How to make an AI-proof small business asset

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

_{From Brandon KochkodinForbes contributor}

Nick Huber’s first The Storage Squad company started not with a fancy pitch deck for 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 went to New York City Huber went to Leopold, Indiana, for an investment banking internship, unsure of what he wanted to do. He figured he’d make a few dollars subletting his Ithaca apartment on Craigslist. The mother of a fellow student contacted the website and hoped to be able to store her child’s belongings in his apartment.

Huber eventually founded Storage Squad, a summer service for college kids that picked up their belongings after school, put them in a locker, and reversed the process again in the fall. Storage Squad eventually expanded to locations such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. While growing his service business, Huber also began purchasing storage units, eventually owning an interest in 64 locations in 11 states. In 2021, he sold Storage Squad for $1.75 million. He kept the units. As he grew his company, Huber developed a startup philosophy that has helped him build a mini-business empire—and one that seems particularly well-suited to a time when so many employees feel threatened by artificial intelligence.

“AI will never be able to clean, build and maintain our physical world. “The more strenuous the job, the better,” he explains.

Huber, 35, who now makes his home in Athens, Georgia, has made millions by not being a Wall Street wizard or programming apps that claim to “change the world.” Instead, he has built or invested in 11 companies that together, he says, generated more than $50 million in revenue last year. None are based in Manhattan or Menlo Park. They don’t hire fancy PR firms or claim to have earth-shattering breakthroughs. Almost all of them were bootstrapped – and Huber insists they make a living within a few months. It’s essentially the opposite of the typical business model of a VC-backed Forbes 30 Under 30 startup.

Huber really wants to get rich, but is skeptical about whether it makes sense to aim for a big win right away. He expects his storage network, which had $15 million in revenue last year, to be worth about $140 million, based on net operating income of $9.8 million and the valuation of publicly traded storage companies . (He only owns a portion of it.) Adding in the value of his shares in other companies, Forbes estimates that Huber is worth about $35 million.

On X (formerly Twitter), where he has 385,000 followersHe delights in trolling those who believe that every startup should revolutionize or skyrocket an industry. Instead, he offers uncompromisingly factual advice. “Unless you’re already rich or live in your parents’ basement, every single business you start needs to be cash flow positive within two months,” he recently wrote. “You are incapable of taking a moonshot. Get rich by doing something simple, then moonshot when you can afford it.” He is writing a tentatively titled book The sweaty startupwhich is due to be published by HarperCollins next year and is based on this philosophy.

When Huber first heard about this mom looking for summer storage in 2011, the obvious question was, why wasn’t she using one of Ithaca’s established storage companies? It turned out that these companies still sent workers with clipboards and paper schedules and weighed each box. They struggled and were unwilling to keep last-minute appointments.

“I thought I could just overtake them,” says Huber. He recruited fellow Cornell track team co-captain Dan Hagberg, and they used their own big old cars — a 1999 Cadillac DeVille and a 1997 Buick LeSabre — as pickup trucks. “We worked hard for a week and the next minute there was $3,000 cash on a bed and we were like, ‘Wow, we created this out of nothing,'” he remembers.

Last year, Huber took a course in entrepreneurship. The professor rejected his moving and storage business because he felt it wasn’t scalable and didn’t have a “moat” – making it difficult for competitors to imitate. But after learning what a moat was, Huber concluded that his real advantage was a willingness to sweat and a willingness to provide top-notch customer service. “I have a theory about trying to change something,” Huber says. “If you try to change the world, if you try to change people, you will go broke. Look at where people are spending their money now and get some of that money.”

Huber is both a born hustler and a natural. In high school, he was more of a standout athlete than a student and ended up getting into an Ivy League university through his high school coach cold-calling college track and field coaches. He left Ithaca as an Academic All-American and held school records in the pentathlon, heptathlon and decathlon.

“Nick will do in three days what takes most people three years,” says Hagberg, who has been a partner with Huber since that first summer move.

Huber didn’t limit himself to dirty dealings. But he believes this is the best starting point for most aspiring entrepreneurs. Then he believes they should expand into side businesses if they see a need and have capital to deploy. His companies needed websites, so in 2023 he founded WebRun, which creates websites designed to convert visitors into customers. Realizing the crucial role of search engine optimization in his storage business, he founded BoldSEO. As his real estate portfolio grew, he realized the benefits of cost segregation, which accelerates the tax depreciation of real estate assets, freeing up more cash. This led to the formation of RE Cost Seg in 2022. The same logic applies to Titan Risk, its commercial insurance broker.

“Nick gets an idea in his head and moves extremely quickly,” says Mitchell Baldridge, Huber’s longtime CPA and co-founder of RE Cost Seg.

In 2021, Huber began hiring workers in the Philippines for $5 an hour to staff its 24/7 customer support team, hiring 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 valuation of $52 million, renamed it Somewhere and hired an experienced manager from Silicon Valley, as CEO. In addition to customer service representatives, Somewhere also recruits programmers from Latin America and the Philippines – and Huber uses them. He shrugs off criticism that he exports U.S. jobs or exploits foreign workers. Big companies outsource all the time, he says.

And of course, since Huber is now buying small businesses, he has founded his own business brokerage, simply called Nick Huber.

Huber’s approach to finding opportunities is simple but compelling: just look around, see what services make you money, and see if you can do them better. Hard work is essential: One of his main tactics is tracking down local businesses with poor customer service. How do you find them? Especially on weekends he calls under the pretense of a customer. If the phone keeps ringing, you have found a weak point. But if someone starts right away, the business is likely to be highly competitive. If a local business is still using a fax machine, that is another indication that it is at risk.

As it expanded, Storage Squad chose its targets with common sense and a little experience, not big marketing studies. “We quickly found out that the expensive private schools with lots of foreign students were in our wheelhouse,” says Huber. “A public school in the South, like the University of Georgia, the kids are resourceful, they drive trucks, they rent storage space.” The same cannot be said in Boston, where “they have their father’s Amex and are willing to take on the problem a few hundred dollars to solve.”

MORE FROM FORBES

ForbesWhy small business owners are the only surefire winners of this electionFrom Brandon KochkodinForbesSo now you have virtually unlimited funds to build your small business empireFrom Brandon KochkodinForbesHow to Buy a Small Business with No Down PaymentFrom Brandon KochkodinForbesBy the Numbers: Meet the Forbes Under 30 Class of 2025From Alexandra York