This is an auto-generated transcript of Never Enough Podcast Episode 2. It 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 [Music] 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 hos 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 met so my my first company that I ever like 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 doom 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 h hell Mary like hey we've got about 10 months of cash off the bank like why don't
we partner on something you know I'll 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 like what like friend feed back in the day but for work so it' be like this person posted this on GitHub this person is working on this document in Dropbox all that kind of stuff I I feel like it was one of those things I still I still want it you know I think too like at the time it was 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 that's how we met I started working for you and then you 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 and I formed a studio together called need want just had a bunch of different ideas for e-commerce products so the the most successful was Peele which was a super thin iPhone case I 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 beding 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 a notebook company called Mod Notebooks was kind of like mol skin 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 uh where you're not you're not there anymore and you bought a building you did kind of interesting stuff in 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 airb being 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 a rough time turn into like a nice side hustle and I always thought like man if I could just have like 10 more of these like I'd be set the office or the building that we had our office and one day property manager came around and you know introduced himself and
said the build the building was going in forclosure 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 you and Chris uh 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 was really fun operating for quite a while it was definitely a you know different
experience than anything digital was like kind of the first brick-and mortar thing and 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 shephard 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 far work week when I was 177 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 happen to be in the Philippines so we were basically just like a marketing you know 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 CU we just couldn't afford domestic people for a lot of roles I just noticed over you know long long period
of time my friends businesses you know they weren't they were just hiring domestic people or you know 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 surv survive really rough periods so honestly it was when Co hit I had this thinking always where a lot of these startups that are huge now got started in like the 2008 crash and worked at an Architecture Firm during
that I remember like you know all these guys that are 50 years old getting laid off and you know 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 and look at like what the needs are and and try to start something new and so during Co you know I just kind of like locked myself in my office and was just looking at different ideas
I could start and Shephard was kind of the one that that I think hit my co-founder was wanting to 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 and that was kind of the the Genesis of the idea you know 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 to other services in that space But I 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 happen to be reading not about head hunting but yeah we just we' use the Simple Head Hunter model which is you come to us hey I'm looking for a person to do X roll great we take a small deposit that's completely refundable just to know people are are serious and then we go out and find that person and
then the customer only pays if and when we find you know 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 is basically a percentage of the presumed first year salary which you know when we when I was starting it I looked at doing manag services and you know 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 to charge for your services is just that that big upfront once you find someone it's so funny I remember when Co hit everyone was like oh my God this is crazy remote work and I think you and I had both been doing it for 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 you know 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 or you know Latin America or the Philippines and that people there are more motivated harder working you know 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 you know have the kind of you took our jobs mentality um about it all but yeah splice in the uh South Park yeah you know like my argument with that is like look like it's we're in a global economy at this point like it that's that ship is 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
a proponent of like fire everyone and move the entire team overseas I think the The Sweet Spot is having a really healthy mix of you know a lot of back office stuff done overseas and then still having you know leadership and senior level roles State Side that's not to say like you can't find amazing people I mean Jer was GM of the business for like 3 years um and he's my you know Filipino co-founder like he's awesome we found our GM of the Latin America side of things um is in Columbia like you
can can get awesome people but I think that's a a really healthy mix you've done a lot of different stuff and now I literally today you just announced that you sold a majority steak and Shephard and I'm really curious about that what 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 yeah so it it went through yesterday it closed yesterday fire came through yesterday 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 account 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's kind of like this awkward uh exciting experience and 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 do
you wanted to just talk about how Shan Pur and Nick Hubert came to be involved and then you know 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 you know he's got a big F he's a troll yeah he's great at trolling TR yeah uh but he
also also talks pretty openly about his self storage deals I think that's why he 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 you know doing some service don't overthink things so he would 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 like great let's do it so we did a a really simple like handshake Gentleman's Agreement uh I think he was getting either 15 or 20% of deals that clothes that were generated from him and like very quickly you know he was getting 20 30 grand checks every month and you know 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 you know their Enterprise Value is just like exploding off of me tweeting about this thing which you know he was not wrong like it was growing the business quite a lot so he approached again he's like look I I've got to have some equity in this thing so about a year after doing the affiliate deal we did a a deal basically converted that into
equity in the business you know kind of killed the affiliate deal and uh 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 you know 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 on the business getting him involved and I think about another year fast forward Shawn purri from my first million approached us about wanting to get involved
as well he his vision was basically like instead of you know doing a bunch of courses or doing a bunch of AD deals like he wants to get a 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 uh kind of in that vision for him and did a pretty similar deal this time though Sean Sean bought in to the business in pretty favorable terms and so those two deals like I mean it was I think it was a really clear
like fit you know Their audience fit to our customer base I think is why it worked work so well so yeah we 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 like you're always you know 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 you I was like sure open 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 Peele the e-commerce business about I don't know six or eight months ago and that was a really awful experience
the buyers are just you know tough guys to deal with and I just kind of promised myself like if I ever sell she I'm going to do it with someone I know and trust like I'm not going to like shop it to you know just private equity and you know have a a hellish experience like I I just went through that so my first thought was like hit you up again and you guys are always buying so you guys made an offer I I took it to the rest of the guys you know Jer and and uh Sean and Nick and you know for for different
reasons they kind of convinced Me Maybe it's 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 you know your deal was a mix of cash and stock and Nick's like I what if I did this deal all cash I was like what do you mean um and so that kind of kicked off him making a formal offer that required him raising money so it's kind of contingent on like if he could put it together I was playing
basketball with Nick at um Camp MFM they do this annual event with Mr Beast and we were we were having lunch and we started talking about the deal and then he kind of was like you know what screw it like I want to do this and I I at the time I was like okay I'm not going to compete with Nick Nick's the man I'm sure he can go and and raise the money so yeah it seems like seems like it all came together in the end leading up to it I was still wrestling with like should I like is this the
right thing to do and we we could get into that uh just the psychology of selling how life-changing is this this money I mean I I don't have to you know work ever again if I don't want to you know putting it index funds and letting 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 you know I talked to a lot of friends that have sold you know gotten completely out 100% of their shares and just like listening to interviews
and stuff and it sounds like there's definitely if you sell out you have cash flow prior you know business is growing it's bitting off cash flow and then you sell you have this pot of money and it goes into this like preservation mindset of like oh no like I I got to make this last whereas you know with business like you're in control you know you can grow this thing and I I knew myself and I and I get kind of anxious about you know business and just anything with that and I thought I think that
would drive me nuts if I sold the whole thing and it was I was worrying about preserving it and 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 so I can live on that cash flow and then let you know the the proceeds compound and then of course if like worst case you know the business went to zero and in amount of time like I've taken chips off the table and you know it's still a win
but I don't think that's going to happen so yeah I mean my my debate with the whole thing internally was like mathematically if you look at this just as math I will absolutely make more money if I just held the business like it doesn't make sense to sell when you look at it you know as a math equation if I just hold that it keeps growing like you know I'll still in the business at a certain point it'll spit it off enough dividends to where I would have gotten that amount but it to me it was a uh
question of which regret what I be more comfortable with it's a regret of greed like I sold too early and this thing just kept going and it became a billion dollar business that I own the majority of or a regret of loss of you know God forbid you know anything can happen and the business you know declined or went to zero one day and I had the opportunity to sell and I didn't take it and it was life-changing money then which one would I be uh more upset about you know I I wrestle with that for a
while and I I decided like I'm okay to live with the regret of greed it's life-changing money still like enough you know I I don't need to be a billionaire like 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 uh without maximizing the ultimate outcome so that's ultimately why I decided to to take the deal that's really cool I think that 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 so my cash flow is lower and then I've got to replace that with dividends or stock appreciation or something else and my friend reiv calls it molehill mindset where you're kind of like oh my God I got my little molehill now I've got to preserve it I have so much more to lose so I think that's kind of an awesome setup where if you can afford to live off of your cash flow and that'll keep growing and you can still get you know super even richer
by selling Equity or something in the future that's awesome but yeah I think like having that sense of security is really a good move can you talk about in this we did a little prep Doc and in it you mentioned like you read the psychology of money what have you taken from that book and what are you going to do with that money to try and preserve your sense of security I think just like the theme of that book really opened my eyes to like I I just always thought about money and investing like a math
equation you know it's just like do whatever the math says like like and what we just talked about is a good example of like it's the wrong choice to sell you know assuming this thing keeps growing like it is but from a psychological perspective it's the right decision uh to sell and I think one of the things in that book too is like a mortgage you know I mean maybe not right now with the way rates are but um typically for the last like 20 years paying off your mortgage if you're an investor and
or investing in the market it's like it actually doesn't make sense to pay off your mortgage but psychologically it makes you sleep better at night great like then that can be a great decision for you and so I just really love I think it opened my eyes to that perspective of like you got to just do what's right for you and and kind of take stock of how what you get anxious about and what keeps you up at night and and solve for that and so I I think stuff like that you know I I would prior to that
book it was just like yeah why why would you pay off a house or why would you do this like if you know look at the numbers you know but at the end of the day like we're all emotional so are you going to do that are you going to pay off your mortgage I haven't decided yet but I'm a lot more likely to we're going to be moving States and building a house and you know this one I'm not got a sweet mortgage with I'm sorry to hear that what what are you sorry to hear you know my story right oh building
a house I spent six years building I mean you've built houses before you've been through it I know and you're also in Texas the great state of Texas where they make it incredibly easy to build a house I'll never forget um the day day I bought my lot that I was going to build my house on I was texting you and you said oh my God me too we're going to build a house too and I think your house took about 8 months to be in maybe a year and my house took 5 years that's the difference between uh Canada
and Texas yeah yeah I I would have a different feeling if it took 5 years or anything close to that I mean I don't know my wife and I are gluts for punishment when it comes to to home building we I mean I used to want to be an architect I've always been interested in in design and especially architecture and my wife is an interior designer by trade so we it's it's one of those things of like you know what can you spend your money on things you really enjoy and we actually really enjoy this stuff
for the most part it does get tedious and there's a lot of decision fatigue but yeah we we we do enjoy it so I'm curious actually two things one actually three so are you going to change anything lifestyle wise two are you going to buy yourself a toy like are you going to buy a stupid car or something like that and then three what are you going to do every day like how are you going to spend your time but yeah let's start with number one so what are you going to change lifestyle wise you going to
upgrade you going to stay the same you said you're going to build this house yeah I think the house for the most part is kind of the only plan I mean it was honestly in the works prior to the deal um we were going to do it irregardless but yeah that's kind of the the one thing that we're we're planning on doing I mean I think overall Not A lot's going to change like maybe we'll you know pay for a a babysitter more often to have like a an extra date night with my wife you know just like stuff like
that but for the most part I don't think a lot is going to change I do like cars I think you know that I've always loved cars so I you know I have some fun cars I'll probably add you know maybe one or two more to the collection but yeah that'll probably be my my dumb purchase if you will so there's nothing that you've like picked out to celebrate or anything like that no I mean I like watches are cool cars are cool but uh in the near term no like I I don't have garage space and I don't know I'm
just going to like as much as I can a lot of advice was given to me of just like just sit with the money for as long as you can just like just get used to it don't like be the dumb like lottery winner and go out and spend a bunch of money and then six months you wake up you're like oh my God I spent weight like just just like don't just hang on to it just get comfortable with it so honestly no I mean the house is the only thing in the works it's interesting it's kind of like when you're you've been
with a long-term girlfriend and then you get married and it's like well we already live together like there's really nothing different you just wake up one day and you've signed a legal document and that's kind of like what it feels like to sell your company I had this experience where I was already kind of I was already doing really well I already had more than enough money and I was able to do whatever I wanted and then I sold a business and I had this big amount of money in the bank and and there's
nothing I wanted to change and it was kind of like this weird feeling of like okay I've won I've won the business game but like I don't feel anything like I don't you know yeah it's very it's very strange it's it it it every time I go through something like this it kicks off an exential crisis which leads into my next question so what are you going to do all day like if you take the money part out of it right ultimately you're getting richer for money but you're adding to a bank account where you
don't necessarily need more money and it doesn't change your lifestyle so like where's the meaning going to come from and what do you want your work life to be yeah I mean I I've always well not always I I used to want to you know I was inspired by the gates and Zuck of the world but very quickly realized I just wanted Freedom so to me it's like I just secured Freedom like you know ultimately down the road as long as I'm not stupid with it all but as far as dayto day like I think my wife is like
I give you till uh Christmas before you start another company but I'm like I don't know I there's a lot of hobbies I want to explore and books I want to read like I like to read I just you know feel like more obligated to sit down on my computer and handle work when when I had a daily role but yeah I mean I my plan is to just like dive into some hobbies that I've gotten into that I haven't had a lot of time to to mess with like I mean really cheap stuff like pickle ball and Golf and Tennis and then
honestly like there's a lot of people via Twitter and locally and and stuff like that that I love to get to know better that I find really interesting that I I just felt like you know it'd be great to get to know these people you know if it makes sense but you know I need to like work on my business like I've got a job at the end of the day is how I I viewed things where now I feel like I have the freedom and time like yeah sure like let's do this podcast let's let's you know random people I want
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