Devon's clippings · Clipped: Tue-11-Jul-2023 · Original:
twitter.com/sweatystartup/status/1671207958066212893
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An update on my portfolio of businesses and an outline of my 5-10 year goals.
I'll tell you how each business is doing, how big I want them to get, and what type of personal cashflow I hope to achieve.
I've started 8 companies over the past few years (6 in the past few months) with these goals in mind.
The goal last year at this time was to start a group of companies that could accelerate my current businesses AND EACH OTHER.
Here are the main foundational businesses that I've started and how each is going:
1. Web development and landing pages .
Online real estate is just as important as physical real estate. Landing pages and websites that convert are key. We're doing 3 full site builds a week and have a team of 9 people here.
2. SEO and link building with .
Links are still 70% of SEO and we can now build them effectively and consistently. I also have the team working on structural SEO and programatic SEO stuff at all of my companies.
We've got 4 signed customers in addition to 5 of my other companies and a team of 5. This was launched 2 months ago.
3. Performance marketing with .
Adspend across google, bing, FB, Insta, Tiktok and more will continue to be critical for most of my companies as well as my own personal brand. I'm about to roll out an email acquisition strategy through AdRhino.
My operator / partner has been onboarded and we have two hires starting in the next two weeks. This company is only doing internal work now but will launch in July.
4. Recruiting overseas talent with .
Every single one of my companies hire employees in LATAM and the Philippines through Shepherd. This is a tremendous operational advantage.
This is a massive company and we did over 200 placements in May with 130+ employees.
5. Recruiting local operators and management talent through .
Local management firepower is the key to growth and I have the best recruiter in the business on my team at RecruitJet. We're in the middle of several big placements across my companies.
We've placed one outside placement in our first three months and have several more in the pipeline. The team is 3.
6. My business brokerage through nickhuber dot com will tie it all together.
We'll help owners sell businesses with a massive audience in a whole new way and also use this for personal dealflow for investments / capital raising / partnerships.
We've got 30+ business leads and will be taking our fist three out to market in the next 6 weeks. The licensing has been a challenge but we're working through it. The team is 2 (including my father as the main operator).
VERY excited about this business as my personal private equity arm grows and I begin to make more significant acquisitions or investments myself.
From the real estate perspective my self storage company is a customer of the companies above as well as two more real estate service businesses:
1. Cost segregation studies through .
This business is exploding and we have 26 employees already. We do low-cost but aggressive fully engineered cost segs for my self storage facilities and hundreds of other customers per month. Saving us money and time and tax dollars.
2. Insurance brokerage services through .
We're partnered with an excellent insurance producer and we've made two additional hires at this company. We're now our own broker of record and we saved $100k annually on our insurance premiums by locating a new carrier for our self storage portfolio through Titan.
The admin / compliance headache here is also significant but we're very close to launching our marketing campaign. The team is 5.
I've made a significant investment in a pest control brand - Spidexx - with and we're very excited about the future in that business as well.
We'll utilize nickhuber dot com to source equity and debt as we launch and acquire more pest control branches as well.
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Overall - things are in hyperdrive despite my main business (real estate) being in a very slow season.
I have a serious competitive advantage in three areas:
1. Capital - I have access to serious amounts of equity and debt through my network to buy businesses and real estate.
2. Talent - through my following as well as the recruiting companies above I can locate talented operators to help me run these companies, local employees and overseas employees.
3. Distribution - my personal brand is growing fast. My email list has grown from 40,000 subscribers to over 100,000 subscribers in the last three months and we're adding 500+ per day. Twitter engagement is also WAY up. Working on the other channels. I'm doubling down here and beginning to invest serious money ($100k+ per month) in marketing and talent.
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I've begin to make hires at my holding company level to help me setup and run these individual companies.
The team here is now 5:
1 Operations
1 Marketing / Copywriting
2 Video / Audio
1 Automation
We'll make several hires here over the next 3 months.
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My goal over the next year:
Get as many smart people together as I can as operators and get to know them. Build the dream team that I'll work with for the next several decades.
Goal over next 3 years:
Build a few great businesses and several good ones. Get my personal cashflow up from about $250k a month to $1-2 million. Build several of these companies to $5-10 million values and get them spitting off a few million a year.
Goal over the next 5-10 years:
Begin to deploy capital of my own at a larger scale and buy businesses or invest in businesses where I can pull some levers and have a competitive advantage.
Bolt additional businesses onto my portfolio strategically. Go buy $10-20 million businesses and grow them effectively.
Deploy serious money into Self Storage over the years and make that more and more of my own capital vs outside capital. I'd like for Bolt to be a $750 million + portfolio 5 years from now and I know that is where the majority of my net worth will be and where I'll shield other income from high taxes.
I want to make a lot of my operators wealthy and go on to do more and more with them. Some of them are already proving to be incredible operators with serious talent.
All this while working 30 hours a week or less. Traveling with my kids and family. Playing a lot of golf. Doing sports with my kids. Staying physically fit and maintaining a great relationships with my wife.
We'll see what I can do and how far we can go!