Personal Holding Companies: Build vs. Buy?

Today Greg is joined by Nick Huber. In the last 9 months, Nick has co-founded 6 companies in addition to Bolt Storage. In this episode, Nick and Greg break down the inner workings of a personal holding company and how to grow it at max speed with minimal risk. 

►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,
creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusive
episodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.

https://latecheckout.substack.com

FIND ME ON SOCIAL:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg
Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/
TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenberga

LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:
Production Team:
https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.com
Nick Huber
https://sweatystartup.com/

SHOW NOTES:
0:00 - Intro
3:23 - Twitter as a network accelerant 
8:15 - Personal Holding Companies 101
12:10 - Buy vs. Build
20:22 - Nick asks Greg for constructive feedback
26:39 - Avoid mental overload as a multipreneur
30:27 - Substack vs. ConvertKit

Creators & Guests

Host

GREG ISENBERG

I build internet communities and products for them. CEO: @latecheckoutplz, we're behind companies like @youneedarobot @boringmarketer @dispatchdesign etc.

What is The Startup Ideas Pod?

This is the startup ideas podcast. Hosted by Greg Isenberg (CEO Late Checkout, ex-advisor of Reddit, TikTok etc).

📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free: https://www.gregisenberg.com/

X: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

Free 5 day course on using the ACP method to turn strangers into customers via internet audiences and communities over here https://www.communityempire.co/

Greg: Sweaty Startup, Nick Huber, the man who needs no introduction.

Nick: Greg, what's up, man?

Greg: You need no introduction because you are a staple of the internet. You've upset enough people on the internet that the people that hate you hate you, but the people that love you love you.

Nick: I think in order to get people to really be a fan you have to You have to take a stance on something, right? If you're just middle down the road, everybody thinks you're decent and nobody really likes you that much. It's kind of a tough, I think that's a tough position to be in. If you're going to, you got to pick a side online, I think, right?

Greg: you do have to pick a side if you want to say something. Worthwhile and interesting, but you, on the other hand, seem like you're, you know how to rile up the crowds. Is that fair to say?

Nick: I think the, one of the most fascinating phenomenons to me is that a human being could be going about their day, doing whatever they want. They're living their life. Most of them are in America where you can literally do whatever you want to be doing. You're either. With people you chose to be around, you're in a place that you chose to move into.

You're working a job that you took a job offer to do, and you're going to open up Twitter and you're going to see something that some stranger named Nick Huber put on the internet, and you're going to get upset by that, upset to the point where you're going to take time out of your day to, to just spew out a bunch of mean things or, or tell your friends or talk about it, or just have these negative thoughts floating around your head.

Totally mind blowing to me. I didn't know that such a large percentage of people. Where that easily influenced by things that just don't matter at all.

Greg: it's not, it's not that it's Nick Huber saying it. It's just that people have strongly held beliefs. And then when you say something that's against that belief, that really upsets people. I think it goes, it goes back to like human beings are tribal and It feels like you're attacking them, even though you're always like joking about it.

For example, like tell people about the deck tweet

Nick: Yeah. I made a, I made a tweet that said, I found the stupid picture of a contractor who put a deck on half of a slide glass door on a second level. So that literally half the slide glass door, the window part of it. Was facing outside straight to the ground. But on the other half, there was a deck where one 200 pound person would take up the whole deck.

I would get out there and nobody could stand there with me on that deck. And I made a tweet that said, Hey, just, uh, installed this at one of my rental properties. I raised the rent, you know, from 900 to 1, 500. The tenant moved out of course, but I was able to release it at the new higher price right away.

Like this is the key to, value creation and wealth building or something stupid. And I, and also just a lot of people hate landlords, man. a lot of people think that residential real estate should be an entitlement and not a for profit business. so, so that one really, really took off.

Greg: and took off, like how many people saw it

Nick: 20 million people saw it. So I don't know, a third of the daily active users on Twitter probably saw that tweet at some point or the other.

Greg: and what does that translate into dollars and business? Like why, why do a tweet like that? You know, are you doing it for fun or are you actually like, this will get my name out there. It'll translate into dollars.

Nick: So there is something to be said for the fact that the tweet after if you add value, if you teach somebody something, it will be seen by more people because if you're scrolling down through Twitter and you avoid and you see a Nick Huber post, but you just continue to scroll on. Elon is a lot less likely to show you the next Nick Huber, for sure.

Like, Hey, he, you just saw one of these. You didn't click on it. So we're not going to show you, but if you go through and you click on somebody's tweet, you're going to see more of that person. It happens all the time. So even my true followers, the people who are in a business, the people I'm after, they'll click on the deck tweet just to read the replies because the replies are hilarious.

So. The next tweet, then if I add a lot of value or if I pitch something or something or the other, it'll get, it'll get seen by more people. There's kind of an afterburn of engagement, but yeah, there's no, there's no like massive follower gain.

And then now, unfortunately on Twitter, you have a ton of people trying to do it and they kind of just, maybe that's what I look like too, but they kind of look like idiots when they don't do it right.

I

Greg: So we have a friend, Julian Shapiro. He tweets like once a quarter now.

Nick: wonder why.

Greg: the reason why he got Twitter. It's because he, he was like, there's a bunch of really smart people on Twitter and I want those people to read my tweets. It's the same reason why we all got on. Um, and not even to read my tweets, but also that I can go and reach out to these really smart people, send them a DM, and be like, hey, do you want to grab coffee or whatever.

Nick: It's a network

Greg: Network accelerant. Now, when you're creating tweets that upset a lot of people, you might get blocked. And some of those people that might block you those are the people that you set out to attract initially. So I think Julian will use Twitter very differently today than he would a few years ago because he's like, I'm only, when I drop something on Twitter, it is going to be fire.

Like it is going to be super well researched. It's going to be like nothing else out there. It's going to be a unicorn. You're going to love it. And he doesn't want to play those algorithmic games. Whereas it feels like you are playing a little bit of algorithmic games.

Nick: accelerant. I should, I should absolutely be more disciplined on Twitter. Absolutely. Also I'll say that like there is not a method to this madness all the time. I, half the tweets are doing nothing to, for Nick Huber brand. There's nothing to gain by making a lot of these tweets. That's for sure. But like the people who block me. I think that's, that's also kind of, there's an advantage there.

Like I'm, I'm weeding out the people who don't get my sense of humor for one thing, take it too personally, politically, totally disagree with me and people that I wouldn't maybe jive with over time. Anyway, I'm kind of weeding those folks out. So I don't mind, I don't mind having a couple of true fans and a lot of people who just, okay, Nick's Nick's not for me.

And that's perfectly fine. Perfectly fine.

Greg: And the truth is, even if you're not saying anything controversial, like, I don't consider my tweets to be controversial, but people block me all the time. So, this morning, a buddy of mine sent me a tweet, and, and, so I go and click on the tweet, and I see, I can't see it.

Nick: That's the

Greg: And, I, and, and I'm like, who's this guy Tom?

, cause I can't see it, I had to check it out in, Incognito mode, it's Tom Sweeney. And I was like, who's Tom Sweeney? he's the CEO of Epic Games. It's like a 20 plus billion dollar company. And all of a sudden, I'm like, why did Tom Sweeney block me on Twitter? Like, what did I say such that Tom Sweeney, a guy I've never met with, A, I've never met with him before.

B, I've never replied or liked any of his tweets. And also he's, you know, Epic Games up until very recently was a client of Late Checkout as well. And it was a great experience. So it's like, don't go on Twitter unless you're. You're, you're prepared to have some of your heroes block you.

Greg: So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk more about the Nick Huber world. cause it isn't just at sweaty startup on Twitter anymore. There's a bunch of accounts that you're a part of and businesses that you've created on top of it. Um, I've talked a lot about recently about multi preneurship, which is this idea around, how do you create a company that creates companies?

And that's something that you're doing and doing.

Nick: just like you, I mean, I'm a, I'm a huge fan of stuff that doesn't scale. Entrepreneurship, everybody talks about scalability. Everybody talks about raising capital, about moats, about, you know, world changing ideas.

I think that if you have a competitive advantage in one area, you can do regular things that other people do and make really good money. And it can become life changing money as you've seen with some of the agencies that you've built. And I think it's, it's been really interesting to see our group of friends, you, me, some of our other friends six other guys who are similarly driven, similar growth strategies, all supporting each other and. all kind of shift towards. Repeatable, boring, not that scalable businesses, but that when you play the game at a big level and you know how to delegate, you know how to market, you know how to sell and you have distribution and you can attract talent and you can build teams. Just amazing things can happen. I think you and me have been cheering each other on, you know, since the very beginning of like, people are sleeping on agencies, people are sleeping on these businesses that don't scale.

So. You and I both are kind of seizing the opportunity,

Greg: Yeah, and, you know, we can say who's in the group. So it's, it's me, you, Sahil Bloom, Sean Puri, Sam Parr, Nikita, Nikita Beer,

Nick: Austin.

Greg: Austin Reif. That's it, right? Julian was a part of the group and he left, but it was amicable. So it's interesting because A lot of that group is traditionally been like a venture backed type mentality.

Like I raised venture capital, Sam raised money for his, you know, for the hustle. Uh, Sean has raised venture, Austin raised venture, Sahil was in a PE fund. And it's interesting that we've all kind of just had a collective aha moment, which was distribution matters. and just building trust as much as possible on these platforms.

And then What's a non venture backable business at least to start that you can build, you know, people call it boring businesses, people call it not scalable, but you know, Shepard is a great example of something that could scale, right? Like that's a business that could be really big.

Nick: Yeah. It's not that we're not starting businesses that could be really big. I think there's examples in all of our, in everything that we are doing, but from Sam to Austin, to you, to me, to Sean, all the businesses that we're going after, there's examples of massive companies. There's examples of companies that do, you know, 25, 50, a hundred plus million dollars a year of revenue.

So we're not talking, we're not necessarily talking like. A small one man solopreneur journey here. We're just talking about stuff that's already been done before. Like this stuff has all been done. There's marketing agencies. There's pay per click agencies. but if you do it well, you're a good salesperson. You're good at building teams. Magic happens and all of us kind of got that all, it hit us all at the same time. And we were kind of on a race to do boring shit, make as much money as possible. It's been really fun to watch everybody crush it.

Greg: I feel like the majority of people in this group chat now have, now have like offshoring agencies.

Nick: Yeah. Austin's got one, Sean's in shepherd with us. So it's, uh, yeah, I mean, there's, there's great business models and there's poor business models and we can all tell the difference

Greg: totally, I want to talk about buying a business for a second. So at the end of 2022, we bought a business and out of that business was incubated our fastest growing property right now, which is, uh, boring marketing. com, which started off as an AI technology that we ended up spinning up to help brands, uh, with SEO.

And now I'm hooked on this idea around what else could I buy? Because not only are you buying the assets, but you're really buying a team of operators who have systems and processes. Um, and you can just like on day one, lean into it. So my question to you is you want to be buying more businesses. Like, what's your framework for thinking about what to buy, how to buy it, what price to buy it at, and as much detail as you're willing to share.

Nick: Buying a business is exciting to me because there is nothing harder. Then the first seven or eight months of a service business startup. I own RE cost seg, which is doing 150 grand a month now, and has reached escape velocity. And it's going to be an amazing assets, a life changing business that. You know, Mitchell Baldrige, myself, Dan and Mitchell's wife, Mel have started, but still at the six month mark, the six month mark, we had a phone call where our operator is near tears.

We're selling, we're selling 50 grand a week of cost segs, and we can only deliver 10 grand a week of cost segs. We're having massive bottlenecks inside the organization of actually delivering. We overloaded the company with business. I, we were doing a good job promoting on Twitter and it was exploding.

That was really, really hard and really, really stressful. It's sleepless nights for me as, as a non operating partner and hell for our operating partner, which is Mitchell's. Wife, Mel, we got through it. She's a badass. The company's going well, but the idea of buying a company that has got that part covered, that is extremely intriguing to me.

So how I will think about buying businesses will be the same way that I'm thinking about starting them, which is turning my cost centers, like looking at my profit and loss statement and looking at where I'm spending money. And the interesting part is like, if you look at the 10 businesses that I've started.

Eight of them were businesses that I was spending money on it at bolt storage, property and casualty insurance, debt brokerage, cost segs, SEO, link building, performance, marketing, website development, recruiting, all these things were things that I needed as a business owner. And it turns out that if I need them as a business owner, then a lot of the business owners who follow me on Twitter for the management advice and trust me, because they listen to my words, they read my newsletter, they listen to my podcast, whatever it might be. They'll need the same type of kind of things that I need. So it's a comfort thing. And I also needed the personal cashflow. Like the personal cashflow is new to me, like having liquidity, having money in the bank is new, a way to risk it all in my opinion was to buy a business that was too big and the turnaround fails and all of a sudden I'm personally guaranteed that people that I raised money from are pissed.

I've ruined a reputation. I'm just now getting to the point where my personal monthly cashflow is starting to stack up enough where I can make, take some swings. But I also, I'm kind of thinking about my. You know, Nick Huber holding company as a, as an accumulation of talent. I'm trying to get talented operators in.

I'm trying to get to know them, get to know their strengths, get to know what they're good at. How good are they at building teams? How good are they at, you know, doing these things inside these companies? And over the course of a year, two years, three years, while we're collecting money, while we're building the bankroll, I'm building this Rolodex of operators that I can, you know, okay, maybe.

Web run didn't work, but I know that will at web run is one of the best, you know, team builders on the agency side that I know. So I'm going to go with, well, I'm gonna buy a company. I'm laying the groundwork of businesses that all companies need. Every company needs a link building service.

Every company needs paid ad support. Every Every company needs these things. You know, the cashflow allows me to buy them.

The services allow me to accelerate them and I can own and hold them and either sell them or my five year goal is to build my Rolodex full of bad ass operators that I know and trust they've come in. They've showed me what they can do. And I think that's kind of the underrated part of me starting these companies.

Yes. I talked to Andrew Wilkinson on the phone a couple of days ago and he's like, Nick, what are you doing, man? You're starting all these companies. You got to just go buy them. You're, you're playing the game on hard mode. And he basically said, your ability to go by these companies is going to be dependent on who and how you can hire the operating, the management teams.

Greg: .

I was actually sitting in this seat in 2020 when I spoke to Andrew Wilkinson when I was just starting late checkout, and he gave me basically the same advice. Greg, I don't understand why are you starting so many companies? Why are you building so many products? Just go and buy them. And my reaction to Andrew was, yeah, but it's so much fun going zero to one and building from scratch.

Like, I love coming up with the name, coming up with the brand, do the positioning, like the zero to one. And while I'll always love that, he was right. Like it took me a few years to realize, you know what, like, okay, you know, going zero to one is art, going one to N is more science.

Nick: Mm hmm.

Greg: And playing only in 0 1 is a bit of a mistake when there's no reason why you or I can't be doing both.

Like we can, we can still be incubating and buying.

Nick: , if you try to start on third base, if you try to start by just buying a big company and turning it around, when you've never operated a small company, you've never started a company, you've never built teams, you've never, you don't have a ton of experience delegating.

It's really hard. I'm looking forward to these new challenges. And Andrew is absolutely right. You and I are both seeing the light that you can buy companies and you can pull a couple of levers and create millions of dollars out of thin air of equity value in cashflow. That's, that's exciting. I think you and I are both going to love that.

We're going to love it. You're already proving that you can do it. I'm excited to challenge myself and try to do it. I'm not there yet.

Greg: How do you think about what is the right size in terms of purchase price for the first deal?

Nick: I would buy a company now that has two or 300 grand EBITDA. I mean, that's enough. That's enough to, you know, hire some decent people. they don't have a management team at two or 300 grand.

The owner is the manager, but they have some people who can execute. They have some client leads. They have some people who can deliver what, whatever the services they're delivering. I think that's a beautiful place to start because it can be really low risk. You can get a business really cheap and seller finance, almost all of it.

And if it crashes and burns, then. you hand the keys back and, and walk away. It gets tougher for the first one, especially if you go out and need to, you know, take an SBA loan for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. And, and you've got to raise money for the equity. And it's not rocket science.

And I think that people can do it absolutely can be done, especially if you know how to delegate and build teams, but it just seems riskier to me. But it came down to, Hey, do I want to buy a business that does two or 300 grand a year, or do I want to just do the work in six months and get my own business there and save the four, six, 700, 000 I'd have to buy that company for.

Greg: The assumption you're making there is that 100% of your bets are going to make it there, but they're bets, right? Like we incubate stuff all the time that fails. So like we'll often put 250 grand into something and try it and it fails. now one of the things I'm learning is like all these starts and stops that you're doing, 250 grand here, 150 grand here, 100 grand here, 300 grand here.

I'm kind of seeing the light where I'm like, actually I want to do less incubation. reduce that budget, still do incubation, but reduce that budget and take that budget to actually just buy something that's working.

Nick: I got a question for you, Greg. You know me really well now. Um, we are, we are friends. You, we've been talking weekly, almost daily for three years now. You, you've seen how I've evolved. you read my tweets. You, you follow along closely. What could I be missing? Like what, constructive feedback. I love it. I revel in it and I'm not easily offended. Like, what do you think I'm doing wrong? Or what do you think I could do better? Or what, what blind spots do you think that I could have? Or what do you think five years from now? I'll look back and say, damn, I wish I knew that.

And I would have started doing that earlier now, because I feel like you, you are five years further ahead than me. So.

Greg: So

I think that you could be acquiring one to two companies per year. And if you, you know, in five years from now, if you're acquiring one to two per year, you have eight companies after five years, I think two of them can be smashing successes way bigger than anything you've incubated. I think that you're You're a finance guy at the core.

Like you said, seller financing, assuming that everyone is listening to this, understands what that means. Like you understand your way around the books. So I think that because you understand distribution and the books and deals, like to me, it makes total sense that you should be buying companies. if I were you, One thing I would do is I wouldn't buy a 200, 300, 000 EBITDA business. I would go and just say, how much is it to go to an MBA school costs, I don't know, 50 grand a year. So I'm going to take a budget, my MBA budget, it's going to be 50 grand, and I'm going to buy something for 50 grand.

I'm going to do the negotiation myself. I'm going to, I'm just going to manage the whole process from A to Z and I'm going to put an operator on it. And assuming this 50, 000 investment goes to nothing, but just a way for you to test and hit the tires on this, you know, put it into, uh, your audience, see if they like it.

And I would also not do a service based business because I would also want to test what are other types of businesses that my audience would like. So I tweeted at you a couple of days ago. Um, You were tweeting about jobber and a few other SAS products.

And I always see you tweeting about these different SAS products and I'm kind of like, well, why don't you own one of these SAS products? Like you talk about how. You know, you're building businesses for you, but you're probably spending hundreds, thousands of dollars a month on the SAS products that you could be owning and actually building for you.

And as you know, the multiples on SAS businesses are a lot higher than the multiples on service businesses. So if I were you, the number one thing I'd be doing is buying a cheap SAS product, giving it to my audience. iterating from there writing my learnings after three or six months and then say okay.

I did it for 50k Now, let me try to buy something with 300 to 500 000 in ebitda

Nick: good advice. Yeah. I need, I need some SAS products. I need them. I know that, I know it's on my roadmap. I just need to take it more seriously. I think you're right.

Greg: And I said it because like, we're constantly incubating SAS products and the other thing that people don't talk about in SAS line that much is that you can literally incubate a SAS product in 30 days. You know, I'm old enough to remember like, you know, five years ago when you wanted any SAS product, it was 2 million to build a SAS product.

That was like pre product market fit. That's just like a product. And now it doesn't cost two million dollars anymore. It

Nick: If I, how much would it cost me to build a Google review aggregator? Cause I need Google reviews on every single one of my companies and 63 self storage facility, you know, brick and mortar locations. I need a way to aggregate and automate getting. Google reviews from customers and so does my entire audience.

So should I build that? Or should I find somebody who had tried to build it and couldn't get any customers and wants to sell it to me for under a hundred grand.

Greg: I mean, I would start with finding out if that exists somewhere else. One of the ways I typically do that is I go on product hunt. And Product Hunt has like a C, a failure, failed product. So 99% of the products that are on Product Hunt have failed. And you might find something, you know, from 2015 or 2017 that actually looked really good.

It's basically a dormant business, uh, operator might've just. Lost interest in it, you know, a lot of people lose interest in these businesses because they're just not seeing traction. So if you can come to them and be like, Hey, I'm your traction guy. You're the product person. Like help me revive this.

I'll give you 50, 000 to do it. And I'm going to give you upside. I think it's compelling.

Nick: That's a good idea. I'll be on product hunt the rest of the day here.

Greg: I also think that you could, you can also partner with other people, right? Like you can partner with a firm like ours. Where like we've done deals where we'll just take upside and sometimes a little bit of cash, a little upside, and partner with people. Um, you know, we've partnered with, Mr.

Beast has night media and they've built some, some products. Um, and we've partnered and took equity in some of those. So I also think there's groups like ours, like for people listening to this that like are interested but might, might not. You know, want to put out a lot of money. Like cold call different agencies and partners.

And even if on their website, it says they're not, they don't do this stuff. Like you never know. It's the same thing with, hiring a potential employee, right? Someone might have a job, but if you DM them or you send them a message, who knows, you might catch them on a day where they're having a bad day and they really like what you're doing.

And all of a sudden you're able to convince them to come join your team.

Nick: I like it. The world is swimming with opportunity. That's for sure. It's almost like you can't, you can't keep your head above water. It's coming so fast sometimes.

Greg: Do you ever feel like you're doing too many projects at the same time? Because every time I start a project, the analogy I use is it cuts my brain in another section. So if you think about it as like a pizza. you're cutting it in another slice and another slice and another slice and another slice and it's a bit of mental overload.

So sometimes, you know, I look at what you're doing and I'm like, Whoa, this guy's like working on a lot of projects. is that just me or how do you feel about it?

Nick: Yeah, I, I'm a over delegator to the extreme, meaning I'm not going to interact with any of the customers. I'm not going to have an email address from, for the company. I'm not going to have a job in the company or I'm pissed off. And that's a blessing and a curse. It's a curse because you know, I, it's 80% as good as it would be if I were doing it myself.

Like I could do it myself better. But it's a blessing because I can take more shots and I can invest in an operator who I know is awesome. I mean, an example is my property and casualty insurance company, which could be. The biggest of all my businesses in 10 years, the CEO of that company is, is my business partner, Dan Hagberg, who I went to college with and founded the storage company with and owns half my real estate portfolio.

And I know he's a killer and I have, I have not been on one meeting. I have not done anything at all for that company, except ask him on the fourth hole of a golf course. Oh, Hey, by the way, how's, how's Titan risk going? Other companies are different. Like not, not all operators are as competent as Dan in a way.

Like they're, they're impressing me. Like these people that are running these companies, they're impressing me. Like, I don't, I don't need to talk to the guy who runs my recruiting company, but once a month and he, we've done 76, 000 of revenue. And in the first three months and recruiting cyclists.

Like long recruiting sales cycles long. So I don't know. I think I will pull the plug on some, but none of them right now are like, damn, this is the one I probably am going to need to pull the plug on. I like it. I like being able to check in. I like looking at the new leads and all the companies I like.

It's kind of addicting to kind of look at the, trajectory and the tough part. But yeah, then there's stressful. Then there's stressful parts. Of course, it's like one of these companies did some work for my company and it didn't go well. And Dan's like, Hey, Nick, I need to give you some feedback. Uh, this.

This was fucking shitty. Like we're going to fire your company here if they don't get their stuff together. I'm like, Oh damn it. That's stressful. So yeah, it's not all without, it's not all without its stress. That's for sure. I still spend, 10 hours a week on the golf course and 10 hours a week working on my personal brand and I hang on my family.

A lot, you know, so I feel like I have a decent balance, but I'm definitely, I'm definitely working hard right now. That's for sure.

Greg: I like the rule of I don't have an email address

Nick: Yeah.

Greg: creates this distance between you and the business. And it's basically, and I think Andrew does this really well, Andrew Wilkinson, which I think he got from Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, which is it's all about the operator and we respect and support the operator and we're here to help.

But we're not really here to be in the day to day like if you're if we're if I'm here in the day to day then There's an issue with the operating team

Nick: And they're varying level of investments too.

Like the property and casualty insurance is a money suck right now. I'm, I'm personally investing 30 grand a month into that one. The business brokerage is another 30 grand a month. And I'm just, I'm investing because I believe in those companies, but just a longer sales cycle and permitting and requirements and, you know, getting paid on a deal closing when you start a business brokerage.

You know, best case scenario is six to nine months after you start the business. So definitely varying levels of personal investment.

Greg: What about email, email newsletters as a form of, you know, nurturing leads? You know, you have a really big. newsletter that I subscribe to. I love it. Um, you send weekly emails and in the emails, you know, you, you, you highlight some of your companies. Are you thinking about having individual newsletters for your companies?

And is that a big part of the strategy?

Nick: No, we we've thought about it. I've had operators bring it up that they want to start writing a newsletter and I just can't see the value of building a whole nother audience and being irresponsible for a whole nother newsletter when I can, you know, get yesterday's or Monday's email. I highlighted bold SEO in the top of the email.

We got 24 leads, 24 leads, , our sales guys. Booked up for the whole week, like his whole week schedule. He's got six calls a day now. so yeah, it's, it's my newsletter is the core strategy. Like Twitter's awesome. The individual Twitter accounts are awesome. We can, you know, reach our customers pretty well on Twitter, but email is where I can really, really, really drive value.

I don't do any outside advertising on my newsletter. I don't let anybody pay for spots on my newsletter. I. Take up all my own space really inside of these companies now. And it's so far, it's working pretty well. Some, some services are harder to sell than others, but some of them, just a lot of business owners need, which is, which is a blessing

Greg: Your newsletter is on ConvertKit

Nick: love convert kit. You,

Greg: and yeah, right, so right now I'm thinking I'm thinking about switching from Substack to ConvertKit sell me on why I should move Substack to ConvertKit?

Nick: uh, convert kit is really good link tracking. I can change the links after I send emails out. I can, you know, stack sequences on. So I know that if somebody clicks on the bold SEO link, I can then drip them three more emails over the next week about SEO services, because I know they're a pretty warm lead, even though they didn't fill out the form on bold SEO.

com. so yeah, it's, it's just the customizability. If you're, if you're gonna start promoting and selling on your newsletter, it's really. Good for that. I don't even utilize it fully, but then there's the creator network of like everybody being able to recommend each other that, you know, the quality of the emails aside, I know that, you know, three out of four might be a total joke.

Um, you were, you were bringing up some stuff this week about how it was like, it could, it could be getting just a lot of confusion among people, not even knowing they're signing up for my email list, but that's still been, I've still noticed like a uptick in. Like the sales, which are important to me and at two or three bucks, uh, an email, it's, it's worth that.

So yeah, it's, it's all convert kit just does a good job, but beehive sub stack, they're all, they're all doing similar stuff now too. So

Greg: Yeah, the Beehive We use Beehive for you probably need a robot which are our AI newsletter and it's really amazing for for just like you want to get a message out there and You want to push it out in a really beautiful way. And I love at the end of each Beehive newsletter, you can say like, Do you like it?

Did you not like it? And there's almost like a comment section. you get to understand how valuable the email was to someone. And that's my favorite part about Beehive. But if you're actually trying to sell stuff, convert automations. IE, like what you're saying, you click this, therefore, I'm going to put you in this drip FOMO sequence of, you know, teaching people SEO, for example, before they buy it, right?

There's so many people who might click on your SEO link or your Ari Kaseg link and just not be ready to buy. Uh, so they're in this. And it's like, how do you nurture them and build trust during that, that time so that, uh, you know, maybe after the five email sequence there, they're ready to make the jump

Nick: the most valuable part for me, I haven't even really utilized. Like my marketing team, we have a plan to really utilize these sequences to like you're saying nurture these leads. I don't do it. Well yet. What's the magnets are like the best way that I can get high value people on my newsletter?

Like, Hey, here's a pdf. It's free. All you gotta do is give me your email. Here's some awesome copy on Twitter. Why you should click the link and why you should get it. I wish I could share my screen and just show you like all my, I can track all my pages, all my lead magnets. I can see how many people visited the page, how many people signed up through that lead magnet.

It tagged them. So I know which of my subscribers came from like a really high value real estate. Like somebody who signs up through like, Hey, here's the, 20 aspects of closing a real estate deal. I know that the 450 people who signed up through that lead magnet, like they're in the real estate game.

They're valuable. Those followers are worth 20 bucks a pop or more. But I know that the people who clicked on like, Oh, here's a list of 200 plus business ideas. I know that they're all entrepreneurs and that's fine too. But I have all that like separated inside of convert kit. And I can post these, lead magnets on a schedule over and over and over again.

And I can track, how many people are signing up on each one. Which ones are hitting how they're hitting the different copy changes and stuff like that.

the sub stack have like lead magnet ability where you can.

Greg: like, no, not even close, like not even close. Substack is the fastest way to get up and running if you want to create a newsletter. So. When I'm doing anything, if I'm trying to post on Tik Tok, if I'm trying to, and I don't post on Tik Tok, if I'm trying to post on Instagram and I don't post on Instagram, if I'm trying to buy a business and I'm not, and I've never bought a business, I always ask myself, what is the path of least resistance so that I can see if I like this thing?

So I chose Substack, you know, Three, four years ago, because it was so easy to do. I got set up in 30 seconds now you know, I think it's important for people to, and whatever it is they're doing to quarterly or yearly ask themselves, like, what has changed between now and then? And for me personally, what has changed is I now have 70 plus thousand subscribers I'm also selling some of my services within my email newsletter and my open rate is starting to really go up and my click through rate is going up. So I'm starting to really build trust with people and subset just doesn't give me the tools I need, you know, the tagline for convert kit should be take email seriously. if, ConvertKit hired Late Checkout, our design and branding agency, we would probably do something around that and we would try to own the category of taking email seriously.

I mean, my dream, to be honest, is a mix of beehives design and like poles with convert kits, serious automations. Like that's my dream email.

Nick: I wonder, Yeah, it was amazing to watch convert kit. Just take over drip, like drip used to be the one like three years ago, drip was the only one people use and it's just been a slow move to convert kit. But I wonder when Nathan is going to add. You know, the, the design forward front end to convert it, it would be easy to do those polls and, and

Greg: I mean, I hit him up. I hit him up the other day and I was like, dude, hire late checkout. We'll crush it for you. So maybe soon,

Nick: I'll tell him to hire, I'll, I'll text him right now. Tell him to hire late checkout.

Greg: I got to run, but dude, thank you for letting. Me and everyone take a peek inside your multi printer brain. I think the world of you and you're doing incredible stuff. And I can't wait to see what you build over the next three years. And bye.

Nick: I appreciate it, man. You're a, you're a pretty serious influence in my life and I look up to you a lot and I appreciate the fact that you want to see me win, man. And I want to see you win and I know you're, I know you're crushing it. So appreciate you having me on and thanks for everything.

Greg: All right, man. I'll catch you later. Where could people sign up to your newsletter?

Nick: Yeah. I mean, the newsletter is how you get to know Nick Huber. I mean, I, I write a 1500 word email every week about management, delegation, hiring, recruiting, building companies, real estate. So yeah, go to sweatystartup. com and get on my newsletter.

Greg: Love it. Later.

Nick: Thanks, Greg.