Nick Huber Profile picture
Sep 28, 2020 11 tweets 3 min read Read on X
How to get rich without getting lucky:

Find a way to make $100 an hour doing something simple IN YOUR TOWN.

Do it until you have $10k+ in the bank and you’re too busy to sell new customers.

Hire employee for $25 / hr to do what you do so you can sell new customers.

Repeat.
Be willing to work and sweat and even maybe scrub toilets for 3-6 months.

Look at the market unemotionally. It’s not about you and what you love doing.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Look at competition as a sign there is money to be made.
Compete with folks who run their business like its 1985 with secretaries, yellow pages, and cash.

Wrap in technology. Never take cash. Outsource accounting and get software for all other admin.

Turn quotes in 10 mins or less without site visits.

Book in 30 secs or less.
Stop blaming the labor market for your inability to hire good people. Market to them just as you would market to customers.

Stop looking for unicorns who will treat your business like you do. They don’t exist.

Build a business that can thrive with perfectly normal people.
Simplify their job and understand the golden rule:

If you ask them to be competent at more than 5 things they’ll be incompetent at all of them.

Employees want clear, simple direction so they can succeed. Autonomy is overrated and makes for good unicorn books.
Keep spending your time selling.

That means hiring ahead of revenue sometimes.

Do the things that are important but not urgent. Every week analyze the fires that distracted you from selling.

Make it a priority to prevent all of them next week with better systems.
Do the marketing that doesn’t scale.

Everybody yells at digital marketing to spend more on AdWords. Dont.

Hire an outside sales rep on commission. Cold call 500 people per quarter who could potentially refer you biz.

Get a marketing intern to put out bandit signs.
Follow up with your past customers. They are golden opportunities for referrals and more work rarely tapped by service companies.

Send hand written thank you notes 4 wks after service.

Get reviews on Google May Biz. With photos.

Spend $500-1000/mo with a good SEO shop.
When you run out of new work in your town step back and take a look.

Make the decision to hire a a manager to replace yourself and do whatever the hell you want with your life or go to another town and do it all again.

What are your goals?
Or use your cash and experience to shift into bigger and bigger opportunities.

For me it was moving boxes->student storage->self storage. For you it might be cleaning toilets-> managing Airbnb’s -> owning short term rentals. Whatever.
Need a place to start? Check out this list:

sweatystartup.com/businesses-I-l…

Want a list of tools and a step by step?

sweatystartup.com/essential-tools

Need to figure out if there is room for you to compete? Check out this process:

sweatystartup.com/the-best-way-t…

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More from @sweatystartup

Jun 26
How to figure out if your business idea is any good in 5 minutes or less:
A while back I had friend in Athens tell me that he wanted to start a house painting business.

We were sitting on my back deck drinking a Keystone light on a random Saturday at about 4pm.

He asked me what I thought.

I went to work.
I typed "House Painting" into Google Maps on my phone.

10 results popped up nearby.

I hit "call" on the first one.

A guy answered on the second ring. He was nice.

He told me he could come to my house anytime on Sunday or Monday to give me a quote.
Read 6 tweets
May 23
How to get rich without getting lucky:
Find a way to make $100/hour doing something simple IN YOUR TOWN.

Do it until you have $10K+ in the bank & you’re too busy to sell new customers.

Hire employees for $20/hr to do what you do so you can sell new customers.
Look at the market unemotionally.

It’s not about you and what you love doing.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.

Look at competition as a sign that there is money to be made here.
Read 12 tweets
May 13
The life of an entrepreneur can be brutally difficult.

But nobody talks about it.

Time for a stiff drink and a few words on some of the most stressful periods in my life.
The thing about being an entrepreneur is that there is nobody you can ask for help.

There is no boss you can call and dish off the really hard problems to.
And there is no track-record or “way of doing things” that is proven.

So you have this constant nagging feeling that what I’m doing might not work and I might lose a lot of money.
Read 27 tweets
Apr 17
There are a lot of underrated skills in this world.

Attributes that aren’t openly discussed but are widely shared by the most successful among us.

Here's how you can increase your chances.
Knowing what advice to take (and what to ignore) is a superpower.

My method:

Take it from anyone.

Weigh it according to how happy / successful the giver is.

Put it through my bullshit meter.

Do the work to apply it to my life.

Ignore 75% of it.

Cherish the rest.
Energy and excitement are underrated.

If you aren’t excited, even the most lucrative tasks can seam pointless.

The grass is always greener. Every opportunity has 10 really good reasons why it will fail.

Energy > competence.
Read 11 tweets
Mar 27
A mindset shift that really changed my life:
Walk into every single interaction with the goal of adding as much value as humanly possible.

Don't think about charging money, withholding info, etc.

Prove you know your stuff.

Help in a massive way.

Gain trust. Profit later.
A lot of folks have this mindset of scarcity.

If I give away what I know I’ll lose something and they’ll gain.

Or if someone else makes money, I must be losing money.

The sooner you realize that it’s a plentiful world, everyone can make money and you should share everything.
Read 7 tweets
Mar 20
In 2021, I worked on a career-defining $75M self storage deal that could have generated tens of millions in enterprise value for my company Bolt Storage.

But we lost it to a competitor...

It hurt!

Here's what happened:
The deal was for a 20 property portfolio (750K sq ft.)

The owner's brother-in-law follows me on X.

They wanted to sell their portfolio, so he called me to visit the properties to discuss buying them.

I went & loved the properties. I spent 4 hrs discussing the deal.

Why?
I knew the properties were worth more, especially if my team & I ran them for a few years.

So I talked to a few LPs & bankers to finance the deal, & made an offer (close to their asking price).

I was pumped. The deal would be my biggest & best yet. I thought I had it.

But,
Read 11 tweets

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