Nick Huber’s Post

Name a hard industry to scale (not a new idea/change the world business) and I'll show you a company that has made it to $100 million in revenue and has scaled. If there isn't a $100 million revenue company in your industry, pick a different industry because you're in a job that's too hard to delegate and it will really tough for you to get wealthy here.

Entrepreneurship is the ultimate marshmallow test. Most people aren't wealthy and successful because they’re not willing to trade short term discomfort for long term gain. They make decisions that maximize pleasure today, tomorrow, or next week instead of looking to the future and making decisions that will maximize results 5-10 years from now. Remember: Success in life and business is a LONG GAME. Patience and optimizing for 10+ years down the road is how you actually win.

Look down the hall. Look at your boss. Look at the person who is in your shoes but 10 years further along. What are they doing? Do they have balance? Are they earning money while they sleep and spending their time pursuing their hobbies or with their children? If they're still grinding, overweight, unhappy and have a trail of broken relationships, run for the hills!

Too many business owners spend time on the urgent and not important stuff. It is comfortable and normal to get stuck in the flow. The important and not urgent stuff is hard, uncomfortable and very easy to procrastinate. But if you do it your business will grow.

The blue ocean strategy is risky. It is expensive. You are often trying to force a round peg into a square hole. You’re making guesses about which services or products a buyer might want based on your own hypotheses or personal preferences. Who in their right mind would play this game? I’d rather swim in the red ocean, picking and choosing the opportunities I want to pursue and the areas where I can compete rather than trying to invent a new market where I might have to spend years trying to convince people to change their behavior. To succeed in the red ocean, all you need to do is pick an existing product or service with a proven business model in a proven market and then do an above average job. For most folks, this is the way to go.

Early in your career you have virtually no leverage. You have no negotiation power because you have no real skills, no track record or experience, no network or capital, you own no assets and you have no passive income streams or savings to protect you if you make a mistake. Therefore, you have no power at all to negotiate or set terms. The people around you that are paying you to work for them have everything you want and need because YOU are the commodity. And that’s okay! That’s how it starts for everyone. But once you gain some skills, experience, capital, and a network, all of the sudden the scales starts to tip in your favor. You now have options. Slowly, you start to realize that not just anyone can do what you do. You have unique experiences and an early track record of results and other companies would love to pay you for that! Your salary starts going up and you are getting more job offers from other firms. You learn to hire and delegate and now you can build and manage teams. You now have some leverage and you can negotiate a lot more for yourself and set better terms. To me, a career is all about compounding these core things. Raw skills and operational chops. Capital. Your network. Your brand and reputation, etc. The more you build of each, the more leverage you will have in every situation. It often takes 10+ years to get this snowball rolling down the hill in the right direction. It involves a lot of hard work. But once you do, the game of business gets much easier and much more fun to play.

Everybody wants to build an online personal brand so they can amplify their business and make more money. The cold hard truth: If you aren't building a business, buying real estate, hiring employees or successfully making money nobody cares to learn from you. Nobody wants somebody who hasn't done it telling them how to do it. We get enough armchair quarterbacks in real life. People who haven't done anything but shovel advice at us non-stop. If you want a following, go do something interesting for years first. Everybody naturally wants to skip this step.

Three things to understand about life and business: 1. You can't succeed alone. Almost everything worth doing in life requires cooperation and collaboration with other people. 2. You can't make anybody do anything. People do things because they want to do them or they need to do them to get something else that they need. 3. Every single person in the world is selfish. People do everything that they do in an effort to make themselves feel good or make their lives better or solve their problems. Therefore: The most important thing you can do is be unselfish. Business isn't about you. It isn't about what you want. It is about solving problems for other people.

For 99% of people, you want to start a business and compete with companies that already exist. Why try to reinvent the wheel? They have proven the model. They make great profit and customers need them. They have found a way to recruit employees and people want to work in this field. They have figured out how to sell to customers, deliver great work, retain their clients and team, launch new product offerings and more. By all accounts, they have won the game. If you are thinking about starting a business and there are no existing companies doing what you want to be doing, think again. Most of the time, you’re looking for something that doesn’t exist and taking all of the wrong kinds of risk way too early in your career.

If you're working 60+ hours a week you have one of three problems: 1) You are a poor delegator. This is the most likely scenario (95%) Most people are terrible at delegation. They want to do everything themselves and micromanage every decision. These folks RARELY get rich and NEVER have a good work life balance while they're at it. 2) You have too much ego, believe you’re too special, and incorrectly believe that you are the only one that can do your job. This also includes the people who are obsessed with their jobs and do it because they WANT to be doing it. They have their entire identity as a human wrapped up in their work and so they only care about how that area of their life is going. They sacrifice everything else including their physical health, their relationships, being a good parent/father, friend, their hobbies, etc. They do this all to chase their career dream and satisfy their ego. This is very common (4.9%) 3) You’re in too hard of a business. There are some businesses that just can’t be scaled. The market sucks and nobody has done it before you. You’re solving a problem that doesn’t exist and trying to climb an impossible mountain. This is very rare (.1%)