Nick Huber: How to Make Millions from Content Without Selling Ads

what do you i'm i'm an investor of yours so you're i don't forget how much i invested but you're like well i don't really invest in anything other than like like total index funds and but you're like one of the few i think you're one of three things that i did it's going great i mean i i see the returns but how much do you have in total self storage now like a hundred million dollars or something i think the last time i came on it was fifteen properties or so and twenty million dollars of the storage and we now have sixty one properties one point eight million square feet of storage we've acquired it for a hundred and three million dollars we've raised forty one million dollars from people like you who invested in both storage that's been a whirlwind the last two years have been crazy you say a hundred million dollars with the that that's how much you paid for i i don't know how much it's worth i don't know either i mean we could we could guess we could try to guess but look the real estate market has no mark to market right because like elon musk he can see how many shares tesla has the value of those shares i have no idea i mean i can make educated guesses but we sold our portfolio today i don't know six months ago we might be able to sell it for hundred ninety million or so oh that'd be awesome we mh i think the way i met you was so you're you know it's kind of a creepy story years ago i dated this polish girl and i remember seeing your picture on twitter if your this is so weird your face reminded me of hers that the best compliment that's the best compliment i can get are you polish i'm german yeah hub my my my mom is a get finger so yeah we're very german i remember seeing your picture and i was like oh my gosh this guy looks polish almost and then i was driving cross country and i did a twitter live or something like that i forget what i did and you like commented and i just called you on air or no i called you like your phone i just put a speaker photo we started talking and that and that's how we you how we how we met i think right yeah and now we know each other quite well i think we've punched each other in the face we've guarded each other and found each other in basketball we have hung out at a couple conferences and and we talk several times a week so i appreciate commitment man i appreciate you too i i that he told me that he was the catholic and i was like yeah but you're faster like you're not good and then i looked up his time times i was like oh he's better than i was it's and then that's why i like to even more or your four hundred times i think you rate forty seven yeah i open forty seven there's you know splits are crazy because your coach wants to tell you that you're run really fast splits to pump you up but he told me i ran a forty six seven one time split i i'd believe that my so my fastest opens were only in the forty eight and forty nine's and my splits were forty seven so you're probably a second faster than i was but and did for those for for the like you went hard on twitter when we when like covid started so there's like we have this text message group it's me yu sean austin reef nikki nikita beer style bloom greg is i think that's everyone forget yeah were you were an addition that came on about six months or a year after the group started but yeah added some good you've added some good great banter to it and like but the reason the group started was you guys all went hard on twitter around the same time and you like certain red boys each other stuff you're the red boys and then i remember you started doing that but did of that hundred million dollars that you've raised or eighty million dollars that you were raised i forget how much how come from forty you've raised forty yeah how much as come twitter ninety ninety six percent of it has come from twitter no way is that is that real yeah mine my entire real estate private equity company was built on the back of twitter yes i had we bought built our first self storage facility we raised five hundred grand my dad took a mortgage out on our house to do he didn't tell me that he did at the time because we're middle class and i went around to his friends basically and he helped me raise the money for that first deal everybody says you know you're not self made and that's mine not self made stories that my dad was the first investor in my first storage building but no then we ran out of money and we had to buy our second third fourth and fifth properties with that with our own cash from our store from our stored company our moving company so then you know fast forward to twitter i'm tweeting about deals i'm tweeting about some of our properties and people are dm me asking to get on our investor list and fast forward to today we've raised forty million bucks from three hundred and twenty people and we have two thousand people on our distribution listing and it's changed my entire life what's forty million divided by three hundred what's the average check ben can help us out maybe i don't have a calculator on me but yeah fifty grand people start we have some investors up over a million bucks that's crazy i wish i had done a million dollars when when i saw like the checks out deal that deal at your in is gonna be a really good deal we've we refinance it in a really crappy refined environment but we're gonna build some climate control storage on that property and that was a deal that was really big and was uncomfortable man i mean we bought a nine one yeah it was a big deal for us was our biggest deal so far i was like hard for us to like get the money together and and and raise the money for it nine million bucks and then we bought another small property after that another you know portfolio after that included all on the same one our basis is about fifteen million and i can i got my spreadsheet up here it's not even know what that means what's basis mean that's how much you're for yeah total cost total cost but but you're in for twenty percent of fifteen right because the only put or twenty five percent down yeah exactly right so we we put about thirty percent down we have you know twelve million in debt because we refined it ref refinance out some cash but now it's got a million dollars of net operating income and it's a you know twenty twenty million dollar plus property which is great that's crazy yeah i remember seeing that check well what do you wanna talk about today i wanna talk about all all types of stuff dude you we have can you talk about the shepherd thing that you're doing yeah so that company is a phenomenal company and and i i it kinda kick can kick off our discussion because my goal real estate a little bit slow the company is in a really good spot i still spend a ton of time saying thumbs up thumbs down to deals and thinking strategy and working on it but i have a lot of time and i also have thirty million impressions a month on twitter and you know what that's like when you have a podcast like this and the distribution that you have but yeah my my goal right now is to is to build a portfolio of ownership trunks and in great small companies know sweaty start ups it's and austin our friend austin re founded morning he was supposed to come on today and he had like a last minute board meeting so axel spring thinks a lot the order of morning group thanks guys yeah but anyway i was like awesome what should we talk about and you and mean an awesome to thing in a group chat and he was like let's talk about because he knows that i hate advertising and i like make fun of i used to make fun of him as like an enemy now i make fun of him as a friend and about how much do you wanna love makes some of everybody sam not really do i i don't know it's good it it it you just you just make jokes that are at people's expense and it's hilarious and sometimes they're funny and and i was like austin what what do you wanna talk about he's like let's talk about non ways or non advertising ways to monetize media following and you did it so you did i don't know what your net worth would be or what like the the the value of your percentage of your thing would be but you've done it to the tune of like a hundred million dollars of real estate that's your non advertising way of monetizing your audience yeah you're also doing it in like a bunch of sorry go ahead yeah my equity and that is maybe you know ten million to twenty million yeah so and and so that and then like you operate this successful business so it's not like it's just because of twitter you know you make smart decisions beyond that but you are also doing it a few different ways i'm actually a customer of your other business which is a cost tag business i almost use shepherd which i don't know if you are a part owner or if you're just an affiliate for but you're doing it in a bunch of different ways and i wanna talk about the ways that you're monetizing in non ad ways of your audience yeah so shepard is the ideal store i mean it was late two thousand twenty november december i wanted to hire somebody in the philippines i at marshall h owned support she and i was his customer i made a deposit for them to hire somebody and my goal was to get somebody on the phone and my self storage facility that could you know press one to make a payment you're gonna go to this person and they're just gonna process the payments for us just extra help doing very simple things i gave them actually they built the job description they got me three candidates ready to interview i got on and interviewed them all in the course of an hour and i was absolutely blown away and hired all three of the people i'm like this towards the rate per hour five dollars an hour eight hundred dollars a month to get these people to come and work for my service company and and they're off fast forward yeah they were they were incredible fast forward four out you know four months later i had fifteen of these people working inside of my company and not only were they doing the simple stuff but they were answering sales calls they were guiding the logistics of a customer in a in one of my facilities looking for a specific unit they were just able to do exactly what our american reps do except instead of paying sixty or seventy grand a year they pay we pay you know ten grand a year so it was there's a game changer now we have our whole finance departments in columbia shepherd has helped us find those folks in columbia so the the business blew my mind and i went to marshall in two thousand twenty two or two thousand twenty one may said hey i wanna be an affiliate to this company like give me a cut of what i can bring in and do some tweeting at that time they were doing about fifty grand a month and revenue she was that's their i there that that's the net of the net of payouts to the the workers no that's like total revenue total revenue or shepard okay as a company as that business the one that like does the head hunting and finds the employees four american companies so they were doing you know fifty placements a month or or less and they were growing fast it was a good company and i started tweeting and pissing off the woke mob and recommending the port shepherd for like a fifteen percent cut of revenue that what those tweets where they're they're hilarious i i would say like i'm gonna weather this recession for one main reason my my employees all work for five dollars an hour in the philippines and they're absolutely incredible and then it made me look like a complete idiot but the woke mob would just blow these threads up totally blow them up we're talking to the tune of three to five million impressions and so that really accelerated the growth of she they're getting a ton of business as it was they started growing like crazy fast word a year later and shepard had seven x the size of that company had had grown by seven seven x and how long one year one year and it wasn't just because of me it wasn't just because of me it's because they started offering folks in colombia they started doing a ton of work and they and they had like fifty part of the you you a part of the puzzle a big part of the puzzle to help it grow i went to marshall and i was like marshall this business is way too good i'm not getting enough money like i wanna own part of support shepard and he's like no way like that's that's that's ridiculous you're just you're just an influence i was like man i'm gonna go start another company that does exactly this or i could be a partner of yours and he was and he's like he's like okay you're right like let's make a deal and we negotiated an i own fifteen percent of shepherd and you can forward to and what's the deal like you have to keep referring a certain amount of customers and do you still your payout we pay no the the affiliate payout was canceled i got fifteen percent of profits and he just trusted me that i was gonna be motivated to continue to do what i do and now once a month i just pissed off of mob on twitter i sent some newsletter at you know ads and i kinda sit on the board and do a little bit ops things and and recommend but i'm mostly just tried those guys and that's when it comes to that well what wait i want i want i need you to red redeem yourself really quick because you're like you're like i pissing people off but the reality is is that like what's the salary ten grand a year is what to them yeah these people me and my one of my reps were talking the other day and it's like yeah i i bought a house nick i it's incredible i bought a house in the philippines and i'm like what are you talking about he's like yeah this is my home it's a three bedroom house that i bought and me and dan talk all the time that our that our employees in colombia and the philippines are are just as wealthy as us they have the same exact lifestyle as we do because yeah they get on the bus they commute two hours and they work for like you know two dollars an hour over there with with not the best conditions and then they get to work from on companies and it changes their life so the reality is that the model has no idea what they're talking about this is an incredible opportunity for them and for us and now a lot of people are you know making that switch and getting employees over there which is alright i i interrupted you do because i wanna you to redeem yourself of what were you saying think about so you fast forward a year now in another year of promoting and the business growing and i think fifty one percent of their their businesses repeat customers who wanna come back for get to get more you know help but it's a multi seven figure profit business a year i make fifty grand a month personally from my fifteen percent ownership i showed god that's so funny well dude you would not have wanted to go and start a competitor to them would you that would it sounds hard it sounds like a hard business operate it's really hard they got a hundred and fifty employees was mostly bluff i mean it's a super hard business to start they have a ton of really good talent and a ton of like sales reps and like the way that they do business is really difficult they gotta go and recruit and interview all these people over there and vet them and grade their english and like get all these people these employees put to put in front of these business owners so yeah it was and marshall a a pretty good entrepreneur i like martial a lot i mean he's done like eight different companies and and a few of them very have very well very good entrepreneur so yeah that's a larry i can't believe you you worked that i think that's a good deal i've had so i've had a few people so i there's this guy who did the guy diego what's his website is it like short z i think it's like like short clips i'll have to find it but anyway he this dude dm me he i think he's is he cuban or he's not from america i forget what he is but he he dm me and i get these dms all the time whether they're like i'm gonna make videos for you you you get those with like i wanna i'm like dude shut up yeah right through a day that people wanna write my newsletter for me yeah i it's like stuff like that all time and nine out of ten them they're just like really bad they're not good at what they do and this guy just kept dm me and i was like screw it fine like just make clips for me send me ten of them like i just sent something stupid or something like that just like get him off my back and like within before the night was over he sent me like ten and they were pretty good and i was like alright well i don't wanna post these i'm gonna make you posted it from me i'm gonna give you my instagram password send me a picture of your driver's license your social security card and he told me at one point he looked at his girlfriend and i go send me your girlfriend driver's license too and interview and he sends me a picture of volvo but i go great i know a lot about you i'm gonna i'm gonna you know if we're gonna have an issue if you screw me here's my password to my integrate make it work and he does and he kills it and i go from like a thousand followers to like ten thousand followers in a week and then like up now to fifty thousand he kills damn so get this so i was like alright you're right you're awesome but here's the deal you're gonna do this for me for free for a long time and in exchange i'm gonna tell all of my friends about you and i'm eventually once you prove it to my friends i'm gonna tweet out that i think you're great and he said great and so within a month of him messaging me we got him up to like twenty grand a month or something like that i forget like a a really good wage and he's like has this thriving business and then i tweet them out and we send tons of customers to him and so i also do the same thing where i take a small percentage of the profits and i'm loving this but i would rather have the profits rather than equity in the business but really i think do you mean like a cut a cut of revenue you'd have a revenue rather have a revenue share than equity slice that's the mistake saw sa sent me a text yesterday and i said nick what's her three biggest regrets in life and one of why does he doing he asked you that question what a weird question to ask works on he works on this dumbass content online who knows what i gonna tweet about why he asking you that okay go ahead one of them was not going to marshal a year earlier and getting equity instead of freaking a cut of profits or revenue yeah yeah i i just don't know if a clip agency is ever gonna sell yeah i love agency i love agency businesses and i don't wanna like give advice to people all the time do you what i i think it's different when you're with marshall because marshall like a very proven entrepreneur who has a couple exits under under belt but like sometimes when he doesn't want listen yeah they don't need or want me to get involved in their operations yeah yeah like dude i don't wanna like i don't wanna guide you i just wanna send you customers and i like i i sometimes i prefer transactional is what i mean yeah so i love i love leaning in i love leaning into the ops my business partner not operational mastermind and you know yeah i've have three other companies that i'm working on launching right now on on a very same very similar trajectory as support shepherd by the way diego company it's called short it's like a a short clip and then z y dot c short z dot c so short and then z y dot c i'm given i mean you should don't you should own twenty five percent of his company yeah i don't know maybe maybe i will end up regretting that but i'm i'm happy with the deal yeah but we and so what were the other two regrets oh i don't know let me look i think it was go ahead and get married a little earlier and i have kids a little earlier even though i did it when i was almost thirty and then you you weren't married until your thirty or first kid i got married when i was twenty seven when had my first kid at twenty nine and i kinda if so if that was three years earlier i would've have been just as happy but you generally i like so many so many people i talked to to say they wish they would had their kids earlier by the way and i'm shocked that people say that are you are you excited to be a dad at some point i know you and sara sort of talk about it are what do do you think about how you think that's gonna change your life i'm pumped i'm so pumped i i think that a i agree i wish i would've have done it earlier and i am so pumped i think it's gonna be life changing i think i was talking to sarah about this last night i was like so we've achieved a lot of like interesting things at a relatively young age like professionally like we're known in our field and like we have some respect amongst some peers financially like we've achieved some things like and then we were like parents say like well you're never ready and i was thinking last night i'm dude i'm totally ready like what else do i need to do this is like it feels like the next step so i'm incredibly ready and i don't really care about this but i actually think it's gonna turbo charge my career i think that like it's gonna make you feel like amped up like before it was i was earning so i don't know why i was earning i was trying to make money for ego ego typical reasons and then after that i was like now i'm in the place where i make money because i do shit that's fun and because of my fun hobbies often the outcome is income i pick and choose different things now i think it's gonna feel like i want something for my children i want to impress them i wanna show them how to work hard i think that there's gonna be like a little bit of that and it's also gonna be like i don't wanna spend all of my time after like six pm working and so i have to pick and choose my battles and i think that's gonna actually force focus and the outcome will be better financially am i wrong i think you are right on the money with your two things there's two more number one is that you are going to get so much more emotionally mature when you have kids at least for me i was highs lows it it just it just puts stress in relative form when you know you have a human that you have to care for and the stress level of when that human is sick or when when they scream or when they cry or when they hurt themselves or when suffer that that puts it all in perspective so you just get like better at dealing with stress the second thing is like i got more focused and was able to get more work done when i couldn't travel the world i couldn't go play golf all the time couldn't just get on a plane and go with be spontaneous and go spend two weeks in europe so instead i would spend really good quality time with my family in my house and then pop to my computer to take you know tinker inside of my business and make my business better it's just more don't know makes sense yeah it it totally makes sense and i'm we have three kids now yeah five five three and nine months yeah man i'm i'm i'm pumped for it and i i think the out i don't care about this but i think the outcome will be a better career because of children that's that that's my prediction think you're right i wanna talk about the cost tag business because that thing so that seems like it's going even better than support she so i'm a customer i used it mh i got it for free though so but i i am a customer and i i'm did you did a video so cost is we have engineers who go in and they break out the different parts of a commercial property or an income property a piece of real estate and then they give you a schedule of which you can depreciate that to the irs meaning like because normally what twenty seven years it's normally twenty seven years year straight line appreciation they take it so that oh the windows those are only a five year life you know the landscaping outside i only a five year life then you got all these ground improvements that we're gonna make and all these other things that can be accelerated a little faster so and then there's something called bonus depreciation we're going away in the weeds you don't need to know that but basically our engineers come in the building and they draw a picture of the property they split it out into different values and they give you document that you can get to the irs to get way more depreciation and save money you're one so i haven't gotten my i haven't gotten my report yet though but let's just make believe on a million dollar property that what's a million divided by twenty seven is what yeah you're gonna twenty seven thousand is it much twenty seven thousand dollars a year yeah okay in depreciation the mh two point two percent maybe something like that and then on with this it would be what like two hundred grand in year one yeah and on a self storage facilities anywhere from twenty to thirty percent year one depreciation an industrial property might be ten to twenty percent and rv park might be sixty seventy percent it just depends on how many ground how much ground improvements you've done like work at the outside of the property landscaping you know windows doors you you might you pay that do i pay that tax back if i sell the property before twenty seven years yeah it's it's called recapture so if you don't plan to hold the property for a while then you need to keep some money because your basis drops basically your taxable basis drops by the amount that you'd depreciate so that gap is called recapture and you pay that at the recapture rate stuff like that so yeah and where keep doing this we have my my friend mitchell bald who you know his wife mail they are my partners and my business partner dan is minority owner as well i own forty five percent of ari ko and i mean mitchell mitchell had done hundred plus of these before we started this company and he'd never really thought about hey we can we can find some engineers and do this stuff really well we've created twitter account ari cost we got really competitive pricing because instead of me flying somebody do your property in texas we did a facetime you facetime with one of our guys and he walked around to took some screenshots what was that like my property manager did it and i was out there with her and i think she was on her phone i she was on her phone and she said the guy sounded italian are they in italy or something they're all yeah we have some people in miami florida is pretty popular columbia philippines we've hired seven people from support through support she for this company it's which is another funny about part about but yeah we have twenty three twenty three employees mitchell wife male who spent eight years at k g or yeah yeah yeah of the big one of the big consulting firms she was out of management consultant she's the ceo of the company and yeah we're nine months old and we did two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of revenue last month dude that's crazy and i remember like so jen my pm she it took her like twenty or thirty minutes and so my property is big it's like twenty acres but there's like a four thousand square foot house and then like a barn that has a gym it's this for an air airbnb do i have and she like spent maybe twenty minutes walking around and he was like what's that thing and they're like oh that's like our water purifying system and he was like alright cool let me see that alright cool show me all the windows yeah they look like okay what can we depreciate faster and they're like show me this show me that yeah yeah and he and she was like we have two garage doors here and he was like alright let me see if the garage door i forget what else it was but like like he she was just walking around and he like had a checklist but then also he would see stuff and like ask like wait let me see that water filtration system or like you know this my property is out in the country so we have like a a well or something i think she he was like let me see the well like i like like wanted to see all this stuff and i haven't got a report yeah i think we just get it did it like ten or seven days ago yeah but yeah so that's the business and there's one other company in the space that's doing it that i almost went with it was called the madison spec is yep that yeah is that they'll they'll fly somebody out to your property and they'll charge you twice as much to do a cost because they gotta get somebody out there so it's a dude win scenario when i read about this i mark jenny so we have this friend named mark jenny who we've talked about the pub he's a badass yeah he's badass at he has like i don't know his portfolio was like mid eight figures of airbnb bar stool guys rented one of his house is for super bowl week dude i saw the so the bar guys is are in arizona i think for yeah and i saw like the mini put course and basketball and i was like i bet this is marks and then you or someone else told us that it was marks and he i was he's inspired me to get into airbnb and i was like mark what should i read and he like sent me some book and he told and that's why i learned about accelerate depreciation and i started googling how to how to do it and i only found a couple firms doing it so i thought it was gonna be like a niche business i didn't think it's gonna be like a big business what how big do you think this is gonna get my prediction and again i i try not to make predictions because then i just set expectations and end up getting you know stress because of expectations and stress and that stuff yeah i think we'll do three to five million of revenue over the next twelve months and i think i it'll become a it'll become a over the next five years a ten million to fifteen million dollar year revenue business i don't i mean you don't have to set expectations but i will but i feel like that is under shooting it i think it could be potentially bigger i don't know how big the market but i bet you there's just so many other services that you can begin to offer depending on how hard you wanna work yeah we're we're launching so that's ari cost dot com we're launching tax credit hunter dot com as well to do e credits and employee retention credits same purchase group mitchell mitchell and mel that's when you didn't if you didn't lay off employees during covid and you want a small business you can get to employee retention tax credits back from the irs and you need mitchell you need mitchell to really talk about that stuff i can't guide but basically if you didn't fire your employees when covid hit and you kept them on the government is offering massive tax credits to your business and very few entrepreneurs know it they expire in two thousand twenty five and yeah it's it's it's significant we're talking the the guys that we know who are running companies with hundred fifty employees are looking at hundred to a million dollars in tax credits hundred thousand million there's a company called main street main street do the exact same thing i think sean either invested or knows the guy who founded it named doug and they were an advertiser with the hustle they're a good company but what they did was how much money did they raise i think they raised they did the exact same thing you're saying they probably had like a tech play to it i don't remember exactly but they're still around but i think they've raised like two or three hundred million dollars like a i forget the exact number but like a huge amount and i think they just recently laid off a ton of people not because the business stinks but i think they just like raised a ton of money and hired a ton of people but i do think that that's proof that this if i'm in your position and i'm like oh well you guys have just validated the idea and concept we're not gonna raise money because we don't wanna screw up our cap table but i bet we can do this because we already have a little bit of money we already have an audience maybe we won't grow its fast but we'll own the whole thing and do it already way and i think the audience is the key i mean the the ari cost twitter account which i i run and mitchell runs it's got thirteen over thirteen thousand followers already no shit what are you tweeting on there to to make people follow it just all about cost tag all about real estate investors client client examples anonymous client examples about how much money we say clients it blows people's mind when they realized that real estate investors you can make i mean i'm an example of this can make two three million dollars a year from operating companies and if you're real estate professional and you buy property each year and you cost them and appreciate them you can have zero tax liability zero yeah but becoming a real estate professional a pain the butt i try to do it i try to do it and i i was like there's no way i can justify like basically to if i remember correctly become a real estate professional you have to i forget exactly seven hundred hours you have to spend you have to be the person who spends the most time in the business yeah there's you you need a good cpa to really like log your time and create a a rock solid case and then you also have to i think a certain i think the majority of your income has to come from real estate if i remember correctly or you can't is there something where like the or where is it like you're outside your all your revenue streams can't add up to be more than your than your real estate income is it something like that i thought that there was something where like you can't make much money well maybe i'm wrong but i remember that the seven hundred hours thing i was like there's no way i can qualify i think you can get some i think you can get some i don't wanna talk on my ass here i don't remember exactly but i think if you do three hundred and sixty hours you can you can get some in short term rentals short term rentals there's a loophole in it right now we're doing a ton of cost savings on people who have short term rentals because they don't have to be a real estate professional they just have to spend more time on that rental property than anybody else and there's some threads that mitchell bald has and if you search it if you search short term rental on the already cost account you could read the thread but yeah it's a there's a loop loophole around short term rentals well that's sick dude i think that potentially those businesses can be bigger than like your storage thing but that's just because that's what i know is like internet businesses but i think that actually could be pretty massive right i think i am very bullish on what could happen i'm excited yeah and then i'm also buying i i'm buying and rebranding a property and casualty insurance company but the hell that they they provide property insurance like if you have a a commercial piece of property self storage facility or a multi family unit you need to get property insurance on that in case there's a tornado or a fire or somebody slips and falls outside yeah i mean i have it at my airbnb i think i think it's expensive i'm pretty sure i paid five or six thousand a does that sound right yeah that sounds right we pay over four hundred thousand or over three hundred fifty thousand dollars annually to insure our self storage portfolio but it's also a pain to work with these insurance companies like the brokerage is operate like it's nineteen fifty you have to put like i don't have like a login i think i just have like a pdf that like they sent me and then they sent me more questions that said like hey did did you ever fix this hand real or something like that yeah and anyway like it's pretty antiquated it's my business partner we were working with a top ten firm in the country brokerage firm top ten this is one of the biggest companies and my business partner dan had to go into that business and build a system for them to quickly get us quotes on properties and to bind our coverage we can't pay online things move slow as hell nobody responds to us so yeah we're buying an insurance company in kansas city we're rebranding it as titan risk titan risk dot com is the shout out and we're gonna spin up a property casualty insurance company on the back of again the the the following your website's down so you gotta is it a titan risk dot dot com you said yeah alright yeah it'll be soon it'll be up it'll be up by it tomorrow hopefully alright good i i don't know i think this said michael live tomorrow he gotta to get up by then on thursday what what did you pay for that the guy was doing he he we found a guy who had a really good contract base with carriers because that's the key like everybody goes to the same carriers but you have to have contracts with those really good carriers we found a guy in can you had that and he was i think he's doing million million and a half of revenue inside of a shop he's the producer he has four back office we're gonna hire folks through she and some americans as well account admins and we're gonna lean on his shop at the beginning and kinda spin up a a secondary brand so so if if i come on if i come on in six months i'd give you i'd be able to share a ton because this is in its infancy but i'm more excited about this business than i am about ari cost egg and and tight tax tax credit hunter our software is the worst have you heard a pub hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot is easy you to adopt and actually looks gorgeous i think i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better i wanna ask you about the fourth one but for the first three did you put up any capital for any of them yeah we funded a checking account for our cost that we put fifty grand in there and then the two months later you know we making distributions that's nothing not me that's nothing yeah mh and dude that's crazy to me great thing about hiring an employee even if you hire a a really good engineer for a hundred thousand dollars you're only paying them eighty three hundred dollars a month do you have any engineers for these companies yeah you need we have civil engineers inside of costa so yes it's this is this stuff's not easy right mel bald is a bad like she's managing twenty three people we're doing a ton of volume of sales doing all these cad drawings breaking down these properties marshall team is really bad badass like none of these companies are easy by any means who's building the system so like and a not civil engineers but mean like web yeah we're using air tables a crm we have a lot out of the pocket tech but yeah we're getting some web work done as well and i'm starting a a web a a web landing page front end development company as well called web lebron dot com but that's with another guy that's gonna be spun up in the next month so yeah i mean it's getting it's getting fun i wanna ask you about this last one and then i wanna ask you more questions about all this stuff i i'm wanna write my questions down because i wanna interrupt you what's this pest thing oh the pest control business i have i an lp good friend of mine who owns six branches of a pest control company and he needs the he needs capital to go buy additional properties and he's got some capital but not you know five or ten million dollars and i said properties i meant additional companies to latch onto his to his business but i might do a deal with him where i sit on the board and i advise operationally i help them hire overseas talent through support she and implement them inside the company and then raise the money from my real estate investors to buy the business but that's in infancy as well i need more time to to really talk on that so about between two and six months ago sean and i on this pod talked about a few things i told him i was like basically like on instagram you have like rihanna and the kardashians and then there's like thousands and thousands of more but those two those the the kardashians and in rihanna are like two prominent examples of people who have built hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of net worth via instagram on youtube we have mister bees he's like the common he's the one that everyone talks about and then you know there's way more of people who have built like there's the lady who started ips etsy i think it's called the makeup brand there's just tons of them on facebook you could say that like buzzfeed and like a bunch of other people like you know built multi billion dollar businesses on backs of facebook now there hasn't really been one who's done it on twitter the and snapchat same thing we can think of a few more examples the reason twitter maybe it hasn't worked is because i think people haven't taken it seriously and also there's only like three hundred fifty million people it as opposed to instagram there's like what billions but i think that's changing and what we haven't seen yet is someone who has built like the the equivalent of the kardashians on twitter except instead of selling makeup i think they're gonna be selling on it b to b or professional whatever that is considered you know b b services or something where it's like a higher end person not a young woman buying like twelve dollar makeup and we haven't seen that yet and then cha was like yeah and then we have like the guy mafia so you have people like the strip mall it's like these anonymous accounts like the strip mall guy who i know who he is i'm friends with him and he is a large business and i don't know what it what has come from twitter but he has large business and then there's like five or six other guys there's like the used car salesperson guy and he's like potentially gonna build a large business and like it's very predictable what watch guys is selling shit loads of watch on twitter yeah i almost bought a a a rolex from him he like i had these date just that i wanted mh no one has done this to the extent of like hundreds of millions i guess you kind of almost have already but no one has done this to the extent that i think possible is you might be one of the first or at least one of the people that i know closely who might be one of these early people to build a multi hundred million or even a billion dollar fortune mostly because of your audience on twitter do you think that's that's accurate i think these companies are so in so in their infancy and it's really easy to get to two hundred fifty grand of revenue but ask guys like andrew wilkinson how hard it is to go from two hundred fifty thousand dollars a month to you know two hundred fifty million dollars year in revenue like those types of jumps is on another level right i don't know if i have what it takes to do things like that you're saying you don't think you you you you have what it takes how can you i'm say that i'm gonna try no yeah i'm gonna try but i mean what harder can it be than what you're doing now but you give it ten or fifteen years to mature i don't know i think what austin reef does at morning brew like managing these bigger companies is just a different skill sets different like but you're not doing it but i'd have to to become a billionaire wouldn't i i don't know because dude it's kinda like you're like the ryan reynolds of twitter a little bit you know what i mean like he's got mint mobile he has the soccer team that he partake and he's got i don't the the alcohol drink that he has i think he has a few more i i mean that guy sound operating those companies conor of mcgregor is not operating the whiskey thing but like and i can't operate frankly i can't operate my companies either i'm focused on my real estate and everything else yeah and so my point being is if you're just if you have ten to twenty or thirty percent of a handful of things one of them could hit there's this guy named felix dennis have you ever read this awesome book of how to get rich i i love that book yeah i love that book i recommend that book to everyone it's horribly titled but it's the best book i've ever you should have equity in that book sam dude i whenever we mentioned in the pod well notice the next day goes up the charts like a ton and what he's dead now but he he built like a publishing empire that was like it made him much a a lot of money but the bulk of his wealth was he owned ten or twenty percent of this thing called micro warehouse which went public for multi billions and he made many many hundreds of millions from it and he had the same thing where he was like look i own the magazines that i'm gonna promote you guys in there for free and i'm also gonna be like an adviser but i'm gonna be considered a c founder and this was my idea and i hired you guys but he didn't manage the company he met with the with the other founders a lot and he gave it his opinion but he wasn't like running the data thing i don't see why you you couldn't do that with a few more things i think the you know the power of blowing up a brand is one thing the power of spotting and reading and hiring and del two really good operators is something is another thing as well that's underrated and something that i'm think that i'm good at finding people who really think about business the right way and to build these companies i can't operate them i'm an investor i'm an advisor and i and i pump their stuff on twitter and i'm a customer and i you know help but you gotta find somebody who really is really good at running a company and that's where i wish i i made a joke on twitter that offended a couple of my good friends a couple days ago that said like i need to do more angel investing so that i can invest in these companies i can see how these founders think about business and how they make decisions and how they write their updates and how they fight through and i can get a look into their brain and and i can spot the killers right i can find those those guys that are just really good at business and then i can pull them aside when they give up and i made a a a statement like the hell you know when they wanna leave the health that has venture capital and that's not true it was it was it was just not cool for me to say that about my buddies who had so much value of the world in in that space but anyway you're joking i was i was half joking and half being serious because i wanna pull these people away and and basically found and start and buy businesses that i think that they could come in and run great businesses that are ran like crap and just accelerate their growth and make them better dude austin reef is an amazing operator and i remember when i first met him i was probably twenty eight or twenty nine or thirty and he's younger than me he's four years younger than me and i was like you're the first person you're one of the very few people who's like my peer but younger than me who i'm i'm a little intimidated by i'm like you you i i'm i remember telling him i was like dude i'm a lot better than you had a few things you're so much better than me at a few other things and i was to the way there he listening to the way that he thinks about business problems and the way that he talks through them and the way that he paints a story and in a clear and concise way when you're asking him about his business is that's what i'm talking about think that's the ten x sir austin is the ten x or he's a hundred x exercises he's on another level but like when you're around a lot of these people and you just talk to them and you start asking questions and hearing the way they think about business you can do it too like you can just tell you can tell when somebody's different when somebody's really got it you know what dude he's the best but i would also say like andrew wilkinson a great friend of mine i don't know what his empire's is worth but in the five hundred to a billion range depending on public markets he when i talk to him i don't feel like i'm like andrew i don't feel you're out of my league you just been doing it for longer and you are really creative and you were the first person you were you were bolder and smarter than than me to like believe that this could actually become a thing and you did the thing and then you did it for years and years and you didn't give up and you never bow down you always did it your way but in terms of like your vision and my vision you know my vision now that i see you could do i'm like i don't think you're ball i think we're in the same ballpark of like hit intellect and so that's why when i see him i'm like dude you're inspiring to me because i kind of feel like we're almost the same although the results are not the same and i find that to be very inspirational and that's kind of the same for you maybe like you look at a guy like him and be like oh man andrew is is my idol yeah i that man understands leverage and delegation unlike anybody that i've ever met right he can find somebody he can he can his his brain is so good at analyzing the pros and the cons of making a bet he does business like a poker player right when the odds are in his favor he's gonna go big and he's just proven that he can make those bets better than anybody else he'd find those excellent operators and i think he's a undercover killer too i mean i know that he comes off really humble but the dude i think he's a killer too he's a killer and yeah anyone who's that successful is not not a killer yeah you're right he and he and he does a good job because he's like is a i always tease them i'm like dude you always dressed so nice when and you have slick back hair like you like have this like designer like look to you but like you're like quit acting like you're like not a killer because you definitely are he's got it why what do you what do you do with your bunny do you what do you invest in well real estate i'm not that liquid right i haven't sold a company i haven't sold any properties so i personally guarantee you know fifty million dollars plus of debt and i only have three point six million dollars liquid so i'd be foolish to start spending that on houses cars and both right so i keep a lot of cash about a million in cash i keep another another two and a half million dollars and public equities that i can create cash you trading are you trading buy i buy buy stocks and hold them for a long time i'm way too dumb to try to guess what's gonna inside of my but you didn't used to be that way i bought some dumb we talked about our friend austin reef we i bought some dumb stocks that i then sold six months later for a big loss absolutely but i'm not trying to day trade in time markets awesome douglas us all that that zillow was like the buy he was like it i buy but i it was a fair argument but we bought it at a hundred and fifty bucks it went up to two hundred and i was getting text from austin that the that you know let's let's go it is incredible now it's thirty bucks or something but now i i mean google and facebook and microsoft and apple all is the best companies in the world i'll got fifty percent cheaper so i bought a lot of those and i'm gonna hold them for five years and i'm sure that i'll do fine what's motivating you right now i just think it's fun i mean the building the building is really fun is that you i mean i wanna talk about you now too sam because your your earn outs over here how many years post exit are four years out no dude two two two years okay never mind yeah i mean you build something you sell something you have that event and then when it's over you're like well shit i kinda love i love i love building i love tinkering i love entrepreneurship in business i needed so i gave myself one year to i basically wrote the rules where i was like i'm gonna read anything that interests me whether that's so i read a lot of fiction and i read i don't read business books anymore and then i also said i'm just gonna search i'm just gonna search so i'm just gonna plot and search and just whatever interest me i'm just gonna pursue it you know i was like i was like i'm gonna a dog on a walk following on my nose and i'm not gonna like feel guilty about that and i noticed that after about six months i was ready to roll again i screw made some mistake i made some ear reverse decisions at my company like some culture decisions basically when i started the company i was twenty five and then when i about sold that i was about thirty and like i was a different person and i'm more solid on who i am now so i would have different values when i start my next things but anyway i made some mistakes so i basically kinda had to sell the company or in order to like get out and so i was pumped about it but at the same time i was like i wish i was wealth i wish i was i wasn't wealthy when i started the business i had nothing i was like i wish i was wealthy so i didn't have to sell this to get liquidity because i would have liked to have owned it forever but i was very very very happy to get that time to relax and to seek and then after about six months i was like dude i need action i need to gamble i felt i remember watching a james bond movie and i'm like should i become a cop like i need to go out and like get into trouble like i need to experience like it's the certainty i think it's like it's the it's making a decision where you don't know what the answer answer's gonna be and then waiting and seeing what happens that is just incredibly addict about entrepreneurship and business dude i just like like being a shit head with my friends i love our group chat like when it gets spicy i like think about it all the time like it's so funny and i'm like i gotta go do something now to one up the the guys here and that's how i feel so like my my best the best time i have that i love the best when it comes to work as when i'm with like my partner joe or someone like that and we're like we can't pull this off can we fuck let's go try it like that that adrenaline that's like my version of like james bond when i'm watching him like having like a card chase i'm like dude let's this is our this is our nerdy version of a card chase i need that thrill and it just so happens that the outcome typically is money and so that's what i'm motivated by is like the thrill i don't give a shit about legacy when people talk about legacy i'm like i don't give a shit dude i'm gonna i'm like imagine the feeling that you had when you before you were born that's what i think i'm have when i'm dead why do i care what people think about me you know i wanna like leave something in my children because i love them but like i don't give a fuck about what everyone else thinks i don't care about legacy i just wanna have fun and like have excitement in the moment and that's what i'm motivated by yeah making these making these business deals and these business decisions in these in these calculated bets we'll call them like them with you and and all these things i'm working on there they're just calculated bets and when you when you put the money in and you just never know what's gonna happen you never know what's gonna happen when you try to sell it when you start to get customers when you start to solve problems and it's it's addict for sure by the way well we can keep this on but producer ben we have to bleep out the name of what he just said i haven't announced that yet what can we talk about it we yeah yeah yeah can we can't say what it is but we can we can we can mention i have a thing that i'm gonna be announcing in a month i'm gonna might one month nick just said the name of it we gotta bleep that out i'll be announcing it in one month i've been doing that low key for two reasons one i wanted to prove that i can do it without my audience and two i wanted to make sure that it worked and was life changing it's a wonderful product before i i like get like an influx but i'm gonna announce that in a month what else we wanna talk about anything else i mean i mean i've been thinking a little bit about like what holds people back and anxiety and the decision making that like the having anxiety no i just mean like the uncertainty like the the fear failure like it it it's it's in everybody not that i guess anxiety is a is a bad term more like insecurity right i have insecurity and the and it holds me back from making big decisions and the problem with it is is the more insecure you are the less decisions you make and decision making is like something that you have to practice to get really good at if you don't make sure decisions with a lot on the line you have to you're never going to get better at it ever going to get better at it so then you have on made decisions and that equals stress because stress is a decision that hasn't yet been made and then it just cycles and snowball so people who are they have security they have anxiety around making decisions then they get stressed out because they have these these decisions and it's just a big compounding snowball of of like it just holds people back from kicking so much ass like every high performer that i know they they make a ton of decisions they make some of them wrong they lose some money like there's downside of course but they just make them and make them and make them and they make them quick and they get better at better at and better at and that's when the leverage kicks in and they can just build and grow and build grow my parents when i was a younger kid i would like sell cds or like sell used stuff on ebay and i i remember making mistakes and they're like oh that's alright you can't get a hit unless in the game and i was they're like you're swinging your mist but you know you gotta you gotta swing to get the hit can't get hit listed in the game i remember here in that and that like changed my life and so now whenever i screw up i'm like whatever like you know a three hundred batting average in baseball is great so i'm like that's all i need like that in business is fine in fact in business do you actually need less if you try a hundred times and one thing works that makes up for all the ninety nine things but that's what i always help you like dude you gotta see you you got it you can't get a hit listening in the game i've been asking high performers this because now i have a five year old i'm thinking about what i can do for my kids to help them just get better at making decisions and get you know more a more solid a more solid foundation in in the event of insecurity did your parents just like let you struggle a little bit like that's something that i found is real very common among entrepreneurs and successful people because so many parents nowadays they really mess up because they like shelter their kids from all decision making they like make the decisions for the kids they like they they keep them from getting in any pain at they're gonna keep them from having to deal with the uncomfortable of pain they're gonna put them in a bubble and i looked back on my parents and my my parents would like they would make me make the little decisions when i was a kid so that i got better at making the decisions and then when they they were bigger i wasn't overwhelmed with fear and insecurity i was always skateboarding and roller lighting and going to skate parks and i remember i had a uni cycle i would and i would try to write it downstairs and they were like i was crazy i was like do all this crazy stuff i remember when i was at fourth grade i could ride a uni cycle and juggle and i would do all this crazy like skateboarding shit and they would be like hey let's go to the skate park but the only rules they had was you have to wear helmet they was as the long wear helmet we don't care so i was in and out the hospital broken broken broken fingers stitches on my eye broke my arm broke my collar bone i've had a lot of broken bones and they were i always say my parents they once i left school i wasn't financially like they didn't they've never like helped me with the business or anything but they supported me up until then and so i had that but they were emotionally supportive so i remember when i left school and moved up to san francisco and told them i was gonna join this thing called airbnb they were like this sounds like a multi level marketing thing like is this like yours and i was like no guys like it's like i think it's legit like at the time i was like two or three hundred people work there it's legit and they're like you're gonna leave school to go do this and i was like yeah it's legit and and they're were like this sounds horrible but you know we'll see you saturday we'll come down there and help you move out and so like they did things like that that were like very emotionally supportive and so and that was like huge and so a lot of my friends who don't take risk oftentimes their parents were quite neuro erotic and they instead of saying why instead of saying like of course this can work they would default to saying like well this will never work because of this this and this or like you can't go study abroad like mexico is dangerous haven't you seen that there's like shootings or you know like people get sick when they do this and that like i remembered like that was used of the default versus like screw it look we'll we'll handle it when we get there yeah putting your kids in a bubble and now that i have a five year old like it sucks to watch him struggle and i and i a bunch of employees and it sucks to watch i i don't know there's there's a lot of similarities between like raising like your kids get hurt though like let's say your kid's riding a bike and he's wearing a helmet and you're like dude he's one hundred percent about the nat his teeth out if he's about to hurt himself bad and i'm gonna go the emergency obviously i'm gonna run and try to catch but if he he's still on over on the other side of call stack and he eats a curb and he falls down and he starts screaming i'm not gonna sprint over there and pick him up and cuddle him does that make sense like i'm gonna yeah i'm gonna let them i'm gonna let them figure that crap out but i just think it bleeds over into everything like if you if an employee walks in your office and they they have a problem and you just say get on my way i'm gonna solve that problem then that enables that enables them to a it doesn't let them learn how to solve problems on their own and be it it enables them to bring you more and more problems and just be completely enabled to like get shit done without you as a boss do you ben just texted me and he wanted he wanted me to ask you you you you have all three boys right i have a five year old boy three year old boy two alright ten month old girl are you gonna raise her the same way i would imagine yes right oh man i don't know i don't know if i will yeah i got you got if i have a daughter i mean this is my i'm hypothetical you're living it but i think i would definitely you gotta do it the same way right yeah yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna raise strong secure daughter for sure like hey gonna show her that i'm gonna treat her mother with a ton of respect and that her mother should never take shit from me just because i'm a man right that's that's something like you cripple women in the long run if you like enable or like lead them to be insecure so i'm gonna try to raise like a really strong confident secure girl who can yeah knows how to struggle with grace absolutely so when she falls down in her bike knocking gonna run over there either i guess well good dude i'm happy you came on i like talking to you by the way we do this thing on on on our youtube channel i'm gonna do it now i'm was supposed to do it earlier on we talk about the gentleman's agreement have you heard me say this i have not dan you're catching me i totally blind so we we've been growing our youtube subscribers at i think last month we grew by twenty thousand and the pitch was this which i stole it from this guy named jesse on fire so i'm i'm not gonna act like i came up with but it was we gil people a little bit we said hey hold on and hold on and i normally say in beginning after forgot have they do day go hold on unlike everything else on youtube our content is not for free we actually work for you and the way that you pay us back it's kinda like when you go up and buy like you up to seven eleven and you see like a jar for the muscle dystrophy and you take a piece of candy and you leave a quarter you leave a dollar that's what this youtube channel is except instead of the dollar you gotta do is click a like and subscribe on on our little channel and we work for you and so our content not free you have to subscribe if you watch more than one video and it's called the gentleman's agreement because we're not there it's a handshake so anyway that is the gentleman's agreement so you do have to subscribe to our channel but dude that pitch changed everything immediately we started close seeing close to a thousand people a day clicking subscribe so it's worth it's so you gotta have like a unique way of asking for it and and it's worked and so now we have all types of people coming up to us i had i was riding my i was on a yesterday the guy drove by goes here i honored the gentleman's agreement i swear to god it austin i had two people last week say that to me so anyway that's our gentleman's agreement so if you're listening if you've ever listened to more than one episode this is the gentleman's agreement it's an honor system you have to do it and we can't check this on you but please do it everyone's doing it apparently if we're growing almost a thousand a day but nick i appreciate you you're you what's the what's the promote it's a so support shepherd the shepherd thing support shepherd dot com so what start up dot com both storage dot com support shepherd dot com r e cost egg dot com tax credit hunter dot com web lebron dot com titan risk dot com and sweaty startup up on hand twitter twitter no and i i mean i really appreciate that i mean you bring me on here i hope your audience got something from this because the value that this will add to me is is phenomenal man you've always been incredibly supportive a remember i was trying to launch a little community around real estate and you got on a call when you're busy hell and i wasn't that big of a deal and you helped me set that whole thing up i mean the generosity sam is freaking awesome well i appreciate that and now maybe one day i'm gonna ask to be an affiliate of your affiliate or something like that so anything you need anything you need there let me know alright i appreciate you thank you very much that's the that's the pod