📖 Read the full transcript of this episode
Marshall Haas is the co-founder of Shepherd (now Somewhere), who recently sold a majority stake in his company. Watch as we dive into the incredible journey from architecture to headhunting, leading to a million-dollar exit.
Marshall offers valuable insights from his diverse ventures, including selling iPhone cases, running an Airbnb business, and building Shepherd. He discusses the challenges of growing a company, working with influential partners, and the emotional aspects of selling a business.
Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or simply seeking practical advice for personal and professional growth, Marshall’s experiences offer valuable lessons. Tune in for an honest conversation about the realities of entrepreneurship, the significance of strategic partnerships, and charting your own path to success.
00:45 - Introducing Marshall Haas: From Architecture to Entrepreneurship
00:57 - Entrepreneurship Journey: First Businesses to E-Commerce Success
03:51 - Diving into Real Estate: The Airbnb Experiment
04:57 - Headhunting and Starting Shepherd
10:11 - Selling Shepherd Behind The Scenes
15:50 - What’s Next?20:29 - Building a New Home
22:03 - Life After the Big Deal
23:49 - Finding Purpose Beyond Wealth
24:34 - Exploring Hobbies and Building New Connections
27:09 - The Power of Time Tracking and Delegation
28:39 - Books That Shape a Business Mindset
32:40 - Innovative Health and Productivity Hacks
33:36 - The Joy of Delegating Leadership
35:15 - Business Ideas and Future Ventures
41:10 - Essential Tools for Productivity and Creativity
42:37 - Exploring New Career Paths
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/marshal
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marshallhaas/
Auto-generated from YouTube. May contain minor errors.
literally today you just announced that you sold a majority steak and Shepherd yeah I it's a weird like I got my wife I was like Hey like I think it's going to be in the count you want to log in with me you know do this together and you see the number and we're both like I don't know how to react like do we jump up and down like you know it was kind of like this awkward exciting experience you know and then I went and played pickle ball with some neighborhood buddies that was planned and came home and like went to bed like it was just you know it's still a normal day so dude this is a crazy huge day I think you just got a massive wire transfer is that correct yeah funny timing with recording this and the timing of the deal yeah it went through yesterday we we'll get to that we'll get to that in a minute but can you just introduce yourself
to people who don't know you maybe give a little three minute overview of who you are and your businesses so I'm Marshall Haas the long or short version of my story is I used to want to be an architect when I was a kid I worked at a firm had no idea about business started getting exposed to like the billionaires that we all look up to my first business was an architectural rendering little agency that was quite small you know just like enough to buy beer money was kind of like my first business thought I want to be an architect eventually dropped out of school and did a project management app um with you maybe we can talk about a little bit yeah why don't you tell why don't you tell everyone how how you and I met so my first company that I ever got some funding for was at the time it was called absorb a weird name I don't I think I just like
got a domain it's all cringey looking backwards we're kind of running out of money and you had launched I think it was like called design Capital at the time and I kind of pitched you like a hail Mary like hey we've got about 10 months of cash in the bank like why don't we partner on something you know I'll lead it my co-founder is a developer you guys provide design and that's kind of how we started working together we launched this thing called Peak which was basically like an automated way to kind of see what your team was up to still kind of a good idea yeah like I think the intention was very well intended to like not shoulder tap you know your team but like still be able to kind of see what they're up to but I think the backlash was like oh this is big brother kind of like you know micromanaging it was kind of like what friend feed was back
in the day but for work so it'd be like this person posted this on GitHub this person is working on this document in Dropbox all that kind of stuff I feel like it was one of those things I still want it you know I think too like at the time there was some janky workarounds we had to do to kind of like get certain things coming to the feed and so some things were less elegant than we wanted but yeah that's how we met I started working for you and then joined kind of like the software business as a whole and then you left and what did you do after that so around the same time I started getting interested in ecom a guy named John Wheatley and I formed a studio together called need want just had a bunch of different ideas for e-commerce products so the most successful was Peel which was a super thin iPhone case it was
around for 10 plus years that was a fun business and then we had a bunch of other stuff that was less successful we had a bedding company called like a bed sheet company called smart bedding the idea was like to kind of cut down the time it takes to make your bed with kind of a unique design to it with how the top sheet and the duvet cover connected that was kind of the next successful one we had a notebook company called Mod Notebooks was kind of like Moleskine but when you're done with the notebook you can mail it back to us and there was a whole scanning component and it would upload to Dropbox and Evernote and stuff like that so we launched like four or five of these I think only about three of them were successful and did that for about 10 years until my most recent company you were based in St Louis where you're not there anymore and you bought
a building you did kind of interesting stuff in real estate do you want to talk about that so we had an office in downtown St Louis you know when some of the e-commerce stuff hit a rocky point I started Airbnbing my loft that I owned and at one point it was doing like four or five grand a month it was like making more money than we were paying ourselves I was just like man this is awesome like you know what was a rough time turned into like a nice side hustle and I always thought like man if I could just have like 10 more of these I'd be set the office or the building that we had our office one day property manager came around and introduced himself and said the building was going in foreclosure and it was an opportunistic timing thing and we looked at it and put a deal together and ended up buying it with me my old co-founder
and then you and Chris got in on the deal and I think we did 14 short-term rentals and there's about nine like Loft office spaces so kind of spun up like a boutique hotel in a way without the front desk but yeah that thing was really fun operating for quite a while it was definitely a different experience than anything digital was like kind of the first brick-and-mortar thing and only brick and mortar thing I ever did and then how did you go from selling iPhone cases and running a short-term rental business to Shepherd I mean really my entire career like not being in Silicon Valley I was always working remotely with people so I was always comfortable with that you know the natural extension is to start like I read the 4-hour work week when I was 17 or 18 like you know it got exposed that whole idea and that first business that I had doing architectural renderings the team that did
the actual rendering work happened to be in the Philippines so we were basically just like a marketing company selling it and so when we did the e-commerce thing like we had operations and customer support overseas it was just kind of always a thing that ever since my first company we did because we just couldn't afford domestic people for a lot of roles I just noticed over a long period of time my friends businesses they weren't they were just hiring domestic people or who's in their town even but definitely just like US or Canadian it just kind of shocked me you know it was kind of like a cheat code for us and allowed us to like have decent margins or survive really rough periods so honestly it was when COVID hit I had this thinking always where a lot of these startups that are huge now got started in like the 2008 crash and I worked at an Architecture Firm during that
I remember like all these guys that are 50 years old getting laid off and then fast forward years later there's also all these startups that were formed during that same period that are worth billions and I always promised myself if there was a big thing like that I would kind of buckle down and look at what the needs are and try to start something new and so during COVID I just kind of locked myself in my office and was just looking at different ideas I could start and Shepherd was kind of the one that hit my co-founder was wanting to do something together and I just looked at like what are the things that has worked for us and one of my friends companies need and that was kind of the genesis of the idea basically help my friends that are small business owners hire overseas and kind of hold their hand
through that how's the business model work now it's still the same model from when we started like we're going to expand probably to other services in that space but I had no idea what a head hunter was until shortly after starting it I read about the business model and like a throwaway line in a book I happened to be reading not about head hunting but yeah we just use the simple head hunter model which is you come to us hey I'm looking for a person to do X role great we take a small deposit that's completely refundable just to know people are serious and then we go out and find that person and then the customer only pays if and when we find someone that they want to hire so it's kind of a success only model win-win it's an easy sell to get people in the door and then our fee is basically a percentage of the presumed first year salary which
when I was starting it I looked at doing managed services and I always wanted to do something that was recurring revenue I was always jealous of all my friends that had that but yeah it's a really cash flow positive way to charge for your services is just that big upfront once you find someone it's so funny I remember when COVID hit everyone was like oh my God this is crazy remote work and I think you and I had both been doing it for me I've been doing it for 15 plus years everyone was like oh my God I can work in Colorado and make San Francisco comp and that kind of happened for a while right I think suddenly everybody was like oh cool I can access jobs anywhere in the world but I don't think anyone realized was that first a company in San Francisco is going to go okay I can hire people in Vancouver now but
next they're going to be looking at Bangalore or Latin America or the Philippines and that people there are more motivated harder working you can pay them a fifth of the amount of a North American person and it's an incredible comp there I mean what have you seen like first of all when you bring this up with people do you get do people push back on it or are people generally accepting of it yeah I mean you definitely still get people that push back and have the you took our jobs mentality about it all but my argument with that is like look it's we're in a global economy at this point like that ship has sailed like we transact and do business with people all around the world there's no reason why a portion of your talent shouldn't or can't be overseas and I'm not a proponent of like fire everyone and move the entire team overseas I think the sweet spot is having a really healthy mix of a lot of back office stuff done overseas and then still having leadership and senior level roles stateside
that's not to say you can't find amazing people I mean Jer was GM of the business for like 3 years and he's my Filipino co-founder like he's awesome we found our GM of the Latin America side of things is in Colombia like you can get awesome people but I think that's a really healthy mix you've done a lot of different stuff and now literally today you just announced that you sold a majority steak in Shepherd and I'm really curious about that how did you get to that decision how does it feel I remember getting my first big wire transfer and maybe you've had a couple before but oh my God what a weird crazy
feeling yeah so it went through yesterday it closed yesterday wire came through yesterday yeah it's a weird like I got my wife I was like Hey like I think it's going to be in the account you want to log in with me do this together and you see the number and we're both like I don't know how to react like do we jump up and down like you know it's kind of like this awkward exciting experience and then I went and played pickle ball with some neighborhood buddies that was planned and came home and went to bed like it was just still a normal day do you want to just talk about how Shaan Puri and Nick Huber came to be involved and then cuz that was I think your first time having investors in the business right so we started me and Jer my co-founder started it in April 2020 about a year or
two into it Nick Huber who's like a self storage operator has like a private equity fund he'll raise to buy self storage deals he talks about it openly on Twitter he's got a big following he's a troll yeah he's great at trolling but he also talks pretty openly about his self storage deals I think that's how he built a really big following of just other small business owners big proponent of just like don't go off these billion dollar ideas go start a local business doing some service don't overthink things so he became a customer just organically and I was aware of him I followed him he ended up hiring like 10 people and he actually approached me and was like hey man like I don't know if you know who I am but I've got a big following what do you think about doing some sort of like affiliate deal like I think I could drive a lot
of business love the business I can talk about it genuinely great let's do it so we did a really simple handshake gentleman's agreement I think he was getting either 15 or 20% of deals that closed that were generated from him and very quickly he was getting 20 30 grand checks every month and I think he was loving it we were loving it and it was growing the business pretty rapidly but I think after about a year he started wising up and realizing I'm getting 20 grand a month these guys are their enterprise value is just exploding off of me tweeting about this thing which he was not wrong like it was growing the business quite a lot so he approached again he's like look I've got to have some equity in this thing so about a year after doing the affiliate deal we did a deal basically converted that into equity in the business
killed the affiliate deal and he kept doing what he's doing kind of talking about us but as now a partner kind of like a marketing partner and that just kept helping the business grow like we were prior to that when we were snowballing from word of mouth that definitely put the lighter fuel on the business getting him involved and I think about another year fast forward Shaan Puri from My First Million approached us about wanting to get involved as well his vision was basically like instead of doing a bunch of courses or doing a bunch of ad deals he wants to get a minority stake in a handful of businesses and everything he does he'll just point at those businesses and talk about those so we were the first deal kind of in that vision for him and did a pretty similar deal this time though Shaan bought in to the business in pretty favorable
terms and so those two deals like I mean it was a really clear fit their audience fit to our customer base I think is why it worked so well so yeah we basically had a ton of free marketing through those two deals and really grew the business that way how did you come to do this deal you know you've we've been buddies for a long time you're always keeping up on what I'm up to and vice versa and I think it was like Christmas Eve one year you texted me you're like hey any interest in selling and this was like I don't know year and a half ago or something like that I was like sure open to anything and you ended up talking with your team you guys put together an offer it just didn't make sense for us at the time and we just kind of shelved that idea but I think fast forward
like another year or so I reached back out and was open to maybe taking some money off the table maybe selling like 10 or 20% I sold Peel the e-commerce business about six or eight months ago and that was a really awful experience the buyers are just tough guys to deal with and I just kind of promised myself like if I ever sell Shepherd I'm going to do it with someone I know and trust like I'm not going to shop it to just private equity and have a hellish experience like I just went through that so my first thought was hit you up again and you guys are always buying so you guys made an offer I took it to the rest of the guys Jer and Shaan and Nick and for different reasons they kind of convinced me maybe we shouldn't take that deal and we carried
on but right at the end when we were like all right we're going to turn this down Nick was like I would do this deal your deal was a mix of cash and stock and Nick's like what if I did this deal all cash I was like what do you mean and so that kind of kicked off him making a formal offer that required him raising money so it's kind of contingent on if he could put it together I was playing basketball with Nick at Camp MFM they do this annual event with Mr Beast and we were having lunch and we started talking about the deal and then he kind of was like you know what let's do this and at the time I was like okay I'm not going to compete with Nick he's the man I'm sure he can go and raise the money so yeah it seems like it
all came together in the end leading up to it I was still wrestling with like should I is this the right thing to do and we could get into that just the psychology of selling how life-changing is this money I mean I don't have to work ever again if I don't want to putting it in index funds and letting it do what it does with the markets so yeah we can talk about the deal so the reason why I ended up taking the deal was I talked to a lot of friends that have sold gotten completely out 100% of their shares and just listening to interviews and stuff and it sounds like there's definitely if you sell out you have cash flow prior business is growing it's spitting off cash flow and then you sell you have this pot of money and it goes into this preservation mindset of like oh no I got to make this last whereas with business you're in control you can grow this thing and I knew myself and I get kind of anxious about business and just anything with that and I thought that would drive me nuts if I sold the whole thing and was worrying about preserving it
