Quick note before we dive in:
I own Bolt Builders with my father who is a 40 year construction vet. We do architectural design, site plans, pre-construction management.
If you're working on a project - just respond to this email and I'll intro you!
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It was the fall of 2011. My business partner Dan and I had just started Storage Squad a few months earlier. We were 50/50 partners and we were starting our senior year of college.
As the months ticked by, we watched all of our friends at Cornell get six-figure jobs in NYC and Chicago. Investment banking. Hedge funds. Fortune 500s. Big 4 consulting. They were getting offers for $80,000 to $120,000 per year.
We knew our Ivy League degrees were worth something and there was a serious opportunity cost for every week we spent moving boxes when we could be kicking off a successful career at a company.
The business was about eight months old, but I still wasn’t sure if I could hack it as an entrepreneur. People told me I was crazy. Nobody else was doing this. And frankly, there is something uncomfortable about going in a totally different direction than literally everyone else in your life. No matter how confident you are, that sense of anxiety and fear creeps in, and I’ll admit that it got to me. So I decided to keep my options open and run a job hunt at the same time I was building my company.
Halfway through my senior year, I received an offer from Coca Cola in Irvine, California for $80,000 per year. That was big money right out of school in 2012. At the time, my partner and I had one cargo van and $5,000 in total revenue. I knew if I was going to turn down Coke I needed to make it count. I was giving up a lot.
I called my father and told him I was considering going all-in on Storage Squad. He was surprised and apprehensive. He mentioned a few of my friends with big time job offers. He reminded me my Ivy League degree was valuable and he was nervous.
“I support you,” he said, “but you better make it count.”
Dan was fielding similar offers, so right then and there we set a goal for ourselves. We needed to either fail spectacularly or make something happen. The worst case scenario was a failed business after burning a few years of valuable time. There is no slow rolling entrepreneurship when you could be earning $80k a year and starting a career in corporate America.
So we decided to get uncomfortable. We would focus on speed. We made a big plan and started racing.
Instead of just operating at Cornell, we would launch at three other major universities. We convinced three people in our network, Dan’s cousin at Illinois, my best friend who was in grad school at Indiana, and Dan’s best friend who was an undergrad at Iowa to open and run branches of our business there. We made a wild guess on a profit sharing plan with our friends who would do the work on the ground. Then we took a few more of our student loan dollars and bought three more cargo vans.
Our singular goal was to get more than 250 customers in 2012.
If we did that we would prove to ourselves that Storage Squad was a viable business and that sticking with it was a rational choice.
So we wrote “250” really big on the whiteboard in Dan’s room. And we agreed that if we couldn’t get 250 customers, we would shut down the business and go get jobs. Two hundred customers wasn’t good enough. 249 wouldn’t even be sufficient. It was 250 or bust. That was our high water mark. It was our “proof of concept.”
The discomfort was almost unbearable. We had no idea what we were doing. How would we compensate these people? Where would we store the stuff? Where would we get the money to lease warehouses and buy boxes?
Oh, and did I mention all of this was happening during finals week our senior year? And that Dan and I were finishing our Division I track careers? We were both captains, and I had been a D1 All-American the previous year. Not only was I trying to finish the season strong, I was also training hard, hoping for an Olympic trial run and another Ivy League championship in the Decathlon. Most importantly, I had met a girl a few months earlier who I wanted to marry. So I was busy selling her on spending her life with me.
By the end of May, it was done, and I had a plan for what I was going to do next. I passed all of my finals and graduated with a 3.4 GPA. I won the Decathlon at the conference championships with a school record, and I got 11th at the USA championships. I told that girl I loved her at graduation, and she said it back. She’s my wife today, and we have three kids. I missed the Olympic Trials by one spot and hung up the spikes, but I was preoccupied enough with other exciting things that I couldn’t have cared less. Storage Squad ended the season with 253 customers. Dan and I had a heart-to-heart, promised each other we wouldn’t get jobs, and kept racing ahead full speed.
That one decision to continue with entrepreneurship changed everything for me. Had we not hit our goal and not continued to build our business, it's quite possible that I never would have become an entrepreneur.
I'm sure I'd be doing well in corporate America somewhere but life wouldn't be the same.
I'm very glad we hustled and made it happen and that I decided to stay the course. The last 14 years have ended up being a lot more fun and rewarding than I ever could have imagined back then.
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A few posts from this week.
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Onward and upward,
Nick Huber
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