193. The Sweaty Startup's guide to finding top talent, with Nick Huber
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70% of people in this world are totally incompetent. And the sooner you realize that as a business owner or a manager or a leader, the faster you can accelerate your career and your business. Another sad truth in this world is that a huge chunk of our population, they get ahead by either being immoral...

or abusing mentally or emotionally. I've had the blessing of having all these Twitter followers now for five plus years, and I've started to hear their stories about how they made their money, what mistakes they've made. If you make decisions slowly, you are asking your top performers to leave. If you tolerate and surround those A players with B players and C players and people who are low performing, your A players are going to be gone. Anywhere I go, I'm hunting. Whether it's a bartender at a bar, they're slinging drinks, they're moving quick, they're efficient. Same thing at

Enterprise car rental, when you just see the madness happening and this one guy or gal is like taking charge, you can find these folks and you can hire them and you can hunt them. I also love hiring teachers. Teachers are amazing because if you can lead 35-year-olds, you can sure as hell lead 35-year-olds.

What about this term, toxic superstar? Why are you so obsessed with winning? Is there something that happened when you were perhaps a bit younger where you didn't get to win? Hold on, hold on, hold on, stop. Anything worth doing in life is hard. All the things I'm most proud of were very hard to accomplish. But I think that's what makes the winning fun is the losing. I think the mistake that hiring managers make is they try to...

Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. We are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne, I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al and I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you create amazing workplace cultures.

Today, we are joined by a genuine hero of mine, Nick Huber, sweaty startup guy, founder of Storage Squad, Bolt Storage, and also the majority investor in somewhere.com. Nick has managed to build multiple million dollar businesses without a single revolutionary idea. Instead, he's focused on what he calls boring, sweaty businesses, and he's going to talk

that actually make money. Now, as I've mentioned before, Nick's book is out this week and I got a copy about a month ago. Genuinely become one of my favorite business books of the last five years. I highly recommend you go out and buy your copy today. We don't get any money for that.

We should. We should. Nick, yes, give us some of your money. Yeah, Nick won't mind that because he's straight talking too. He's as straight talking as he is successfully cuts through all the entrepreneurial fairy tales and I'm going to change the world narratives to actually talk about what works. And while everyone else is chasing the next unicorn startup, he's quietly built a 100 million self-storage empire and now employs over 300 people worldwide.

In this episode, Nick shares some genuinely eye-opening insights about leadership and workplace culture. You're going to learn why he believes that 70% of people are totally incompetent, his words, not mine, and how to spot the rare A players who will transform your business. Nick also breaks down why leaders who make decisions slowly drive away top talent and why surrounding your best people with underperformers is the fastest way to lose them.

I was on bonus. We dig into his controversial views on global hiring because Nick's company, somewhere.com helps businesses hire overseas talent. He doesn't hold back on why he thinks most American workers are entitled compared to global counterparts. So after this very short break, join us as we learn why boring businesses might actually be the smartest path to success and why most entrepreneurs are playing the wrong game entirely. You like case studies, Leanne. Mm hmm.

Here's one from HubSpot about Sandler training and how they cut their sales cycle in half using HubSpot's AI tools. In half? That sounds a bit far-fetched, Al. The numbers are actually pretty solid. They used Breeze, which is HubSpot's AI tool suite, to personalize every customer interaction. And as a result, their qualified leads quadrupled, their click-through rates jumped by 25%, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. I think I'd

worry that using AI would kind of remove the human touch. Fair point, but not in this case. In fact, using Breeze, they actually enhanced it. So if this sounds like something you want for your organization, not you, Leanne, the listener, go to HubSpot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow. So I am joined here by genuinely someone I've followed for a lot of years. I want to say back to Reddit days, but we'll get into that in a second. Can you tell us who you are, what you do, and what you might be famous for? Al, thanks for having me. I'm a opportunist,

I do boring things over and over again to impact the most amount of people and make some money along the way. And I'm famous, I guess now because I have a book that launched this week. And the goal is to help other people make great decisions and get rich doing sweaty, normal, boring things. Books.

book's called the sweaty startup i think what's interesting about the book and about your way of of doing things is that a lot of books are like oh you can start anything why don't we revolutionize let me create the next facebook for dogs why don't we go and do this and you've taken a very very different country contrarian approach to that so talk us through what's your idea of starting a good business you ask anybody on the street what is an entrepreneur and who is an entrepreneur and what does it mean to you they're going to talk about elon musk they're going to talk about mark

uh zuckerberg they're going to talk about steve jobs they're going to talk about shark tank and product hunt silicon valley and raising money um but when i look around my town at people who are wealthy people who are doing what they want when they want people who are flying private jets and on the big beach houses and are at the nice golf clubs none of them raise capital none of them started you know revolutionary new idea businesses

Almost all of them did boring things, you know, for years. So entrepreneurship to me is finding something that works and copying it and doing it and out operating the other, the other people in the field. So in your book, you start off back at college and how you started storage squad. Um, tell me, give me the time because I have in my head this idea of a subreddit called sweaty startup. Was that you? And if so, where did, where did that come in? Yeah. 2018, I started a podcast. I was on some, um,

I was on some calls with my brother who runs a landscaping company and I was mentoring him and I'm like, you know what? I just need to, what if I started a podcast and I'm the kind of guy who just ships it. I move very fast. So I recorded a five minute episode and I posted it as the sweaty startup. And it was all episodes of different business advice that podcast still exists. Um, but I had nowhere, nobody to listen. So how can I promote this? Reddit. I started my own subreddit. I started posting an entrepreneur the other day.

the other subreddit. Um, and man, they're, they're brutally mean on Reddit. I'm glad I don't have to go back there anymore.

Well, they're brutally mean on Reddit, but also on Twitter X, whatever we're calling it these days. You went through a period of being a little bit cheekier. Some of your posts were, they got huge amounts of engagement, but they were a little bit sort of tongue in cheek, I'm guessing. When I can write, you know, 400 characters on Twitter and somebody on the other side of the world sitting on their couch doing whatever they want gets angry, like literally angry. That is, that's hugely entertaining to me. So I can't help myself, unfortunately. Yeah.

If you're listening to this and you're not following Nick on Twitter, go. Although these days you seem to be a little bit less inflammatory, but I did enjoy that period of like nine months where everybody got angry at you. It was brilliant. Let's talk about your credentials. I'm sure a lot of people will have heard of you, but if they haven't, then can you talk us through the businesses you've started from all the way from Story Squad all the way up to somewhere or Support Shepherd, I think it used to be called. Yep. So I started Storage Squad when I was in college.

brutally hard business. It was a pickup and delivery storage company, uh, for students. So when they move home, um, after university come back, um,

At our peak, we did over 2 million of revenue. We were in 12 states. We were at 25 major colleges, almost 300 part-time employees. So I learned how to operate a company in an incredibly hard business where everything happens at once, many different cities, driving trucks, packing supplies, all of it. Um, 2015, I started construction of a self-storage facility. Um,

Got it done in 2017 and realized very quickly that storage was the business to be in, not moving. That first deal went very well. Built the building for all in. We were at about $2.9 million in

And we, it's worth 10 million today. We still own it. We bought out all of our partners. It's been life changing money for my partner and I, um, we refinanced that building, bought a lot more, raised a lot of capital. We've, we've raised $40 million, um, and bought a hundred million dollars worth of self storage, 63 properties, 2 million square feet. We

I sold Storage Squad in early January 2021. A small exit, but we had no debt. It was about $1.7 million exit. Then started RE Cost Seg in 2022, became involved in Somewhere.com, used to be called Support Shepherd in 2021.

Became an investor in that business in 2022. And I bought the majority ownership stake in somewhere.com about a year ago on May 1st of 2024.

And that's when I took a pretty big swing. I raised about $20 million and borrowed another almost $10 million to make that deal happen. Are you pleased you did it? Yes, I'm pleased. It's been a stressful year. It was a stressful deal to put together, but it's growing. It's growing fast and it has unbelievable potential from here because worldwide talent is the future. And I also love Somewhere because it can fuel all of my

current businesses. Is it different managing something like commercial real estate and then going off? And how hands-on are you with somewhere? Are you actually properly CEOing in there? No, there's a team. We have a full team, but I'm very involved. I'm an operator at heart. I'm in the trenches at Bolt Storage. I'm in the trenches at somewhere. I'm in the trenches at another company that's growing really fast called RE Kostleg. It's a construction or a real estate services tax firm.

But yeah, I mean, look, I'm interviewing, I'm hiring, I'm in meetings, I'm telling people what to do. Right before we got on to record, I was meeting with my outbound sales team at Somewhere talking about changing up their script because they're not pitching our services the way I want them to. So I have a big team and our executive team is mostly in South Africa at Somewhere.com, which is another mind-blowing thing that you can find COO talent level in South Africa. But

I'm an operated heart, so I get in the trenches often. I'm going to come on to the actual idea of offshoring a little bit later on because I want to get from the horse's mouth how it actually works. Tell me about your leadership style all the way from your first employee. Was it your first employee or your brother? Was that when you started? Yeah, in my lawn care business, yeah. My style in general in leadership is to

fire quickly. I don't put up with low performers. I think the worst thing that you can do for high performers inside of your organization is surround them with low performers. A mentor of mine, Chris Powers, told me when I was kind of complaining about an employee on one of our calls, he said, Nick, fire him. What are you doing? I was like, well, I can't fire him. It's our busy season. Then I got to go pick up the pieces. We're working 80 hours a week right now. He'd be like, Nick, if you tolerate

C players. Your entire organization will become a C-level organization, and the fastest way to watch your A players walk away is to surround them with C players.

So that hit me like a ton of bricks. And it really is my style is that find high performers, enable them, keep giving them more and more and more, let them grow and grow and grow. And I wouldn't say get out of their way. I still ask the right questions and make sure each function of my business is working on the lowest hanging fruit. That's kind of my management style. Look at the sales team. Hey, what's the one most important thing on our sales team we can do?

to unlock and help us sell more. Let's do that right now. Then, you know, over in recruiting, what's the one thing that would help us recruit more and faster and have a better customer experience?

Let's all focus on that until we get it done and move on to the next thing. One of the things that I think you said in your book was that your company is only as strong as the people you hire. Now, you must have had some kind of, you just talked there about how you'd have A players, you don't tolerate C players, but has that always been the way that you've done things or something you've learned quite recently as you grew your companies? It's been an evolution. I would say who, this is going to sound bad and I'll say it though, because I think it will help people. I think

70% of people in this world are totally incompetent. And the sooner you realize that as a business owner or a manager or a leader, the faster you can accelerate your career and your business. So early in my life,

I would especially in labor jobs like moving you hire anybody who will show up to work on time and is a warm body who's not under the influence of a drug like that's just that's the way and we can get into offshoring as well into this conversation but that's that's how hard it is to find people to work in the United States so early on in my career I've put people in seats and if they were doing the job to an acceptable degree I would tolerate it for a very long time as I've

progressed and seen the power of high performers, I've just gotten better. I think if there's one area of leadership and management that I've improved upon the most in the last 15 years, it's my ability to find actual A players and get them to do really well inside my companies. How would you recognize an A player? So the only way is to work with them. Unfortunately, I have, I've yet to look, you can give people assessments.

In interview processes, I love giving them a test and having them show me what they can do that helps a lot I can really see How their mind works I can I can eliminate a lot of the landmines and the poor performers. I can give them a typing assessment I can give them a A job to do to show me what they can do 90 of the people won't even try because they don't work hard enough to actually do assessments during interview processes You're left with the bottom 10 or the top 10 and then um, you know you go from there, but I have a

I have a saying in hiring that 10% of the people have a job they love and you're not able to find them. Even if you went after them and recruited them, they have a boss that loves them and they're perfectly happy. They're in career nirvana. Then there's the bottom half of the workforce, the 10% at the bottom who's actively looking. They're actively applying for jobs. They are unemployed maybe. They need work. Then there's that 80% in the middle. And that 80% in the middle is where you find almost all the talent.

So it's through referrals. It's through hunting. It's through finding people who are doing the job that you want them to do and bringing them in. But how do you tell if they're an actual A player, an A performer, is you start to see how their mind works. You start to ask them questions and they come to you as a business owner with a problem or a leader. You're a leader in an organization. They come to you with a problem. You have two options. Get out of my way. I'll solve it, which is how 90% of people do it. It's the easy way in the near term. Or you

You're going to ask questions and you're going to figure out how their mind works and you're going to send them away with their problems so that they have to solve it. And when you do that, when you start to ask questions of the person, start to figure out how their mind works, you get two things. They get better at decision making and they become a little bit more confident in their abilities to solve problems. And number two, you get to look into their mind and see if they have what it takes and see if they're an actual A player.

But most business owners and leaders and managers, a problem comes to them. They say, get out of my way. I'll solve it. That's not the best way to do it in the long run. So does an A player evolve or is someone always an A? They start an A player and they just stay as an A player. Oh, yeah. I've seen people make massive career changes.

improvements and learn new things and adapt very quickly. And they have like almost all the A players from a management perspective have a sense of what needs to be done that's not explicit. They can sense a problem. They can predict what is the lowest hanging fruit. They can

Just naturally think about what needs to be done. Very, very, very few people can actually do that. What about this term toxic superstar where you end up having someone who is incredible, but they're an absolute asshole to be around? You ever come across that?

Yeah, there's no, I definitely don't have any patience in my organizations for people who are manipulated. Like another, another sad truth in this world is that a huge chunk of our population is like, they get ahead by either being immoral or abusing mentally or emotionally other people.

That sounds bad. It sounds like, what are you talking about, Nick? No, it's true. You just better hope you're not married to one of these people or have to work for one of these people because it will ruin your life. Because a lot of people, they get their way in this world by manipulating and playing head games and talking down to and just treating people with irrational disrespect and

there's no place for that in an organization if you want to build a place where people want to work what i really like about your book is there's so many stories in there and i really love it i hate a textbook story book where they would say this has happened and and this is what you should do have you got any stories around perhaps someone you don't necessarily need to name them but perhaps someone who you can think of as like yeah they were one of my favorite people i work with yeah there's about there's about 30 short stories in there for with lessons they're either my stories

of hard lessons that I've learned in management, business, marketing, growth, whatever, or their life or business lessons from my network. Because I've had the blessing of having all these Twitter followers now for five plus years. And that has put me in front of a lot of different people at conferences, on phone calls and emails. And I've started to hear their stories about how they made their money, what mistakes they've made.

A very hard part about writing this book was sharing all those stories with the individuals and figuring out if they were okay with me sharing them and how I needed to massage a detail about where they went to college or what city they're in so that I could actually share it. Because some of them are very tough stories. Like my buddy who was an attorney who chose that game to play. But one of my favorite all-time hires I found in a Walmart parking lot.

So I was, I was in Ithaca, New York. It was early in my, I think it was like 2013, 2014 when I was growing my moving company. I was in the truck in the parking lot answering emails on my computer. My girlfriend now wife ran in to get some groceries. It was like 8 PM. I see out of the corner of my eye flash across the screen and this Walmart employee in a vest is running through the parking lot. And I, I, it's like I saw a ghost because I'd never seen ever seen a Walmart employee move quickly.

Um, he runs around picking up a bunch of carts around. I watch him for five minutes. He's running around gathering a bunch of carts, sprinting with the cart, a whole line of them, pushing them back to the front entrance of Walmart and a Walmart sack goes tumbleweeding across the parking lot. He bends down while pushing all the carts, picks up the Walmart sack and jams it in his back pocket. I'm like, okay, hold on. Something's unique about this person.

So I shut my computer, I follow him in, I got a business card in my back pocket and I make sure our paths cross. And I say, hey man, like what's the hurry? What are you doing? Just like sparking up conversation. He goes, oh, well, the varsity basketball game is getting out in a half an hour and we got no carts and my manager is in the back and the cart guy didn't show up and we're about to get, you know, 40, 50 people show up after this varsity basketball game and we got no carts. And I'm like, okay, this guy's different. He thinks different. He has a different view on

work. He doesn't own this Walmart. He's making 12 bucks an hour, but yet he cares and he's moving quickly and he's solving problems. I pull out my card and say, hey, if you know any friends who like you who are looking to work, I pay $20 an hour. I run a company called Storage Squad. We're a moving business. There's tips as well. It's a fun job. We're on the college campus, whatever.

Well, that night he sends me an email. I interview him the next day and I hire him and he ends up working for me for four years, traveling from Washington, DC to Boston, to Ithaca, running crews, leading people. One of the best hires that I've ever made. I noticed there, you said something to him in this story. You didn't say if you're looking for a job, you said, if you know anyone, was that key? It's key. It's key because it takes the pressure off the conversation. Of course, they think about themselves above anybody else.

But I didn't want to directly solicit him for a job. It's a little bit awkward. It can be pushy almost. You just say, hey, I'm a business owner. I'm Nick. Maybe we had a three-minute conversation where I was telling him a couple more things about me planting little seeds. But yeah, it's

I'm hunting. Anywhere I go, I'm hunting. Whether it's a bartender at a bar, because 99% of the time you're at a bar and the bartender is focused on one person, won't even acknowledge you, they're slow. But sometimes you walk into a bar and there's a bartender that just has awareness and they look at you, they raise a finger, you know they're coming, they're slinging drinks, they're moving quick, they're efficient, they're just

non-verbally communicating with everybody at the bar knowing that they're going to be served. Same thing at enterprise car rental. When you just see the madness happening and this one guy or gal is like taking charge, you can find these folks and you can hire them and you can hunt them. And in your town and sweaty startups, you got to just go and find these people. I also love hiring teachers and

Teachers are amazing because if you can lead 35-year-olds, you can sure as hell lead 35-year-olds. After this very short break, we'll be back with Nick and some of his more controversial ideas on leading people and building great cultures. Hey, you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you. If you're enjoying Truth, Lies, and Work, there's another podcast on the HubSpot network that I think you're going to really, really like. Are you talking to me? Yeah.

Is this the Mistakes That Made Me podcast? Yes, it is. I've been binging this as well recently. Iman Ismail interviews these amazing business owners about their biggest business mistakes. And honestly, it is fascinating how often these massive errors lead to the biggest breakthroughs. I just love how real Iman is and hugely helpful in her advice.

In her latest episode, she's 34 weeks pregnant and breaks down exactly how she's systematizing her agency so it runs smoothly while she's on maternity leave. And of course, as a psychologist, I really appreciate how Eman is normalizing failure as just a simple part of the business journey. You can listen to Mistakes That Made Me wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back. Let's rejoin Nick and Al. Let me ask you about this pushy thing, because there's a lot of stuff in your book about pushiness. I remember there's a story, which I won't spoil it for anyone listening, but about you and your wife's or your now wife's engagement ring. How are you to manage to balance this idea of you not being pushy yourself, but also pushing people to be the best they can be? Well, I think there's two types of people in your company. There's decision makers and there's people who follow, um,

the guidance and the rules that are, that are signed out for them. And yes, they may have small decisions that they need to make on the job, whether they're doing customer service or billing or whatever that, and you teach them frameworks on how to make those decisions. But at any company, only a small few need to be the decision makers. The rest of the entire organization needs to be the executors that they're going to get, they're going to see the job and they're going to get it done. Um, so when you, when I'm, when I'm talking about a players, um,

I need people that can either follow directions, which is way easier to find an A player. Maybe that's even a B player. And then I need people who can lead and make decisions and run my company when I'm not there. An example of that is I was in a, this isn't in the book because it happened very recently. I was in an all hands meeting at my storage company and we're talking about operations and I'm starting to ask questions and they're like, oh yeah, by the way, the roof collapsed.

in Erie. It's fully repaired. The roof is back on. We have some interior work still to do for three of the tenants, but two of the tenants are now back operational business. And I'm like, hold on, wait a second. Everybody talking about a roof collapse? And they're like, oh yeah, Erie over Thanksgiving break had record snowfall. They had like four feet of snowfall in one day. It was a heavy wet snow. Maybe it was two weeks, like two big snowstorms. And our retail store, the roof collapsed.

Al, they didn't tell me about this. They're like, I was like, why didn't I know about this? And they're like, oh yeah, Nick, we know that A, you would not have been able to help us. And B, you would have been kind of a pain in our ass if we told you about this. So we went ahead and made these decisions. We solved the problem. We got three bids from GCs. We worked with the insurance company and it all happened.

And now, you know, so there's people that grow in your organization and you can trust to do things like that. Not everybody needs to be able to make those decisions and solve those problems. And that's not a true fair comparison because my business partner was involved in that conversation. But, um, just kind of example of when you, when you enable and empower people to make decisions, amazing things can happen. So from a personal point of view, how did you feel when they told you that they just deliberately did not involve you in that?

I, we have a good enough working relationship with the guy who told me that he's been with me. He was actually our main operations manager at storage squad. We hired him back in 2014. Um,

there's enough trust there that I was smiling and kind of chuckling about it. You said that there's going to be a large percentage of people who are just there and they are just following directions and they're doing a great job. Does that mean then that they should stay where they are or do they still have the ability to move up to management perhaps? Is that going to ruin them? What's your thoughts on that? It turns out, Al, that most people don't like

people problems and everybody coming to them when they want to raise and every environment being a sales environment. If you're in management at a company, every single part of your job is sales. You're selling your team on doing their job. You're selling vendors on selling to you. You're selling customers on buying from you. You're selling nonstop. And in life too, like I have to sell my seven-year-old to get his shoes on for school every morning. But some people don't like that. A lot of people don't like that.

And so, yes, I think there's something to be said for, yes, doing, working on new and more challenging projects, but

not everybody's cut out for management because management is a stressful game. Let's talk about somewhere. So you have got hundreds of remote employees around the world. You just mentioned South Africa, which I'd heard about South America. I'd heard about the Philippines. Didn't know South Africa was a big thing. What do you wish people knew about recruiting people in a different country that they don't now? So I have an abundance mindset in every area of life. Al, you making money doesn't mean there's less money for me.

My neighbor making money doesn't mean there's less money for me. The guys that I play golf with at the country club winning and doing really well in life does not mean that there's less opportunity for me. I think that there's plenty to go around and that there's plenty to do. And the only thing that happens when things get more efficient and cheaper is that quality of life goes up. People love complaining about offshoring. And what they don't tell you is that this iPhone, this iPhone was assembled by somebody making $2.75 an hour.

But they all want to buy this iPhone for under $1,000. And if it was $2,000, they would complain. Same thing happens when they go to Walmart or they order things on the internet is that people have an insatiable desire for cheap goods because that improves their life. They can buy more things to make their life better the cheaper things are. So there's never been a problem of not enough work to do in America. When the lawnmower was invented...

100 years ago, they said, oh man, this is going to kill a lot of jobs because everybody's running around with those, you know, body powered choppers for to mow lawns. No, it just made it so that less humans needed to spend time mowing lawns and they went on to do other things to make life better. I feel the same way about

off-shoring, you know, low, medium, and even high skilled jobs, frankly. So we've talked about how off-shoring, and am I using, is off-shoring, is that the right term? Is that what you're using? Yeah, hiring somebody that's not within your country's borders. So we've talked about how it makes the person who's doing the hiring, makes their quality of life go up. But there is an argument that you're exploiting someone because you're paying them a tenth of what you'd pay them in, say, America. So what's your answer to that? Yeah, I think the, that's the main argument that I get from Americans on Twitter and on social media is,

Um, but who, who's to say that a human in America is better or more entitled than a human in South Africa or a human in the Philippines? Um, these folks are making like, I, this was pretty early in my career. I actually didn't tell the story in my book and I don't tell it very often.

Um, we had hired maybe 10 or 15 Filipinos to work for my self-storage company, an average of an average of about $800 a month market rate for a U S based customer service rep at that time was 35 to 40 K a year. So we were looking at going from $20 an hour down to $4 an hour for labor saved about 80%. Um, and one of the, one of my reps got on the call. I won't say her name because she still works with us. She's like, um, Nick, I just want you to know that like this job is

I was like, fast forward to three months ago, I was getting on a bus in Manila and riding a packed bus for an hour and a half to get to a job where I earned a dollar 90 an hour. And now, um, my mom is sick. My sister went from, it's going to sound crazy to say this. My sister went from being a prostitute to being able to stay home and care for my mom in my house because of this job. So all the people who tell me that I'm, you know,

They literally call me a slave owner for employing people in Africa and Asia and India and Europe and Latin America and South America. I don't think they understand that these opportunities are massive opportunities for the people abroad. And with an abundance mindset, I really honestly do not believe it takes away opportunity from Americans.

or brits if you are employing someone i'm guessing there's going to be slight nuances in how they work and the strengths perhaps they've got as a culture talk me through that hiring internationally is hard but some regions have massive strengths south africa is a sales hub you can find sales people who are highly trained sales people have sold high ticket items they're closers

You can find sales managers. You can find CFOs. The finance is massive. There's a huge amount of South Africans who, it's called chartered accountants there, who get on an airplane and fly to New York City every year for three months to do audit and tax work for Big Four, Pricewaterhouse, Deloitte. You can hire those people for $3,000 a month, full time. It's a game changer. So South Africa, I love for finance, for sales.

Also executive assistants, general assistance roles, customer service, of course. The Philippines is the original outsourcing destination. Like there's a massive culture there. There's skyscrapers in downtown Manila of call centers. People have been working remotely and for US-based companies for a really long time. Average typing speed is high there. Cost is low. It's one of the lowest cost places in the country to hire. The culture is very different from Western culture and you don't

You don't get as much management, upper level talent out of the Philippines. Latin America is an amazing technical hub, developers, and also creative graphic designers, audio engineers, construction hub in Latin America, meaning architects, civil engineers, project managers, operations managers. And I love recently, I love hiring paralegals in Latin America because you can be a licensed attorney in Columbia and you're making like $1,200 a month. So yeah,

Every area is different. There's financial analysts who can work magic and excel in Egypt, $750 a month, under $4.50 an hour for... In Cairo, Egypt is one of the most low cost of living major cities in the world. Sri Lanka is an amazing resource for legal assistance, general assistance, customer service, great English, hardworking, huge remote work environment. And then there's Portugal, Romania, Poland for...

tech, digital marketing, SEO, front end, back end development, iOS development. So that's somewhere we're literally, we're exploring the entire globe to find the best talent of each type. So I'm learning a lot about this as I go. Is there a different approach to work, perhaps, if you live in a country where it is more difficult to earn good money? I think there is a lot of entitlement in America right now, unfortunately.

There's a lot of people who think that they're just entitled to the highest wages in the world. They're entitled to the highest standard of living in the world. But, you know, when it comes to working for it and adding value to society, sometimes that's not quite aligned to the expectations. When you hire somebody in Colombia and Brazil and Mexico and South Africa, they realize that working for a U.S.-based company is a massive opportunity, not only for them, but for future generations, and it can change the trajectory of their entire life.

So which one of those two people is going to come into a job with more energy and more to prove? Let's talk about one of the other things I saw in your book, which is execution is a thousand times more important than your idea. Now, I'd love to go down the rabbit hole of actually business ideas, but this podcast is more about how you actually sort of implement ideas around work culture. So if someone's hitting a growth phase, what do they normally end up messing up when it comes to their people? If you're interested in the business ideas that I like that are not

sexy, innovative, I have a resource that folks can download. It's sweaty startup.com slash ideas. There's 200 plus small, small, boring business ideas that are low risk to start. I think the mistake that hiring managers, leaders and companies make is they try to, they love new ideas. They're addicted to innovation within their business. When in reality, it's

more often than not, my job as leader of several of these companies, more often than not, is just to settle people down and get them focused on the most simple thing that's going to be proven to work. Whether we're copying what a competitor is doing, or we are just going in and tweaking something in a very small way, or changing the way we do our sales pitch, or changing the ad that we're writing. Whereas a lot of people on my team come to me and say,

Nick, we have to do this totally new, different thing where we go do psychometric testing, for example, on our people. And we're going to implement all of this crazy stuff. And I'm like, hold on, hold on, hold on, stop. Take a step back. Let's accomplish our near-term goals first. And let's do what's proven to work. Let's look at our competitors to analyze our competitors. Let's figure out what they're doing and what's working for them. And let's iterate on that and improve that and implement it into our business. So

I love slow, well, quick, but simple things.

iteration. You talk about franken-businesses, I think, in your book. I'm going to coin a new phrase, franken-culture, where you go out and collect ideas from other cultures. You've said the word boring probably more often than I think anyone I've ever interviewed. And your whole idea is you build boring, reliable businesses. How are you avoiding that whole idea of an exciting idea that makes you go, oh, we could change the world? Does that ever appeal to you? I look at it as

What's fun and what's not fun? The idea of doing something innovative and world-changing is very, very fun. That idea has that allure. But in reality, what's fun is winning, making more money this month than you made last month, growing your team, selling new customers, making even more money, making changes, watching them happen, iterating, and then, oh, wait, now we're winning even more. Winning is fun. Losing sucks. So in my opinion, I don't care what I'm doing.

I'm industry agnostic. I don't care how sweaty it is, how boring it is, how fun it is, how exciting it is. I don't care what I want. I want to be like a cup of water at the top of a mountain. You empty a cup of water. It's going to find the quickest route down, the path of least resistance. That's me as an entrepreneur. My job is not in business. There's no extra points. It's not an Olympic gymnastics routine or David Goggins workout. There's no extra points for doing something really, really hard.

So why wouldn't I pick the best opportunity that's the easiest, that's the simplest, that allows me to win? Because winning is really fun. So I think a lot of people get caught up on those ideas when they should focus on, hey, let's figure out what the lowest, you know, lowest barrier to entry way to win here is. Let's do that. My editor actually tried to get me to remove this from my book. But I said, when you go after an opportunity, choose your competition wisely. Do you want to play basketball against LeBron James or do you want to play basketball against a fifth grade girl?

The winning, the winner gets money every single month from a cash flowing business. You want to go to Silicon Valley and compete against the Stanford grads or do you want to compete against the plumber down the street with a fax machine on their desk? The choice is yours. To me, losing really isn't fun. Like getting no momentum, getting no customers, having no money, that's not fun. So it

you know, building an organization and growing and watching the company grow. I mean, look, there's, I have over 300 employees across my, um, you know, portfolio of companies and they all have a better life than they did before I was around. That's really, really rewarding and fun. So are any of my businesses are shattering groundbreaking? No, actually, actually all of my businesses are doing exactly what at least 10 to 20 other competitors are doing.

But I've made a really good life because I can execute and I can lead and I can manage and I can sell all those things that people forget about. You are now a long way from not having any money. So as your wealth starts to increase and it will increase, it'll pick up speed now, won't it, with all of your investments. Do you think there will be a time where you'll start being a bit more risky and say, do you know what? I am going to throw 10 million at this idea. That's when it's time to change the world.

You want to change the world. You want to do a tech startup. You want to go try to do something nobody's ever done before. Get rich first. You either need to be rich or you need to have very wealthy parents and not be afraid to live in their basement. That's when it's time to go try to change the world. But man, a tech startup, a world changing business, trying to compete with Elon Musk, doing these things when you have no network, no money and no operational chops, like you've never ran a business before.

Forget it. Forget it. You're playing basketball against LeBron James, having never picked up a basketball before. The entire theme through the book is choosing your competition to the point where you have an exercise where you on a Saturday night, you rang lawn care companies. I think it was to see who'd pick up. Why are you so obsessed with winning? Is this something that happened when you were perhaps a bit younger where you didn't get to win?

No, I, the funny thing is, is that I've always, well, I've, look, I've struggled with everything. Anything worth doing in life is hard, whether it be sports or business or dating or having kids and all of the most, all the things I'm most proud of were very hard to accomplish. But I think that's what makes the winning fun is the losing.

Um, I would never lose just to lose. I would never play a game where the deck is stacked against me, but inevitably you're going to have losses and you're going to have mistakes and you're going to have hard times. I tell a ton of those stories in the book about just how hard this can be. Um, but I think that's what makes the winning. That's what makes building a profitable company so fun because it is so hard. So, um, yeah, it's not,

You got to be competitive for sure to want to be an entrepreneur. What people don't understand about entrepreneurship and leadership is that it's directly applicable to working at a company. And I spend a lot of time with high performing employees, almost my entire network. There's just not that many entrepreneurs in the world. So a lot of my friends in town, a lot of my network is very high performing employees. They do their job very well. I talk to them about what frustrates them at work or why they leave jobs.

And there's themes. There's themes. And this is what not to do if you're trying to lead and manage a team. Number one, if you make decisions slowly, you are asking your top performers to leave. And number two is if you tolerate and surround those A players with B players and C players and people who are low performing, your A players are going to be gone. So an A player, if they come to you and say, hey, look, there's a better way for me to do my job.

I have this idea, that idea, and the other idea. We can all agree that this is the better way to do the job. And you as a leader, if you talk a big game and do nothing, that is the recipe to have an extremely frustrated team and a team that will eventually walk away. And if it's a big office politics game where there's one really high performer and there's three other low performers on the team and they've come to you as a manager and says, hey, look, this person's not doing their job.

Hey, look, they messed up again. Hey, look, this is making me work Saturday nights because I'm picking up the slack for this other person. And you refuse to let that person go because either it's too big of a company or there's a bureaucracy. I know in America, we have a very open economy for letting people go who are not doing their jobs well. Other places in the world, the UK included, is very hard to let somebody go. So at major corporations, there can be people who are low performers and make it 40 years. There's nothing worse for high performers. So as a leader-

That's just something to be aware of. If you tolerate those C players, your entire organization will become a C player organization and you're going to watch your A players walk away. You said something there that A players come to you and say, look, there's a better way to do my job. I think my worry would be

If I say, oh, cool, okay, give it a go, and it completely goes wrong, do you have to have some kind of judgment around that? Or do you just generally say, go on, give it a go? Well, they're generally asking for a way that you can make their life easier. So generally, it's your job. But many times I'll say, no, look, I disagree.

We don't need to be focused on adding X, Y, and Z complexity to our business. We need to do this, that, and the other better. And there's lower hanging fruit. I have a lot of big idea people that work for me and I'm constantly reining them in and saying, hold on, let's focus. Hold on, let's focus. There's a difference between that and them saying, damn it, I'm putting this stuff in Microsoft Excel for four hours a day. Get me an executive assistant in the Philippines for $4 an hour to do this. I make $4.

I'm one of the highest paid people at the company and I'm doing this work over and over and over again and it's making my life suck. And the boss says, oh yeah, I hear you. We'll think about getting you somebody else to help you with this. And then nothing happens. But I also think like from the employee side, like from the employee side, there are things that you can do as well, which is before you take a job is just understand, is it a big conglomerate that there is no way they're going to change anything about the way they do business. A lot of people, a lot of employees walk into these situations and

And they work for one of the largest companies in America. They go to New York City and work for JP Morgan. And they get in on the floor, the 57th floor on 51st Street in New York City. And they say, hey, there's a better way to do this, guys. And the boss says, honey, we've been making over a billion dollars a quarter for 50 years. I don't need your ideas around here.

So if you're an idea person who wants to move up quickly through an organization, don't go to the big bureaucracy. Don't go to the place where you can hide without doing anything. And you can last 40 years. And the person with the most tenure who shows up early to meetings and does the best at office politics gets the most weight, you know, increase in salary, work for a company where the owner is aggressive. It's a small team, the company's growing, and you can, you can do really, really well there. But another big part of it is just a,

look down the hall at somebody who's winning the game you're about to play. A massive mistake people make is they pick the wrong game, the wrong career altogether. A lot of people, a ton of people want to be doctors and lawyers. This is a very confrontational or not widely accepted view that I have is that I don't know very many 45-year-old doctors and lawyers who aren't obese or

overworked, divorced, depressed, or an addicted to substances, but very rich. So look down the hall, look where you're headed. Look, if I play this game and I'm about to win this game and I'm very good at it, what happens to me? Very few people who pick a career actually spend the time thinking about, you know, what does it look like if I win? I had a friend who was a super high performer, super high performer in college athletics, went, got a damn near perfect score on the LSAT.

which is the pre-attorney test to get into law school in America. Went to Columbia Law, which is one of the best law schools in America. Got a clerkship with the best judge, studied and worked all the time, and then got a job at the most prestigious litigation firm in the country in Washington, D.C., William & Connolly. Got a job there. Three years into the job, he is kicking ass, making a million dollars a year, working 90 hours a week,

He had found a way to get married after some, you know, relationship issues because of how much he was working. Um, and his wife got pregnant and he was going to deliver a baby in October. This was, this was July. He went to see his boss and his, and one of the partners at the firm said, Hey, we're putting you on this case in New York city. Cause it's a litigation firm. Like they're, they're arguing in court and they're in hotel rooms. We're putting you on this case with one of our biggest clients in New York city. Um,

You're going to, you're about to go to New York city for four to six months. And he goes, Hey, I can't take this. Like you got to put somebody else on this because I'm going to miss the birth of my baby. My first baby is coming in October. This court case starts for September 1st. I can't do it. Like find a different one. And the partner told him, Hey, uh, it's not how this works.

Like any attorney in any attorney in this country would kill to be in your position. You're getting paid a million dollars a year. If you make partner in three years, you're gonna be making 5 million a year for the rest of your life and on up. Like this is what we do. He's like tough love. This is what we do. And so here's, here's my friend had won. The game was the best of the best went to the best law school, got the best score, got the best clerkship, got the best job. He won the game that he was playing.

And he finds himself looking at a guy across from a partner who was overweight, divorced, alcoholic, but had a big ass beach house in the Outer Banks. He's like, is this the guy I want to be? And he told that partner to fuck off, rose a giant fit in the office. It was a very, very sad deal. Very, very sad deal. He walked away. And it's a heartbreaking story about how if you pick the wrong game to play, even if you win,

Is it really, really what you want? I'd like to know, you've grown from two people to now over 300 people across multiple different companies. If you were to go back again, at what point would you start thinking about creating a good workplace? Is it important in the first 20, 30 people? Yeah, you got to treat people with respect. You got to be direct. You got to be a good communicator. You got to understand that

relationships are really complicated. And if you are stubborn, if you're straightforward and other people have issues and, or you have a temper, like tempers ruin careers. It's really sad. Um, if, if you have some of those early on issues, then you're not going to be able to grow past a couple of people. Nobody's going to work for you, want to work for you, but actually structuring a company

And setting clear expectations and have people who manage people is a whole new skill. And it's not always easy, I'll say. So I still have a lot to learn about that. I'm learning fast and I think I'm getting good at it. But yeah, once you get over 30 people, it gets hard. When someone finishes the book, they've put it down, they've just finished it. What do you really genuinely hope they've learned? I hope they are better equipped to pick what game to play.

Meaning finding an opportunity. The whole first section of the book is about picking the opportunity. I hope they have understood what skills are important, whether it be hiring, management, decision-making, delegation, sales, and picked up a lot along the way on how to do those things better because I tell a lot of very tactical things on how to improve those.

And then the whole last section of the book is about people because you can't do this alone. So it's about, you know, how to treat people, how to make decisions with people, how to train people to be extensions of you, how to delegate tasks, how to delegate decisions. And then the last chapter I kind of had fun with and gave people a lot of very practical life advice that they might not get, but kind of things that I wish when I was 20 or 25, I would have read and kind of

how to think about kids, how to think about career, how to think about what spouse you pick, how to think about, you know, how you design your life and your health, your fitness, you know, because in reality, you know, money and business is a part of it, but we also have

families and we have our bodies and we have our physical environments that doesn't matter how good we are at business. Some of those other areas can really ruin your life if you don't have, you know, enough energy put there in the right way. So I want people to read that book and kind of feel like they're

but also well-equipped to go make some more money. Is there any other part? We've got this link, sweatystartup.com forward slash ideas. Is that a good place for people to start? Yeah, go download that list of business ideas. And then there's some other resources. That's the best place. Go to sweatystartup.com slash ideas. That'll also put you on my newsletter and you can get my thoughts every week on, you know, management, on opportunities, on marketing and kind of how I think about business and life.

Thank you so much, Nick. It's been a genuine pleasure and a career highlight for me. Thank you so much for your time. I love your stuff. Thanks for having me on. That was Nick Huber, author of The Sweaty Startup and founder of not one, not two, but multiple million dollar businesses. It's really refreshing to hear someone cut through all this startup nonsense.

Nick focuses on what actually works, which is boring, reliable businesses that make money from day one. What we're saying is boring is a new sexy. We are exactly saying that. We are. My stock is going up then.

I personally, I really enjoyed Nick's interview and his approach to team building. He is very clear, he's very direct and he is focused on hiring people who solve the problems and make the decisions. Look, I might not entirely agree with everything in his approach as a psychologist, but

And that's just the case with most fast moving entrepreneurs and businesses. It's just the way it is. You can't always do things, you know, by the book. So it's nothing against Nick and his ways. But what I do think he's tapping into is something that a lot of leaders overcomplicate. He's not spending time on these personality tests or frameworks, which, let's be honest, can be

absolutely useful in the right hands but they're not often in the right hands and they're not magic and they don't predict performance all that well in terms of the different psychological assessment methods we can we can use and if they are misused and they can actually be more confusing and more harmful if you don't know what you're measuring or why it's not a good place to start so what nick's really getting at is just really good job design

So understanding what the role actually involves and then finding people who can do that well. And that's the bit I completely, completely agree with. And I think as well, his point about high performers leaving when they're surrounded by low performance. Yeah, this is absolutely right. It's backed by research as well. There's a recent study that showed that nearly 7% of people said that working with low performance dragged down team morale and 44% said it made them more likely to leave. So yeah, it

brilliant advice from Nick there. If you want to learn more about Nick's approach, go and grab a copy of his book, The Sweaty Startup, or check out sweatystartup.com forward slash ideas for his list of 200 low risk business ideas and some leadership ideas in there too. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review. It makes our day. As Leanne said on Tuesday, it makes our day when we see a notification of a new review coming through. So make us happy. Yeah, it really would make us happy. What would also make us happy? I sounded really sad then. Because it's a lot

Fowl podcasting. It is. You don't always know in the moment how people respond and like it. No, we need to play some sad music here. I was going to say, are we back next week? Yeah, no, we would. And we hope you're back next week too. We'll be back next Tuesday with our regular This Week in Work, which includes our news roundup, our heart take and our surgery. But we're actually recording this tomorrow because we're on holiday next week, as I might have mentioned earlier.

Last week, I may be a bit harsh when I said I won't think about you at all. I probably will because it's inevitable, isn't it? How could I not? You're my people. But we're always telling you lovely listeners to make sure that you try and set these boundaries between work and life, that you try and, if not balance, some kind of healthy integration. So we're doing the same and having an entire week off. So there'll be no LinkedIn. There'll be no guest interviews. There'll be no recording. There will just be sunshine and tapas.

Spain, as I'm sure you guessed. That's where we're going. Northern Spain. Going to eat a drink away around an area we've not spent that much time in. We have been up to northern Spain over a period of like two months, but we're going to go properly in depth. Spain, we're going to get inside you. Yes, we are, in a non-creepy way. I might be a bit creepy. You're very creepy. The good news is, though, that nothing will change for you. You won't even notice that we're gone.

You'll still have the regular Tuesday edition. We'll also be bringing you a full interview that we did recently with a CEO of mine, Dr. Sarah Hughes, the full unedited, unfiltered version. And I have to say, this interview really did stay with me. Sarah is incredible and she spoke so honestly today.

and powerfully about the reality of mental health and mental illness in the UK. Some things to expect. She talked about the serious gaps in how we support people with complex mental illness. And it was that call to action that actually inspired our episodes on

on psychopathy and on schizophrenia. Sarah also talks about the social and economic cost of getting it wrong and why we can't just drop in a wellbeing programme and hope for the best. So just so you know, as I said, there is content in this interview that's never been heard before. There are some heavy themes in there. So you have been warned. So we'll speak to you very soon. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye.