Learning from a self storage tycoon: Nick Huber

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes and 32 seconds

Feb 02, 2023

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Today I want to dive into someone who we are big fans of here at The Steel Road.

Nick Huber is a Twitter mogul with over 275,000 followers, the founder of Sweaty Startup, and now runs a private equity fund with 1.8 million square feet of self storage called Bolt Storage.

Bolt Self Storage | Affordable Self Storage About

But how did Nick get to this point? He wasn’t just born into a whole bunch of real estate holdings.

Nick was just like the rest of us. Some schmuck with a non-tech service business.

In 2011, Nick and a partner started Storage Squad at Cornell University. Uniquely focused on helping students move, they built it into a company that sold for over $1,000,000 and provided Nick with the capital to move onto real estate investing.

I scoured Nick’s blog posts, podcast appearances, and tweets to pull nuggets of wisdom from his work so that you can follow in his footsteps.

Nick’s own words are marked and in quotations.

The beginnings of Storage Squad

When Nick started Storage Squad, he started just like the rest of us. Getting in, rolling up his sleeves, and doing the work.

For the first 3 years of the company, Nick was very involved in the day to day of the business. This taught him a few important things:

“Early on, you have to do everything. For 3 years, I was driving the box trucks.”

People swing too far in either direction. They are too lazy to get in and do the work, or they don’t optimize for efficiency in their business. It takes time to get to a point where you can hire and delegate.

“Entrepreneurs go after terrible business models.”

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Go out and get work done and improve on inefficient industries.

Business Operations

“We didn’t build software or try to reinvent the wheel. There was some technology that already existed and we realized that we could come in and carve out a piece of the pie.”

Use what is available to you. Don’t overcomplicate things and make the game harder to play.

“Self Storage facilities were all running like it’s 1980. Find a business that makes a lot of money but still has a fax machine.”

It’s so much easier to compete with these businesses than Stanford grads and really intelligent people. Find your niche where you have an advantage.

“If something is required of me, it becomes a bottleneck because I have a ton to worry about.”

Once you shift out of “do everything” mode, you should look to remove yourself as much as possible. Once you are delegating, you are working on the business, not in the business.

“I don’t have a job at my company.”

The Golden Nugget

If you only remember one thing from this newsletter, I hope it is this. 👇

“More and more opportunities come up as you get better at business. My story is no different, we started by hauling boxes with cargo vans and ten years later we’re buying millions of dollars of self storage.”