Shaan Tells All: Shepherd Sells For $52M, Paper Gains, Plus Why B2B Influencers Are Coming

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
Okay, so the news is this, if you've been listening to this podcast, you know that Shepherd is a business that I'm a part owner in. I've been talking about it on the podcast, and it's a great business. And last week, news broke that there was a private buyout of a majority stake in the company for $52 million at a $52 million valuation. It was done by Nick Huber.
I had the opportunity to sell my shares in that. I decided not to, not a single share. I'm holding every single share. So today we're gonna talk about, I guess we'll tell the story of, you know, how Shepherd even grew in four years to be a $52 million company, how I ended up getting involved with it becoming an owner in the business and why one of the owners in the business did this buyout, how they took $29 million and bought the majority controlling stake in the company. So that's the news.
Now here's the backstory.

**Sam Parr** (0:53)
All right, Shaan, last week you guys had a big announcement.
So you and Nick bought Shepherd. And that's amazing.

**Shaan Puri** (1:01)
And I didn't do it. Nick did it, not me.

**Sam Parr** (1:03)
Yeah, but you were part of it. You were part of it.
You're one of the partners.
And I guess maybe I'm gonna interview you at least for this first segment because I wanna learn all about it.
I think it's amazing what Nick has done. So let's start with the beginning. Explain what Shepherd is. And then I guess we'll start in like 2020 when it started and explaining like how it grew and what happened last week.

**Shaan Puri** (1:25)
Yeah, so there's a guy named Marshall Haas who was an entrepreneur, done a bunch of different things. I think he owns like a hotel in St. Louis.
He had a bunch of e-commerce companies, some goofy one, like some emoji, something, something. Then he had Peel, which was like a phone case type, like a thin phone case. So he was in e-commerce. And one of the common things with e-commerce is, e-commerce is like a real business, but it's like a lemonade stand business. Margins matter.
And so what a lot of e-commerce operators do, and I did this too with my e-commerce brand, I think 60% of our staff is offshore, is because margins matter, you have to figure out a certain specific problem, which is, how do I get great talent without paying the full cost, without paying the full cost of hiring Stanford grads and Harvard grads, or even just a normal median worker in the States? And so a lot of us, we go to talent hotbeds like Latin America, where you find great programmers or data analysts, or the Philippines, where you can find a great customer support team that will do the job at a fraction of the cost. Usually about five times less than it costs in the States. So five times less is like pretty massive. So Marshall's running Peel. He starts hiring more and more people overseas and he decides to start a company called Support Shepherd.

**Sam Parr** (2:37)
Which at the time was ridiculous. I saw, I'm friends with Marshall on Facebook. I've been friends with Marshall since 16 or 14 When he told me he was doing this, I was like, this is silly. But then I saw the branding. The website pretty much looked the way it does now from the beginning.

**Shaan Puri** (2:51)
Well, he uses your favorite color of green as well.
And so he creates his brand. And you're right, the idea of hiring talent overseas is not new. This has been going on for a long time. I remember my dad once bought this book called The World is Flat. And I was a little kid and I read this book and it was all about globalization of talent.
And it was something that big companies were doing, but more and more small companies have been doing this, startups and the like, especially for specific roles. So anyways, he starts his company and it starts doing decently well. He's promoted on Twitter and starts to grow. So now Nick comes along.

**Sam Parr** (3:26)
Nick Huber from Sweaty Startup.

**Shaan Puri** (3:28)
Exactly, Nick's got a storage company. He's in the real estate space. And what people don't know is Nick has certain companies like he has a cost segregation business. Cost seg is basically when you buy a property, you do a cost seg study and it allows you to accelerate your depreciation.
So instead of depreciating something over 30 years, you might be able to accelerate the schedule to seven years. It saves you a bunch of money in year one. So it's well worth the trade to go pay for a cost seg study in order to save the money.