We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nik Boone. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nik below.

Nik, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

As bad as it sounds to say, I went from idea to execution without much forethought or a business plan. I had a client with a need that I tried to solve for him and it slowly snowballed into a very small business, that snowballed into a medium sized business, to now a large sized business. I entered each stage with a little more knowledge than before and the same thought in mind each time “What is the worst thing that could happen?” I decided to officially open the business with the idea of it growing into a massive company and also with the idea of it failing quickly, but decided I would rather see if I could make something out of nothing and help some people along the way. It is a common myth that you need to have everything figured out before you start any company. Just start it and see what happens!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I originally got into real estate as a way to pay for college, and figured I could sell a few houses to help pay for gas and books. 9 months into my career a random client called me and wanted to see a house listed for $60,000 (back in 2011), saying he had a meeting with a Realtor and drove to hours to meet him and now he isn’t answering his phone calls. So I printed this house along with 12 others and sold him two houses that day. After he bought them, he needed help managing them as rentals, which I had no clue about, but I told him I would figure it out. He ended up buying 100 houses from me and had me managing them all for him with my first assistant. From there, a lot of the properties needed work done to them after tenants moved out, so I hired some maintenance technicians and have since then grown the business to over 1200 properties with over 20 employees.

Let’s move on to buying businesses – can you talk to us about your experience with business acquisitions?

I have bought several other property management companies in the last few years. Again, this is something I had no clue about and not a lot of money to gamble on a different business. I asked for some basic numbers from the other company, made an offer, and they accepted it. Then I had to figure out how to actually close the deal and onboard new clients to my company without scaring them because I couldn’t afford to lose any of them.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

In the early years, we struggled to make rent for the office suite. One month I had to sell a motorcycle I had to pay for rent for the business and myself. We discussed moving the office into my garage years later because we were still struggling on keeping the lights on and barely making payroll. We kept the vision in our heads and decided to try for another year and if it couldn’t turn around, we would close the business. Luckily, we kept growing and refining and kept the business open long enough to see some positive cash flow!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ascendbakersfield.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikboone/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikolasboone