Sweaty Startup

The Harsh Reality of the Post-2022 Bull Market Everyone looks like a genius when cheap debt flows and every marketing campaign hits. For a long time, the digital business community operated under a collective delusion. We believed that a powerful personal brand coupled with raw, unfiltered confidence could turn any mediocre agency, service business, or software venture into a highly profitable enterprise. This was peak delusion. Between 2019 and 2022, scaling felt natural. You put a product in the market, hyped it on social media, and watched the customer acquisition costs drop. But the market changed. High interest rates, shifting platform algorithms, and tighter corporate budgets have collectively corrected the ecosystem. Nick Huber, founder of Sweaty Startup and co-owner of global recruiting agency Somewhere, recently joined Shaan Puri on the My First Million podcast to discuss the quiet operational failures that hit even seasoned operators. Huber built a reputation on high-energy, confident business building, but the last several years forced a deep operational reckoning. Building businesses isn't a series of easy wins. It is a grueling, systemic process of surviving your own strategic errors. The Anatomy of a $52 Million Acquisition and Its Immediate Aftermath In early 2023, Huber made the largest acquisition of his life. He bought Somewhere—then operating under the name Support Shepherd—at a $52 million valuation. The business was growing rapidly, helping American companies hire high-quality talent in the Philippines and South Africa. When the founder received an acquisition offer from Tiny founder Andrew Wilkinson, Huber stepped in to buy the company himself, structuring a complex deal that combined $20 million raised from investors with a $9 million seller note from the founder. Then, new owner syndrome set in. Operators who acquire cash-flowing businesses often feel a compulsive need to immediately change everything to prove their brilliance. Within weeks of closing the deal, Huber executed a series of bold, fast changes that backfired. First, he spent $400,000 to buy the domain somewhere.com and changed the name from Support Shepherd. The brand’s search engine optimization (SEO) and organic authority vanished overnight. The company lost 300 highly qualified leads per month, a third of its total volume, in a single day. Second, Elon Musk bought Twitter, altering the platform's distribution algorithm. Huber's ability to drive hundreds of high-value leads with a single text post about hiring overseas evaporated. Finally, because Huber and his partners publicly bragged about the massive scale of the business, they invited a wave of new competition. Dozens of copycat agencies entered the international hiring space within six months. The lesson is simple: when you have a profitable niche, pounding your chest on social media is a form of operational suicide. Rebuilding the Org Chart from the Outside In Despite the initial setbacks, Somewhere recovered, growing its revenue 60% compared to the pre-acquisition period. The turnaround didn't happen because of a magic marketing hack. It happened because Huber redesigned the corporate structure by applying his own recruitment philosophy to his executive tier. Most Western business owners assume that overseas talent is only useful for basic, repeatable administrative tasks. They delegate phone support, data entry, and basic scheduling to the Philippines, while keeping expensive, local C-suite executives in high-cost cities. This is a massive mistake that destroys margin. Huber restructured his entire portfolio, including Bolt Storage and his real estate management firms, to rely almost entirely on international leaders. In his current organizations, only a tiny fraction of employees are American. The rest of the management tier lives globally. For example, the Chief Operating Officer of one of his fastest-growing companies lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. His head of performance marketing lives in Bogota, Colombia. His IT compliance consultant, who successfully pushed the firm through complex SOC 2 compliance, works from Cape Town, South Africa. These are not cheap assistants. These are highly educated professionals, many holding advanced degrees and Big Four consulting experience, who can be hired for a fraction of the cost of a mediocre US-based manager. If you are still hiring US-based middle management for remote desk jobs, your competitors are going to run circles around your cost structure. The Five-Day Global Hiring System If you want to build a highly leveraged international team without paying high agency fees, you must build an objective, highly filtered recruiting system. Most companies make terrible hires because their interview process relies on subjective conversations and gut feelings. Instead, you need a process that filters for actual output. To find a world-class operator, follow this protocol: * **Step 1: The High-Volume Sourced Pool.** Post your job on LinkedIn targeting South Africa, Colombia, Brazil, or the Philippines. Promote the listing with $100 a day for five days. This small investment will net over 1,000 applicants. * **Step 2: The Typing Speed and English Screen.** Filter the list immediately. Force every applicant to complete a typing speed and English proficiency test. In global recruiting, this simple filter eliminates up to 85% of applicants who cannot type at least 35 words per minute. * **Step 3: The Friction Video.** Send the remaining candidates an automated request to submit a simple, one-minute video introducing themselves and explaining why they want the role. Another 80% of applicants will drop out because they are not serious about doing the work. You are left with a highly qualified pool of 30 to 40 people. * **Step 4: The Task-Based Assessment.** Never hire based on an interview. Create a structured, paid work trial that takes 60 to 90 minutes. For an assistant, have them organize a complex travel itinerary or draft emails from a messy voice memo. For a financial analyst, have them build a specific model in Excel. Pay them for their time, and judge the final work product side-by-side. By focusing on production over personality, you remove bias and identify the single candidate who can actually perform the job on day one. The Myth of the Multi-Company Holding Company The business world fell in love with the holding company model over the past five years. Influencers championed the idea of owning ten different companies, claiming that "synergies" and cross-promotion would create massive enterprise value. This trend is dying, and it deserves to die. Running multiple companies simultaneously is an operational nightmare. Unless you are an elite operator who has spent a decade running a single, highly profitable business with a fully autonomous executive team, building a holding company is a recipe for mediocrity. Operating companies are volatile. Unlike real estate, where tenant rent is relatively stable, active businesses can see wild fluctuations in profit and cash flow. When you own eight different small businesses, you do not get to enjoy the upside of all of them. Instead, the deepest, most systemic crisis of the weakest business bubbles up and consumes 90% of your executive energy. The wealthiest people in business do not diversify early. They focus on a single, highly specific model and run the exact same play for a decade. Focus is Say No to Great Ideas During the early days of any venture, it is easy to get distracted by new channels. We want to test influencer marketing, launch new product lines, build partnerships, and expand into new regions. This is a major strategic trap. Real growth comes from finding one highly effective distribution channel and one highly profitable revenue stream, and then hammering them with relentless consistency. As legendary investor Peter Thiel once pointed out in his lectures, when an early-stage company boasts about having seven different revenue streams or customer acquisition channels, they are not confessing their strength; they are admitting they do not have a single working model. To scale to seven figures and beyond, you must become comfortable with saying no to good ideas. If Facebook ads are driving your growth, do not touch influencers, SEO, or retail partnerships until you have maxed out your primary channel. The job of a great executive is to act as a barrier against distraction, keeping the team focused on the single engine that actually funds the company.