Meet Nick Glassett.

HostIf you're sick of the rat race and cubicle life, or if you're looking for a side hustle and want something completely different, our next guest has just the thing for you. Nick Glassett is the founder and owner of The Jump Off, an event rental business, and wants to show you how you can scale your own. Good morning.

Nick GlassettHey. Good morning, guys. How are you?

HostWe're good. We're doing great. It's great to have you in. So, let's jump off! [Laughter] So, how did you start The Jump Off?

Nick GlassettSo, I was a corporate employee. I had a regular job. I was very unhappy. I was dying to be an entrepreneur. So I actually quit my job, went to zero dollars, to try and figure out what business I wanted to start. At the time, my wife had bought two used inflatables already, recently, so we already had them. So I kind of started the business almost out of convenience, just because I had them there. I wanted to learn how to be an entrepreneur and kind of figure out the ways that you run a business. And so, that was it. I thought it was a side hustle. Had no idea it would be something I would fall in love with, yet here we are.

HostYeah. I mean, that kind of thing, that's everyone's desire: to find something, a profession that they love. Clearly, you know, that happened with you too. From that small beginning, from those two inflatables—I have questions about why they were even purchased anyway—but the business itself, how's it looking today? I mean, how did that come from that to where you are now?

Nick GlassettSo, we are very successful now. We have 90 inflatables. We've got tables, chairs, all that good stuff, games. We've just added four event tents, so we're going into tents now. And we have—I just promoted two guys to full-time. I've got an office manager, a 3,000-square-foot warehouse, forklift, two trucks, five trailers, all that good stuff. And we're actually adding mobile miniature golf. We just added that. It will be here in about two weeks. We're very excited for that.

HostAwesome. That's really cool. You know, something about you is you also started a YouTube channel. So why was that an important step for you in this process?

Nick GlassettSo, like everybody, I kind of always wanted to be a YouTuber, but didn't really know how. And then, once I became an entrepreneur, I started kind of experimenting with making content and had no idea what I was doing. I'd never been on camera. I'd never edited a video. I'd never produced anything. And then one day, I kind of accidentally made the perfect video for YouTube. It pops, so I start making as much content as I can. And lo and behold, the channel just takes off and becomes something that I never thought possible.

I really—you know, I started it because at my old corporate job, I would teach and mentor people all day long. I was a district manager, so that's what I did every day. And that was the one piece of corporate life I missed. So I figured if I start a YouTube channel and can be successful, I can do that at scale. And it just so happened to work out wildly successful.

HostYeah. I mean, part of the reason you're here is to obviously share your journey as an entrepreneur and the do's and don'ts. Is that an essential part? And I see that kind of as the central part now, having some kind of social content. People want to interact and connect and feel like they're associated with a business. Is that just as essential to a business as doing spreadsheets and making sure that your bottom line's on?

Nick GlassettI would say today, absolutely. Like, if you're not making content for your business, or some version of that, you're just going to be falling behind all of the people that are, because that's just where the attention of everybody is. Everybody's looking at a phone, scrolling through social media. If you're not making content for it, they're not seeing you.

HostSure. Yeah. And we spoke about your journey from, you know, the beginning into where you are now. Do you have any advice for anyone that might be looking to do the same thing? Because you've grown to actually scale the business to where it is today, right?

Nick GlassettYeah. And so this is kind of like my thing, my little soapbox I've been on recently. It's where I tell people—because I get a lot of people that come to me that want to start an inflatable business because of the content I put out there—and I tell them: if you start it as a side hustle and treat it as a side hustle, it's going to stay a side hustle.

If you go hard and treat it like a business—okay, so you have yourself a good website, a great name, a great logo, insurance, proper inventory, all that stuff—and go hard at that, it will grow faster. So, the harder you go, the harder you grow.

HostYeah. You just mentioned that you've got mini golf coming—an inflatable mini golf—to add to the business. What is next for you? Are you planning on scaling more? Are you planning to get more things, franchising? What is next on the horizon for you and The Jump Off?

Nick GlassettYeah. So this year, I'm really focused in on—so like I said, I've just promoted two guys to full-time to kind of give myself a little bit more free time—because what I want to do is document all of our processes into a playbook, like SOPs, standard operating procedures.

So that way—like the funny joke that I tell online all the time is that I want to take over the world. Like, that's the ambition that I have. And so this year, I'm going to be working on getting all the processes set up to where we can basically scale now nationwide using licensed locations. So that way, if somebody wants to start the business, they can hit the ground running. I did everything wrong—right?—and learned it all the hard way, so they'll have access to me and they can hit the ground running.

HostVery cool. That's great. Nick, thank you so much for joining us this morning. To learn more about Nick and his event rental company, The Jump Off, or to rent equipment for your next event, just visit itsthejumpoff.com.