Running a business and being a business owner isn’t all fun and games. People rarely surprise me with good news; whenever my phone rings, it’s bad news. People don’t call the owner unless there’s a problem they can’t solve, and that’s where things can get stressful. Everybody thinks that entrepreneurship is fun, they look at people who are successful and get glamorized. But they don’t realize the truth behind the success.
In my early days with my student storage company, we were seeing massive growth and were constantly understaffed, and I was trying to manage it all as a twenty-three-year-old. My partner and I would spend three weeks straight sleeping under four hours a night and pulling a few all-nighters to get through our busy season. We were handling customer service, billing, scheduling, loading trucks, and everything else you can imagine; there was a ton of work to do in very little time.
At one point, after three days of working nonstop, we had four of ten scheduled employees not show up. My partner and I took trucks out ourselves to make up for it, already stretched beyond our means. In the middle of the day, I got a call from an employee who had just side-swiped a car in the street and caused $20K worth of damage. Another employee called that their truck had broken down on the side of the road because they had put gasoline in a diesel truck. Shortly after, I got a call that our last remaining truck had been left in the middle of the street, as both employees walked out on the job and quit.
After getting that third call, I broke down on the side of the street. Everything seemed to be crashing down, and I was overwhelmed beyond belief at how much was going wrong and how much still had to be done. I called my partner Dan, and he politely told me to get it together because we still had two days of this ahead of us. I collected myself, drove the truck until it was empty, then drove to the abandoned truck, and finished out the day. This was, by far, the hardest moment in my entrepreneurial career.
When you run a hard business you learn what real stress is and how to get through it. Every entrepreneur has war stories; they’ve all suffered, they’ve all done things they didn’t want to do. There are no easy methods because to be an entrepreneur you need to be willing to do things that others don’t want to do. Making money isn’t easy; operations is hard, sales is hard, and customer service is hard. You can learn, you can read, you can listen to podcasts, but you’ll never gain experience and grow if you don’t get out there and try. Embrace the journey, enjoy the ride, and grow from it.
FREE PDF – How to analyze a property and know what it’s worth: https://sweatystartup.ck.page/79046c9b03
Check the show notes here: https://sweatystartup.com/the-sweaty-startup/
Check out my free Delegation / Hiring 101 course!
Click here: https://nickhuber.podia.com/delegation-hiring-101
Join our Real Estate community: https://sweatystartup.com/rec
Special thanks to the sponsor: http://supportshepherd.com
We have a reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/sweatystartup/
Twitter Growth Mastery Course: https://sweatystartup.com/twitter
Want to hire me as a consultant? Click here: https://sweatystartup.com/storage
Here are the links to my businesses: Business Brokerage – https://nickhuber.com/ Personal Brand – https://sweatystartup.com/ Self Storage – https://boltstorage.com/ Bold SEO – https://boldseo.com/ Insurance – https://titanrisk.com/ Recruiting – https://recruitjet.com/ Landing Page / Web Development – https://webrun.com/ Overseas Staffing – https://supportshepherd.com/ Debt and Equity – https://bluekeycapital.com/ Tax Credit – https://taxcredithunter.com/ Cost Segregation – https://recostseg.com/ Performance Marketing – https://adrhino.com/ Pest control – https://spidexx.com/