578: Side Hustle Showdown: Sweaty Startups vs. Laptop Lifestyle

23:11Learn those things as step one. Then the capital comes, you start to put some money in your bank account. Then you start to meet people, potential investors, potential employees, and then the snowball can start rolling down the hill. But way too many people try to start a really hard business first without the capital, without the operational experience, and without the people. As a Side Hustle Show listener, I know you're looking for ways to improve your life through entrepreneurship, but earning more is just one part of the equation. That's why I want to recommend you check out the Personal Finance Podcast.

23:39It's hosted by my buddy, Andrew Ginkola, and he specializes in sharing the tips, tactics, and hacks to upgrade your money, all while spending less and saving more. For example, I just want to give you a few of the episodes I've been listening to recently. The first is called 13 Financial Moves to Reduce Stress and Anxiety. I think we all feel a certain amount of stress about money, either there's not enough or there's not gonna be enough or we're missing out on the next big thing Andrew goes through this checklist of actionable ways that you can sleep better at night which I loved second one was 10 ways to increase investment returns and how those small wins can really compound over time after we get paid from our side hustles we want to make sure we're putting that cash to good use and then finally super interesting episode called why you should negotiate every bill not something I'd really considered before but apparently I've been leave money on the table for years.

24:31Again, check out the Personal Finance Podcast, entertaining and informative advice from someone who absolutely loves the topic. Search for the Personal Finance Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Your wallet will thank you later. A lot of side hustlers suffer from what if-itis. What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I pick the wrong path? But one thing 100 % of our amazing guests have in common is they took their shot. They phased down those what ifs and they got their answers through taking action. Our partner Shopify helps turn what ifs into why nots.

25:06Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names to the very guests on this show. What if I can't design a website? Shopify's got you with ready-made templates to match your brand style. What if people haven't heard about my brand? Shopify helps you find customers with easy to run email and social media campaigns. And what if I get stuck? You can tap in to Shopify's award-winning 24-7 customer support. Let's turn those dreams into and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash side hustle.

25:41Go to shopify.com slash side hustle. Shopify.com slash side hustle. Miles, any shortcuts you've seen for people who are starting that TikTok channel about shortcuts create long delays my man so yes there is actually and the shortcut is to start right now publish your first thing today and then stick with it for three to five years and publish somewhere to the tune of 500 to a thousand pieces of content and i'm talking long form content not twitter posts here in the next three to five years and the shortcut is doing the work for three to five years straight because you're gonna have to learn all like operations all the stuff he just talked about i just say there's a jar full of learning curves that you're going to have to go through.

26:23And you don't learn how to get through these learning curves from watching YouTube videos or from buying into guru courses or from buying into guru coaching. You learn how to get through these learning curves by doing the things, right? There's all kinds of stuff. And I would push back a little bit on the concept of unique capital get started. I mean, do you constitute like these two pieces that cost less than$20 capital? Because if you look at the empire that Mr. Beast has built, It really came from him just cutting videos. And there is a creator path today that you can start. So YouTube, everyone watching this and listening to this has a cell phone that is capable of making a video that could go up on YouTube.

26:59You can do long form horizontal content on YouTube. You can do verticals on TikTok, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts for under a hundred dollars. And this is how my wife and I started our blog. I actually had to borrow the money from my dad because my last entrepreneurial endeavors went belly up. I went belly up with at least four or five entrepreneurial endeavors before one clicked. I was learning how to be an entrepreneur the hard way by falling on my face repeatedly. And then things I learned from step one, things I learned from part two, things I learned from step three, it all coalesced with my wife's passion for spirituality and the timing of where I was in my life.

27:36Borrowed$95.40 from my dad for a year of hosting,$7.95 times 12. We got a domain name too. And we just started publishing. I use free keyword research tools and I woke up at 4 a.m. We published for three hours before work. I worked a full day with an hour commute each way in the bay. I worked all evening and we did that nonstop for about 18 months. Just literally, we went all in. We published 500 blog posts in the first couple of years. We were at like 1 ,800 posts at this point, but we haven't really been publishing for the last several years. There is the potential to bootstrap an audience. Once you have an audience, I mean, YouTube will partner with you on the ad revenue.

28:12I don't think that's the best approach to making money per se, but it's possible. You could throw Google ads on your website. It's not the best approach to making money, but you can do it and it will generate cash flow if you have nothing. I love the observation and also be observant of how you feel while you're doing the things. So if you're the golf guy and you're out golfing, you're like, all right, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do like three TikToks a day and I'm gonna start TikTok and golf. And like at the end of day three, you've done nine of them. And you're like, I hate myself. I don't like the way I feel on camera.

28:38Like I despise being a TikToker. perfect that is wonderful feedback so now what's your pivot don't stop right like what do you try next what do you try next and for some people it might be grabbing the bucket and the sponge and seeing if you can clean the neighbor's windows it might be flipping stuff on ebay it might be trying different things to find where there's a market that has a need that you can kind of sort of fill and you don't feel like a total schmuck doing it okay and again you can't steer a parked car, but like, how bad do you want it? And I know each and every one of us on this call, we've all done things that we had to do.

29:15We had to get through. It sucked in the moment, embrace the sock because the success that you desire is on the other side of a lot of little failures and people are trying to avoid fail. I just want to know the thing that'll work like miles. Is there a business you can guarantee will work for me? It's like, yeah, it's called like failing repeatedly for about five years and something will absolutely click for you, which is a little disheartening for people, but I would rather be honest versus hyping you up about passive income as if somehow being a creator is easy. It's not, but it's a whole lot better than I was a customer support rep.

29:45I was getting yelled at on the phone for$20 an hour, commuting an hour each way to like, that is real 40 years of that. Ooh, that's where I found that motivation to just like willing to be a fool, willing to show up on YouTube, willing to make my YouTube videos like, you know, dirt face on my YouTube videos. Cause I get 2 % higher click-through rate on them than the other ones because like, how bad do you want it? There's something to that. Be willing to commit to it for the long haul and agree with you that you don't need a ton of startup capital to build an online content business. The question is, you're six months into it, you're 12 months into it, you're just not seeing the results.

30:19You're not seeing the traction. Nobody's watching this stuff. Nobody's reading this stuff. Do you commit to that for another four years, like hoping and praying that there's something at the end of that tunnel? At what point do you have to throw in the towel and pivot. I want to base where you're at at that six month mark by how much have you done? How many tries have you taken? How many at bats have you taken? How many pieces of long form keyword targeted content have you published? Right? A lot of people are like, Oh, I'm not seeing results. And you look back and they've done like 12 things over six months, like dog, what are you doing?

30:49Right? So there has to be a frequency and this furvish kind of pitch to it. So if somebody hasn't published 150 or 100, Roberto Blake has his 100 rubbish videos idea. I have a 90 day content marketing challenge that I talk about, which is do one piece of content for 90 days. So if you don't have the volume, if your sample size is not large enough, you aren't going to have statistically significant data that will allow you to make a good business decision off of said data. Now, if you try this and you pivot and you try that, you pivot and you try that and you pivot, every time you pivot, you start back at zero.

31:21And this is what a lot of people are doing. They're like, oh, dropshipping sounds great. great. Oh, that sounds great. And they're just jumping over here, over there, and they never get the power of compounding working for them. And obviously, Nick, as you know, like the power of compounding is real. You start stacking up cashflow real estate and it's like, wow, I love cashflow real estate. I've been a flipper and I've just did another deal recently. That's got some great cashflow to it. So the power of compounding is real, but the power of compounding also works in content, right? Google, YouTube, TikTok, they don't really trust you on your first uploads because there's so many spammers trying to put up AI rubbish and they're just trying to like clog up the search.

31:54So you have to like break through the algorithm. You got to break through your stuff. And it generally takes hundreds of pieces of content before you really know if you're on the right path or not. So for me, it's like, how fast can you do 200? Can you do it in six months? Like, why not? What else are you doing with your time? It doesn't take that long for a lot of people. It's just addiction to consuming content, feeling like that's working in some weird way. People ask me all the time. They say, Nick, how did you get 300 ,000 followers on Twitter. I want to be, and I'm speaking specifically to the business management money making type of content influencer.

32:29That's what I meant. The best way to get a big following if you want to be known for building businesses or making money is to stop tweeting and like actually go out and make some money. Like nobody wants to follow somebody in a business money making space if they haven't actually made money. So like step one, put Twitter away, go build a business, get rich, get rich first, then people will follow you. Talk about what you're doing. I mean, yeah, and you can build along the way. And there's rare examples of folks getting pretty big on Twitter by telling stories of other entrepreneurs. That's a way to do it as well.

33:01But the surefire way is people want to follow special people. That's why all the most followed people on Instagram are professional athletes. They're world-class actors, singers. They want to follow elite people. The best way to get a following is to be elite. That's the hard part that nobody wants to do. That's leadership, Right. Like a leader is not someone swinging in the hammock, passive income, telling other people what to do. No leader is there with the spoon in front of the pile of manure, shoveling the manure day after day, after day, after day. I remember when vlogging was really big a few years ago.

33:32And like, it's fun to see how TikTok and reels kind of killed vlogging in a sense. Everybody wanted to be a vlogger, right? Everyone would be a Casey Neissat. And it's like, well, then go live an interesting life, sell everything you own and go be a nomad for five years, which is something my wife and I did. We donated and just got rid of everything. We lived completely nomadic for five years straight. Like that's really freaking interesting. It's extremely difficult. It's risky. We hit points where we were like, how the did we get like, what are we doing with our, like, you got to get to those points to become the kind of person who deserves an audience, right?

34:05And most people are boring. They aren't doing anything. They're watching a bunch of people. They think that would be fun. Then they watch some guru webinar that says, oh yeah. And it's easy because you can do faceless videos and blah, blah, blah. And they just end up spending a couple of grand and eventually it's all, they're all liars and they go back to their day job. And it's kind of like, go make lightning strike. What is lightning striking? That's making a sale of some sort, flipping something on eBay, doing something that gets someone to send you money, someone you've never met before, just getting someone to give you money for a thing, a service, something.

34:34Once you get lightning to strike once, can you get lightning to strike a couple of times a day? And then if you're getting it done a couple of days, man, how big of a pump can you build on that thing and then how can you merchandise on it and it is a process and that's where the online side of things at least from my perspective seem a little bit easier to scale because it's like well it takes the same effort to produce an episode that 10 people listen to or 10 000 people listen to it takes the same effort to write the blog post that nobody sees or 100 000 people see and so there's like this unique scale and leverage to it where with my painting business for example like yeah, I could have crews running out.

35:09I could delegate to a foreman and like potentially, but it was much more challenging. It was much more people reliant versus tech reliant, if that makes sense. But while it might be easier to get going, you're probably also going to deal with a whole lot more competition that you've never had in that house painting arena in that one little town there. And that's fair. It's a give and take, right? Like every coin has two sides. Yeah. Geography can be a pretty serious moat. Hey, what is your moat? Hey, I picked a town where there's not very many good companies doing this. And look, it's an evolution.

35:38You move from decent businesses that can produce cash flow that can teach you those three things to then better businesses that can be scaled and can be delegated more efficiently and can actually grow. I was in a moving and storage company, that business, anybody can start with very little capital, and it's very tough to scale. Painting could be similar. But then you move up to a little bit higher skilled businesses with higher barriers to entry. And all of a sudden, you're in a situation where you can charge a couple hundred dollars per hour per worker, and you can afford to put in the management, you can afford to build a corporate structure and actually grow a company that can thrive and survive and grow without you.

36:11It was that geography can be a moat sparked this memory of mine. So a former co-worker of my boss's, he walked out of the grocery store and saw like those used car magazines, little like used car ads. It wasn't like thrifty nickel, but it was something similar. And he just went down the list of the top 20, top 25 cities by population, calling him up, hey, does your town have this? Hey, does your town have this? Yes, yes, yes. gets down to number 22, like Louisville or someplace. Oh no, we don't have that here. Moves to Louisville, starts it up. And like, that's his thing. It was like, I thought that was really interesting.

36:41Geo, not geo arbitrage, but I mean, we've seen people like, oh, I'm going to rip off this guy's idea and just pivot it to a different location. And it happens all the time. So something that just sparked that. The dog do business, right? So it was in Denver. I was at a conference in Denver two weeks ago. And I think that may have been where I saw the street spam sign was cutting across Denver for this conference. someone who had ambition could be like okay that's working in that metro let me call i'm in cheyenne wyoming or i'm in laramie or whatever like all these other towns like and you just find like wow on google there's literally zero websites ranking for this then you have to answer the question for yourself are you willing to go grab that spoon and sit in front of the pile of proverbial manure or not but to enhance what nick said i love that you're both named nick i can't get it wrong entrepreneurship is a skill and that's the whole like grab ebay and start selling You're like, oh, miles, I'm just selling stuff.

37:29Yeah. But if you take it seriously and if you start to specialize and if you know about old Nintendo games and you start to go shopping and you literally can build and there are people who have very successful businesses flipping things on eBay. So you're you're starting to learn the first few things. Maybe you're using chat GPT to help you write good descriptions and you're starting to learn sales like in fitness. There's all of those supporting muscles like, yeah, you want to build like these and these, but there's all kinds of like supporting muscles that you build along the way. And sometimes you just got to like get into motion, building those, whether it's a fully digital business, a physical business, man, selling real things is a lot easier than selling ideas.

38:06I will say that like from a sales copy perspective and the amount of effort required to sell selling services, people don't want to do stuff. Like, do I really want to go out and wash all of my windows? Like kind of not really. I'm in the middle of nowhere. So I don't have an option for that personally. But like, if you go do things people aren't willing to do, it's really easy for them to say yes. Yeah, something unique about me is that everything I do is a service business. I don't sell any physical products. And even my real estate business, we're buying buildings and we're managing them. But it is a service provided to investors.

38:36We're raising money and we're deploying their capital reasonably and we're managing our self-storage properties. So I'm a huge fan of trading physical work for cash. And it's creating the cash flow on a month-to-month basis for me. I'm pouring that cash flow back into real estate. I'm kind of using my own service, like me, Nick Huber, putting cash into my own real estate private equity company to then manage and buy real estate. Yeah, I just think services are, like you said, hard to do. And if you do it well and you have distribution, you can make a lot of money pretty quick. Hard to do. And maybe to get back to this idea of growth and scale, like more challenging.

39:10You got with the example of the old storage business. I got trucks on the ground in a bunch of different cities. I got people working on there. It seems all of a sudden it becomes logistics. It's a lot to manage. The truth is that delegation is very, very hard. In every service business, if you have people who need to do things in exchange for money, you are running teams of people. You're managing people. Every single one of my companies, it's nothing but a group of people working on these things. And delegation is not taught in school. And it is not taught in sports. Not once is your high school's athletic coach going to tell you, can you find somebody else to do this workout for you to get you in shape?

39:44Or is your math teacher going to say, hey, can you find somebody else to do this exam for you in an efficient manner? Zero delegation is taught to anybody in life, but it is a superpower. So what you have is 95 % of these service businesses, these small service businesses with less than 10 employees, you have an owner that is a poor delegator. And every single decision in the business comes through the owner. Meaning there's two levels of delegation. You delegate tasks. You tell people what to do. That's easy mode. And then there's the delegating decisions. And when you can delegate decisions to people on your team, that's when your businesses can really scale.

40:18That's when every problem doesn't come to you as the owner. And that's when you can go on vacation for a month and your business can actually grow and thrive and produce cash without you there. But it's not easy stuff. And like you said, you use the muscle example. Delegation is a muscle. Delegation takes practice. It's very uncomfortable. And everybody reads books on delegation and hiring and management. No. If you want to build muscle, you're not going to just watch Arnold Schwarzenegger documentaries and write a big workout plan and watch a bunch of YouTube videos and expect muscle to grow.

40:47you're going to go to the gym and pick up the damn weight. Same exact thing with delegation. Until you get somebody who says, hey, Nick, what do you want me to do today? And then I expect a paycheck at the end of the day. That's very uncomfortable stuff that you have to do and practice to get better at. But man, when you get it right, and you have other people working, and you're paying them X, and you're making Y, and Y is a lot bigger than X, that's when another unlock happens. Like that first unlock happens when you make that first dollar in your business wow, I can trade my time for money.

41:19The second bigger unlock that allows people to really grow companies and build generational wealth is when they have other people working, other people making decisions, and they are making money. When that happens, that's when entrepreneurship clicks and business management clicks. Did you know there's a disease running rampant alongside hustlers and new entrepreneurs? It's called superhero syndrome. Symptoms include a feeling like you got to do everything yourself, thinking you're the only one who can do it right and struggling to let go of certain tasks. Does that sound familiar to anyone? But the good news is there is a cure.

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42:27Side Hustle Show listeners get a$75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash Side Hustle Show. Just go to Indeed.com slash Side Hustle Show right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash side hustle show. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring indeed is all you need. As a business owner, you worked hard to make that phone ring, but missing a business call, it's like watching money fly right out the window. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the smarter way to run your business communications.

43:06Quo is the number one business phone system built for 2025, not 1995. In fact, it's rated the top choice for customer satisfaction with over 3 ,000 reviews on G2. Quo works right from an app on your phone or computer, and it means your team can share one number and collaborate on calls and texts, just like a shared inbox. And here is what is really cool, because if you can't answer the phone, Quo's AI agent can. It can qualify leads, it can route calls to the right person, and it's going to make sure no customer is ever left hanging. Think of it like having 24-7 support without the 24-7 payroll.

43:44More than 90 ,000 businesses are already running on Quo, from solo operators to growing teams. Try it free when you go to quo.com slash side hustle. That's q-u-o.com slash side hustle. You can even keep your existing number. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers. Yeah, I like this framework, the task delegation versus decision delegation, and a lot of people will start, I think, naturally with this task delegation. I need a virtual assistant. I need somebody to go do this window washing job that I just booked. Okay, task delegation. Here's the process to follow. Here's the recipe. You can't screw it up.

44:20Just follow this checklist. There's massive wealth that can be built by just delegating tasks. Like you don't even need to get to level two. There's many people that play golf at my country club that go to the nice restaurants and they're very wealthy and they have five, 10 person businesses where they are the decision bottleneck. They don't actually have anybody making those decisions. And when it comes to like, how do you do it? How do you actually get somebody on your team to get good at making these decisions? I have a story about a monkey on a back, like an employee, when they have a decision to make, they have a problem, they walk into my office, their problem is that monkey, that monkey jumps on my desk, and all of a sudden, it's my problem as soon as they tell me about it.

44:55Most business owners, they just collect monkeys. And at the end of the day, all their employees are going home and they got a room full of monkeys and their whole business is chaos. They're firefighting. They're running around like crazy. The good business owners, that employee walks in and they're going to make sure it walks out with that monkey back on their back. So an employee calls me up, says, Nick, I got this big problem. We got the storage unit. It's locked. I don't know whose stuff is in it. We had it. We tried to rent it. I'm not going to just say step out of the way. I'm going to solve this problem.

45:20I'm going to respond with questions. I'm going to respond with questions and I'm going to get them practicing making decisions. They're going to build the decision making muscle themselves and they're going to get better at it and they're going to get out of my office with their monkeys. That's a lot of parallels to parenting on that one. This has been awesome, guys. I'm taking a ton of notes. I think this has been a really fun back and forth. Are there any other factors that come to mind if somebody is standing at the starting line and they're looking at this as two alternative paths? You know, which fork in the road do I want to take?

45:50Do I want to build an online business or do I want to start something local in my own town, service-based? Anything else that you could really sway somebody one way or the other? My parting advice would be if you get caught up in the media circus around entrepreneurship, and if you watch Shark Tank and you're following Product Hunt and you're looking at TechCrunch and you're following all the entrepreneurs on Twitter and Instagram that make millions and millions of dollars, it's really, really easy to try to skip steps, to try to jump ahead, to try to change the world, to try to start a big idea without the capital, the network, or the ability.

46:24And it's easy to fall on your face and fail. I would encourage people to ignore a lot of that noise. I'm sure Miles would agree with me here. Ignore a lot of that noise and just start. Just do something small. Set a really small, approachable goal. I hate big goals. I hate to shoot for the stars and you'll land among the moon, whatever that quote is. It makes me mad. You need to actually start. Set a small goal. Set a really small goal. I want to put$1 ,000 extra in my bank account instead of scrolling TikTok. And if you do that, and you just understand that this is a marshmallow game, this entire entrepreneurship thing, it takes five years to get some momentum, it takes 10 years to get generationally wealthy, if you do it right.

47:02And if you're not willing to delay gratification and make decisions, five, 10 years down the road, you're going to fail. So if you get ahead of yourself, and if you start idolizing entrepreneurs that are way more successful than you, start taking shortcuts, don't build those skills, it's really easy to fail and end up going to get a job. Absolutely. That's some brilliant advice. I just want to echo the delayed gratification piece. So I've published recently video, I don't even know, 700, let's say 775, give or take. So a lot of people will publish video number four and they'll be like, oh man, my video sucked.

47:31I want to look at what Miles did. Like, God, Miles, your videos are so good. Yeah. Don't compare your step number four with my step number 778. Okay. That's just a recipe for you getting your ego mind engaged for a toxic internal conversation, which is going to stop you from taking any action at all. I love the idea of small goals. Make your first dollar. Can you get lightning to strike? Can you get people to watch your videos? Can you get people to engage with your content? I mean, all three of us, I think we would agree at like, how awesome is life when you're on the other side of that failing forward process of three to five years?

48:04It's amazing, right? The flywheel here is spectacular. Like you bounce over to me and we talk about in the trenches running companies, you bounce over to miles and you're talking about putting together the most important aspect, which is distribution. And then you look at Miles' entrepreneurial endeavors and how they're amplified because of his distribution and how running the companies amplifies his content. It all starts to work together and it just keeps your wealth snowball careening down the hill at some point. And invest in real estate. Once you get the cashflow going, a bunch of digital money coming in, like get some physical, tangible things.

48:35Don't be all in on digits and bits and bytes, like get you some tangible cashflow. Take some cash off the table, makes sense. 100 % pay yourself a lot of overlap here no matter which path you choose you have to put in your time you have to learn the skills of the game and you have to stick with it for a long time to start to see these results but the alternative is punching that clock for 30 40 years so it's worth it no matter which path you choose nick huber you can find him at sweaty startup.com join the newsletter over there he is at sweaty startup on twitter miles is at miles beckler.com you can join you can be subscriber number 200 ,000 six something over at his YouTube channel, youtube.com slash miles B.

49:16We'll chalk up those last little bits of advice as number one tips for side hustle nations. We'll include those in the show notes for you. And you're listening to this, you're thinking, okay, cool. I want to dive deeper on this stuff. You are in luck because we have a huge library of episodes on both of these topics in the side hustle show archives. I mean, on the local service side. We've got case studies on window washing and pet waste removal and mobile car detailing and power washing and residential cleaning services and commercial cleaning services. Lots of great stuff there. And of course, on the other side, lots of super inspiring episodes about people building content-based businesses, driving traffic from Google, from podcasting, from social media, from YouTube, monetizing with ads, affiliate relationships, their own products, their own services and enjoying that location independence and time leverage that comes with it along the way.

50:07If you're not sure where to start, the best thing you can do is go to hustle.show, answer a few short multiple choice questions. You can do it on your phone and you're going to get a custom curated playlist of the best side hustle show episodes to check out based on your answers. Again, that's at hustle.show for your own personalized playlist. Big thanks to Nick and Miles for sharing their insights today. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.