#38 : Should you start a sweaty business?

 
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When people hear the word entrepreneurship these days, they tend to think of tech startups, Silicon Valley, and huge companies. But this isn’t a viable - or even desirable! - path to entrepreneurship for most people. For most of us, a small business that we can run alongside our full-time job is a better way to get started with entrepreneurship.

Nick Huber is here today to talk to us about creating your own Sweaty Startup. Nick is the founder of Storage Squad and Storage Squad Self Storage. He’s also the host of the Sweaty Startup Podcast, where he shares tons of resources about starting a business, entrepreneurship, and the advantages of having a sweaty side business.

Nick and I talk about what a sweaty startup is, how to start one without quitting your full-time job, and why they are such a great way to gain more control of your time in the long-term. Nick shares some of his favorite businesses and talks about why businesses that require some physical or in-person labor are often overlooked by would-be entrepreneurs. And we discuss researching your local market and Nick’s thoughts on buying a pre-existing business.

In this episode, we’re discussing…

  • What we mean by “sweaty startup” and why these are a great way to increase your income and eventually control your time.

  • Why people often shy away from these types of businesses, even though their services are in high demand (e.g. plumbing, property management, painting, storage, and many more).

  • Nick’s favorite businesses and why he thinks they are huge opportunities for people both inside and outside the tech world.

  • How to start a sweaty startup while continuing to work a full-time job.

  • Why you don’t need to be super passionate about your business for it to make great money.

Nick’s Top Tips:

  • People overlook sweaty startup opportunities because they require work – getting your hands dirty might not sound as glamorous as running an online business, but there is huge room for growth with a business that has to be done entirely in person.

  • A sweaty startup that can eventually lend itself to real estate is a great idea – things like storage, property management, or other home-related services can all help you get into the real estate space, which is often short on high-quality managers, contractors, and other home professionals.

  • Research your local market before starting your business – you can figure out how good the competition is or if your business idea is going to fill a big gap in your market. Having a few competitors isn’t a bad thing, either, and you don’t need a brand new idea to be successful. You just need a small slice of the pie and to deliver great service!

Resources:

 

+ Read the transcript

What if you could be doing something smarter with your money that creates income right now? If you're an IT professional who is wanting to get ahead financially and enjoy greater freedom of choice. And if you wonder who else in tech is creating ways to make their money work for them? You want actionable ideas with honest pros and cons and no fluff. Welcome to The Richer Geek Podcast for helping IT professionals find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom. I'm your host, Nicole Stoller and in this podcast, you'll hear from others who are already doing these things and learn how you can too.

Welcome back to The Richer Geek Podcast. Today's topic is really about in person services businesses and why these types of businesses could be a great active investment. Our guest today is Nick Huber. He hosts a podcast called the sweaty startup. He's the founder of storage squad and Storage Squad Self Storage. I found Nick through his Reddit community. And I love the message that he's sharing to encourage people to think differently about these types of businesses that may be overlooked. He's a big proponent of leveraging tech to scale traditional services businesses like these, which I also love for the listeners of this show who have the tools and the understanding of how to do this. Let's dive in. Nick, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me, Nichole. I'm following along with your message and really appreciate everything you do. So I'm happy to be here to hopefully out a little bit of value to your audience.

I am so thrilled to be able to get into this topic because we haven't covered anything like this. And I think you're going to give people a lot of interesting ideas and inspiration. So let's start with a little bit. Tell us first your background and a little bit more about yourself.

Absolutely. So my name is Nick Huber. I was born in southern Indiana, just turned 30 years old this year, and in 2011 when I was 22 years sold, I started a service business pickup and delivery storage company when I was an undergrad in college, and slowly grew that business over the course of about five years to do about across all of our businesses, we do about $3 million a year in sales. And I work from home and live in Athens, Georgia, where I don't really have a lot of work here. But I travel I kind of operate these businesses remotely. And I'm having a lot of fun. So that's the that's the 22nd pitch. But I guess we can talk a little bit more about that if you want to.

Let's talk about I found you because you're the host of the sweaty startup, and that is a podcast and there's also a Reddit group, shout out to read it. Can you share a little bit more because you have your story? And then what drove you to start the podcast?

Absolutely. So I feel really passionately about entrepreneurship as a way to live a balanced life. And you hear a lot of people talk about entrepreneurship means working 9500 hours a week, and I did agree with that wholeheartedly. And I was actually mentoring my brother who was a college student last year on starting a little lawn care business that he was working on. And we were just doing a lot of things a little bit differently. He had a lot of success, ended up not needing to go get a full time job after college, which I think is kind of the goal for everybody is to maybe replace their full time job. And I just realized that it's a message that's not really spread in today's culture. You walk down the street and say, What does entrepreneurship mean to you? And somebody thinks about, you know, Silicon Valley, they think about Steve Jobs, they think about Shark Tank. And that is not the meaning of true entrepreneurship. In my opinion, I look around me, at the people who are entrepreneurs, the people who have been able to quit their jobs, the people who have been able to generate generational wealth for themselves and their families. And almost all of them started small, doing completely normal, regular things. So I think that's kind of a message that's lost on today's entrepreneurship culture.

It's interesting too, because that message and then also people aren't going into Those kinds of jobs as much so you find that, you know, for example, working in the real estate investing industry, you find that finding good trades people finding good electricians, and plumbers, is a challenge. And when you do, they're golden. But that part can be a challenge as well.

Yeah, in my opinion, when everybody is looking one way, and the media is pushing everybody one way, and all the smart people are doing one thing, it might be kind of wise to look at what all those people are avoiding. And just like you said, it everybody is avoiding these sweaty businesses, the cleaning companies, the Home Services, businesses, the businesses that you can bootstrap with almost no money that you can start on the side, and really have the potential to maybe not make you a billionaire, maybe not have a TechCrunch article written about you or get you to Silicon Valley, but they can generate an amazing life for you and your family. And I'm living proof of that. So that's why I feel so strongly and passionately about it.

I love it. And I think the question is, is what is your goal? Do you need the articles? Do you need that or are you just Really looking for creating generational wealth, building a business building something you can pass on to your kids and other family members?

Yeah, and being able to wake up at 630 and have coffee and play with my kids until noon if I want to or work on a Saturday morning because I love what I'm doing so much, but not because I have to do that. And that's that's why it's been such a great journey and why I'm so passionate about this, because so many people are kind of stuck doing things that they think they should be doing if they want to pursue entrepreneurship or start a business, when there's really some entrepreneurial opportunities right under our noses with these small sweaty startups.

Let's define more detail around the sweaty startup and you said these opportunities like what all do you put in that category?

Yeah, anything that requires a little bit of physical labor to do. It's not necessarily something that you can start from a computer with no money shipping on Amazon or with a SaaS product. Right, this is a a business where you actually have to have somebody present to shake hands with somebody else. So this can mean any kinds of sales doesn't necessarily mean it's not tech, it just means that it can't be done and outsourced to Pakistan, like a lot of these other businesses. So you're looking at videography, you're looking at Home Services, you're looking at any kind of sales, any kind of business where you have to be there. And the beautiful thing about this, Nicole, is that when a lot of really smart entrepreneurs who are looking to scale a business are looking for things to do, they look at these sweaty startups, and they say, Oh, no, I don't want to do that. Because there's a little bit of work involved. Okay, but somebody like me looks at that and says, oh, if I'm not afraid to go out and do a little bit of the work and start small and do some of this stuff right off the bat, I don't need to take a huge investment. I don't need to take a lot of risks. And I can build something, you know, on the side where I can just test out a bunch of different things move on if it's not quite working. And another thing is, I hate the new idea culture. So a sweaty startup is not a new idea. A sweat startup is something that people are already out there doing. So you can look at businesses, you can look at customers, you can study the market, and you can see what's out there working for people. And you can find where there are opportunities for you to possibly start one of these businesses.

on your website, you have a list of businesses I love and list of businesses I hate. you've alluded to the hate a little bit, but let's talk about so we talked about the definition where somebody is physically having to do something in person that can't be outsourced for cheaper pricing overseas. Tell us what are some of your favorites in that category?

Yeah, some of the favorite my favorite ones, it kind of depends on your skill level. And it kind of depends on how much experience you have running a business and how much money you have to invest. But I love for the inexperienced people. Let's start at the bottom here with myself when I was a 21 year old. I like businesses that you can start without a lot of equipment. I started a pickup and delivery storage company using my own vehicle and storing this stuff in the basement of my house. But you can also start lawn care company because you already have a lawn mower start sitting in your garage, you can start a power washing business because you can get clients before you need to go out and service the clients, you can start a painting company, a mobile car detailing company, a carpet cleaning company, you can even get to get a little bit more creative and still without a lot of risk. You can start things like an Airbnb management company, a property management company, you know, anything along the lines of all right, I don't need to invest six months of my time and energy to figure out if this is possibly going to work.

I love that. And you know, it's interesting, you said property management. So I will say that I had someone sent me a email saying, Hey, we own a couple of rental properties. And we've been thinking of starting a property management company because we're doing pretty well at that. And I think like you mentioned Airbnb that would lend itself to it as well. Like, Hey, I'm doing well with I have one Why don't I help service and so we still have a little bit of the real estate connection there as well.

I love property management as a business and I love a lot of businesses that can lend themselves down the road into real estate. And now almost all my energy, almost all of my net worth almost all my income comes from real estate, which is self storage. And that just happened to kind of coincide with the journey, my entrepreneurial journey, starting by picking up the boxes myself, and then kind of moving into real estate. So I love businesses that can lend themselves to become real estate down the road. And there's no better one than property management. First of all, property management companies, a lot of them are run like it's 1985, right? They don't do a lot of the good marketing, they don't drive rents, they don't really shop hard for, you know, the services that are needed when you have a maintenance issue and things like that, I'm sure, Nicole, you have a really good idea as well of how the deficiencies and how you would run a property management company better. But I think if it's all about data, right, and if you're running a property management company, and you know what you can lease rooms for, and maybe you're doing a short term management company doing Airbnb rentals, and you start gathering that data and you know, like, how value A piece of real estate is, then it's a lot easier to go buy one of those pieces of real estate yourself with a lot less risks, because in my opinion, the rent and how much income you can make from properties, the single biggest variable and the long term success of it. So that's one of the many ways that these businesses can lead to bigger and better, less sweaty things five years from now.

Something you mentioned, the property management not always done well. So I have absolutely on the show talked about that. We're kind of anti property management, we self manage. And there's a reason for that. And I, it's mostly because to those points. So if we found an amazing property management company, that would be different, obviously, there's the big guys, but we're small types of properties. And it's interesting, too, because it's probably one of the biggest complaints I'll hear from people is that they feel like they're not really getting the value for the property management. So you talked about, Okay, a couple of businesses that lend themselves to real estate, are there any others that you would you would consider in that category?

Yeah, I love anybody who can do has a little bit of a skill with their hands, maybe appliance repair handyman services. If you can fix little things in your house, you can add a ton of value. And you can find some deals that where you don't need to buy a turnkey investment. That's one that I love. And I just think Airbnb, short term management and going and finding other people who have properties that they're maybe not seeing the returns that they could in some towns in America, obviously, not all of them. But Airbnb could be a great option. An example of that is my business partner here in Athens, Georgia, which is a football town and a college town with a lot going on several music venues. He bought a property downtown, a condo basically. And he ended up putting it on Airbnb, and he's getting way way better returns than the people who bought condos in the same exact building that are renting them on a monthly basis just because of the town and the nature of it. So I just think that if you're willing to do the work and you're willing to study the market, and you're willing to do some things like the cleaning, the furnishing, you know things like that yourself. There's a lot of opportunities that can lend themselves to real

Now something that you also mentioned, as you talked about, you started your business while you were in college. And while being a college student, not exactly the same as working full time, but you did have other obligations and other things that you were doing. So how do you recommend people start something like this while working full time?

Yeah, I think that's another huge myth about entrepreneurship is that you have to quit your job and dive all in full force to start a successful company. The truth is that entrepreneurship is not zero or one right? You can not necessarily quit your job and you can still start a business you can have both you can run your business, your startup on the side of your full time job. So when you get home from work is when you can do build a website, find some customer leads, go out, do some marketing, right in your town, right? You can do these things for cheap, affordable, right in your town on the side and then you can start to service these customers on the weekends. And before you know it, you'll go down to four days a week because you need your Mondays to run your company. Then, before you know it, you've replaced your entire income, you can quit your job with absolutely no loss of revenue and your life and you can never miss a beat from there on out.

Or you can keep your job if you love it. Cuz a lot of folks, you know me in tech, there's a lot of, you know, people that love the fast pace and finding new technology capabilities. But then you have this business that you find a way to scale it. So you're not actually having to actively be engaged as much kind of like, I think you've done with some of your businesses.

That's a great point. I think a lot of people too often they think, well, I don't want to start, you know, a deck standing company, because I don't like doing that work. And my point is always the same thing. Six months after you start any business, you're not going to be doing that anyway, if you're doing it correctly. There's a big difference between starting yourself a job and doing something that you like doing, and then starting a business where you don't really care necessarily with the services but you're going to find a way to systematize it, hire it out and you scale it up without you physically doing the labor. And then you're doing the sales, you're building the systems, you're doing the training, you're doing the hiring, which is for a lot of us the fun part and can absolutely be done on the side. And yeah, you can keep your job, keep doing whatever you want to be doing. While you're running a business that can kind of grow without you.

There's something else that you said that that made me think of, in Episode Seven, I had Kenny rose, who's a franchise broker, and he, he was talking about that there's always this myth to that you should be passionate, right about, you know, some kind of business that you start. And he said, Look, people are not passionate necessarily about laundromats or barber shops. But these are necessary kind of recession proof types of businesses that give people the lifestyle they want. So I think a little bit you know, maybe you're not passionate about texting, but it can give you the incremental income or the lifestyle that you want.

Yeah. And to expand on that. I mean, it's all about participation, right? If there's a lot of participation and One thing, it's going to be more competitive, right? Everybody wants to play football, everybody wants to play basketball. So to become a professional in those areas is incredibly hard, you're more likely to get struck by lightning than go to the NBA if you're a high school basketball player, right? The same goes for business. If you're going to go after a passion project, something that you love doing, there's a really, really good chance that a lot of other people love doing that as well. Or they love the thought of it. Right? Everybody loves the thought of making money online. in your free time. Everybody loves the thought of selling things on Amazon. Everybody loves the thought of doing these sexy tech startups, where nobody really cares about waste removal or junk hauling or lawn care. And that's why there's such great opportunities is because the participation is lower. I mean, I didn't really see the stark difference until I bought myself a home and it came time for me to upgrade it to find people to service it. I mean, to back up from that. I mean, people are outsourcing more than they have ever outsourced. So they're valuing their time more. I mean, you look at it, Nicole From your life point for me as well, I value my time more than I ever have. So I'm going to pay somebody else to mow my lawn, I'm gonna pay somebody else to clean my carpet, I'm gonna pay somebody else to do all this stuff. Whereas 2030 years ago, people did it all themselves, like our parents, our grandparents, they're handy. They knew they knew how to do everything. And today, people are outsourcing more and more. So the pie is growing. The people who need this service is growing and the people who want to do it, the people who are passionate about it, the people who love it, the amount of them are shrinking. So when I bought my house here in Athens, I needed some things done and I picked up the phone and I couldn't find people that answered the phone. I couldn't find people that would come out and give me quotes. I couldn't find a professionally run organization that was willing to let me pay online. And that was going to send me invoices by email. So you talk about the opportunities for people who have a tech background, if you would be really really surprised if you kind of looked under the hood at how these businesses are operating, and how you could improve and make it easier and make it more efficient and make it you know less of an admin headache. run these businesses. So I think that's another reason why it's a great opportunity. I know I went a lot of ways with that, with that little spiel, but

it's it's so good. So tell us if someone says, Hey, you know what, I'm very interested in figuring out what would make sense for me. And I don't know, I don't care. It could be deck staining, it could be cleaning, whatever it is, how do you recommend people research the market where they live?

Yeah, it's really easy to pick up the phone and call around and pretend to be a customer. It's a beautiful thing. Like in a lot of businesses, a lot of tech startups, you need to do a ton of market research, you need to go out and spend a lot of time a lot of money figuring out if there's a place for you in the market. And then you got to do a lot of marketing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. With one of these businesses, it's really easy to type on Google deck staining near me and call the top five companies. If they all answer the phone, if they're all really professional, if they're all willing to give you a quote the next day or they're willing to service you the next day. It's not a good opportunity, move on. But what will happen is you'll find a lot of these services that nobody answers the phone Nobody will come out and give you a quote, everybody's booked out a month, their quote, velocity is horrible. Just those four things, those are all easy ways to differentiate yourself as a business, answer the phone, be professional, send a quote, send somebody out who looks presentable and is willing to shake your hand and look you in the eye. It's really pretty low risk. That's another thing I love about these sweaty businesses is that you're not really investing a ton of time and energy to figure out if there's something to fit for you. So you can kind of shift start maybe a couple of these companies at the same time. I mean, it's 299 a month to get web hosting now and it's free to send a Google My Business location to your to your apartment or your office or a p o box. So the ways to get found on the internet locally, it's a lot less competitive, a lot more opportunity to to kind of get some early customers and see if something's working out for you.

So what if you do that and so you're in a big city. So let's say you're in the Bay Area, very large area, add you you find that there's 300 Companies that are professional that do answer the phone that do do those things. Do you say to yourself? Well, there's still a tremendous amount of opportunity here. There's a lot of other people to services. When do you say, that's enough? There's too many.

Yeah, that is a really, really great point because everybody thinks they need to be the only competitor in town. And that competition is a bad thing. And another one of my core beliefs, and what I preach all the time at the sweaty startup is that competition is good. One or two companies doing really a good job is fine. I mean, all you need is a really small slice of the pie. To build a business, everybody thinks they need every customer, everybody thinks they're kind of targeting ages 19 to 65, right? If you can find 500 people to use your service over the course of two or three years, a lot of these companies that you start, that's going to be plenty. So you don't need to get every customer. It doesn't matter if there are other companies out there. You know, if you send out 100 quotes and three, four or five of them get accepted, that's fine, right? Just getting a couple of them is just fine. So I would say it just depends on how you You're going with your service. And if there's a lot of competition in that small niche, then you have a little bit of a problem. But if you're doing something like lawn care, or you know, power washing or deck staining a few really good competitors, that's no problem at all. I mean, there's gonna there's there's thousands of people who need these services every day.

What advice would you give for someone, I'm just as you're talking about the challenges that you had, and getting people to come out and give you quotes for your house. I'm having challenges right now with a pest control company. And I'm thinking, gosh, this is just it was good, and it's kind of gone downhill, and I don't know what they're doing. So that is something. I think that there's licenses and you know, I don't maybe someone listening is like, well, but I don't have you couldn't start a plumbing company, right? I don't have certain So what, how do you recommend dealing with that?

I think barriers to entry are good, the more skilled you can get on anything and the more insulation you can get from competitors, the better so pest control. I mean, that's a great example because my brother is a licensed certified Pest Control especially Now, and it depends on what state you're in. I know California is a lot tougher. But in Indiana, it took a 10 hour online course and him going and taking a one day exam and pay $150. And he was a certified Pest Control applicator. So it's sometimes so much simpler than you think. So people spend five hours a day watching TV. On average, the average American spends five hours a day watching TV, you can learn how to do basic Trim Carpentry in, you know, five hours a day, if you spent doing that for a year, right, you'd be really good at that and you could charge $150 an hour for your services. Being electrician is a little bit tougher about being a plumber is not that hard to get certified to do. And the great thing about all this is you can go out and get a part time job working for a company that does all this stuff. And you can learn it really really fast while you're getting paid to learn it. You don't have to pay to take a class to learn how to be a plumber. There are 10 Plumbing Companies within 10 miles of me all hiring right now because they can't find enough help. You know you work for them. Mom's on the side, even if it's just evenings and weekends, and maybe you feel a lot differently about how hard it is to do something like that.

Oh, that's such great advice. So I'm just thinking about all the things having real estate that are frustrated, like plumbing is a big one and trying to find so I've got a network of other real estate investors and we're always sharing people, but then they kind of cycle in and out and they fade out I would say in their service level changes. So that's super helpful.

You'd be surprised that all the low skilled businesses that are really profitable as well; I have a friend here in Athens who deep cleans restaurants. He deep cleans restaurants at night while they're closed, and he charges upwards of $1,000 per service and it takes him four hours and he does it on his own with not that expensive of equipment. Wrap your head around that - he makes two or $300 an hour to deep clean restaurants at night. And then you think about a poxy flooring. That's another one where you know garages people are a poxy and countertops people are proxying like just forget the vinyl right? We're just going to make our concrete floor look really good. That's a huge business that is does not have a huge amount of barriers to entry. I mean, and yet, like you, you mentioned the businesses I love and if you go to sweaty startup calm, and click on the businesses I love, there's a list of about 300 businesses on here that you could start. And I would say 80% of them could be learned in a week, you know, on five, five hours a day of looking into this stuff. So it's not as complicated as people think that's another big message that I try to get across.

I mentioned this earlier, when I talked about the franchise broker he mentioned, you know, recession resistant industries. Do you feel like all of the ones on your list are or do you have ones that that you would tend to lean toward more?

Yeah, like anything, there is a little bit of risk here. So most of them are seasonal. Most of them get really slow in December, January, February, and a lot of them are also recession, like a recession would hit just like a recession hits, you know, 90% of businesses. But I think if you grow a business in the right way, if you buy things used if you're really careful. about spending on your equipment and your infrastructure and you don't have a full time person sitting in your office and you don't sign a big office lease. I mean, the beautiful thing about technology today is that your admin staff can be people who stay at home all over the country, answering customer service, doing billing, all that stuff. So you don't need an office, you don't need all that investment with Office lease. I'm all about buying vehicles used and affordable. I mean, a lot of people don't understand the difference between value and money. And they think that $55,000 pickup truck is the same value as the, you know, is worth $55,000, when in reality, you can get that exact same value on a $7,000 used vehicle. So I think if you grow a lean business and in a really wise and frugal with how you spend your money, I'm not saying not to make investments, but if you grow it the right way, you can be in a lot better position than a lot of your competitors are.

And what if someone is on biz buy sell, and they're looking around and maybe they thought they were going to buy one kind of business and now they've heard this podcast and they're thinking you know what, I'm just going to leave Is there a lawn care business that I can buy? Tell me what are your thoughts on someone buying an existing in these sweaty startup categories?

That is another amazing point is that there are businesses for sale that no one wants to buy 10,000 I forget the statistics, somebody came on my podcast. And if you want to listen to the sweaty startup episode on this, I had a guy named Nick Bradley, come on my show to talk about how he buys these businesses that no one else wants to buy, and kind of grows them and scales them and uses the same stuff and, and he says 10,000 Americans retire every day. And so many of those are baby boomers, and so many of those run service businesses. So there are basically way more service businesses than there are buyers for the service businesses because the family doesn't want to take over grandpa's, you know, service business. They want to go do their own thing or they're already doing their own thing. So basically, you can buy these businesses at one or two times profit in a year. They'll pay for themselves in two or three years. If you want to buy a small business, which I think is an amazing opportunity. We don't have time to dive into that right now. But if somebody wants to learn more, definitely search that on my website because I have a lot of thoughts on some ways that if you do have a little bit of resources, if you do have a little bit of management experience, it's a great opportunity to buy these companies.

It's interesting because I have been after finding your podcast, I thought to myself, well, I need to fast track a little bit right. And what you're essentially in a lot of these businesses is you're buying a book of business, right you and especially if you're looking maybe if you're looking at landscaping, then there's going to be some trucks and some kind of actual assets but in the most part is a book of business. So then it becomes really important to understand like the reputation of the company out there because it's pretty hard to start changing reviews on a name and you can't really just say hey, under new management so definitely some things to explore on your podcast and and on your website to understand more due diligence for buying an existing business.

A lot of times you can buy them and have an earn out over time so you pay the owner Maybe over three years for the business that they're selling you. And sometimes you're only buying it for three years profit. So sometimes you can buy it with absolutely no money. Um, if the if the owner, these, these businesses are going to die, if they don't sell these businesses, they're going to die, that business is just going to go away. So sometimes the handshake and getting an owner to really like you as a person, and then feeling like their businesses going to live on, because it's a very emotional thing, if they just want their business to survive, and sometimes that's a great position to be in if you're willing to kind of take that on.

This has been so great. Tell us what are some other resources that you'd recommend for someone to get started?

Yeah, I have a book list on my website that has a lot of books that I you know, I'm just my quick spiel on books. I think that there's they're amazing resources and it's amazing to to kind of read and study but not any one book is going to apply directly to you. So I'm, I'm the type of person who will read a book and kind of pick it apart and throw away What doesn't fit my life and really kind of apply spend some time applying What does work and I think it's practice that does it right. You know, making money and being an entrepreneur is a skill that you have to practice and you have to get out and try. So just reading and reading and studying and studying is a mistake that so many people make. They're Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim. Seth Godin says it all the time. Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, without ever firing a shot or ever trying to start a business. So I'm a huge proponent of trial by fire and get out and actually just fake it, fake it until you make it get out there and offer a service practice a service practice the the art of entrepreneurship, because it's something that you know, it's about momentum. It's about learning the skill. It's about, you know, working for a five year goal. But as far as resources to study, I have a book list that I can pull a couple from. Did you have a book that you wanted to mention?

I did, I did because I went to your list, and this is one of the newer ones that's on your list, which is flip the script, and I got halfway through it. It's fantastic.

Oren came on my friend podcast and he is he's phenomenal about how the the sales, you know, environment is changing now, and people do there they do. They're a lot more research than they used to. So they want you to prove that you are professional and they want to trust you. And it's not about forcing them into a situation. It's about it's more about framing it so that hey, look, I okay without this deal. If this deal doesn't happen, that's fine. But if it does, you're going to be really glad you chose me and kind of forcing people to sell for you, which is an amazing kind of mindset shift. That is really great.

Yeah, so everybody check out the book list because there's several and I think I got there's another one there was a 2020 list of tax advantage, something for small business, which I do have people ask me about reducing their taxes because you know, anything that they can do to reduce their w two income which you if you're an employee you have that you have very limited there's not much you can do so you do have to own or invest in a business to be able to you know, one you make profit from the business. You never do it just for tax purposes. But you get these advantages through that as well. So you have a great list there.

That's at sweatystartup.com/booklist. But there are some things that you should outsource. And there's some things that you must know as a business owner. And so so many people make the mistake of Oh, I'm just going to hire an accountant or Oh, I'm just gonna hire a bookkeeper to worry about all that. And I disagree with that wholeheartedly. That is horrible advice. You need to learn the tax code and you need to learn the write offs and you need to learn the depreciation if you're doing real estate and how to amortize loans and all the important stuff that can save you huge money. That's just one of the resources but I you know, I feel very strongly that it's something that you need to learn and that's called 2020 business small business taxes by JK lasser. It reads like a textbook, but I really was fascinated by this great resource.

It's thick, it's super thick. Some something to your point. This is I've think I've mentioned before, definitely informed Is that I read a tax strategy book for real estate investors about three years ago and we've been investing for years right? And there were these strategies that I suddenly got really frustrated. Why didn't our CPA bring these up to us and the reality is, the CPA is not your tax strategists. CPA does your taxes. That's two different things. You have to bring it to them or you have to find someone who can strategize with you and we're constantly finding out things that we could have done a different way. And it's always changing. So great advice there that you can't just hire again the CPA doesn't even really do strategy. They mostly are doing your taxes.

A CPAs job is to be safe and to make their work not that heavy if an audit happens. So they're not going to get aggressive with your tax plan. It's up to you to get aggressive with your tax plan. So to you know, break down your depreciation by the different asset parts on the roof and in the in the utilities and inside the home. Like when you home, you can spend Put out and appreciate a lot of things faster that people you know, accountants hate that because a lot more work for them. But it can save you a ton of money over time. And yeah, just, you know the depreciation and then we can talk about the power of real estate and why I love real estate so much, but, but absolutely, taxes are a huge part of it.

So you guys, you have to check out this podcast, the sweaty startup it is it's just so inspiring. And even if you aren't planning on starting a sweaty startup, there's a lot of great advice and information as well. Where can listeners get in touch? I mean, we talked about the podcast but you know, how can they get in touch with you and learn more?

Yeah, thanks, Nichole. I appreciate it. And you can email me Nick@sweatystartup.com. Shoot me an email and you can post over in the set we have our own sweaty startup subreddit which is reddit.com/r/sweatystartup or you can go to sweat startup.com. I try to get the information out to as many people as are interested in it. So if you are kind of fascinated by the management techniques or Real Estate or the small service businesses, I have some tools on there that that might kind of give you the urge you need to get started.

It's so helpful to have you on today. And I know that we'll have to have you come back and talk a little bit more. I'd love to delve into how how you evaluate existing businesses, but we will do that another time. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for tuning in to The Richer Geek Podcast. For today's show notes including links and resources, visit us at the richer geek.com. Don't forget to head over to iTunes, Google Play stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts and hit the subscribe button. help us spread the word by sharing with others who could benefit from listening and leave a rating and review that'll help us get the podcast in front of more people. I appreciate you. Thanks so much for listening.

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ABOUT NICK HUBER

Nick is the founder of Storage Squad and Storage Squad Self Storage. He’s also the host of the Sweaty Startup Podcast.

 
 
 
Rental Properties, Small Business, StartupsNichole Stohlerpodcast, season 1