I'm Nick Jones. I build companies that don't need me, and yours shouldn't need me either.

I was supposed to become a lawyer. From 2013 to 2014 I did nonpartisan research at the Arizona State Senate, elections and water rights, with law school next on the list. Then a friend mentioned a startup called Uber that had not reached Arizona yet. I wrote a five page email to support@uber.com making the case for my home state. It found its way to the right people, became an interview, and quietly ended my legal career before it started.

Startups were where everything I had been told was a weakness turned out to be an edge. I am openly ADHD and dyslexic, which means I see systems and patterns before I see details, and launch work rewards exactly that. As Uber's City Coordinator from June 2015 to April 2016 I helped open markets across Northern and Western Arizona and assisted the Las Vegas launch. I was Director of Expansion at Titan Urban Transportation from 2017 to 2018, spent June 2018 to December 2019 on Lime's early expansion team standing up cities through several generations of scooters, and later, from October 2021 to December 2022, launched Chicago, Wisconsin, and Philadelphia as an Expansion Expert at Sealed, a climate tech company. Launching taught me the lesson this whole company is built on: if what you built only works while you are standing next to it, you did not build a system. You built yourself a job.

I started Eat Sleep Launch Repeat in early 2020, about two weeks before the pandemic. When Flagstaff shut down, I put the bigger contracts aside and spent that first stretch helping local businesses survive, bringing what I had learned inside billion dollar startups to the shops on my own streets. That season set this company's character. ESLR grows businesses by developing their digital, physical, and human infrastructure, and every engagement is scoped with a graduation date. A traditional agency profits from your dependence. I profit from your independence.

I'm still based in Flagstaff, and I still work with local businesses across Northern Arizona alongside teams nationwide.

I co-founded Freaky Foot Tours with my mother, local historian Susan Johnson, in 2015; it now runs tours in Flagstaff, Prescott, and Tucson without me in the day-to-day. Per the company's May 2025 anniversary announcement, that team has earned 1,000+ five-star reviews across Google, TripAdvisor, Viator, and Airbnb and been TripAdvisor's #1 nightlife attraction in Flagstaff three years running; Discover Flagstaff has named it Best of Flagstaff three years running, 2023 through 2025. Flight Club, another company I co-founded in October 2019, was bootstrapped deliberately, without outside money. Con Smania, a retreat center on Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula, was built to run day to day without me on the property. None of that is luck. It is documentation, trained people, and systems doing their jobs. The client side of the same standard is on the work page.

The community thread runs as deep as the business one. I was part of Care About Climate's founding era and served on the youth climate nonprofit's board of directors from 2014 to 2020, including as chair, and that work carried me into UN climate negotiations alongside young advocates from around the world. Years later, my last W-2 role was expansion work at a climate tech company, the same conviction wearing a work badge. I also volunteer with the Black Rock Rangers at Burning Man, and that community has taken me as far as Namibia and South Africa. Both taught me the thing I bring into every client engagement: people do their best work in rooms where they can be fully themselves.

A few more pieces, for the record. I earned degrees in History and Hydrology from the University of Arizona with honors, and a degree in Spanish from Universidad Nacional in Costa Rica, and I work in both languages. The water rights research at the Senate made more sense once you knew the hydrology came first. In college I was president of the swing dance club, spun records on campus radio, and taught poetry to kids. I still dance. And on my first ever podcast, I told the host the thing I still believe most: keep an open mind, about others and about yourself, because life is both too long and too short not to take chances.

The greatest achievement you can have as a business owner is to build yourself out of day-to-day operations. I have done it in my own companies, and it is the only outcome I am interested in selling. If you want a partner who measures success by how completely you stop needing him, tell me where your time is stuck. I will tell you honestly whether I can help, and I will tell you honestly if I cannot.