How To Make An AI-Proof Small Business Fortune

This founder built his brand on a simple idea: Forget about changing the world. Get rich doing mundane and even dirty jobs better.

_{By Brandon Kochkodin, Forbes Staff}

Nick Huber’s first business, Storage Squad, didn’t begin with a slick pitch deck to potential investors or an analysis of the total addressable market, but with a simple Craigslist ad. It was 2011, the summer before his senior year at Cornell University. While some friends were heading to New York City for investment banking internships, Huber was going home to Leopold, Indiana, unsure of what he wanted to do. He figured he’d pick up a few bucks by subletting his Ithaca place through Craigslist. That’s when the mother of a fellow student reached out through the site, hoping to store her kid’s belongings in his apartment.

Huber ended up creating Storage Squad, a summer service for college kids that picked-up their stuff when school ended, moved it to a storage locker then reversed the process in the fall. Storage Squad ultimately expanded to places like Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. While growing his service business, Huber also started buying storage units, eventually owning a stake in 64 locations spread across 11 states. In 2021 he sold Storage Squad for $1.75 million. He kept the units. While he grew his business, Huber was developing a startup philosophy that has helped him build a mini- business empire–and seems particularly well suited to the age when so many white-collar workers feel threatened by artificial intelligence.

“AI will never be able to clean, build and maintain our physical world. The sweatier the job, the better,’’ he declares.

The 35-year-old Huber, who now calls Athens, Georgia home, has made millions by not being a Wall Street wizard or coding apps that claim to “change the world.” Instead, he has built or invested in 11 businesses that together, he says, generated more than $50 million in sales last year. None are based in Manhattan or Menlo Park. They don’t retain fancy PR firms or claim to be making earth-shattering breakthroughs. Almost all of them were bootstrapped – and Huber insists that they earn their keep within a matter of months. It’s essentially the opposite of the typical business model of a VC-backed Forbes 30 Under 30 startup.

Huber is keen to get rich, but skeptical of the value of immediately going for the big score. He figures his network of storage facilities, which last year had $15 million in revenue, is worth around $140 million based on its $9.8 million in net operating income and the valuation of publicly traded storage companies. (He only owns part of it.) Add in the value of his holdings in other companies, and Forbes estimates Huber is worth about $35 million.

On X (formerly Twitter), where he has 385,000 followers, he delights in trolling those who think every startup should disrupt an industry or scale to the sky. Instead, he offers relentlessly down-to-earth advice. “Unless you are already wealthy or live in your parents basement, every single business you start needs to be cash flow positive within 2 months,’’ he wrote recently. “You are in no position to take a moonshot. Go get rich doing something simple, then take the moonshot when you can afford it.” He’s writing a book, tentatively titled The Sweaty Startup, to be published next year by HarperCollins, based on that philosophy.

When Huber first heard from that mom looking for summer storage space in 2011, the obvious question was why she wasn’t using one of the established storage companies in Ithaca? Turns out these firms were still sending out workers with clipboards and paper schedules and weighing every box. They were plodding, unwilling to accommodate last minute appointments.

“I figured I could just out operate them,” Huber says. He recruited Dan Hagberg, his fellow co-captain of the Cornell track team, and they used their own big old cars—a 1999 Cadillac DeVille and a 1997 Buick LeSabre—for pick-ups. “We worked our butts off for a week and the next thing we know we had $3,000 of cash sitting on a bed and we’re just like ‘wow, we created that out of nothing,’” he recalls.

Senior year, Huber took a course in entrepreneurialism. The prof was dismissive of his moving and storage business because he believed it wasn’t scalable and didn’t have a “moat” –something making it difficult for competitors to imitate. But after learning what a moat was, Huber concluded his real advantage was a willingness to sweat and a drive to deliver first-rate customer service. “I have a theory around trying to change anything,” Huber says. “If you try to change the world, if you try to change people, you’re going to go broke. Look at where people are spending their money now and go get a little bit of that money.”

Huber is both a born hustler and a natural grinder. In high school, he was more of a standout athlete than student and ended up at an Ivy League university by having his high school coach cold call college track coaches. He left Ithaca as an Academic All-American, and the holder of school records in the pentathlon, heptathlon, and decathlon.

“Nick will do in three days what it takes most people three years to do,’’ says Hagberg, who has been partners with Huber since that first summer moving venture.

Huber hasn’t limited himself to dirty businesses. But he thinks that is the best place for most aspiring entrepreneurs to start. Then he believes they should expand to ancillary businesses when they see a need and have capital to deploy. His businesses needed websites, so in 2023 he created WebRun, which builds web pages geared toward turning visitors into clients. Realizing the crucial role of search engine optimization in his storage business led him to establish BoldSEO. As his real estate portfolio expanded, he saw the benefits of cost segregation, which accelerates the tax depreciation schedule of real estate assets to free up more cash. That led to the 2022 creation of RE Cost Seg. The same logic applies to Titan Risk, his commercial insurance broker.

“Nick gets an idea in his head and he moves extremely fast,’’ says Mitchell Baldridge, Huber’s long-time CPA and cofounder of RE Cost Seg.

In 2021, Huber started hiring workers in the Philippines at $5 an hour to staff his customer support lines around the clock and used an outsourcing startup called Support Shepherd. Impressed, he bought 15% of the company in 2022. This year he raised $30 million, $20 million in equity plus $10 million in debt, to take majority ownership at a $52 million valuation, renamed it Somewhere and brought in an experienced Silicon Valley exec, as CEO. Along with customer support workers, Somewhere recruits–and Huber uses–coders from Latin America and the Philippines. He shrugs off criticisms that he’s exporting U.S. jobs or exploiting foreign workers. Big business outsources all the time, he says.

And, of course, now that Huber is buying small businesses, he has started his own business brokerage, this one called simply, Nick Huber.

Huber’s approach to finding opportunities is simple but compelling: just look around you, see what services are making money and figure out if you can do them better. Hard work is essential: One of his main tactics is spotting local businesses with poor customer service. How do you find them? He’ll call pretending to be a customer, especially over the weekend. If the phone just keeps ringing, you’ve found a weak spot. But if someone picks up right away, the business is likely stiff competition. Similarly, if a local business is still using a fax machine, that’s another tip off that they’re vulnerable.

As it expanded, Storage Squad picked its targets through common sense and a little experience, not big marketing studies. “We figured out quickly that the private expensive schools with a lot of out-of-state students were our wheelhouse,” says Huber. “A state school in the south, like the University of Georgia, the kids are resourceful, they drive trucks, they go rent storage units.” The same can’t be said for Boston where “they’ve got dad’s Amex and they’re ready to solve the problem with a couple hundred bucks.”

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