Surviving the Side Hustle

From Math Student to Multimillion-Dollar CEO: Nick's Journey of Innovation and Resilience

• Coach Rob • Season 1 • Episode 61

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What does it take to succeed as a CEO across multiple industries? Join us as we sit down with Nick, a seasoned leader who shares his remarkable journey from his childhood in India and Canada to his current role at IdeaScale, an innovation software company. Nick reveals his transition from a math and physics student to a Wall Street investor and ultimately to the professional CEO of diverse companies, including a $100 million trucking business and a men's shoe startup. Discover Nick's unyielding passion for creating value for customers, employees, and shareholders, and gain insight into his strategic vision for the future.

In this engaging conversation, we delve into the essence of resilience and self-improvement. Nick draws from his own experiences of overcoming financial struggles to emphasize the importance of staying focused and achieving daily goals. Practical advice on incorporating short meditation sessions and prioritizing tasks will inspire you to build a strong foundation for both personal and professional resilience. Listen as Nick reflects on his college years and shares valuable lessons on maintaining perspective amidst the chaos of distractions.

Hard work and preparation are the cornerstone of success, and Nick debunks the myth of overnight achievements through his personal anecdotes. He shares the immense responsibilities of leadership, from ensuring employee well-being to making impactful professional decisions. As we explore the challenges of balancing fitness goals with personal priorities, Nick highlights the importance of accessible education resources and the role of social support. Wrapping up with essential advice for aspiring side hustlers, Nick underscores the importance of clear goal-setting and the sacrifices necessary to achieve them. This episode is brimming with actionable insights and inspiring stories, making it a must-listen for anyone on their own path to success.

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Rob:

what's going on, guys? Today on the show we've got nick. Nick is an interesting dude and we're going to dive in. We recently connected and I'm looking forward to hearing a little bit more about his story and hopefully uh share with you guys, and you guys will find a lot of value from this. So, nick man, how are you doing? I am doing great. Uh, I got a morning workout in.

Nick:

It's a beautiful day and life is generally going well today. Good, good, where are you? Where are you doing? I am doing great. I got a morning workout in. It's a beautiful day and life is generally going well today?

Rob:

Good good. Where are you located, by the way? In Philadelphia, Nice. I was actually born right outside of Philadelphia.

Nick:

Nice, yeah, I love it. I've been here about two years, moved here from New York City and loving the fact that I actually know my neighbors. Nice nice.

Rob:

Yeah, new York City is a lot of neighbors, but not necessarily the most friendliest all the time. So from there, how about we just kind of dive in mind sharing a little bit about yourself? How'd you get to Philly? Where'd you start from? I know you got a good story. I'd love to hear a little bit about that.

Nick:

Sure.

Nick:

So my quick background grew up in a mix of India and Canada throughout my childhood.

Nick:

Came to the United States for college, originally studied math physics there, spent the next 10 years of my career on Wall Street as a professional investor so doing hedge fund things, private equity things on multi-billion dollar deals went to business school at Harvard and then for the last four or five years I've ended up in the very weird job where I'm a professional CEO, which I didn't know it was actually a career. That means people hire me to be CEO of companies and to help them take help take those companies to the next level in their life cycle. So over the past five years I've run or co run $100 million revenue trucking company with 1000 people all over the country. A small $2 million revenue men's shoe startup that was sold sneakers, and now I have the great pleasure of being running IdeaScale, which is the largest innovation software company on the planet. Been around 15 years, hundreds of customers, including Pfizer, comcast, post Office. We are basically the innovation brain or software behind a lot of these organizations.

Rob:

Wow, dude, that is pretty wild. That's pretty cool. I didn't know that that was a thing actually just bouncing around between different places. And so you don't. You're not acting CEO for multiple businesses, right? You kind of move from one. I'm dedicated.

Nick:

It's a full-time job, right by the fact. Yeah, so I'm a full-time job. This is what I'm going to. I've been doing this for two years and maybe doing this for the next 10 or 20 years, because I really like what I'm doing here.

Rob:

Nice and you're talking about in terms of helping growing other businesses, not specifically just the scale business that you're currently at.

Nick:

Yeah, so I've done two prior to joining Idea Scale, where I've now been for two years. The prior business I helped co-run was a small $2 million men's shoe sneaker company and prior to that was a huge $100 million revenue trucking company.

Rob:

Yeah, yeah, I was just getting clarified that you're looking to just move forward through and moving on to the next product, whenever that may come. I wasn't sure.

Nick:

yeah, well, I think idea scale is somewhere where I'm going to be for for a long time, because it's the type of place that has creates a lot of opportunity, both for me personally as well, as I think I'm doing some good for the world along the way nice, yeah, I mean, it sounds like a cool thing too.

Rob:

So, um share, if you could a bit on on how did you fall into this position, or how did you, how did you build yourself into this position? I should say, because I imagine it's a lot of work and got a great bio.

Nick:

Yeah. So, look, a lot of it does come into knowing the right people. But uh, a lot of it does come is also about developing the right skills. So for the first 10 years of my career I really spent it on Wall Street, where you work really hard. You're working 100 hour weeks, you're barely sleeping. That's really tough physically and emotionally but conversely, it's a tremendous learning opportunity. So while I was there, I had the opportunity, at the age of 22, to sit in the boardrooms with senior people. I didn't open my mouth, but I got to listen to really brilliant people running really cool businesses. So you learn a lot from a lot of different people but a lot of different industries. And then, ultimately, I just got lucky where somebody gave me a call and said hey, nick, there's this opportunity to come run a company. Are you interested? And when you get that call and at whatever point in your career is when opportunity knocks you obviously open the door.

Rob:

Yeah, as long as you're prepared and doing all that work ahead of time, then you can really seize it to the fullest. I love that. That's incredible and the idea scale. How big of a company is that currently?

Rob:

And these are all large kind of well-known organizations that you or I would deal with, like major fast food chains, pfizer, which is the largest pharmaceutical company on the planet, comcast, which probably provides both of our home internets, etc. Nice, and so your role now? Obviously you're trying to help grow that and build that and scale that up itself. What are some of your goals that you have both?

Nick:

personally and professionally. Sure, so professionally, I think I have two goals. Number one I love the idea of creating value for my three core constituents, which are my customers, my employees, my shareholders. So I love the feeling that, hey, I'm creating jobs. The tech industry has had a lot of layoffs over the past two years and yet we grew during that time. We added more people. We provide a lot of job security. During that time, we also added more value to our customers, and that's a really good feeling where you're creating value for the world. Secondly is I think our business actually does something really cool which helps the kind of stodgy organizations innovate faster and better, and that's a good feeling that you're helping these organizations do something that they're really struggling with. So that's kind of my professional goals.

Nick:

I like building things and I like creating value for the ecosystems or people around me. At a personal level, I'd say two things. Number one is there's a great sense of pride I have when I see something built. In high school I used to be a carpenter and at the end of each summer it was wonderful to see a building. It could be a strip mall, a temple, a church, a house. You get to see that at the end of the summer, something you helped contribute to building, and that's a really good personal feeling. The second is look, I'm still quite young, I'm still quite early in my career and I want to continue learning and getting better at what I do so that I'm going to be just just.

Rob:

It feels good to continuously learn and that's something that's something I hope to have as a personal goal throughout it's just keep on learning and growing and, um, and just keep helping a lot of these businesses and, I would imagine, continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Are you have any kind of goals down the road of maybe potentially starting your own businesses or you just kind of like taking the ideas that people are bringing to you and then helping run those?

Nick:

Sure. So I'm not one of those people who say, hey, I know I'm going to be an entrepreneur or start my own business. If the right idea comes to me and I think I'm the right person to start a business, I certainly will. But I have no burning desire that I'm just going to start a business to say I did or have my name on the door no-transcript.

Rob:

Love that Great answer there. I got to ask you because one of my core principles that I teach with a lot of my coaching clients is building their resilience and how it can be so important to entrepreneurs and people just in their typical 9 to 5 lives and then just in general in life and in the personal world lives. And then just in general in life and in the personal world um, how do you continue to build your resilience? Because I imagine you've got to go through a lot of ups and downs with work, clients, workers like employees, just work situations and all of that?

Nick:

sure, so that that's a really uh good question, but a difficult one. I'll say it's uh. There's kind of two or three elements. Number one it comes as a factor of my upbringing. I originally grew up in India. I had two hours of running water a day and electricity that was on or off.

Nick:

When you go through that in your early childhood and you grew up as part of an immigrant, initially in India and then as a poor kind of your stereotypical immigrant family with a shirt on your backs, you grow used to a lot of things, right, you grow used to light. You know a lot of things in life just are inconsequential. There were times when I was growing up where my parents, you know, really struggled financially. And when you know that insecurity exists in your life, you just grow a lot stronger. So, going through a bit of pain and you know, in your childhood, that's number one.

Nick:

Number two as an adult I think I had become more centered, just by realizing that a lot of ups and downs, whether it be my personal life or professional life, just don't matter in the grand scheme of things. I have a wife, you know, sometimes we fight, sometimes we are happy and laughing together, but none of those individual days matter, knowing that there's a much stronger underlying love and commitment to be together for life. In my professional life that same thing holds true that a lot of the in any given day at work, you may be happy, you may be sad, you may be pissed at your boss or a subordinate may have done something bad. You can't let that just dissuade you or rock you mentally, because in the grand scheme of things, most of those things just don't matter. And so focus on the things that really do matter, and you'll find yourself just naturally a lot more resilient when you're not distracted by the minutiae of day-to-day life.

Rob:

Love that, and that's an easy follow-up. For me to ask you, though, how do you as in the listeners, how do they gain the clarity so that they can continue to stay focused when adversity kind of pops up during the day?

Nick:

Sure. So I would say meditation. I'm not talking fancy sit down and yoga across your legs with scented candles. Take three minutes in the beginning of the day to say like this is what freaking matters for me today. Right, that could be building your relationship, accomplishing a project at work, finishing an essay for school, whatever it is.

Nick:

Spend like literally three minutes in the morning while you're you know, making a cup of coffee or out for a walk or you know doing laundry, whatever it is. Take literally three minutes every day to figure out what the hell your goals for that day are, and if you write the end, you can either do that mentally I personally literally do write it on a piece of paper. That here's the one or two things that I really want to accomplish today. It could be yesterday. I had two goals was I wanted to set up a marketing campaign and I wanted to make sure I did a strength training at the gym because I hadn't like lifted in a while. Those are my two goals, very simple. There were a million other things that I did during the day, but I made sure to hit those two things because I knew everything else was inconsequential in the scope of those 24 hours.

Rob:

Wow, yeah, I love that. I do something similar with the critical tasks. I make sure I just try to get one, two, three, maybe three things down, but I try not to put on more than three critical tasks. Otherwise then that critical task list just ends up becoming that never-ending to-do list that everyone has. But that's a new concept for me relatively new, I should say. I've been kind of following that for a few years now. Is that something that you just naturally kind of took up over the years, or is that something that somebody specifically thought?

Nick:

I think, look, I don't think anything, at least to me. I don't think anything comes naturally. I'm not naturally gifted at anything. Everything in my life requires a lot of hard work, right? I'm not one of those, you know, born geniuses or artists or people who are just gifted beyond measure. I work for everything.

Nick:

And so sometime in college I realized, look, I was just getting distracted. For those who've gone to college, there's just a lot going on. There's a million clubs, there's sports, watching other you know your college team play sports. There's your academics, there's your friends, there's partying, a lot of stuff going on, and you end up doing everything poorly. So somewhere in college I started coming to the realization that I was just doing everything poorly and I was getting, you know, caught up in the whirlwind of college life and I needed to be much more focused about the things that actually matter to me. Hey, here's the three friends I care about, here's the class I really care about, here's the, you know, the gym practice, or here's the food I want to eat, or whatever it was. So it was a habit I developed, you know, in college and I've tried to be reasonably consistent in doing that every morning. Again, I, you know you can. Some people do full 30 minute hour long meditations.

Rob:

I take three minutes while I'm you know taking a shower and making a cup of tea in the morning. Yeah, I love that. I think some sort of a reflection practice on a consistent basis can be massively helpful For me. I just do a monthly recap where I just sit down and journal, write it out what do I remember from this month, what really stuck out, what wasn't so great, what could be better. And then I try to do a daily couple-minute meditation, things when I do have some time or if I feel like I'm getting a little overwhelmed with a lot of things.

Rob:

But yeah, just a simple little reflection. It doesn't have to be structured and it could just be something so simple as just hey, what do I have going on today? Um, you mentioned you mentioned in college one of the things that you had started paying attention to was, uh, like also some of the food and stuff too, like, okay, like paying attention, you got a lot of other things in there. I want to shift it into asking what kind of like inputs are you consuming on a day-to-day basis? Because that could be. You talk about nutrition, or we talk about like, um, digital stuff too, so it could be like motivational, educational kind of things, or I'll let you take it on how you want to sure the word used was inputs, did you say?

Nick:

yeah sure, um, so I do a bunch of stuff for continuous growth and to make sure I like center myself. So, number one I'm a big believer in healthy eating. Uh, because I find I'm just happier, healthier, more focused when I'm eating properly. Right, when I eat pizza and junk food, I feel like crap the next day. It feels good in the moment, but then you literally don't want to roll out of bed next day. When I eat healthy today, it's actually very easy for me to get out of bed at five in the morning tomorrow. So I've noticed like diet is a huge impact on my quality of life. That's number one.

Nick:

Number two is I. You know, I'm a reasonably you know active physical person. I'm working out four to seven days a week. Nothing too crazy. I'm not, you know, trying to become jacked or run ultra marathons, but hey, just just enough fitness to keep myself like looking good but also emotionally happy. Cause, again, when I work out, my I don't get as tired, I work more effectively, I'm mentally more focused.

Nick:

Number three is um, look, I already have the job as CEO of a reasonably sized company, but I realized that my skills today need to continuously develop. So I actually spent somewhere between 10 to 30 hours a month, taking continuing education every single month and a half for years. So in the past month alone, I've taken three courses on prompt engineering for ChatGPT, and those are non-technical courses that are accessible to anyone. I've taken a course on database engineering and number three I'm taking a course on algorithms. Now, those latter two are a little more technical, but the cool thing is these courses are all free and accessible to anyone, right? And I believe I'm doing that partially for personal enrichment, but partially because I need to keep developing my skills every day, every week, every month. Otherwise I'm going to be irrelevant, if not today, definitely five years from now.

Rob:

Yeah, I, I love that I try to stress so many times to a lot of a lot of clients. They they get into a situation where they're like okay, I'm smart enough, I know what I'm doing, I'm starting a business. I've got a couple clients here and they just forfeit the continuing head and I'm like dude, what are you doing? You want to continue doing. Well, you got to stay up to date, you got to be learning new things, looking at it from different perspectives and angles and everything, and that can be a hard pill for people to swallow that like oh, I already am great at what I'm doing, I don't need to get any better. So that's pretty funny there, and I love that you don't stress your training, your physical training, too too hard. It sounds like you just want to get in, get the body moving, and you want to make sure that you're looking good, look good, feel good, play good, right, exactly.

Nick:

Right, I'm not again. Yeah, I'm not trying to be an ultra marathon athlete or, you know, a bodybuilder. Uh, that requires a tremendous amount of dedication that I don't have the time for. And, going back to essentials, that's not my priority in life. I do not want to be or need to be able to bench press 500 pounds or squat 2000 pounds. Right, if I, if that was a priority in life, I'm certain I would dedicate the hours doing that. But that's not my priority in life relative to what I think is essential for today, in this year.

Rob:

Yeah, so you said that you take these courses and you say they're free and easily accessible to everybody. Where are you finding you got to pay them?

Nick:

some money and if you want a full degree, you got to pay them some money. But because I already have a degree you know from other aspects of my life I'm not focused on getting this. I'm not paying the fees to get the certificates.

Rob:

So that's another reason.

Nick:

That's one resource that's my personal favorite. They have kind of everything from classical music to computer programming and everything in between. There's a couple other companies like that do very similar things. Udemy is another one. Youtube's also pretty good, but the challenge with YouTube learning courses is their passive learning. You're just kind of listening to it. A lot of learning requires you to actively do something. It requires you to take notes, so you don't quite learn as much if you're just listening to some person talk.

Rob:

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm somebody who certainly loves the passive learning. I used to always listen to books, podcasts, courses all the time when I go out for walks, driving, and as good as it is to hear that constantly coming in, just like you were saying, you're not learning as well as you can unless you start implementing. And they say teaching is the best way to really determine whether or not you know the material. So that's interesting. I like those. Those are great resources. Thanks for pointing those out. Next, I kind of want to change a little bit here and I want to go back to maybe talking a little bit more socially. So one of the principles I try to point out to individuals is looking at their team triangle. So the team triangle to me the top of the triangle is where it's the smallest apex. There. Those are your coaches. No-transcript.

Nick:

Sure. So I have a really weird answer for that. I don't think I can point to any specific individuals or names for people I look up to or think of mentors. I was trained as a mathematician and scientist, so I actually look to the best theories. So rather than thinking, hey, this is Einstein's theory, I look up to Einstein or Elon Musk, right. I look at what the research has said. It works right. And that applies to fitness, to leadership styles, to interviewing, right. There's a funny thing I learned about 10 years ago that typical job interviews are absolutely useless. This has been known academically for 30 or 40 years and yet almost every company does job interviews, which is kind of a silly waste of time if you know that they're not going to work. So my kind of for lack of better mentors is whatever the research says actually works, both personally and professionally.

Rob:

Well, what do you have to say about when research kind of goes back and then suddenly something else kind of shows a little bit different? Because I know in strength and conditioning that's where my background is they say, oh, you need to be training like this for this amount of time. And in nutrition they change their full thoughts on different things like dietary cholesterol and such like that sure.

Nick:

So there's. There's a, you know, living in philadelphia. I want to quote always sunny in philadelphia, for, for your listeners, listen to that. There's a uh episode there where they're talking uh, where McElhenney I can't pronounce his last name Mac says science can be wrong sometimes. Right, Einstein was proven wrong. Aristotle was proven wrong. All these great genius people were proven wrong over time. Thing is, science can be wrong sometimes, which means that I would still put my faith in, on average, the wisdom of very, very smart people who've done their research, knowing that, hey, there's some chance the research flips and says the other thing. But rather than on the random opinion of somebody who is incredibly charismatic or just well-spoken, I'd rather rely on the wisdom of science and the wisdom of crowds than on my buddy who just has, you know, this great energy drink or great you know secret shake that he wants to pitch me.

Rob:

Cool, all right, love it. Great answer. Um. Secret shape that he wants to pitch me. Cool, all right, lovely. Great answer. Um the so continuing down this, uh, team triangle. The next level down are your captains. So who are those that you can really lean on for support or you? Um you call to share like a win or a huge success for yourself?

Nick:

sure. So I'd say there's two groups in that right. Right, I'm married, so I have a wife who's like, obviously, a close partner. She is, you know, very, very bright, so I can rely on her, share my success and failures. I'm very fortunate. That second group is I have the, you know, an idea scale. We have a good. I have the good fortune working with a bunch of bright people, both junior and senior, so I, you know, and we work in a very non-hierarchical way so I get to interact and work with them very closely and provide a nice feedback loop. And third is probably a couple of close friends from callers that I've stayed in touch with. We've gone different ways professionally but we know we can always call each other up and ask for honest, true feedback as well as share our successes and our failures and kind of out of the blue too.

Rob:

Yeah, I love that. You mentioned earlier about opening the doors of opportunity when they come knocking, and have you heard of when people refer to as luck being when preparation meets opportunity?

Nick:

I have.

Rob:

Yeah, so I got to ask you because I know you're constantly pushing and you're prepared all the time. It sounds like you do everything you can to make sure that you're tip-top shape, or as close to, for a lot of different aspects of your life. And how do you start to get around or get into the hallways with all those opportunity doors? I guess because you said in the beginning you were wall street and then you got the. You were lucky enough to sit in in the room with a bunch of people for other people who might not be as lucky yet how do they go about finding some of these doors of opportunity?

Nick:

Sure, so I was fortunate to be in those rooms, but I didn't get there through luck, right? My last name is not Rockefeller. I grew up in say, like quite dirt pool. The way I got into those rooms was just grinding right. People don't under people under appreciate the amount of hard work it takes to set up the opportunity. So you were talking about, you know, just a moment ago.

Nick:

I forget the quote used where opportunity meets preparation. Was that the quote? Yeah, a lot of people who end up in very fortunate circumstances did it. You know, some people did it because their last name is Rockefeller, but a lot of people, myself included, worked their butts off right In order to be given those shots at Wall Street. I worked my ass off through high school, worked my ass off through college, was one of the top students in college. I applied to hundreds of jobs in order to get that shot at Wall Street, networked and that was not. Hey, I'm just sitting at a cocktail party, that is. I'm cold, emailing people, phoning them up and doing that repeatedly, even after they reject me. It is tough to create opportunities and people underestimate the amount of effort that successful people put into making themselves successful. Very few people just end up lucky billionaires in life.

Rob:

Yeah, I was going to say what about the overnight success stories that you always hear about? I fully believe, even even those who seem to be overnight successes, there's a lot of hard work going on behind the scenes, and all those individuals as well. Yeah, so I got to. So it seems like you're pushing in and putting in a lot of work. You're you're busy doing things. You've got your goals set, your personal on check there. What about bring us back so that you so we we know you're still a human share with us a little bit of, uh, some things that you might be going through currently with the new position? Uh, that might be a little challenging for you.

Nick:

So, look, I suck at a lot of things in life, right.

Nick:

Uh, I can't. You know, I'm totally tone deaf when it comes to music. I can't play guitar or flute. I can't sing at all. I got cut from choir when I was eight or nine years old the only, you know, the only kid in elementary school who gets cut from choir, like the one club that doesn't cut.

Nick:

People have had lots of failures in life, right. So I'll say a few things. Right, I have. I think I've been very conscious in my life to pick the things that I care about and try and get really good at them. And for the things I suck at, I may still pursue them because they're fun, or I could just say I suck at it and it's not enjoyable for me to, like you know, I'm five foot six and 150 pounds. If I go play football against the NFL, like anybody in the NFL or a buddy of mine who played at Ohio State, I'm going to get absolutely crushed, right. So that's probably a poor life decision for me. So, look, some of the things I'm struggling with right now are a few things. I'm going to be a father for the first time in about two months and that's really kind of frightening to me, right, being responsible for another human being is really freaking me out, man. So that's something that's starting to be worrisome. What else? Congratulations, by the way. Thank you, number two.

Nick:

Going back to profession for a moment look, one of the things that it's really hard for people to appreciate who don't sit in the CEO spot is look, there's some fun parts of the job, but there's some really stressful, difficult parts of the job. I got 100 employees. When you add up their wives, husbands, kids, parents, anybody else that might be supporting, I've got 500 people's livelihoods resting on me, right. So that's a lot of stress, because I want to make sure that if I F up, I don't cost these people their jobs, their livelihoods, their the ability to pay for their homes, their you know groceries, their kids' educations.

Nick:

Um, that's something that weighs on me literally 24-7, right, weighs on anyone who's not a psychopath, who has any level of responsibility. I hope that it weighs on them that they are responsible for a tremendous number of people's life outcomes, not just their employees. My customers rely on me to actually create a good product, and when we screw up, I feel genuinely personally bad about that, because the responsibility ultimately lies with me and we do screw up on lots of things and I feel personally bad about that. Personally lose sleep. So that's tough stuff that I deal with every day and I don't always get it right. In fact, quite often I get it wrong don't always get it right.

Rob:

In fact, quite often I get it wrong. Oh yeah, that's um. That can be a lot. It sounds like that's a lot of stress and pressure you're putting on yourself, um, but I guess, in a way, like you need, you need pressure right in order to, in order to shine like a diamond, because you need that pressure and that heat, um, constantly to make sure that you're coming out on top.

Nick:

Yeah, have you heard of the sword of Damocles, by any chance? No, so it's this old Greek fairy. I don't know if it's Greek. Yeah, I think it's a fairy tale or fable. Some guy wants to be king and the king says, okay, you can be king for a day. But what he does is he hangs a sword above the throne, hanging by a single horse's tail uh, tail hair right and so to symbolize like, hey, it sounds, everyone loves being king. It's nice to be the boss, but there's so much pressure that people don't appreciate. There's always a sword hanging over your head. You have to feel a tremendous sense of responsibility and people often underweight that because they only see the good parts of the job. Or, hey, how nice would it be to be my boss? Right, not realizing that your boss often has these pressures that you will not appreciate until you're sitting in his or her seat?

Rob:

yeah, being able to have that uh perspective really changes a lot of thoughts for a lot of different things. Um, nick man, this has been pretty good here. I love all the input you're giving to share and the strategies too, but where do people go to kind of follow you? I want to make sure that we are courteous at the time. I know we're coming up on a half hour here. How do people get in touch with you?

Nick:

three, three ways. Firstly, for the company, our website is ideascalecom. Our software is entirely free for individuals and organizations, less than 100 people. If you want to get in touch with me personally, the best way is through linkedin. Just search nick jane on linkedin. I respond to 100 of messages, so feel free to, like you know, uh, to connect with me there or message me. Thirdly, you can email me directly at nickjane at ideascalecom wow, there you go, guys.

Rob:

It's pretty good, uh. For people under 100, or companies under 100 people, they get to utilize all of uh, everything you guys have for free. Yep, cool, and he responds to 100. I saw that you were pretty high ranked in your replies and I can see now that you must do it Like really, that's impressive, yeah.

Nick:

No, it's. Look, if somebody does the courtesy or just spends the effort of writing me a message, I'm going to at minimum respond with its basic politeness. Yeah, I'm Canadian, so I'm very polite.

Rob:

It's basic politeness, I'm Canadian so I'm very polite Love that, love that. Well, nick, before I let you roll, I got to ask you what would be your number one piece of advice for an individual starting out, and how would they survive the side hustle?

Nick:

I'll give two pieces of advice instead of one. Number one define your goals in life, whether that be money, fame, happiness, love. Define what things that you want in life are. And the second piece of advice is you can't have it all right. You make sacrifice, and that sacrifice could be money, that sacrifice could be health, that sacrifice could be sleep. You make sacrifices in life to achieve the things that you want for your individual life.

Rob:

Nick man, I love that. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on today and share a lot of nuggets. I loved it and I appreciate you for really just taking the time. You're on early. You're good to roll. You're an awesome dude man, I'm glad we got to connect.

Nick:

Thank you so much for having me, rob. You've been a wonderful host, thank you, thank you.

Rob:

All right, guys, we'll talk to you later.