Nathan Ruff started his first business at the age of 12. Since then he has started five other businesses, all with two common goals: providing exceptional value and working with exceptional people. Nathan is now the CEO of Rabbit, which is a network of small kiosks where you can rent power bricks. Rabbit is located at bars, restaurants, hotels, venues, and pretty much everywhere people wait or hangout.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Find a Rabbit

I know a lot of smart people. And when I talk to smart people, most of them, they’re not entrepreneurs. You know, like the ultra smart. And I realize because they think through everything and they talk themselves out of everything. And so I have this thing, like, I was never smart enough to like talk myself out of doing things. And then I was just too far in, I was like, all right, I guess I gotta finish this. Yeah. I think there has to be some level of irrationalness to be an entrepreneur.

Welcome to the Establishing Your Empire show. A podcast that inspires entrepreneurs, creatives and future business owners to pursue their passions, grow their organizations and build their empire. My name is Daran Herrman and creatively I’m best known for my photography. But business wise my claim to fame is growing a company from $15K per month in online sales to breaking the one million dollar a month barrier. And I’m sitting down with interesting people to talk about their process, the lessons they learned and how they have Established their Empire’s.

Daran Herrman:
All right. I have Nathan Ruff with me on the Establishing your Empire podcast. Nathan’s the CEO of Rabbit, which is they got these cool power stations, kiosks that are in bars, restaurants, and wherever people are hanging out and needing to charge their phones and their devices keeping the world safe, that connected one character at a time. So pretty, pretty fun intro there for, and I think you’d do a lot of other stuff too, which we’ll get into, but why don’t we start off with like, maybe your, you know, who you are, what’s your kind of, you know, elevator pitch, right?

Nathan Ruff:
Yeah. So I’m a Nashville native started my first business when I was 12. My neighbor had given me a Ralph Lauren sweater when I was 11 and I never felt quality like that before. And I was like, I want more of this.

You know, nobody hires a 12 year old. And so I just went on to start a company, watering plants. And then from there start a company regroup and golf clubs. And my whole thing is jumping into things before I know what I’m doing. So like I ordered business cards, all this stuff to regroup golf clubs and then realized that wasn’t strong enough to do it. And on the 15th page at Google, Google’s awesome. I found a air compressor attachment where you could shoot them in required no street. And so, you know, my, my way of solving things has just been like, alright, I’m just going to do it. Like I see the market, I see the need. And then I’ll just like, I’m just going to get into it and find a way through.

Daran Herrman:
Yeah. As opposed to just quitting, I was like, is there a, there’s gotta be a different way to do this. Right….

Lead Cast

• Daran Herrman
• Nathan Ruff