INTERVIEW REPOST | Make Money with a Sweaty Startup, feat. Nick Huber

0:00You're listening to the Travis Makes Money Podcast. Hey, what's going on? Moneymakers, welcome back to the Travis Makes Money Podcast, where it's our mission to help you make more money. If you're new to the show, we release brand new conversations with unconventional moneymakers every single day of the week. So if you have not yet, please be sure to go to your podcast, Appetiteschoice, right now, hit the subscribe or follow button so that you never miss an opportunity to learn how to make more money. And while you're there, if you want to leave us a quick rating review, we'll be eternally grateful as it really does help out the show tremendously. Today on the show, or we talking about all things, really entrepreneurship, real estate investing, and somewhere probably in between there as well, with my new friend Nick Huber. Nick is an entrepreneur and real estate investor who resides out in Athens, Georgia with his wife and three kids. He owns somewhere.com, both storage, RE, Costs, Seg, and several other businesses. His real estate portfolio currently includes 68 self-storage properties covering two million square feet. As portfolio of companies, employees over $325 people and makes over $30 million annually.

1:01They can enjoy his golf hunting, mountain biking, history, fishing, travel sports, and spending time outside of the Friends and Family. So he's not really a busy guy. Doesn't really have much going on, but he did take the time to spend with us today to talk to all of you and me about how to make more money. So Nick, what's up, dude? Welcome to the show. Travis, thanks for having me. I got to say that $30 million is revenue. It's not profit in my pocket. I wish it was. Don't we all? But yeah, man, I think generally there's a lot of stuff out there. Our circles overlap because there's a lot of stuff out there about how to spend less money, how to save, how to invest. I like talking about how to make more. And there's a lot of wealthy people I know have some things in common. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, you've got to, you know, success leaves clues. There's really only two levers to pull when it comes to getting more money in your bank account. The first one's cutting expenses. The second one's making more money. And only one of them can be done infinitely. You can't keep cutting everything all the time. And expect to also enjoy life in the meantime. You're just, you keep punting for some distant future off, far off date,

2:05that may or may not come, that you may or may not even survive to see. And you're going to wait until then to go to Hawaii instead of figuring out how to do it now just blows my mind. So that's the purpose behind the show when I know that you had a lot to say about those things. Let's start in the past, bro. Tell me about how you made your first dollar ever. And then tell me about how you made your most recent dollar. Well, I was cutting it from both ends, man, because I came from an extremely frugal family. So I was very good at saving money and, frankly, helping me back a little bit of entrepreneurship because of my just fear to invest and spend on things that grew my company. But I started picking up and delivering boxes on a college campus in 2011. Started a company called Storage Squad, pick up and delivery storage. Two weeks after we started the business, I had $3,000 cash sitting on my bed because we picked up a lot of people's stuff for summer storage. So how old were you? 22. Okay, so you were in college, saw getting a problem for other college students, essentially. Correct. Yep. Okay. So that business became, you know,

3:06two million a year, annual revenue, only about 350K of profit. It was a hard business. 200 part-time employees running around driving box trucks in major cities. We picked up items for 7,000 students at 25 major colleges in 12 states. It was a nightmare of a business. I cut my teeth on it. I learned operations. I learned hiring. I learned delegation. I learned sales. And I learned about the ultimate form of leverage, which is hiring people to do work for you. But yeah, man, it was, it was a business that kind of catapulted me then in 2015. I had some money in the bank. And we built a storage facility from the ground up in Ithaca, New York. And it spent $2.9 million on that project. We still ownered it's worth over $10 million today. It's been a total life-changing amount of money for me and my partners. And yeah, realized real quick that storage is a lot easier business than pick up and delivery storage. So we sold that company in 2020. And you know, really built the private equity business. Tell me about the importance of choosing the right vehicle, Nick, because there's a lot of advice that floats around on the internet.

4:09And one of those pieces of advice that I see often is the like the don't quit mantra. It's like never quit, never give up. It'll work eventually and these types of things. And while that I understand the intent behind the advice, it's also just not true. There's just like there's some sometimes you're just in the wrong vehicle. And that does matter. And you've proven that. I mean, look, the entire concept of my book, The Sway Startup is like choosing your competition. I call it being like water. You're on the top of the mountain. You got a couple water in your hand. You dump out that couple water. That water is going to race down the mountain and find the path of least resistance to get to the bottom. The easiest path to the bottom. Whereas every entrepreneur I know, they feel like they need to do hard things against hard competition. When in reality, business is not David Goggins work out or an Olympic gymnastics routine. There are no extra points for degree of difficulty. Right. So like picking your opportunity and what you're doing. And it goes into careers as well.

5:11Pick what you're going to do pretty wisely. Like look down the hall. Look at what it looks like to win that game that you're about to start playing. Yeah, you know, it's it's really interesting when you start looking at these different vehicles. Because the cool thing about having the show is that it's just giving me access to see what people's lifestyles are like. And the bottom line is, bro, like having a business is hard regardless of what it is. But when I see the people who are enjoying their business the most, it's typically in one of these kind of paths to least resistance type industries. Or they figured out a differentiator in their competitive market that allows them to be able to hold a segment of the market better than a competitor might hold it. I mean, it's like, look, you're you're going to put in the work regardless. It is my point. You know what I'm saying? Like the problems are going to come regardless of what stage of business that you're at, how much revenue you're generating or the potential scalability of the vehicle that you're in. So you may as well pick the ones that give you the most return on the hard work that you're going to put into the business anyway. One of the worst pieces of advice that I see in entrepreneurship is like do something

6:13you're passionate about. Hmm. Do something you find interesting. I think that's a terrible way to go about it because if you're operating any business at scale, you're dealing with problems, you're hiring, you're firing, you're delegating. So you might as well pick one where you're actually likely to make some money because business without any money is damn near impossible. But when you start cash flowing and you start rolling that snowball down the hill and you're making $10,000 a month, $50,000 a month, $100,000 a month, $1,000 a million a month. Business gets infinitely easier because you can put smart people between you and your problems. So pick a business where you can win and choose your competition. Like look out there. We got in the self-storage business because we said okay, where are all the really dumb people making money? Where can we be average? That's a great question to ask. Yeah. Where can we be average and still win? Yeah. Yeah. So do you want to go compete against the folks in Silicon Valley with, you know, 20 million adventure capital funding and computer science degrees and parents and country clubs? Or do you want to compete against the person down the street who's making $2 or $3 million a year

7:14but sells a fax machine on their desk? And doesn't even have a website. Yeah. Right. All businesses are hard. All businesses are hard but some are easier than others. Yeah. And by the way, those $20 million venture back startups that has a founding team of four who all have MBAs from Stanford, those companies still fail at like a 95% failure rate. So even though it seems glamorous to be in that vehicle, it's actually not even for the people that are doing it at the highest level. So there's other ways. Popular. The most popular page on my website of all time is my list of 200 plus business ideas that are basically all bootstrapable like have been done before or boring. So you can go to swathestartup.com slash ideas and check that out. But yeah, man, look, it's power washing. It's cleaning something that's dirty. It's picking up something and moving it to where it needs to go. It's repairing something that's broken. And any number of niches and industries is a great place to start if you have no money, no network and no operational chops. Like to run a business at scale, you need three things.

8:16You need cash because doing it is expensive. Hiring is expensive, investing in everything. You need a network of people you can hire, people you can sell to. And then you actually know what you're doing. You need to be able to make decisions and run a company. A lot of people have none of those three things. My first business storage squad was about me acquiring those three things. In that business, I acquired operational chops. I acquired enough cash to build a storage facility and built a network of some people who could work for me and work with me. Yeah, I saw a post you put out on Twitter, slash x, whatever you want to call it today that was talking about the big lessons that you've learned in real estate acquisition primarily. And the one piece of advice on there that I thought was like, oh, that's interesting because it conflicts with the majority of other advice that you see around the internet, which is always something I'm interested in, was that you said it is always better to have cash. If you don't have cash, do do something to make more cash first before you put money in real estate. But like there's so many other people out there that are like, you don't need cash for real estate. You could do it with no money down. You could do it for other people's money and blah, blah, blah. So what led you to make that post about that?

9:18Yeah, look, there's a ton of people selling courses on how to wholesale real estate and how to get into real estate with no money down. Like, hey, it's phenomenally risky. And real estate is the best business in the world, especially real estate private equity. I'll admit it. It's amazing. It's phenomenally capital intensive. And if you don't have the cash or options to get cash, that cash calls every single shot in this business. Yeah, the person with the cash calls the shots. So if you got no cash and only two people to go after for cash, those two people are going to call the shots. If you got no cash and 400 people who have cash that want to invest in you, you still call the shots, but very few people find themselves in that situation. So yeah, forget real estate until you have some money. It's my life. Yeah, especially in this inflated interest rate environment, you know, it's like the cost of capital is significantly higher. So deals that might have worked literally two years ago are deals that now just don't even pencil out because the debt service is too high and you don't have enough cash to get the deal without the debt service. Yeah. If you're raising money from private investors to make a acquire at cash because you don't have

10:23the money, then you have to convince your investors to be on board for a lower cap rate, a lower return because it's just going to be a lower annualized return on the money if you have to use that much cash to acquire it and it's not your cash anyway. But yeah, I thought that was super interesting to take. Real estate has been really hard the last two and a half years, which makes it a really good time to get into the real estate business, whether it be a broker and a praser, you know, a syndicator, a deal hunter, property management company person because a lot of the weak players are washed out because the last two and a half years have been brutal. Yeah, especially in the commercial space. What have you seen in self storage specifically compared to some of these other, like is 100% of your portfolio self storage properties or are you also in multi-family or other areas? We have one industrial building and a second industrial building and a contract. It's a good business as well, but we are 98% storage. Look, it's a great business. I've never seen a storage facility go bankrupt that didn't have a bunch of debt on it. That's not good of a business. That's how good of a business it is.

11:28But everybody knows how what their properties are worth and when debt service goes up and they still want 2021 prices for their properties, it makes it really slow and it's aggrined from an acquisition standpoint. So I feel it turning though. So if somebody's considering getting into the storage business now, I'd say you're making it your timing is going to be good because literally nine out of 10 players who are bear-whether storage investors have moved on to other things. Is that just because of the interest rate, Mariner, or is there other reasons? Yeah, the last two and a half years have been brutal. Transaction volume way down, occupancy rates down a little bit. People spend more money to lease up properties. So yeah. But there's still a lot of, from what I understand anyway, I'm fairly green on this stuff, but from what I understand, there's still a lot of meat on the bone in terms of mom and pop shops. There hasn't been an epic consolidation of self-storage into a few private equity groups. It's still somewhat fragmented. The problem is that you can underwrite,

12:33underwrite means like tell what a building is worth. I can tell what a building a self-storage property is worth in five minutes anywhere in the country and so can everybody else. So what you have is a bunch of cold collars calling all over the country, small facilities, media facilities, large facilities, and they can look at the unit mix. They can look at the location and say, hey, that property is worth 1.2 million. So when that's the case, and you can scale a business that well and operate remotely and do all the things that we do at our business, it's, man. So yeah, is there meat left on the bone? There's way more meat in midi or grittier businesses like industrial and some of these other businesses where you have to know a local market to what? Yeah, yeah, yeah, got you. That's it because it's just more consolidated to a local area. If you were like, there's less competition by definition. And there's only 50,000 storage facilities in America. So you can download that list of 50,000 and you can start a Filipino cold calling them every one, one by one by one. And next thing you know, as a storage owner, I get 45 cold calls a day to sell my properties. Oh my gosh. That's crazy. So that's something to keep in

13:35mind if you think you're just going to go, you know, buy a mom and pop storage facility. They know what their properties are worth. Yeah, well, another point in your post is that real estate is not passive income, which is again, what all the gurus want you to believe because they want you to buy their 50,000 dollar training program. But there's nothing passive about it. Oh yeah, it's a business man. Like we have we have 8,000 tenants. And those tenants move in. They move out their locks break. They hit run into our gate. They run into our buildings. You know, they have it rains really hard. Part of this rain in a couple of years and several units flood. And we had body story. We we had a huge snowstorm in Erie, Pennsylvania that you know, collapsed part of our roof of one of our buildings because they got four feet of snow just after Thanksgiving. So oh no, that's not passive at all. Yeah. Well, look, again, you're going to be putting work into whatever you're doing. So this is just another way to put work into something that could potentially at some point in the distant future be passive. If you have enough systems processes and good people

14:40in place to run the majority of the business, maybe you can just step in on a couple meetings or something like that. But it's going to require a lot of work in the meantime. That's right. We have a great team that runs our properties, but I'm still involved. But yeah, it's when it goes well, it can go really, really well. Like we bought a property, we bought a property for $20 a foot in Erie, Pennsylvania, outside of Erie, another kind of small portfolio for $600,000 at auction back in 2019. It's worth $2.2 million now. And I own it with no partners. Wow. But when it goes well, it can go really, really well. I love these types of businesses too that give you some sort of security against the risk of the business with an historically proven asset class like real estate. I've noticed in this with things like self-storage is like it's a business more than it is a real estate investment. But it's secured with the real estate investment as well. Like there's always value in the business. There's no version of you buying the business in it being worth zero. Like you said, like you've never seen a self-storage facility go bankrupt,

15:42barring insane debt service bills. But other than that, you have an asset. It's also cash flowing through the business side of the asset. So there's things like that. I've seen these senior care facilities pop up that allow you to acquire a bunch of residential real estate, a bunch of houses. But the rents are six to eight X. What a market rent would be because you're renting out individual rooms and you have a hospice care worker in there. It's like those types of businesses are super interesting to me now. It's like how can you acquire real estate, but in a less risky way. And how can you get in business but secured by a really fortified asset class? Yeah, there's no small business in America that trades at 15 times earnings. Real estate does self-storage does. I bought somewhere at comm for five times earnings. I bought it for $52 million. It was making $10 million annually. So because it's way riskier. There's no people paying recurring rent inside of a physical building that you can see. You can sell. You can redevelop. You own the land.

16:43So yeah, like you increase profits in a storage facility from five grand a month to $20,000 a month, massive massive values created because your property is worth 14, 16 times, you know, annual profit. Yeah, that's a crazy number. These are multiples that are typically in that full circle Silicon Valley startup world is though you see those types of multiples that exist there, but to be in like a safer, secure, always needed service like that and have those types of multiples to be traded. That's insane, dude. I didn't even realize that. Talk to me about somewhere. What was the purpose behind that? This is part of the private equity portion of the business. You guys are actively looking to acquire more businesses like this that are not necessarily self-storage. No, it's a secondary entrepreneurial venture of mine. So I have a partner, Dan, who runs my real estate portfolio with me. This was me branching out of my own. Dan's just an investor in it, but I raised $20 million to buy and trolling interest in

17:45somewhere. We closed that on May 1 of last year. So yeah, it's a recruiting company that finds international employees for US-based businesses, generally saving 70, 80% on payroll. Yeah, I remember actually looking into you guys for the software company that I was running at the time. And what I really liked about it is that it wasn't there was no race to the bottom in terms of like I'm looking for a $3 an hour VA to handle administration tasks. It was like this is like real talent. These are these are like a list talent is just costing me one fourth of what it would cost me if I had them here in the States. I had a finance in Columbia, you know, an attorney in Brazil had a sales in South Africa, my ticket sales closers in South Africa, financial analyst in Egypt. So yeah, people think VA, they think of a Filipino that's going to, you know, if you press three on the bank of America line, you're going to talk to somebody who can maybe process something for you. Right. No, no, a phenomenon talented people who can grow and scale companies. So yeah, across 300 plus employees in my portfolio, there's 20 Americans probably. Oh, wow, well, yeah. So

18:50you're following your own advice there for sure. What about that particular business was interesting to you versus the myriad of other potential acquisitions you could have made at that time? Just came to me at the right time. And I think the interesting thing was like you never have permission in the timing is never right to make a big deal. So when it crosses your lap, like sometimes you just got to get uncomfortable to buy what you consider to be a great business. And the timing was not correct. I had never raised $20 million. I'd never taken over operations of a company that large with 160 plus employees. My partner just approached me and said, hey, Nick, I'm thinking about selling 51% of this business. Like do you want to sell half of your shares? And I was like, you know, kind of want to kind of want to be the one who buys your shares instead. Yeah. Wow. What was your what was your gastrointestinal track doing around that time? My quarters all levels were 32. So normal range is like 10 to 14. Yeah. Yeah. That about sums it up.

19:56Super stressful. I mean, yeah, like when you're when you're making when you're doing a big deal, like it's it's difficult. Has there been a helpful frame for you to think through those types of problems? Yeah, it's it's experience making decisions over time and like the stakes going up as you prove yourself as a decision maker and as a leader. Like I have I have 10 years of experience running a company, making investments, buying a business, leading people that just gave me reinforcement. I needed to see there to know what I didn't know, be humble enough to know what I didn't know. Yeah. Also be confident in myself enough to to take a big swing. But I tell you to do a big deal. It never it's never comfortable. Yeah. Yeah. But to be fair though, and correct me if I'm wrong because I've never done a deal like that before either. It's a little bit easier to put those deals together from what I understand because of the size of the deal. There's way more like the money is much more available to acquire a business of this size. Then even a company that's doing a half a million not like a a laundromat that's doing

20:59$300,000 in sales on 10% profit. It's actually it could actually potentially be a little bit easier to acquire these massive companies because of the infrastructure that's already set there. The kind of like set it and forget it that's been set up by the founder or whoever the management team was previously. So like securing the financing, raising the money and things like that can actually be a little bit easier when you're playing in that type of a pond, right? They say the deals stay the same, just the dollar figures get larger and that actually thinking about it here for the first time, nobody's asking that question, but it was harder to raise money for that first self-storage facility in the New York when I was raising 500K. Then it was to raise 20. It was still a lot of work. It was still three months of stress, a shitload of meetings. Sure. 39 people invested 20 million dollars. You know, that's a lot. Yeah. But it was harder to raise money for that very first storage facility when we raised like 500K. So yeah, you're right. The capital is more fortified when it's in a when it's in a business that's that established. Exactly. Exactly. What are you looking at now? Are there any verticals or any particular industries or

22:02niches that you're super excited about on the acquisition side? I bought this is a big deal for me, like buying this company. So I'm focused on locking and tackling both storage is also coming into some opportunities with acquisition. Like we feel the moment I'm picking back up, we're getting really close on some some pretty large deals. We almost got a three million dollar deal under contract three days ago. We got out bid by maybe 25 grand at best and final. RE Costsag, the engineering firm is growing like really fast. You know, we're going to have our first million dollar month of revenue coming up soon. So tell me a little bit more about that. Can you do it find what RE Costsag is? So yeah, RE Costsag is a construction. It does cost segregation studies or real estate investors. We basically provide a depreciation schedule tax report for the deduction schedule of a building with somebody buys it started in 2022 with with a couple partners and yeah, it's just really really flying lately. That's super interesting. So you it's fee based? Yeah, we charge an average of $2,200 for you know, somebody buys a million dollar piece of commercial real estate to go in. We break down

23:07break the building down and provide them a depreciation schedule like a basically a 20 page PDF at the end of their CPA. Like tell them how much they could deduct every year. And I assume this came from your own experience in difficulty of navigating the Costsag because like that I mean, this is one of the biggest reasons to be investing in real estate as well, right? Is the is the accelerant depreciation on the properties? Yeah, I kept running into real estate investors who just didn't know that it existed. They didn't know you could buy a building for a million dollars and when 100% bonus depreciation was here in 2022, like you get $200,000 tax deduction year one even though you only put 250K into the deal. Wow. So yeah, the tax advantages were massive. I was making money from all my side businesses. But since I run my real estate private equity firm, I was also, you know, absorbing a ton of losses. So that was one of the big, big expenses every time we bought a building, Dan, we got to spend another two grand on a Costsag, two grand on a Costsag, two grand on a Costsag. We're like, it's a pretty big bit. This is a pretty good business. Let's look at our look at our, you know, our expenses and turn turn one of them into a eventual profit driver.

24:08This is another classic example of selling the shovel in the gold rush. You know, everybody, everybody else is focused on raising money and acquiring commercial real estate. But it's like, what does that person need? What's the problem that we can solve for all these people that are going out and finding these deals? People don't understand like how much business is done just inside the transaction world of commercial real estate. There's appraisals, there's inspectors, there's financing fees, there's, you know, attorneys that make bank on these deals, there's, you know, it's, there's a lot of people who live basically on real estate transaction volume. Yeah, there's lots of shovels to sell. So to speak. Yeah. Yeah, if you're going to buy, if you're going to buy a million dollar deal, you're going to have 50 grand of closing costs. Yeah, it's crazy. The seller's going to have 50 grand too. So that's 10% of the value of the deal that goes to all the people who have to do work to transact it. So yeah, it's a lot. All of these conversations, dude, I appreciate you coming on just because like you're actually somebody that's out there doing the thing that you're not just talking about it, you're not just selling courses, which is why I like,

25:09I like following your stuff online. It's actually really funny. I didn't, we would do daily episodes on the show. So over the last eight weeks, I've probably done about a hundred interviews batching up episodes and stuff. And so I think I reached out to you recently on like Twitter or X or Instagram something. I was like, hey, man, we should do an episode sometime. And then like that day, your team emailed me about the interview that we already had scheduled. And I was like, oh, all right, never mind. We're already on the calendar. But I say that to say that like you're somebody who's content I actually like to follow because you give no BS advice from somebody who's in the driver's seat currently, not something that you did 20 years ago, not something that you're doing so that you can make an income from coaching or consulting. And I really appreciate about that. I appreciate that about you. You have a book as well, the sweaty startup. Tell me about where that came from. Yeah, look, it's a it's a call out on Silicon Valley and like the entrepreneurship culture that we see on the internet that you got to have a new idea,

26:09got to raise money, you got to try to change the world. All the wealthiest people that I know started normal old-fashioned businesses. So like the entire book, this way startup, is about those businesses, how to spot those opportunities and stories of the numerous super successful people who have started it. And then the skills and how to hire, how to delegate, how to make decisions and all that stuff along the way. It's one of the coolest things about business, man. It's like it's a sport just like anything else except there's no barrier. There's no talent barrier when it comes to being successful in business. You know what I mean? There's a part of my book that my editor wanted me to remove. It's like business is a game where you pick your competition. You have a prize at the end of the tunnel. You get to pick what the prize is too. Like is it a billion dollar tech startup or is it 30 grand a month of income from a business? For me, it was 30 grand a month. That was my number. That's all I needed to live a great life. Put my kids in a good school and order what I wanted to order when I was at a restaurant. So like 30 grand a month is the prize. Do

27:10I want to go play basketball against LeBron James? Of course. It's a great girl. That's exactly the exact illustration that I was going to use. I'm a big basketball fan and it's just like, man, you could work your ass off playing basketball, your entire childhood and you're never going to be LeBron James. It just isn't going to work. There's a certain level of innate talent that some of these professional athletes have. When you just sit court side or you sit on the sidelines of NFL game and just look at the mass of people that are standing in front of you, you're like, oh, that's why they get paid as much money as they get paid to do this thing. You know what I mean? And then the bummer part is that the tiered directly below them are getting paid worse than like a sales guy out of software company or something like that. You know what I mean? There's like, there's 12 white guys in the NBA under 64. I don't like those odds, bro. I don't like those odds. So I'm a white dude under 64.

28:10Yeah. So like, do I really want to play that game? Right. Right. Exactly. You better love basketball if that's the path you're going to pursue. What you end up being is like the assistant coach who never sees family at some college who makes 38,000 a year. Yep. You got injured playing overseas, trying to take another alternate path. It's like an entrepreneurship man. It's a level playing field. The market decides whether or not you can hit that target. And if you can just go out and learn the necessary skill sets, there's no there's no talent barrier. There's no IQ barrier. There's no like the commonalities between all the successful people that I talk to on the show or just in life walking around. They're nothing that we can't install into our own programming if we just put in the work that's required. And that's what makes the game cool to me. Yep. 100 I 100% agree. All the wealthiest people I know, like the ones I see in my life who have the jet sitting in Athens and have the big ass house in Hilton head and their members at seven country clubs, none of them raise venture capital.

29:14Yeah. And a lot of them don't have MBAs. Oh yeah. I know one of them who has a secretary print out his emails and he writes the response on the email and leaves it on his desk and then goes and plays golf while she uploads and writes his email. He hasn't logged into his AOL email address in seven years worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh man, I love it. So I got to ask you this question, bro, because I know I know that you're out there giving some real advice. Are there any people who see giving advice in this space who you are just like you're just tired of seeing them like get over on people scam people and you're like please stay away from these types. So even if it's not a person in particular, like this this type of you know person stay away from these. Yeah, like I have I think business for people like you and me it builds what I call a bullshit meter. I can walk into a lunch. I can walk into a meeting. I can hear somebody talk. I can I can read their you know their tweets and I can just sense if something is just not quite

30:15adding up. Unfortunately, a lot of people who want to be entrepreneurs or are dreaming about entrepreneurship, they haven't developed that bullshit meter. They haven't been lied to, scammed, tried things that didn't work enough times to know like who's who's actually doing something and who's not. The problem is is that it's not my message is not sexy man. Like my book is never going to sell millions of copies because I'm telling people that hey, it takes a while it takes a while you're rich. Hey, go trade your time for money first. Right. Don't do real estate unless you got some cash. Hey, like this is a 10 year game or even a multi generational game. I tell a story my book about like a guy who's wealthy now and everybody looks at him like damn what like man, he just it all happens so fast for him. He's 35 years old and wealthy. Well, you're rewind to the first generation three generations ago who got off the boat in New York City and worked hourly wages in New York City for a whole career to send to send his parents to college. His parents then worked a whole career as doctors and lawyers to send him to a different college and

31:16set him up to maybe take a risk and become an entrepreneur and he takes the risk and becomes an entrepreneur in the first five years. Absolutely nothing happens. And then year six bang, it all happens and everybody's looking at him like wow overnight success. It's a multi generational game. If you can't play that then and my message isn't sexy man. So like what I hate is people getting sold the get rich quick stuff because it's just it's so rare that Mark Zuckerberg is you know one day and is dorm at Harvard and you know two years later you know leading a billion dollar company. Yeah, yeah, those there's a reason that you hear about them. It's because they're that rare. Like that's that's the reason they're in the zeitgeist is because that's the sexy version of the story. It's so similar to sports man like people get caught up. I'm a huge sports guy too. Love track and field, love basketball, follow baseball, have a lot of friends who play baseball. Like these guys get sucked into this dream because they see the golf like Eric Cole the golfer who was on the corn fairy to

32:20her until he was 32 and then all of a sudden won a PGA tour in vent at 35 was making negative money for 10 years as a golfer like who in their right mind would make negative money for 10 years as a golfer and not go get a job. Yeah, but then he hit it. You hit it. So all these other guys are 2627 now I play golf with them in Athens country club. They were on tour at 29 years old trying to make it against all odds like all they had to do was like play like a gambler and realize hey time for me to go become an insurance salesman or a wealth manager. But no like so yeah it's and that's one they're the 52 year old club pro who can't pay their bills. Really really hard really hard so like the Rudy's and the you know gladiator movies and you know the against all odd overnight success is really really brutal. Yeah yeah and it's the the the whole the punchline is that bringing this back to the beginning of the conversation when you talked about like the worst advice following your passion it's like we listed off in your bio and your intro we listed off an entire list of things golf hunting mountain biking history fishing travel sports spending

33:23time outside with friends and family all of that stuff falls into the passion categories for you you can still do all of the things that you want to do is the point you just don't have to do it being dead broke. Yeah it's it's I threw my golf clubs on my jet and went and played golf with a buddy because I have a boring ass business that pays me enough money every month. Exactly. I don't say that's a brag I'm not going to post pictures of my airplane on social media it's a very small it's a very small jet but like money lets you do whatever the hell you want. Yeah yeah go back to money and then do what you want. Yeah but do it with money because it's much more fun. Yeah that's that's all people it's I'm broke because like we do the show you know and I get people push back and they're like well money is everything and I was like I look I never said it was everything but it is everything to someone who has none of it you know what I'm saying money money is in everything unless you want to buy something. Yeah right right and like it is neutral if it's just a tool then I would way rather have a lot of it then have a little of it if it doesn't make me a better person to have more or less of it then I want more of it because it just makes me have a

34:27better life you know and when your family has a health issue and you get and you just get up the check and and go solve it. Mm-hmm. Don't I worry about insurance don't kind of worry about all the other stuff that everybody else has to worry about. People think like the people who say not not having no money like doesn't matter doesn't matter doesn't matter it really matters sometimes and it's just the unfortunate truth of life. Yeah so people who have more money live longer they're healthier they have better relationships on average not not all the time of course. Is it the dark side of all of this of course life is hard for everybody but I encourage you to make building wealth a part of your life and I think that's why people are listening to your show so I think we're speaking to the choir. Yeah yeah exactly man and it brings me directly into our sign-off on the show which every single episode I sign-off by saying remember money only solves your money problems it doesn't solve all your problems having money will not solve all your problems in fact a lot of times it creates a whole new set of problems that you then have to go figure out it's all however it was a little bit easier to solve the rest of your problems if you got some

35:31money in the bank like it's it's easier if you're if your if your mental health is is in a really bad spot it's easier to solve your mental health problems if you have some money in the bank if you have some cushion if you have the ability to take some time off and whatever whatever that meditation retreat or a trip to Hawaii with your family or going on the golf course with your buddies that you haven't seen in four years you know what I mean like you can't make those decisions if you're worried about what you're like how you're gonna put food on the table for your kids next month you know it it just is a little bit easier to solve the rest of your problems if you got the money one already taking care of and figured out it's the amplifier man it amplifies the good and amplifies the bad so be wise well dude Nick thanks so much for doing this man I know it's taken up too much of time so I'll let you get going here the sweaty startup go pick up a copy of Nick's book as you all know on the show of course you want to be disciplined with your finances of course you don't want to go waste money at a bunch of stuff all the time however the one thing I always encourage everybody have an unlimited budget for is books this people like Nick have learned these lessons to build this type of wealth for himself and they're compiling all those lessons and

36:36putting them in 250 pages for you to consume it's it's it's the shortcut to everything you want in life it's the knowledge that you are missing that's preventing you from living the life that you want so do not pause do not hesitate just go wherever you buy books and get a copy of the sweaty startup I promise you will not regret it Nick thanks so much for taking the time to spend with us today everybody else listening tuning in remember money only solves your money problems but it's a little bit easier to solve the rest of your problems if you got some money in the banks let's solve that problem first here on the Travis makes money podcasts thanks for tuning in catch you guys next time you sell