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Business is challenging in every way.
The people. The problems. The decisions. The investments. The risk.
I stuck with it for for 15+ years and got rich for one main reason:
My journey into entrepreneurship was approachable, fun and relatively easy. I had moderate success and I was profitable very early on.
And because of that, I gained confidence. Then I got better. Then I tried harder things.
I didn’t try to launch a brand new business idea. I didn’t try to educate a market. I had no big visions of changing the world.
I didn’t stand in front of a classroom pitch competition and talk about my moat.
Instead, I went out on a lawn mower and did boring work but got paid 5x as much as my friends who had jobs at Subway when I was 15. I went to college with $40k in my bank account.
Then I started a pick up and delivery student storage company as a junior in college. I got that company to $2M+ in annual revenue through a lot of grit and sweat.
Then I built a self storage facility when I was 25. Now I own 68 properties and a few other companies.
It was a process. I made money and had at least some success the entire time. When most entrepreneurs try to start something they try to make it about a new idea.
They don’t make any money at all. They have trouble raising money. They have trouble finding customers. They have trouble hiring people.
The BIG problem:
When you do something hard and you do it on hard mode, it isn’t fun because the rush and excitement of "innovating' quickly fades away.
Failing isn’t fun. Losing sucks. When you do something that isn’t fun for a long time, eventually you’re like “wtf am I doing with my life this is crazy." And then you burn out. And then you quit. And then you go get a job and say "Entrepreneurship isn't for me... The odds were against me anyway. It's just too hard."
Here's another way to think about it:
Imagine if you've never played golf and then for the first few rounds you go out and try to play the hardest course in the world, 4 or 5 rounds in you’re going to come to the realization that you hate golf and should stop wasting your time!
Or if you tried out basketball and stepped into a pickup game with professionals, the same thing would happen. If you wanted to get into running and signed up for a marathon the first week, you'd give up on mile 4.
Our entire education system and a lot of our media around entrepreneurship is setting young people up to lose. They tell them to play the game on hard mode.
They glorify the genius business owner who had a revolutionary idea and succeeded against all odds.
It’s no wonder why everyone quits and goes to get jobs when they compare themselves to this. We need a college entrepreneurship class where kids sit and listen to guest speakers 1x a week for a semester.
But instead of tech founders and venture capitalists we have service businesses and agency owners come in and talk about how they got rich slowly over time.
Like my friend who runs an HVAC company and makes $5m a year. Or my buddy who rolled up body shops and made 10s of millions. Or car dealerships. Or FedEx routes. Or web development or marketing agencies.
Instead of clean cut smooth talkers who have Ivy League degrees and use big words, they’ll see normal people who did common things for years and got rich. It would be far more approachable.
No one would talk about raising money. People would talk about trading their time for money, bootstrapping, and becoming profitable in year 1.
You'd have a local construction company tell kids about how their business makes $30M/year building some of the buildings they see in town. Or a concrete business, or a tree-trimming company. Or a guy who owns 8 car washes.
They’ll leave thinking “wow, I can do that” vs seeing the tech guy who's worth $100M because he sold some new app and say “wow that guy is so special. He's one in a million. I could never do that.”
And then instead of browsing the internet idolizing tech founders they’d walk around their town thinking about how the local businesses make money.
And they’d spot real, approachable opportunities. And then we'd have more people willing to give entrepreneurship a try.
I think we’re getting this all wrong and I believe more people need to understand just how much this media is hurting our kids. I do think there is another way and that's what my whole sweaty startup philosophy is about. Showing people the alternative path.
I hope this gets you thinking about 2026. If you're kids are home for the holidays, share this with them. It might just change the course of their career.
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P.S.
If you own or invest in real estate, you need to get a cost seg study done. 100% bonus depreciation is back and the tax savings are unbeatable.
You can estimate your savings here. 30 minutes of work could save you 10s or hundreds of thousands in taxes this year.
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A few posts from this week:
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Thanks for reading.
Onward and upward.
Nick Huber
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