Nick Huber started his business journey hauling boxes for college students. Today, he’s turned that grind into a $140 million real estate empire.This founder built his brand on a simple idea: Forget about changing the world. Get rich doing mundane and even dirty jobs better.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.
“AI will never be able to clean, build and maintain our physical world. The sweatier the job, the better,’’ he declares. “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.
“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. 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 itand brought in an experienced Silicon Valley exec, as CEO.