This founder built his brand on a simple idea: forget about changing the world. Get rich by doing mundane and even dirty jobs better.
By Brandon KochkodinForbes team
NIck Huber is the first The Storage Squad company didn’t start with a slick pitch deck to potential investors or an analysis of the entire addressable market, but with a simple Craigslist ad. It was 2011, the summer before his senior year at Cornell University. While friends went to New York For internships in investment banking, Huber returned home to Leopold, Indiana, unsure of what he wanted to do. He thought he would make a few dollars by subletting his place in Ithaca through Craigslist. That’s when the mother of a fellow student contacted the site, hoping to store her child’s belongings in her apartment.
Huber ended up creating Storage Squad, a summer service for students who collected their belongings at the end of school, moved them to a storage locker, then reversed the process in the fall. Storage Squad eventually expanded to places like Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. While expanding its services business, Huber also began purchasing storage units, eventually owning a stake in 64 locations across 11 states. In 2021, he sold Storage Squad for $1.75 million. He kept the units. While growing his business, Huber developed a startup philosophy that helped him build a mini-business empire — and seems particularly well-suited to an era when so many white-collar workers feel threatened by artificial intelligence.
“AI will never be able to clean, build and maintain our physical world. The sweatier the work, the better,” he says.
Huber, 35, who now lives in Athens, Ga., has made millions by not being a Wall Street wizard or coding apps that claim to “change the world.” Instead, he built or invested in 11 companies that together, he says, generated more than $50 million in sales last year. None are based in Manhattan or Menlo Park. They don’t use fancy PR agencies or claim to make revolutionary breakthroughs. Almost all of them have been recruited – and Huber insists they will be earning a living within months. This is essentially the opposite of the typical business model of a venture capital-backed company. Forbes 30 Under 30 to start up.
Huber wants to get rich, but he is skeptical about the point of immediately aiming for the big score. It estimates that its network of storage facilities, which generated $15 million in revenue last year, is worth about $140 million based on its net operating income of $9.8 million. of dollars and the valuation of storage companies listed on the stock exchange. (He only owns part of it.) Add the value of his stakes in other companies, and Forbes estimates Huber is worth about $35 million.
On X (formerly Twitter), where he has 385,000 subscribershe delights in trolling those who think every startup should disrupt an industry or reach for the sky. Instead, he relentlessly offers down-to-earth advice. “Unless you’re already rich or living in your parents’ basement, every business you start should have positive cash flow within 2 months,” he recently wrote. “You are in no position to take a photo of the moon. Get rich by doing something simple, then take the moonshot when you can afford it. He is writing a book, tentatively titled The sweaty startupwhich will be published next year by HarperCollins, based on this philosophy.
When Huber first heard from this mom looking for summer storage in 2011, the obvious question was why she wasn’t using one of the established storage companies in Ithaca? Turns out these companies were still sending workers out with clipboards and paper schedules and weighing each box. They worked painfully, reluctant to accept last-minute appointments.
“I figured I could just make them work,” says Huber. He recruited Dan Hagberg, his fellow co-captain of the Cornell track and field team, and they used their 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 moment we had $3,000 in cash laying on a bed and we were like ‘wow, we created this from nothing,'” recalls -he.
In his senior year, Huber took an entrepreneurship class. The professor was dismissive of his moving and storage company because he thought it wasn’t scalable and didn’t have “moats,” making it difficult for anyone to imitate. competitors. But after learning what a moat was, Huber concluded that his real advantage was his willingness to sweat and his willingness to provide top-notch customer service. “I have a theory about trying to change anything,” Huber says. “If you try to change the world, if you try to change people, you’re going to go bankrupt. Look at where people are spending their money now and go get some of it back.
Huber is both a born hustler and a natural crusher. In high school, he was more of a standout athlete than a student and ended up at an Ivy League university by asking his high school coach to cold call college track coaches. He left Ithaca as an Academic All-American and school record holder in the pentathlon, heptathlon and decathlon.
“Nick will do in three days what most people take in three years,” says Hagberg, Huber’s partner since that first summer move.
Huber didn’t limit himself to dirty business. But he thinks it’s the best starting point for most aspiring entrepreneurs. He then believes that they should expand into ancillary businesses when they see a need and have capital to deploy. His businesses needed websites, so in 2023 he created WebRunwhich creates web pages intended to turn visitors into customers. Realizing the crucial role of search engine optimization in his storage business, he created BoldSEO. As his real estate portfolio grew, he saw the benefits of cost segregation, which accelerates the tax depreciation schedule of real estate assets to free up more liquidity. This led to the creation in 2022 of RE cost segment. The same logic applies to Titan Riskhis commercial insurance broker.
“Nick has an idea in his head and he moves extremely quickly,” says Mitchell Baldridge, Huber’s longtime CPA and co-founder of RE Cost Seg.
In 2021, Huber began hiring workers in the Philippines at $5 an hour to staff its 24-hour customer support lines and brought in an outsourcing startup called Support Shepherd. Impressed, he bought 15% of the company in 2022. This year, he raised $30 million, $20 million in equity plus $10 million in debt, to take a majority stake at a valuation of 52 million dollars, and renamed it Somewhere and brought in an experienced Silicon Valley executive as CEO. In addition to customer service employees, Somewhere recruits — and Huber uses — coders from Latin America and the Philippines. He ignores criticism that he exports American jobs or exploits foreign workers. Big companies outsource all the time, he says.
And of course, now that Huber is buying small businesses, he’s started his own brokerage firm, it’s simply called, Nick Huber.
Huber’s approach to finding opportunities is simple but compelling: Just look around, see which services are making money, and determine if you can improve them. Hard work is essential: one of its main tactics is to spot local businesses with poor customer service. How do you find them? He will call pretending to be a customer, especially on weekends. If the phone continues to ring, you have found a weak spot. But if someone takes over right away, the company will likely face stiff competition. Likewise, if a local business still uses a fax machine, that’s another sign that they are vulnerable.
As Storage Squad has expanded, it has chosen its targets through common sense and a little experience, not big marketing research. “We quickly realized that expensive private schools, which serve many foreign students, were our wheelhouse,” says Huber. “At a public school in the South, like the University of Georgia, the kids are resourceful, they drive trucks, they rent storage units.” The same can’t be said for Boston where “they have dad’s Amex and they’re willing to solve the problem with a few hundred dollars.”