All right, welcome to the Bebout Ready podcast. Today I have a special guest, Nathan Hirsch. We're going to talk about leadership. And Kia is an awesome guest to talk about this.
If you're looking to build your teams, if you're looking to grow your company, you know, a lot of people focus on actually getting clients. But what do you do when you actually get those clients? How do you fulfill upon them without working 120 hours a week? Well, Nathan has deep insights.
He has a great background of growing a few different businesses to well over a million dollars. I'll let him tell his story and I welcome Nathan to the podcast. Welcome. Yeah, thanks so much for having me out.
I'm excited to be here. Yeah, man. I'm glad we finally got this, sort this out. Absolutely.
It's funny. Growing up, my parents were both teachers and I kind of had this mentality that I was going to go to school, get a real job, work for 30 years, retire. I mean, that's what they did. And they're loving life right now.
So there's nothing wrong with that. But I knew at a young age that that wasn't for me. I had a job, a 40 hour week job since I was 15, 16. And I was good.
I mean, I learned a lot about sales and customer service and marketing and managing people. But I also learned how much I just hated working for other people. Every day I would just watch the clock and I couldn't wait to get home. So when I finally got to college, I kind of looked at it as a ticking clock.
I had four years to create a business or I was going to go into the real world and get a job and work it and pay bills and never be able to get out. So I started hustling and I started buying and selling people's textbooks. I would take my summer money that I'd made and buy people's books at the end of the semester, hold onto them over the summer, over the winter, sell them at the beginning of the semester when prices went back up. And that was my business.
And I created a little referral program. People would tell their people, and before I knew it, I had lines out the door of people trying to sell me their books to the point where I got a cease and desist letter from my college telling me to knock it off because I was stealing too much of the bookstore business. So that was my first glimpse into being an entrepreneur. And I mean, from there, I had to pivot.
My parents were teachers. I didn't want to get kicked out of school. So I sold some books on Amazon. And this was back in 2008.
No one really knew what Amazon was. It was kind of like this big bookstore that was just getting into other products. And I started experimenting with outdoor products and video games and computers and stuff that a college guy was really into. And I just failed over and over and over.
The only thing I could get to sell were these books. And it wasn't until I branched out in my comfort zone and down the baby product industry that my business really took off. So if you can imagine me as a 20 year old single college guy selling baby products on Amazon, that was me. And this business exploded.
I mean, it was the wild, wild west of Amazon. And my parents tell me that I should probably pay taxes, right? And I knew it then account. And the first question he asked me is, when are you going to hire your first person?
And I kind of shrugged him off. Like, why would I do that? That's my end of my pocket. I love this business.
I can do it seven days a week forever. And the accountant just laughed in my face. And he said, you're going to learn this lesson on your own. Well, sure enough, I first did this because then I could just get destroyed.
I'm working 20 hours a day. My social life plummets, my grades go down. And I finally get to the other side. And I think, man, I'm people.
So I posted a job on Facebook. I have known nothing about hiring. This guy in my business, a lot of classes, hey, I did interviews at your hire. He's up being an amazing hire.
He's hardworking. He's smart. He brings a lot to the table. He ends up being my business partner on my Amazon business.
He's co-owners are free up right now. His name is Connor Gillivan. So I hit the jackpot. And there I am as this 20 year old punk kid thinking, man, this hiring thing is easy.
You post a job on Facebook. Someone shows up. You make more money. You're like, I'm easier.
And I just proceed to make bad hire after bad hire after bad hire. I'm quickly realizing that college kids not very reliable and turning to the remote hiring world, the up works, the fibers. And I got pretty frustrated with how long it took me to post a job and get a lot of applicants and interview them. And that's when I had the idea to build my own platform free up.
So that's kind of how I went from a broke college kid to starting Amazon business to the idea for free up. Awesome. So this got into free up because not everybody. I mean, people are just talking about that.
What is free up? Yeah. So I tried to take everything that I liked about the other platforms and change everything that I didn't like. So we get thousands of applicants every week.
These are virtual systems freelancers, agencies from all over the world. We have debt them for skill attitude, communication, top 1% get on our platform. And then we make them available to our clients quickly, whenever they need them. You don't have to browse.
You put in a request. We send you one person by default. You can always say 73, 75, we're happy to do it. From there, you can interview them, hire them, negotiate rate, agree to fix price.
You can pass and provide us feedback. And we'll get you someone else based on that feedback. So it's a pretty fast and efficient process. And on the back end, we have 24, seven support in case you have even the smallest issue and a no turnover guarantee if someone quits, we cover replacement costs.
So that's really the concept of pre-veting the speed, the customer service, and the protection. Yeah. I have quite a bit of experience with the other platforms. And that is you get spammed like no other once you post a job on other platforms.
Let's talk about it because it's not just not virtual assistance, right? Because a lot of people think a lot of small business owners, that's the first thing that they heard. They maybe the Red, the 4-hour week, or they've listened to some groupers say, hey, you need a VA. But that's not like a remote staff member isn't always a VA, right?
Talk to us about that. Tell us the difference between who's on your platform. Yeah, I mean, we like to divide into three levels. You got basic, mid, and expert.
They have virtual assistance. They have years of experience because we're not a marketplace for UBS, but they're followers. They're there to follow your systems, your processes. Then we got the specialists, the graphic designers, the bookkeepers, the writers.
They're the doers. You're not teaching a graphic designer, how to be a graphic designer. But they're not consulting with you either. And those from the US or non-US, maybe in that $10 to $30, $10 to $35 an hour.
And then you got the experts, the 25, $30 and the high level freelancers, consultants, agencies, they're bringing their own strategy, their own expertise to the table. They can execute high level game plans. So what you have to decide as a business owner is, do you need a follower? Do you need a doer or do you need an expert?
And I only hire people from my own platform. For example, our customer service, our billing, is all done by the followers. We have the A's in the Philippines. We got on our platform.
That crushed it. I hired someone with years of bookkeeping experience, but he does it our way. Then we got the doers, the mid-level people. I have specialists who run by Instagram.
I have a graphic designer. I have a video editor. And there's a certain level of collaboration. But I'm not saying do this step one, do this step two.
He knows how to video at it. And then you got the high level experts that will use to run Facebook ads to do UI, UX developers, or they're bringing their own expertise and strategy to the table. Again, still collaboration. But I'm not telling them what to do.
So it just depends what you're looking for. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm super proud I'm getting chills talking about you. Because this is one of the messages that I drive home, is that as you need to, as a business owner, as you go up the scale of how big your business is, you need to take decision making power off yourself.
Because one of your finite resources as a business owner is your ability to make decisions. Like you can only make certain amount of decisions in a day. And at the end of the day, the decisions are driving your business forward. So I'm pumped that you broke it up with that and really providing that for the marketplace.
Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, I don't take the mentality. Like you need to hire this person right now. I mean, there's no right or wrong way.
You can hire a solo person. You can hire an agency. You can hire a follower or a doer for different things. Sometimes if someone needs an Amazon listing, they could do a specialist or an expert.
It just depends on where you're at in your business and exactly what you're looking for. So I like to provide options. And people can make decisions on what's best for their business. Yeah, I mean, I mean, a few months ago, I used the platform.
I needed somebody to list some products, do some stuff I didn't know on Amazon. I was like, OK, here you go. It was great. Like, hold it off.
No problem. So yeah. So talking about you're hiring. Like, how do you vet these people?
What can you give to the listeners so that they can improve their hiring, making you some ideas or how they can hire better? Yeah, I mean, the first thing is just the matter. Yeah, I'm hiring. No one has a 100% higher record, right?
That doesn't exist. You don't have it. I don't have it. But the people that get to that 80 to 95 have a lot more success in their business than the people that are stocked in the 30 to 40.
So you want to make sure that you're continuing to improve your hiring process, your interviews, all parts of that. So you get closer and closer to that higher percentage. So for me, I'm looking for three things. I'm looking for attitude, skill, and communication.
So for skill, we don't need everyone to be a 10 out of 10. There are people you hire, like the VA's, there might be a three out of 10 or four out of 10, and there might be experts that are nine or 10s. But what you do care about is that they're honest about what they can and cannot do. That's what you care about at the end of the day.
So we put people through skill tests. We obviously, that's when you look at resumes and background and reviews and all that kind of stuff. But that's just one part of the equation. And a lot of times, you can go overboard just vetting for skill.
For attitude, we do one-to-one interviews. We look for people who are passionate about what they do. They're not just in it for the paycheck. They're a graphic designer or a bookkeeper.
They love being a bookkeeper as much as I love being an entrepreneur. Those are the type of people that we look for. They can't get aggressive when things don't go their way. They have to be able to accept feedback without taking it personally.
That overall good attitude with the person that you want to do business with. And then you've got the communication. And to me, communication is everything. Because it doesn't matter how good of an attitude or how good a skill someone is.
If you can't communicate with them at a high level, it's never going to work out. So for communication, it's stuff like responding within a business day, how they handle emergencies, can they speak your language at a high level, can they get on the same page with a scope quickly, can they hit due dates and communicate ahead of time, and then need extra time. So it's really that trifecta of skill, attitude, and communication. And it's very rare that you hire someone.
You're like, wow, they had a great scale, a great attitude, a great communication. But they were a terrible hire. That usually doesn't happen. When you find the trifecta, it usually works out.
Awesome. Awesome. So probably a lot of people want to know, when is it time for somebody like a solopreneur to hire? What have you seen the tells that they're ready to hire?
Yeah. So for a while, this was my least favorite question, right? Because it's impossible for me to be like, now's the time. This is it.
Go for it like this second. And everyone's at a different place in their life, in their business. So I tried to take a step back and say, how do I decide when is the right time to hire? So for me, I look at how much money I made last month.
And then I say, how aggressive do I want to be? If I'm going to build my empire, and maybe I'm young, and I can take risks, maybe I'm going all out. I'm investing 40, 50, 60% of my profits from last month back in the business. And if I'm more conservative, and I'm at bills, or other things, then you pay, maybe it's 10 to 30%.
But figure out what that number is. And you can always go up 10% or down 5% next month. But if you don't have an idea of how much you want to spend, and how much you can afford to reinvest, you're really not. Yeah.
You're going to be a red. And maybe you're going more project based. And you're like, hey, I'm going to get my website down to my logo, or get my books caught up one time. So from there, that's really how I approach whether it's the right time to hire.
You also have to look at what is your hour worth. If you're a brand new startup, your hour might not be worth anything. You can't really build anything for your time. And if you're two years in, it might be worth $1,000 an hour.
So I like to create two lists. The first list is everything I do on a day-to-day week-to-week month-month basis. And I'll prioritize it for easiest or hardest. And I will assign a dollar value to everything on the list.
And I'll also prioritize by how much time it's taking me. And then I'll start shifting away on the list and start giving those tasks to the lower level of the A's. And then on the other side, and this is one of the best activities that Connor and I do, Connor and I partner, we look at our weaknesses. And we'll say, hey, you're bad at this.
I'm bad at this. We'll write it all down. And we realize, OK, we compliment each other. We can do these things very well.
You're good at what I'm bad at. But there's also always a list of these things that neither of us are good at. But we end up doing them every single week. And we need to hire specialists and experts to take those things off our plate.
So step one is figuring out that budget. And then step two is figuring out, do I go and hire people to follow my processes? Or do I hire people to turn weaknesses into strikes? Yeah, that's awesome.
And I know that personal development is great. But when it comes down to actual in the trenches, who you are, the player that you are inside your business, I love that you guys are really identifying and being authentic with what your weaknesses are. Because I know that when I was young, I would try to keep trying to get better at those things and basically go through the cycle of, I'm just running myself crazy. So yeah, you've got to figure out what you're good at.
If you don't know what you're good at as an entrepreneur, you have to do some self-reflecting. And I think there's a lot of field. I know there's a lot of field entrepreneurs out there that take all these different courses and all these different things. And they have all this knowledge, but they're still only good at that one to three things.
That's what most entrepreneurs are. They're good at one to three things. And if you're good at sourcing, if you're good at marketing or sales, do that. And yeah, we all want to get to the point in our business where we're at a golf course or on the beach and get an email with how much money that we made.
And that's it. And you don't do anything, right? A lot of us do, not everyone. But more realistically, for the first few years of your business, two, three, five years, you need to be focusing on what you're good at and hire people for what you're not.
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, like, one of the things is, at least the real estate or some of my real past thing, I'm not a business because there's so much beauty and so much fun to run a business, especially where we're teams and stuff. So yeah, like what's coming down the pipe for you guys? What are your future visions goals with free up?
Yeah, I mean, we're excited to see how far we can push this thing. I started this with $5,000 three years ago and we've been scaling it ever since. I mean, we're in Tyler remote. We practice what we preach.
So no office. We only hire people from our own platform. All the data operations are done by people in the Philippines. All the mid and expert level stuff is done by freelancers where we're just one of their clients.
And we want to see how far we can push that with the current model. We want to change the hiring industry. If you're talking projects, we have a lot of awesome stuff rolling out. We launched our agency program, which we're continuing to develop.
We have agencies on our platform that you can hire now that we've vetted. We have a lot of UI and UX stuff coming out to just make the whole user experience better. And that's really what we're focused on, not just adding skills and going into different spaces like marketing and e-commerce and real estate agents and software companies, but also just the overall experience, how can we make this faster and more efficient, better for both sides? And that's what we're focused on.
Awesome. So how can people get a hold of you? Yeah, so we have a Facebook group called Outsourcing Masters. You should definitely come join.
We have our own podcast outsourcing and scaling. Go to freeup.com with three E's, my calendar, my teams calendar is right at the top. And you can create a free account, mention this podcast, get a $25 credit to try us out. Awesome.
That's awesome, man. You know, I appreciate you having me on. And I think a lot of the entrepreneurs out there, especially so openers need to hook up with you, get on your platform, figure out what's the, you know, go through that process you just mentioned, identify their next hire because, you know, that next hire could be the next, the next really truly growth piece that it'll free them up from doing what they need to do to get to the next level. Also, I appreciate you having me on and have a great rest of the day.
Yeah, you too.