This is an auto-generated transcript of Never Enough Podcast Episode 2. It may contain minor errors.
Andrew: So dude, this is a crazy huge day. I think you just got a massive wire transfer—is that correct?
Marshall: Yeah, funny timing with recording this and the timing of the deal. Yeah, it went through yesterday.
Andrew: 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 overview of who you are and your businesses?
Marshall: 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 the billionaires that we all look up to. My first business was an architectural rendering little agency that was quite small—just enough to buy beer money, was kind of my first business.
Andrew: Why don't you tell everyone how you and I met?
Marshall: My first company that I ever got some funding for—at the time it was called Absorb, a weird name. We were kind of running out of money, and you had launched I think it was called Design Capital at the time. And I kind of pitched you a Hail Mary, like, "hey, we've got about 10 months of cash in the bank, why don't we partner on something?" That's kind of how we started working together. We launched this thing called Peak, which was basically an automated way to see what your team was up to.
Andrew: I feel like it was one of those things—I still want it. Like a friend feed for work.
Marshall: Yeah, and after that I started getting interested in e-com. 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. The most successful was Peel, which was a super-thin iPhone case—was around for 10-plus years. That was a fun business. Then we had a bedding company called Smart Bedding, a notebook company called Mod Notebooks. We launched like four or five of these—I think only about three of them were successful. Did that for about 10 years until my most recent company.
Andrew: How did you go from selling iPhone cases and running a short-term rental business to Shepherd?
Marshall: Really my entire career—not being in Silicon Valley, I was always working remotely with people. That first business I had doing architectural renderings—the team that did the actual rendering work happened to be in the Philippines. So we were basically just a marketing company selling it. When we did the e-commerce thing, we had operations and customer support overseas. It was just kind of always a thing.
Marshall: I just noticed over a long period of time—my friends' businesses, they were just hiring domestic people. And it just kind of shocked me. It was kind of like a cheat code for us, and allowed us to have decent margins or survive really rough periods.
During COVID, I just kind of locked myself in my office and was looking at different ideas I could start. Shepherd was kind of the one that hit. My co-founder was wanting to do something together, and I just looked at—what are the things that have worked for us and my friends' companies? And that was the genesis of the idea. Basically, help my friends that are small business owners hire overseas and kind of hold their hand through that.
Andrew: Do you want to just talk about how Shaan Puri and Nick Huber came to be involved? Because that was, I think, your first time having investors in the business.
Marshall: So we started—me and Jer, my co-founder—in April 2020. About a year or two into it, Nick Huber, who's like a self-storage operator—he became a customer just organically. He ended up hiring like 10 people. He actually approached me and was like, "Hey man, I've got a big following. What do you think about doing some sort of affiliate deal?" So we did a really simple handshake gentleman's agreement. Very quickly he was getting 20-30 grand checks every month.
Marshall: But I think after about a year he started wising up and realizing—"I'm getting 20 grand a month, these guys' enterprise value is just exploding off of me tweeting about this thing." Which, he was not wrong. So he approached again—"Look, I've got to have some equity in this thing." So we did a deal, basically converted that into equity in the business.
Marshall: Then about another year later, Shaan Puri from My First Million approached us about wanting to get involved as well. His vision was—instead of doing a bunch of courses or 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. We were the first deal in that vision for him.
Andrew: Literally today, you just announced that you sold a majority stake in Shepherd. How did you get to that decision? How does it feel?
I got my wife, I was like, "Hey, 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? It was kind of this awkward, exciting experience. And then I went and played pickleball with some neighborhood buddies—that was planned—and came home and went to bed. It was just a normal day.
Andrew: I remember getting my first big wire transfer. Oh my God, what a weird, crazy feeling.
Marshall: Yeah. 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 it sounds like if you sell out, you have this pot of money and it goes into this preservation mindset of "oh no, I got to make this last." Whereas with business, you're in control, you can grow this thing.
Marshall: So the reason why I did the deal is because I got to hang on to a sizable portion of the business still, which will spit off cash flow and dividends every month. And I can live on that cash flow and then let the proceeds compound.
Andrew: Can you talk about—you mentioned you read "The Psychology of Money.” What have you taken from that book?
Marshall: I just always thought about money and investing like a math equation. The theme of that book really opened my eyes. Like, mathematically, if you look at this just as math, I will absolutely make more money if I just held the business. It doesn't make sense to sell when you look at it as a math equation.
But it was a question of—which regret would I be more comfortable with? A regret of greed—I sold too early and this thing just kept going and became a billion-dollar business? Or a regret of loss—God forbid anything happened and the business declined, and I had the opportunity to sell life-changing money and I didn't take it? I decided I'm okay to live with the regret of greed. It's life-changing money. I don't need to be a billionaire. I am happy to be set for life and take care of my family and still get to kind of go along for the ride.
Andrew: I've had that experience a couple times where I get this big pile of money and I think it's going to reduce my anxiety, but I've given up cash flow as a result. And my friend Reiv calls it "molehill mindset"—where you're like, "Oh my God, I got my little molehill, now I've got to preserve it. I have so much more to lose."
Andrew: So what are you going to change lifestyle-wise? You going to upgrade? Stay the same?
Marshall: I think the house for the most part is kind of the only plan. It was honestly in the works prior to the deal. Maybe we'll pay for a babysitter more often to have an extra date night with my wife. But for the most part, I don't think a lot is going to change.
Andrew: Is there nothing that you've picked out to celebrate?
Marshall: No. I mean, I like watches, cars are cool. But in the near term—no. A lot of advice was given to me of just like, sit with the money for as long as you can. Don't be the dumb lottery winner and go out and spend a bunch of money. Just get comfortable with it.
Andrew: It's kind of like when you've been with a long-term girlfriend and then you get married—well, we already live together. There's really nothing different. You just wake up one day and you've signed a legal document. And that's kind of what it feels like to sell your company.
Andrew: So what are you going to do all day? If you take the money part out of it—ultimately you're getting richer, but you're adding to a bank account where you don't necessarily need more money. So where's the meaning going to come from?
Marshall: My wife is like, "I give you till Christmas before you start another company." But I don't know—there's a lot of hobbies I want to explore and books I want to read. Really cheap stuff—pickleball and golf and tennis. And then honestly, there's a lot of people via Twitter and locally that I'd love to get to know better. I just felt like it'd be great to get to know these people, but I need to work on my business—I've got a job at the end of the day. Now I feel like I have the freedom and time.
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