Nick's Portfolio Contraction Story

Nick shares how his overconfidence led him to start too many companies, and what happened when reality hit.

"Five years ago when you guys had me on the pod, I felt like I knew everything. I think it was that irrational confidence early in my career that I wouldn't trade for anything because it led to a lot of success and me putting myself out there. But you just realize that business is hard. 2024 and 2025 are not the same as 2022 and 2023 for any entrepreneur I know.

I thought business was easy. I thought building executive teams was easy. I thought customers just came. I thought I could do no wrong because I had this personal brand. I started 11 companies over a three year period.

I had a marketing company, pay-per-click marketing company called AdRhino. I had a sales consulting company called Huber Method. I had a business brokerage. On and on and on. I went through a phase where I was like, 'I got the hot hand, my audience is super powerful, let's scale up some companies.'

I thought with a personal brand that's strong enough you could get an agency business of any kind and go to the moon whether or not you do a couple things right or wrong. And then the algorithm changed, business got a little harder, people started really watching how they're spending money.

Four of them have been shut down. Two of them are treading water right now. Of the six bottom ones, we were up to half a million dollars a month maybe of total revenue. I know a lot of people who are making less money now than they were three years ago."