The Side Hustle Show - Full Episodes - Sweaty Startups vs. Laptop Lifestyle: Side Hustle Showdown

We live in an amazing time. The ability for us to go publish content without gatekeepers is relatively new. And so like Kudos to everybody here who's participating in that. And I do believe that this is one of the most unique and astounding wealth generation periods of our world.

It's really reflective of when the Gutenberg press came out in like the 1400s, like this is revolutionary. We all take it for granted at this point in time. But the way I see the world is that there are billions of people, I think there's five billion people staring at these things almost all day long. When they're not staring at these things, they're on their laptop looking for stuff.

When they're not on that screen, they're probably on another screen. And all the data says that screen time is going up. So what are they doing? They're consuming content.

And in theory, they're consuming content that they believe is going to help them make their lives better. And sometimes that's how do I invest my money into storage units to generate passive income on cash flow? It can be a wide variety of things. It's how to get a date.

It's how to get laid. It's how to get fit. It's how to lose weight. It's how to gain weight.

It's billions and billions. In fact, there's actually trillions of searches on Google each and every year. There's two billion monthly logged in users on YouTube each and every month. And there's about three billion monthly logged in people on Facebook.

So that's the opportunity, right? They're looking for ways to improve their life. And we can just choose ourselves and be like, you know what, I'm going to go all in and help a group of people. And I'm going to be the most helpful person in their world.

And when that clicks, the cash flow is just amazing because of the scale that comes behind it. I love it. Lots of content consumers out there that opportunity to become a creator of the content, answer those seven billion query. Answer the questions that are being asked, position yourself as an authority.

Years ago, a friend of mine, it gave me what he called the rule of the internet that people are only ever online for one of two reasons, either to solve a problem or to be entertained. And if you can do either of those things, you got a business opportunity there. Nick, what about you? My whole stick is just, hey, close your computer, look around you at your town, and look at these businesses that are interacting right now.

They're interacting with customers, they're selling, they're making money, these industries that already exist. And I think once you look a little bit closer, you realize that these business owners, the ones who are running those companies, they're not all up to date on the technology that's available in the ways that you can run your companies. And if you're really good at this stuff like Miles said, you can run circles around these people and you can make really good money. I'm all about finding the path of least resistance and competing against the easiest competition there is.

And I think local service businesses, some of them really make a lot of really good money and they aren't that great at what they do. You see a lot of the entrenched competition operating, if they have a website at all, it looks like it's, from 1998 and you'll see stuff like, fax us for a quote, you'd have to be a little bit easier to do business with in this day and age. And one of my favorite methodologies is just noticing kind of the commercial service trucks as I'm driving around town. I saw one the other day that was mobile bike repair.

I was like, oh dang, that's pretty creative. And you have the mobile pet groomers and you see the gutter cleaners, the standard ones. But every now and again, I'm like, hey, maybe I should, my bike is due for a two and a, maybe I should call these guys up. Nice wrapped spinner van on that front.

But maybe we transition into that idea generation phase and Nick, you'll let you go first with either using storage squad as an example. Just if you are idea agnostic at this point, how do you evaluate what opportunities are out there or what you could possibly do to get something off the ground and you cite us a lot of the ground? I think the interesting thing about this is the long tail of opportunities. The opportunities are endless.

I met a guy I had a call within my metham through Twitter. He runs a company in Kentucky that drives around picking up horse carcasses. Somebody's horse dies. It's an equine, like grim reaper and they drive around and pick up horses and he's got three crews, four trucks.

There's about seven employees at his entire company. He nets over a million dollars a year driving around Kentucky doing this. Interestingly, the closer you get to the cities, the more in demand his service is because there's nowhere to bury the horses. So it's just, the opportunities are just phenomenal.

But I like to impart just an awareness of business, okay? Most people are walking and going through their day and they're just lollie-gagging around. They're thinking about themselves or looking at their phone, swiping through TikTok videos. But in inquiring mind and entrepreneur can everywhere they walk, everywhere they shop, everywhere they go to spend money, they can just think about, just start thinking about things through the lines of, hey, how does this company make money?

You sit down in a restaurant, run some quick calculations on revenue per table for the night, how much of those folks in the back office making or in the kitchen? And you can just start to think about how are these folks making money? An example on the other end of the spectrum is I had a tree that was leaning over towards my house. Four guys showed up, they were here for 25 minutes.

I wrote them a check for over $1,000. It's not hard when you're thinking about opportunities through that lens, hey, how profitable is this? I'm running a miniature profit and loss statement in my mind to figure out where the good businesses are and where the more competitive businesses might be. Yes, this underrated skill of just, look at around paying attention to what's going on.

We're doing the same calculation. There's a guy who has a bicycle ice cream truck in our neighborhoods who comes around, I don't know if you used to have, we used to have Joe's, was the guy who played the entertainer and come around real slow and give you time to run in the house to get your money. So you guys doing it just like in the, with essentially a glamorous cooler on the back of a bike and we're like, hey, how much does this guy do it on a hot summer day? Miles, my hypothesis is with the online side of things, there's maybe a stigma or stereotype where it's, almost like the matrix, I got to find this low competition niche and I got to read all this keyword data, I got to figure out the stuff out.

So how do you approach it for when a new entrepreneur comes and asks for help and getting started online? Yeah, generally speaking, I'm recommending people go inside, right? Go into your heart. So your example of the mobile bike repair person, I'm assuming they love bike riding.

I'm assuming they've got like that van set up in a way that they can go take bike trips. So they're tax deductible van, they're tax deductible lifestyle, that allows them to do what they love and whether they want to start adding on mountain bike coaching and other types of services from there, it's a beautiful business model that can allow someone who is so passionate about mountain bikes and they love mountain bikes and they are just consumed by mountain bikes, they can build a really amazing lifestyle around that. And then do you want to scale it and run crews and have multiple vans or not? These are all wonderful questions that each individual entrepreneur gets to answer for themselves.

But I'm usually looking for people to go inside. What is the biggest thing that you've accomplished in the last three to five years? What have you been doing with your time? And even if that's like, well, I ain't been doing nothing but play in Fortnite.

Great, like we can actually start there because that means you probably know enough about the game of Fortnite to help someone like me who might want to hop on and get up to speed quickly to be able to play with my nieces and nephews, I'm willing to spend a hundred, 200 bucks to get up to speed. So I'm not just like getting owned every time I get into the arena. And there's just a billion long tail ideas that I'll represent that. Now, there is a risk that some people get to of, if I love the hobby and then it becomes a business, it's no longer something I love anymore.

I don't have the best answer for how and where that line is. That's a very individual thing. But if you don't know what to start creating on, just start creating, right? If you're all about mountain bikes, start creating mountain bikes.

But when you look back through your past three to five years, what are people asking you for help with? What are you already helping people with? And if you've been doing bike tuneups for a long time and you're always willing to go over to your friends house for a couple of beers to do some bike tuneups, maybe starting a mobile bike tuneup business is something that would fit into your lifestyle. And then for the people who are like, yeah, but I got nothing.

Three to five years, I've literally been doing nothing about petting my cat. Then where do you want your life to go in the next three to five years? Okay, are you overweight? Is it time for you to lose weight?

Great. And this is where we start to get down that kind of Gary Vaynerchuk idea that's maybe a little overdone of documenting the process. But some people, so in my circumstance in my position right now, I built a high cash flow business. We do hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue each and every month.

So where is my money going? How do I get my money to grow for me or how do I protect my wealth? These are the kinds of challenges that I'm personally facing at this point in time that could open me up to another brand to or potentially build upon my brand, et cetera, et cetera. So where have you been and where are you going?

Because it's really easiest to create content based on what you know or what you're going to be all about for the next three to five years. And that's really the starting point. If I'm, you say to go down like the Fortnite example or I've been playing a lot of golf the last five years, whatever it may be, you pay any attention at this point. So I'm going to start creating, I'll build a golf website.

Like you pay any attention to who's already out there, like what level of competition you might be up against or even thinking down the road of how am I ever going to monetize this? You're not paying any attention to that. Hey, I'm going to start this activation. So the, I would say the first question that people have to answer for themselves is are you a writer or are you a performer?

All three of us here were performers in a way. So the question to me is blog versus like audio slash video content because you need to learn how to publish and create content. So there's the tactical learning curves and the tactical like, okay, I need a cell phone holder. I need a little tripod.

I need to hook these things together. And so you can literally just start a TikTok channel and start sharing little bits and pieces of your golfing, of your golf days, of your friends being goofy. And the algorithm will start to give you a lot of feedback. People will start to ask you questions in the comments and yet again, through just taking the leap of faith and taking action, the feedback loop opens up.

And it's so many people are trying to watch videos and try to understand through guru courses. Like, how do I steer my parked car? And I'm like, yo, get out of the car and start pushing your car. And then when you have momentum, you can now start to course correct and adapt and pivot and steer your car.

And so I do think that is just jump in and go. Keyboard research is obviously helpful. Being in one of the big three niches, which is love, romance, relationships, money and wellbeing. Like that there obviously is some benefit there, but we each could rattle off, which we've been doing, dozens of examples of boring businesses that most people forget about that are crushing it.

They've got wonderful standard operating procedures and they've built an amazing cash flow and amazing lifestyle. Personally, I just, I want to do that. Like, if I don't want to be famous, I don't want to be like on a, I would much rather be wealthy, high cash flow, unknown work in a boring business that takes me two hours a day, which is what I've been building. That's probably a good transition back to Nick at this point.

So first of all, I met someone and I had a recent podcast with Meetup in Seattle and her advice, which I thought was really good, was pay attention to what you pay attention to in terms of idea, generation, niche selection. What are you into? What do you care about? But I'll throw this deck to Nick because I remember from our original episode, probably 2019-ish, you said under no circumstance, are you allowed to start a business around your passion?

People are passionate about things, which means they do irrational things like work for free. I don't want to be in a market where people are working for free. So I'll tee that back up to you. Yeah, I think it's this world we pick who we want to compete with.

You're choosing your competition and I see there's some competitive areas because it's fun, a business that's fun is gonna have more people drawn towards it and the cream will rise to the top and 900 people who want of 1000 people who may want to become an influencer, maybe only a hundred of them will get the momentum and kind of get that leap of faith forward. But if I look at industries where the person who's doing this business and making a lot of money, they're not that smart, like frankly. Look at real estate is the highest concentration of wealthy dumb people. I'm one of them, like that's just the truth.

But as far as, okay, if I'm gonna become an influencer and I'm gonna get that following, there's also something that's really important about that is that people want to follow people who are successful and already have done something. So like the quickest way to get that following sometimes is to do something unsexy, make the money and then once you've made the money, you can grow. And I also think you're looking at the market unemotionally and realizing that as an entrepreneur, it's not necessarily about me, like it's not about me. It's not about what I want.

So when you talk to some entrepreneurs and I love this and I want that and I and you realize it, oh, this business is all about you. It's not at all about what the market wants, what somebody's willing to pay you for. So if you can separate yourself from the business that you're going after, you can look at the market unemotionally and say, who can I compete with? What gives me the best odds of success?

And then once you work through that process, you realize that every business, if you start to do it well and you start to do it at scale, every business is the same. It's hiring, managing, firing, solving problems, running a company is running a company and no matter what industry, so you might as well pick something that gives you the best opportunity to earn versus, hey, what do I love doing? Because yes, you can run a three or four person business and earn money by doing the actual work. But if you want to scale, if you want to take your business to the next level, you're not going to be doing that work any more no matter what field you pick.

I think that's a great distinction there too, because like some people literally just want to make $1,500 a month more, $3,500 a month more, and they've got so much, they just want that little extra nug and they want to trade some of their free time that they have that they're scrolling and they're like, man, I know there's a way for me to change my relationship with my devices in a way and get it working for me. The ultimate truth and entrepreneurship from my perspective is a zig-zagged quote, you can have anything you want in this world if you help enough other people get what they want. So getting good at helping other people get what they want is the key, whether that's a clean yard with no dog do in it and you're willing to go do that or whether that's entertaining videos on TikTok. It's irrelevant and I think my niche particularly and Nick, you're in this, I'm rolling this niche a little bit, right, to make money online slash internet marketing niche.

A lot of people look at it and they're like, ooh, I want to be that guy and it's no, you don't, like the competition is a bunch of assassins. Like the money is not actually as good as people think it is in this niche. My wife and I have a brand that's in the spirituality and meditation space that we've been running since 2009. The absolute bulk majority of my income comes from there partly because I teach everything for free, but I did, I had to do something to stand out.

I had to be different and I'm looking at all these assassins with their killer sales pages and they're amazing funnels with their $30,000 programs on the back, back, back end of everything I'm like, how can I ever compete against these people and still bring my truth out to the world, bring my divine spirit out to the world through content. And this is what I came up with. And a lot of people idolize, I think all three of us, in a way, in a kind of a strange way. And we're all here, yo, like worm farming, like growing a worm bin and like making worm compost may actually be one of those niches that has a grand total of zero good marketers in it.

And you could literally within three months be the best marketer in that entire niche. And I think that's one of the ideas of, if you go play in that sandbox, your ability to go actually get traction and some of those traction of getting traffic, getting your email subscribers, getting customers, like it's so motivating versus trying to climb that uphill battle and sliding down because you're going up against a bunch of assassins. Yeah, it's funny. We've had a couple examples of that recently.

We had a guy who, Cytusso was running out mobility scooters to tourists or travelers visiting L.A. And he had that site up, I think, for years before he actually plugged down the money and bought his first mobility scooters, I wanted to see a critical mass of inquiries coming in to this site before I really invested. So he let it age, let it rank in SEO and smart. Okay, now I'm going to pull the trigger and actually go out and do this.

And same thing, we had a guy to use the Cooper scupper example. Did that in Denver or a suburb of Denver? And his original intention was I'm going to rent this out to a local service provider. But then he started getting leads.

It was like, I didn't have anybody to farm it out to yet. So it's like, I guess I'll go do it. And when we spoke, he'd done hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of this Cooper scupper business and he's doing really well with that. And I think maybe the key takeaway, especially in the online world, is if you don't have, maybe passion is an overrated word, but if you don't have that curiosity that drive to really own that niche, just somebody else does and somebody else will and you're not going to compete.

Like I love travel hacking and points and miles and optimizing all that stuff. But I don't love it to the same degree that dozens and dozens of other travel bloggers do. So I'm never going to be able to compete with them. And the only reason I've been able to do this business for 10 years is because I love it.

But if somebody else maybe has two or three articles related to side hustles on their site, they're not going to compete with me. Right. I've been at a huge business game for a long time. But I want to transition to this, the idea of the money milestone.

Because I think this is a really important motivating for a step. Once I see that initial attraction, I'm so much more motivated. It's like making your first dollar online. And for me, it was like my first shoe sale commission, like for my original side hustle, I come back to the hotel after working my day job, traveling on the road, hit refresh on the report and it's somebody bought the thing.

I got made my first $4.65 or something. Oh, if you can do it once, you can do it over and over again. Works. Yes.

And we have hundreds of stories. I'm like, I made my first 11 cents from an ad click or something. It's okay. Proof is the pudding.

And for my original business, if you could call it that, it was pretty straightforward. Knockin' on doors, trying to sell paint jobs. Like I can talk to my customer one-on-one. It's pretty simple.

But for the online side, it's like just tossing stuff out into the ether and hoping somebody finds it. I don't know, Nick, I feel like the sweaty start upside or the local service side, probably a little bit easier to connect with customers. I don't know how do you go about finding your first, your first paying jobs? Yeah, it's look around what you have in your house.

What do you have the ability to buy in a low-risk way and how can you get out and make a little bit of money? I had a car that could fit some boxes in it and I had an empty room for the summer that I filled with boxes. I made zero investment and I got done with two weeks' worth of work and I had a couple grand laying on my bed and yeah, it's that feeling that it's wow. Okay, I just tested this.

Now I can get after it and I can go. When you're walking around the world with this inquisitive mind or you're working for a company that offers X services and you're meeting clients that already are in that space and you can maybe pick off a couple to do on the side, you can just find a situation that you're in where people need something and you're gonna go out and make a little bit of money doing some work. That's step one. Before you get into the delegation, before you get into the scale, it's, hey, I'm gonna trade my time for money and that's gonna evolve into entrepreneurship.

I don't need to worry about scale, I don't need to worry about a moat, I'm gonna go out and trade my time for money. And once that happens and it starts to happen repeatedly and you start to get too busy to keep doing the work, that's when you focus on the delegation and the growth and the scale and taking it to the next level. Yeah, Nathan Barry has his ladders of wealth creation and it starts with a job and then it starts with this freelance or service based business. Like you gotta stack up these different skills to really scale beyond that.

And you can skip some steps, but you can't really skip learning the skills as his argument. I have a unique theory in that. So to really start a mega successful company, like a big company that can scale, you need three things. You need, first of all, in the most important, you need operational skills, you need to be able to sell, you need to be able to delegate, you need to be able to run a company.

Number two is you need some capital and number three is you need a network, either a network of employees or a network of investors or a network of partners or customers. Without those three things, you cannot grow a successful company. A, you don't know what you're doing, but you don't have the money to do it and see you don't have the people around you to put that team together. So the first company, in my opinion, company number one, it needs to be about acquiring those three things and less about acquiring money.

Does that make sense? Do your first company to learn operations, to learn sales, delegation. So these things that are just totally unique to a normal life that most people don't get exposure to, learn 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 wait, so many people try to start a really hard business first without the capital, without the operational experience and without the people. In miles any shortcuts you've seen for people who are starting that TikTok channel about shortcuts create long delays. Now, 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 1000 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 going to have to learn all operations.

All of a sudden he just talked about, I just say there's a jar full of learning curves that you're going to have to go through. And 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 gets started. Are we 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. You can do long form horizontal content on YouTube. You can do verticals on TikTok, Instagram, Reels and YouTube shorts for under $100.

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 and where I was in my life. borrowed $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 community to weigh in the day. 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 1800 posts this point, but we haven't really been publishing for the last seven years. And so there is the potential to bootstrap an audience. Once you have an audience, YouTube will partner with you on the ad revenue.

I don't think that's the best approach to making money per se, but it's possible. You can 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 three TikToks a day and I'm gonna start TikTok and golf and 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. Like I feel like I despise being a TikTokter.

Perfect. That is wonderful feedback. So now what's your pivot? Don't stop, right?

What do you try next? What do you try next? And for some people, it might be grabbing the bucket in 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 fill and you don't feel like a total schmuck doing it. Okay, and it's just again, you can't steer a parked car. Like just, I had a little beat up Dotson that I used to have to push start it myself. It was a Dotson 510 cool car in the world, by the way, but it had battery issues and I would have to push start it myself.

So sometimes you gotta get out and you look like a fool. You feel like a fool, but like how bad do you want it? And I know each and every one of us on this call, like we've all done things like that we had to do. We 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 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. I was a customer support rep. I was getting yelled at on the phone for $20 an hour, commuting an hour each way to that is 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, dirt face on my YouTube videos because I get 2% higher click-through rate on them than the other ones because like how bad do you want it?

Yeah, 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 started capital to build an online content business. The question is, you're six months into it, you're 12 months into it, you just not see the results, you'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?

Or at what point do you have to throw in the towel and pivot? I just want to know how much you, I want to base where you're at that six month mark by how much have you done? How much how many tries have you taken? How many of that have you taken?

How many pieces of long form, keyword targeted content, have you published? A lot of people are like, I'm not seeing results and you look back and they've done 12 things over six months. Like, what are you doing? So there has to be a frequency and this furvish 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 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. And this is what a lot of people are doing.

They're like, oh, drop shipping sounds 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 is like the power of compounding is real.

You start stacking up cash flow real estate and it's wow. Like I love cash flow real estate. I've been a flipper and I just did another deal recently. There's got some great cash flow to it.

So the power of compounding is real, but the power 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. It's so you have to 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. And 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, a money making type of content influencer.

That'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. Nobody wants to follow somebody in the self in the business money making space. If they haven't actually done it and they haven't actually made money.

So step one, put Twitter away, go build a business. Get rich first, then people will follow you, talk about what you're doing. 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.

But the sure fire ways, people want to follow special people. That's why all the most followed people on Instagram are professional athletes, the world class actors, singers, that 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.

As leadership, right? A leader is not someone bark at swinging in the hammock, passive income, telling other people what to do. Now a leader is there with the spoon in front of the pile of manure, shoveling the manure day after day after day. And I remember when vlogging was really big a few years ago, and it's fun to see how TikTok and Reels killed vlogging in a sense.

Everybody wanted to be a vlogger, right? Everyone would be a Casey Neissat. And it's been 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. That's really freaking interesting. It's extremely difficult. It's risky.

It we hit points where we were like, how the, did we get? What are we doing with our, you got to get to those points to become the kind of person who deserves an audience, right? And 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 could do faceless videos and blah, blah, blah. And they just end up spending a couple of grand and eventually it's all, this is all, these are all lies, they're all liars.

And they go back to their day job and it's 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 or someone, just getting someone to give you money for a thing, a service, something. Once you get lightning strike once, can you get lightning strike a couple times a day? And then if you get down a couple of days, man, how big of a pump can you build on that thing? And then how can you merchandise on it?

It is a process. That's where the online side of things, at least from my perspective, seem a little bit easier to scale because it takes the same effort to produce an episode that 10 people listed to or 10,000 people listed to, it takes the same effort to write the blog post that nobody sees or 100,000 people see. And so there's this unique scale and leverage to it where with my painting business, for example, yeah, I could have crews running out, I could delegate to a foreman and potentially, but it was much more challenging. It was more, much more people were liant versus tech reliant if that makes sense.

And it was real quick, sorry. So while it might be easier to get going, you're probably also going to deal with a whole lot more competition that you never had in that house painting, arena in that one little town there. And it's a give and take, right? Everything has, every coin has two sides.

Yeah, geography can be a pretty serious mode. Hey, what is your mode? Hey, I picked a town where there's not very many good companies doing this. And look, there's, it's an evolution.

You can move from good businesses, 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-scaled businesses with lower-barriers entry, with higher-barriers 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 grow without you.

It was that geography can be a moat, sparked this memory of mine. Former co-worker of my boss's described, he wanted to start, or he walked out of the grocery store and saw those used car magazines. There's little 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 up, hey, does your town have this? Hey, does your town have this? Just gets down to number 22, like Louisville or someplace. Oh, no, we don't have that here.

Moves to Louisville starts it up. That's his thing is I really, I thought that was really interesting. And geo-arbitrage, but we see people like, oh, I'm gonna rip off this guy's idea and just pivot it to a different location and it happens all the time. Some, well, that dog do business, right?

So, okay, so it was in Denver. I literally, I think I was at a conference in Denver two weeks ago. And I think that may have been where I saw the street bam sign was cutting across Denver for this conference. So, like 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. And you just find, 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. Yeah, 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, you literally can build. And there are people who have very successful businesses flipping things on eBay. So you're starting to learn the first few things.

Maybe you're using chat GBT to help you write good descriptions and you're starting to learn, say, so there's all, there's like in fitness, there's all of those supporting muscles. Yeah, you want to build like these and these, but there's all kinds of supporting muscles that you build along the way. And sometimes you just got to 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. I 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 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, it's we're buying buildings and we're managing them, but it is a service provided to investors, we're raising money and we're deploying their capital reasonably and we're managing our self storage, you know, properties. So I'm a huge fan of trading physical work for cash and it's creating the cash flow on a month, the month, the basis for me, I'm pouring that cash flow back into real estate. I'm using my own service like me, Nick, you were 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, you can 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, you got it 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's it's it's all the sudden it becomes yeah logistics, it's a lot to manage. Yeah, the truth is that delegation is very hard.

Like there is an 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. And not once is your high school athletic coach gonna tell you, hey, can you find somebody else to do this workout for you to get you in shape? Or is your math teacher gonna 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 super power. 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 they can, 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, that'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 gonna just watch Arnold Schwarzenegger, documentaries and write a big workout plan and watch a bunch of YouTube videos and expect muscle to grow, you're gonna 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. That first unlock happens when you make that first dollar in your business.

Wow, I can trade my time for money. The 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. Yeah, 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.

Just follow this checklist. Talk to me massive wealth. Yeah, 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 build businesses where they are the decision bottleneck. They don't actually have, 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 call it, 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 jumps on my desk and all of a sudden it's my problem as soon as they tell me about it. Most 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 who stuff is in 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. I'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. A lot of parallels to parenting on that one. Cool.

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, which fork in the road do I want to take to want to build online business, or do I want to start something local in my own town service-based? Like anything else that you could really sway somebody one way or the other. I think my parting advice would be, if you get caught up in the media circus around entrepreneurship, and if you watch Shark Tank and your following product, 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 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. And it's easy to fall on your face and fail.

I would encourage people to ignore a lot of that noise, and 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, like you need to actually start, set a small goal, set a really small goal, I'm gonna put a thousand dollars extra in my bank account instead of scrolling TikTok, and if you do that, and you just understand that, look, this is all, 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, and if you're not willing to delay gratification and make decisions, five, 10 years down the road, you're gonna 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 just fail and end up going to get a job. Absolutely. That's brilliant advice. I just wanna echo the delayed gratification piece.

So I've published recently video, I don't even know, 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. I wanna look at 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 gonna 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?

All three of us, I think we would agree it. Like, how awesome is life when you're on the other side of that failing forward process of three to five years? And I think 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 a distribution.

And then you look at Miles's entrepreneurial endeavors and how they're amplified because of his distribution and how running the company's amplifies his content, it all starts to work together, and it just keeps your wealth snowball building down, correening down the hill at some point. And invest in real estate. Once you get the cash flow going, a bunch of digital money coming in, get some physical, tangible things, don't be all in on digits and bits and bytes, get you some tangible cash flow. Take some cash off the table, make sense.

It's not a big pay yourself. A lot of overlap here, no matter which path you choose. You're gonna have to put in your time, you're gonna 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, punch in that clock for 30, 40 years.

So it's worth it, no matter which path you choose. Nick Hubert, you can find him at sweatiestardup.com, join the newsletter over there. He is at sweaty startup on Twitter. Miles is at milesbeckler.com.

You can join, you can be subscriber number 200,000, six something over as YouTube channel, youtube.com slash milesbeckler.com. We'll talk up those last little bits of advice as number one tips for side hustle nations will include those in the show notes for you. And you're listening to this, you're thinking, okay, cool, I wanna 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 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. If 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 gonna 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.