How Nick Huber Built His Wealth: From Sweaty Startup to Real Estate Investor

0:00Nick Huber welcome to the show man good to have you Greg thanks for having me we've uh I feel like we've been friends for almost two years now and getting closer by the day and we rarely talk in person it's almost all texting I know I know I don't think have we ever even like chatted I don't think so I think this is the first time I've heard your voice except like listening to your listening to your pod and stuff yeah this is weird this is super weird but I'm happy we can make it happen and you know I really wanted to bring you on the show to talk real

0:30estate because I'm more and more interested in real estate uh the stock market is painful and although you know a lot of people are saying real estate is uh a scary place to be uh in 2023 I just wanted to bring you on because I think a lot of people have these questions and you're the real estate guy you're the Self Storage guy so I thought let's hear it from the horse's mouth

1:02I won't sit here and tell you that it's easy being a real estate investor right now I was talking to my mentor Chris Powers about a month ago and I was just I got on the phone with him and I was just complaining and I was saying man it's tough out there the bankers are paying the butt the investors are paying the butt the deals aren't any good like our the sellers want too much money you know the Market's not doing great and I was just complaining and complaining and eventually he said Nick stop he's like you don't understand like this is how real estate works like why do you

1:29think we make so much money when times are good it's because we'll go three four five seven years when things are really freaking hard and nobody has fun in real estate so he's like Nick so stop complaining nobody's having fun nobody is having fun in real estate right now it is not easy to make money anymore and it's hard and that's part of it and we just gotta keep our businesses going keep our head down focus on operations um and keep working so that when things turn around there'll be half as many competitors as there are right now because Over The Last Five Years everybody who has bought assets no

2:00matter how well how good of a job they do managing them has made money and everybody thinks of real estate as a passive investment and it is if you just stroke checks into deals as a GP or as an LP which means a limited partner Silent Partner but if you're a GP like me and you're actually buying real estate and trying to make it more valuable and running it and answering the phones and collecting money from tenants it's a business it is a small business there's people there's management there's hiring there's firing there's problem solving and so the people who are best at business um win and that's something that a lot

2:34of people don't understand about real estate so real estate's like I mean it's a multi-trillion dollar asset class it's a it's a really big space it's like saying Tech right there's consumer there's social there's marketplaces there's B2B you focus on self storage um which is a niche how do you recommend to people to think about which Niche to focus on and and why are you excited about self storage in real estate you look around I mean are you sitting in Miami right now Greg yep yeah if you're if you're in Miami within five mile radius of where you are right now there are probably 400 000 businesses real estate

3:18businesses operating just one building renting renting space to retail renting space for storage units renting space for multi-family condos all these different asset classes um and if you zoom out across the whole United States there's millions of buildings millions of buildings and all it takes is one building to change your life so when I thought about okay you know here are my goals in life I want to have free time I want to make money I want to have you know have it all right I want to have it all I want to except maybe like people to know who I am which kind of happened through

3:49Twitter anyway but if I want to succeed in life for me that meant not having to answer to anybody and having Financial Freedom like what are the odds what is what game can I play where the odds are the best that I can do that and I can accomplish that it's either go start a business and try to raise money or look at this business self storage or real estate in general where a lot of people can win at real estate a lot of people can win so it's all about odds and picking you know who you're competing with and I looked at the Real Estate Investors out there we're not

4:20that smart we don't do anything special many of them don't even know how to use email and a lot of them are wealthy all it takes is to be the top 75 percentile of Real Estate Investors to make a lot of money and why Self Storage like how did you get into it and yeah why yeah so I picked self storage because I was running a moving and storage company out of college called storage Squad we did pick up and delivery student storage and I was able to leverage that into about a 1.5 million dollar bank loan on our first Self Storage development so uh the

4:51big pull for me into Self Storage was that I looked around at the storage businesses operating and I didn't think they did a great job I thought that I could come in and I know I didn't need to beat them I know I didn't need to take everything and it wasn't a you know two companies battling and the winner is going to take all like a tech you know like a like a race in Tech in one in one area in one Niche it was hey these companies that run self storage facilities they kind of operate like it's 1980. they got somebody sitting in there in an office you know many of them

5:21don't take online payments credit cards they take cash they take check um not that efficient not that good of technology to help people rent units and if I can do this I can probably carve out a piece of the pie for myself and so that's what we did and now we've kind of you know innovated as much as possible with hey we're going to come in get rid of that manager that's on the ground in an office renting units and replacing with one manager on the phone who can rent units at several different locations so what we have now is 61 self storage facilities none of them have an

5:53office none of them have a full-time staffed manager on site and we have 50 employees spread really all over the world 20 of them in the Philippines 10 of them Colombia and you know several all around the United States that kind of run the business of renting units and operating the Self Storage business so basically we found an opportunity to use a little bit of technology that already existed we didn't build software we didn't try to reinvent the wheel there was some technology that already existed and we realized that we could just come in and carve out a piece of the pie so I feel like that's a little bit of a

6:24framework for thinking about which Niche you should go into in in real estate so I think you've said before if there's a fax machine like chances are there's an opportunity yeah I mean you find a business that makes a lot of money and has a fax machine and the odds are competing with them will be a little bit easier than competing with the Stanford grads you know the VC backed firms the smartest people that you know right there must be a lot of other opportunities you know boomers are going to be giving you know hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth to Millennials soon you know the America

7:04runs on small business a lot of those are Mom and Pop shops a lot of those probably have fax machines I know you've talked a lot about uh boring businesses before what opportunities do you see in in boring businesses uh right now yeah I think you kind of think about who are the wealthiest people in the world and they're on one level you know those are the Elon musks and the mark zuckerbergs and Steve Jobs if you look at it on who are the wealthiest people in my town who are the people that are at the nice restaurants right now in Miami who are the people that are at the nice

7:39restaurants right now in Athens who are the ones that have the nicest houses who are the ones that are in the country clubs who are the ones that have money like who are the people that have money so they can do what they want to do and if you walk to my country club in Athens and I went around and I just asked everybody what they did I think the answers there'd be doctors there'd be lawyers of course and then there would be entrepreneurs there would be people who they didn't go raise money they didn't go raise Venture Capital somebody either them or somebody in their family a lot of old money in

8:08country clubs as well but somewhere somewhere along the line at some point somebody started a small business and you'd ask them if they were entrepreneurs and you talk about you know raising money and they'd look at you like what are you even talking about like all I did was hey I had I had a couple resources had an opportunity to start this HVAC company I hired two guys next thing I know 10 years later we wake up we got you know 30 Crews and I got a business worth 30 million dollars Pest Control you know one of my good friends at the club is a pest control guy just

8:37he's got seven Crews and he sits around and plays golf all day and makes 800 Grand a year on and on and on and on down the list of businesses that most people would say why would I ever do that it's a race to the bottom those Services you know you're competing with a guy in a truck when in reality they can be really good opportunities to start your wealth snowball and people also forget about the momentum that is involved in entrepreneurship very rarely do you have these people who the Evan Spiegel's who go from zero to billions of dollars in wealth on their first shot when they're

9:0825 years old the more likely story is you know several businesses over 10 or 20 years learning a ton and just more and more opportunities come up as as you get better at business so my story is no different we started hauling boxes with cargo vans and 10 years later we're buying you know millions of dollars worth of Self Storage do you know the uh the story of Roland's like I recently heard about their story do you know no tell me Rollins is a company that was started in the 1800s I think they do about two or three billion dollars a year in Revenue 2.4 billion in Revenue they got

9:4916 000 employees it's the largest conglomerate Pest Control this has happened to me like you have like you know I lived in New York and all of a sudden you come home and there's mice or rats or whatever in your place like you will pay anything to get them out of your house right as fast as possible you call up a mom and pop shop you know maybe nine times out of ten that is a mom Pop shop but maybe one times out of ten it's this role in this company and Roland started off funny enough in the owning car dealerships they own car dealerships and then they

10:24bought a couple local radio stations I think they must have seen that pest control companies were advertising on these radio stations so they said to themselves hey let's go start buying up some of these pest control companies yeah you know fast forward to today I had heard about them on CNBC I was watching CNBC and one of the newscaster says like the number one recession stock you know this is in financial advice but the number one recession stock is rolands because people if they've got rats in their house they're not trying to save money what do you think about that business I don't know about you but my parents

10:59like my dad back in 80s when he first got married and he bought a house he did everything in his house he didn't call contractors to mow's lawn he didn't call people to fix his sink he didn't call people to remodel his kitchen they just did it like they spent a ton of time they learned how to do it and they did it I don't know anything about anything so when I have a problem in my house I call my dad right so what are my kids gonna do when they have a problem they need to kill a mouse like my dad would have never called a pest control company to

11:30kill a mouse but I have a pest control company that comes here to my house every single month and I pay him 30 a month and I'm never gonna not own a house that I don't pay a pest control company to do that stuff it's just like the shift of specialization in the economy people getting more focused on time and people Outsourcing everything else I don't have the initial stat of this but I have the 2018 stat so back in 1990 10 of people paid to have their lawn cut like pay for somebody else to come and cut their lawn in 2018 44 of people paid

12:02to have their long cut do you think Greg that that number is going to go up or down in the future it's going up yeah man we're Outsourcing everything we're paying other people to do stuff around our house now these are not sexy businesses they're not fun to tell you go back home to your uh family reunion or you know for Christmas and you tell your grandma hey I'm going to start a I'm starting a new business and she'll be like oh well what did you invent like what's your new idea uh no Mom I'm just gonna kill bugs you know nobody's excited about that nobody's uh

12:32thinks you're gonna make really good money um people aren't going after that for the ego stroke that you get of being an entrepreneur and walking around in sweatpants with a backpack on and you know that's not the cool thing to do so the really smart people are not flocking to Pest Control they're not flocking to self storage they're not flocking to building decks or power washing or any of these little things around the house that more and more people are spending really good money to get done I think back in the day you had to like you had your dad fix things because he had to probably like there was no

13:06there wasn't Google there wasn't like YouTube there wasn't you know Yelp in a directory of places that he can call and he just had to figure it out himself you know I remember learning how to drive standard standard cards and like I've basically got into this car brought my phone like went on YouTube and like was basically watching how to drive standard while I'm driving standard a ridiculous way to learn how to do something but I just had so much help like when was the last time you stopped you know because you didn't know where you're going you put something in Google Maps yeah and I think that's just made

13:47us as like a softer generation yeah I mean the fact that we can get anything in the whole world delivered to our front door in two days on Amazon the fact that we can have you know sit down and stream any video in the world in 10 seconds you know totally I mean last Thursday I went to volunteer at feeding it's called feeding South Florida it's a sort of a food shelter for families that need food basically and I went to a warehouse and I went and inspected a bunch of canned goods to make sure that they weren't expired I you know sorted it put them in

14:27boxes I went to my girlfriend and friend after we did it all together and we spent an afternoon doing it it was it was three hours and I was like such a headache like I can barely breathe I don't know why and they were like yeah we have headaches and it's because like none of us at all are used to like you know hard physical labor and that wasn't even hard physical labor it was literally sorting cans of Campbell Soup um but just like being in the warehouse fumes everywhere I think you're you're right when it's like were kind of soft our generation is kind of soft

15:06everybody everybody wants to get rich nobody wants to for me it was carrying 70 pound boxes up spiral staircases for 20 hours straight for college students that's how I started everybody wants to be ripped and sit on the beach and have that feeling of having a good ripped body nobody wants to wake up at 5am and when you're not motivated and do the actual workout to get rich or to get ripped it's like everybody thinks you gotta you can just fast forward entrepreneurship and make a ton of money when in reality you got to do a bunch of not fun things and you got to be willing

15:41to suffer and you gotta not really make decisions with your emotions you got to think logically about maybe a best opportunity that you can go after and if you talk to a lot of people who you know maybe they didn't have the network they didn't have really wealthy parents they didn't have that Head Start they just got started by doing not fun stuff they're sorting Campbell's Soup bottles in a warehouse for you know it wasn't six hours it was it was weeks and months what would you do if you know you started with under a hundred thousand dollars liquid net assets and you wanted to make seven figures

16:14next year what would you do I don't know I think it's it's all about kind of walking around and and like how to scope business ideas for me and everybody that I know as an entrepreneur thinks about this the same way like when we go to restaurants the first thing that we think about is like is this restaurant making money and you're counting heads in the restaurant and you're thinking about how their business might work how much how much rent a month do they pay for this building you know how many employees do they have in here what are the net costs on this dish that I ordered how profitable might this

16:42restaurant be then you walk by this little bitty Boutique and antique shop in downtown Athens and nobody's there and you've never seen anybody there and you're like how the heck does this business make money you know what's their rent how do they make money every entrepreneur that I know kind of walks around life just thinking in a a more intricate way about how business Works how does this business work and when you start to walk around your town and you watch the lawn care companies you watch the pest control companies show up you watch the garbage companies show up you watch you see all of a sudden all the you know

17:11five or six different power washing companies just in a little small town like Athens and you start to see how they work and you start to Google how would I find this company how do they make money um it becomes pretty evident where an opportunity might be for you in your town if you just kind of think critically about that stuff do you do the same thing Greg do you walk around life and just kind of think about how business might work everywhere you interact I actually do it more like on the internet like my version of walking around is like quote unquote teleporting to different Facebook groups

17:39or Reddit subreddits and seeing like what are different niches that are underserved that are growing really really quickly right now and then looking at these Facebook groups or subreddits and being like what are these people asking for and then how do I build products to solve their needs yeah yeah my story was I was in I was at Cornell in Ithaca New York and we were watching this company called Big Red Storage just make an absolute killing during finals week I'm talking we did some basic math and found out that they were doing like 450 000 a year of Revenue and we watched how they did their

18:15business and they showed up and they had scales they had they like had physical scale so they were weighing every box and building receipts they spent like 45 minutes with every customer building a receipt of of the weight of everything and billing the customer there was no way to sign up online they weren't taking last second customers so all we did was see that they're like okay here's a company that makes a ton of money and they're not accepting customers last second and they're weighing everything and their operations their Logistics are are terrible so we're like let's just throw up a website and see if we can get

18:44some customers and two weeks later after a lot of sweat we had five grand in cash sitting on our bed because we went around and picked up all the stuff and did the work and then you fast forward five years later we had a business that was doing 2.5 million a year in sales and making 500 Grand a year in profit and we had half a million bucks after tax in the bank to go build a self storage facility from the ground up fast forward five years later we have 61 self storage facilities and we've acquired over 75 million dollars for the storage so it's like those little steps

19:14of like hey I just I was walking around my life looking at how this one storage company made money in this in my town and there was there was that opportunity there was that little opportunity how important is looking at other businesses and trying to emulate them in some capacity you know I think well the next three weeks involved us studying all 20 companies in the country that did pick up and delivery student storage and there was one company in Bloomington Indiana called guys and dollies and they did it really well they gave away free boxes they had like pick up hubs where you could bring your stuff to a truck

19:49that was parked there for certain hours during the day they were really efficient and we basically modeled half of our business off them we found another company in Boston that had a really good way of like handing out those free boxes and like marketing and having their their sign up form was perfect their customer service was way better we modeled half of our business off that again it's not it's not like I have to be the best company in the world to win in this and what we're talking about it's I just have to be good enough to get a piece of the pie and if I can

20:18get a piece of the pie then I can improve and I can improve and I can improve and some awesome opportunities will come so yeah we absolutely had very little Innovation we just built a Frankenstein business by taking bits and pieces of other companies putting them together into our business and then before we knew it we were one of the best and the biggest should you start a cash flow business first and then buy real estate or should you get into real estate somehow um because it is expensive right I think most of the gurus that you look at online will say you got to start with

20:52real estate you got a wholesale deal so you got to find investors you got to go out and start with real estate buy that one Fix and Flip and fix it and flip it whatever you got to do and my advice is if you don't have a network that you can raise money from meaning like you are a private school kid and your dad is an entrepreneur and your grandpa's an entrepreneur and all the people you know are entrepreneurs that you can go out or even not entrepreneurs but doctors lawyers people you can go raise money from if that person I would say go ahead and

21:20get in real estate and go find that deal and raise money and get the help because you're in a great situation no shame in that but if you're just a kid from the Midwest whose mom was a school nurse and dad was a construction manager and you got maybe they have a hundred thousand dollar net worth and you don't have any money absolutely forget about real estate stop getting obsessed with real estate and go start a company or work for a company and find a way to make a ton of money period absolutely and then once you have money then it's like okay what's my real estate thesis

21:51what you know how do I think about my portfolio do I get into uh commercial residential real estate is a really good wealth multiplier it is a way to like roll your wealth snowball if you have a wealth snowball rolling down a hill real estate is an amazing way to like make that snowball bigger and keep it rolling but if you're starting with nothing and you're trying to get get somewhere and build wealth I don't personally think that real estate's the best way so I would agree with you like wait till you have some money then think about how to put that money to work because in

22:24real estate you have to have cash the person with the cash calls the shots and luckily when I did my very first deal at a half a million bucks on my own cash so I had a little bit of Leverage we didn't have any one investor that just took over and named the terms the bank you know we didn't have to go get a co-signer for our first loan on our first bank we would have owned very very little of the upside if we had zero cash bring into the deal Sweat Equity means almost nothing in real estate in my opinion the people with the cash call

22:49the shots what advice do you have to someone like me frankly so I'm a Founder I've got a team of about 40 people you know I'm busy doing that I'm interested in real estate but I also don't wanna I don't want it to hurt my main my main business you know how should someone like me think about real estate it's just like I consider well two parts number one is I would focus on continuing to make money the way that you're best at making money which is your agency let's assume you know you're doing 10 plus million a year in Revenue multiple Millions a year ebitda there's no reason for you to take

23:28the eye off the ball because of some sexy opportunity in real estate where you're not the best at that right I have 300 people on my on our investor Capital stack that have invested passively in our deals I'm what's called a syndicator I'm the GP I put 10 of the cash needed for a deal in or a little less or a little more and then I raise money from a bunch of people we put the deal together and that's my business that's how I'm in business all 300 of those people very few of them are full-time real estate professionals actually I don't know any of them that

23:58are they're all just getting real estate exposure by investing now the second part of that is to do it you really need to understand real estate it's just like having a CPA you have a CPA that gives you really good advice but unless you know a little bit about the tax code you're probably going to miss some stuff probably not going to pick a good CPA probably not going to figure out what big overwhelm overarching strategies you want to implement so understanding leverage understanding value add understanding that operating income understanding the risk of debt and cash flow and how all that works together it's really critical because there's a

24:30lot of folks that are not that went under in 2008 that lost a lot of other people's money and if this keeps up and interest rates stay high for another couple years it'll be no different this time and a lot of people who do what I do and raise money from outside investors will go bankrupt and the people who invested the money will lose the money what do you like better if you know if you can invest in a trailer park or a parking lot which one do you like better the good thing about a parking lot is it's a it's a more operationally intense business and

25:02the more operationally intense businesses like the old manual car washes you know some of these businesses that really they're not necessarily you know passive as passive and you can't necessarily find third party management as easily if you buy a self storage facility you can pay CubeSmart 13 of your revenue and they'll do everything they'll just send you checks right parking lot who's going to find a manager parking lot it's a little bit sweatier the returns are probably a little bit better hasn't been institutionalized it hasn't been rolled up by private Equity um but mobile home parks are an asset class where you can roll them up you can

25:34scale you can scale management you can manage them at scale and you can build a bigger portfolio and there's appetite right now from private Equity to buy big chunks of mobile home parks I don't know about parking lots so basically my plan is I'm gonna go do the work in Self Storage to buy one-off deals here and there a million dollar deal here a two million dollar deal there will stumble upon a 10 million dollar deal and I'm going to go around and do the work to accumulate a big portfolio and when you have a bigger portfolio you have less risk you have economies of scale and you

26:04have appetite from from new buyers new people new money with cheaper cost of capital bigger players come in and by tranches of bigger assets so the values go up when that happens and you know that's our long-term place like build something where we're acquiring assets at small scale but we're combining them and it gets more valuable as you as you do that so one part of your strategy is modernizing basically some of these self storage facilities the other part it seems like is buying these storage facilities in you know secondary tertiary markets right like you're not buying self storage in in Manhattan or Miami Beach or whatever right correct yeah so

26:50you know this is not easy you might think oh Nick's just buying self storage facilities I'm competing with 50 other groups just like me 50 other groups are out there trying to find self storage to buy and when you're in investor board rooms and you're trying to raise money and you're trying to get financing for deals the first thing investors are going to ask is you know when can we buy storage in Austin Texas or Atlanta Georgia or Miami because those areas are growing they're growing nuts I want to own property there so there's a lot of people who do exactly what I do trying to buy deals

27:20there and obviously that runs the price up demand for those assets is a little bit higher and cash flow year one is almost non-existent or sometimes impossible to find in those markets for guys like me without the cheap cost of capital I'm not raising a giant fund I'm not borrowing it two and a half percent so we found our way to find your one cash flow and going some other areas where other investors aren't necessarily as excited about a lot of people ask me Greg how do you build products that Foster Community well I've got good news that's exactly what late checkout does my company we partner with the largest brands in

27:59the world and fast-paced startups to design products that resonate with your community we add a couple interesting clients every single year so if you're interested and that sounds like you email front desk at laycheckout.studio with what you're working on what you need help with and don't forget to mention the where it happens pod thank you [Music] tell me a deal where tell me a deal that went horribly like what is your worst deal and what's your best deal well um you got to talk about why real estate sucks right now we haven't had a deal and and none of the properties that we've acquired so far I'm worried about

28:46losing the building so I gotta say I'm lucky and none of our deals have been horrible right we have a deal in Springfield Illinois it's one of the bigger markets that we bought it's about 250 000 people it's right in the middle of town um we're missing performa on that deal um we projected seven and a half eight percent return and we're about five to six percent return year one on that deal when the interest rates went up starting in November of last year the home the the homes that sold started to decrease like people weren't moving people were hiring local movers and people stopped buying homes and this

29:21month compared to last December we're like we're like 30 of the amount of you know homes transacting so that's a big driver of how many people rent storage units so not only is our debt getting more expensive our debts getting more expensive our debts getting more expensive asset values are dropping that's exactly what's the what the FED wanted to happen because when you borrow more expensive you can afford to pay less money for the same amount of yield the same amount of profit so our the value of our buildings are dropping or all buildings are dropping and less people are renting storage units so operations are under pressure as well we

29:50moved in at one of our big portfolios we moved in 140 tenants last November and this November we've moved in 45 tenants right so occupancy's dropping and luckily um we didn't put a ton of Leverage on many of these deals we're pretty lean we don't have full-time overhead of staff so we're still cash flow positive everywhere but yeah I can very easily see how somebody paid money thinking that because from 2020 to 2021 we were able to drive revenues 25 I'm talking like if I if a storage facility that I was going to buy was doing 20 grand a month in 2020 I knew that if I bought in 2021 I could do

30:31almost 30 grand a month like I could literally go almost 50 up on revenue or even 25 25 000 a month that's huge for net operating income and earnings and and thus the value of the property that has now changed like we under right now that we're revenue is going to stay the same year one so if you bought a deal thinking you were gonna drive Revenue by 25 to make your numbers work that's how deals that's how deals Fall Apart and I mean the difference between real estate and you know stock equities like is that you know if the stock market goes down what people say to do is

31:05dollar cost average right just put in a little bit every week or every month and you know over the long time a long period of time you'll be okay with real estate if you want to get into real estate you can't really do that like you only have like if you you have to be very smart about when you're purchasing your building your product if it's your first building that you're buying should someone buy it in 2023 or is it too uncertain so there's just so much real estate in the world look there's 50 000 self storage facilities some of them are going to be really good deals it all

31:43depends on how how much you pay for one like there's a hundred thousand buildings within five miles of where you are in Miami um some of them will trade at really good deals where the people who bought them are going to make a lot of money we haven't acquired very much storage in the second half of 2022 because overall as a market seller expectations are still too high and I don't think it's wise to deploy a lot of capital into real estate but we just bought a deal and closed it on the 15th of December for 1.65 million and it's a really good deal I think in a

32:15couple years it might be worth three million dollars you know so it's really hard to say it's really hard to say it all depends on there's deals what you're saying what you're saying is basically like no matter if it's a bull market or a bear Market bull market will have deals bear Market will have deals you just have to be like a hawk basically and you have to do your research and you have to have a thesis and you have to be probably not afraid to walk away from deals yep yep and you got to do the work you gotta stay in the game you can't get

32:45frustrated and all upset like when I was talking to my mentor and I was like we just need to go pencils down and like stop everything and he's like no no no no no that's not how you make money in real estate over the long run you have to keep working you have to keep underwriting you have to keep talking to sellers you have to keep talking to brokers and eventually it'll open back up I love it okay I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the sweaty startup Empire the ecosystem of sweaty startup you know when I look at you I see you as a

33:17a Creator in the space like you've got a few hundred thousand Twitter followers you've gotten you know an amazing podcast you've got an email list you've got a community you've got courses how do you think about yourself as a Creator and do you think of yourself as a creator I do and and I think when I started and I think to be successful I think you would agree with this when when I started all of this I had no plans of making money or you know having a ton of opportunities come from it I literally just recorded myself and broadcasted it into ether tried to find ways that I

33:53could grow and eventually started to catch on and the whole thesis as you know is hey you can think about entrepreneurship a different way you can think about entrepreneurship and the fact that you don't need to necessarily go raise money you can just do little simple things over time not sexy things you're going to make decisions with logic you're going to try to choose your competition you're going to use some core fundamental strategies to think about entrepreneurship and even if you're a person who works at a company like think about management think about value out of that company in a similar way the podcast started to

34:21grow Twitter I started to grow you started on Reddit basically right like you start you started on the entrepreneurship entrepreneurship subreddit yep I got really lucky in that they allowed links on there for a little while and they put up with me for about a year and a half of promoting uh the sweaty startup and so I would write I would write really good copy I would write something about entrepreneurship all the the techies would hammer down and hate on me and all the small business junkies would engage and love it and it was just a uh you know a time where a lot of folks

34:54were pissed off that I was writing on Reddit but it was the only place that I could find a bunch of entrepreneurs that I could know of I Didn't Know entrepreneurs another thing about entrepreneurship it's really lonely I can't just in my town go around and find and see all the entrepreneurs they're busy they're working they're secretive whatever it might be it's pretty lonely business in general so um eventually a guy named Moses Kagan found me on on Reddit and said Nick you know you're getting into real estate you really should go on Twitter that's where the deals happen you got to go on Twitter and I was like ah Moses like

35:25social media is a waste of time like I just want people to listen to my podcasts and do my own business whatever he called me back about six months later and this is a guy that has over 200 million dollars worth of real estate he took the time to call me back again say Nick I'm serious get on Twitter you're right I can tell you right really well like you're going to grow there and I got on Twitter and I wrote my first thread and I put the profit and loss statement of a self storage facility just got radically open like it's it's you see more of it now

35:49but back in 2020 you didn't see entrepreneurs like opening the books up and telling everybody how much money they made or how much money they lost or exactly how they did business so I got on there posted a real estate deal a thread and Moses quote tweeted he had like five or three to five thousand followers at the time he's like hey Nick's here you got to follow him he's a friend of mine and boom I got my first thousand followers and you fast forward a year later I've had I had that one really big thread where I met you guys but we'll talk about that talk about that

36:17because that was like legendary yeah I I have a blessing and that I can I can I'm a prolific content creator not all of it's good as you know you probably disagree with a ton of stuff I write so many people disagree with a lot of it and that's fine it makes me smarter I love it when people challenge me on Twitter but I can write a ton of content especially when I get in a zone so I got in a Zone one Sunday and I wrote for like four hours just business principles life principles things I agreed with things I just disagreed with and it ended up being the first major

36:48thread of mine that got you know got me 30 000 followers over the course of a couple days yeah I remember I had a thread once that got 60 000 likes and you sent me a message and you said I was it was just like 20 minutes after I had posted it I had like 2 000 likes and you were like Greg a viral post can change your life your life is going to be changed and I didn't really understand what you meant by it um but you know I got 70 000 followers in 24 hours from that post and it did change my life you think about the opportunity that

37:32comes along with 250 000 followers and a unique Niche especially like real estate I've started businesses and advised on them we can touch on re cost like if you want I've raised money from Twitter I've met people like you from Twitter started businesses with people um that I've met on Twitter and it absolutely changed my life so like yeah you can be on Twitter and you can post and you can waste time and you can talk about fantasy football and politics or you can get on Twitter and get pretty serious about a certain niche and it can just be a side effect of that that you

38:04can find Opportunities to make a ton of money which has been a blessing for me my takeaways from your story of like how you you know became quote-unquote famous is number one you started in Reddit and if you can make it on Reddit you can make it anywhere it's kind of like Manhattan it's like New York City right if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere if you can create content that really connects with people on that platform it really really forces you to be an incredible writer because people don't have time for like people go down on you on on Reddit you know

38:38stuff right people are meaningful especially to the capitalists and the entrepreneurs right yeah that's definitely one takeaway is like if you want to like sharpen your skills like Reddit is a great place to do that uh the second thing is don't write cookie cutter stuff so figure you know in your Niche right so in your Niche you pick self storage and real estate look at look at what everyone else is doing and don't do that right like push it a little bit have a unique voice and like you did right you you put out your numbers when people weren't putting out their numbers you wrote stories when people weren't

39:19writing stories on Twitter I think you're forgetting the most important part and like the number one reason why most people have a ton of followers on Twitter is because they're actually doing something interesting and uncomfortable and hard in their real life everybody wants to be a con an influencer on Twitter everybody wants to have a bunch of followers nobody's willing to actually start a business and raise a bunch of money of other people's capital and go out and buy a bunch of property and like do that scary hard work of building an actual business in real life so I don't know I mean sahil came to Twitter and did something

39:51incredible he built a brand off of writing alone I mean he he had a badass private Equity background and we know he's brilliant and we know he's going to build an Empire but he came in not necessarily talking about his own experiences but like breaking down the framework to just be a badass human I think that is so incredibly rare and so incredibly hard and I would never want to compete with sahil to try to make it on Twitter I couldn't I'm not as dedicated I'm not as smart I'm not as good of a copywriter as Sawhill but I was doing something interesting in real life I was buying a

40:23bunch of storage I was building real estate private Equity company I had sold the company those things are what really allow you to grow a big following and if you can do it in a way that you know you follow the badass people the movers the Shakers the deal makers the investors the entrepreneurs start following you and and latching on to you because they like the way that you think you can make a ton of money whereas the posters that have three to five hundred thousand followers on Twitter struggle to make five or ten Grand a month sometimes what would your business look like if you

40:55never had an audience if I didn't have Twitter we would probably own about 10 self storage facilities right now instead of 61. my net worth would be about 10 of what it is right now I would not have invested and advised on re costig which I think is going to be the one of the biggest businesses that I'll have done you know if we look back 10 years from now and we'd probably still be running our Moving and Storage Company because we would have to keep that cash flow coming in to feed ourselves because the real estate you know we just wouldn't have been able to find investors and we'd be

41:29struggling to find deals and yeah man I'd be 10 years behind or 20 years behind my career of where it is now what's what's re Cossack and and why do you think it's going to be big so with real estate comes an army of folks in the background who help real estate transact you have attorneys to buy 75 million dollars worth of real estate over the past 18 months we've had four full-time attorney salaries we've had title companies that we've paid hundreds of thousands of fees we've had closing attorneys we've had property insurance agents we've had all these different people that do services so that we can

42:06transact real estate that's another lesson Is that transacting real estate is super super expensive you can sell Apple stock with a click of a button if I wanted to sell a couple properties it would take me six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and expenses one of the things that you do when you buy a piece of property is you got to figure out the depreciation schedule with the IRS and all the real estate costing companies out there were just they were slow they had to actually visit my properties it didn't make any sense so my CPA and the smartest dude I know is

42:36Mitchell Baldridge him and his wife on a firm CPA I don't know if you've spoken to them either but he is done he turned out he had done almost a thousand call sex for his clients as a CPA in-house and it was a pretty simple pitch for him to actually start a cost segregation firm the basis behind it is you need a you need an engineer to break down your building and tell you how fast you can depreciate certain aspects of a piece of property anybody who buys a piece of property over a half million bucks is going to get a cost segregation study done so they have a depreciation

43:10schedule to show to the IRS and to offset taxes that way our firm simply does remote visits and we do it at a really affordable price and we turn them around really quick and we're 20 employees deep now and you're in 150 Grand a month of cost effect it's crazy I love it because it's number one it's a it's a creator of that business like Mitchell Mitchell writes these awesome tax threads on Twitter which get a lot of love and he's basically along with the help of you kind of getting interest in real estate and tax savings and then you've got this Niche down Services business that you

43:52can funnel those people to and it goes back to what you're saying about Twitter which is like it's so valuable if you can be a Creator a mass an audience of really high value people and then you can create a product or products productized service in this case there's there's seven or eight figures or maybe even bigger this is the way to put in perspective imagine if every single day a stadium a football stadium of Real Estate Investors Dallas Stadium full of Real Estate Investors and I got to stand in front of them in a mic for 20 seconds every single day and tell them something how

44:27valuable would that be if you knew what Real Estate Investors wanted how to help them what services they needed what parts of the closing process were not great I mean it's just like having a megaphone and being able to scream in the air of your Direct Customer over and over and over again it's insanely valuable yeah and you picked a niche that's like highly highly valuable right like when you're thinking about picking a niche if you do want to create a creator-led business I think you know if you're trying to optimize for Revenue like you want to pick a niche that is highly valuable right that's why you look at

45:03YouTubers and you have someone like Graham Stefan who's uh one of the biggest Finance YouTubers that just took off during covet he's got a few you know three or four million YouTube subscribers he's making three four five six million dollars a year where you have someone else who has three million YouTube subscribers and they're making two to four hundred thousand dollars a year and it's just because you know Finance as a category is just way more valuable than let's say comedy so Bigger Pockets many of the people listen to this have not even heard of that podcast it probably gets fifty thousand downloads an episode if you if you're into real estate

45:41investing you probably listen to Bigger Pockets they talk about a lot of the same stuff I talk about they're actually much bigger they have bigger influence than I do but you know maybe their platform maybe their blog maybe the ads maybe their podcast maybe all that generates let's say a couple million five million dollars a year of profit right let's just let's say it's pretty big business pretty big Media Company but in the background of that Media Company the guys who started the podcast with Bigger Pockets they are now raising 50 million about 50 million dollars a month they're raising from the Bigger Pockets audience money to buy real estate and then

46:18they're syndicating and they're buying tons and tons and tons of real estate off the back of that podcast so small relatively small reach you had never heard of Bigger Pockets and you're in the Creator world huge huge huge mega wealth business in the background running behind it behind the scenes I'm like looking at this website and you would never expect that this business is doing that well but it makes complete sense do you know uh the car dealership guy I've talked to him a couple times yeah he's he's trying to figure out how to monetize his business too and he started doing some of those spreadsheets where

46:54like helping people buy and sell cars I love that yeah can you can you talk more about like what he does and why you might why you think it's interesting he writes really good copy I mean it's it's over and over and over again the people who rise up to the top on Twitter are the ones who know how to write clear and concise copy they know how to ignore Nuance they know how to piss people off they know how to write things that make smart people think deeply about something and car dealership guy his family owned a big bunch of car dealerships he knows the business really really well

47:25and he talks about the business he talks about when to buy a used car how to buy a used car the inner workings of a car dealership business and I'm sure I don't know how old he is I don't want to share too much about him that he doesn't you know want me want people to know but he is he is going to build if he plays his cards right he's going to build a really big business buying and selling vehicles yeah so he's anonymous which is pretty interesting like if you were him would you like why is he Anonymous I don't have patience for people who are

47:53Anonymous like if you if you're not even if you are not willing to put your face behind your ideas on Twitter then I am not going to heavily weight your ideas on Twitter period I mean I love the concept of web3 and I love um balaji's idea of everybody being an anonymous being on the internet but in general in business when it comes to people doing deals with you when it comes to people wanting to get to know you when it comes to Serious opportunity that all comes when people get to know a person that they can trust and they can build rapport with and people invest

48:24money with me people bring deals to me people talk about business and opportunities and I can make so much money on Twitter because I'm a real human um the Anon stuff I don't know it's kind of a cop-out in my opinion my best guess is he he has like a full-time job and probably didn't realize like it was going to be this big and then all of a sudden he's got hundreds of thousands of followers he's got his community he's got you know all the stuff he's doing and he's just like all right I guess I'm the car dealership guy now you know I think but I drink well strip mall

48:55Trent is another example of just somebody who they write incredible copy in their prolific content creator and he's already been doing real estate for a while so I don't know who is that it's just a guy who tweets about strip malls in real estate on Twitter and it's an anonymous account that writes really well and you can learn a lot about real estate by following them um in my opinion as well if you're going to raise money from people on the internet and you're not going to disclose who you are it's kind of like having your cake and eating it too it's like it reeks of like trouble down the

49:26road if people start raising money and building businesses with Anonymous profiles I but that's just my opinion I don't have anything against these folks who are Anonymous I just I have made the decision to put my name out there and I'm reaping a lot of the rewards from the Network that has grown what advice do you have for folks who are interested in sweaty slash boring businesses if they want to get into it yeah I would say it's not easy of course there's a lot of reasons why you shouldn't do it you can name a ton of reasons right now why a small service business in your town might be a crappy

50:00thing to do but no business is easy contrary to what you read on Twitter making money is freaking hard but if you're willing to do the work and you don't care about your ego and you're not going to make decisions with your with your heart and what you want and everything that you want out of a job and everything that you want out of life and you're willing to do something that other people want and give customers what they want and get excited about the process of Entrepreneurship maybe what you want is to build a business and to manage people because all businesses when you're it could be a sexy Tech

50:33startup or it could be a lawn care company every business if you're doing it right involves hiring people firing people making hard decisions and managing problems that's every freaking business so you might as well do a business where you don't have to be the best to win where you can choose your competition you can study a market that already exists you're not training customers you're not dependent on raising Venture Capital you're not dependent on the debt Market of how your VC backed company might be valued at any given time you can just take steps forward and over the course of five years you can put some money in the bank and then you put

51:05some more money in the bank and you can get better and better and better at managing hiring firing doing those decision making doing those things that make an entrepreneurial entrepreneur and your world your whole world will open up if you do it long enough and you have what it takes I love it Nick thanks for thanks for the time where could folks find you uh you can go to sweatystartup.com you can get on my email newslet letter there that's where I send an email to everybody once a week once a week and uh follow me on Twitter if you don't know about me already but Greg I really

51:32appreciate it man I have a ton of respect for what you're doing I consider you a mentor of mine and close friend and I appreciate the fact that you want to see me win and you've done a lot to add value to my life man so I really appreciate it of course man it's just it is weird that we've never met though we will we're going to smoke a cigar together within the next 12 months all right man take care