An Excerpt from The Sweaty Startup: How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things
An excerpt from The Sweaty Startup by Nick Huber, published by Harper Business and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Innovation & Creativity category.
Business media, television and movies, and top college courses all tell entrepreneurs the same thing: To succeed in business, you need to have a revolutionary idea. To them, success is about changing the world through constant innovation. But the truth is, 99.999 percent of businesses that pursue this strategy will fail.
In The Sweaty Startup, Nick Huber shows us that you don’t need a ton of money, a brilliant new idea, complex technology, or extreme scale to succeed. There is another way to do business and find success by keeping things simple. Nick encourages readers to pursue opportunities with good odds, low risk, and moderate rewards that will set you up for a successful life, not just a successful business. Forget about mastering your craft, Huber advises. Focus on mastering sales, hiring, and delegation instead. It’s not about doing what you love or pursuing your passion. It’s about following the path of least resistance and executing on a proven idea in a proven market to win.
Bringing together the stories of dozens of successful businesses, including his own, Huber reveals an accessible but often-overlooked path to wealth and a life well-lived. To Nick, entrepreneurship isn’t about trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s not about new ideas, raising venture capital funding, or going on Shark Tank. Instead, it’s about doing common things uncommonly well. The Sweaty Startup is a refreshing and straightforward road map outlining his philosophy for a new generation of entrepreneurs.
The Sweaty Startup has been longlisted in the Innovation & Creativity category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is from the book's opening section, "Start Here."
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Everybody thinks they need a revolutionary idea or a get-rich-quick scheme to find success. Something that has never been tried before. Something that will put a dent in the universe if it works and turn the founder into a billionaire and a walking legend. TechCrunch. Product Hunt. Shark Tank. Forbes 30 Under 30. All about new ideas. Changing the world. Constant innovation.
Business titans like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg dominate social media, podcasts, and major publications preaching innovation and living on the cutting edge of technology. To hear them tell it, being an entrepreneur is all about 0 to 1. Blue ocean. Raising money. Infinite growth. Scalability and exits. Initial public offerings. Up and to the right . . . and on and on and on. You know what?
It’s all garbage.
There’s a radically different way of thinking about success, wealth, and entrepreneurship that has worked for millions of enterprising individuals since the beginning of time, and I will explain it to you in this book.
The most widely publicized path to wealth is what I just described, but the most common path to wealth through entrepreneurship is actually by chasing a small, boring opportunity.
Most of the wealthy people in your town who are eating at nice restaurants and have memberships at fancy country clubs didn’t disrupt industries or raise venture capital. They started small, boring businesses.
I’ve met thousands of successful entrepreneurs. People flying around on private jets. People with vacation homes in the most expensive zip codes in America. People who play golf every day while earning more money than ever. People who spend time with friends and family and go on epic adventures with people they love.
What do they all have in common? None of them had a new idea.
These people are not famous. They weren’t trying to change the world. They didn’t raise venture capital. They didn’t move to Silicon Valley to create viral apps. They aren’t on the cutting edge of technology, and a few of them still have fax machines sitting in their offices. They do not spend time giving interviews to major publications, and nobody writes articles about them.
They go about their lives, running their businesses just a little bit better than their competitors.
Most of them started really small and traded their time for money doing actual work. A lawn care business is a sweaty startup. So are home service businesses, construction businesses, and trades. But mobile hairstyling can be a sweaty startup. Interior design, SEO, bookkeeping, video editing, or property appraisal companies are all sweaty startups, too.
What matters most isn’t the type of business. It’s that these entrepreneurs didn’t reinvent the wheel—they stuck with proven business models that work.
Here’s the kicker:
They kept going for five, ten, or twenty years. They built great businesses over time. They kept things simple. When they had more work than time to do it, they hired other people to help them for a few bucks less than they were charging. They managed risk and grew slowly. They built their skills and got better and better at making decisions related to business. They learned to lead other people. They became good at sales and persuading people to go along with them or buy from them.
One of them bought a car dealership and then bought ten more over the next fifteen years. Another took over a body shop from his father and turned it into a highly profitable chain of body shops. A third bought a struggling FedEx delivery route and transformed it into an empire. Yet another started an HVAC company twenty years ago and does more than $20 million in annual revenue today.
A friend of mine buys industrial buildings that were built by somebody else. He manages them a bit better and maximizes their profitability. That’s it. That’s the whole story. He’s worth $250 million and he is thirty-six years old.
The stories you are about to read in this book are real. They are stories of actual people doing boring things for years. People doing hard things, making sacrifices, building skills, having fun, and getting rich slowly.
Most of these individuals have never spent a night in their offices on a cot. Less than half of them average more than forty hours a week after the first few years. None of them started the first or only company in their industry or even their town. All of them have competitors who are bigger and better than they are.
Most of them are just average people doing common things uncommonly well.
Entrepreneurship media has been lying to you, and this book is an official callout.
You do not need a revolutionary idea to become an entrepreneur.
I would go as far as to say with complete confidence that this mindset is sabotaging today’s entrepreneurs and setting our next generation of business leaders up for failure.
Raising money and getting after a new idea are terrible ways to maximize your odds of success. Ninety-nine out of a hundred “new idea” startups fail. Most founders get discouraged by the entire process, think it is impossible to win as a business owner, and end up getting jobs.
I’ve watched it happen over and over again . . .
Above-average people with above-average skills try to start an incredibly hard business that nobody has been successful with before. They realize too late that no one has made that idea work yet because it’s incredibly hard. They fail. They think they don’t have what it takes, so they give up and go get jobs. It is sad. Motivated, talented people starting hard businesses, failing, and giving up on entrepreneurship forever.
Want to hear the most surprising thing about the wealthy people I know?
Most of the highly successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know today are totally normal people. They aren’t brilliant. They don’t have exceptional IQs. They did not score a 1530 on their SAT or go to a top-ten university. Many didn’t even get a high school diploma.
Hell, some of them are even below average. Maybe even dumb.
What did they do well?
They were consistent. They delayed gratification. They put their egos aside and did things they didn’t necessarily find interesting, fun, or exciting. They did something boring. They hired people and delegated. They were salespeople who sold themselves and their ideas to customers, partners, vendors, and employees. They picked a proven business model with weak competition and a lot of profit to go around.
They launched a sweaty startup.
Excerpted from The Sweaty Startup: How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things by Nick Huber, published by Harper Business. Copyright © 2025 by Nick Huber. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Nick Huber is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and popular creator focused on real estate and entrepreneurship. He is also the founder of The Sweaty Startup movement. Through his content, he openly shares his philosophy on life and business while building a diverse portfolio of sweaty startups in real-time. Nick co-founded and operates his primary business, Bolt Storage, a real estate private equity firm, which owns 1.9 million square feet of self-storage facilities across 62 locations in 11 states. He also owns stakes in 10 other businesses that collectively employ more than 250 people. He lives in Athens, Georgia with his wife and three kids.
