AI transcript
0:00:05 Here’s an oldie but a goodie from the archives from the Side Hustle Show Greatest Hits collection.
0:00:10 Do you know how much cash flows through your hometown on a monthly basis?
0:00:13 Here’s a guide to diverting some of that money your way.
0:00:19 What’s up? What’s up, Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show because
0:00:25 opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.
0:00:31 Hat tip to Thomas Edison for that one. It’s a good quote though and an appropriate one for
0:00:35 today’s show. I’m excited to welcome Nick Huber to the program. Nick, what’s up, man?
0:00:40 Nick, thanks for having me. You bet. I’m a big fan of everything you do, so I’m glad to be here.
0:00:45 Well, thank you for tuning in. Nick is the co-founder of Storage Squad, which answers
0:00:49 the question students have of what do I do with my stuff over the summer? Well,
0:00:53 you give it to Storage Squad, they pick it up, they store it, they deliver it back to you
0:00:59 when you need it again. It’s a company that’s grown to over $3 million in sales since starting
0:01:05 as a little part-time project back in 2011. Nick is also the host of the Sweaty Startup
0:01:11 podcast at sweatystartup.com. I think that’s my favorite podcast name that I’ve come across lately,
0:01:18 and I invited him here to help us walk through his Sweaty Startup Idea Framework. That is,
0:01:25 how can you start a low-risk, low-overhead, local, service-based business? How can you set it up for
0:01:31 success? And how can you let that be the vehicle that drives you away from a lifetime of cubicle
0:01:36 slavery? Stick around in this one to hear Nick’s thoughts on generating service business ideas.
0:01:41 You can start today how to go about evaluating the market and competition and scoring your first
0:01:46 customers. That’s why I think this is pretty exciting. It doesn’t take many customers to begin
0:01:52 to make a meaningful income here. Nick, let’s get into this and generate some service business
0:01:57 ideas. This is the biggest pain point that I hear from side hustle show listeners over and over again.
0:02:03 I just need an idea. If I have that magical idea, I know I can go get started as you’re advocating for
0:02:08 a different type of idea. Something that has already been done, it’s already been proven,
0:02:12 and it just needs somebody to go out there and execute on it better. Let’s dive into this stuff.
0:02:17 Where do you suggest people start when they’re looking for that first side hustle idea, first
0:02:23 business idea? Yeah, absolutely. The reason why I’m so excited about this is I bought a house
0:02:29 about a year and a half ago, and I didn’t realize how hard it was to find people who were willing
0:02:34 to service your home, whether it’s cleaning the carpet, washing the windows, power washing the
0:02:38 driveways, the hundreds of businesses that people are outsourcing and outsourcing more and more.
0:02:43 I think about my grandfather and my dad and how they were good with their hands and they knew
0:02:47 how to do everything and they fixed their own stuff and they did their own things in their home.
0:02:51 I don’t know about you, Nick, but I am not that way. I think a lot of the next generation of
0:02:55 homeowners are not that way. What they’re doing is they’re reclaiming their time. They want to
0:02:59 spend more time with family. They want to spend less time tinkering in the garage, so they are
0:03:04 literally outsourcing everything that has to do with home ownership. Same with businesses.
0:03:07 Businesses are focusing on what they do best, outsourcing a lot of other things.
0:03:13 I think a lot of brilliant, bright entrepreneurs are missing these business ideas that are right
0:03:18 in our backyards or in our small towns or in our big cities that we can get out and
0:03:22 touch and feel and do ourselves. That’s the trend that I’m seeing out there.
0:03:27 No, absolutely. I can see that trend just as myself personally compared with
0:03:33 generations past and my father. He was able to do that is an interesting idea. You’re saying,
0:03:39 oh, plus combine that with more people getting higher level education instead of going to the
0:03:44 trades. There’s a shortage of this type of skilled worker. As a listener of the show,
0:03:49 you should come in and fill that gap or you could come in and fill that gap as a potential
0:03:54 entrepreneurial venture. A big part of this is competition. When I’m looking at e-commerce
0:03:59 or freelancing or Amazon FBA and these businesses that are amazing because they’re location
0:04:02 independent. You can work online. You can work from anywhere. There’s not a whole lot of barriers
0:04:08 to entry. I look at the amount of people flooding those markets and the people that are not
0:04:12 necessarily geographically limited. You’re competing with people from all over the world
0:04:17 in some other areas. Pakistan, places where this kind of work is taught in schools a lot.
0:04:22 People are more affordable dollar per hour to do this kind of work. I look at the competition.
0:04:25 When I look at the competition in these home service businesses, I don’t think a lot of
0:04:29 these people consider themselves entrepreneurial. I don’t think a lot of them are very innovative.
0:04:34 A lot of them are running their businesses like it’s 1985 with a fax machine, not a whole lot of
0:04:42 email even. They’re doing business like it’s 1985. I think a smart young entrepreneur with today’s
0:04:47 technology can really carve out a very interesting piece of the pie on these businesses that are
0:04:51 already in our cities. They’re already operating. They’re already profitable. More importantly,
0:04:54 as we’ll talk about here in a second, they’re easy to study and it’s easy to find out if you can carve
0:05:00 out a piece of the pie. Yeah. This was something where we were shopping for a home cleaning service
0:05:05 as an example of something that we’ve begun to outsource ourselves. It was just like you’re
0:05:12 describing. Every website, if they even had a website was from 20 years ago, it was all this
0:05:17 contact us for a quote and we’ll get back to you in five business days. The service we ended
0:05:21 up going with is called Handy. It was just like an app. I didn’t have to talk to anybody. It was
0:05:26 like $40 off your first cleaning or something. It was like this price seems reasonable. I don’t
0:05:29 know. Nobody else, I didn’t want to bother calling them for a quote. I don’t know if they’re
0:05:33 overcharging me. I’m sure they’ve got some technological overhead and development in this app,
0:05:38 so there probably is some margin in there. All they are is a matchmaker. They hook me up with
0:05:43 local cleaners who I otherwise wouldn’t have been in touch with and they just play this middleman.
0:05:48 The developers of Handy aren’t the ones coming out scrubbing the toilet. They’re just playing
0:05:53 a matchmaker in a way similar to what Chris Schwab was doing with ThinkMades on the podcast
0:05:59 maybe a year and a half ago. What kind of questions aside from maybe do I have a tech
0:06:03 advantage or do I have a customer support advantage? That was Chris’s whole thing,
0:06:07 was like, “I went on Yelp. Nobody was complaining about the cleaning. They were complaining that I
0:06:11 couldn’t get a hold of anybody. I took a while to get a quote. I didn’t know when the people were
0:06:15 coming.” What other questions can people ask if they’re evaluating different service business
0:06:20 ideas? Yeah, so number one for me is I avoid things that people are passionate about. That’s
0:06:24 the number one question. Is anybody passionate about doing this? Because if there’s a lot of
0:06:29 people who are passionate about it, then there’s probably a high level of participation and the
0:06:34 odds of success are probably a little bit lower. This would be like starting teaching yoga or
0:06:39 something. Exactly, right. The things that are fun, the things that people are hobby-oriented,
0:06:44 restaurants, brewing beer, things that are fun. Those are the things that if other people are
0:06:48 kind of having fun doing that, they’re maybe not going to make wise business decisions. They’re
0:06:51 going to undervalue their time. Those aren’t the kind of people that I want to compete with if I’m
0:06:54 starting a business. Which goes counter to most advice of like, “Well, pick something you’re
0:06:59 passionate about.” I know. I know. I’m passionate about building something. I’m passionate about
0:07:03 entrepreneurship and I’m passionate about taking steps forward every single day. I want to do what
0:07:07 I want to do in my free time right away from work. The goal here for me is have a five-year plan so
0:07:11 that I don’t have to work a whole lot. I can do what I’m passionate about and not be stressed out
0:07:16 about earning money doing those things. What else? I look at a rising demand. Like I said,
0:07:20 people are outsourcing more. The pie is getting bigger every single day. 20 years ago, 5% of
0:07:26 people paid someone to come mow their lawn. Today, 40% of people do. I’m guessing 10 years from now,
0:07:30 that number will be well over 50%. There’s more and more and more customers coming on the market
0:07:36 every single day that are using these local services. The big one is competition. We already
0:07:40 touched on it a little bit. If you’re looking at who you’re competing with and what kind of models
0:07:47 they’re using, it’s pretty easy to choose a local service business based on how they do business,
0:07:51 then try to compete with the tech entrepreneurs, the online entrepreneurs who are not necessarily
0:07:56 location dependent and really, really good at what they do. Okay. That’s interesting. So not
0:08:03 necessarily going out to conquest somebody else’s customer, not necessarily trying to steal market
0:08:08 share, but just, hey, there’s a rising tide of people outsourcing their lawn mowing, their home
0:08:14 cleaning. We talked to a woman a few weeks ago who was doing pet waste removal. And what else
0:08:19 is cool about that is the house is going to keep getting dirty, the grass is going to keep growing,
0:08:24 the dog is going to keep pooping in the backyard. You’re setting yourself up for a recurring stream
0:08:28 of revenue as long as you can keep doing this work or contracting people to do this work with you.
0:08:34 Absolutely. So in my mind, every business has either an employee problem or a customer problem.
0:08:37 Most businesses, they have customer problems. They can’t find enough customers to get the
0:08:42 revenue to build the business to be profitable. A lot of these industries and we’ll look at how
0:08:45 to actually analyze and figure out where the problem is. They don’t necessarily have customer
0:08:48 problems. There’s enough customers. They have employee problems. And I learned this when I
0:08:52 bought my house and I needed to get some things done. I would call an esteem cleaner for the house
0:08:56 when we moved in. I wanted somebody to build out my closet. I was looking for somebody to put
0:09:00 shelves in my garage. I was looking for somebody to put pest control around my house mow my lawn.
0:09:06 And I would call 10 companies and seven would answer the phone. Three were not taking new clients.
0:09:10 The other four took a really long time to come out and even look at my home.
0:09:14 It wasn’t like, okay, you know, I’m eager to get this business. I need this business.
0:09:18 They all have employee problems. They don’t have customer problems. That makes sense. So
0:09:22 they have trouble delivering the service and meeting the demand based on how many
0:09:26 employees or how their systems are designed. They don’t necessarily have a marketing
0:09:30 employee problem because the demand in some of these areas is so strong.
0:09:34 If you are mystery shopping these companies, you’re calling these companies up. I imagine
0:09:38 if they’re saying, hey, it’s going to be two to four weeks before we can get out to you,
0:09:42 that’s a good sign in your case because you’re like, okay, maybe there’s clearly
0:09:46 more demand than there is supply here. Absolutely. Lead time is number one.
0:09:51 So when I’m analyzing opportunities, I like to make a list of 10 businesses that I could
0:09:55 potentially offer with my current skill set with what I already equipment that I have. You know,
0:09:59 it’s 10 different businesses that I could start in a low risk way. And the first thing that I’m
0:10:05 looking at when I start to poke around is lead time. How long is it going to take you to come out
0:10:10 and give me a quote or build my closet or do whatever it is that I need to have done? How
0:10:12 long is that going to take? And you’ll be really surprised when you get on the phone with some
0:10:16 of these companies and they’re like, oh yeah, we’re booked out four weeks basically all the time.
0:10:20 And when we’re really busy in May, June, July, it’s more like six or seven weeks,
0:10:25 six or seven weeks for us to come out and do this. And that is not a joke. I just call around a
0:10:30 bunch of companies to put a little sidewalk down to my lower entrance to my basement because I
0:10:33 want to put it on Airbnb. And I called about 10 companies. Most of them answered the phone, most
0:10:38 of them were professional, but only two have come out and actually talked to me. And I made
0:10:43 all those calls about three weeks ago and only one has already gotten me a quote. So 10% of the
0:10:47 companies that I called have actually come out and delivered a quote and it’s been over two weeks
0:10:51 since I made those calls. More with Nick in just a moment, including more ways to come up with
0:10:57 service business ideas and how do we evaluate which ones to actually move forward with right after
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0:13:12 details. Interesting. So you’re kind of starting from the point of like what would I need done in
0:13:19 my own house? Any other kind of starting points to seed this initial list building exercise?
0:13:23 Yeah. I mean, I have a list on my website. It’s what a startup of literally about 200 different
0:13:27 services. It’s the long tail of these service businesses. You don’t necessarily have to limit
0:13:32 yourself to house painting or pest control. You can get very, very, very specific. Like if you
0:13:37 learn how to build one random example is a steam shower. I was interested in converting a steam
0:13:41 shower in one of my bathrooms because I think it’s really a healthy thing to do. I was kind of into
0:13:47 it. So I looked on Google and there is one company in the state of Georgia that does this. One company
0:13:52 that install steam showers. They wanted a $300 nonrefundable deposit to even come out and look
0:13:57 at that job. Because they can. They can’t. Yeah. They just can’t solve the employee problem to
0:14:01 service more customers. They have constraints in those regards. So you can get very creative.
0:14:05 Like think of anything that you could possibly need done. Like building out custom closets is
0:14:10 one that I love that you can order kits online and with a screwdriver and a laser level, you can
0:14:14 install really, really good closets in people’s houses. You got deck staining, window cleaning,
0:14:18 gutter cleaning, mobile bartending. You can think about just your network and what kind of lends
0:14:22 itself to what you could possibly do. I like to make a list of 10 businesses and get more
0:14:27 specialized as you go. Make a list of five businesses that are really low cost, really low
0:14:31 skilled, really low barriers to entry. And then think about, okay, if I did a little bit of investing
0:14:36 in most times just time. I love how you say, Nick, your life is what you do from five to nine
0:14:40 is the important time, right? What can you spend instead of watching TV? The average American
0:14:45 watches five hours a day of TV. What can you do to kind of get into something that has a little
0:14:48 bit more barriers to entry, maybe a little bit of equipment, maybe some skills that you need to
0:14:52 learn? I like making a list of 10 businesses and putting them on a piece of paper. That’s where I
0:14:57 start. Yeah, there’s a listener of the show who has a parking lot striping business who he’s
0:15:00 sent me some details on this. And it’s like, yeah, there’s a little bit of equipment. There’s a
0:15:05 little bit of skill and I guess probably practice in learning how to do this the right way so you
0:15:10 don’t mess up the parking lot. But it’s so niche and so specialized that like, hey, anytime there’s
0:15:14 a new parking lot going in in town, he’s the guy that gets the call. I have a friend actually who
0:15:20 does deep cleaning of restaurants. So he will go in at night with equipment. It’s a very sweaty job,
0:15:24 goes in at night in about five hours. He will deep clean and degrease a commercial kitchen
0:15:30 and restaurant floor. And he will net profit at the end of the night about $1,000 and four hours
0:15:34 time. Wow. He’s the only one in town who does it. He has all the contracts. And he was just a guy
0:15:38 with the cargo van, drove around, not necessarily that skilled. He was just willing to do this one
0:15:42 little niche thing. Now within about a three city radius, he’s the first guy on Google because
0:15:46 there’s only about two or three companies that do it, has more business that he could ever hope for.
0:15:51 He’s raised his prices every year by 30%. He just keeps having a full schedule. It’s pretty awesome.
0:15:54 Yeah. So we talked about a kind of like low skill, low barrier to entry stuff,
0:16:00 installing custom closets, installing steam showers. That stuff sounds a little bit more
0:16:04 stressful to me as like, okay, well, I’ve never done that before. I’ve definitely never gotten
0:16:08 paid to do that before. So where do you draw the line between, okay, yeah, I can figure that out
0:16:14 versus like, I might have some serious liability on my hand or I might need some special certifications
0:16:18 or licenses, something like that. Yeah. Well, a lot of times you can actually work part. I mean,
0:16:22 the thing about all these companies, Nick, is that they’re all really hurting for employees.
0:16:26 You could go get paid to learn how to install steam showers by calling that company and saying,
0:16:30 I really want to side job on the evenings and weekends. They would easily hire you for $20
0:16:35 an hour to come work for them and do that stuff. So it’s like going to school while getting paid
0:16:40 to do it. So that’s one option that I love. The second option is YouTube. I mean, it’s amazing
0:16:43 what you can learn on YouTube. I ended up installing my closet myself after I didn’t
0:16:48 want to pay the $3,500 for the basic package from California Closets or Inspired Closets.
0:16:53 It took me about 20 hours total. I built the closet of my dreams, had a ton of fun,
0:16:56 and it’s not as hard as you’d think. So that’s my advice there.
0:17:02 Okay. So you’ve got this list, five to 10 business ideas with varying degrees of complexity.
0:17:06 What happens next in your startup evaluation process?
0:17:11 Yep. Open up your computer, go on Google, and search each business. So gutter cleanings on your
0:17:14 list, you’re going to search gutter cleanings and wherever you’re from, like Bay Area, wherever,
0:17:18 Athens, Georgia. And you’re going to call the first three companies and you’re going to make
0:17:21 a little Excel spreadsheet. And you’re going to kind of play a customer. You’re going to pretend
0:17:24 to be a customer. You’re going to have an address that you need them to come quote service for,
0:17:29 or you’re just going to pick their brain. And you’re going to kind of weigh them on three things.
0:17:33 Number one is speed. Like I said, quote velocity, how fast can you come out? How fast can you provide
0:17:37 a service? Because you know that if they’re booked out four weeks, A, they’re losing a lot of business
0:17:41 and B, they are very, very, very busy. The next thing you’re going to look at is accessibility
0:17:44 and digital marketing. Do they have a website? Most of them, you’d be very surprised that you’ll
0:17:50 see one with a Google listing with no website, no real systems, no digital marketing, no advertising.
0:17:55 Last one I like to look at is pricing. For example, the landscape company that did get me the quote
0:18:00 wanted $23,000 to put a sidewalk around that I’d calculated how many yards of concrete,
0:18:05 how much wood I needed to do it. It was about $1,500 in material. That is example of where
0:18:09 they’ve just continued to raise their prices because they know they’re the only ones in town
0:18:13 that are getting out and giving people quotes and they’re getting a lot of jobs. So speed,
0:18:17 accessibility and pricing, that’s the things that you really look at. You can analyze and I do this
0:18:22 all on the phone by playing a customer. So I’ll call the top three businesses of all 10 on my
0:18:27 list. So I’m making 30 phone calls and I’m keeping a little spreadsheet of, okay, and I’m just,
0:18:30 if all three answer the phone, if all three are not that busy, if all three are very eager
0:18:34 to get your business, if all three are running Google AdWords, if all three have pretty low
0:18:40 pricing, I cross that off my list. But if they’re slow, if they’re not interested in my business,
0:18:44 if they’re not running ads, if they’re very expensive, I circle it. So after that exercise,
0:18:49 I usually have a list of about three businesses left that there’s some meat on the bone here.
0:18:51 There might be an opportunity for me to carve out a piece of the pie.
0:18:58 Do you find even in these low-skill businesses there is apparent margin out there? There is more
0:19:03 apparent demand than there is supply for window washing or gutter cleaning or something like
0:19:09 that. It’s like, okay, with a ladder and a squeegee, I could get this done. Do you find even with
0:19:14 stuff like low barrier to entry, like the pet waste removal, or is it just like, hey, it’s a race to
0:19:19 the bottom. It’s commoditized. There’s nothing left here. That’s an excellent question. And that
0:19:22 is the number one complaint that you hear from all the smart entrepreneurs who want an online
0:19:26 scalable business. They all say, why would I do that? Why would I compete against Craigslisters?
0:19:31 Why would I race to the bottom? Why would I go in these low-margin, non-scalable businesses?
0:19:37 And in my opinion, they have the wrong mindset. You don’t need to get every single customer.
0:19:41 That’s number one. You need to shift your mindset of saying, okay, I’m going to convert
0:19:47 30% of my bids, and I only want a certain type of customer. I think a lot of business owners
0:19:53 early on, they say, okay, they kind of get emotional about converting leads to jobs,
0:19:56 and they want to get every customer, and they want to win every bid, and they’ll discount,
0:19:59 and they’ll drop their prices, and they’ll do what they have to do to win every customer.
0:20:03 Whereas if you’re doing this the right way, you understand that, okay, I’m only going to convert
0:20:08 one third, 25% of all these leads that come in, but I’m going to go after the customers that need
0:20:13 two things. They want professionalism, and they want speed. They want somebody who’s super
0:20:17 professional, and they want somebody who can do this stuff quickly, and price is not as important
0:20:21 to them. There’s a lot of customers like that out there. I’m one of those customers. If I’m calling
0:20:25 around to lawn care companies, I want somebody who’s professional, who shows up in a collared shirt,
0:20:30 who I don’t have to worry about being unprofessional around my family, or driving a beat-up pickup
0:20:34 truck with holes in the side panels, you know what I mean? You want the customers that are willing to
0:20:38 pay the higher price, and I’m telling you, Nick, there are a lot of them out there. Even in these
0:20:44 low-scaled, low-barried entry businesses, you can target high-end clientele who are willing to pay
0:20:49 more for better service, and you can build a scalable company. Even in these service businesses
0:20:52 where people will say, “That’s not a scalable business. Why would I ever target that?”
0:20:56 Right. Well, everything is scalable with the right systems in place, but you bring up an
0:21:01 important point about pricing. This was my biggest mistake when I was painting houses in college,
0:21:07 was pricing too low, because I was afraid I wasn’t getting enough work to keep my crews busy,
0:21:12 so I’d discount, discount, discount, and I probably would have been better off accepting
0:21:18 fewer jobs, like hitting a lower hit rate on the bids that I did do, but just targeting a better
0:21:23 customer. I mean, the customers were fine. It was just me probably discounting unnecessarily.
0:21:28 Absolutely. It’s the only real way that you can build a stress-free, scalable business in the
0:21:32 first place, because if you don’t pack in that extra margin, if you don’t have that extra money,
0:21:35 you’re going to constantly be stressed out. You’re not going to be able to pay your employees
0:21:38 enough. We’ll get to employees in a second, because this is the biggest struggle that you
0:21:42 hear every business owner say, “I can’t find good employees,” so we’ll talk about that in just a
0:21:45 minute, but the way that you scale a business and the way that you build a business with a healthy
0:21:51 foundation is get comfortable charging a higher price and not get emotional about losing bids.
0:21:54 Losing bids sucks. It sucks to hear a customer say, “I’m going to go with a different company,
0:21:58 because they’re cheaper.” You have to have that switch in your mind that says,
0:22:01 “That’s not a customer that I wanted anyway, so that’s fine with me.”
0:22:07 Yeah. We were at our year-end retreat for this painting company, and one of the top performers
0:22:12 in the business gets up and he tells this story about how he’d been out to this woman’s house
0:22:16 three or four times, and they’ve been back and forth, and she’s got all these quotes,
0:22:21 and she comes back to him and says, “Hey, I got this quote for $1,400 or something,”
0:22:24 and he’s like, “Ma’am, I’m going to be 100% honest with you.”
0:22:30 “You don’t want a $1,400 paint job,” and he closes the bid, and it was like, “Wow, that was
0:22:34 a way to turn that around in an area,” and I actually used that when I was doing proofreading
0:22:40 on freelance book editing, and I was like, “Yeah, you could find cheaper editors out there, but
0:22:43 it’s your book. This is your baby. Do you really want to go with them? You got to put your best
0:22:48 foot forward.” Absolutely. And so many of these people are really, really bad at sales as well,
0:22:50 Nick. I’ve had some of them come out to my house. They don’t know how to shake my hand.
0:22:53 They don’t know how to talk to me. They don’t know how to present ideas,
0:22:56 and framing the sales interaction of, “Look, I don’t necessarily need your business. I’m going
0:23:00 to be extremely polite to you, extremely nice to you, but listen, this is only going to work if
0:23:05 our circle’s overlapped. I’m busy. You’re busy. I know that you want really good service. I deliver
0:23:08 that. If you want to pay a price, that’s great, but I don’t discount. These are things that I just
0:23:13 don’t do.” So if you set those guidelines as a foundation for your business, you’ll be in really,
0:23:17 really good shape when it comes time to grow. Another thing about these non-scalable businesses
0:23:21 before we move on from that, people kind of think whatever business I’m going to start right now is
0:23:26 the business that I’m going to be doing five years from now or 10 years from now. That’s just
0:23:31 not the case. Business is so much about momentum and maybe casting a wide net and offering several
0:23:36 different services and specializing, and then specializing. Then as you get skills, you specialize
0:23:40 even more. As you get skills, you specialize even more. Before you know it, five or six or seven
0:23:43 years later, you’re doing something totally different. You’re doing something higher margin.
0:23:46 You’ve kind of weeded out the opportunities as these opportunities have come to you,
0:23:50 and your business is bigger, better, and you’re doing more and more exciting things.
0:23:55 All the wealthiest people that I know, all the richest, the people who have the most free time,
0:24:00 the happiest people that I know, they all started really, really, really small businesses that weren’t
0:24:05 necessarily scalable, and then they grew them. One guy kind of built his own house and subcontracted
0:24:09 it out. Then his neighbor asked if he could build his house. You fast forward 20 years and he’s
0:24:15 building $20 million assisted livings and nursing homes for giant hospital operators,
0:24:21 and he’s worth close to a billion dollars. That’s the story of so many wealthy entrepreneurs,
0:24:25 and that is the opposite of what our media and what kind of the entrepreneur culture
0:24:30 online and on Shark Tank and in Silicon Valley kind of paints. Nobody paints those pictures.
0:24:36 Nobody shows the stories of the very, very wealthy people in our individual cities and towns
0:24:42 that don’t have a sexy story. That’s something else to keep in mind when we’re looking at the
0:24:47 nitty-gritty, non-exciting businesses that start. No, it’s 100% true. We’ve seen it from probably
0:24:52 hundreds of guests at this point that, look, choosing what’s next doesn’t mean choosing
0:24:56 what’s forever. The best opportunities aren’t visible until you’re already in motion. It’s
0:25:00 going to become a little bit of a chorus here, but I’ve definitely found that to be true.
0:25:05 Yeah, so I started my business when I was running up spiral staircases with boxes,
0:25:09 buying a $1,500 van on Craigslist, and my friends were laughing at me and my parents
0:25:13 were thought I was crazy when I was going to take my college degree and do that full time.
0:25:21 You fast forward seven short years, and we’re operating $10 million plus self-storage portfolios,
0:25:26 and we’re on the verge of doing some really, really cool things. Just another encouragement that
0:25:29 entrepreneurship is about kind of momentum, and it’s building on what you’ve previously done,
0:25:33 and it’s learning along the way. Anything you can do to just get started, I think,
0:25:37 is the hardest first step. All right, I’m with you there. Okay, so I’ve got my list of 10 ideas.
0:25:42 I’ve been mystery shopping, the top three competitors that I could find in each of these
0:25:48 spaces, evaluating for speed, what’s their online presence look like, how easy are they
0:25:53 to do business with, and do I have an estimate of their pricing power or what kind of margins
0:25:59 you think they’re able to hold? I imagine from there now it’s kind of a narrowing down process.
0:26:02 What does that look like for you? Yeah, when you’re down to your last three,
0:26:06 you call 10 companies, you kind of study them a little bit more, and then you don’t overthink it.
0:26:11 You jump in and you do it, and you go to domains.google.com and you find an available domain.
0:26:14 I like to have synonyms.com on the other page and kind of just really brainstorming
0:26:19 different ideas, seeing what’s available. I buy it. I send to Google my business location
0:26:24 to my house. I put a Google voice phone number on there. I operate my business with a G Suite,
0:26:27 the suite of Google tools that you can get for just a couple bucks a month,
0:26:31 where you can do everything, and you can get out of the box little customer management software.
0:26:35 I know we’re really ripping through some stuff here, but what I’m saying is it’s just time to get
0:26:40 out and serve some customers. What I always do is I put together a basic website on WordPress,
0:26:43 get an email address, get a phone number, and it’s time to go find some customers.
0:26:48 I usually print out several thousand, get some marketing materials made on Fiverr
0:26:52 or something similar, get several thousand of them printed, put them on a backpack,
0:26:55 go to a neighborhood where I think there’s houses that need what I’m offering,
0:26:59 or there’s businesses that need what I’m offering, and I get these flyers and I spread them out,
0:27:04 and I go see my customers. People laugh all the time when I talk about sidewalk chalk,
0:27:08 but Nick, that is how I built my business, because I knew where my customers walked.
0:27:12 I was servicing students. I knew that they were freshmen. I knew where they walked to
0:27:16 class. I knew where they lived, so I decided to get some boxes of sidewalk chalk, and I would go
0:27:20 on the path where they were walking to class. I knew they were walking to class at 10 a.m. every
0:27:24 day, so I’d get out there at 6 a.m., and I’d write student storage, best prices in the country,
0:27:31 storagesquad.com. I’ve written that phrase over a thousand times in my life, and I’m telling you,
0:27:38 the ROI on that time spent is – I was making probably hundreds of dollars per hour writing chalk
0:27:42 on the ground, because it was so effective. It was a billboard that probably 40% of our
0:27:48 customers in these early days said that that is how they heard about my business. I love the guerrilla
0:27:52 marketing. Wow, that’s awesome. Just getting right in front of their feet, as it were. Did you ever
0:27:57 get in trouble with the campuses or anything for blanketing the city and campus with your ad
0:28:02 messages? We ended up hiring some students to do this, and they thought it was a good idea to
0:28:07 go under the overhangs and write sidewalk chalk advertisements on the buildings,
0:28:13 which that upset the school, and I had to get a power washer and go out and clean it off.
0:28:16 But for the most part, no, they didn’t mind. I mean, the student groups were allowed to advertise
0:28:22 their a cappella groups or basketball recruiting for club ball on the sidewalk, so we did a lot of
0:28:27 the same stuff. When we were turned away, it wasn’t the end of the world. That was a big
0:28:31 part of our early marketing campaign. More marketing ideas with Nick right after this.
0:28:37 There’s no shortage of AI tools out there, but using them means switching back and forth between
0:28:42 yet another digital tool. So instead of simplifying your workflow, it just becomes more complicated.
0:28:47 That is unless you’re using our sponsor, Notion. Recommended by many aside hustle show guests,
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0:29:03 doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds. So I started using Notion as kind of a
0:29:08 centralized place to house all the process documentation that had been built up over
0:29:13 the last decade in the business. But one of my goals for this year is to do a better job
0:29:17 repurposing content, getting more mileage out of the stuff we’re already creating.
0:29:21 And that’s something that Notion AI is really helpful for. Side hustle show listeners can try
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0:29:43 sponsor time. Now I could read you a script about Gusto’s payroll and benefits, but instead,
0:29:48 I wanted to share some reviews and feedback from real Gusto customers. The first one says,
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0:29:58 Know anything that makes payroll a joy? You don’t hear that every day. Amy from Utah says
0:30:03 they do our medical, dental, vision, and life insurance. It’s like going to the spa. And we’ve
0:30:07 got great options and rates, even though we’re a super small team. What about customer service?
0:30:12 Here’s what Amneet says about Gusto’s support team. “Whenever something comes up, I reach out,
0:30:16 and literally 24 hours later, they tell us what to do or assure us that they’ve already
0:30:21 handled it for us.” That’s what happens when you combine smart technology and friendly humans.
0:30:24 And really, that’s just a small sample of the positive feedback that Gusto has earned over
0:30:30 the years. Right now, side hustle show listeners get three months free when you go to gusto.com/side
0:30:36 hustle. Yes, that’s three months of payroll, benefits admin, and more totally free. Again,
0:30:43 gusto.com/side hustle. And we are at a beautiful day in age where this technology is available.
0:30:46 You looked 10, 15 years ago. You had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get these
0:30:51 tools. Now you can use FreshBooks, Gusto, and some others right out of the box that just make you
0:30:54 extremely professional, efficient, and you don’t have to spend your time pushing paper around.
0:30:59 So that’s another amazing advantage that a scrappy startup entrepreneur has with these
0:31:02 service businesses. So I love it. Yeah, so true. I mean, you gave the example on the
0:31:08 Bigger Pockets Business podcast of going into the storage space as a real estate investment
0:31:13 and looking at these other companies that have a on-site manager sitting in the office all day.
0:31:16 It’s like, well, 99% of the time, they’re not doing anything.
0:31:19 That’s exactly our competitive advantage right now. We’re running our self-storage
0:31:23 facilities remotely and building a big successful portfolio doing that just because
0:31:29 a lot of the businesses, even in this big data real estate world, they’re not necessarily
0:31:35 using the latest technology. I’d say only 5 or 10% of these service businesses use things like
0:31:40 FreshBooks, Gusto, Jobber, some other out-of-the-box software that can just make your life so easy
0:31:44 so that you can spend time marketing and making money and not run and payroll and
0:31:47 sending invoices and things like that. It’s a beautiful thing.
0:31:50 It’s funny you mentioned Jobber. Jobber is a really interesting
0:31:55 software tool that I came across recently, like perfect for this type of local service business.
0:31:59 Let your customers know when you’re coming and kind of like an all-in-one system, you know,
0:32:02 when you have a crew out and about in the town.
0:32:05 Yeah, and I have a list of all these tools that I love to implement in the early days on the
0:32:10 website, sweetystartup.com/essentialtools, or there’s a dash between essential and tools,
0:32:14 but there’s just so many great little things that you can kind of bolt on to each other
0:32:17 to get so efficient so that you can get out market and find some customers. It’s a great
0:32:21 time to be alive. All right, we’re going to link that up in the show notes,
0:32:28 sidehustlenation.com/sweddy for next list of essential tools, but let’s go into one of my
0:32:34 favorite parts of the painting business was the pressure washing beforehand. It’s just like,
0:32:38 I mean, there’s entire like pressure washing porn videos just because it’s like,
0:32:42 it’s such a satisfying thing to do. So let’s say I want to start this pressure washing
0:32:49 business here locally. Would you go with the sidewalk chalk route like in a high-end neighborhood
0:32:53 and say, like, I can make this driveway look new again? Like, how would you go about it?
0:32:58 Yeah, first of all, I would go around and do some gorilla cleaning advertisements. Like,
0:33:02 I would literally use my power wand to clean some areas. There’s actually some pictures on my
0:33:07 website of some people under an overpass on the interstate. There was a really dirty triangle
0:33:12 of concrete right there that you kind of see and drive by. And they wrote on there, power washing,
0:33:15 don’t let your driveway get this dirty. And they put a phone number on there. I thought that was
0:33:21 extremely creative. But this is a business where if you’re in a neighborhood and you’re power washing
0:33:26 your friend or some early customers, give a card, have a business card and just hand them out to
0:33:29 everybody that you see and say, I’m in your neighborhood. I’m doing like, look at what I’m
0:33:34 doing here. And you’ll be extremely surprised at how far that goes. So just not being afraid
0:33:39 to walk up and shake hands and talk to somebody. Put you at an amazing advantage in the day and age
0:33:43 where most companies are just nudging their digital marketing department saying, spend more money on
0:33:47 Google AdWords. Nobody’s getting out and doing these gorilla marketing tactics.
0:33:52 I love the idea of carving it out with the pressure washer, the water equivalent of the sidewalk chalk.
0:33:56 Yeah. Another big one is Google My Business. I think so many people find service businesses
0:34:02 on the Google Maps function. And you can send a postcard to any address, pull up, get a Google
0:34:07 listing of your own. And if you have some of your early customers, even if it’s you power wash
0:34:12 your neighbor’s house for free, have them take a picture of your work and put a pretty good review
0:34:17 on Google My Business. And if you get those two things, a photo and a decently worded review
0:34:22 on your Google My Business location, it’ll just supercharge your SEO so that you start getting
0:34:26 some organic online leads fairly quickly. I mean, I’m sure you’ve done a ton of studying
0:34:30 with SEO. You’ve had some specialists on your podcast. It’s really, really competitive to do
0:34:35 these affiliate sites and things like that and target these keywords. But it’s not that competitive
0:34:40 when you’re competing against these 1985 businesses in your small town or big city even
0:34:43 to rank and get found by a lot of people who need these services.
0:34:49 No, it took like one weekend of concerted effort for my wife to get on the first page for her
0:34:53 photography business. And I don’t know if she still is. This was several years ago and they’ve
0:34:57 generated some different sources of leads. But it was like for a local service-based business,
0:35:02 your competition typically isn’t that savvy. So it doesn’t take, it doesn’t take much.
0:35:05 Now, one, you bring up Google My Business. This is a sticking point for a lot of people,
0:35:11 especially doing business as a side, is like sticking their home address on the internet
0:35:17 as their place of business. I understand there’s some workarounds with choosing a geographic area
0:35:21 that you serve. But curious what your take is on that.
0:35:24 Yeah, I mean, when I was in college, I didn’t have a whole lot to lose. So I dropped a pin right
0:35:29 on my dorm. And then my next year, my house, I dropped a pin on that one as well. So yeah,
0:35:34 you can use the service area function. You can also get a PO box. You can also rent a mailbox,
0:35:37 walk up and talk to a business owner and say, “You mind if I put my computer in this corner
0:35:41 and work here once a week and drop Google My Business location on your business?” And most
0:35:46 of the time, they’ll just say, “Of course, that’s fine.” It’s a pretty easy sell to have
0:35:50 almost no negative impact and get that kind of advantage. So I think if you’re scrapping,
0:35:53 you can get creative. There are definitely some ways to get that Google My Business listing up.
0:36:00 In the pet waste removal example, the woman, she had a banner that she hung up at the dog park,
0:36:04 which I think she said it cost her a couple hundred bucks for the year to advertise with
0:36:10 her banner there. She would bring donuts into the veterinary offices and say, “Hey, I brought
0:36:14 these donuts. Can I leave my business cards here as well?” To get in front of her target customers
0:36:18 where they were already hanging out, where they were already doing business. That’s kind of how
0:36:24 she did her marketing in addition to that, blanketed a bunch of local Facebook groups saying,
0:36:29 “Hey, pet waste removal starting at X dollars per week or something like that.” Anything else
0:36:33 on the marketing front, maybe this pressure washing example or anything else that comes to mind?
0:36:37 Just one that comes to mind right now is the lawn care companies. The lawn care companies don’t want
0:36:42 to pick up the poop, but they also don’t want to run over it. So I’m sure if you got in with a
0:36:47 couple lawn care companies, they would happily tell all their clients to also be your clients.
0:36:51 Many, many of these businesses say you’re a deck staining. You just want to be a deck staining.
0:36:55 All you need is a paintbrush and a can of stain to do this. The people who build the decks,
0:36:59 they don’t want to come back six weeks later after the wood has dried to stain the decks.
0:37:02 So you could easily talk to the carpenters who are building the decks and get them to refer
0:37:07 your business. I love finding people who refer you business because nobody else is doing that.
0:37:13 Nobody’s calling the plumbers and saying, “Hey, I put tile in showers. You plum showers. Let’s
0:37:17 work together.” People ask you all the time for referrals. I actually asked my plumber who he would
0:37:22 recommend to tile in my shower. He said, “I don’t know anybody.” I said, “I can’t believe somebody
0:37:26 who tiles showers hasn’t called you yet and introduced themselves.” So sometimes just making
0:37:30 that little extra effort to network and call the right people and offer your services to the right
0:37:35 people is just another huge advantage when it comes to gorilla marketing. Yeah, on the pressure
0:37:39 washing front, maybe that’s like the real estate agents for people who are listening to their
0:37:43 houses. Like, “Hey, look, we can make your house look 10 years younger if we cleaned out this driveway
0:37:47 or something like that.” Yep, I would go straight to the real estate agent, the top agent in town
0:37:51 and say, “I want to power wash your entire driveway for free right now, and I want to show you how good
0:37:56 of my work is and then give her or him your card after the service.” And boom, she’s going to say,
0:38:01 “Wow, every house she lists, she’s going to recommend that you come and get the driveway looking brand
0:38:06 new because it adds whatever the data is on one or 2% of the home value when your house looks
0:38:10 really, really clean when you’re trying to sell it.” So, yeah, real estate agents recommend a ton of
0:38:15 these services, and a lot of times, they don’t have anybody ever soliciting them for referrals.
0:38:20 So, that’s a really, really powerful way to drive business. Well, I love this stuff. I could geek
0:38:25 out on this for a long time. Nick, really appreciate you joining me, reaching out the Sweaty
0:38:31 Startup podcast. Definitely check it out. It’s over at sweatystartup.com. What’s next for you?
0:38:34 What’s got you excited this year? Yeah, I just think that there’s that why in the road when you
0:38:38 get some customers coming in and you can decide to either keep raising your prices and make a great
0:38:44 living or you can decide to hire employees and scale a business. But this is just such a powerful
0:38:49 way to accomplish your goals. So, I’m just so passionate about these service-based businesses.
0:38:54 We got the Sweaty Startup Reddit group that we have almost 20,000 entrepreneurs there bouncing
0:38:58 ideas off of each other. That’s reddit.com. So, the Sweaty Startup sub. You can link to that in
0:39:02 the show notes. But, yeah, I’m just really excited to get the word out more. Was that a group that
0:39:05 existed or was that one that you started? Yeah, we started it. From scratch, we basically have a
0:39:09 little community of service-based entrepreneurs that are running around doing these guerrilla
0:39:14 marketing tactics, helping each other solve employee problems and naming their businesses
0:39:19 and figure out what idea to go after. It’s a pretty cool thing. That’s awesome. What do you think
0:39:25 attributed to that growth? Oh, I don’t know. I think the podcast and getting on a couple other
0:39:28 shows like Bigger Pockets, some people started reaching out. And then I think one thing is
0:39:33 the loneliness of being an entrepreneur. I think we all kind of feel that you have your podcast
0:39:37 to kind of meet people. And I have my podcast to meet people now. But before that, I couldn’t
0:39:42 really relate to a lot of other entrepreneurs who were doing a lot of this stuff. So, a community
0:39:47 was kind of something that was really in high demand because it’s not something that you can
0:39:51 talk to a lot of your friends about who work nine to five jobs when you’re an entrepreneur and running
0:39:55 a business. So, it’s hard to relate to a lot of people. So, I think that people kind of latched
0:39:59 on to, “Oh, this is a place I can go where a lot of other entrepreneurs hang out that are just like
0:40:06 me.” So, it’s kind of refreshing. At what point did you stop hauling all the boxes yourself for the
0:40:12 storage squad and say, “Okay, now I need to hire some help to make this happen?” Because I’m thinking
0:40:18 with the dog poop pickup or the house cleaning or the window washing, it’s like I could reasonably
0:40:25 train somebody to do this as well or better than I could. I’m wondering at what point do you step
0:40:29 out or was that from the very beginning? We went through a couple really, really hard years, Nick.
0:40:33 Where we were trying to do everything ourselves. I mean, we were up all night in these warehouses.
0:40:37 You’ll hear about it on the Bigger Pockets podcast. And one day, we just said, “Listen, I mean, all we
0:40:41 do, my partner and I would sit in a room and just say we can’t find any good employees. We can’t find
0:40:44 any good employees. If we could only find good employees, we would be able to thrive.” Because
0:40:48 we didn’t have a customer problem. We had an employee problem. And one day, we were just like,
0:40:52 “Listen, we got to take ownership of this. Every single business that ever operates and hires
0:40:57 anybody has this same problem. We can’t just keep posting our Indeed ads online and hope that these
0:41:01 unicorns who care about our businesses walk in the door.” So we did two things. Number one,
0:41:06 we simplified the job so that it was simpler to teach and simpler to learn. And we put a bunch
0:41:10 of training videos and processes in place to kind of get the point across of the core
0:41:16 competencies of the job. We took everything else off the plate. And number two, we raised our prices
0:41:22 and had some money to actually hire some decent help. And those two things kind of allowed us to
0:41:27 put the money into finding the employees. I mean, we were pointing at the labor market and we were
0:41:31 operating these really expensive cities where it’s really hard to find laborers. And we finally
0:41:36 said, “Okay, let’s spend some time and money and energy recruiting employees just as we find customers.”
0:41:40 Like we’re talking about the guerrilla marketing for the power washing and the guerrilla marketing
0:41:45 for all this stuff. We got guerrilla marketing tactics in place for finding employees. We were
0:41:48 walking around with business cards in Panera and Starbucks handing them out trying to find people
0:41:52 who wanted to come work for us or earn extra money. And we were just constantly rotating and
0:41:56 having open interviews once a week. I mean, it’s really, really hard to find good employees. But
0:42:01 if you can do it, that’s when things really open up and we were able to kind of scale and grow and
0:42:07 make that shift. Okay. So there’s a couple of things. You simplified the job, the SOPs or standard
0:42:12 operating procedures, make life easier for them, set them up for success, and then raise your rates
0:42:17 so you have a little more margin to theoretically hire a better caliber person.
0:42:21 That’s right. Yeah. In the early days, we’d walk around the clipboard and they had a list of 25
0:42:25 things they needed to do on the back of that clipboard. It was customer service, packing the
0:42:30 truck, loading the truck, labeling the items, writing the invoices, doing the scheduling.
0:42:34 And we said, okay, what can we outsource off of these people’s plates so that they can do five
0:42:38 things really, really well and not worry about the customer service, not worry about the scheduling.
0:42:42 So we had one person do all the schedules for all of our branches. We had one person do all the
0:42:46 hiring for all of our branches. We had one person do all the recruiting for all the branches so that
0:42:50 everybody had a simpler job in the company. They could do it much better. Most importantly, Nick,
0:42:56 we were no longer looking for unicorns who were spectacular at everything to come in
0:43:00 and grow our business. We could hire just normal average people that could do it really, really
0:43:05 well because it was so much simpler. That’s a really powerful takeaway. Chris Duckard calls it
0:43:10 the superhero syndrome in looking for virtual help, but it goes the same whether you’re hiring
0:43:14 somebody locally or hiring somebody virtually. It’s like just because you’re doing all these
0:43:18 things yourself, doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to expect somebody else is able to do all these
0:43:24 things and operate at a high level. Nick, I really appreciate you joining me, sweatystartup.com.
0:43:28 Check them out over there. Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation.
0:43:32 Thanks, Nick. My number one tip is going to be to look up from your computer screen. It’s so easy to
0:43:39 get sucked in to the online sexiness of these other e-commerce, you know, FBA, like online
0:43:43 businesses. My piece would be to just look when you’re walking around your own town, think about
0:43:47 businesses a little bit differently. Think about how that company makes money. Think about what
0:43:52 opportunities are right there in your town. Look up from your computer screen, get out,
0:43:56 shake hands, see people, and I think you’ll be a little bit better off just with that mindset.
0:44:00 Sounds good, man. Thanks so much, and we’ll catch up with you soon.
0:44:01 I really appreciate everything, Nick. Thank you.
0:44:07 That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let’s go out there and make
0:44:12 something happen, and I’ll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle Long.
0:44:16 Now, if you want more Nick Huber in your life, we actually did a follow-up to this original
0:44:24 2020 recording in 2023. That was episode 578, where we pitted his sweaty startup model against
0:44:29 the so-called laptop lifestyle, the location freedom promised by certain online business
0:44:35 models. So that might be a good one to check out next. Just scroll down to 578 in your podcast
0:44:40 player app. You’ll find that one there. Otherwise, I want to invite you to create your own curated
0:44:45 Side Hustle Show playlist of the episodes that are going to be most helpful and impactful for you.
0:44:50 All you got to do is go to hustle.show, answer a few short multiple choice questions,
0:44:55 and it’ll recommend eight to 10 targeted episodes based on your answers. You can add those to your
0:45:00 device. You can learn what works, and you can go forth and make some more money this year. Again,
0:45:08 that’s at hustle.show. Thanks again for tuning in. Cheers. We’ve got a five-star review from
0:45:19 Live2Learn, who writes genuine podcasts with great info. Another one came from Michelle510,
0:45:30 who commented tons of actionable advice and inspiration. Hugo called the podcast Life Changing
0:45:37 in his five-star review. Be sure to drop in a five-star review in your favorite podcast app
0:45:39 and smash that subscribe.
0:00:10 Do you know how much cash flows through your hometown on a monthly basis?
0:00:13 Here’s a guide to diverting some of that money your way.
0:00:19 What’s up? What’s up, Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show because
0:00:25 opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.
0:00:31 Hat tip to Thomas Edison for that one. It’s a good quote though and an appropriate one for
0:00:35 today’s show. I’m excited to welcome Nick Huber to the program. Nick, what’s up, man?
0:00:40 Nick, thanks for having me. You bet. I’m a big fan of everything you do, so I’m glad to be here.
0:00:45 Well, thank you for tuning in. Nick is the co-founder of Storage Squad, which answers
0:00:49 the question students have of what do I do with my stuff over the summer? Well,
0:00:53 you give it to Storage Squad, they pick it up, they store it, they deliver it back to you
0:00:59 when you need it again. It’s a company that’s grown to over $3 million in sales since starting
0:01:05 as a little part-time project back in 2011. Nick is also the host of the Sweaty Startup
0:01:11 podcast at sweatystartup.com. I think that’s my favorite podcast name that I’ve come across lately,
0:01:18 and I invited him here to help us walk through his Sweaty Startup Idea Framework. That is,
0:01:25 how can you start a low-risk, low-overhead, local, service-based business? How can you set it up for
0:01:31 success? And how can you let that be the vehicle that drives you away from a lifetime of cubicle
0:01:36 slavery? Stick around in this one to hear Nick’s thoughts on generating service business ideas.
0:01:41 You can start today how to go about evaluating the market and competition and scoring your first
0:01:46 customers. That’s why I think this is pretty exciting. It doesn’t take many customers to begin
0:01:52 to make a meaningful income here. Nick, let’s get into this and generate some service business
0:01:57 ideas. This is the biggest pain point that I hear from side hustle show listeners over and over again.
0:02:03 I just need an idea. If I have that magical idea, I know I can go get started as you’re advocating for
0:02:08 a different type of idea. Something that has already been done, it’s already been proven,
0:02:12 and it just needs somebody to go out there and execute on it better. Let’s dive into this stuff.
0:02:17 Where do you suggest people start when they’re looking for that first side hustle idea, first
0:02:23 business idea? Yeah, absolutely. The reason why I’m so excited about this is I bought a house
0:02:29 about a year and a half ago, and I didn’t realize how hard it was to find people who were willing
0:02:34 to service your home, whether it’s cleaning the carpet, washing the windows, power washing the
0:02:38 driveways, the hundreds of businesses that people are outsourcing and outsourcing more and more.
0:02:43 I think about my grandfather and my dad and how they were good with their hands and they knew
0:02:47 how to do everything and they fixed their own stuff and they did their own things in their home.
0:02:51 I don’t know about you, Nick, but I am not that way. I think a lot of the next generation of
0:02:55 homeowners are not that way. What they’re doing is they’re reclaiming their time. They want to
0:02:59 spend more time with family. They want to spend less time tinkering in the garage, so they are
0:03:04 literally outsourcing everything that has to do with home ownership. Same with businesses.
0:03:07 Businesses are focusing on what they do best, outsourcing a lot of other things.
0:03:13 I think a lot of brilliant, bright entrepreneurs are missing these business ideas that are right
0:03:18 in our backyards or in our small towns or in our big cities that we can get out and
0:03:22 touch and feel and do ourselves. That’s the trend that I’m seeing out there.
0:03:27 No, absolutely. I can see that trend just as myself personally compared with
0:03:33 generations past and my father. He was able to do that is an interesting idea. You’re saying,
0:03:39 oh, plus combine that with more people getting higher level education instead of going to the
0:03:44 trades. There’s a shortage of this type of skilled worker. As a listener of the show,
0:03:49 you should come in and fill that gap or you could come in and fill that gap as a potential
0:03:54 entrepreneurial venture. A big part of this is competition. When I’m looking at e-commerce
0:03:59 or freelancing or Amazon FBA and these businesses that are amazing because they’re location
0:04:02 independent. You can work online. You can work from anywhere. There’s not a whole lot of barriers
0:04:08 to entry. I look at the amount of people flooding those markets and the people that are not
0:04:12 necessarily geographically limited. You’re competing with people from all over the world
0:04:17 in some other areas. Pakistan, places where this kind of work is taught in schools a lot.
0:04:22 People are more affordable dollar per hour to do this kind of work. I look at the competition.
0:04:25 When I look at the competition in these home service businesses, I don’t think a lot of
0:04:29 these people consider themselves entrepreneurial. I don’t think a lot of them are very innovative.
0:04:34 A lot of them are running their businesses like it’s 1985 with a fax machine, not a whole lot of
0:04:42 email even. They’re doing business like it’s 1985. I think a smart young entrepreneur with today’s
0:04:47 technology can really carve out a very interesting piece of the pie on these businesses that are
0:04:51 already in our cities. They’re already operating. They’re already profitable. More importantly,
0:04:54 as we’ll talk about here in a second, they’re easy to study and it’s easy to find out if you can carve
0:05:00 out a piece of the pie. Yeah. This was something where we were shopping for a home cleaning service
0:05:05 as an example of something that we’ve begun to outsource ourselves. It was just like you’re
0:05:12 describing. Every website, if they even had a website was from 20 years ago, it was all this
0:05:17 contact us for a quote and we’ll get back to you in five business days. The service we ended
0:05:21 up going with is called Handy. It was just like an app. I didn’t have to talk to anybody. It was
0:05:26 like $40 off your first cleaning or something. It was like this price seems reasonable. I don’t
0:05:29 know. Nobody else, I didn’t want to bother calling them for a quote. I don’t know if they’re
0:05:33 overcharging me. I’m sure they’ve got some technological overhead and development in this app,
0:05:38 so there probably is some margin in there. All they are is a matchmaker. They hook me up with
0:05:43 local cleaners who I otherwise wouldn’t have been in touch with and they just play this middleman.
0:05:48 The developers of Handy aren’t the ones coming out scrubbing the toilet. They’re just playing
0:05:53 a matchmaker in a way similar to what Chris Schwab was doing with ThinkMades on the podcast
0:05:59 maybe a year and a half ago. What kind of questions aside from maybe do I have a tech
0:06:03 advantage or do I have a customer support advantage? That was Chris’s whole thing,
0:06:07 was like, “I went on Yelp. Nobody was complaining about the cleaning. They were complaining that I
0:06:11 couldn’t get a hold of anybody. I took a while to get a quote. I didn’t know when the people were
0:06:15 coming.” What other questions can people ask if they’re evaluating different service business
0:06:20 ideas? Yeah, so number one for me is I avoid things that people are passionate about. That’s
0:06:24 the number one question. Is anybody passionate about doing this? Because if there’s a lot of
0:06:29 people who are passionate about it, then there’s probably a high level of participation and the
0:06:34 odds of success are probably a little bit lower. This would be like starting teaching yoga or
0:06:39 something. Exactly, right. The things that are fun, the things that people are hobby-oriented,
0:06:44 restaurants, brewing beer, things that are fun. Those are the things that if other people are
0:06:48 kind of having fun doing that, they’re maybe not going to make wise business decisions. They’re
0:06:51 going to undervalue their time. Those aren’t the kind of people that I want to compete with if I’m
0:06:54 starting a business. Which goes counter to most advice of like, “Well, pick something you’re
0:06:59 passionate about.” I know. I know. I’m passionate about building something. I’m passionate about
0:07:03 entrepreneurship and I’m passionate about taking steps forward every single day. I want to do what
0:07:07 I want to do in my free time right away from work. The goal here for me is have a five-year plan so
0:07:11 that I don’t have to work a whole lot. I can do what I’m passionate about and not be stressed out
0:07:16 about earning money doing those things. What else? I look at a rising demand. Like I said,
0:07:20 people are outsourcing more. The pie is getting bigger every single day. 20 years ago, 5% of
0:07:26 people paid someone to come mow their lawn. Today, 40% of people do. I’m guessing 10 years from now,
0:07:30 that number will be well over 50%. There’s more and more and more customers coming on the market
0:07:36 every single day that are using these local services. The big one is competition. We already
0:07:40 touched on it a little bit. If you’re looking at who you’re competing with and what kind of models
0:07:47 they’re using, it’s pretty easy to choose a local service business based on how they do business,
0:07:51 then try to compete with the tech entrepreneurs, the online entrepreneurs who are not necessarily
0:07:56 location dependent and really, really good at what they do. Okay. That’s interesting. So not
0:08:03 necessarily going out to conquest somebody else’s customer, not necessarily trying to steal market
0:08:08 share, but just, hey, there’s a rising tide of people outsourcing their lawn mowing, their home
0:08:14 cleaning. We talked to a woman a few weeks ago who was doing pet waste removal. And what else
0:08:19 is cool about that is the house is going to keep getting dirty, the grass is going to keep growing,
0:08:24 the dog is going to keep pooping in the backyard. You’re setting yourself up for a recurring stream
0:08:28 of revenue as long as you can keep doing this work or contracting people to do this work with you.
0:08:34 Absolutely. So in my mind, every business has either an employee problem or a customer problem.
0:08:37 Most businesses, they have customer problems. They can’t find enough customers to get the
0:08:42 revenue to build the business to be profitable. A lot of these industries and we’ll look at how
0:08:45 to actually analyze and figure out where the problem is. They don’t necessarily have customer
0:08:48 problems. There’s enough customers. They have employee problems. And I learned this when I
0:08:52 bought my house and I needed to get some things done. I would call an esteem cleaner for the house
0:08:56 when we moved in. I wanted somebody to build out my closet. I was looking for somebody to put
0:09:00 shelves in my garage. I was looking for somebody to put pest control around my house mow my lawn.
0:09:06 And I would call 10 companies and seven would answer the phone. Three were not taking new clients.
0:09:10 The other four took a really long time to come out and even look at my home.
0:09:14 It wasn’t like, okay, you know, I’m eager to get this business. I need this business.
0:09:18 They all have employee problems. They don’t have customer problems. That makes sense. So
0:09:22 they have trouble delivering the service and meeting the demand based on how many
0:09:26 employees or how their systems are designed. They don’t necessarily have a marketing
0:09:30 employee problem because the demand in some of these areas is so strong.
0:09:34 If you are mystery shopping these companies, you’re calling these companies up. I imagine
0:09:38 if they’re saying, hey, it’s going to be two to four weeks before we can get out to you,
0:09:42 that’s a good sign in your case because you’re like, okay, maybe there’s clearly
0:09:46 more demand than there is supply here. Absolutely. Lead time is number one.
0:09:51 So when I’m analyzing opportunities, I like to make a list of 10 businesses that I could
0:09:55 potentially offer with my current skill set with what I already equipment that I have. You know,
0:09:59 it’s 10 different businesses that I could start in a low risk way. And the first thing that I’m
0:10:05 looking at when I start to poke around is lead time. How long is it going to take you to come out
0:10:10 and give me a quote or build my closet or do whatever it is that I need to have done? How
0:10:12 long is that going to take? And you’ll be really surprised when you get on the phone with some
0:10:16 of these companies and they’re like, oh yeah, we’re booked out four weeks basically all the time.
0:10:20 And when we’re really busy in May, June, July, it’s more like six or seven weeks,
0:10:25 six or seven weeks for us to come out and do this. And that is not a joke. I just call around a
0:10:30 bunch of companies to put a little sidewalk down to my lower entrance to my basement because I
0:10:33 want to put it on Airbnb. And I called about 10 companies. Most of them answered the phone, most
0:10:38 of them were professional, but only two have come out and actually talked to me. And I made
0:10:43 all those calls about three weeks ago and only one has already gotten me a quote. So 10% of the
0:10:47 companies that I called have actually come out and delivered a quote and it’s been over two weeks
0:10:51 since I made those calls. More with Nick in just a moment, including more ways to come up with
0:10:57 service business ideas and how do we evaluate which ones to actually move forward with right after
0:11:04 this. Creating really great retail experiences is tough, especially if you’ve got multiple stores,
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0:11:55 That’s all lowercase and learn how to create the best retail experiences without complexity.
0:12:02 Again, that’s at shopify.com/sidehustle. If saving more and spending less is one of your top goals
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0:13:12 details. Interesting. So you’re kind of starting from the point of like what would I need done in
0:13:19 my own house? Any other kind of starting points to seed this initial list building exercise?
0:13:23 Yeah. I mean, I have a list on my website. It’s what a startup of literally about 200 different
0:13:27 services. It’s the long tail of these service businesses. You don’t necessarily have to limit
0:13:32 yourself to house painting or pest control. You can get very, very, very specific. Like if you
0:13:37 learn how to build one random example is a steam shower. I was interested in converting a steam
0:13:41 shower in one of my bathrooms because I think it’s really a healthy thing to do. I was kind of into
0:13:47 it. So I looked on Google and there is one company in the state of Georgia that does this. One company
0:13:52 that install steam showers. They wanted a $300 nonrefundable deposit to even come out and look
0:13:57 at that job. Because they can. They can’t. Yeah. They just can’t solve the employee problem to
0:14:01 service more customers. They have constraints in those regards. So you can get very creative.
0:14:05 Like think of anything that you could possibly need done. Like building out custom closets is
0:14:10 one that I love that you can order kits online and with a screwdriver and a laser level, you can
0:14:14 install really, really good closets in people’s houses. You got deck staining, window cleaning,
0:14:18 gutter cleaning, mobile bartending. You can think about just your network and what kind of lends
0:14:22 itself to what you could possibly do. I like to make a list of 10 businesses and get more
0:14:27 specialized as you go. Make a list of five businesses that are really low cost, really low
0:14:31 skilled, really low barriers to entry. And then think about, okay, if I did a little bit of investing
0:14:36 in most times just time. I love how you say, Nick, your life is what you do from five to nine
0:14:40 is the important time, right? What can you spend instead of watching TV? The average American
0:14:45 watches five hours a day of TV. What can you do to kind of get into something that has a little
0:14:48 bit more barriers to entry, maybe a little bit of equipment, maybe some skills that you need to
0:14:52 learn? I like making a list of 10 businesses and putting them on a piece of paper. That’s where I
0:14:57 start. Yeah, there’s a listener of the show who has a parking lot striping business who he’s
0:15:00 sent me some details on this. And it’s like, yeah, there’s a little bit of equipment. There’s a
0:15:05 little bit of skill and I guess probably practice in learning how to do this the right way so you
0:15:10 don’t mess up the parking lot. But it’s so niche and so specialized that like, hey, anytime there’s
0:15:14 a new parking lot going in in town, he’s the guy that gets the call. I have a friend actually who
0:15:20 does deep cleaning of restaurants. So he will go in at night with equipment. It’s a very sweaty job,
0:15:24 goes in at night in about five hours. He will deep clean and degrease a commercial kitchen
0:15:30 and restaurant floor. And he will net profit at the end of the night about $1,000 and four hours
0:15:34 time. Wow. He’s the only one in town who does it. He has all the contracts. And he was just a guy
0:15:38 with the cargo van, drove around, not necessarily that skilled. He was just willing to do this one
0:15:42 little niche thing. Now within about a three city radius, he’s the first guy on Google because
0:15:46 there’s only about two or three companies that do it, has more business that he could ever hope for.
0:15:51 He’s raised his prices every year by 30%. He just keeps having a full schedule. It’s pretty awesome.
0:15:54 Yeah. So we talked about a kind of like low skill, low barrier to entry stuff,
0:16:00 installing custom closets, installing steam showers. That stuff sounds a little bit more
0:16:04 stressful to me as like, okay, well, I’ve never done that before. I’ve definitely never gotten
0:16:08 paid to do that before. So where do you draw the line between, okay, yeah, I can figure that out
0:16:14 versus like, I might have some serious liability on my hand or I might need some special certifications
0:16:18 or licenses, something like that. Yeah. Well, a lot of times you can actually work part. I mean,
0:16:22 the thing about all these companies, Nick, is that they’re all really hurting for employees.
0:16:26 You could go get paid to learn how to install steam showers by calling that company and saying,
0:16:30 I really want to side job on the evenings and weekends. They would easily hire you for $20
0:16:35 an hour to come work for them and do that stuff. So it’s like going to school while getting paid
0:16:40 to do it. So that’s one option that I love. The second option is YouTube. I mean, it’s amazing
0:16:43 what you can learn on YouTube. I ended up installing my closet myself after I didn’t
0:16:48 want to pay the $3,500 for the basic package from California Closets or Inspired Closets.
0:16:53 It took me about 20 hours total. I built the closet of my dreams, had a ton of fun,
0:16:56 and it’s not as hard as you’d think. So that’s my advice there.
0:17:02 Okay. So you’ve got this list, five to 10 business ideas with varying degrees of complexity.
0:17:06 What happens next in your startup evaluation process?
0:17:11 Yep. Open up your computer, go on Google, and search each business. So gutter cleanings on your
0:17:14 list, you’re going to search gutter cleanings and wherever you’re from, like Bay Area, wherever,
0:17:18 Athens, Georgia. And you’re going to call the first three companies and you’re going to make
0:17:21 a little Excel spreadsheet. And you’re going to kind of play a customer. You’re going to pretend
0:17:24 to be a customer. You’re going to have an address that you need them to come quote service for,
0:17:29 or you’re just going to pick their brain. And you’re going to kind of weigh them on three things.
0:17:33 Number one is speed. Like I said, quote velocity, how fast can you come out? How fast can you provide
0:17:37 a service? Because you know that if they’re booked out four weeks, A, they’re losing a lot of business
0:17:41 and B, they are very, very, very busy. The next thing you’re going to look at is accessibility
0:17:44 and digital marketing. Do they have a website? Most of them, you’d be very surprised that you’ll
0:17:50 see one with a Google listing with no website, no real systems, no digital marketing, no advertising.
0:17:55 Last one I like to look at is pricing. For example, the landscape company that did get me the quote
0:18:00 wanted $23,000 to put a sidewalk around that I’d calculated how many yards of concrete,
0:18:05 how much wood I needed to do it. It was about $1,500 in material. That is example of where
0:18:09 they’ve just continued to raise their prices because they know they’re the only ones in town
0:18:13 that are getting out and giving people quotes and they’re getting a lot of jobs. So speed,
0:18:17 accessibility and pricing, that’s the things that you really look at. You can analyze and I do this
0:18:22 all on the phone by playing a customer. So I’ll call the top three businesses of all 10 on my
0:18:27 list. So I’m making 30 phone calls and I’m keeping a little spreadsheet of, okay, and I’m just,
0:18:30 if all three answer the phone, if all three are not that busy, if all three are very eager
0:18:34 to get your business, if all three are running Google AdWords, if all three have pretty low
0:18:40 pricing, I cross that off my list. But if they’re slow, if they’re not interested in my business,
0:18:44 if they’re not running ads, if they’re very expensive, I circle it. So after that exercise,
0:18:49 I usually have a list of about three businesses left that there’s some meat on the bone here.
0:18:51 There might be an opportunity for me to carve out a piece of the pie.
0:18:58 Do you find even in these low-skill businesses there is apparent margin out there? There is more
0:19:03 apparent demand than there is supply for window washing or gutter cleaning or something like
0:19:09 that. It’s like, okay, with a ladder and a squeegee, I could get this done. Do you find even with
0:19:14 stuff like low barrier to entry, like the pet waste removal, or is it just like, hey, it’s a race to
0:19:19 the bottom. It’s commoditized. There’s nothing left here. That’s an excellent question. And that
0:19:22 is the number one complaint that you hear from all the smart entrepreneurs who want an online
0:19:26 scalable business. They all say, why would I do that? Why would I compete against Craigslisters?
0:19:31 Why would I race to the bottom? Why would I go in these low-margin, non-scalable businesses?
0:19:37 And in my opinion, they have the wrong mindset. You don’t need to get every single customer.
0:19:41 That’s number one. You need to shift your mindset of saying, okay, I’m going to convert
0:19:47 30% of my bids, and I only want a certain type of customer. I think a lot of business owners
0:19:53 early on, they say, okay, they kind of get emotional about converting leads to jobs,
0:19:56 and they want to get every customer, and they want to win every bid, and they’ll discount,
0:19:59 and they’ll drop their prices, and they’ll do what they have to do to win every customer.
0:20:03 Whereas if you’re doing this the right way, you understand that, okay, I’m only going to convert
0:20:08 one third, 25% of all these leads that come in, but I’m going to go after the customers that need
0:20:13 two things. They want professionalism, and they want speed. They want somebody who’s super
0:20:17 professional, and they want somebody who can do this stuff quickly, and price is not as important
0:20:21 to them. There’s a lot of customers like that out there. I’m one of those customers. If I’m calling
0:20:25 around to lawn care companies, I want somebody who’s professional, who shows up in a collared shirt,
0:20:30 who I don’t have to worry about being unprofessional around my family, or driving a beat-up pickup
0:20:34 truck with holes in the side panels, you know what I mean? You want the customers that are willing to
0:20:38 pay the higher price, and I’m telling you, Nick, there are a lot of them out there. Even in these
0:20:44 low-scaled, low-barried entry businesses, you can target high-end clientele who are willing to pay
0:20:49 more for better service, and you can build a scalable company. Even in these service businesses
0:20:52 where people will say, “That’s not a scalable business. Why would I ever target that?”
0:20:56 Right. Well, everything is scalable with the right systems in place, but you bring up an
0:21:01 important point about pricing. This was my biggest mistake when I was painting houses in college,
0:21:07 was pricing too low, because I was afraid I wasn’t getting enough work to keep my crews busy,
0:21:12 so I’d discount, discount, discount, and I probably would have been better off accepting
0:21:18 fewer jobs, like hitting a lower hit rate on the bids that I did do, but just targeting a better
0:21:23 customer. I mean, the customers were fine. It was just me probably discounting unnecessarily.
0:21:28 Absolutely. It’s the only real way that you can build a stress-free, scalable business in the
0:21:32 first place, because if you don’t pack in that extra margin, if you don’t have that extra money,
0:21:35 you’re going to constantly be stressed out. You’re not going to be able to pay your employees
0:21:38 enough. We’ll get to employees in a second, because this is the biggest struggle that you
0:21:42 hear every business owner say, “I can’t find good employees,” so we’ll talk about that in just a
0:21:45 minute, but the way that you scale a business and the way that you build a business with a healthy
0:21:51 foundation is get comfortable charging a higher price and not get emotional about losing bids.
0:21:54 Losing bids sucks. It sucks to hear a customer say, “I’m going to go with a different company,
0:21:58 because they’re cheaper.” You have to have that switch in your mind that says,
0:22:01 “That’s not a customer that I wanted anyway, so that’s fine with me.”
0:22:07 Yeah. We were at our year-end retreat for this painting company, and one of the top performers
0:22:12 in the business gets up and he tells this story about how he’d been out to this woman’s house
0:22:16 three or four times, and they’ve been back and forth, and she’s got all these quotes,
0:22:21 and she comes back to him and says, “Hey, I got this quote for $1,400 or something,”
0:22:24 and he’s like, “Ma’am, I’m going to be 100% honest with you.”
0:22:30 “You don’t want a $1,400 paint job,” and he closes the bid, and it was like, “Wow, that was
0:22:34 a way to turn that around in an area,” and I actually used that when I was doing proofreading
0:22:40 on freelance book editing, and I was like, “Yeah, you could find cheaper editors out there, but
0:22:43 it’s your book. This is your baby. Do you really want to go with them? You got to put your best
0:22:48 foot forward.” Absolutely. And so many of these people are really, really bad at sales as well,
0:22:50 Nick. I’ve had some of them come out to my house. They don’t know how to shake my hand.
0:22:53 They don’t know how to talk to me. They don’t know how to present ideas,
0:22:56 and framing the sales interaction of, “Look, I don’t necessarily need your business. I’m going
0:23:00 to be extremely polite to you, extremely nice to you, but listen, this is only going to work if
0:23:05 our circle’s overlapped. I’m busy. You’re busy. I know that you want really good service. I deliver
0:23:08 that. If you want to pay a price, that’s great, but I don’t discount. These are things that I just
0:23:13 don’t do.” So if you set those guidelines as a foundation for your business, you’ll be in really,
0:23:17 really good shape when it comes time to grow. Another thing about these non-scalable businesses
0:23:21 before we move on from that, people kind of think whatever business I’m going to start right now is
0:23:26 the business that I’m going to be doing five years from now or 10 years from now. That’s just
0:23:31 not the case. Business is so much about momentum and maybe casting a wide net and offering several
0:23:36 different services and specializing, and then specializing. Then as you get skills, you specialize
0:23:40 even more. As you get skills, you specialize even more. Before you know it, five or six or seven
0:23:43 years later, you’re doing something totally different. You’re doing something higher margin.
0:23:46 You’ve kind of weeded out the opportunities as these opportunities have come to you,
0:23:50 and your business is bigger, better, and you’re doing more and more exciting things.
0:23:55 All the wealthiest people that I know, all the richest, the people who have the most free time,
0:24:00 the happiest people that I know, they all started really, really, really small businesses that weren’t
0:24:05 necessarily scalable, and then they grew them. One guy kind of built his own house and subcontracted
0:24:09 it out. Then his neighbor asked if he could build his house. You fast forward 20 years and he’s
0:24:15 building $20 million assisted livings and nursing homes for giant hospital operators,
0:24:21 and he’s worth close to a billion dollars. That’s the story of so many wealthy entrepreneurs,
0:24:25 and that is the opposite of what our media and what kind of the entrepreneur culture
0:24:30 online and on Shark Tank and in Silicon Valley kind of paints. Nobody paints those pictures.
0:24:36 Nobody shows the stories of the very, very wealthy people in our individual cities and towns
0:24:42 that don’t have a sexy story. That’s something else to keep in mind when we’re looking at the
0:24:47 nitty-gritty, non-exciting businesses that start. No, it’s 100% true. We’ve seen it from probably
0:24:52 hundreds of guests at this point that, look, choosing what’s next doesn’t mean choosing
0:24:56 what’s forever. The best opportunities aren’t visible until you’re already in motion. It’s
0:25:00 going to become a little bit of a chorus here, but I’ve definitely found that to be true.
0:25:05 Yeah, so I started my business when I was running up spiral staircases with boxes,
0:25:09 buying a $1,500 van on Craigslist, and my friends were laughing at me and my parents
0:25:13 were thought I was crazy when I was going to take my college degree and do that full time.
0:25:21 You fast forward seven short years, and we’re operating $10 million plus self-storage portfolios,
0:25:26 and we’re on the verge of doing some really, really cool things. Just another encouragement that
0:25:29 entrepreneurship is about kind of momentum, and it’s building on what you’ve previously done,
0:25:33 and it’s learning along the way. Anything you can do to just get started, I think,
0:25:37 is the hardest first step. All right, I’m with you there. Okay, so I’ve got my list of 10 ideas.
0:25:42 I’ve been mystery shopping, the top three competitors that I could find in each of these
0:25:48 spaces, evaluating for speed, what’s their online presence look like, how easy are they
0:25:53 to do business with, and do I have an estimate of their pricing power or what kind of margins
0:25:59 you think they’re able to hold? I imagine from there now it’s kind of a narrowing down process.
0:26:02 What does that look like for you? Yeah, when you’re down to your last three,
0:26:06 you call 10 companies, you kind of study them a little bit more, and then you don’t overthink it.
0:26:11 You jump in and you do it, and you go to domains.google.com and you find an available domain.
0:26:14 I like to have synonyms.com on the other page and kind of just really brainstorming
0:26:19 different ideas, seeing what’s available. I buy it. I send to Google my business location
0:26:24 to my house. I put a Google voice phone number on there. I operate my business with a G Suite,
0:26:27 the suite of Google tools that you can get for just a couple bucks a month,
0:26:31 where you can do everything, and you can get out of the box little customer management software.
0:26:35 I know we’re really ripping through some stuff here, but what I’m saying is it’s just time to get
0:26:40 out and serve some customers. What I always do is I put together a basic website on WordPress,
0:26:43 get an email address, get a phone number, and it’s time to go find some customers.
0:26:48 I usually print out several thousand, get some marketing materials made on Fiverr
0:26:52 or something similar, get several thousand of them printed, put them on a backpack,
0:26:55 go to a neighborhood where I think there’s houses that need what I’m offering,
0:26:59 or there’s businesses that need what I’m offering, and I get these flyers and I spread them out,
0:27:04 and I go see my customers. People laugh all the time when I talk about sidewalk chalk,
0:27:08 but Nick, that is how I built my business, because I knew where my customers walked.
0:27:12 I was servicing students. I knew that they were freshmen. I knew where they walked to
0:27:16 class. I knew where they lived, so I decided to get some boxes of sidewalk chalk, and I would go
0:27:20 on the path where they were walking to class. I knew they were walking to class at 10 a.m. every
0:27:24 day, so I’d get out there at 6 a.m., and I’d write student storage, best prices in the country,
0:27:31 storagesquad.com. I’ve written that phrase over a thousand times in my life, and I’m telling you,
0:27:38 the ROI on that time spent is – I was making probably hundreds of dollars per hour writing chalk
0:27:42 on the ground, because it was so effective. It was a billboard that probably 40% of our
0:27:48 customers in these early days said that that is how they heard about my business. I love the guerrilla
0:27:52 marketing. Wow, that’s awesome. Just getting right in front of their feet, as it were. Did you ever
0:27:57 get in trouble with the campuses or anything for blanketing the city and campus with your ad
0:28:02 messages? We ended up hiring some students to do this, and they thought it was a good idea to
0:28:07 go under the overhangs and write sidewalk chalk advertisements on the buildings,
0:28:13 which that upset the school, and I had to get a power washer and go out and clean it off.
0:28:16 But for the most part, no, they didn’t mind. I mean, the student groups were allowed to advertise
0:28:22 their a cappella groups or basketball recruiting for club ball on the sidewalk, so we did a lot of
0:28:27 the same stuff. When we were turned away, it wasn’t the end of the world. That was a big
0:28:31 part of our early marketing campaign. More marketing ideas with Nick right after this.
0:28:37 There’s no shortage of AI tools out there, but using them means switching back and forth between
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0:29:03 doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds. So I started using Notion as kind of a
0:29:08 centralized place to house all the process documentation that had been built up over
0:29:13 the last decade in the business. But one of my goals for this year is to do a better job
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0:30:16 and literally 24 hours later, they tell us what to do or assure us that they’ve already
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0:30:24 And really, that’s just a small sample of the positive feedback that Gusto has earned over
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0:30:43 gusto.com/side hustle. And we are at a beautiful day in age where this technology is available.
0:30:46 You looked 10, 15 years ago. You had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get these
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0:30:54 extremely professional, efficient, and you don’t have to spend your time pushing paper around.
0:30:59 So that’s another amazing advantage that a scrappy startup entrepreneur has with these
0:31:02 service businesses. So I love it. Yeah, so true. I mean, you gave the example on the
0:31:08 Bigger Pockets Business podcast of going into the storage space as a real estate investment
0:31:13 and looking at these other companies that have a on-site manager sitting in the office all day.
0:31:16 It’s like, well, 99% of the time, they’re not doing anything.
0:31:19 That’s exactly our competitive advantage right now. We’re running our self-storage
0:31:23 facilities remotely and building a big successful portfolio doing that just because
0:31:29 a lot of the businesses, even in this big data real estate world, they’re not necessarily
0:31:35 using the latest technology. I’d say only 5 or 10% of these service businesses use things like
0:31:40 FreshBooks, Gusto, Jobber, some other out-of-the-box software that can just make your life so easy
0:31:44 so that you can spend time marketing and making money and not run and payroll and
0:31:47 sending invoices and things like that. It’s a beautiful thing.
0:31:50 It’s funny you mentioned Jobber. Jobber is a really interesting
0:31:55 software tool that I came across recently, like perfect for this type of local service business.
0:31:59 Let your customers know when you’re coming and kind of like an all-in-one system, you know,
0:32:02 when you have a crew out and about in the town.
0:32:05 Yeah, and I have a list of all these tools that I love to implement in the early days on the
0:32:10 website, sweetystartup.com/essentialtools, or there’s a dash between essential and tools,
0:32:14 but there’s just so many great little things that you can kind of bolt on to each other
0:32:17 to get so efficient so that you can get out market and find some customers. It’s a great
0:32:21 time to be alive. All right, we’re going to link that up in the show notes,
0:32:28 sidehustlenation.com/sweddy for next list of essential tools, but let’s go into one of my
0:32:34 favorite parts of the painting business was the pressure washing beforehand. It’s just like,
0:32:38 I mean, there’s entire like pressure washing porn videos just because it’s like,
0:32:42 it’s such a satisfying thing to do. So let’s say I want to start this pressure washing
0:32:49 business here locally. Would you go with the sidewalk chalk route like in a high-end neighborhood
0:32:53 and say, like, I can make this driveway look new again? Like, how would you go about it?
0:32:58 Yeah, first of all, I would go around and do some gorilla cleaning advertisements. Like,
0:33:02 I would literally use my power wand to clean some areas. There’s actually some pictures on my
0:33:07 website of some people under an overpass on the interstate. There was a really dirty triangle
0:33:12 of concrete right there that you kind of see and drive by. And they wrote on there, power washing,
0:33:15 don’t let your driveway get this dirty. And they put a phone number on there. I thought that was
0:33:21 extremely creative. But this is a business where if you’re in a neighborhood and you’re power washing
0:33:26 your friend or some early customers, give a card, have a business card and just hand them out to
0:33:29 everybody that you see and say, I’m in your neighborhood. I’m doing like, look at what I’m
0:33:34 doing here. And you’ll be extremely surprised at how far that goes. So just not being afraid
0:33:39 to walk up and shake hands and talk to somebody. Put you at an amazing advantage in the day and age
0:33:43 where most companies are just nudging their digital marketing department saying, spend more money on
0:33:47 Google AdWords. Nobody’s getting out and doing these gorilla marketing tactics.
0:33:52 I love the idea of carving it out with the pressure washer, the water equivalent of the sidewalk chalk.
0:33:56 Yeah. Another big one is Google My Business. I think so many people find service businesses
0:34:02 on the Google Maps function. And you can send a postcard to any address, pull up, get a Google
0:34:07 listing of your own. And if you have some of your early customers, even if it’s you power wash
0:34:12 your neighbor’s house for free, have them take a picture of your work and put a pretty good review
0:34:17 on Google My Business. And if you get those two things, a photo and a decently worded review
0:34:22 on your Google My Business location, it’ll just supercharge your SEO so that you start getting
0:34:26 some organic online leads fairly quickly. I mean, I’m sure you’ve done a ton of studying
0:34:30 with SEO. You’ve had some specialists on your podcast. It’s really, really competitive to do
0:34:35 these affiliate sites and things like that and target these keywords. But it’s not that competitive
0:34:40 when you’re competing against these 1985 businesses in your small town or big city even
0:34:43 to rank and get found by a lot of people who need these services.
0:34:49 No, it took like one weekend of concerted effort for my wife to get on the first page for her
0:34:53 photography business. And I don’t know if she still is. This was several years ago and they’ve
0:34:57 generated some different sources of leads. But it was like for a local service-based business,
0:35:02 your competition typically isn’t that savvy. So it doesn’t take, it doesn’t take much.
0:35:05 Now, one, you bring up Google My Business. This is a sticking point for a lot of people,
0:35:11 especially doing business as a side, is like sticking their home address on the internet
0:35:17 as their place of business. I understand there’s some workarounds with choosing a geographic area
0:35:21 that you serve. But curious what your take is on that.
0:35:24 Yeah, I mean, when I was in college, I didn’t have a whole lot to lose. So I dropped a pin right
0:35:29 on my dorm. And then my next year, my house, I dropped a pin on that one as well. So yeah,
0:35:34 you can use the service area function. You can also get a PO box. You can also rent a mailbox,
0:35:37 walk up and talk to a business owner and say, “You mind if I put my computer in this corner
0:35:41 and work here once a week and drop Google My Business location on your business?” And most
0:35:46 of the time, they’ll just say, “Of course, that’s fine.” It’s a pretty easy sell to have
0:35:50 almost no negative impact and get that kind of advantage. So I think if you’re scrapping,
0:35:53 you can get creative. There are definitely some ways to get that Google My Business listing up.
0:36:00 In the pet waste removal example, the woman, she had a banner that she hung up at the dog park,
0:36:04 which I think she said it cost her a couple hundred bucks for the year to advertise with
0:36:10 her banner there. She would bring donuts into the veterinary offices and say, “Hey, I brought
0:36:14 these donuts. Can I leave my business cards here as well?” To get in front of her target customers
0:36:18 where they were already hanging out, where they were already doing business. That’s kind of how
0:36:24 she did her marketing in addition to that, blanketed a bunch of local Facebook groups saying,
0:36:29 “Hey, pet waste removal starting at X dollars per week or something like that.” Anything else
0:36:33 on the marketing front, maybe this pressure washing example or anything else that comes to mind?
0:36:37 Just one that comes to mind right now is the lawn care companies. The lawn care companies don’t want
0:36:42 to pick up the poop, but they also don’t want to run over it. So I’m sure if you got in with a
0:36:47 couple lawn care companies, they would happily tell all their clients to also be your clients.
0:36:51 Many, many of these businesses say you’re a deck staining. You just want to be a deck staining.
0:36:55 All you need is a paintbrush and a can of stain to do this. The people who build the decks,
0:36:59 they don’t want to come back six weeks later after the wood has dried to stain the decks.
0:37:02 So you could easily talk to the carpenters who are building the decks and get them to refer
0:37:07 your business. I love finding people who refer you business because nobody else is doing that.
0:37:13 Nobody’s calling the plumbers and saying, “Hey, I put tile in showers. You plum showers. Let’s
0:37:17 work together.” People ask you all the time for referrals. I actually asked my plumber who he would
0:37:22 recommend to tile in my shower. He said, “I don’t know anybody.” I said, “I can’t believe somebody
0:37:26 who tiles showers hasn’t called you yet and introduced themselves.” So sometimes just making
0:37:30 that little extra effort to network and call the right people and offer your services to the right
0:37:35 people is just another huge advantage when it comes to gorilla marketing. Yeah, on the pressure
0:37:39 washing front, maybe that’s like the real estate agents for people who are listening to their
0:37:43 houses. Like, “Hey, look, we can make your house look 10 years younger if we cleaned out this driveway
0:37:47 or something like that.” Yep, I would go straight to the real estate agent, the top agent in town
0:37:51 and say, “I want to power wash your entire driveway for free right now, and I want to show you how good
0:37:56 of my work is and then give her or him your card after the service.” And boom, she’s going to say,
0:38:01 “Wow, every house she lists, she’s going to recommend that you come and get the driveway looking brand
0:38:06 new because it adds whatever the data is on one or 2% of the home value when your house looks
0:38:10 really, really clean when you’re trying to sell it.” So, yeah, real estate agents recommend a ton of
0:38:15 these services, and a lot of times, they don’t have anybody ever soliciting them for referrals.
0:38:20 So, that’s a really, really powerful way to drive business. Well, I love this stuff. I could geek
0:38:25 out on this for a long time. Nick, really appreciate you joining me, reaching out the Sweaty
0:38:31 Startup podcast. Definitely check it out. It’s over at sweatystartup.com. What’s next for you?
0:38:34 What’s got you excited this year? Yeah, I just think that there’s that why in the road when you
0:38:38 get some customers coming in and you can decide to either keep raising your prices and make a great
0:38:44 living or you can decide to hire employees and scale a business. But this is just such a powerful
0:38:49 way to accomplish your goals. So, I’m just so passionate about these service-based businesses.
0:38:54 We got the Sweaty Startup Reddit group that we have almost 20,000 entrepreneurs there bouncing
0:38:58 ideas off of each other. That’s reddit.com. So, the Sweaty Startup sub. You can link to that in
0:39:02 the show notes. But, yeah, I’m just really excited to get the word out more. Was that a group that
0:39:05 existed or was that one that you started? Yeah, we started it. From scratch, we basically have a
0:39:09 little community of service-based entrepreneurs that are running around doing these guerrilla
0:39:14 marketing tactics, helping each other solve employee problems and naming their businesses
0:39:19 and figure out what idea to go after. It’s a pretty cool thing. That’s awesome. What do you think
0:39:25 attributed to that growth? Oh, I don’t know. I think the podcast and getting on a couple other
0:39:28 shows like Bigger Pockets, some people started reaching out. And then I think one thing is
0:39:33 the loneliness of being an entrepreneur. I think we all kind of feel that you have your podcast
0:39:37 to kind of meet people. And I have my podcast to meet people now. But before that, I couldn’t
0:39:42 really relate to a lot of other entrepreneurs who were doing a lot of this stuff. So, a community
0:39:47 was kind of something that was really in high demand because it’s not something that you can
0:39:51 talk to a lot of your friends about who work nine to five jobs when you’re an entrepreneur and running
0:39:55 a business. So, it’s hard to relate to a lot of people. So, I think that people kind of latched
0:39:59 on to, “Oh, this is a place I can go where a lot of other entrepreneurs hang out that are just like
0:40:06 me.” So, it’s kind of refreshing. At what point did you stop hauling all the boxes yourself for the
0:40:12 storage squad and say, “Okay, now I need to hire some help to make this happen?” Because I’m thinking
0:40:18 with the dog poop pickup or the house cleaning or the window washing, it’s like I could reasonably
0:40:25 train somebody to do this as well or better than I could. I’m wondering at what point do you step
0:40:29 out or was that from the very beginning? We went through a couple really, really hard years, Nick.
0:40:33 Where we were trying to do everything ourselves. I mean, we were up all night in these warehouses.
0:40:37 You’ll hear about it on the Bigger Pockets podcast. And one day, we just said, “Listen, I mean, all we
0:40:41 do, my partner and I would sit in a room and just say we can’t find any good employees. We can’t find
0:40:44 any good employees. If we could only find good employees, we would be able to thrive.” Because
0:40:48 we didn’t have a customer problem. We had an employee problem. And one day, we were just like,
0:40:52 “Listen, we got to take ownership of this. Every single business that ever operates and hires
0:40:57 anybody has this same problem. We can’t just keep posting our Indeed ads online and hope that these
0:41:01 unicorns who care about our businesses walk in the door.” So we did two things. Number one,
0:41:06 we simplified the job so that it was simpler to teach and simpler to learn. And we put a bunch
0:41:10 of training videos and processes in place to kind of get the point across of the core
0:41:16 competencies of the job. We took everything else off the plate. And number two, we raised our prices
0:41:22 and had some money to actually hire some decent help. And those two things kind of allowed us to
0:41:27 put the money into finding the employees. I mean, we were pointing at the labor market and we were
0:41:31 operating these really expensive cities where it’s really hard to find laborers. And we finally
0:41:36 said, “Okay, let’s spend some time and money and energy recruiting employees just as we find customers.”
0:41:40 Like we’re talking about the guerrilla marketing for the power washing and the guerrilla marketing
0:41:45 for all this stuff. We got guerrilla marketing tactics in place for finding employees. We were
0:41:48 walking around with business cards in Panera and Starbucks handing them out trying to find people
0:41:52 who wanted to come work for us or earn extra money. And we were just constantly rotating and
0:41:56 having open interviews once a week. I mean, it’s really, really hard to find good employees. But
0:42:01 if you can do it, that’s when things really open up and we were able to kind of scale and grow and
0:42:07 make that shift. Okay. So there’s a couple of things. You simplified the job, the SOPs or standard
0:42:12 operating procedures, make life easier for them, set them up for success, and then raise your rates
0:42:17 so you have a little more margin to theoretically hire a better caliber person.
0:42:21 That’s right. Yeah. In the early days, we’d walk around the clipboard and they had a list of 25
0:42:25 things they needed to do on the back of that clipboard. It was customer service, packing the
0:42:30 truck, loading the truck, labeling the items, writing the invoices, doing the scheduling.
0:42:34 And we said, okay, what can we outsource off of these people’s plates so that they can do five
0:42:38 things really, really well and not worry about the customer service, not worry about the scheduling.
0:42:42 So we had one person do all the schedules for all of our branches. We had one person do all the
0:42:46 hiring for all of our branches. We had one person do all the recruiting for all the branches so that
0:42:50 everybody had a simpler job in the company. They could do it much better. Most importantly, Nick,
0:42:56 we were no longer looking for unicorns who were spectacular at everything to come in
0:43:00 and grow our business. We could hire just normal average people that could do it really, really
0:43:05 well because it was so much simpler. That’s a really powerful takeaway. Chris Duckard calls it
0:43:10 the superhero syndrome in looking for virtual help, but it goes the same whether you’re hiring
0:43:14 somebody locally or hiring somebody virtually. It’s like just because you’re doing all these
0:43:18 things yourself, doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to expect somebody else is able to do all these
0:43:24 things and operate at a high level. Nick, I really appreciate you joining me, sweatystartup.com.
0:43:28 Check them out over there. Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation.
0:43:32 Thanks, Nick. My number one tip is going to be to look up from your computer screen. It’s so easy to
0:43:39 get sucked in to the online sexiness of these other e-commerce, you know, FBA, like online
0:43:43 businesses. My piece would be to just look when you’re walking around your own town, think about
0:43:47 businesses a little bit differently. Think about how that company makes money. Think about what
0:43:52 opportunities are right there in your town. Look up from your computer screen, get out,
0:43:56 shake hands, see people, and I think you’ll be a little bit better off just with that mindset.
0:44:00 Sounds good, man. Thanks so much, and we’ll catch up with you soon.
0:44:01 I really appreciate everything, Nick. Thank you.
0:44:07 That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let’s go out there and make
0:44:12 something happen, and I’ll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle Long.
0:44:16 Now, if you want more Nick Huber in your life, we actually did a follow-up to this original
0:44:24 2020 recording in 2023. That was episode 578, where we pitted his sweaty startup model against
0:44:29 the so-called laptop lifestyle, the location freedom promised by certain online business
0:44:35 models. So that might be a good one to check out next. Just scroll down to 578 in your podcast
0:44:40 player app. You’ll find that one there. Otherwise, I want to invite you to create your own curated
0:44:45 Side Hustle Show playlist of the episodes that are going to be most helpful and impactful for you.
0:44:50 All you got to do is go to hustle.show, answer a few short multiple choice questions,
0:44:55 and it’ll recommend eight to 10 targeted episodes based on your answers. You can add those to your
0:45:00 device. You can learn what works, and you can go forth and make some more money this year. Again,
0:45:08 that’s at hustle.show. Thanks again for tuning in. Cheers. We’ve got a five-star review from
0:45:19 Live2Learn, who writes genuine podcasts with great info. Another one came from Michelle510,
0:45:30 who commented tons of actionable advice and inspiration. Hugo called the podcast Life Changing
0:45:37 in his five-star review. Be sure to drop in a five-star review in your favorite podcast app
0:45:39 and smash that subscribe.
Do you know how much cash flows through your hometown on a monthly basis?
In this episode we explore how to get some of that cash flowing toward you!
I’m joined by Nick Huber, co-founder of Storage Squad and host of The Sweaty Startup podcast.
Storage Squad, a student storage service, has grown to over $3M in sales since starting it as a little part-time project back in 2011.
I invited Nick on The Side Hustle Show to help walk us through his “sweaty startup” framework. That is, how you can start a low-risk, low-overhead, local, service-based business, set it up for success, and let that be the vehicle that drives you away from a lifetime of cubicle slavery.
Tune in to hear Nick’s thoughts on generating service business ideas you could start today, evaluating the market and competition, and scoring your first customers.
That’s why I think this is pretty exciting — it really doesn’t take many customers to begin to make a meaningful income here.
Full Show Notes: The Sweaty Startup: How to Start a Local Service Business
New to the Show? Get your personalized money-making playlist here!
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