This founder built his brand on an easy idea: ignore changing the world. Get wealthy by doing mundane and even dirty jobs higher.
From Brandon KochkodinForbes contributor
Nick Huber’s first The Storage Squad company began not with a flowery pitch deck for potential investors or an evaluation of the overall addressable market, but with an easy Craigslist ad. It was 2011, the summer before his senior yr at Cornell University. While some friends went to New York City Huber went to Leopold, Indiana, for an investment banking internship, unsure of what he desired to do. He figured he’d make a couple of dollars subletting his Ithaca apartment on Craigslist. The mother of a fellow student contacted the web site and hoped to give you the option to store her child’s belongings in his apartment.
Huber eventually founded Storage Squad, a summer service for faculty kids that picked up their belongings after school, put them in a locker, and reversed the method again in the autumn. Storage Squad eventually expanded to locations resembling Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. While growing his service business, Huber also began purchasing storage units, eventually owning an interest in 64 locations in 11 states. In 2021, he sold Storage Squad for $1.75 million. He kept the units. As he grew his company, Huber developed a startup philosophy that has helped him construct a mini-business empire—and one which seems particularly well-suited to a time when so many employees feel threatened by artificial intelligence.
“AI will never be able to clean, build and maintain our physical world. “The more strenuous the job, the better,” he explains.
Huber, 35, who now makes his home in Athens, Georgia, has made hundreds of thousands by not being a Wall Street wizard or programming apps that claim to “change the world.” Instead, he has built or invested in 11 firms that together, he says, generated greater than $50 million in revenue last yr. None are based in Manhattan or Menlo Park. They don’t hire fancy PR firms or claim to have earth-shattering breakthroughs. Almost all of them were bootstrapped – and Huber insists they make a living inside a couple of months. It’s essentially the other of the standard business model of a VC-backed Forbes 30 Under 30 startup.
Huber really desires to get wealthy, but is skeptical about whether it is sensible to aim for an enormous win instantly. He expects his storage network, which had $15 million in revenue last yr, to be price about $140 million, based on net operating income of $9.8 million and the valuation of publicly traded storage firms . (He only owns a portion of it.) Adding in the worth of his shares in other firms, Forbes estimates that Huber is price about $35 million.
On X (formerly Twitter), where he has 385,000 followersHe delights in trolling those that imagine that each startup should revolutionize or skyrocket an industry. Instead, he offers uncompromisingly factual advice. “Unless you’re already rich or live in your parents’ basement, every single business you start needs to be cash flow positive within two months,” he recently wrote. “You are incapable of taking a moonshot. Get rich by doing something simple, then moonshot when you can afford it.” He is writing a tentatively titled book The sweaty startupwhich is on account of be published by HarperCollins next yr and is predicated on this philosophy.
When Huber first heard about this mom in search of summer storage in 2011, the plain query was, why wasn’t she using one in every of Ithaca’s established storage firms? It turned out that these firms still sent employees with clipboards and paper schedules and weighed each box. They struggled and were unwilling to maintain last-minute appointments.
“I thought I could just overtake them,” says Huber. He recruited fellow Cornell track team co-captain Dan Hagberg, and so they used their very own big old cars — a 1999 Cadillac DeVille and a 1997 Buick LeSabre — as pickup trucks. “We worked hard for a week and the next minute there was $3,000 cash on a bed and we were like, ‘Wow, we created this out of nothing,'” he remembers.
Last yr, Huber took a course in entrepreneurship. The professor rejected his moving and storage business because he felt it wasn’t scalable and did not have a “moat” – making it difficult for competitors to mimic. But after learning what a moat was, Huber concluded that his real advantage was a willingness to sweat and a willingness to offer top-notch customer support. “I have a theory about trying to change something,” Huber says. “If you try to change the world, if you try to change people, you will go broke. Look at where people are spending their money now and get some of that money.”
Huber is each a born hustler and a natural. In highschool, he was more of a standout athlete than a student and ended up moving into an Ivy League university through his highschool coach cold-calling college track and field coaches. He left Ithaca as an Academic All-American and held school records within the pentathlon, heptathlon and decathlon.
“Nick will do in three days what takes most people three years,” says Hagberg, who has been a partner with Huber since that first summer move.
Huber didn’t limit himself to dirty dealings. But he believes that is one of the best place to begin for many aspiring entrepreneurs. Then he believes they need to expand into side businesses in the event that they see a necessity and have capital to deploy. His firms needed web sites, so he created one in 2023 WebRunthat creates web sites designed to convert visitors into customers. Recognizing the crucial role of SEO in his storage business led him to found it BoldSEO. As his real estate portfolio grew, he realized the advantages of cost segregation, which accelerates the tax depreciation of real estate assets, freeing up additional cash. This led to the founding of in 2022 RE cost segment. The same logic applies to Titan Riskhis industrial insurance broker.
“Nick gets an idea in his head and moves extremely quickly,” says Mitchell Baldridge, Huber’s longtime CPA and co-founder of RE Cost Seg.
In 2021, Huber began hiring employees within the Philippines for $5 an hour to staff its 24/7 customer support team, hiring an outsourcing startup called Support Shepherd. Impressed, he bought 15% of the corporate in 2022. That yr, he raised $30 million, $20 million in equity plus $10 million in debt, to take majority ownership at a valuation of $52 million and renamed it Somewhere and brought in an experienced manager from Silicon Valley as CEO. In addition to customer support representatives, Somewhere also recruits programmers from Latin America and the Philippines – and Huber uses them. He shrugs off criticism that he exports U.S. jobs or exploits foreign employees. Big firms outsource on a regular basis, he says.
And after all, now that he’s buying small businesses, Huber has began his own business brokerage, simply called: Nick Huber.
Huber’s approach to finding opportunities is easy but compelling: just go searching, see what services make you money, and see should you can do them higher. Hard work is important: One of his essential tactics is tracking down local businesses with poor customer support. How do you discover them? Especially on weekends he calls under the pretense of a customer. If the phone keeps ringing, you could have found a weak point. But if someone starts instantly, the business is more likely to be highly competitive. If a neighborhood business remains to be using a fax machine, that’s one other indication that it’s in danger.
As it expanded, Storage Squad selected its targets with common sense and a bit experience, not big marketing studies. “We quickly found out that the expensive private schools with lots of foreign students were in our wheelhouse,” says Huber. “A public school in the South, like the University of Georgia, the kids are resourceful, they drive trucks, they rent storage space.” The same can’t be said in Boston, where “they have daddy’s Amex and are ready to solve the problem with a few hundred.” Dollars to unravel.”
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