Nick Huber's $52M Acquisition of Support Shepherd (Somewhere.com)

The Setup Nick Huber is the Sweaty Startup guy. Small-town Indiana, Cornell track, co-founded Storage Squad in college with partner Dan Hagberg picking up and delivering storage for students. Six years of brutal operations: 25 campuses, 12 states, 200 part-time employees, a fetal-position moment on Buswell Street in Boston after a driver ripped the top off a truck under a bridge and another poured gasoline into a diesel tank. Exited Storage Squad in 2021 for seven figures. Pivoted to self-storage real estate: 63 properties, a portfolio he values above $100M. In 2021 he became a customer of Support Shepherd, an offshore recruiting agency founded by Marshall Haas. Hired five Filipino CS reps for his storage business. Became an affiliate, drove traffic from his then-growing Twitter audience, and in April 2022 bought in as a 15% minority partner when the business was doing roughly $50K/month of revenue. A year later Sean Puri bought 15% and Nick got diluted to 12.75%. By late 2023 the company had grown several multiples and Nick was personally routing 20-30% of its revenue through his audience. The Deal November 2023, Marshall called. Andrew Wilkinson's Tiny had offered to buy 51% at a $47M valuation. Would Nick sell half his shares for roughly $3M? Nick spent two months convincing Marshall to sell the majority to him instead. Valuation ticked up during negotiation to $52M. The stack Nick built: - Rolled his existing 12.75%. - Bought 18% directly from Marshall via a seller note at 18% interest, collateralized by the business, junior to all other equity. Interest-first, then 50% of distributions withheld for taxes, 50% toward principal. - Raised a $20.3M equity tranche for 39.25% of the company across ~38 investors. Two sub-tranches: 20% carry for investors above $1M, 30% carry for those below. No preferred return. No fee. Carry starts once distributions equal invested capital. Blended GP math: 12.75% existing + 18% seller note equity + ~8% effective carry = roughly 39.2% ownership if the deal performs. Marshall retained ~13.5%. Sean retained his stake undiluted. Nick took 100+ investor calls to close 38. Some lasted five minutes. No finance background, no prior SMB acquisition, learned the vocabulary live. Operating Moves First move post-close: bought the domain Somewhere.com for $1,000 and rebranded off Support Shepherd. Risky, but unified the brand around a bigger TAM than Philippines-only. Geographic diversification. At close, 80% of placements were Filipino. Today: 40% South Africa, 40% Latin America, under 15% Philippines. Reasoning: specialized talent in sales, finance, and operations sits outside Manila. Cairo for power-BI analysts at $700/mo. South Africa for salespeople with British-accented English at $2K/mo. Bogotá for ops and legal at $1,500/mo. Eastern Europe for developers at $3-5K/mo. Proof point in his own storage portfolio. Bold Storage moved its sales and CS team from the Philippines to South Africa. Phone conversion went from 32% to 41%. Q1 revenue up 14.1%, NOI up 20%+ year-over-year, while Extra Space and Public Storage posted revenue declines. On 15,000 units with 200 inbound calls a day,...