Somewhere.com Acquisition Journey

Nick Huber tells the story of how he acquired Somewhere.com (formerly Support Shepherd) and the immediate challenges that followed.

"Marshall Haas had built Support Shepherd, an international hiring company. Andrew Wilkinson made a $47M offer for it, but I told Marshall, 'You shouldn't sell it to Andrew, you should sell it to me.'

His jaw almost hit the floor. He's like, 'Nick, this is insane. This is life-changing money.' And I'm thinking, 'Holy shit, I'm negotiating against a titan. This guy's bought 40 companies, I've bought zero. He's a publicly traded business billionaire.'

But Andrew saw some AI risk and headwinds, so we ended up working it out. The business kept growing during negotiations, so the price became $52M. I raised $20M from investors to buy about 40% of the company. But I realized if I only did that deal, I'd only be entitled to a 20% carry once everybody got their money back. My ownership would go from 12% to 20%. I'd have to raise $20M, put my name on the line, take all this risk - I realized I can't do this deal, it would be foolish.

So I went back to Marshall and said, 'Hey, I need to buy more of the company.' That's where we got creative. I carved out an 18% seller note directly from Marshall to me - about $9M for 18% of the company. So all in, I was in for $29M, and now I was in charge.

Then three things changed drastically:

Number one: We changed the name from Support Shepherd to Somewhere.com. I'd sat over too many people's shoulders watching them spell 'shepherd' incorrectly to know we cannot grow a big company with this name. We bought somewhere.com for $400,000. Our SEO and brand recognition vanished overnight. In that one fell swoop, we lost 300 leads a month out of about 1,000 leads that we had.

Number two: Elon bought Twitter and started drastically messing with the algorithm. It went from me being able to tweet about hiring somebody in the Philippines for $5 an hour and send 3,000 website visits and 200-400 leads to the company, to virtually nothing. My ability to send business to the company with my personal brand vanished.

Number three: I wasn't the only one to think international hiring was a beautiful business. Many competitors started over the next six months to a year. We were pretty loud about the acquisition, which invites competition. The month we announced, the two months after, it was actually peak growth because a lot of people checked it out. But it also emboldened existing competitors to go harder and created 10 new competitors.

And then the economy started to shift. Interest rates went up, a general silent recession happened in a lot of different industries. Our customer base was real businesses - small business agency owners, ecommerce businesses on tight margins, responsible tech companies. They're cost sensitive because they live in the real world, they're not VC subsidized.

I also made a lot of bold executive changes. The company had grown very quickly doing 95% of its hiring in the Philippines for executive assistants. We started to invest in Latin America, South Africa, finance talent in Egypt, building executive teams, performance marketers - actually structuring and building a company from the ground up internationally."