say, Hey, man if you have any friends here's my  card. I run a moving company in town 20 bucks an hour plus tips for our crew leaders.

The days fly by, like we're all over the college campuses. There's a little bit of travel involved. If you know anybody looking for a job, let me know. And then I leave and I get an email that night, interview him the next day, hire him that night. And he is one of the best employees we ever had. He worked for me for five years, traveling from DC to Ithaca, to Boston to, Chicago is crazy. So yeah, just hunting employees is the way to find now.

Austin Gray:  How early on was that in storage squad when you found that person?

Nick Huber:  Two years in.

Austin Gray:  Two years in. Okay. So that first hire you made.

Nick Huber:  The first hire I made was, this first season because we didn't have enough, people to do all the moving that I needed to do. So we convinced some people to work the great thing about a seasonal business is that it can be so busy during certain times that you have no choice but to delegate.

At our peak, in 2017, we had. 25 major colleges, 15 locations, 12 states, and the finals week is all packed within about a four week period. Late April is northeastern, late May is Cornell, every other college Harvard State College, all of those are in the middle. So we went from having four full-time employees to 200 plus part-time employees during that busy season.

And I could only be in one college town. So put me in Boston, put my partner in dc. Everywhere else. We had to fully delegate everything. There was no choice to close our computer and go help our guys. There was no choice to go to the warehouse and make sure it was organized. So that helped me as an entrepreneur because so many business owners, they get caught in this busy work of actually executing their day-to-day, and they don't work on the important but not urgent stuff to grow their company and to accelerate the long-term value of their business.

Austin Gray:  Okay, so this is one of the big reasons why I love reading your newsletter is because you talk about this kind.

As an entrepreneur? Did you just [00:22:00] naturally know how to play the game, or was there a point in time where you were like, I gotta figure out a way to learn how to delegate this? Do it better. So you're talking about this concept of hunting to go find great people. Has that always come naturally or did you have a learning lesson in there where you were trying this Indeed stuff or trying other job postings and then you were just like, man, I gotta find a better way.

Nick Huber: Yeah, I think everything I've learned has been obviously I digest a lot of content, but it only helps you if you apply it. I've been in the trenches of running companies for a long time, so none of it came natural. It was me pounding my head against the wall, learning the hard way over and over again. That's why I wish I had this book in my hands at the beginning.

Austin Gray:  Absolutely. And I wish I had that book whenever I was starting my business too. 'cause I think like some of the things that I've taken from, things that I've learned from guys like you, it's hire faster, delegate faster, right? That's allowed us to grow. And so in this book, I. All right. Here's a concept I really wanna flush out with you. When you're starting a business, there is a phase where you have to like solo bootstrap a certain piece of it to get it off the ground. Like your energy that you put in moving it forward.

Nick Huber:  Yep.

Austin Gray: If somebody's listening to this podcast and they're starting right now, and they are literally doing everything to get the business off the ground, at what point. Does that transition need to be made to look, I gotta go hire, I gotta go find the right person to do this task. What's that trigger point?

Nick Huber:  As soon as you're not spending 25% of your working hours on things that are important but not urgent. The stuff that's important, but not urgent sales, strategy, competitor research a new deal with somebody that can grow your company. Hiring and delegation falls in there to as soon as you're not  spending 25% of your time and you're still working the full week and you're not spending 25% of your time on the stuff that's going to grow your company.

Which is answering the phone, putting out bandit signs, doing gorilla marketing, chasing down talent, making a new deal, trying to do business development. All that stuff, is super important to grow the company long term. But then it all depends on your risk tolerance as well. I know a lot of people who have built very good businesses over time with very little delegation.

They don't live a great life. But they've made generational wealth. They've made real wealth where every decision inside their business comes to them. They are the bottleneck of every decision. That means they answer the phone on the second hole in the seventh hole and the ninth hole of the golf course.

And they've never been on a vacation where they don't have their phone next to them, but they, you can build a business that way. It's a little bit more risky to hire ahead of some of those things and it's also hard to help those people make decisions. But I think it depends on what you want , if you want a job cause a lot of these businesses are just jobs. If there's no equity value, you're just trading your time for money, that's a job that you control. A lot of people want that. My brother's lawn care company, he doesn't have goals to be a billion dollar lawn care enterprise. He is not trying to do m and he's not hiring managers, yet a lot of things come through him, but over time, over 10 years, he is gonna build a really good business. I'm not wired that way. I go faster now that I'm more confident and I have the cash flow to do but I'll tell you truthfully, like running a business without cash, it's really freaking hard and nobody talks about that.

If you're too strapped to pay some people to come and work for you, it's really hard. But look, I have 325 employees across my portfolio and 300 of them are not in the United States, and they, make 800 to $2,000 a month total salary. So you can find super competent people to outsource some of your headache that are not on site.

Now, sometimes you need to hire somebody to get in the [00:26:00] seat of the truck or the lawnmower and do the work, but you can also have your back office and management be international and have a competitive advantage for sure.

Austin Gray:  Yeah. And while we're on that could you just go ahead and tell our listeners a bit about somewhere and how that could play into this?

Nick Huber:  Yeah I got involved in a business four years ago called somewhere.com that changed the way I think about building businesses. Like I said, 325 employees across my portfolio, 300 of them are not Americans. You can hire bookkeepers. Accountants in Egypt and South Africa, you can hire sales teams in South Africa.

You can hire estimators and billing specialists in Latin America. You can hire admins and customer service reps in the Philippines. And what you have is my real estate private equity companies. My overhead's 1.5 million a year for 45 employees. My competitors are spending 5 million bucks through the same company. It's massive difference. .

Austin Gray:  I hosted Baird Kleinsmith on the podcast too. Do you think any company of this next generation has any chance to compete with people who are overseas or hiring overseas?

Nick Huber:  Oh yeah. Look I have a big network of entrepreneurs now. And I know a lot of people who do really well. Eight outta 10 of them have no international employees. We're in the very early innings of this. Do you have international employees at your company yet, or no?

Austin Gray:  I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and then count subcontractors who

Nick Huber: That's amazing.

Austin Gray:  Web stuffs. 

Nick Huber:  Yeah.

Austin Gray: : Nine total people

Nick Huber:  That's amazing. So you have a massive competitive advantage over the eight other operators in your town who do what you do because they don't. 

Austin Gray:  We're running. All I do is record the episodes of this podcast and my team in the Philippines just handles everything else 

Nick Huber:  yeah. We're in the early innings. I think one out of 10 businesses sub $1 million do this. So it's a massive competitive advantage when you do it.

Austin Gray:  Yeah, absolutely. So another thing that you have talked about in your newsletters, and it's been helpful for me as an early stage owner operator, the concept of making decisions. You wrote a newsletter on this at some point, and I remember reading it and thinking it's no different than sales, it's just reps. And in entrepreneurship, there's never a clear answer, it seems like 

Nick Huber:  Decision making is really hard because we are not ever exposed to it. Growing up our parents put us in bubbles. They protect us from all pain. They make decisions for us. I went to college. I got a 23 on my ACT. I would never get in Cornell today. Even with my track ability, I got into an Ivy League school because I could run track when I got there.

I met a lot of geniuses, kids who got perfect scores on their acts. Same with SATs. Brilliant kids. They did not know how to figure out what bus to take to class. They didn't know what they should get for dinner. At the buffet, they didn't know how to get on and schedule and research their classes because their parents did everything for them.

They put them in a total bubble, and the parents' mission was to get their kid in Cornell. So the kid was a robot that took orders from their parents. And when they got to Cornell and they learned about weed and sex none of these nerds were interested in that. But video games they got totally obsessed with it and they didn't know how to interact with it.

They didn't know how to make a decision not to do it and stay up all night. And yeah, it was pretty crazy to watch how so many people are totally sheltered from making actual decisions and learning and living with the consequences of it. And decision making is a learned ability. The best way to start making decisions is when the consequences are very low.

And not when they're high. Because you get used to negative feedback if you make a bad decision and positive feedback if you make a good one. Yeah. It's absolutely reps. Same with delegation hiring. Like we're never, there's never a world where we as high schoolers.

Walk into a classroom and they say, oh yeah, you guys have a seven page paper to write tomorrow. Why don't you find a freshman to write that paper for you? Or you show up to track practice and they're like, oh yeah, we got a circuit in four, four hundreds today. And then we were gonna do weights, but why don't you find somebody else to lift weights after practice for you?

There's no absolutely zero practice delegating tasks to other people in the real world. So 99% of people do not know how to do it. So if you can lead other people and tell them what to do and make them want to do it and excited to do it you're in the top 1% and you're gonna be a very effective entrepreneur.

Austin Gray: Something you said along that, and I don't remember if it was in that newsletter, but this is just the concept I've been continually coming back to. I lead our team meetings on Tuesday mornings, nobody wants to follow people who make decisions and that concept of "Hey, if I don't know the answer to this, I'm just going to pick and make a decision one way or the other." I'm gonna be okay with living with the consequences. But I think what's important is making that decision in that moment.

Nick Huber: Yeah, I have a lot of friends who are high performers at work. They earn two, three, $400,000 a year working for a company. And I love talking to them because I ask them all often what do you dislike about your job? And man, do they give it to me? Like they'll talk for half an hour about what they dislike about the job.

But I like asking that question because it helps me as a leader, as a business owner know what to watch out for. But it almost all boils down to two things. Number one, they know of a way to improve their work. Their customer's lives, their company, and they go to their boss and say, Hey, I need this to change because it's hard and it doesn't make any sense.

I need you to make a decision here. Help me. And their boss doesn't make a decision. Their boss will talk a big game. They'll say, oh yeah, that's so important. I'd love to help you. And then absolutely nothing happens. And number two is they're surrounded by C players and low performers, and they're carrying the weight of those low performers.

So as a boss, as a leader, I think it's absolutely critical that you make decisions. Obviously, making good decisions is very important, but no decision is often worse than making a bad decision. And then when it comes to firing your low performers, man I was talking to a mentor on the phone and I was complaining about one of my guys. I was like, this guy is a pain in the ass. He keeps making mistakes I'm gonna keep trying, I'm gonna keep training, I'm gonna keep trying to change them. It's on me as an entrepreneur. Maybe I gotta simplify the job a little more.

I gotta do more. He goes, Nick, fire him. And I'm like I can't. It's busy like I need him. That's more stress for me. And he goes, Nick, here's something true. The competence of your entire organization falls to the level that you tolerate. So if you tolerate C players, your A players are going to walk away and your entire organization will be a C-level organization.[00:33:00] 

So if you want to retain your A players, you have a choice like you can put up with incompetence and watch them walk away. Or you can fire the poor performers and make your a players happy. So it's not always easy, but letting people go and firing them is a very critical part of what we do as entrepreneurs.

Austin Gray:  At the end of the day like firing was really hard for me early on. 

Nick Huber: Oh, same. I would put up with poor performers for far too long.

Austin Gray:  Yeah, because there's this feeling that it's okay, I need to lead them well and I need to help them along in their life. But where I've come to Nick and I'm curious if you're from a similar here, but it's like I'm not sure how much I can help the other people.

Like they have to make a decision to help themselves. If I've tried, if I've given them the frameworks and if I've very clearly communicated the expectations, here's what it's happening, and it happens and three times that they're not doing it. And then if we're having the conversations about that guy at the management level, it's probably time to fire him. 

Nick Huber:  I learned very early in my career that I have to do business, like a poker player plays poker, and I'm playing the odds on everything. And yes, people change. Yes, people improve. Yes, people turn it around, but they do it 10% of the time. Me with my livelihood and my customers and my money on the line, why would I take those odds?

Somebody's gonna change and improve 10% of the time. The other 90% of the time I continue to lose money and have stress, and my business suffers. It's a no brainer. So people are like, Nick why are you so cruel? Why don't you give people a chance? And I do. Look, I do. I'm reasonable. Nobody's perfect. When somebody proves and shows me who they are, my job is to believe them. It's as simple as that.

Austin Gray:  And not only is your business relying on. You to make that decision. But your A players and everyone else who is performing at a high level are relying on that and to the point that you made, it's like me or you tolerating that person who continually makes the mistake over and over again after being clearly communicated the expectations. And there's a clear written SOP for exactly what needs to happen in this scenario. Like we're doing a disservice. To the leadership team or the people who are showing up and giving the best effort. And to me that's worse, at least where I'm at right now with it.

Nick Huber: I a hundred percent agree. Yeah, it's, but look it's hard and people are going to make mistakes. You have to take ownership of it. As a business owner, it's your fault. Everything is your fault.

Austin Gray:  Yeah.

Nick Huber:  That's a tough thing to come to terms with a lot of business owners play victim all the time. I suggest you read Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink three times and apply it to every single part of your business because anything bad that happens is your fault as a business owner. If you have that mentality, good things will happen. So yeah it's difficult. But yeah. When somebody shows you who they are, you gotta believe them.

Austin Gray: You have kids, right?

Nick Huber:  I have three kids. I have a. 7-year-old boy, 5-year-old boy, and a 3-year-old little girl.

Austin Gray: Sweet. What are some ways that you are going to help them make decisions or help them learn how to make decisions as they grow up?

Nick Huber:  Yeah. They're at a pretty young age now. But there's consequences for all their actions. I'm not afraid for them to get upset because they have to miss dessert or miss going. To an event they had planned or missed going to get ice cream with the family because they made a poor decision.

I'm not afraid for them to cry and suffer a little bit. Obviously I'm super supportive. I love on them all the time, but my kids don't get their way when they cry. But yeah, at this age it's enabling some of the skills as well. I make my kids do things that older kids are even afraid to do.

They order from the. Wait staff themselves within reason, unless we're slowing down the whole restaurant, if we're playing golf, my son loves golf. He loves the halfway house because he gets to get some candy. He doesn't get the candy unless he walks up to the lady in the thing.

Tells her his name, calls her ma'am tells her our member number and asks her politely for the candy himself. He was so scared the first three times that actually didn't get candy because he didn't wanna walk up and talk to anybody. But I did not bail him out. And now he does it with ease and every time he sees an adult, he looks in the eye and he'll make conversation with which, puts him ahead of most 12 year olds from a communication standpoint.

Austin Gray:  That's awesome. So we're coming up on 10 minutes to the top of the hour here. I wanna make sure we get in a couple questions that, some of the people have asked here, and it comes back to where we started. So Doug, on X said you talk a lot about starting and scaling dirty or sweaty businesses, what is one business you would not touch, even if it's profitable?

Nick Huber:  I wouldn't get in the restaurant business. Yeah, the restaurant business is brutal.

Austin Gray:  What are three local service businesses? So out of the two, I know you mentioned your 200 business lists, three that you just love?

Nick Huber:  I love pest control. I love fire suppression, install and maintenance, meaning sprinkler systems, that's more commercial. And I love weed control and fertilization contracts, except the problem with weed control, fertilization and pest control is I know that there's some pretty long term negative impact of these chemicals and messing with them. So that's something to think about

Austin Gray:  For team members for 

Nick Huber:  Yeah. Not as worried about the landscape and the environment. I'm more worried about the people I know. We all know what Roundup, how bad is for people. 

Austin Gray:  Yeah. So if you had to pick one to start in 2025, which one are you starting? 

Nick Huber:  I would go even more niche if I had no money and no network. I'd start a pest control sales business door to door. I would find some pest control companies who are willing to pay me a thousand dollars for a good contract. I'd get their polo on and their clipboard, and I would go door to door and [00:39:00] sell their contracts. And that's a business where the crew leader can make 150, 200 grand in a summer. And these individual salespeople can make 30, 40, 50 grand in one summer. So people sleep on that.

Austin Gray:  Going back to your recruiting, where do you go find those salespeople and how?

Nick Huber:  Salespeople. I'm building all my sales teams in South Africa right now. Somewhere we get 30,000 applicants a month, we do a typing assessment for them first because 28,000 of them can't type more than 30 words per minute, and they're totally unfit to work a remote job. You're left with 2000 great candidates that you can then screen and have, do some practice sales stuff. But yeah it's very difficult to hire a US-based salesperson and super expensive. I like hiring South Africans.

Austin Gray:  How would you do that in pest control if you had to go door to 

Nick Huber: Oh, the same concept. Yeah. I would, I'd go straight to Salt Lake City, Utah, because of those Mormons.

Austin Gray:  Dunk man. Slam dunk.

Nick Huber:  Yeah 

Austin Gray:  which security system are you recruiting from?

Nick Huber:  No, look it's these folks spend two years selling things that are virtually impossible to sell, which is religion. I've talked to guys who have went to, one of my friends sold the Mormon faith in South Africa for I think, is it three years they do this or two. He had zero conversions. Zero. Not a single person. He said one person invited him inside to talk and he found out a couple minutes later that the guy was just hitting on him.

Austin Gray:  Not in Utah though, right?

Nick Huber:  No, he was in South Africa.

Austin Gray: Yeah. In South Africa. I was about to say that. That stuff doesn't happen in Utah.

Nick Huber:  So yeah, you can do that for two years, man. I think it's why those folks are so badass. Asset business.

Austin Gray:  Yeah, definitely. I'm a Christian that grew up Christian, but one of my roommates and still one of my greatest friends today of the Mormon faith, ball with him.

Nick Huber: Yep.

Austin Gray:  Colorado and then he transferred back to BYU. But out and worked security sales with him after those guys know how to sell. A hundred percent. I wasn't joking when I'm asking like, which security system company are you recruiting from?

Nick Huber: Yeah, I'd go straight to college, man. I get the clean cut energetic college kids.

Austin Gray:  So just straight to BYU.

Nick Huber:  I don't know, I'd probably get scrappy, figure out where they are.

Austin Gray:  But that's exactly how you would do it. You would go straight to a college campus in Utah and recruit there, set up a booth,

Nick Huber:  I don't know. 

Austin Gray: The door.

Nick Huber:  I might get scrappy with some internet stuff too at the same time, but Yeah, absolutely.

Austin Gray:  Cool.

Nick Huber:  Then I would go, I'd cold call two or 300 pest control companies until I find the one that's willing to pay me a thousand bucks a contract to sell their services. And I'd go make some frigging money for sure. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. you mentioned this the other day said something like, one of your friends was starting a business and talking about it. And I want you to hit on that concept like, what do you do if somebody's Hey man I'm thinking about starting this business. And it was along those same lines.

Nick Huber:  Yeah, he had  spent two months of work trying to do a house painting. I'll tell the 32nd version of this story. It's about a five minute story in my book. He said, Nick, I wanna start a house painting company. What do you think? He comes over and I'm like, it doesn't matter what I think he had done three months worth of work. 

By the way, he bought a domain shopped a bunch of franchises done a business plan priced out rigs. He had done it all, and in 10 minutes I called three competitors in town and they were all super hungry for business. They were super responsive.

Sunday afternoon, they all followed up. One of 'em said he'd beat any price he had. They all had crews available that week to start painting. He found out real quick that he could have saved himself three months worth of work by just picking up the phone and calling some competitors. 

Austin Gray: I love it. Nick, what else are you gonna share with our listeners? Our audience is zero to 1 million phase. What's one thing you can tell 'em that's gonna help 'em on 

Nick Huber:  No. Get out and hustle as soon as you don't have time to sell. Don't be afraid. Don't be ashamed to trade your time for money. As soon as you don't have time to sell, make a hire. Your first hire should probably be a thousand dollars a month virtual assistant to do some backend stuff. Then you hire some technical people on the ground to do the job itself.

Get super scrappy about how you find those people. Always be selling customers and man, do those things for five years and good things are sure to happen.

Austin Gray:  Where can people find your book to learn all of these concepts 

Nick Huber:  Yeah. Go to sway startup.com/ideas. Download that list of 200 plus business ideas. And then yeah, man, get the Sweaty Startup book. It's on Amazon. We'll put a link down below. But yeah I'm also active on Twitter. Folks Wanna use somewhere.com and get a discount. They can email me, nick@sweatystartup.com. Yeah man I'm very available. 

Austin Gray:  Awesome. We've got five minutes here to the top of the hour. You have a hard stop at the top of the hour. 

Nick Huber:  I should probably head because I need to get some water and use the bathroom before my 10:00 AM. 

Austin Gray:  Okay. Sounds good. So you guys heard it right there, Nick. Thanks again for being on OWNR OPS podcast. I sure appreciate it. Listeners, thanks again for listening to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. Every week, we drop episodes on Friday where we talk all about building local service-based businesses. 

If you haven't signed up for the newsletter yet, you can go to OWNROPS.COM., that's OWNROPS.com/newsletter. We summarize all the key learnings from these episodes, and we send those to you in a weekly newsletter on Saturday mornings. Thanks again for listening. Don't forget, work hard. Do your best. Never settle for less. See you guys next week.

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