0:00 Hey, welcome back to the Oculus podcast today we have a special guest returning sweaty startup on Twitter, we have Nick Huber. If you have not seen the other episode, please go check it out. We talk about VAs family building big business and leveraging your social media. Please go check it out. Nick. Today's episode is called deal breaking on the cover cool, interesting stories. What is your coaching stories? We got a couple minutes to do it. So let's let's, I like hearing a lot of opportunity. So let's see what you got. 0:26 Yeah, I think the dark side of entrepreneurship is not talked about enough. I think that most people when they think about business, entrepreneurship, they think of the fact that teaming on Facebook, Instagram, social media, people talk about how easy it is to make money, yeah, and how glamorous it is to be an entrepreneur, and how you can build wealth that way. And I think that that's just simply not true. As the leader of an organization, you have a lot of responsibility, you have a lot of people who look up to you, and you have problems that stuck with you. Like if you work if you work for a company, you can a serious problem can happen. And you your job is to kind of be the messenger of that problem, and pass it up the chain, to eventually the owner of that company, because they're the ones that really at the bottom at the end of the day, they're the ones that are responsible for the health and livelihood of that company. Not everybody is cut off to be an entrepreneur. You talked to me five years ago, I thought everybody should do it. I thought everybody should, why would you not? Yeah, now you talk to me. Now I talk to me today, I think that most people are better off getting a job. Nine out of 10 people are better off not becoming an entrepreneur. That's a sad thing to say. But people idolize it, people dream about it, and people make it seem so awesome. But the dark side of it is not talked about nearly enough. So I guess I'll tell a story of kind of one of the most stressful points in my career and how much pressure was on how much pressure was on. So I run a I ran a student storage company for 10 years. We started in 2011. Nine years in the pandemic hit. And I was counting on doing pickup and delivery storage at 25 colleges in 12. States in May, we're going to pick up all the finals weeks is going to come. We're going to pick up everybody's boxes, we're going to store them in a warehouse and deliver them back. Well, in March, everything stopped. And all the colleges sent all the kids home. And there's my business with six full time employees, my own family to feed all six of our employees had families of their own to feed and rent to pay and a lot of kids in those families. And we had essentially no outlook of getting in on any student storage for the whole year. What were we going to do? How are we going to pay our people and how was I going to pay my own mortgage. And I had a baby, I had two kids, two kids and a wife that didn't work. So we basically got our backs against the wall, my partner and I and our main operator, we started trying to sell universities on doing like full service, dorm room moves, because two big colleges, one in Philadelphia and one up in Boston. They sent their kids home during spring break. And they told them they're not allowed to come back to their dorms. So these colleges had big problems. They had all these kids stuff like literally a fridge full of food, dishes in the sink, bedding on the bed, you know, stuffs sitting right on the, you know, fully furnished and they needed these dorms emptied. But these kids, these kids left for spring break. And then we're not allowed to come back to the city at all. So these colleges, there's two of them, in particular one in Philly and one in Boston, they needed somebody to come in and pack up their stuff in these dorms and and get it out of there. We put our name in the hat to try to get a little bit of business suck, do something. We were competing against JK moving. We're competing against Allied Van Lines. We're competing against companies with 500 plus employees and running multimillion dollar companies in these cities. And we were trying to get through the bidding process with these universities to do this work for them in high stress situations. We did what we had to do to get the work and we didn't we didn't lie, but we exaggerated our ability to hire our workforce. We exaggerated our presidents in the cities, we exaggerated our ability to actually do it. We just did what we had to do we sold these executives were sitting across from these executives on Zoom meetings just like this. And these these executives are in hell. They're trying to figure out what to do at their school. Their job is their job is incredibly hard. And now they got to pick a moving company to come in and clear 1000s of rooms full of kids, and the kids aren't there. The parents are upset that somebody else is going to go through these rooms and pack them up and ship it home or whatever it is. But my partner and I, we did it. We got a contract with a school in Philadelphia, I can't name the actual school, got into the dorms and we FaceTimed with the kids. And we packed up their rooms and boxes and shipped it home or stored it in a warehouse in Philly. We hired 45 People from our entire network all over the country. We flew them into Philadelphia, we stayed in Airbnb s, we hired 25 of them were from one Restaurant Group in Philadelphia that had been laid off. They were Hispanic, it was a Hispanic workforce. We vetted them, we vetted them, we background check them all, we got them all trained up on how to pack people's rooms, and we put them FaceTimed with students who are on the other side of the world, while they packed up their rooms. And a lot of times two or three kids are living in one room, you don't know who stuff is what you're on a video conference with these kids packing up these rooms. So two weeks after the pandemic started. I was in Philadelphia for six weeks, packing up dorms with 40 plus employees that I had never met. Living out of an Airbnb, every single day all day, a 12 hour 12 to 14 hour workday is actually more for me. That's what my employees were working. While we were all we were loading up and packing up these dorms. We had no idea what we were doing. We built systems along the way. Things went wrong things went right. But we scraped together enough revenue and enough profit to feed our families and got through it. But it was the most stressful situation I've ever been in. There was no talk of PvP, there was no talk of employee retention credits, there was no government support. At the time when all this was going down. We we were extremely stressed, we did something that we looking back was just incredibly risky to do this work of packing up these kids student, the students, dorms, and just did what we had to do to get through it. But it was a dark, dark time as an entrepreneur, 7:22 I really want to hit on that a lot of a lot of people don't talk about it. The key on social media, they have the Lamborghinis, and the Rolex watches and all this stuff. And that's a flashy side of it. But I love when actors like yourself to come on this side of it and talk about the ugly side of it too. Because us being the leader of a business, we have all the responsibility of our employees, like you, as an employee may show up to work and you think that's all fine and dandy, you put in the hours and you put the piece out and you walk out the front door. But we as leaders of that business, take on a personal responsibility about hiring you, then we're going to make sure we have enough ability and work to make sure we're able to cover you. Like that's our responsibility as a boss, we're not gonna like a lot of us don't want to lay you off and just kind of let you on your own and figure it out. Like we that's the last thing we want to do. You know, and we already know yours that we already have invested time and effort to hire you and bring you on however long you've been with the company and we don't want to let you go. It's a lot of it's a lot to carry. So I 100% agree. I wasn't so funny, because I was the same thing. I think every shooter I'm sure a type thing too. But like now, after carrying such a heavy load and burden myself, and I've seen and been through those tribulations like we're last to get paid. I guarantee you when you did that, you paid all your employees, you made sure they got paid for all the hours they did. And your last week, whether that was $10 or $1,000. You know, yeah, we 8:48 got paid, we got paid actually, a couple of days before we ended up delivering the stuff back in August it was we had to borrow money to make payroll because the colleges were extremely slow to pay. 9:00 It's crazy. That's crazy. And stuff like that, like you either you have to have your invoice 30 days out or 60 days out. Like it's you have to carry payroll because your employees need to eat tomorrow, that day, you know, it's insane. So I really, I'm really glad you brought that story. And it's just it's a lot. It's lots of carry. I don't I know you're on time restraints. I'm gonna let you go. But man, I really appreciate you coming on. And I really appreciate you sharing and being so front on the podcast, and I think we had a great time working to find you online and we'll end it right here. I really appreciate everything. 9:34 Yeah, Daniel, thanks for having me. They can find me and follow me on Twitter at Sony startup, or they can check out my personal newsletter that I write each week. It's also available at sweaty startup.com It's on management, sales, hiring, delegation, all the important stuff if you run a company, 9:50 so I'm gonna say this again, if you have not seen the other episode, please go check it out. We're gonna put all the links in the bio below. If you have any questions, please reach out. We'll see on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in. And thanks. Thanks for coming. on sharing the good bad and the ugly we'll see you next tune in bye Thanks for having me