The Money Mondays
How We Went From a Beat-Up Van to 200+ Franchises w/ Nick Friedman & Vince Ricci 📈 EP113
Tue, 18 Mar 2025
Breaking from the usual RV setting, this episode features exclusive finance discussions with two successful guests who runs multi-million dollar companies specializing in hauling junk and the creative studio industries...---Nick Friedman is an entrepreneur, public speaker, and co-founder of College Hunks Hauling Junk, a rapidly growing junk removal and moving service. With a passion for leadership and personal development, Nick has built a successful business by focusing on customer service, innovation, and a strong company culture.---Vince Ricci is the founder and CEO of Hubble Studios, a creative agency specializing in brand strategy, design, and digital marketing. With a passion for storytelling and innovation, Vince has built a reputation for helping businesses craft powerful and impactful visual identities. His expertise in design, strategy, and creative direction has led Hubble Studios to become a trusted partner for companies looking to elevate their brand presence and reach new audiences.---Like this episode? Watch more like it 👇The Business of Live Events & Tony Blauer's Self-Defense Philosophy: https://youtu.be/FaSrgPK23FkWhat Does It Take to Reach a Billion-Dollar Valuation? w/ Albert Preciado: https://youtu.be/rOFamvnu4qgThe MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel: https://youtu.be/DcE0V0rVTbkCan Anyone Become a World-Class Salesperson? Jeremy Miner Reveals How: https://youtu.be/m07lSVAoZpIWatch ALL Full Episodes Here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6k---The Money Mondays is a business podcast here to teach you how to make money, invest money, and donate money by showcasing some of the world's most successful people and how they do the same. Hosted by serial entrepreneur Dan Fleyshman, the youngest founder of a publicly traded company in history, this money podcast gives you an exclusive behind the scenes look at how the wealthiest celebrities, entrepreneurs, athletes and influencers make, invest and donate money.If you want to learn more business and investing while you work to improve your financial life, you're in the right place! Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@themoneymondays?sub_confirmation=1Dan Fleyshman,The Money MondaysLearn more here: https://themoneymondays.comWatch all the podcast episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6kLet’s Connect...Website: https://themoneymondays.comPodcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-money-mondays/id1663564091Twitter: https://twitter.com/themoneymondaysLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-money-mondays/about/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@themoneymondaysFB: https://www.facebook.com/The-Money-Mondays-110233585203220/
Chapter 1: Why did Nick Friedman start College Hunks Hauling Junk?
Awesome. So I'm the founder of College Hunks, Hauling Junk and Moving. We've got over 200 franchises, as you mentioned, started from really humble beginnings, a beat up cargo van that we borrowed when we were in college. I describe it as a 20 year overnight success. At the beginning, we were doing all the work, answering the phone, driving the truck, hauling the junk.
People would call to complain about driving. I'd be in the driver's seat answering the phone. So it's been a fun journey and we feel like we're just getting started.
So as you guys know, on these podcasts, I cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. So we're gonna go over these different topics over the next 32 to 38 minutes. The reason we keep the podcast under 40 minutes is because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes.
So this podcast will be under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure. We are trending as the number one entrepreneur podcast right now. So we gotta hit it while it's hot. This podcast is gonna come out this week. So- Number one spot, baby. Nick, got lots to live up to. We gotta stay number one. Ready for this? That's right, ready.
When you were first building up, did you actually think you'd become 200 franchises, $300 million? Did you have a vision in your mind or were you just like, I'm gonna do a truck or two and see what happens?
So at the beginning, it was like I didn't even know what an entrepreneur was. It was actually my friend from high school. His mom had a beat up cargo van. She let us borrow it to stay out of trouble before our senior year of college. And she looked us up and down. She goes, you guys could be like college hunks who haul junk. And then that actually put the vision in my head.
As soon as she said that, I was like, that's catchy. That's a pattern interrupt. That's not what people associate with moving and hauling. It's more clean cut. It's funny. It's catchy. So from that point on, after we graduated college, I knew I didn't want to have a regular job. And we had very aspirational dreams really at the time.
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Chapter 2: How did College Hunks grow from a single van to 200+ franchises?
We didn't want to be just two guys driving around a truck all day. So we envisioned, you know, imagine if we could land in another city and see our trucks driving around. And now today it's, you know, people are texting me photos of the truck anytime they see. I think I got a text from you as well.
And so I think having that lofty aspiration was part of the foundation of what got us really excited at the beginning. It got us motivated. And we actually pursued franchising as a way to expand. I think we had a little bit of a naive view of what that would mean. We thought it might be an easier path. There's no easy path in business.
And so we had to become students of entrepreneurship and just grind it out.
So on the make money side, franchising, why does someone go franchise from College Hunks versus just go buy a truck or two and go do it themselves with their own brand?
So I think anybody who starts a business, they have to learn very quickly how to work on the business, not just in the business. And in our case, like I said, we were answering the phone, hauling the junk. People would call to complain about driving. I'd be the one answering the phone in the driver's seat.
I think anybody who started a business can relate to doing every single thing from top to bottom. But if you want to grow a business and not just be self-employed by your own operations, you've got to learn how to create systems and processes.
And so we read a book called The E-Myth Revisited by a guy named Michael Gerber, talks about people not failing, systems failing, and creating those systems and processes so you can scale. And it talked about franchising and this franchise model. And I think a lot of people maybe have, like we did, a naive view of what franchising means.
Really what it is, it's a way to expand the brand without having to deploy your own capital. Because we didn't have capital, we didn't have a lot of human management personnel that we could deploy. but we did have this lofty vision of taking a brand and making it nationwide.
So in order to package up what we had made successful locally, we went down the franchise path where every time somebody purchases a franchise, we get a small injection of capital that we can reinvest into building out the infrastructure, the support, the branding, the marketing, and everything else that goes along with the business model.
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Chapter 3: What are the benefits and challenges of franchising a business?
So if you have a restaurant chain, if you have a dry cleaning chain, or you want to go franchise like a Century 21 or an insurance company, typically they want 6% to 13% of gross sales and 1% to 3% of what's called a marketing fee that helps go to the budget to do nationwide or worldwide marketing that'll help the franchisee, which would be you in this example.
Also, it can range anywhere from zero to $150,000 on average. Typically around 50K is kind of like the normal deposit for a franchise. Now, if you're going to get McDonald's, that number is much bigger, right? It could be hundreds of thousands, if not $1.5 million in some cases for really big name franchises.
What you want to think about when you're researching is what type of product, brand, service, restaurant, trucking company, et cetera, do you believe in the brand, has experience? I don't recommend going to franchise someone that has two or three locations. That happens often. Someone who opens up two, three locations, they're like, we're going to start franchising, rolling out.
They don't have their systems in place yet. The reason you would want to franchise is someone has a really good brand and really good systems. Those are called SOPs, systems and procedures. And you need those things to happen. Otherwise, I'd rather you wait until they have five, 10, 15, 20, 30 locations where they really have experience.
I mean, you hit it on the head. I mean, when we first started franchising, our early franchisees were kind of the early adopters and we were still building the plane in flight. We didn't have it all figured out. And so they were kind of taking a bigger risk. And we actually had to give them a little bit better deal than we do now because we didn't have it figured out.
We didn't we were confident it was going to work, but we didn't know and they didn't know it was going to work. There's actually 3,000 different franchise opportunities out there across all the different industries and sectors that you mentioned. A lot of people think a McDonald's or a Burger King, but there's not just restaurants.
There's retail, there's service, there's aesthetics, there's real estate. And if somebody's got a great successful business of their own, they could become a franchisor where they develop it, but there's a lot of heavy lifting involved in that industry.
or if they're thinking about a business opportunity, like you said, they might invest, but spending the time talking to the existing franchise owners to see, would they do it again? What would they do different? Are they making money? Because there's a lot of sizzle out there, but you got to have the stake behind it.
For sure. Yeah, so I invested in one called Ever Bowl, the acai bowl chain. I first invested, there was 13 locations. I threw in 500K, they went to 17 locations, 21 locations, 25 locations, bam, bam, bam, scaling, scaling. Me and my friends, we raised at our mastermind $5 million for the company. Boom, 27 locations. And then March happens, 2020. Oh, no.
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Chapter 4: How to choose the right franchise to invest in?
Hair salons, restaurants.
Right, like in our business, you don't need moving experience, but you need some sort of leadership acumen or ability to develop leaders because you're hiring, guys to go out and provide a service to the community. So you gotta be willing to build leaders in doing that. So do you have a skillset that you could apply to this business? Is your family behind you in this idea?
Your spouse, your friends, your neighbors, your parents, do they believe in this concept that you're excited about? Can you make the return on the investment? That's the financial side. And then the fun factor is or fulfillment factor is like, you know, life is short. Is this something you could see yourself getting up every day, even if things are challenging to do?
And so I think talking to some mentors, there's actually franchise brokers that are kind of like real estate agents. But for the franchise industry, we work with a lot of them in our business where they'll do personality profiles and background assessments to identify individuals.
Is this you know, let me present a couple different concepts to you based on your background, your interests, what you said you're not interested in and help people kind of land on the decision of the type of concept they might be interested in owning and running.
The other thing I'll mention, you know, a lot of times this word comes up in franchising called absentee ownership or semi absentee ownership. And I will tell you. It's a buzzword. It's somewhat cliche, especially in the broker communities. Everybody wants passive income, but it's not easy.
In my mind, you know, very, very few business ventures are truly passive unless you have a significant amount of capital and somebody that's going to. a CEO that's going to execute, right? That you, you know, it's, it's ask who, not how, who's going to do it if I would deploy this money. And so, you know, the franchisor is not going to do it for you.
So you got to have somebody that's going to run it, who you can trust that, you know, is going to produce the business. And can you make a return if you're paying him on top of that?
So I have this rule that I won't invest in any company or do any partnership or deal without a quarterback, without someone running that business. So people say, oh, you've got 43 investments and all these companies are doing. You're posting about mortgages and sports cards and Everbulls and blah, blah, blah, blah. Sports cards has a CEO. Elevator mortgage has a CEO. Elevator funding has a CEO.
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Chapter 5: What are the key factors for successful business investments?
People don't see behind the scenes how much losses went into the early days, the investment that went into it. And eventually you come out the other side and everybody touts you an overnight success, but they don't realize how long it took you to get there, how much learning took place along the way.
Absolutely. All right. So let's talk about the real life of the business. what does it cost for someone, a customer, to come rent from College Hunks? Like, what's the cheap side and what's the full size? Like, hey, I'm moving a big house.
Yeah. So, you know, we pride ourselves on being a, I would say, premium style experiential brand. There's a book I read called The Purple Cow by Seth Godin. He says, if you're driving down a country road, you see a bunch of brown cows, you've seen it before, you're not going to notice it. If there's a purple cow in that field, This was before social media that the book came out.
He said, you're going to pull over. It's remarkable. You're going to tell your friends and neighbors about it, talk about the dinner table, put it on social media.
And then it goes further to say, we talked about this a second ago, it needs the sizzle, which is the brand image, the name, the colors, but it also needs the steak, meaning the service has to live up to whatever promises that you're making to the customers or the team members. And so, you know, we're the only one stop solution for both moving and junk removal.
We say we help people move the items they love, get rid of the stuff they don't. We leverage our trucks and labor to deliver donations for folks, you know, install furniture and so forth. And so pricing is hourly for the moving side of things. Call it a two man move anywhere from 100 to 150 bucks an hour. Obviously, if we add a third or fourth guy, it can increase from there.
Junk removal is volume-based, how much space the items fill up in the truck. So if we're cleaning out a whole garage that takes four to five pickup trucks worth, which is about the size of our trucks, it'd be like five, six, 700 bucks, depending on the geography. But that includes all the labor, the disposal, the loading fees. And so the moving industry is antiquated, right?
I mean, we didn't invent moving. It's probably been around since the wheel got invented. And so we took a simple concept, put a creative image on the external side of it, a very focused, intentional on the inside of it. And so we're not the cheapest. Probably somebody could find a less expensive move on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace or what have you.
But we say, look, there's a lot of options to go buy coffee, right? You could go pay $4 or $5 for Starbucks or you could go... pay 50, 75 cents at the gas station, but it's a very different experience between the two. They may even taste somewhat similar, but the experience is very different. So we, you know, we made HUNK's brand promise.
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Chapter 6: How does Nick Friedman approach business growth and expansion?
So when people pitch you, because they're going to pitch you, people pitch you, ask them some key questions. Where are their revenue at? What's their actual experience? Who else is involved? Who's on the advisory board? Who's an actual investor? There's a big difference between advisory board and investor. Someone that cuts a check versus just puts their name on it. There's a lot of differences.
Just ask a lot of these questions before you make your investment, because when you get it right, you can have a 6x, 12x, 20x. When you get it wrong, which is gonna happen, you're only having a 1x loss. That's why Nick mentioned you gotta have multiple investments when you're taking angel investment risk. You can't just do one angel investment. You gotta do three, four, 10, 20. I've done 43.
43 sounds like a lot, but it's been a decade. It's really only four or five a year if you think about it. Because I'm seeing 200 deals and I'm picking four or five. All right, Nick. So you're investing a lot back into the business, right? A lot of people don't realize someone goes and does 10 million in revenue, they're probably broke, right? They're in debt.
Sounds good. Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash flow is king. That's something I learned after a few years. We used to tout our revenue numbers. And yeah, even at the beginning of this, talking about what we're doing in Topline, it's exciting. It sounds like a big impact. But to your point, especially in the early days, you're plowing that money back in. Of course.
And you're making small bets and sometimes big bets along the way. Not all of them pay off.
So, in this scenario, there's very, very, very, very, very, very few companies that go off to do $300 million revenue. At what point do you think about, should I exit the business? Should I go acquire a bunch of other companies that are in the moving space? Should I do, other ancillary companies? Should I become like a trucking company here? Should I be a box manufacturer?
Because you probably go through millions of boxes. What are the things? Should we do the wrapping tape? Should you have a wrapping tape company? I could sit here and rattle off, and I'm sure you guys have thought about all of them over 20 years. Sometimes when you have a core business like what they're doing for the moving space sometimes you think about what are the vendors we use?
What do we spend money on? Yeah, if you're spending money going buying Tape and you go through freaking I can't even imagine how much tape you go through to tape up the boxes Maybe we should do that. Yeah, when you go through literally millions of boxes Maybe we should have our own and sell the boxes to our customers or to our franchisees. Talk us through that concept.
Yeah, so the short answer is yes to all the above. All of those thoughts that you just rattled off is the stuff that wakes me up in the middle of the night and I got the hamster wheel running. It's like, oh, we could do this, we could do that. We should do this, we should do that.
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Chapter 7: What are Nick Friedman's future plans for College Hunks?
Oh, man. You know, I guess I would pinch myself first. Then I'd probably look at my bank account about 25 times just to make sure it was real. And I think shut my phone off and just take a moment to like breathe and soak it in and spend time with the family, the wife, the kids, fire up the jet and go around the world for a couple of months.
And I think that'll be allowing me to just sort of reflect, have that little mini sabbatical moment. And I think I would get bored out of that very quickly and say, well, what am I coming back to do? And how can I be more impactful on this next go round? I've never met an entrepreneur who has officially retired.
They may not be grinding it out day to day like they did at the beginning, but they're still involved in something because, you know, the moment you start, you stop growing, you're dying in all effects. And so. I've met 80, 90-year-old guys that are still grinding out. I met a guy, one of my neighbors, he's got a big horse farm now. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting hobby.
He got very mad at me. I said, that's an interesting hobby. He goes, no, it's a business. It's not a hobby. And I was like, oh, got you. My apologies, because I'm thinking this guy's almost 90 years old, and he's got all these horses that he's breeding and selling.
But he's running it just like a business, and he's just as fired up about it as he was the publicly traded company that he grew as well.
Yeah. My ranch is not a business. That's right. One hundred forty thousand a month of feeding animals. They're very hungry.
That's right. Well, there's nonprofit benefits as well out there that, you know, you can get involved in, too, in no margin, no mission. So if you didn't have a successful business, you couldn't do things like that. They weren't businesses that were, you know, nonprofit or community driven initiatives as well.
All right. Last two questions on the charity side. So make money, invest money, give away to charity. Why do you think corporations, when you start to get hundreds of employees or thousands of employees, et cetera, why should they have some type of philanthropic component to them? Not just the money part, but why should they have some type of philanthropic initiative within the company?
Well, you know, there's a quote we always say, you know, don't chase the money, chase the dream or the purpose or the impact. Chase something that's broader than just making money because money is a powerful tool. It's a facilitator. It can create your lifestyle, but it can also create impact for the people that you care about, whether it's a community or family or your employees.
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