A.J. Lawrence:
I mean, I’ve really enjoyed your content. I went through quite a few. When I was going through like, okay, how many? I have at least 20 bookmarks of the different things. I cannot write content that way. So we don’t have to kind of jump into it right away, but I was like, all right, how much time, what is it doing? I know you’re kind of doing this as an exploratory thing as we jumped in before the start of recording, but I’m just really fascinated about how you’re doing this because it is so interesting and it’s a lot of fun. What would it take? And guys, I’m a little bit fanboying here, but you had a great post recently around what would it take to actually buy Greenland? And it’s so funny because I’ve read all these other serious articles. You actually broke it down quite well. And it was like, that’s funny. Better than I’ve seen like the New York Times or other things where they’re like, oh, well, this and that. And it’s like, oh, here’s the couple variations of her happen. It’s like, okay, nice, smart, intelligent, and a little bit of fun. All right, so taking a step back, you’re really big in the SMB Twitter. You kind of have your finger really well on the pulse of this sort of entrepreneurism, getting started, getting to scaling, all this. What is your own entrepreneur journey here?
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Nikolas Hulewsky:
It’s a great question. Well, first of all, thanks for the nice words. It’s nice to hear someone say something nice about me, so thank you. So I always knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. In fact, when I was a kid, I didn’t realize it at the time. My mom would always say about my dad in a negative way, oh, he can’t work for anybody else. And I thought that was a bad thing. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized, oh, I’m the same way as my father. You know, as you get older, you realize you’re one of your parents and I happen to be very similar to my father. Unfortunately, not unfortunately, I married a woman who’s very, very risk averse. And so when we got married, going into entrepreneurship was not in the cards. So I got educated, I got a job, I got a ton of experience, and about seven years ago, I decided I was going to make the leap. And I’m really glad I got the experience that I did because I wouldn’t have been successful otherwise. But I worked in home health and hospice, which is healthcare. Hospice is death and dying. Home health is getting people back to a prior level of function. And when I went into entrepreneurship, I decided I’m going to stick with what I know and I’m going to go build a home health and hospice from scratch. So I built a home health and hospice from scratch. At the same time, I purchased a medical billing company. Kind of crazy, but it was an opportunity that looked really good. So the medical billing company was doing about $7 million a year in revenue. It was a nice sized company. And then the whole month in hospice, I grew from scratch, from 0 to $12 million in about two years. I’ve since sold both of those businesses. Over the last two years, I’ve been kind of obsessed with content. A good friend of mine, a business partner, Chris Kerner, who’s mobile home park guy. And he’s always had a presence on social media and he’d always be getting these inbound messages like, hey, this is a cool idea, hey, you should do this. And he’d tell me about them and I’d say, you should do that. Oh, you should explore that. And he never would. And finally he’s like, well, if you want to do something with these ideas, why don’t you start social media presence? You really can’t do that when you’re scaling. You can’t divert your attention. You’ve gotta stay maniacally focused. And so after I sold the businesses, it was like, okay, could I do this? Could I grow a social media following? This will be interesting. And I was so burnt out from scaling, it seemed like a nice distraction. And so I just started writing, started writing thoughts, I started writing my experience, how to value businesses, how to buy them, how to scale them, how to manage people, all those things. And I found with that not only was fun, but I was learning a lot and I was meeting a lot of really cool people. And so early on in that journey it kind of came this idea of I don’t know what I’m going to do next. Like I made a good amount of money but I didn’t make enough money to buy an island. So I can be really picky with what I do next, but I need to do something next, at least in my opinion. So I’m going to figure that out. Like my next big swing is going to be from the network that I build. And this is a cool place to build a network. And so I’ve been diving pretty deep into content specifically over the last year.
A.J. Lawrence:
As you talk about diving into content, are you creating content that’s specifically around generating a higher presence or in developing sort of that networking with the type of people you want to? What’s kind of that thrust? Because some of your posts I’ve seen, they go quite viral. I mean, yes, we’re not talking Kardashian or whatever is the people, Elon Musk, I’m not even going to go there. You really are getting some large ones but I do notice some are very specific. And I think while you’re getting engagement, they do seem to be presupposing a certain level of understanding and involvement in a space. So how do you kind of play that?
Nikolas Hulewsky:
There’s a saying in venture investing which is, first time founders focus on products. Second time founders focus on distribution. 50% of all dollars raised by VCs are spent on Google or Facebook just acquiring customers. So the ability to have a distribution channel to get your idea out there is exceptionally valuable. And I view social media as another distribution channel, whether that’s Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, you name it. Those are distribution channels to get your ideas out there. And when it comes to business content in particular, I’ve just noticed two types. There are the Nik Huber types who are really good at generating viral content and they then used that to turn it into a business. And then there’s like the Michael Girdley types who are really successful in business and then they use that expertise, that knowledge, whatever, and leverage that into a social media following. Both of them are trying to grow a social media presence. Both of them are trying to grow a distribution channel. They’re doing it in different ways. So Nik Huber is very bombastic. Don’t hire anybody with blue hair, this is my new renovation and it’s a picture of like a house on stilts. And then Michael Gurdley is putting out really thoughtful content. I think I fall somewhere in the middle. I love posting funny things. I like observations. But I am trying to build a brand or an audience around being thoughtful of like, oh, yeah, Nik’s funny. He posts some harebrained things sometimes, but he’s thoughtful. He’s smart. Because if I was just trying to grow an audience, then when it comes time for me to take advantage of it, it’s a shotgun approach. Maybe I get somebody cool in there who approaches me, maybe not. It’s like building a business. If I’m careful about crafting my image and I’m careful about what I put out there, then I’m attracting the type of people who I’m going to resonate with. So whether it’s to build an audience of a thousand or a million, you want to be thoughtful about it. Because ultimately it’s the relationships out of that audience that are going to pay off. It’s not just, oh, I got a million people who saw this post. I feel good about myself, at least. That’s not why I’m doing it. Some people do do that. Some people are just trying to be famous. That’s not the point of trying to grow for me.
A.J. Lawrence:
No, and especially in this where you’re trying to get that type of thing. I remember when I had my last company that I sold early on, it was like, well, we got to niche down. We got to like, you know. And I’m like, we provide extra. We want clients who want to think and do that extra like let’s paint the fence together. Not like clients “have it done”. We want to geek out. And it was like, we can’t say that. That can’t be your thing. But with content, we did eventually, and we got much better. And I finally stopped trying to be wacky. But over the years, we’ve created content that was very specific to that process of getting your hands dirty and working with partners.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
And did you build your business from scratch?
A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, my last one. Yeah.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
So you know this. In the beginning phases, it’s like, I’m just throwing spaghetti at the wall. What works, what do I like, what resonates with people?
A.J. Lawrence:
Take the garbage out? We’ll take the garbage out. Whatever you want us to do.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
Exactly. Oh, you want us to do that service. And so, you really can’t afford to be picky at that point in my opinion. You kind of got to be broad. But then over time, you refine what your offering is. And there’s a lot of different time points in the business journey. A $100,000 a year in revenue is very different than even $500,000 a year in revenue. And you’re figuring out different things at each one of the places anyways. For me, it was, I don’t even know who I’m writing to. And I had to figure that out. And I’ve gotten to this place now with the podcast, with writing, where it’s like I like helping people make their first million dollars. There’s a lot of content about ideas. I’m not necessarily the idea guy, but it’s like, cool. You’ve got a business, you’ve got an idea, you’ve started something. How do you now make your first million dollars? How do you scale it? How do you buy a new business? How do you sell it? How do you think about pricing? How do you think about optimizing? I like those conversations and sort of that’s where I’ve kind of focused my niche. It’s a smaller niche. I mentioned Chris, mobile home park guy, my friend and business partner, he’s very broad. He’s like business porn. Here’s an idea, here’s an idea, here’s an idea, here’s an idea. That’s not the type of content that I necessarily want to put out. And so I think being thoughtful in that, I am now attracting people who not only like that content, but see, oh, Nik has an expertise. Maybe we could do something with him. I’ve had private equity funds reach out to me and say, would you lead this roll up? We’re thinking about doing such and such in this space. We can raise some money. Would you lead this roll up? And so far the answer’s been no, because I don’t want to do that right now. But that’s just like a confirmation of those are the types of opportunities that will come my way just by building a good audience.
A.J. Lawrence:
I’ve seen, and I’m pulling a blank, but there is some good. Like, how do you take it step by step through it? I mean getting that type of attention is really helpful. I think it’s also sort of like the investment opportunities. The SMB space as someone who is also looking to acquire, looking at the failure rate, even with the increase, what did they say? It doubled in the past year or so from like 2% to like 4%. They’ve recently just had it little, but still you’re talking about failure rates that are a dream for any type of business owner who’s in that lovely like, wait, you’re talking about. And I think it’s under 250k. I think if you’re over 250k, it does drop. And I think somewhere, whatever the SBA is in, it’s the higher up you go, the lower the failure rate is. But it has increased just because I think there’s been so much of a rush into it. There are some players who do kind of promote that. It’s a great passive. Not going to mention any. Some of the people out there or the 0% down or the kind of the finance to the gills without any room. But like, even with that increase out there, that’s still on the most secure way. So like looking at that space and getting it, you’re talking, and I think this is where it’s really interesting following you, it’s like, there’s so many good opportunities to then, if you can help people there, be a partner to them, to maybe invest in their businesses. Are you doing any investing out of this?
Nikolas Hulewsky:
I did, yeah. I actually did two searcher investments last year. One was a commercial kitchen and appliance repair company based in Tampa, Florida. So that was a ton of fun. I met him on Twitter and he’s like, hey, I found this business. He sent me the financials. It looked really good. He had good experience. It wasn’t exactly gap funding, but he needed money to close the deal and took a percentage stake in that. So excited about that business. And then I invested in a small community. They’re based in North Carolina, but they’re nationwide. So, yeah, I have invested in businesses. And back to your point, there’s a couple things I hate. I hate the passive push. Oh, you can make passive income. Unless you have more than $10 million, no business is passive because somebody has to manage it. Unless you’re wealthy and you can pay someone to manage it, it’s not passive. And even in that instance, you still have to manage the people who are managing people. The second one is, have you read EOS?
A.J. Lawrence:
Yes. I kind of hit my head over.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
I’m a visionary. I need an integrator.
A.J. Lawrence:
We all do.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
And I’m like, first of all, yes. Second of all, you don’t even need to worry about that until you’re at like $5 million in revenue. In my opinion, that book is really written for scaling businesses that have teams. But before that, you can’t just be, I’m the visionary so I need an integrator. Okay, you’re saying you don’t want to work, basically. It’s like, for the most part, anybody who sub 5 million is actively running their business.
A.J. Lawrence:
There’s a great post and they just recently, the guy who does foundry. He’s rolling up foundries.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
Reg. Yeah, Reg Zeller.
A.J. Lawrence:
Reg.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
Or Josh Schultz. They were together for a while.
A.J. Lawrence:
They were together and they did a great breakdown of what it meant to actually be the visionary and the operator. And it was so funny because the amount of work that Reg took on and where it sort of started going into that like, oh, now I go play golf. But that I’m actually thinking all the time. And that thing was, as you said, was much more advanced than like, hey, I got an idea. Let’s go hire some VAs out of the Philippines. And you do all the work and I’ll sit there and come up with cool things. It was like pretty amazing breakdown. But yeah, you have to have something of substance to make it worthwhile. If you want to be a visionary, you actually have to get shit done first before you get to let me just play around on the edges.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
Well, I hate this like “I don’t want to be in the weeds of the business”. I’ve never met in my entire life anybody who was hyper successful who wasn’t in the weeds of their business. Now, they may not have been doing. I always revert to health care intake or sales or operations or like billing and collections. But they knew what the freak was going on. Like, they knew who was on their team, they knew what the issues were. They were very involved in those businesses. The only time you get to the point where you’re like, oh, I’m not in the weeds of the business is when you’ve made enough money by doing the things I just said that now you can invest in people or hire people to do stuff. And I think that it does people a disservice when you’re getting in to think that they’re going to run a business, a small business in particular that way. A small business is you, man. You’re sub $5 million, that’s you. Once you get past 5 million, that’s when you’re bringing on talented management that can grow the business and manage the business and it expands outside of you. But under $5 million, like you are the business.
A.J. Lawrence:
And what’s really funny because of the few businesses, as we talked about, so few actually get past that million dollar. The entrepreneur has to have their fingers in everything. They have to live, breathe it. As I used to say, I had this bad problem where someone would ask me how I was doing and I would talk about the business. So how are you doing? Oh, well, we had some delayed payments. This client’s loving it. Yeah, it was like, okay. That same thing is also then a weakness as you do approach 5 million and you need to get to that. Because it’s like if you are so involved and you have everything, you still need to be involved and you still need to know everything, but in a different way. You can no longer be that person who does the thing. Like I used to laugh. It was great for the first couple of years. Every day, right before when I first woke up, I looked at my bank accounts and I calculated where I was on bills and payments and inbound. At the end of the day, I would do the same and track that number. And I did this for years and four or five years in, finally got big enough and I finally got my head hit enough times. I was like, oh, let me bring in a fractional CFO. And I was so proud to show him this. And he just like looked at me. It’s like, that doesn’t do anything. That’s nothing. Just look at the cash flow statement. But I have this thing. I know where all the checks are. I know all the things. Yeah, that doesn’t really, you need to grow. You can’t. But I know if we’re going to fall apart. It’s like, dude, if that’s your real worry right now, you have the wrong focus.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
Yeah, I think businesses under like $2 million, you’re pretty much managing everybody. Between 2 and 5 million is when the first time you have managers in there that you’re managing. So it’s like you’re managing the managers who manage people. But then you start getting past that where you have managers who manage other managers. And once you get, at least in my experience, that second layer of management, that’s where you can’t be just the force of personality who micromanages everything. You’ve got to have systems, you’ve got to have a way to infuse your culture and your vision and your ethos into the rest of the team. Because you can’t be in every hiring meeting, you can’t be in every disciplinary meeting, you can’t be in every strategy and collections meetings. You’ve got teams for that now. You’re running everything. But you’ve got to figure out, how do I get me, Nik’s ethos, and what’s important to me pushed down to the rest of my team. And that’s why you start seeing people who have a mission and vision statement and they’re very clear on their hiring metrics and these are our core values. And that’s why EOS, they have the rocks which are more practical, but they also have the like 10 year, 5 year vision, et cetera. It’s because when you start getting to that size, you need to be able to figure out a way to push down to your teams your vision. Because smaller than that, I’m with them every day. I can just talk to them. They see my ethos. But past that, they don’t see me every day. So you’ve got to figure out, how do I get the water to the end of the row?
A.J. Lawrence:
How do you move that? And I think that’s always this fun piece because I know when I went through that period, I would think I was saying the same thing. And the people who I was interacting with daily understood where my way of rephrasing things was. But when there were further team members, as you said, out there, or we had multiple offices in different parts of the country, once or twice a week, they’re on video, chats and all this. And they hear me say something and it’s just like a week’s variation of me saying the same thing every day multiple times. But I’m now saying it in such a way that’s different. They would be like, we’re now doing what? And I’d be like, no, no, it’s the same thing. And they’d be like, oh is this the same thing? And I’m like, it is that.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
It’s so true. That’s why I think the exercise of going through your core values in particular is so important. Because what I’ve learned is you think people understand what you’re saying, but for the most part, they take the things that they agree with and nod, and they’re like, yeah, yeah, we’re in alignment. But when you put pen to paper and you’re actually writing it out, what’s the definition of X? Everybody starts having a different interpretation of what that means and what the application of that is. So as you grow, like for us with the home health and hospice that I grew, we had to go through that exercise. What are our core values? Why is joy one of our core values? That’s weird. And what does joy mean? Are we just like Pollyanna walking around all the time, right? So we had to go through the process of what that meant to us. But what it did is two things. First, it set a standard throughout the rest of the organization. We could print it out and show them, hey, here are our core values. Anytime we orient or onboard somebody, we use those things. Anytime we discipline somebody, we referred back to those things. Anytime we had an all staff meeting, we referred to those things. So it’s like it created shared language, and then it created buy in from the people who helped create it with us. Right? That leadership team that came together to create those, they were bought in because it was their culture. They helped write it, they helped create it. And many times, at least for me, earlier in my career, I didn’t put in a lot of emphasis on that because I didn’t think it was as important. What’s important is, no, we got to cut costs. No, we got to go out and sell. We got to go out and whatever, X, Y and Z. But then you come to realize any of those functions are executed by humans. And if humans don’t understand and they’re not bought in, if they don’t believe in the vision, they’re not going to do well. So you’ve got to spend the time to really get them on board and on your team and build trust, and then you can go and push. So I focus a lot now, especially when I’m scaling, on we’re building the culture. Who are we? How do we talk? What are the things that are important to us? And anybody who’s entering that new phase, I think it’s just a very important exercise early on to start having those conversations of what are our core values.
A.J. Lawrence:
And I like the way you say that early on because I know for myself, my difficulty in sort of doing them. We did eventually, but as we grew, I kind of let slide. But what happened was time where I really needed it most was when all of a sudden I couldn’t touch base with 15 people to 20 to 25, 35 to 45. And it was like, I’m still trying to talk to everyone. So instead of it being one and a half days a week, I’m now three and a half days a week. But wait, I also need to do-why am I trying to do 8 days a week? It was also this period where I felt overwhelmed. There were so many moving parts and trying to get everyone to sit down and focus and do it was so frustrating for me because there were so many other things I had to do. So this idea that you just put out there of like, start early, put it in. There’s a real reason why that pays dividend. From someone who didn’t, it’s hard to do it in the middle of the fire when you’re there to actually sit down and say, okay.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
It’s like going to LinkedIn to look to a job. Most of the time when you see somebody posting frequently on LinkedIn, you’re like, oh, they must be looking for a job. And if you haven’t built a network, if people don’t know you and you haven’t built a network, then going to that network at the time when you need them is not the best time to go and approach that network. Cause you haven’t built up any goodwill, any reciprocity. And it’s the same with culture in a company. The time you need to access that culture are the hardest times. But if that’s the first time that you’re really digging in to create the culture, it’s a very difficult situation to be in. And this is a business idea that I have. I mean, I don’t know that I’ll launch it, but I think that companies, larger companies, 100 plus employees, their CEO should have a weekly podcast or somebody in that organization should have a weekly podcast. Because like you said, you can’t touch base with each individual employee anymore. I had 250 employees at the healthcare company that I had. I could not talk to every single one of those employees every week. Some of them were $15 an hour CNAs and some of them were my marketing executives or clinical leaders, whatever they were. How do you get all of those people to buy in and trust in the ethos if you’re not able to talk to them? You’ve got to either rely on your middle management. But more and more I like this idea of like, do a podcast. Have them actually listen to you, especially if you’re the driving force behind this business. Because getting your message out as a leader is very important for cohesion of the rest of the company.
A.J. Lawrence:
And don’t use the AI avatar like I am right now to actually do it because they can tell really quickly. As you were saying that, I was like, oh yeah, throw everything into Notebook LLM. Yeah, this is my geek. Like, oh that’s right, the culture. Okay, all right. But back to the point. But no.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
Well, there’s a million things you could do from it. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, you could. No, but that’s the fun. You can split it up. So, okay, I like that idea because you get everyone aligned. I’ve heard this from more than a few people of doing this like weekly, we do stand up. We have sort of like state of the biz update, our weekly cadence. And this is just for my search team and for the podcast and stuff like this as I go out. But I like the idea of taking that like as things, creating this, this is where we are, this is what’s going on. Keeping a little alignment around the long term with the quarterly. And I like the term quarterly rocks, even though I’ve never done quarterly rocks. It’s such a cool concept. It’s like, all right, I have a bunch of rocks. Let’s get the sand first, because the sand always fills everything up. Let’s get the rocks in first, that lovely one. Fill your vase with rocks before you put the grit of life in. But that is really cool. And just taking a step back just on your business idea, I think it is a good idea because I know someone who does one for not-for-profits, specifically not-for-profit membership groups. And their whole thing is specifically creating. They reach out and sell to this segment of the market and they produce these things for the membership podcasts of the leadership team talking about XYZ happening or blah, blah, blah, or NRA stuff, those types of organizations. So, yeah, I could see that being a really cool, and kind of tying it into some form of internal advisory consulting, internal culture thing.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
I never had a thousand employees, but any company that I’ve worked with or worked for or know of that has a thousand or more employees, they have internal communications. They have an HR team that takes care of it or a communications team. They send out newsletters. They’re very active in communicating because they know how important communication is to the rest of the organization. But what I don’t see a lot of are conversations with the CEO, conversations with a senior executive. And I think that that would be really valuable to a lot of companies who want to make sure that their culture is still strong even at the lowest common denominator.
A.J. Lawrence:
I mean, it goes back to FDR sitting at the fireplace reading the comics for kids when there was the strikes so the kids couldn’t get, you know, it’s like they found out. At first, it was just one way of saying good, but then by doing these fireside chats, he was able to connect and answer questions that people were having and it bypassed him. We haven’t seen politicians bypass mainstream media recently at all and do different things. It’s like, guess what? You can do if you actually reach out and talk in people’s normal patterns of interacting, you can get different things. That is good. I like that a lot. That would be a really great business and probably get bought. Someone who had that larger consultant could probably buy it just for the ability to kind of integrate if you had the good structure in it. Let me not geek us out into doing that. But that’s a cool idea. All right, so you are exploring. What are you finding? Since you’re generating so much good content, what are you finding that’s so interesting that’s helping you seed your content?
Nikolas Hulewsky:
I think the biggest thing is that I make time for it. You’d be shocked if you dedicated an hour, even a week, to just sit down and write what you’ve learned, how much content you would generate. Because all of us are essentially a living, walking, breathing LLM. We’ve taken this disparate set of experiences, we’ve condensed it and synthesized it, and then we use all of that context to make quick decisions as we see problems that come up in the future. And we don’t necessarily think about it that way. Right? But that’s essentially what an LLM does. And if we sat down and wrote out how do I value a business? All of a sudden you’re going to start listing out the steps that you take or the non-negotiables that you have about buying a business or how do I manage somebody? How do I think about bringing on a partner? What is working capital and why is it important to a business? Those are all things I never sat around and thought about until I started writing content. And now I’ve been able to sort of create this framework of how I think about things. I think it’s a really good thought exercise, not just for someone who wants to write content, but for you just to codify like how do I think about managing people? What is important to me? And that has been as important as anything else. Because now I’m like, okay, this is my wheelhouse. These are the things that I’m good at. This is where I think, what’s that called? ekagi or ikigai? Where things I’m good at, things I like, things that add value to the world, and things that I find fulfillment in or something. There’s like four of them.
A.J. Lawrence:
And things I doom scroll.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
Yeah. Things I doom scroll. That’s where I think as you write out your thoughts and just think through experiences, yeah, I do enjoy doing this. I am really good at this, and people seem to value this. It just helps kind of clarify even your own value proposition.
A.J. Lawrence:
Very cool. So I know you’re in an exploration phase. Have you put a framework or even a concept of when you’re going to move it to something? You’re like, oh, I give myself three years, five years?
Nikolas Hulewsky:
I’m giving myself 2025 is the year I decide. Yeah, I’m going to decide to do something this year. I feel like there’s a couple ideas that are swirling around what is next. I think what’s surprising to me is that I am getting to the place where I think content is always going to be a thing that I do. I kind of thought it was going to be a thing that I did for a season and then was done with it. But I get a lot of enjoyment. I meet cool people, I like writing about things. I get satisfaction with helping other people. But there’s enough kind of percolating right now that I think there’s going to be at least one good big opportunity that I take in 2025. It’s different than the first time that I did it, which was like go out, try to buy a business with the SBA or start from scratch. This time is going to be, should I go raise money? I don’t need to think small. I don’t need to go buy a three, five million dollars business. I could go roll up an industry or I could go buy a bigger business and just stick with that business and try to scale it because I could go out and raise money. But then the question is, do I want to raise money? Like, this is literally an internal debate that I’m having right now. I don’t like bringing on outside investors.
A.J. Lawrence:
No. I mean, the big thing is, and you’ve seen this math and you probably have done these posts, so it’s like when you look from traditional search funds, private equity, to all the things, to traditional, self-funded, SBA backing, whatever. It’s like you control your destiny but you’re controlling your destiny over, let’s just say something of like 2 to 6 million dollars of value. You go up higher, you’re getting a smaller amount but you’re talking numbers but you’re also talking, as you said, different bosses. I just have never been built to serve in heaven. I’d rather rule in hell. It’s kind of my feeling of this. From very early on, similarly. I heard that phrase when I was like 13 and I was just like, yes. I don’t know what it meant and I had no concept of how it would guide my life, but I will do this. But still, it is that interesting concept of how do you do this? Because the numbers do. I know I’ve had multiple guests who’ve gone through the private equity thing and it’s like, it’s a money machine with, you know, there’s risk. And there’s only a few people being asked to that dance, but still, it’s a money machine if you are willing to do it. But as you said, you have to be willing.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
This is the last thing that I’ll say is like, you have to know why you’re doing it. Why do I care about making $50 million or $100 million or $5 million? Like, where is your line? And for me, I have young kids. I don’t want to be away from my kids that much. And I also want to have a nice quality of life. I don’t want to be working necessarily 90 hours a week. So $100 million is not my goal. I know what it would take. I think I could hit it. It’s really not my goal to roll something up and get $100 million. I want to do something that I own, that I can effectuate an impact, but I don’t want to necessarily be beholden to somebody else who’s like, no, it’s a billion dollars or bust. So that to me is as important of a thought exercise as anything else. Where do you want to be? I think I would probably be happy at this point just making 10 grand a month. I know that sounds like crazy, probably to you, and just doing what I’m doing. So my wife’s not like, are you just dicking around on YouTube all day? What are you doing in there? But, yeah, you just really need to figure out why. What’s motivating you?
A.J. Lawrence:
I sit there and I have that same thing. It’s like, retire in Southeast Asia, retire in Southern Europe, retire in Switzerland. Switzerland is the top of my thing where it’s like, okay, these are the things. We can do the first three steps of this but if we want complete, you know, we got to do a few more things if we want higher, but kind of is nice. And I think that there’s nothing wrong with that either. No. Matter of fact, it is incredibly lucky given most everything out there. So I love that thing that you bring it to like, what do you really want from this? And I think preparing and understanding what that means is so powerful. All right, Nik. I know I could keep bugging but I know you have to kind of disappear soon. I really appreciate you coming on the show. I’ve been a big fan for a while. Thank you. You’ve helped me look at different things and I really do appreciate the content you are creating and I’m excited to see what you do. And I would love to actually, as you go forward and kind of start firming it up, love to hear more about that and learn about it just personally, let alone, you know, bring you on the show if I can. But I think what you’re doing is really fascinating and I think this is one of the cool you can do from this journey we take as entrepreneurs. It’s like, okay, I have some time and I have some opportunity to do it. And I think you’re doing pretty amazing there.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
Very lucky. I mean, it’s very lucky to have time. That’s the most worthwhile thing in the world.
A.J. Lawrence:
Indeed. What’s the best way for people to start learning about you, to check out, to reach, see what you’re doing? You’re on so many great platforms.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
Find me on Twitter. Twitter or X as they call it. That’s my favorite. It’s my favorite platform to write on.
A.J. Lawrence:
All right, I’ll put that all in the show notes, in the email and everything. And everyone, I don’t know if you’re seeing this, but recently I’ve had something where I’ve been clicking on Twitter links and the show is not loading. And I actually just have to remove the Twitter and put X. I don’t know if Elon and his, if they’re doing something with that. I thought they had a 404, permanent redirect, but who knows? So just we’ll put the correct links and everything.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
Appreciate that.
A.J. Lawrence:
Hey Nik, thank you. This was cool to have you come on the show. Thank you very much.
Nikolas Hulewsky:
Appreciate you. As I get farther along the road, I may have to just get your advice on some of these opportunities I have because I’d love to get your perspective. You’ve obviously done it.
A.J. Lawrence:
I’ve done some things. I don’t know, I’ve done some things. We’ll just leave it there. I’ve done some things, but no, I would love that. All right, everyone. Look, thank you so much for this episode. Check out Nikolas, it’s all under Nik. It’s easy way, just Google that. But we’ll put the URLs for everything in there. His ideas of starting early, we’ve had other guests talk about the value of mission, I’ve talked about that understanding your values, your long term. Definitely as someone who really floundered and had a lot more pain of trying to do those things in the thick of it slightly before, let alone from the early days, it would have come on so much helpful. So just listen to him when he talks about this because it really has a big impact. So everyone, thank you again for listening and can’t wait till we are back again. Talk to you soon. Bye.