When everything works, you learn the wrong lessons

All right, look, on YouTube everybody talks about how they're crushing it. Every business podcast, every business influencer is talking about how great everything is going. But on today's podcast, my buddy Nick is coming on and he's doing the opposite. He's talking about a bunch of the big mistakes he's made. He's eating humble pie publicly on the podcast today and talking about some of the things he's learned from it. So I want you to tune into this episode. He's talking about how he made the biggest acquisition of his life when he bought somewhere.com. How he might have screwed up certain things and how he's trying to recover from those. It's another side to Nick. If you know Nick, he's, he's, he's a popular guy online, but you don't always get to see the, uh, the humble side. And so I think it's a great episode with Nick. Enjoy. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. All right, what's up? We got Nick Huber here, friend of the pod. Nick, what's up, man?

Sean, thanks for having me. It's been a long time.

Dude, you, um, you wrote something. So we have every guest do a little prep doc of like, hey, what do you— what are some things on your mind, stories, ideas that you want to share? And you wrote one that I think is very interesting to people who've been following Nick Huber. So you built up this personality online of being confident, borderline cocky, you know, you have strong opinions, you are not afraid to piss some people off. And you said this in the documentary, you said, I have been humbled of my cocky attitude in my 30s. Is this a— do we have a heel turn? What's that, a face turn like in wrestling where the bad guy becomes good? What's going on?

Yeah, man, I think the last 5 years in business— I mean, 5 years ago you guys had me on the pod. I felt like I knew everything, man. Like, and I think it was that irrational confidence early in my career that I wouldn't trade for anything because I think it led to a lot of success and me putting myself out there. But Yeah, man. Like, you just realize that business is hard. Business is really hard. So it's not the same as it was. 2024, 2025 are not the same as 2022, 2023 for any entrepreneur I know.

So give me an example of how Nick— what Nick was thinking then versus Nick thinking now, because there's this great phrase, everyone's a genius in a bull market. I think part of what you're going to talk about is like back in 2020, 2021, 2019, like during that era, felt like you could do no wrong. But like, give me Nick back then. He was thinking XYZ about himself or the world. And now what is Nick thinking?

It's not all roses. But you are, you know, I guess older and wiser now. And you've— it's sure some things shut down, but other things you've sort of doubled down on and have started to work. What do you think caused that? Was it just market kicking your ass a little bit in certain areas that, that sort of made you reassess? Were you wrong about a specific thing?

I thought with a personal brand that's strong enough, you could get into an agency business of any kind and go to the moon, whether or not you do a couple of things right, couple of things wrong, whatever. And then, yeah, the algorithm changed. Like, the business got a little harder. People started really watching how they're spending money. So I just think it, it's harder now than it was, man. Like, I know a lot of people who are making less money now than they were 3 years ago.

Right, right. Okay. I want to jump around into some of your new ideas. So things you're feeling, thinking right now. So, you know, you mentioned being sort of humbled and you mentioned your portfolio going from How many companies did you have kind of like at your peak and how many do you have now? 11.

Yeah, I started 11 companies from, you know, 2016 was my first.

You were like, I'm going to do an SEO company. I got a storage company. I got a— what else did you have? You had a bunch of others.

I had a company, paper, pay-per-click marketing company called Ad Rhino. I had a sales consulting company called Huber Method. I had a business brokerage. I had, you know, on and on and on. So I went on a phase where I was like, I can't, I'm— I got the hot hand. My audience is super powerful. Like, let's scale up some companies.

Do you remember at your peak what the group revenue or, um, of the companies you owned the majority of, uh, group revenue or cash flow was at the peak? Because it was working for a little while, right?

Right. And so I think the most interesting lesson, because I've got to see it from the inside, I don't know how much of this you've shared, but we were both partners in a company called Somewhere. Actually, at the time it was called Shepard. And people don't know the backstory here. So the backstory is Marshall, who's the founder, who was the founder of the company, owned the majority of the company. Then me and Nick both had a good chunk, but in the minority. And Marshall calls and he says, hey, I got an acquisition offer. I think I'm going to take it. And I was like, oh, wow, talk me through it. What is it? And he tells us that Andrew Wilkinson, our buddy, other friend of the pod, he made an offer to buy the company for $52 million. And this was great. You know, this is a company that Marshall bootstrapped, didn't raise any money. Potentially big exit, but it was a stock-based deal. And, you know, Marshall was going to take it. Marshall had worked for Andrew when he was young. He had a lot of respect for Andrew. So I think it was like part of it was like this, like almost like full circle validation moment. But, you know, personally, I think every entrepreneur can have that where it's like, wow, Facebook wants to buy my company. This is unbelievable. And then there's the financial component to it. And on the phone, I was like, well, let me give you my opinion. And I realized very quickly, I was like, oh, he's actually already decided. This was a, let me, I just wanted to let you know, disguised as a, what do you think, call. But, you know, I'm, I'm a very opinionated guy. So not to be deterred, I was like, hey, listen, like, you know, we're growing really fast. I like our stock. Why would we trade our stock for other person's stock? Like, we should just keep our stock. It's growing. It's a small company. So by nature, it's going to grow much faster than these larger companies. And, you know, that stock might not be that liquid. Are you sure this is a deal you want to do? Then I call Nick and I'm like, Nick, what do you think? I had this opinion. You were very similar. And we had this idea of like, if he's going to do— if he wants to sell, maybe we could buy it. And originally that was some of the idea. And I said, oh, look, my, my life will get too crazy and complicated. I don't want to do this, but you were like, I'm going to do it. And so walk— that's where, that's where the story begins. Walk me through what happened. First of all, was that your same history? Did I mess anything up there?

And then, yeah, it was a $47 million valuation. The company was 3 years old and growing really fast, about 150 employees. I was a customer and then became an investor and had started to build worldwide teams. But yeah, here we are. Marshall calls me, hey, Andrew, Andrew wants to make an offer to buy the company. I realized, hey, I don't want to sell any of this company. If anything, I want more of this business. And this was peak This was also just peak Nick Huber, you know, not humble Nick Huber of thinking I can do anything and I can't go wrong.

And by the way, we had just tripled the business that year. So it wasn't like, it wasn't like we had any reason to not have confidence. Like the business had just tripled in cash flow. And so like, that was good. Yeah. Hey, I got something pretty cool to share with you guys. So if you're like me, you listen to podcasts or YouTube videos and you like to take notes, you're here to learn. And that's a lot of effort. Sometimes you're on the go and you can't do it. And so the folks at HubSpot who are sponsoring the podcast have done something pretty cool for you. They have created the MFM Vault. It's a place to go find notes and resources that they pull from the different episodes that we do. So if we have a guest on that shares their 5-point framework, they write down those 5 points with the examples that the guest gave and they put the notes there for you. So if you want to access the vault, it's totally free. All you gotta do is click the link in the description below. And you can access all the notes and the stuff in the vault. We're gonna keep adding to this, trying to make it better over time. Thank you to HubSpot. This is a very cool way for them to sponsor the podcast, but by instead of telling you to go buy their stuff, they're actually giving you something instead. Okay, carry on. So you decide, I'm gonna, I tell you, hey, I think I'm probably not gonna do it, but you're like, I'm gonna do this anyways.

Yeah, I say, you know, Marshall, actually, I want to be the one to buy your company. You shouldn't sell it to to Andrew, you should sell to me.

And his initial reaction is like, you and what money?

Yeah, he had, he had a lot of questions. His jaw almost hit the floor. He's like, Nick, this is insane. Like, you kidding me? Like, this is life-changing money. You sell 51— it was a 51% deal because he still needed— remember, he still needed me and you in because we were sending a lot of business in. He still wanted Marshall to have some skin in the game. And yeah, man, the next 3-month period, I sold Marshall on the fact that I could raise $20 million. I negotiated a seller note for a chunk of it. Had to get very creative with how I structured this deal because I realized real quick that it's not the same as real estate and how much skin I can get in the game.

So let's talk through this because a lot of people will give high-level numbers, valuation, sale price, but terms is where, like, anybody who's done deals knows, like, structure and terms matter a ton.

Yeah.

Uh, in how a deal gets done, like an all-stock deal, all-cash deal, upfront, earnout, contingency-based, seller finance, debt. You know, it's a big— there's a big array of different ways the deal can go down. So can you just give us the simple version of like what was that?

So originally a $47 million offer from Andrew, but the business kept growing over the next 6 months that we kind of got this deal done. It became a $52 million purchase acquisition price. And let me be clear that Andrew, it was early on, it kind of felt like me and Andrew negotiating against each other. Holy shit, I'm negotiating against a titan.

This guy's bought 40 companies. You've bought zero.

Yeah. Publicly traded business, you know, billionaire on paper for a while. A great friend of ours. And then Andrew kind of just thought about some AI risk. He saw maybe some, some headwinds and he said, you know what, Nick, like maybe we'll do this together. It was kind of a conversation throughout. It wasn't as if we have any animosity between each other. But yeah, it was, it was, I was going to raise $20 million to buy 40%, about 40% of the company from Marshall. I realized that if I go out and raise $20 million to buy this company, I'm only entitled to a 20% carry on top once everybody gets their money back.

Right. So the structure is you go to investors, investors give you $20 million. Your deal with them is I get a 20% carry or profit share of, of that. So like, you know, you're only owning— so the $20 million buys you what, what percentage of the company?

And a seller note is basically the seller saying, I will lend you essentially the money to pay me and you're going to pay me every year or every quarter, whatever you guys decided this. So what was that? That was $18 million. What did you just say?

That was about $9 million for 18% of the company.

So you, you all in, you raised $20 million from investors, you get $9 million, $9 point something million from Marshall. So you're in $29 million and now you're in charge and you've got peak energy. And I'm talking to you and we both are like, dude, we've had so many ideas of how we could turn this business, you know, from X to Y. This is going to be great. And then what happens?

So you lose a third of your traffic on your brilliant name change. Okay, next.

Yeah, let me, let me look at my notes. So number 2, um, Elon bought Twitter. Elon bought Twitter and started drastically messing with the algorithm quickly. And it went from me being able to tweet about hiring somebody in the Philippines for $5 an hour and send, you know, 3,000 website visits and 200, 300, 400 leads to the company to virtually nothing. Right. So my ability to send business to the company with my personal brand Vanished. Okay. The third thing is, I wasn't the only one to think international hiring was a beautiful business. And many, many competitors started over the next 6 months to a year.

So you guys were pretty loud about the acquisition, which also invites competition, right?

You tried telling me over the years, by the way.

I tried telling you this, but like, you know, everybody wanted to pound their chest. Natural, honestly. Like, and I get it. There's actually an upside to it too, right? I think the month we announced that, to be fair, the months, the 2 months after we announced the acquisition, it was actually peak growth because like a lot of people went and checked it out and realized like, wow, there's a reason why all these people use this service. There's a reason why there's a high repeat rate of this service. It's probably pretty good. So it did initially cause a burst, but it also created, you know, it emboldened the existing competitors to go harder and it created, you know, 10 new competitors, let's say.

Yep. And then the economy started to shift, like interest rates went up. A general, like, silent recession happened in a lot of different industries.

Right. And our customer base, our customer base was not super well-funded AI companies or something like that where, you know, spending was— they're just spending, you know, sloshing money around. Like, we help real businesses. So it'd be whether it's, you know, small business agency owners who own 100% of the business and the cash flow matters to them. It's e-commerce businesses where you're already on tight margins. And that's why you leverage global talent because it improves your margins, but you might just stop hiring altogether, right? Like you might just actually shrink your workforce. Tariffs are coming. You don't know what's going to happen with that. So you shrink your workforce. You know, we would serve tech companies that were, you know, more responsible with their cash. And so like all these business owners that are great customers to have and a big part of our audience, they are obviously cost sensitive because they live in the real world. They're not VC subsidized with, you know, $50 million rounds where you can just aggressively go higher and spend against macroeconomic headwinds.

Yeah, e-com, e-com headwinds, home service headwinds, construction headwinds, real estate headwinds means less people are hiring, less people are growing their teams.

Right.

And I made a lot of bold, quick executive changes inside of Summar when I, when I acquired it. The company had grown very quickly. It was doing 95% of its hiring in the Philippines, executive assistants. Right. We started to invest in Latin America. We started to invest in South Africa. Finance talent in Egypt, building executive teams in South Africa, performance marketers, you know, high-skilled, you know, actually how to structure and build a company from the ground up internationally.

It's an important part. I'm making fun of some of the fun decisions because, because there is a happy ending. It all works out. The company's back, it's growing well, all that good stuff. So then it's fun to laugh about mistakes. It's not so fun when if things go poorly, you don't, you don't laugh about the mistakes as much. You cry about them.

Yeah, we're making it sound like we're going to end this in bankruptcy, but No, no, I guess the spoiler here—

give the spoiler, then we'll kind of keep going.

You know, over the last 4 months, if you compare it to before acquisition, those 4 months I was negotiating the deal, we're up about 60% from a revenue perspective. And over last year it's 28%. So I'm still behind my like pro forma of what I hope to do with the company when I bought it. But revenue is growing very healthily and our team is awesome. So I think we're doing a phenomenal job of finding people all over the world. I've learned a ton about worldwide recruiting. I want to give some people some tips too. How to do this themselves, like what, what to look for. But yeah, it's been a, a lot of changes.

So the reason I wanted to share this is because 99% of people talking about their experiences buying and running businesses, the selection effect is the people who are failing shut up and the people who are succeeding get real loud. And I think what's cool about you is that you, you can give it and you can take it. And so like you are, you are bold and you say what you mean, you say what you feel. You're not, you're not afraid to be wrong. And if you're wrong, you say I was wrong., and I really love that about you. I really respect that about you. I think that's actually quite rare. And in this case, like, you know, you're basically saying, hey, I went and did this deal. And then like, here's a bunch of things that immediately I did wrong or went wrong for me. And I had to like, you know, figure out how to do better. And I think that's actually like quite admirable. The second part of it is there was, there's something that in, in sports they call new, new owner, sort of new owner syndrome, which is anytime a sports owner buys a team, they immediately start changing everything. And because they're like, oh, I could, I can do no wrong. I know how to fix this. I'm going to do all these great things in year one. And one of the things that I think is actually pretty interesting here is even though we run this global talent company and we were finding talent all over the globe, we were mostly finding kind of junior and mid-level talent. So like, you know, whether it's assistants, executive assistants was like a big, you know, a huge part of our business, sales folks, you know, whatever. There's folks like that. But C-suite folks, we would typically assume are, well, that's who I want to use, you know, you know, different, local hires, either, you know, in the same office as me or just American hires, expensive, big pay packages, you know, got a lot of pedigree with companies I recognize, you know, whatever. And so we did that. You know, we hired a bunch of executives and that was, I think, made total sense on paper. And I think one of the cool things that you figured out that I didn't see going into this was since then you have actually rebuilt not just the junior and mid-level, but actually the executive team with executive talent elsewhere. And I kind of took that and I was like, oh, I should do that in my businesses because that's actually like an even bigger hack because you were like, dude, I'm finding— here's this person in South Africa. They've got an MBA, they speak perfect English. They've worked for international companies and American companies that do work internationally for 12 years. They've been a financial controller controlling these budgets. And you can hire that person at this price. That's incredible. You know, you're saving huge amounts of money on really great talent and really hungry low maintenance, hard worker, hardworking talent all around the globe. And so that was, I thought, one of the bigger surprises to me and like things we got wrong that we kind of corrected. And I don't know if you want to say a quick thing about that.

And I don't want this to be a Summar plug, but you, you were like, dude, I could tell you how to do this without Summar. And I was like, oh, that's like an anti-ad. So great. You can use Summar, but here's how you do it without us. Uh, so how do you do it without us?

All right. But that's too many. How do I filter?

You wipe out whatever, 80% of people right away.

Great.

Uh, what's the next easiest heuristic to find great talent?

Right. Task-based test over interview is huge. We do that in all of our stuff.

I didn't even mention the interview, I guess.

So to give people an example of the assessment real quick, I just pulled one up. So this is what I use to find my assistant. So I basically gave this out and I said, I said, I want you to do the task and I want you to record a Loom video explaining what you did as you do each task, which tells me their thought process, shows me kind of how they work and not just like the end product. And I also get to hear them communicate and if they're like an easy person to communicate with. So my assistant task, I said, uh, pretend you're booking a vacation from LA to Paris for my wife and I. Our ideal dates are this, but we're flexible on those by a day or two. Here's our preferences. Send me a couple options. The lowest cost option, the best option that balances convenience and cost, and maybe the most luxurious option, more expensive, but whatever. I want to see them put together kind of a menu of options because that's typically how I work with my assistants. Like, You get me to 90% and then I pick and choose what I want. Another one, I said, here's a voice note. I put a voice note on SoundCloud. I said, of me dictating while driving, um, draft these two emails based on what I mentioned. And in, in that voice note, I'm like, hey, oh, I gotta, I promised X so-and-so I would introduce them to so-and-so. You know, I met them at lunch, blah, blah, blah. And then I try to see if they can just quickly grok, like, basically, can I write a fuzzy address on an envelope and will it still get there? Right? Because I'm not going to get perfect instructions most of the time. So how do they deal with imperfect instructions? I'll have them do simple things like, hey, I've just moved from Texas to Wyoming and I don't have, I don't have changed my driver's license. Can you figure out how I need to get like, get like DMV work? Like, how would I get a new license? Could you do it all the way? And if not, what steps do you need me to do? And then, uh, like make a birthday card in Canva for my daughter's birthday. I want to see like, do they have like basic design and event organization skills? And the last one was like research. So it's like, hey, I'm looking for influencers for this new fitness product that I have. Find me 10 fitness influencers that fit this criteria. Let me just see if they're able to like quickly do data collection and research and be able to provide something useful to me. And so like, those are examples of what tasks I put out there. I put it in a— that's a, that's a one-page Google Doc. And they send me basically a Loom video of them doing each task. And that's how I quickly filtered through, you know, 50 people that like, somewhere basically it was like, hey, here's 50 people. Here's the 4 we like best. I gave them the assessment. I didn't like the first 4. Then they gave me another batch of 4 and immediately there was someone who was great.

Yeah, they shine. The, the, the person who's competent will shine to the top of the crowd without any work on your end. It's a, it's a beautiful thing.

You were basically saying like, uh, you know, you find all these different talent so people can go find it themselves if they wanted to find it through somewhere. Like, what is the, what is a simple way to do that?

I mean, we, we prepared kind of like a special thing for your audience. Do you want to talk about that now or you just want to talk about like generally how the company works? Yeah. What is it? What do you, what do you have? Yeah, I, I, in advance of this episode, I personally vetted and interviewed 10 salespeople in South Africa, 10 finance folks in Egypt, LATAM, and South Africa, and 10 executive assistants in Sri Lanka, LATAM, and South Africa. Gotcha.

So you did a personal vet shortlist for each of them?

Yeah, I watched their videos, I analyzed their resumes.

What do you want people to email you, or how do people get access to that?

Yeah. So if they email me, nick@sweatystartup.com, I can hook them up with some of these profiles, let them see them, and hopefully help them grow their team.

That's cool. I'm curious, man, you are always meeting interesting people, partly due to having a presence on Twitter, partly just, you know, you have like one foot in the Sweaty Startup world, one foot in the tech world, online media world. I'm just curious, like, who have you met recently that kind of either inspired you or like, you know, broke your frame in some way, or somebody who you think is doing cool stuff?

I have one person in mind who's building a pest control, like, monster of a company. I don't want to out him. It's just incredible to me. You know this. You've actually taught me a lot of this stuff is that they find one thing that really works inside their company and they just run the same play for 5 or 10 years to grow a monster business. Hammer it. I didn't think that business worked that way. You could do one thing really well and everything else You know, you're not hiring internationally. You're, you're not doing the latest software. You haven't even looked at AI. You're not answering the phone past 5:01 PM. Right. But you do this one thing well and you're worth $100 million.

Right. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out 4/5 of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to The data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. Have you ever seen Peter Thiel taught a class at Stanford and they put the class notes online and it's been there for a long time. It's called the, the Blake Masters notes or something like that. Did you ever read those?

No. What's, what's the main takeaway?

Brad Jacobs. Brad Jacobs with how he grew United Rentals and several of these other companies. He ran the same place.

What was his, what was his play? I actually don't know.

I'm sure he had several different plays, but how you make a few billion dollars is like you find a way to grow, you know, equipment rental business through— is it local ads? Is it, is it outbound sales? They were— they had a really good outbound sales team for contractors and then boom, that business skyrocketed. He pulled the same executive team, pulled his main players out of that company once it went public, put them in the next one, and boom, you know, that's how you grow 5 companies in a row, figuring out, figuring out what companies that play will work for.

Why?

What would happen if for 6 months our entire executive team laser-focused on growing that referral number? And do we think that we'd be better off than, you know, maybe the last year and a half we've been trying to get, you know, slam a round peg into a square hole. And I think, right, it's unbelievable. The job of a CEO sometimes is literally just to tell your team no and to get them focused on what's already working.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And not hedge. Like, you know, I would, uh, I would say no, but then we kind of greenlight this little test. I would say no, but then like 2 weeks later we just do it anyways. What happened to our no? Was that not a real no? And I think there's all these ways where you can think you're compromising or you're having your cake and eating it too, but actually you're just spilling your cake on the floor. Um, and it's better to not do that. All right, let's take a quick break because I gotta tell you a story. Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type, it's got a janky interface, it's built like a 2002 tax form, and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction, they locked my account, they put me on hold for 45 minutes, and then they told me I gotta visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. Uh, after asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury. And so now my payroll is 2 clicks. I can wire money, I can pay invoices, I can reimburse the team. All from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies, and so do 200,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Callum A., and Evolve Bank Trust, members FDIC. You said running a holdco is overrated. I think the trend will die down. Most rich guys I know are focused on one big business and built it for a long time. So holdcos or these portfolios of businesses like you were doing was a very, very big idea or popular idea in our circles, in our bubble about 5 years ago. And it's not a new idea. Holdcos have been around for a long time. Give me your updated thoughts on the holdco.

One source of problems rather than 10. All right. Another one you have here, consistency is underrated. You're on the consistency train. What's your take here?

Yeah, I think it's really easy to get excited about something and jump in and be delusionally like, focused on one thing for one year, even two years, whether it's business, a certain idea, your physical health. I know people who are there either running a marathon and cutting, cutting calories and super fit and super clean and super healthy, or they're totally falling off the rails and doing the opposite while they're focused on something else. It's kind of sexy to just jump in and be totally all obsessed with something. The people who win are like, even keel. Maybe they're not working 70, 80 hours a week. Maybe they work 50 hours every single week for their whole career, or even 20, 30, 40, whatever it is. But it's hard. It's hard to stay excited about something for a long time without getting burnt out. But I think it's a superpower. Like, if you can be even keeled in all areas of life— I'm not just talking about business, but mostly business— if you can just keep from gaining weight up the first time, it's going to be a lot easier to stay healthy the rest of your life. You can just stay focused on one business or a certain way that you do things and, you know, get after it, you can really win. I know a lot of guys who they're either kicking ass inside their companies or they're like totally checked out and like ignoring the hard decisions.

It's the ability to zoom out. So many entrepreneurs, they're so focused, they're so intense, they're so jammed up in the weeds inside their company. And look, sometimes you got to do that. Like I've been in the weeds in several of my companies, but the people who can really zoom out, like you're saying, what really matters here? And you do that for 4 or 5 years, 6 years, 10 years, 20 years, right, man? Father Time. Like, it's really sexy to build businesses fast and exponential growth. And you hear about all these stories we read about them and it takes over media, especially social media.

Well, you've seen that meme almost at this point. It's not supposed to be a meme, but it looks like a meme now. It's like fastest company to $100 million ARR. And it's this, these charts and it's like, well, Slack took 7 years and then it's like, we did it in 2 weeks. And there's like the new AI company that's got a straight line up. And then, then somebody else comes in and says, we did it in 2 minutes, we did it in 2 seconds. And that's what they're, they're all trying to just beat each other to this like sprint to, to low quality revenue. And I think it's so funny. It's like in The Big Short where he's like, Why are they confessing? And he's like, they're not confessing, they're bragging. And it's like, I think they think that's a great thing. And it's like, the more impressive chart is the one that looks like Qualtrics. You know, we had the founder of Qualtrics on, and he said he has a huge sign in his home office that just says, tune out the noise, play the long game. And he was like, dude, for 7 years, nobody cared about what we were doing. We were single-mindedly focused on getting 150 universities to use our thing because we knew that was super important. If we did that, we had a real business., and it took us time, but we just stayed scrappy. We stayed focused and we just did that for years before we ever got any press, any social media, any anything. And it's like, that's who you don't want to compete against is somebody who can do that. 'Cause they're building this giant foundation of what they're trying to do. It doesn't mean go slow. It just means don't get fooled into thinking that you need to, you know, sort of quickly sprint and just grab some revenue number out of thin air. As like what success looks like. Success is this sort of durability over time.

There's expectations. Like, people have to realize that the expectations of yourself as an entrepreneur in your career, they depend on your last 6 months, your last 12 months, your last, you know, 2 years. If you've had that hockey stick exponential growth, like, think about how you have to follow that up. And I think some of those entrepreneurs kind of dream of a world where there's no investors, nobody watching, growing slowly over time, building something sustainable.

Yeah. What, uh, okay, you have some other ones here. You said, um, being a YouTuber is the hardest job in the world. I think some, like, coal miners might disagree, but go ahead.

Well, I think social media is changing. Like, we can talk about how the X algorithm's changed, how it feels to be a content creator is totally different now. You almost have to be video first. I don't know if you feel this, Sean. Like, if you aren't on YouTube, you are not growing right now.

That's true. I think there's always exceptions, but it's largely true. And I've said this before, video is the language, the native language of the internet. So it's like going to a country. If you don't speak video, then you are not going to be able to communicate because that's how, that's what everybody here speaks is video. Short form, long form, doesn't matter.

Yeah. As an entrepreneur, I'm really hesitant to get on that hamster wheel because I see, I see what the life is like of, okay, you got this banger video, your influence grows, got to follow it up the next week. You got to follow it up the next week. You got to follow it up the next week and you got to be on. And then we go back to that consistency conversation that we just had. Living that life for 10 years, living that life for 10 years. Like, how would that look? How would that feel? I think it's a very difficult job. I have a ton of respect for people who do it. I think it's still worth it. But in my opinion, the value of a personal brand on all things not video is going down, in my opinion. All right.

One more spicy opinion here. This might be the spiciest of all. AI is bullshit and unsustainable and will decrease quality of life for the 99%. Wow. Say some words about that.

Wow. That's because what, data centers being built or there's double—

there's 30 data centers that have come online in Georgia in the last 4 years. There's still 30 more in the pipeline being built right now that have negotiated unsustainable energy rates with the local municipalities. Where does it stop before like, okay, the companies are able to put AI in place to replace employees, But the energy cost— and this is why I think for 1% of people it could get really ugly, or for the rest of the people it could get really ugly. Like, what about your ability to run a dishwasher or run an air conditioner or run a heater in your house, which all require a massive amount of electricity that gets more expensive for almost everybody? You have less money to spend on other things to make quality of life better. So yeah, hot take. But man, I'm very bearish on AI right now.

You said it's bullshit and unsustainable, but you said also, you said in the next 20 years it's going to change everything. So it's not that you think the long term is is you're saying that something today is overpromised. What, what is it? Is it— and you're saying personally you're getting value, doctor in your pocket, recipes, life, day-to-day stuff. It's the business use that you're not seeing the—

Do you have a Tesla?

As soon as they make a Cybertruck that doesn't look like a Cybertruck, I'm all in. Like I want full self-driving. I know how safe it is. I'm not willing to drive a sedan because they're not safe. Somebody T-bones me.

Dude, I bought one. It is— the self-driving is unbelievable. It is so good. Yeah. Like I also, before I bought this car, I also thought like The narrative was Elon's been promising, he hasn't delivered it. It might be harder than you think. Maybe you can't even do it without, without LiDAR or whatever. And then I buy the car, I push the button and it drives me everywhere flawlessly. You know, and I'm like, this is here. This is already working. You know, this is incredible. And I think the data backs up the personal experience.

Yeah, I have, I have ridden in full self-driving and it is mind-blowing. It's mind-blowing. I want it. I need it. But like, is it going to be widespread?

Is—

are we going to have, you know, robo taxis like San Francisco all over the country? I still think we're 10 years away from it. And Elon said it'd be 2012 that we were going to have this happen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He— his timelines have been wrong. But I— but I think that's more— that's less to do now with the tech and more to do with the regulation at this point. So which I think is a different, different question. You mentioned pest control. Are there other businesses that you found interesting or like, you know, you've been surprised at how well they're doing or a niche that you you know, you nerded out about a little bit.

We built our first self-storage facility 6 hours from where we were living, borrowed, borrowed $2 million from a bank, spent $3 million to build a self-storage facility 6 hours away. Yeah. Now I'm in Athens, Georgia, which is another different city, and people are like, oh, you're in the self-storage business. Like, which one in town do you own? Right? I'm like, they're nowhere near here. I'm sorry.

Yeah. In storage, what was the insight on location for you? So did you find like, oh, this— a certain strategy on location worked well for you?

Yeah, we didn't even— we didn't even talk about real estate. It's been a chaotic, you know, 3 years in real estate as interest rates have risen. Just total carnage in the business. Luckily, We've done some things operationally that, you know, give us a little bit of an advantage.

But I'm sorry, explain why that is. So for somebody who's not in real estate, why does interest rates going up create, as you said, carnage in the real estate market?

Right. What's going on with your properties now? Because that was, that was the time when you were buying too.

Is the future for Nick Huber buying more storage facilities? Is it just running Somewhere and growing that? Is it something else, you know, 5 years from now? Like, do you know what's the future? Future for Nick?

You know, I have my, my ego has, has written a lot of checks over the last 5 years. Now I got to go cash them. No, I'm pretty focused on, on growing somewhere. I want to grow RE Cost Seg and I want to buy more storage. We have a couple of deals under contract now. The company's in a good place and there's just so much less competition in the real estate business right now. So it's a double-edged sword. I just think business is naturally cyclical. It really is like there's really good times and there's harder times. And sometimes the hard times are good because you got to buckle up, you got to operate, you got to make things to make your business more efficient. And it washes out the people that can't do that and it becomes less competitive. So I'm genuinely excited about the real estate business over time. I think we're better than anybody in the world at finding amazing talent somewhere. And yeah, so I'm going to grow some of these companies. I want to grow some of them really large.

Very cool. Well, man, I appreciate you coming on. Always fun to catch up.

Good deal. Thanks for having me, dude.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orangetheory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're gonna hear 'em share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.