Introduction
Nick Huber, known as the “sweaty startup guy,” recently executed a first time business acquisition of somewhere.com for $52 million. In this interview, he reveals how he structured the complex deal as a newcomer to private equity transactions, negotiated better terms through creative deal structuring, and leveraged international remote teams to build competitive advantages. His journey challenges conventional entrepreneurship narratives while offering practical insights for first-time acquirers.
Founder Success Story QnA
Why did you write your book and how has it gone?
“Yeah, it’s an organized message to myself is what this book is. People think it’s for everybody else. This is reminders to me on how to run a company and it’s what I really wish I had in my hands when I was, you know, in the early stages. And yeah, you should absolutely write a book. It was very difficult. I grew as a person. It was harder than I thought, like almost everything I’ve ever done in my life. But it’s been rewarding.” “I did not make the New York Times list, which I thought it was going to, sales have slowed way down after the first week. So, if you’re doing it to make money, and if you have expectations around it, I don’t suggest writing a book. But if you do it to get better, to have a new intimacy with your audience, I can already feel an energy, a different energy with people who are direct messaging me. Then I suggest it.” “I got a half a million dollar advance from Harper Collins to write the book, which also added stress because now I feel like I need to deliver for them. We have a lot of work to do to make it profitable now for them. I’m confident that we can do it over time, but they thought I could be a New York Times bestseller with a with an advance like that, and I’m not. So there’s a little bit of pressure there too.”
What is the central sweaty startup message?
“When you walk through any major city in America, if you took a microphone and put it in somebody’s face and said, ‘What does entrepreneurship mean to you?’ 90% of them will say the same thing. new ideas, new inventions, new products, Shark Tank, tech, you know, a new piece of technology, raising money, San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. But I’ve met a lot of wealthy people, so have you 95% to 99% of the wealthy people that I know, and I’m talking generational wealth through entrepreneurship, did not go that direction. They started sweaty startups, boring businesses. They outexecuted, they out-hustled. So, it’s kind of messed up to me that 95% of the media is dominated by one type of entrepreneurship, but 95% of wealthy people went in a different direction.” “This book is an official call out to entrepreneurship culture.”
Can you give us your bio in two minutes?
“Yeah. So, went to Cornell University to run track from a small town in southern Indiana. Two middle-class parents, didn’t own assets or businesses or rental properties growing up. Met my business partner senior year, started a pick up and delivery storage business called Storage Squad, the hardest business in the world. 6 years later, we were at 25 major colleges, 12 states, 14 locations. We picked up and delivered 7,000 plus students a year, 50,000 plus items, 200 plus part-time employees, a lot of different warehouses. It was a brutally hard, logistically challenging business doing storage for students when they left college.” “2015 we realized that that was not the business we wanted to be in forever. There was only so much opportunity there. We built our first self-storage facility from the ground up. Upstate New York $2.9 million all-in basis on that deal. And then that one changed our lives. It’s worth $10 million today. We still own it.” “We bought a lot of self-storage facilities in 2020, 2021. We have 63 properties now, 50 employees. Bolt Storage is the majority of my net worth. 2021, I got involved in somewhere.com as an affiliate customer at first. A year later, I bought in as a minority equity partner, 15%. 2022 started a company called re cost seg cost segregation firm and it’s grown to be very large 50 plus employees 750,000 plus a month of revenue.” “2024 May 1st 2024 about a year ago is when I closed the big deal to acquire majority interest in somewhere.com.” “I started the Sweaty Startup podcast in 2018. I went all in like I do on any given hobby and I didn’t get anybody to listen to it for about a year. My friend Moses Kagan found me on Reddit trying to get people to listen to my podcast and said, ‘Nick, you got to come to Twitter.’ And I did. Now I have 400,000 followers.”
How do you reconcile advocating for sweaty startups while wanting to get out of your own?
“My fear is that through my work on these podcast interviews, my own podcast, my own newsletter, my own exit is that I generate an era of entrepreneurs that end up 10 years into not owning a business but owning a job. A job that controls every hour of their life with addiction problems and a wake of broken relationships behind them. That’s my fear because this is humbling. It’s brutal and people don’t talk enough about why it’s so hard.” “I was during a busy season in Boston, I lost 20 pounds in a 4-week period because I wasn’t eating. I was sleeping on a warehouse mattress of one of our customers. I was chafing so bad between my legs that I was bleeding. I had a mental breakdown a couple days later on the side of the road because four really expensive bad problems happened at the same time and I didn’t know what to do.” “People don’t talk about that stuff. The guys drove my truck under a bridge and ripped the top of it off. Another one put diesel fuel in a diesel fuel engine and a third one sideswiped to BMW in Cambridge. All within a 3-day period. All while our customers were calling me. Not that you remember the exact location or anything. I do. Right there on the corner store on Buzzwell Street in Brookline actually. Brutal indeed.”
How did the somewhere.com deal come across your desk?
“I became a customer of it in 2021 where I hired five Filipino customer service reps to work at my storage company. I then used somewhere.com to build my storage private equity company over the next year and started hiring in Colombia and in the Philippines. 2021, I was an affiliate. I was talking about it online. I was driving a ton of business to it. I went to Marshall and we negotiated a deal for me to buy 15% of the business. So, I became a 15% partner in April 2022.” “This was when the business was five times as large as when I got involved at the beginning from maybe 30-40-50 grand a month of revenue up to about 250 grand a month of revenue when I became a minority partner. A year later it had almost tripled in size again. Sean Perry came in and I got diluted down to 12.75%. He bought 15% of somewhere.com. And then the business continued to accelerate and grow.” “In November 2023, Marshall, the majority owner, Marshall Hos, called me and said, ‘Hey, Nick, I don’t have anything in writing, like this is very early stages, but Andrew Wilkinson at Tiny has vocalized interest to acquire 51% of somewhere.com for at a $47 million valuation. What do you think of that? Would you want to sell half your shares?’ And it’s one of those moments in my career where, you know, as a small town kid from Indiana, taking $3 million off the table. That’s not generational wealth, but that’s life-changing money for a guy like me. I instead spent the next two months convincing him to sell the majority of the business to me instead.”
What was the reason back in 2021 that Marshall let you buy 15%?
“Because he knew that if I left and started a competitor, the business would not grow as much as it was today. So, it was a very very good deal by Marshall to do that. Looking back, I probably should have started my own, but he’s also a great operator and he had a ton of value. So, I think it was a win-win situation. It was carrot and stick. It was Marshall: I might start one of these because I have an incredible audience to drive to it. So don’t you want me to drive that audience your way instead?” “Exactly. And by you know a year later it was my number one source of income. Frankly I was 30-40-50 grand a month of income coming into the business coming into me personally from this business. So life-changing.”
How were you involved beyond marketing it on social media?
“Yeah, I was a customer of it. I was building now all of my companies. We had expanded to Latin America through kind of my urging. But operationally I was not involved. They Ben Surman was the COO, a very very good operator. Marshall was the CEO and they did their thing until I acquired the majority interest.”
How did the Andrew Wilkinson offer play out?
“$47 million enterprise value, acquiring 51%. It would be some stock. It would be a little bit of vested over time. But it was pretty much became an open conversation. It wasn’t me on one side of the table, Marshall on the other side of the table, Andrew over here. It was all of us talking together about how to do this because Andrew needed me to be in the business to make it work long term.” “Andrew Wilkinson of Tiny needed me because of your Twitter distribution. So this was right. Yeah. He wouldn’t let me sell all the way out and I wasn’t even sure if he was going to let me sell 51% out because he needed me to have a vested interest in growing the company. For sure. I was sending 20 to 30% of the company’s revenue to the business with my audience.” “At this juncture, the founder was away weighing this offer from Andrew who’s trying to navigate some kind of a deal structure where you are still involved, but instead of kind of playing along on this, you come in with a counter offer. How did this play out? There it was about the same value. It was going to be more cash, less stock. So that was kind of the advantage.” “Marshall’s first question obviously was ‘where are you going to get 20 million?’ like this doesn’t make any sense, Nick. How are you going to pull this off? And so instead of selling down, this became a conversation about, okay, how can Nick get involved almost like a co-sponsor with Andrew and we do this together, cash out Marshall a little bit so that he gets a good payday and then we get an increased strategic interest in this asset that we so believe in and are building our businesses around.” “I wanted I thought that this was the first business that I had been involved in that had $500 million revenue potential over time. There are at least a hundred companies in the United States doing exactly what somewhere.com does that are larger than somewhere.com. There’s full skyscrapers in Manila and Johannesburg and Cairo and Mexico City and Bogota of companies that are doing this at scale much more mature than us.”
What is the market positioning of somewhere versus big corporate offshoring?
“Yeah, the niche is that we are building it’s finally an area we read the world is flat book back in 2002 or three when that came out but it is technology is finally to a place where you can truly have a worldwide diversified team operating in sync with no business process outsourcing firm in place to handle everybody. I can run a company right here from my basement in Athens, Georgia with Slack, with Notion, with Asana, with Fathom, with G Suite.” “I can run a company right here with my finance department split between Cairo, Egypt and Johannesburg, with my sales team in South Africa, with my admin back office in the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. With my developers in Eastern Europe, with my operations managers in Colombia, with my legal team in Colombia, with my HR department in São Paulo Brazil. So, we have a company now that there’s teams of recruiters that work with each of our clients that can build a truly worldwide team and tell you where the best talent is in the world and have you go get them and then there’s no ongoing fee. We’re one of the few where we pay an upfront they pay an upfront fee for us to find somebody then they own that relationship instead of paying 1,500 two grand a month up charge to handle compliance basically.”
How does the remote workforce manifest in operational expenses?
“Oh, so I mean first of all since I acquired this is this is a very complex story so I hope people can follow. When I acquired somewhere.com it was called Support Shepherd. I bought somewhere.com for $400,000. changed the domain name of the company, rebranded it. 80% of the placements were in the Philippines when I bought the company. Today, we are 40% South Africa, 40% Latin America, and less than 15% Philippines.” “At my storage company Bolt Storage we had a full Filipino-based call center to rent storage units. We were converting new clients who called to rent the storage unit. We were converting them at 32%. We rebuilt our sales team and our customer service team in South Africa and our conversion rate is 41% now. I don’t know if you can conceptualize the power of what that means at scale, but we went we have 15,000 units. The phone rings 200 times a day.” “We have $100 million worth of real estate that depends on revenue. Our revenue went up 14.1%. Our net operating income was up over 20% in Q1. Year-over-year. massive, massive, massive, unspeakable value to my business to increase my conversion rate from 32% to 41%.” “We have a real estate private equity company that manages 300 plus investors. We do investor relations. We manage 16 bank relationships now. We have 20 plus open deals at any given time. I can run my entire PE company, management company included, with 50 employees for $1.5 million a year. $1.5 million a year is my overhead as a business. My friend runs a very similar size shop in Atlanta with $5 million a year of annual overhead.” “So, it just decreases the risk. It allows me to hire head of revenue. It allows me to make a profit through really difficult times. We can talk about how difficult the last three years have been in the real estate business and how this frankly kind of saved us as operators.”
Can you explain the mechanics of how you put this deal together?
“So I was in a dilemma because I’m used to the real estate business where you know you do a seven or 8% preferred return and then you get a 30-40-50% promote which is a carry in the we call a carry a promote in the real estate business. I realized after two or three meetings with capital investors for small business that there’s no such thing as a 50% promote. Cap the cash calls the shots.” “So, if I was going to acquire 51% of the business after you take out me and Sean who don’t want to exit, if I’m going to buy about 40% from Marshall, I’m going to raise 20 million bucks to buy 40%. But after it’s all said and done, I’m going to own an extra 8% of the business because I’m on a 20% carry. So, I’m going to go from 12.75% ownership to, you know, 20.75% ownership and I’m going to raise 20 million bucks. I’m going to put my reputation on the line and I’m going to go through the headache and stress of buying this company. Would you do that?” “I decided that no, I have to find a way to get more upside for myself in this business. So it was not necessarily a retrade, but it was kind of me going back to Marshall and saying, ‘Hey, look, I need to buy more of the company. Buying 39-40% of it does not work for me. I need to acquire like 58% from you to make this worth it.'” “What we ended up settling on was a 39.25% equity chunk from investors. 20,300,000 what I’m going to buy outright. So the value of the business over the three months of negotiating, it accelerated. We just settled on a $52 million valuation versus 47 because the business had started to grow 39.25% in a private equity chunk where I’m going to get him cash. But then I need an 18% seller note on top directly to me. Directly to me that’s collateralized by the business itself.” “What I ended up doing was I owned 12.75% outright. I did an 18% seller note from Marshall directly to me. And then I did two private equity chunks. One with a 20% carry because they invested more than a million dollars in the deal and one with a 30% carry if they invested under a million dollar in the deal. So those blended together it was about 32.96% with a 20% carry, 6.29% with a 30% carry. Blended it was 6.5% for one, 1.8% for the other 18% seller note 12.75% I already owned if the deal went well and I got everybody paid back I would own 39.229% of somewhere.com and that for me was worth it.”
How did you position yourself to negotiate those leverage terms?
“Yeah, it’s I had access to a lot of capital. I had 300 plus active investors in my real estate business that had worked with us for four, five, six years and can trust us. I had a big reach through the deal to additional potential PE shops that I could go take meetings with. Sophisticated investors.” “It’s definitely salesmanship and me having to, you know, tell people, hey, look, like here are the risks of this deal. It’s AI, it’s competitors, it’s Twitter might not work as we’re rebranding all these things that are changes. But you know, if you believe in me as an operator, if you believe in the future of this business, then this could be a good investment for you.” “The growth trajectory of the business absolutely helped but I didn’t have any resume of raising for an operating company especially $20 million or hiring a CEO or building a management team. So yeah it’s been it was I didn’t have track record. Nobody was going to say, ‘Oh, it makes perfect sense. Nick’s done this before.'”
How has revenue changed over the last 12 months?
“Q1 was really good. I mean, things are things are looking very good. Q1 revenue 26% growth over last Q1 which was massive. We’re still highly profitable still making distributions every month.” “But then the tariff liberation day, like there’s just little things about this business where, you know, in April we had a 250k reduction in revenue over March because tariffs were put in and almost all of our physical product goods, ecom goods, direct to consumer goods, they all froze hiring. We lost 50 deals in our pipeline. We have 400 deals at any given moment in our pipeline. A lot of them paused, canceled.” “The pipeline behind it is really good. So, it’s not a long-term issue for the business. But those little blips, you just don’t see that in real estate. You don’t see the president making a tweet costing the business 250k in revenue in one month.”
How did you recover from the SEO collapse and Twitter algorithm change?
“We’ve had a we have drastically improved the customer experience drastically. We present better candidates faster than anybody in the business. Our repeat business went from 1.2 two placements on average to three placements on average. So, our clients are coming back for more and more and more talent.” “None of my recruiters were on variable compensation. Now they’re on over half of their compensation is variable. The best recruiters are making very good money. Same with sales. There’s no variable compensation. There was no sourcing efforts to run ads and do LinkedIn outreach and find referrals for candidates. So yeah, it’s just improving every little part of the company that over time shows itself, but the first year those things take time.”
Where is your executive team located?
“Head of finance is in Johannesburg. Head of revenue operations is in Johannesburg. Head of sales is in Johannesburg. Head of recruiting ops is in Cape Town. Head of sourcing is in Manila.” “Every year 30,000 chartered accountants from South Africa fly to DC, New York, Philadelphia and do corporate tax and audit work for Fortune 500 companies. So there’s a massive finance culture and sales culture in South Africa. When they go back to Johannesburg they don’t want to hit the road for four months again and be away from their family. So they want to work remote for US businesses and four grand a month puts you in the top 0.1% of earners in the whole country.” “Johannesburg is the financial capital of the continent. It’s just like London just like New York City as far as the work culture there.”
Nick Huber Business Stats
Nick Huber has built a diverse portfolio through strategic acquisitions and operational excellence. His businesses generate significant revenue while maintaining remarkably low overhead through international remote teams. Below are key metrics from his portfolio companies:
- Acquired majority interest in somewhere.com for $52 million valuation
- Owns 63 self-storage facilities under Bolt Storage
- Manages 325 employees across portfolio companies
- Runs real estate private equity firm with only 50 employees
- Operates re cost seg generating $750,000+ monthly revenue
| Business | Annual Revenue | Employees |
|---|---|---|
| Bolt Storage | $10M+ | 50 |
| somewhere.com | $30M+ | 227 |
| re cost seg | $9M+ | 50 |
Nick Huber Method
Nick Huber’s approach combines aggressive deal structuring with international team building. He focuses on operational improvements that create exponential growth leverage. Key elements of his method:
- Negotiates seller notes to increase personal equity stake beyond typical sponsor arrangements
- Bifurcates investor tiers with different carry structures to incentivize larger commitments
- Rebuilds customer experience to dramatically increase repeat business
- Implements variable compensation for recruiters and sales staff
- Shifts workforce composition toward high-value regions like South Africa
- Measures and optimizes every part of the sales funnel systematically
Nick Huber Tools
Nick Huber leverages technology to enable his globally distributed teams while maintaining tight operational control. He uses collaboration tools strategically to overcome geographic barriers and time zone challenges:
- Slack for real-time communication across all time zones
- Notion for centralized documentation and knowledge sharing
- Asana for project management and accountability tracking
- Fathom for AI-powered meeting notes and action items
- G Suite for shared document collaboration across regions
- Typing tests as first filter in hiring international staff
Key Notes
Nick Huber’s experience offers valuable lessons for business acquirers. His journey reveals both opportunities and pitfalls in executing complex transactions:
- Seller notes can be strategically structured to increase sponsor equity beyond typical carry arrangements
- Platform risk (SEO, algorithm changes) can devastate lead generation overnight
- Conversion rate improvements (32% to 41%) create massive revenue impact at scale
- Offshoring strategy must evolve beyond Philippines to specialized talent pools
- Business acquisitions typically follow a J-curve with 18 months of operational challenges
- Media presence builds trust but creates vulnerability to algorithm changes
Get Started in Just 5 Steps
Nick Huber’s path to successful first-time acquisition offers a clear roadmap for aspiring business buyers. Follow these practical steps to build your own acquisition strategy:
- Build domain expertise by becoming a customer of businesses in your target industry
- Create distribution channels (social media, email list) to demonstrate value to sellers
- Start small with minority stakes to gain insider knowledge of target businesses
- Negotiate creative terms that increase your equity upside beyond standard carry
- Focus on operational improvements that create exponential revenue leverage
Conclusion
Nick Huber’s $52 million first time business acquisition demonstrates that unconventional deal structures can create exceptional sponsor value. His journey from running a brutally hard student storage business to acquiring a major international recruitment platform shows the power of operational experience and strategic patience. While the post-acquisition period brought unexpected challenges with SEO collapse and algorithm changes, his focus on improving customer experience and conversion rates turned potential failure into 26% year-over-year growth. For aspiring acquirers, Huber’s approach offers a blueprint: build credibility through customer experience, negotiate creatively with seller notes, and relentlessly optimize operational metrics that drive exponential revenue impact.