“It's back to basics—just be a good person and operate with some integrity, and you can be around long enough to see some success for yourself.” – Marshall Haas

Marshall Haas (@marshal) is co-founder and CEO of NEED/WANT, a family of brands that includes Peel and Shepherd. He started his entrepreneurial career at age 21, and has continued to create businesses and products since then. He is an investor in Tiny Capital and Loop Internet, and he’s currently building a collection of cabins in Texas under his brand ofHaas.

To listen to Marshall’s quick interview on habits, routines, and inspirations, click here.

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Chapters

Marshall's background and path to entrepreneurship
Influential books
Need/Want and creating products
Profit margin is crucial
The ups and downs of running a physical product business
On Shepherd and overseas recruiting
Tweaking and optimizing the business
Personal projects and ofHaas
The core principles of business

Books Recommended in This Episode

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T. Kiyosaki
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss‍
Principles by Ray Dalio

Learn More About This Topic

20 Book Recommendations from Charlie Munger

Marshall noted his appreciation for Munger’s business philosophies; this list of books that Munger himself has recommended gives a good depiction of his thought processes.

Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Peter D. Kaufman

This collection of Charlie Munger quotes is probably on the bookshelf of every investor.

Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor by Tren Griffin

A great summary of Munger’s investing strategy and mental models for entrepreneurs and investors.

A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers From Warren Buffett by Peter Bevelin and Warren Buffett

A great resource for entrepreneurs and investors alike.

Charlie Munger Bronze Bust

A true collector’s item for the desk of any investing and business nerd.

Transcript

Daniel Scrivner:

Marshall, I am really excited to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for making time.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Daniel Scrivner:

So I'm really excited about this. I've followed you for a long time. I've followed your journey from Need/Want to all of the businesses that you have built and you've just had an incredible journey, and so, this fits into a vein of interviews that we do around serial entrepreneurs. So we're going to cover a lot of ground. We're going to talk about the companies, talk a little about your process, some of the tools that you use. But just to start, maybe you could share a little bit of the background story leading up to Need/Want, but share a little bit of your origin story, what got you interested in business and into this mode of life?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah. So I'm 31 now. I think I got pretty interested when I was like 16, 17, got a Apple laptop I think when I was 15. I had never heard of this company, start researching it. You learn about Steve Jobs, guys like that. My parents, they had regular jobs. Nobody in my family is a business owner or anything like that, so I didn't even know when I was a kid you could do something outside of a job.

Marshall Haas:

Fast forward when I was 17, I had an internship at an architecture firm, I used to want to be an architect. And it was this crazy firm that did like mansion, manor homes, money is no object, this is the Wayne Manor type thing, just insane. And that's sort of another time. But while I was working there, we'd have these clients that would come in. I never got to meet them, but I'm working on their projects, I was like this grunt kid. And he started asking like, "What do these people do?" I've learned what something would cost. I'm just like, "That's not in the vein of anything possible with I think what you could make in any job, even a [inaudible 00:01:37]." And it's like, "oh, this guy owns a giant law firm. This guy owns a utility company."

Marshall Haas:

It's pattern matching and I started to realize that everyone was this business owner. It was just kind of like an initial like, "Oh, there's this other thing you can do." Yeah, just opened my eyes, and then I had the interest, and I think just from there, was a lot of diving into books, reading a lot different books, trying to learn about business, and marketing, and sales and all that. But I would point to that experience as what opened my eyes to just what's possible in a way.

Daniel Scrivner:

Was there any books that you remember reading in those early days that you still think back on, or reflect on, or reread?

Marshall Haas:

I wouldn't say I'd reread this one, but I feel like a lot of people, their first is Rich Dad Poor Dad. So I had a great timing of, again, opens your eyes like, "Hey, it doesn't have to be a certain way." I skimmed it the other day and I was like, okay, just looking back, it feels really primitive information, but some of those books are like right time, right place, you're in the right way to receive it.

Marshall Haas:

I think the other one which a lot of people point to as well, I was super early on and it opened my eyes even more it was the The 4-Hour Workweek. I think that came out when I was like 18, so like a year into getting interested in everything and you're like, "Oh, all these business owners that I was just describing your all-super old school." They own law firms and utility companies, all that. And I was like, "Oh, this is like digital thing." You start learning about tech companies and possibility of running something remotely 10 years ago, all that kind of stuff. It just blew my mind back then. I think there's a lot of [inaudible 00:03:10] in the book, some flak for the name, but like there's some really good first principal stories for entrepreneurs in there around delegation, and removing yourself, and designing your machine however you want it to look for yourself. So yeah, I would say 4-Hour Workweek was like a huge curly one for me.

Marshall Haas:

These days I love stuff from Charlie Munger. He's just a smart old man that you just would love to sit down and be your grandfather and pick his brain for hours on end, but luckily, there's a ton of books of all this stuff.

Daniel Scrivner:

Was there something you felt drew you in? It sounds like maybe it was this idea of autonomy, owning your own destiny. What was it at a meta-level do you think was like, "Okay, I think I need to pursue this or this is speaking to me?"

Marshall Haas:

I think I've always been creative, not necessarily in any specific. It's not like I'm great at drawing, I was drafting for architecture, but just like as a high-level creative, always interested in ideas and the idea of making something, whether it's guys that would build a high-performance car that they built in their garage themselves to learning about guys that built businesses, just the craft of having an idea for something, and then seeing it through, and being able to step back and see something, that side is super cool to me.

Marshall Haas:

There's of course, the monetary motivations with starting a business. Again, I started to realize there's kind of this ceiling if you have a job and then this unlocked ceiling as far as income when you see these people that are near billionaires building these houses and you're like, "Oh." So of course, that's there, but yeah, I think it's the creation side, is what excites me with all of this.

Daniel Scrivner:

I'd love to jump in and talk about some of the businesses that you've built over the years. And if I'm getting the story correct, I think the first major one was Need/Want, and there's a lot to uncover there, I don't want to give any away. So do you mind talking a little bit about the origin story, and what you were experimenting with there, and how that concluded?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah. So how I describe Need/Want today versus what it was back then is different. So around 2012, I'm going to say, I think I was 22 at the time, I was in software working on a startup that kind of ultimately was acquired and it wasn't going great, but I think had this good landing. So Zen Software thought I wanted to do something in the software space, but over here, I've always had this entrepreneurial ADD. It's like, "Oh, what's this physical product thing?" I forget what even turned my attention to physical products. I think it was seeing some Kickstarter. Back then, it was mostly trying to fund a art project or whatever, but there started to be some physical products on Kickstarter. And realizing these are like one or two-person teams, again, eyes opened. You don't have to be a massive Unilever or massive consumer packaged goods company to make something.

Marshall Haas:

So I started just keeping a log of little annoyances I had in my life that could maybe be a physical product. And the first one that I settled on was the idea of making your bed and how it could be improved. So ultimately designed, if you break down what goes into making your bed, if you sleep with a top sheet is tucking the top sheet, or realigning your blanket and your sheet, that's kind of the core of making your bed. And if you optimize that and cut the top sheet and duvet to be the same size, and then we added a snap system along the two sides, every like 18 inches or so. They kind of were free-flowing, but still stayed aligned in your sleep.

Marshall Haas:

So that was kind of the idea, prototyped it with the seamstress. I planned to do a Kickstarter for it. And so, this is all while I'm full-time in this [inaudible 00:06:48] thing, it's like a side project. I think I originally was trying to get my mom and sister just to run with the idea and didn't really take it, and I just was still super curious about doing physical product.

Marshall Haas:

Starts with one. The story goes, basically, I met my co-founder, Jon Wheatley, co-founder Need/Want via Twitter. So he was this other software guy way more successful in software. He had a startup that went through YC, they were a social network, raised a bunch of money, he did the whole Silicon Valley thing. But he's like the only guy that I saw that was in software and also dabbling with physical products on the side. So Jon had just started Peel, which is a super-thin iPhone case brand. And I was on the verge of getting ready to launch this Kickstarter, reached out, hit it off right away, had a ton in common and pitched him on joining me to do the Smart Bedding, that business and flew out.

Marshall Haas:

I was in Canada at that time for the LAS company and flow to San Francisco to come hang out with Jon, first time we ever officially met in person, stayed with him for like a week. We were filming a Kickstarter video. And during that week, we had a list of ideas, all on physical products that we had come up with together. They kind of evolved, but it was like, "Man, there's a lot here. Maybe we should do a ton of stuff, do these altogether and maybe slap a name on it and make it this studio in a way, or just give a name to all these projects we do together." So that's where Need/Want came in. So Jon had the domain, needwant.com, and thought that was perfect for something just kind of wide and broad. And it's like, "Hey, we've got this list of ideas, let's start attacking them one by one." And yeah, that was kind of the Genesis of the company.

Daniel Scrivner:

I remember I think one of the products was also like an Emoji Mask, maybe one was pool floaties, all of this comical fun. Maybe the bedding was the most serious purchase, but I just remember it felt like a really fun, interesting experiment to see what would take off and maybe what wouldn't.

Marshall Haas:

So I mean, I could go through them real quick. There was Smart Bedding, which eventually rebranded to Primary Goods. We kind of expanded more home goods, did a mattress and other stuff in that. Mod Notebooks was the second one that we had an idea for. And that was essentially a paper notebook, similar to like a Moleskine quality, thick paper, all that, but in the back cover, hidden in was a prepaid shipping label that then when you finish your notes, you could put it in that envelope, ship it off, and it would go to a scanning center, and we would digitize all of your notes for you. And then we had this companion app that would sync with Evernote, and Dropbox, and all that. That was our one that kind of bridged physical and digital.

Marshall Haas:

And then yeah, Emoji Masks was like a really fast Halloween side project to everything that had like a little viral hit for 30 days and then fizzled out, pool floaties that I remember, but a lot of different stuff that we threw against the wall. And then we eventually acquired Peel from Jon, made sense to use company resources and grow that one. But yeah, it was these startup's studio in a way but not trying to raise a ton of money for everything. For a long time, everything was run by the same core team, had all these three or four different brands going at one point. And it was a lot of fun just like scratching our entrepreneur ADD itch at scale, and that's what it was back then anyway.

Daniel Scrivner:

I wanted to bring that up in part because I feel like that's the dream of every entrepreneur, is you have all of these ideas and you really have to fight this urge to ship them all or sometimes you wanted to ship them all, I guess, see what happens. And so, I'm curious when you reflect back on that, what were some of the biggest lessons you learned? I mean, and they could be things like, "Hey, you can see a great blip of traction, doesn't mean it's going to be there 30 days later." In the case of Emoji Masks. But I'm just curious when you think back, what are the lessons that shine through?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah. I mean to that one, I think it's like pattern recognition looking back. So a lot of the lessons learned was one of the big ones is just, we know the margins [inaudible 00:10:58] these different businesses that we've done. And the pattern of the ones that have done really well, and grown, and have become real businesses, one had good gross margins, that was the problem with the bedding company, is we didn't have the best margins on that one. So it was really tough on cash flow and every dollar that you bring in, half of it is going to reorder, just to keep a baseline revenue, forget if you want to grow and step up to the next level of revenue.

Marshall Haas:

And then yeah, attacking problems that are going to be around. I mean, we knew Emoji Masks, we had the right expectations going into it that it was just going to be this side project. It's not like a problem, it's a novelty thing that was just for fun. What are problems that are going to be lasting? That's been the theme.

Marshall Haas:

The Peel is our biggest one that came out of that era and people still want a cell phone case that protects that isn't hideous. That was kind of the genesis, was just like a case that doesn't make your sexy new iPhone look disgusting like the opposite at times like OtterBox, you get this amazing new iPhone and you slap this thick piece of plastic on it. It looks nothing like what Apple intended and people still care about aesthetic today. Long-term, I think about that business and wonder what the iPhone is going to look like in 10 years, it's probably going to be in your ear and not need a case, but whatever, we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Daniel Scrivner:

You have a lot of years left; I think on that one.

Marshall Haas:

For sure.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, it's so funny. I mean, I typically will buy the Apple cases. It's like once a year, I maybe take the case out for whatever reason. And it's almost like you discover a new phone underneath the case where you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is so thin." You forget how beautiful it is because, yeah, you're just surrounded in a case. So with Peel, that business has been going on now what, 10 years, something like that?

Marshall Haas:

Eight or nine, maybe at nine, almost at nine, yeah.

Daniel Scrivner:

I mean, it's been fascinating. I think obviously when you zoom out, I think businesses that create accessories in the Apple ecosystem, I mean, one, it's a huge market, so I'm not surprised you guys have been able to stay. What lessons have you learned over that time? Because obviously, looking forward, you think maybe that business is smaller or maybe it doesn't exist, so I guess I'd be curious, what has it been like running it? And we can dive into some more questions after. Anything that's novel or interesting that you've learned running that business because I've never had exposure to a business in the Apple ecosystem. So I'm guessing there's probably something interesting there, maybe something interesting about just like how persistent it is, this market for cases.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah. I mean, so a typical e-commerce business, every year, Q4, from around Black Friday to Christmas, that's everyone's busy season, people are buying gifts, that's why, money's flowing, that's usually when you make your profits for the year, for the most part. I know a lot of friends, they'll basically break-even up until that point and then they crush it then. For Peel, we've got this great boost to that, which is the Apple Keynote. Whenever that is, sometimes it's September, sometimes it's October, we cross our fingers that it's September every year because it kicks off our busy season. So we get this extra one to two months busy season. We kept our breath about now we're at late October, get reorders going to prep for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Christmas rush.

Marshall Haas:

So yeah, running that business and being tied very much one-to-one to how well the iPhone does that year is kind of how the business works. And it's just fun from the inside. We try to match. So we have 10 colors for the iPhone 13 and we do try to match at least the most popular ones one-to-one like a black case, there's black phone if he bought that one, it looks just like your iPhone or going to come out this year in a blue color that'll match that.

Marshall Haas:

But looking at the sales data in the year, you can tell, I don't think Apple releases that stuff, what color does well, all that, but we kind of just have that data which is just fun. I'm an Apple fan, so I have that company still and it's just cool to see what's popular in their product lineup. And can kind of tell if the iPhone's doing well and well received one year to the next before Apple releases those numbers. I feel like it's insider trading if I go buy their stock off of some of this information I have, but that part's been fun just as an Apple fan since the very beginning when I got my first laptop when I was a little kid.

Daniel Scrivner:

You've had a few physical product businesses, you've had this one that's now been going eight or nine years, what have you learned, good and bad, about what it takes today to manufacture a physical product, get it built somewhere, have it here, be able to sell it, fulfill it and all the challenges involved there?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah. Luckily, now, we're kind of a well-oiled machine as far as the production. We have a few factories but with our main factory, and we have a rep in China, a third-party representative of our interests that will go to the factory and check up on quality control, things like that. But yeah, I mean, getting something up and going like that, we just had to navigate all those things. And there was some times where we took a leap of faith with doing a production run. We've had some bad experiences with Smart Bedding and Kickstarter and having bad factories.

Marshall Haas:

But I've gone to China quite a few times. And the first time we went and we toured the factory, I'm just thinking we're going to go in, we're going to see how it's done, and then we're going to try to renegotiate. Here I am thinking that our stuff is made. We work with them closely, but I don't have every detail of how the factory runs, it's a partner of ours. And going in, I'm just thinking they're just like pulling a lever on a machine, everything's going to be automated down a conveyor belt. And I was really shocked to see how much it's still done by hand, even at a big scale. I mean, we're ordering, we do hundreds of thousands, it's still, yes, there's a machine that stamps out [inaudible 00:16:40] case, after that, it's a lot of manual stuff.

Marshall Haas:

So I mean, to give you a quick overview, it comes off the machine and it's two pieces coming together, and there's a seam. Someone by hand with a sharp knife, and they look like craftsmen, just like shaving off the excess plastic, goes down the line, they put it over a flame to get off any of the excess, goes to another area, one out of so many, they test fit just to make sure that batch is correct and there's no weird issue. I think they're brushed off of any of this excess plastic. Step one, machine, everything else is done by humans, so kind of blew my mind.

Marshall Haas:

I think as Westerners, we have this view of China and sometimes not in great light, but I'm kind of the advocate, and I tell everyone that'll listen to me like, "There's a bunch of craftsmen over in China. It's impressive. It's just plentiful. Everyone's really great and more is done by hand than you'd actually think."

Daniel Scrivner:

That's fascinating, just the experience of being involved in hardware businesses. The other businesses you have, we're going to talk about Shepherd in a second, and of Haas, the one that you're in the process of booting up now. One of those obviously is in real estate, definitely has some physical things involved. The other is, I don't know, it doesn't have too much physical in the nature of what you're producing. So I'm curious, this experience, has it shaped or set a bar for you in terms of, one, I'm just never going to do another physical goods business, two, if I do, it has to look like this, or have this scale, or have these margins, how do you think about what you would do differently or what would make that interesting in the future?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, I do have some rules I've set up if I were to do another e-commerce brand or nice to have stuff, and then there's other check marks that are like, look, it's got to be this, some of that falls in margins which I touched on. And Shepherds is an agency which we don't have an office or anything, it's all just services. I've gotten to see pros and cons with different types of businesses. Sexy as e-commerce has become, there's definitely a lot of negatives with it. If you screw something up, I know in software, you can change a line of code and fix for one or a billion users, and with a physical item, better not do that because they're in customer hands and that's kind of catastrophic. You can, of course, iterate on the next one, just hopefully the mistake was nothing too big. I'm sorry, I'm getting off-topic. What was the first part of the question though?

Daniel Scrivner:

No, just any specifics. If I put myself in your shoes and I've had experience with digital businesses that are in software, which just look and feel very different. I mean, as an example, I have a friend also named Daniel who owns a business making accessories for dogs called Woof, and he's an incredible industrial designer. We have conversations all the time where he's just like, "I can't believe that I made this decision to work in physical goods because everything takes six months to nine months, it's just so slow."

Daniel Scrivner:

And so, I guess the question is just has being involved in a physical goods business or businesses just either made it, this isn't a good business, I'm not going to do it, or just shaped a certain set of rules around what has to be true for you to be interested in the future? And mostly what I'm trying to get at there is for someone listening who's maybe thinking about, should I do this physical thing or something that's in software or digital, how would you encourage them to think through that decision?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah. So to answer the first part of that, I would do another business, it hasn't scared me away or anything doing it for so long. Some of the things that I would encourage someone if they are interested in doing e-commerce business, we already touched on some of this already, but if you're going to do this as a business, it's not just like a side project like the Emoji Mask thing, you can test product and everything, but you know of the problem you're going after is something that is going to be around or it's novel. Are you doing something that it's not a novelty? And that's just like a high-level thing, but more specifically, the margin stuff. I mean, I think that's the thing that people get trapped and messed up in.

Marshall Haas:

And it usually comes down to, they're just not charging enough for the product. They're like, "Oh, I've got this idea for alarm clock of some sort, and it's going to cost me $25, and I'm going to sell it for 50." Please don't, up your price or find a better... Usually, the easiest thing is just price higher and then justify why you're pricing higher. There's only so much leeway in manufacturing. I mean, you may get that down to 18 or something, but I mean, as far as gross margin goes, someone even tweeted like a chart a while back, but it's like 50% to 60%, it's baseline, like, okay, 70-80, great, you've got solid business, you should have good cash flow with that. The dials are aligned to make it work.

Marshall Haas:

And then if you're at like 90% gross margin, cool, you've got like a cash machine. And I think publicly like a company like Gillette with razors, they're like a 90% gross margin business, that's like the goalpost of where you'd want to be. Any other reason for that is people start from like, "Oh, that's fair, charging double for something." Sure. If it's just you selling it to me here now, but as you grow, you just don't know what you don't know until you get there. It's Facebook advertising costs, Google costs, however you're acquiring customers. Maybe you're not doing direct and you're selling into retail, that's their own calculation, customer support, credit card processing fees, all software involved to run your business, people, customer support, employees, fulfillment costs, just mistakes, margin of error.

Marshall Haas:

As far as I think today's age, offering good customer support, yeah, you got to answer your emails in a timely manner, but a lot of times it's just like eating it. You ship them the wrong item, don't make them ship it back and fulfill the other one. And yeah, you're going to have a percentage of those that with out of 100 orders, you may get three or four. It's all the above costs and then leftover to have profit to do it again tomorrow. I could not stress enough healthy margins for someone getting into e-commerce.

Daniel Scrivner:

No one else can see but I can see by the look on your face, that one hits home. It's also the benefit as well too of studying other businesses. Remember growing up, you have no idea what the input costs of something you buy on the shelf is, but then as you study that example you gave Gillette, I mean, sometimes you're just like, "Wow." It is absolutely incredible the amount of margin that's built into stuff every single day that you buy, that's what it costs and ultimately at the end of the day, no consumer knows the input costs, they don't know the markup, they just know what you're giving them and if they feel like it's valuable or not.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah.

Daniel Scrivner:

It's good advice. I thought it would be interesting to change paces. When we talk about Shepherd, walking people through the process of how you went from an idea, or at least knowing a problem, and having a rough idea of how you might solve that, marketing that business and scaling it. And I know the origin story was really interesting of having spent a bunch of time traveling, meeting these incredible people, recruiting people for some of your businesses and thinking that that might be useful for other people. Would you share a little bit of the origin story of Shepherd and even in the earliest incarnation of like, what made you interested or think that there was something there?

Marshall Haas:

So for those that don't know, Shepherd is a headhunter agency focused on overseas talent. And so right now, specifically, we're targeting the Philippines, is where we source majority of our candidates for US companies, and that may expand to some other country soon. And so our model is we get paid when we place someone in a client's company, and that's the only time we get paid. So it's a great sales proposition for us, it makes an easy sale, it's no risk upfront for someone that hires us, and then if we find them someone that they like and they do want to hire, that's when we ply our fee, which is essentially a percentage of their presumed first-year salary, which is how most headhunter agencies work.

Marshall Haas:

The genesis of that, I mean, rewinding 10 years, I won't go through 10 years' worth, but just my very, very first business when I was in architecture and started dabbling, I would call it, in business, I was offering architectural rendering services to other firms on the side and it's like the sign out front of a new development, it's like what it's going to look like, whether it's a watercolor painting or it's a 3D rendering. I was offering that to other firms and then I partnered with an agency actually in the Philippines, and just so happened to be in the Philippines to do the work, and I got the difference, and that was kind of my first business, quite small, but it opened my eyes to what things can cost overseas versus here and all of that.

Marshall Haas:

We hired some customer support people, our bookkeeper became like a financial modeler. She's based in the Philippines. And then Joemer, who I started Shepherd with, he was working with us. He was kind of doing operations, a little bit of everything. He was kind of like the... I don't know if floater is even seen as a negative term, but he was kind of like a floater in the company, he would help a little here, a little there, a really good generalist inside the company. We just became friends, talking on Slack every day, real, funny friendly guy, and we'd talk every single day just about everything.

Marshall Haas:

And so when my wife and I were traveling in 2019, we're kind of doing the nomad thing for a bit. And I wanted to come hang out with him and Venice, is our other employee there. So we went out to Philippines, and we were there for 10 days, and it's great, finally got to meet these people I've been working with for years. Joemer, I know has always had the itch to maybe start something at some point. And we were just hanging out as friends and he was pitching me on different ideas he had. And one was, it wasn't so much headhunter, it was more so he needed a podcast editor or something. We would hire them and then just up the hours. So like we would still manage that person but charge you double or whatever.

Marshall Haas:

That was kind of the genesis. And honestly, I would say from the experience of running other businesses, we ran with that idea and tweaked it to be the model that it is today where we do the work upfront and then we hand off that relationship. They join your team, it's great for both sides. We don't have to then manage that person; I know the problems that come with that. Joemer and I, decided to do that together, figured out what it looked like, a rough business model, maybe getting a little ahead, before really figuring it out, I had a friend that was interested in possibly hiring a customer support team overseas and he asked me some questions. And this is conversation, this figuring out what Joemer, this is over the span of a couple of months. This isn't the week I was in the Philippines.

Marshall Haas:

I mean, to me, that's how ideas, they noodle around, and ruminate, and modify them and stuff. But yeah, I had this friend, and they wanted to hire a team overseas and basically told me I had helped them out. We did one hire for them, saw how that would work for us, how much time would this take, trying to figure out what could we charge for something like this? Basically, just first customer test run thing, seeing what our costs and time would be like on it. And so, we did that and then it was like, "Okay, I think this could work." Figured out a pricing model, built out the website as you see it today, just kind of did one-pager.

Marshall Haas:

supportshephered.com is basically what we launched with, we've added a few more testimonials since we've launched, but the homepage was what it was, same headline, same all that. And I just think when we launched, basically tweeted it out, and then emailed a bunch of small business owner, acquaintances and friends of mine thought they could utilize it, and that was kind of the launch of the company. And I think the pitch has really resonated with a lot of people. It's hard to find great people even in the States right now. We've got friends that need an in-person hire and they just can't find someone. So I think the stars aligned as far as the state of the world right now, and with remote work taking off, yeah, it's been really fun. We're like 18-20 months into the thing, but it's growing like a weed, it's been really awesome. I'm excited about that one.

Daniel Scrivner:

It's been incredible to see that scale and just for anyone listening, just to share. When I was a CEO of Flow, we hired onto our support team from Shepard and just had an incredible experience. And some of the things I think that I learned is, I feel like with the push to decentralization, the goal there in my mind is that talent is now global, and you shouldn't have any preconceptions around, I don't know, hiring someone in this country versus that country and you're truly just looking for someone incredible. And you have those base criteria, but I think even today, there's currency arbitrage, you may get your revenue in US dollars, you may pay out expenses in Canadian dollars or something else that already exists. And this feels like another interesting opportunity to, one, just truly hire the best people, and then be able to compete around the world to find the best talent for the best price. Is that how you think about it? And when someone comes to you and is like, "Help me understand this," what's the pitch or the background that you share there?

Marshall Haas:

I think you nailed it, people are people, whether they're Filipino or Eastern European, wherever they are Canadian, American, whatever, people are people, the talents there, they're happy to work for you. And I think what a lot of people have found out once they've first hires outside of their home country is like, we can have the same water cooler conversations in Slack or whatever. A lot of times you're watching the same TV shows, you're seeing the same movies. We're in a global world now, and so, I think that cultural hesitation quickly goes away.

Marshall Haas:

Sure, we got a ton of flack from people who are just like thought we're... they took our jobs kind of stuff. And for those people, it's like, sure, totally say it was like, yeah, that's why people are hiring overseas, there's some arbitrage there, but there's also the side of like, you want to open yourself up to a world of talent, not who can you hire in your city. In tech, we've all gotten comfortable with this idea of, well, of course, you're not going to just look in San Francisco, you're going to now look in the States, this is just the next phase of that. You're going to looking at Europe, you're going to look in Asia, you're going to look everywhere.

Marshall Haas:

And then for the talent side, I think the same exists for you as well. The ultimate luxury today is, to have a remote position, whether you're a business owner or you have a job, is to have something that's remote, opens up a world of possibilities, one of just being with your kids outside the door of my office, not having an hour commute, all that, but it's the world of opportunity as well. So you can work for a tech company you look up to that's based in Silicon Valley and live in Boise, Idaho, or live in Asia, or wherever it is. That's awesome to me and I think not enough people talk about that side of it as well. I think everyone's like, "Ooh, it's scary and we're all going to get squeezed on salaries." But it's like, look, I mean, as much as the opportunity is there to play with the arbitrage side of salaries, it's to open up to a world of new opportunities for those that are job seekers. So that's my opinion anyway, on how this all works.

Daniel Scrivner:

No, I think that's spot on. I mean, it's very similar to how I feel. It makes me think back to early on in the conversation, you talked about 4-Hour Work Week and this notion of working on your machine, which is something for people listening that are familiar with Ray Dalio. In principles, he talks about a business as a machine, you want to look down on it, you want to approach it that way. I guess I'm curious to explore that for a second. And take something like Shepherd, and you have this initial phase where you're coming up with the idea, you're solidifying the idea, you launch it. Once you see that something sticks and you're like, "Okay, there's something here." What starts turning in your mind, in terms of how to think about that, and scale it, or tighten it up? I mean, do you focus on discipline? Do you focus on process? Is it structure? What are some of the things you think about there?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, I can give some recent examples of what I would categorize as tweaking the machine, specifically with Shepherd, it's the most fresh for me. So we launched, like I mentioned, the pricing models, you don't really pay until the end. It's an easy sell, but also means you can get a ton of people that are like, "Yeah, sounds great, sign me up." You start doing a ton of work and then end up being tire kickers. So I had a lot of that initially, and the fix for that was charging a $500 project deposit. It's still fully refundable. It's just that, just get in the game, get out your credit card, you're serious, it's still the same sales pitch applies, just there's a little bit of friction where it's like, "Hey, I've weeded out the tire kickers." That solved a lot of time-consuming zero-profit type customers or potential customers.

Marshall Haas:

And then it was things around billing as well. Again, okay, we found someone great, they want to hire them, basically invoices due upon the hiring. It's like we want to commit to this person, whether they're starting next week, invoices due. It's like every agency I'm sure runs into this. This is my first agency-type that I've run into and I've talked to others and they're like, "Oh yeah, billing is like the worst, you have someone full-time basically chasing people." And I realized, well, with that project deposit, we can automate it all via the contract signing. We're now like a SaaS product that has a free trial, that requires a credit card. We have a credit card on file and we just built it into the project contract that we're going to charge your card, the amount and we will send an email notifying it, but that change again was like a game-changer for internal efficiency.

Marshall Haas:

So it's like little things like that, where it's like, you may have this thing you're running, you're like, "Oh, this part of the business is so annoying, I hate it." You can problem-solve, and a lot of times, you can find solutions that remove the issue, or make it faster, or whatever. I love that side of business. The day-to-day running of businesses, I think I'm decent at, but it's not like my favorite thing. I love the parachuting, let's see how they land, this looks a little rusty over here, maybe we could optimize that. That's my favorite part. That's kind of how I think about the "machine side of it".

Daniel Scrivner:

So the last piece I'd love to explore is of Haas, which I know is this new concept you have, I think you're building two cabins in Texas, which is super fun and it's really different than what you've done previously. What was the genesis there? Maybe it was some of that love of architecture with some of the genesis of that project.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah. That's one where I know that I could probably have a better return on investment somewhere else, most likely, but it's a good matrix for me and my wife who's an interior designer, of pretty good return or expected return plus interest. And it's going to be a benefit for us. I mean, we're going to use it part-time for ourselves, of course. Yeah, I mean that business has basically... I started going to this area, it's actually an Oklahoma. I live in Texas, but there's this area about three hours away called Broken Bow, and growing up in Texas, I've thought everything was flat here, for the next eight hours. And found this area three years ago, that has super tall pine trees. Honestly, parts of it feels similar to British Columbia, which is where are you based, right?

Daniel Scrivner:

No, Boulder. But very similar, tons of trees everywhere, tree town.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, which again, to me, it was just mind-blowing, being three hours away from that and we would go up there often and started looking into cabins, what it costs to build one up there, what people can charge per night. And when we started seeing or paying it's like, huh, back in the napkin, I think this could actually be pretty good. About five years ago, we bought the building that our office used to be in. It's like a boutique downtown building in St. Louis where we used to be based. And there's 14 residential units in there and I think nine offices. And so, we turned the 14 into a boutique hotel, run Airbnb, Vrbo, all those.

Marshall Haas:

I saw what business model looks like, doing the short-term rental thing at scale. So it's a little bit different for us where it's one big cabin, not consolidated, a bunch of stuff on the same property or anything. But that's one where something later in my career where we have the capital to do something, it's our pet project. If I was looking at an investor in the business of Marshall Haas, he'll be like, "Hey, this is not the best ROI. But it's my business, so get to do what I want there." So definitely a fun thing that I have this bad habit of turning hobbies into businesses and that's exactly what happened there.

Daniel Scrivner:

It isn't a bad thing, I mean, it seems like it takes advantage of your background both in architecture, as well as business. Obviously, you get to work on a project with your wife, which is an amazing opportunity. Where are you at with that now? Any idea of when that's expected to launch open?

Marshall Haas:

So we're in the construction on the first cabin, super slow with COVID and everything. Just getting ground broken, which felt like a giant hurdle, and we're waiting for framing to start probably next week. So we're probably six months away from completion on the first one.

Daniel Scrivner:

Back working in the physical world.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah. And all the limitations that come with it, exactly.

Daniel Scrivner:

Especially with buildings. So I thought it would be fun to close out by just reflecting a little bit on something that you brought up earlier, I know you're a massive fan of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger but I know you have a sweet spot for Charlie Munger. What do you think you've taken away from that that has shaped how you think about business or has even shaped how you run your businesses?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, you see guys like that and you think to run this massive... Create a billion dollars of value, those guys are super wise. But what I've realized is, there's core, really simple principles that are like, everyone already knows these things, sell something for more than you make it for. Core principles still apply and to just not over-complicate things, I think is like the biggest thing.

Marshall Haas:

One of my favorite things is looking at a business and it's just like, "Look, these are all these things that you do that don't matter." You can test though it doesn't matter. There's all this inefficiency in the smallest of businesses to the biggest ones. And to me, that just points to, to make a dollar is fairly simple. We just add all this crap along and it has to look this way and all of these different things. For me, it's just back to basics and as you go along, we've added a lot of complexity to our businesses and it's good to look at everything and what can we cut, what can we be more efficient on? The basics matter.

Marshall Haas:

I mean, also those guys, family life, everything outside of everything we've talked about, you can't be really well-rounded in those things. You want to exercise, you want to have a long life and be healthy, and you think clear, and you can just be a better operator, all these things, eat your vegetables. The older I've gotten, the more I'm just kind of like, "Yeah, I mean, all the things that everyone's told you all along from the start are what matter." Being a good person, you come across sleazy people in business and nobody ever lasts, true they probably got ahead for a couple of years, but eventually, it caught up to them. I look at that or through the lens of like, well, it's back to basics, just be a good person and operate with some integrity and you can be around long enough to see some success for yourself.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, I love it. And you're playing a long-term different game than short-term optimization.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah.

Daniel Scrivner:

Two last closing questions. One, if you could go back in time and whisper something in your ear, advice or words of wisdom, back when you were launching out on this journey to found Need/Want and start then launching these businesses, is there anything you would go back and tell yourself or remind yourself?

Marshall Haas:

To be honest, I don't think I would change anything. My first part of it, if I could whisper to myself, "Chill out, it'll all work out." And then I started thinking through it's like, I think that early angst and anxiety I had of the chip on your shoulder, I think a lot of people have when they first start out, wanting to prove yourself, all that was good for the period of time that I was in, and being paranoid of what's going to destroy our business. I think that was probably the right mindset for the place we were at in my career and I didn't know what I didn't know and so I was just frazzled. I don't think I would change that. I think certain things are appropriate for different times, and I put that in there. Looking back, I should have chilled out or I wish I enjoyed it a little bit more, but I could argue both sides to it and I think it was useful back then.

Daniel Scrivner:

I think that's great advice. I think sometimes you need to go through those things to become a better version of yourself, too.

Marshall Haas:

Exactly.

Daniel Scrivner:

It's all a journey. The last question, for someone, listening, that's been thinking about launching a business for a while, is back where you were when you first started your journey, any advice you would give them?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, I mean, obviously it depends on what they're trying to start. Not to repeat myself again, but let me repeat myself again, which is, attack problems that you think are going to be around long enough. One thing I think that really helped me early on is, the things that worked out, were problems that I had, whether they were little annoyances like John and I both hated ruining the aesthetic of your phone. We didn't have to do a focus group, we didn't have to workshop anything, we just knew. You skipped all that to figure that out, it was just innate. Go after things that are close to you. I think it's great to be part of growing markets and everything, but if you can find that and do something that you're close to, that you have your own problem and can solve for it, I think that's important.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, I think that's great advice. It reminds me of something you said when we were getting ready to record, which is, solve simple problems, build profitable businesses, which I liked. For anyone that wants to find you online, follow you on Twitter, where can people go to find you and follow you?

Marshall Haas:

I'm probably most active on Twitter out of everything. So my handle's just Marshall, M-A-R-S-H-A-L, only one L on Twitter. And my real name is spelled with two, but that's what I could get, so I took it. And then you can find all of our businesses at needwant.com, just N-E-E-D-W-A-N-T.com. And then I do a bit of writing, blogging, every few months or maybe once a year these days, but all that I've probably got 30 plus blog posts on there now, just at my full name, marshallhaas.com.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, and there's some great stuff there. Well, thank you so much for the time, Marshall. I really appreciate it, it's been awesome to chat with you.

Marshall Haas:

Cool, thanks, man.

‍

20 Minute Playbook: Marshall Haas of Peel and Shepherd

‍

Daniel Scrivner:

(silence) [00:42:56] Marshall Haas, thank you so much for coming on the show, it's wonderful to have you.

Marshall Haas:

Thanks for having me.

Daniel Scrivner:

So this should be a lot of fun. We try to keep these conversations under 20 minutes. So they're a little bit faster paced and we'll ask you the same 10 questions we ask every guest. Are you ready?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, let's do it.

Daniel Scrivner:

Okay, the first question is, what have you been excited or fascinated about recently, it can be anything?

Marshall Haas:

The cabin my wife and I have been building has been super fascinating. It's like the culmination of, I just want to be an architect, my wife's an interior designer, just love design as a whole and nature. So it's been fun to dive in and just get the blank slate, get to design something from scratch. Definitely been the most excited for that and then as we were just talking about before the recording is it's going to be a really fun excuse to invite people I admire out, just bring five to 10 cool people out and do a makeshift little event of interesting people. It's going to be my excuse to do that. So yeah, super excited about that.

Daniel Scrivner:

On that project, were you the architect, and how deep in the weeds did you get on architecture and design details?

Marshall Haas:

So we designed it from elevation floor plan side, but then hired an architect to button it all up. There's probably a few little things that we screwed up. And then, of course, to build out the remainder, we did the first two pages, floor plan elevation, and they did the rest of it, definitely looped in some professionals.

Daniel Scrivner:

You did the fun stuff and they make sure it doesn't fall down, which is a good reason to hire an architect. When you think about yourself, what do you think are your superpowers and how have you harnessed those strengths or how do you harness those strengths?

Marshall Haas:

I think I'm pretty good at bouncing between things and context switching, whether that's from just doing a lot, with practice, I've gotten good at it. All entrepreneurs at some level have ADD as far as shiny object syndrome and want to start all these different ideas. I think I've just leaned into that and figured out a way to make that work for me, build a model where I get to do that and really try to figure out how to make that work for me. In the early days, before we're figuring out, I think I just had a knack for jumping between very different problems and things.

Daniel Scrivner:

Just given that obviously, you talked about that shiny object syndrome, are there barriers, constraints you put on yourself to try to limit that desire to just go and do everything?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, today there is. I was way less disciplined five, 10 years ago. I mean, I'm still an optimist, but I think I was just like even more so, where now I'm way more objective about things. Do I want to even take the time and start a new business? And now I got this thing that needs to be managed.

Marshall Haas:

Honestly, a good example of that, very recently, I killed something off. I was building out what we would do with profits, I was starting to buy rental properties, single-family rental homes for long-term tenants, and had four properties and one fourplex and percentage return was awesome on paper. I was patting myself on the back. And I track my time still pretty religiously just to see where time's going. And when I finally looked at it, I realized that the time I'm putting into this thing, forget what the return is, percentage of what I invested is, it just wasn't worth it. That's a part of wanting to be more disciplined. Now, I've got a family and I've been selling them all off, getting out of it completely, putting money elsewhere that I don't have to mess with, less return, but it's a worthy trade-off.

Daniel Scrivner:

Super interesting, that's a great example. On the flip side of the coin, what do you feel like you've struggled with and maybe it's that same thing, and how have you improved or worked around those things over time. But I think for you, if you reflect on your journey, what has felt like the biggest learning curve?

Marshall Haas:

I think delegating things. I think I've gotten pretty good at it recently, but it was something I was aware of. At least I had... just good enough enough to know I want to be good at it, but I was terrible for a very long time. I think the way I fixed it is I took a really conscious approach to it and started studying people that are really good at delegating things.

Marshall Haas:

And the other part of it is getting businesses to a point where there was enough profit to be able to hire people and plug them in. So it was at first realizing I shouldn't beat myself up because there wasn't enough money in the business to do that in the first place, realizing this is a means to an end, let's get it to this point, then I can plug in maybe a operations person or something and then you track it down far enough down the line, is bringing on a general manager or eventually, a CEO into something, I think is the ultimate get there. And we're plugged in general managers into all but one of the businesses. That's all happened very recently too, I've been pretty terrible at it up until recently. So yeah, that's been the key to be able to scale stuff, I think.

Daniel Scrivner:

I'm sure it's been exciting and probably also terrifying.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, here's the reins, yeah.

Daniel Scrivner:

When it comes to habits, routines, what habits have you experimented with over time that have had a positive impact on your life and performance? It can be anything, from meditation, working out, what have you experimented with, what's worked for you?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, I think just sticking to a regular routine as far as exercise, getting enough hours of sleep in the night, going to bed at a consistent time, waking up at a consistent time, and eating healthy, back-to-basics kind of stuff. By far is that had the biggest quality of life improvement and just feeling sharp in everything. And I didn't use to be disciplined when it came to that kind of stuff. Before I got married, I had an artist's schedule, sloppy bachelor schedule, however you want to frame it, but just dive into a problem, 12 hours later, I realize I'm moments from death, I need to eat something. Stay up all night, sleep in all day, take 24 hours off, see a friend, then go back, all that.

Marshall Haas:

I was terrible at consistency and schedule and then meeting my now wife and being married, that puts some healthy schedule in place. She's quite healthy as well, as far as food goes, so that's been good for me. And then, becoming a dad as well. You're up at 6:00, 7:00 AM every single day. And I've grown to enjoy that, that's consistency there in all aspects. I just feel sharp for lack of a better word.

Daniel Scrivner:

We talked about it a little bit, but on the health side, what is your approach to diet, exercise, sleep, and how has that evolved over time? Is there anything novel there or anything you do religiously?

Marshall Haas:

I used to be one of these people that track a lot of different stuff. I was in the quantified self-movement or whatever. And I didn't really see a ton of benefit. I realized one day, I was like, "I don't know, I'm not changing my habits when it comes to sleep knowing that I got seven and a half versus eight." I try to just look back and realize like, "Okay, yeah, I got enough sleep, good job and I feel good today."

Marshall Haas:

I don't necessarily think I have a good answer for that. I think the one weird thing that I do is that I track my time. None of our businesses, we bill by the hour or anything like that, but just for me, nobody else in the company we require to do this, I just track my time. I've got a little Harvest app going, I just tag what I'm in, am I working on Peel? Am I doing personal finance stuff, or opening snail mail, and stuff? And miscellaneous, am I working on the cabin? Just kind of those buckets and then I'll look back, and one, how much time do I work in a week, in a month, in a year, and then how much time am I putting in each of these businesses? And honestly, that was the reason why I realized I should sell off those rental properties. So that's the one thing that I do look back on and I do adjust my life based on what I see.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, super interesting. On the idea side, what books and podcasts have had a striking impact on the way you think? And we talked before about some of those early inspirations, like 4-Hour Workweek, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, is there anything more recent, that's really shaped the way you think?

Marshall Haas:

I think the only podcasts that I really listen to these days, at least consistently, I'll see an interview pop up of someone I like, and I'll listen to that or whatever, but is My First Million Podcast from the guys at The Hustle, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri, I think [inaudible 00:51:03] name, which, for those who haven't listened to it, it's just the two of them, for the most part, riffing on different ideas that they have and then other businesses that they see that pop up through their investing, or just being close to Silicon Valley, talking through what they would do. And I get so many ideas for my own stuff, for new businesses from that. It's weird how hearing other people talk about ideas gives you your own ideas, weird how that... you start forming your own stuff as you're listening to someone talk about a totally different idea, that's been fun to flex that idea muscle on a regular basis and just hear how two others think through a lot of different problems and ideas.

Daniel Scrivner:

You're not the first person I know who really likes that podcast, it's a fan favorite. On the tool side, we talked a little bit about Harvest, what other tools do you use? And these can be anything, I think things, physical, digital that you use to manage your work tasks time.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah. So Peel, we use Basecamp, Shepherd, we use Airtable and Slack, Culture of One, Reseller, they want to use Slack, use Basecamp, whatever. I know our company tasks for Peels are in Basecamp. And then the Ludwig is the boutique hotel we touched on, they also use Basecamp. So all companies stuff are in those, all that lives there. But then I have like another layer for myself, everything I'm going to do for the day, as far as tasks go, whether they're for a certain business or my own personal tasks, pull it out of all those and I use Todoist just really simple task management app. And only I have access to it, my assistant doesn't have access to it. It's just my little area for everything. I'm pretty simple, I use live-in email calendar, iMessage people these days, Todoist has been a favorite of mine, personally.

Daniel Scrivner:

I love just the notion, the idea that you can run entire businesses on just basically two tools Basecamp and Slack, Airtable and Slack. There's obviously other things are involved but I mean, I feel like it speaks to the simplicity approach.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, dude, have you used Airtable? It's awesome.

Daniel Scrivner:

I am addicted to Airtable and I was so against trying it out and now I use it for everything and I pay enormous... Every single month that I see the invoice, I cringe. It's also probably the single most valuable tool that I use.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah. It's our database basically, customized database for all the candidates that we track for Shepherd to team time off and track. It's like can build so many different things out that I would want to use a developer to spin up our own custom thing. We can get it at 80% of the way there with the Airtable, it's awesome.

Daniel Scrivner:

I think it's very similar to why Notion has been so successful.

Marshall Haas:

Exactly.

Daniel Scrivner:

You've had these companies that have been able to build actually great products that you can use to build almost anything, which is extremely difficult to do. When you think about success, what is your definition of success? And that can be one for business, one for life, just a definition overall, how you think about that?

Marshall Haas:

There's the monetary game side of just money and all that, no denying, that's important to me. Building profitable businesses and building wealth is definitely a motivator for me. With that, it's with the asterisk of, I want to do that and still have a good family life. You look at guys like most recently, Elon Musk is who everyone is looking at. The guy has a terrible personal... I mean, maybe he's fulfilled, he's been through a lot of divorces, and he's at the office living there constantly. I don't want that level of success that it means that's the lifestyle I'll take. I'm a fraction to his whatever, that mix of those two if I have to now take away from being a good dad and a good husband, I don't want anymore if that's the trade-off.

Marshall Haas:

So those two going together well is definitely important to me. Today, I think I touched on this in our last conversation, which the ultimate luxury, I think for anyone today, at least for me, is having a remote position, whether you have a job or you have a business being able to do something remotely and having a little bit or full control of your time, that's everything to me.

Daniel Scrivner:

When you think back on your life, in the previous conversation we had, we talked about some of these things that you tried, that you didn't think would work out or that did work out for a while and then didn't, is there a favorite failure? And I think what we try to look for there is, something that didn't work out for whatever reason, but that taught you something valuable, propelled you in a better direction. How do you think about that? And is there something in your mind that sticks out?

Marshall Haas:

Yeah. I think the most painful experience gave me a laser focus on what I needed to know for future stuff. And that was the Smart Bedding fiasco with Kickstarter. I was spending an hour of the whole story, we basically did a Kickstarter campaign for an e-commerce product, raised money, used that money to then fund the production. The factory basically goes dark on us and we're in this horrible in-between position where our customers want product, they're mad at us, rightfully so and we want to do it right, and deliver, and have integrity, but we don't have the funds. And then once we figure that out and had the business going, the margins on that business were quite bad.

Marshall Haas:

Both of those really put a spotlight on what's important, of how you build a solid business, not betting a farm on any opportunity. There was a lot of little things that we shouldn't have done back then that I don't have time to get into, but that business as a whole, was very much one where sell something for $2, cost you a dollar to buy more inventory of that same thing, you just couldn't grow.

Marshall Haas:

With everything, and I've had the fortunate opportunity to see a lot of different businesses and be in a lot of different businesses, I've realized, "Oh, it's a lot easier over here to do this other thing if you set it up correctly." So yeah, I think I learned some pivotal lessons there around margin, solving long-term problems, and what does, and doesn't matter as well. There's so many things that we do in business, that you could not do it and it wouldn't affect anyone. You could stop doing it and nobody would complain as far, as your customers, they would get the same deliverables and nothing changes. And so, all those different things I rattled off there, to me, have been huge lessons that I've applied to everything since I've done.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. Super interesting. Last question, what are you most grateful for in this phase of your life?

Marshall Haas:

I think I touched on it, which is the balance. I'm super happy where I'm at financially, but with the balance of the family life and having time to my kids who are outside my office door, when I'm done with this, I get to go hang out with them for 30 minutes or however long before he goes takes a nap and dive back into some work, that balance there, and being able to see my family, and be a dad and be able to takeoff, if I need to, for his doctor's appointment or one day, his baseball game or whatever. I'm super, super grateful for, and I do not take for granted. I try to protect that at all costs.

Daniel Scrivner:

It's a beautiful way to end the interview. Thank you so much for the time, Marshall. This has been an incredible conversation.

Marshall Haas:

Yeah, thanks, man.

On Outlier Academy, Daniel Scrivner explores the tactics, routines, and habits of world-class performers working at the edge—in business, investing, entertainment, and more. In each episode, he decodes what they've mastered and what they've learned along the way. Start learning from the world’s best today.

Explore all episodes of Outlier Academy, be the first to hear about new episodes, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.

Daniel Scrivner and Mighty Publishing LLC own the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of the Outlier Academy podcast, with all rights reserved, including Daniel’s right of publicity.

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