086: The $12M Virtual Assistant Plan with Nathan Hirsch

In this episode of “Beyond A Million,” Brad interviews Nathan Hirsch, the founder of FreeeUp.com. Nathan discusses his journey of growing his Amazon business to $5 million in revenue and creating FreeeUp, a platform for freelancers and virtual assistants.

He highlights the significance of partnerships, SEO, marketing, and client relationships. Nathan shares insights about finding the right business partner or buyer, effective communication, and the agency model behind FreeeUp. Ultimately, he delves into the pros and cons of using virtual assistants, the transformative impact of podcasts on networking and exposure, and his business portfolio.

Nathan Hirsch is a serial entrepreneur and eCommerce expert. He launched his first online business from college and has achieved over $30 million in sales. He’s the CEO of FreeeUp.com, linking businesses with skilled freelancers. Nathan appears on popular podcasts like Entrepreneur on Fire, sharing online hiring insights. He also founded Ecombalance.com for e-commerce bookkeeping and OutsourceSchool.com to teach his hiring strategies.

• Nathan Hirsch’s journey: Building a $5 million Amazon business and launching FreeeUp

• Virtual Assistants: Pros, Cons, and Building a VA Army

• Partnering for Success: The Importance of Partnerships and Finding Buyers

• Business Strategies: SEO, marketing, and client relationship insights

• Agency Model: Exploring FreeeUp’s Unique Approach

• Podcast Benefits: Networking, audience reach, and SEO improvement

The $12M Virtual Assistant Plan with Nathan Hirsch – YouTube

Transcript:
(00:00) keep in mind we were a Marketplace and this is the beauty of the motto if we didn’t train anyone there was no situation where we took a VA and said we’re going to teach you Amazon we’re going to teach you customer service we were a Marketplace for the the top one percent of va’s and Freelancers you need to already have the skill already had the experience [Music] today I’m talking to Nathan Hirsch Nathan was one of the early people to leverage the Amazon platform to sell his own products he grew that business to

(00:39) about 5 million in Revenue which is impressive anyway but what’s more impressive about the story is the way that he did it he did it largely on the backbone of having a virtual assistant team as the only employment in the company it was him and a bunch of virtual assistants he realized that there was tremendous demand for understanding how to run a business that way and he launched a Marketplace called free up which went from 0 to 12 million inside about four years before he exited the company there are lots of practical applications

(01:11) for this episode today uh I personally love having in-house team and I want as many W-2s to create community and culture inside the walls of Easy Pay Direct or any other company I have as I can that said there is definitely a time and a place for virtual assistants the question is when is the time and place and how do you execute it this episode gets very tactical on how to get virtual assistants moving and when not to use them I love talking about it because it’s an area to learn and learn from somebody that’s doing very well with it

(01:49) and kind of dig into the details and ask really questions that I needed to know answers to so I was scratching my own itch I left with some takeaways I trust you will too enjoy the episode Nathan Hirsch I appreciate you covering that time man it’s good to uh good to get some time in here yeah glad we can make it work we had some tech issues to start it off but all smooth going forward yes I hope so it uh it reminds me of uh you know mid-2000s and dealing with um downloadable video conferencing apps well look why don’t we dive in I want to

(02:27) for people that don’t know uh just give a little backdrop on your story and um why don’t we start there yeah so I’m a long time entrepreneur I’ve never had a real job outside some college internships and high school jobs I started a textbook business out of my college dorm room and started competing with my school bookstore before getting a season assist from my school telling me to knock it off and stop competing with them so that was my first glimpse into being an entrepreneur and I had this Amazon account this was 2008 2009

(02:58) Amazon was more of a bookstore and I was selling all these books on Amazon and I started experimenting with other products came across baby products and Home Goods if you can imagine me as a 20 year old single college guy with more hair selling baby products on Amazon uh that was me and this was a wild wild west of Amazon I mean timing was everything and I was running a multi-million dollar amazon business out of my college frat house making every good and bad decision that a young entrepreneur can make and from there I

(03:28) had to hire people I really didn’t have a choice my business was growing I couldn’t do it all myself and I started hiring a lot of college kids my my my first hire what was awesome my business partner Connor we’ve been working together for 10 plus years after that it was a pure disaster higher in college kids who were drinking on the job smoking on the job I had to knock in their dorm room to to wake them up and that got me into the wonderful world of virtual assistants and built up what I called my VA Army to run my Amazon

(03:56) business started offering these va’s to other Amazon sellers as more and more people started to learn what being an Amazon Seller really was and that turned into my next business the free up Marketplace uh platform for people to hire pre-vetted va’s and Freelancers and that was fun it was my first B2B business I got to learn a lot about Partnerships and SEO and marketing and clients and all that and we scaled that to doing 12 million dollars a year by year four we were acquired in 2019 which is a whole other story we can dive into

(04:26) if you want and now my partner and I are focused on building a portfolio of boring companies that help other entrepreneurs we have Outsourcing school that teaches people our hiring systems so they can just plug into their business to hire really good talent and keep them around and we have two bookkeeping Brands econ balance and accounts balance one for e-commerce sellers one for non-e-commerce and B2B companies and we’ve got other ideas in the pipeline too so long time entrepreneur always loved just building

(04:53) companies and and that’s a little bit about me I dig it um okay well let’s back out of let’s talk let’s talk College Bookstore days because there’s a first of all that’s hilarious I love the idea of competing with your College bookstore and getting slapped on the wrist for it um the 2008 as you mentioned you called it the wild wild west of Amazon that was pre um FBA right that was before Amazon started doing this fulfilled by Amazon program which for those that don’t know um is really one of the huge levers that

(05:24) Amazon had they allowed external sellers to sell on their platform and they would do all the delivery for them um what uh how did that business go you because the transition to free up was much later than that right so how long did you do that and what was kind of the the scale and scope of that yeah so we sold on Amazon for about six seven years we sold 25 million over that time we peaked it around five six million dollars a year and at the beginning we thought we were gonna take down Amazon and by the end Amazon had changed a lot

(05:56) of their algorithms and had made it harder and we were still running it but it wasn’t much fun we were just telling other people’s products and really at the mercy of Amazon and their changes but the whole idea came from Drop Shipping which I didn’t even know it was called Drop Shipping until years later in my mind I said hey I don’t have money to buy inventory I don’t have any place to store inventory I was living in my dorm room at the time and there’s all these U.S manufacturers that have

(06:21) products and they didn’t know anything about e-commerce so I started off just going to this website slickdeals.com and they had a deal of the day and whatever the deals of the day were I would post them on and on and sell it and just buy them on slick deals and get them shipped to the customer and pocket the difference and then I started going around slick deals to the actual manufacturer of these products and said hey I can get you additional sales I’m good at getting sales on Amazon really back then Amazon it was just list a

(06:46) product and it sold we weren’t really doing anything there was no PPC at the time or anything like that and they kept my credit card on file whenever we got an order we would email it to them they would ship it we’d track it on our side and there was a lot of manual work because there wasn’t that much software back then so we had va’s that would fulfill the order send it over to the manufacturer track the shipping make sure it got there ask the customer for feedback edit the listings at the pricing chains or went out of stock

(07:10) before it sold and and that was really the whole business and we worked with 300 plus U.S manufacturers Just Drop Shipping products and over time they slowly realized they didn’t need me they could just sell the product themselves on Amazon but for the first five years it was great I love it I love the Arbitrage uh so that was sort of like I’m piecing together the timeline here um that was so not fully fulfilled by Amazon but the opportunity to list products on Amazon I mean I guess it sounds like it is FBA but just not in

(07:41) the same form that it is today we didn’t do any FBA the only time we do FBA is on returns but we’re not talking that many so everything was Dropship fulfilled by Merchant um they placed an order with us on Amazon we’d reach out to our manufacturer say hey ship it here they would ship it charge our credit card and we would just pocket the difference and obviously have it marked up uh before we sold it so to you at the time Amazon was really your traffic store right it was our sales Channel we experimented with

(08:09) um other Marketplace as well but nothing was even close to Amazon this was their their big boom um right about that sure um the one of the things that I’m always thinking about today or very often thinking about is your own Ecom brand versus an Amazon store right versus posting products on Amazon um at the time and use the term Marketplace which I want to dig into in a little bit here but um at the time did it occur to you to do the Ecom store the independent did you go down that path um what were the UPS or UPS or Downs of

(08:43) that for you yeah so about year maybe four or five we did want to launch our own store and we had a choice to make we could either use Shopify which was brand new at the time and they had a store ready to go or we could hire developers to build their own store and we chose the wrong one we should have used Shopify uh we invested a lot of time and money into having developers build in and tried to build out this Drop Shipping ecosystem and at the same time Amazon was making it harder and kind of hurting our core business so we ended up

(09:11) scrapping that and wasting a year on that uh learned a lot learned a lot of working with developers and even met our developer that we used on free up and even econ balance and accounts balance now so it wasn’t all for nothing but that was definitely just a Learning lesson there but we never actually launched our own store that had any sales yeah we have I mean you know at Easy Pay Direct we predominantly are working with people that have their own econ Brands right but a lot of them also do Amazon because there’s so much traffic there

(09:41) and as a consumer I I very regularly look at somebody’s Ecom store and then look it up on Amazon just because the checkout process is easier right um what uh so I find that kind of conundrum curious and and today it’s different than it was then um but the other thing that I find Curious is the decision to move so you said it at the peak you were doing you know about five six million a year um what in your head what allowed you to say hey now is the time to shift because for a lot of people there’s this balance

(10:17) of am I giving up or am I is it time to close this business and I think that’s a struggle for a lot of entrepreneurs in general Beyond a million is brought to you by Easy Pay Direct if you’re an entrepreneur and and you are still using a product like stripe or PayPal to accept payments it is time to find out why the largest names in your industry would never consider doing that check out easy pay direct.

(10:40) com forward slash bam to find out more yeah I think in the back of my mind I always knew that this was a short-term cash grab I didn’t see that it was going to be there for forever and we could kind of see the writing on the wall I mean when we started I had to be one of the first a thousand five thousand Amazon Seller or something like that and when I was telling people I was an Amazon Seller no one even knew what that was they thought I was running a scammer or something and by year four there’s all these Amazon courses and gurus and Facebook groups of

(11:09) Amazon sellers and and other people are trying to kind of copy everything that we’re doing and it’s just becoming harder and Amazon’s starting to crack down on Drop Shipping as well so we were making money but it wasn’t that much fun we were just kind of waking up every day crossing our fingers hoping that we didn’t get a an email from from Amazon and meanwhile we we had all these great va’s and Freelancers that we had taught e-commerce or that just had e-commerce experience from other Sellers and we

(11:36) started networking with other e-commerce Sellers and they had run into the same issues that we had hiring people that knew Amazon new e-commerce and we essentially said hey we got these people ready to go you tell me what you need call me email text me Skype me I’ll introduce you and you just pay me and I’ll pay them and I’ll take my cut and I’ll back you up in case anything goes wrong if anyone quits I’ll cover replacement costs I’ll give you credit whatever it is and and that started to

(12:01) take off all of a sudden people were referring other people to us we got to launch our own website which is a lot of fun and have our own brand come came up with the name free up with threes and yeah so that started to surpass our Amazon business and I remember we had we were splitting our time 50 50.

(12:19) but we were dreading the time we were spending on the Amazon business it was not fun we didn’t want to do it anymore but free up was exciting we were meeting new people we were growing quickly we had our own brand we were learning podcasts and my own personal brand and all the stuff that went with that so about year two we kind of said hey let’s scrap the Amazon thing and focus all our attention on free up and that was one of the best decisions we ever made and free up correct me if I’m wrong but in my uh poking around before this call

(12:50) free up year one you did a million year two you did five year three was nine year four was twelve is that accurate yeah we grew grew very quick yeah those first two years in particular so somewhere in the second year on your path of I’m gonna be 5x my second year you said what the are we doing with the Amazon selling right exactly and the margins were better you didn’t have to deal with Amazon there was no threat of like just getting shut down or suspended overnight it it was a much easier business to go to bed at night with

(13:21) um okay but here’s the here’s the big question free up ultimately and maybe it transformed into this and I this is the the story I want to hear but creating a Marketplace for anybody is a daunting task or it seems to be because you need it’s the chicken leg scenario right you need a whole bunch of resources and you need a whole bunch of buyers but you kind of need them at the same time so how did you think about doing that or did you think about doing it did it happen naturally or what was the pivot

(13:51) point there yeah I mean that that is the hardest part of a Marketplace and I talk to people all the time they’re starting a Marketplace and I kind of give them that same thing it’s a chicken or the egg it’s tough because you don’t want too many va’s or Freelancers and not enough clients because they’ll leave and vice versa if you have clients with no vas and Freelancers um they’re not going to work with you anyway so the competitive Advantage we had is we already have these va’s and

(14:11) Freelancers from our Amazon business and we had a team leader chikian who’s my favorite VA ever uh who knew a lot of people in the Philippines and we moved her from our running our Amazon business to being our head of recruitment so we have these people ready to go we gave all them out to different e-commerce clients we ran out of EAS and Freelancers and she helped us build this recruitment program and just like we would Market to clients we had to spend equal amount of time marketing to va’s and Freelancers it got to the point

(14:39) where we were getting a thousand applicants a week to get on the free out platform and we would let in one out of every 100 we only wanted the best of the best and we were quick to kick people off if you got bad reviews from a client if you weren’t communicating if we had to chase you down in any way to find out what’s going on or where a project is you were gone and you were never getting another client from us again and we had we set really clear expectations with anyone on the platform but also built

(15:04) really good relationships with them we wanted them to be super happy we wanted to know everything that we could possibly do to make it good for them just like it’s good for the clients and we built a lot of great relationships now the other thing we did is we created a referral program from day one so anyone you referred to uh free up as a freelancer or a VA you would get 50 cents for every hour that they would bill forever so you would make money just by referring other people and the same program on the client side if you

(15:32) refer to client you’d make money for every hour they build forever so that off the alone off the ground helped us get lots of referrals if you’re a freelancer and you’re and you’re getting all these clients you’re going and you’re posting on Facebook hey there’s this awesome new Marketplace it’s tough to get in but if you get in they’ll have clients ready to go and same thing on the client side I remember someone calling me being like hey I’m in a conference in China and someone told me

(15:55) about free up I need a customer service VA and in my mind I’m thinking I’ve never been to China this is cool people are talking about me in other places so that was definitely a key to getting off the ground and balancing that out there were a lot of things that I think are takeaways there one obviously was the referral program right the referral program sounds like it was the uh and let’s let’s ignore the fact that you had a magic person over there that was just grabbing other va’s that she knew or he

(16:21) knew um but the referral program uh huge juice to getting those applications getting a whole bunch of additional va’s to come in um and I think that applies to basically everybody when you look at recruiting and that’s whether you’re recruiting your own staff members or you’re looking for clients or Partners but it led to ultimately the ability to cut people quickly so curating a good marketplace where the essentially the product that entrepreneurs were getting the va’s was super super high quality

(16:56) that’s a scary proposition for entrepreneurs it’s kind of like firing bad customers right they’re bringing in revenue for you and to cut the cord or to say Hey you are not our ideal client is a very hard thing but the resolution to doing that what makes it easier is if you have so much volume that you don’t even want to deal with about clients because you’re going to make it up with the volume anyway yeah and I’m all about customer service and anything that I build and I kind of I learned that from my internship at
(17:23) Firestone so there’d be situations that I mean obviously you kick people off that they’re getting bad reviews but there’s also situations where like a client’s VA would quit and we would pay the first three weeks of a new VA to keep the client around and and and make sure they get a replacement and make money afterwards there’s times where there’s an issue where the client says one thing the VA says one thing the VA has great reviews from other clients so you’re not 100 sure who’s right who’s
(17:48) wrong and we would try to split it and get in the middle or if it’s a 500 refund I’ll pay a third they pay a third VA pays a third and and just creative ways to make sure everyone’s happy and no one feels screwed over and people say coming back so the VA says Hey free up treating me well I’m gonna go do a great job and and stay on the platform and the client says hey Nate I trust Nate I know if there’s an issue he’s going to work it out I’m going to hire more va’s from him so a lot of just great customer
(18:14) service resolving things quickly where we weren’t just taking money out of people’s pocket or saying sorry there’s nothing we can do what uh you mentioned starting the marketplace with a narrow vertical so it was va’s for Amazon sellers were the va’s open for other services at that point or you know how wide was the net at that point for va’s and what they could do yeah so good question to put it in perspective so the first year is mostly Amazon sellers second year we got into more like Shopify and eBay and
(18:47) other stuff and then by year three you is marketing and and all sorts of different um verticals so I mean to start for Amazon it was PPC because that was that the Hot Topic then um it was brand new and there were very few PPC experts I think at the time we were really the only people that offered good Amazon PPC people now there’s a lot of agencies and stuff um customer service uh bookkeeping data entry listing products graphic design video editing those were probably the initial skill sets although by year two
(19:15) we had morphed into a lot of other stuff um and at the end yeah I mean everything from funnels to designing website to Facebook ads Google ads Like You Name It We were in all sorts of stuff we always stayed away from um like anything sketchy like if even like Drop Shipping was becoming more sketchy by the end of it so we would stay away from um a lot of that stuff trying to think of what else was sketchy there but like any MLM stuff like we really wanted only legit services that um and I apologize if anyone listening to MLM we just
(19:49) didn’t want to take any risks uh with with our business yeah well you know it’s funny there I mean look any any industry or area uh it’s a range of quote unquote sketchiness and without a question there are certain industries that just lend themselves to more sketchiness and now like you like you said Drop Shipping is one of them uh but the devil’s in the details right so how you drop ship makes a huge difference um Drop Shipping from China versus the US makes a huge difference I know a good one fake reviews stuff
(20:21) like that like no one could hire my va’s to leave fake reviews on their Amazon product anything like that we would stay away from got it uh so one of the questions that I think people entrepreneurs have in general around va’s and I want to talk to mechanics of that business a little bit more but tactically screening for good va’s is tough and this is true of any employee or any you know employee hire one of the large challenges for things that I’m trying to get better at but large challenges for
(20:52) me as a CEO is the hiring process and effectively screening um combing through who it is and then onboarding them and training them and all that whole thing how did you how do you think about screening va’s on the front end yeah so keep in mind we were a Marketplace and this is the beauty of the motto is we didn’t train anyone there was no situation where we took a VA and said we’re going to teach you Amazon we’re going to teach you customer service we were a Marketplace for the the top one percent of va’s and Freelancers you need
(21:23) to already have the skill already had the experience so for for us we always look for three things whenever we’re hiring someone and it’s the same thing when we were vetting people to get on the platform skill attitude and communication and skills pretty straightforward if you if you say you’re good at Amazon PPC you got to be good at Amazon PPC you don’t tell you don’t over say what you’re good at and you’re honest um and then for attitude and communication those are super great as
(21:48) well I mentioned that issues come up do you have the right attitude or you’re like hey I’m gonna make this client happy or do you have the attitude where you’re like hey I did the work the client’s lying pay me I don’t care about anything else so we wanted people on on the platform that had good attitudes that were fair and reasonable um and that we could work with to make sure everyone’s happy and then community education was the fastest way to to get kicked off of our platform if we had to
(22:12) chase you in any way if you weren’t responding within a business day um if our if yeah stuff like that you would get kicked off so when we were vetting people we had skill tests depending on what their skills were if they were writer we’d look at samples whatever we do a one-on-one interview with them chicky and ran that and make sure that they have the skill the attitude the communication actually talk to them and then we had expectations of the platform that we would give them like uh for how many pages like five
(22:37) pages long or something 12 pages long and then we’d test them on the expectations so hey you have to respond within a business day at all times or stuff like that that we were testing on so before we even let them on the platform they we tested their skill we had met with them and they had gone through our expectations very similar to the the onboarding process we teach at Outsource school um and that way we will We they knew the expectations up front there was nothing hidden clients got the same experience
(23:04) no matter who they hired even if they hired a writer versus a video editor versus a customer service rep and we would hold people to those expectations going forward and I mentioned we weren’t training them so once they were on the platform clients would put in a request the beauty of free up is we’d connect them right away they could get started we’ve already vetted them interviews can be quick um and we weren’t managing them at all it’s not like the VA would report to us the client would be in charge of
(23:29) training and managing them and talking to the VA we were there if even the smallest thing went wrong if a VA didn’t respond within a business day they could reach out to our support team we had their phone number backup emergency contact all that kind of stuff that we would jump in and make sure the client was taken care of but it made us very scalable because it wasn’t like we were running a big agency that we have all these projects that you need project managers to manage how did you screen for attitude on the
(23:56) front end I think that’s one of the toughest things is to think about values and you use attitude which I like but values are in the Venn diagram there’s an overlap there right um so we have a very specific type of attitude that we look for and a lot of these questions are an outro school but we want someone who’s passionate about what they do if they’re a graph designer they love doing graphic design just like I love being an entrepreneur um they they love self-improvement and growth they’re always trying to learn
(24:23) they’re trying to read books or they’re not saying hey I’m the best web developer out there they’re saying hey I’m good but I’m always trying to get better and a year from now I’m going to be better they care about something besides money we all like money in some capacity but that can’t be your number one thing because you can’t compete with other companies on money there’s always someone out there that can pay your people more than you can so they have to care about self-improvement or stability
(24:47) or growth or becoming a leader down the line or buying into the company um and then the last thing is like buying into free up we wanted va’s and Freelancers that love free up we didn’t want to just be another platform that would um that they can get a job to like no one’s loyal to upwork if you get a client on upwork you’re you’re trying to get them off up work as quickly as possible they get the fears to reduce the fees we wanted people that wanted to stay on free up and become friends and
(25:12) family with the other people on free up we had these big group chats of all the graphic designers and all the writers and we wanted people that cared about that and valued Community it wasn’t just a job Board of that so I agree tough to that for but that’s what we looked for and we had a lot of questions that kind of dug into what someone was really about so from a Marketplace perspective uh you know obviously they’re different but you a lot of the words that you’re using in fundamental ideas apply to anybody
(25:42) creating any company right you’re talking about creating sort of an ethos inside of the marketplace for the va’s in the marketplace what were the things that you did to build the marketplace to create the sense of family community stickiness there for the va’s right so I mean first of all is communication we kept people along for the ride we told people we had build hours that by the time we sold it we were billing 18 000 build hours a week well that started off at 100 and went to a thousand went to five thousand so
(26:11) every week we would announce it and we would everyone would get on board and people wanted to break our build hours record so we had all these va’s and Freelancers who are making money off the platform but also are following along with the journey and we shared everything we were doing good and bad hey we’re working on this project hey here’s the software issue we had and so they felt like they were a part of it they were a part of it um we would share the good Bad and the Ugly and the second thing is just listing the feedback we
(26:38) wanted to know like what do you like what do you not like people wanted a job board we created a job board they could see um that we were acting on their feedback really quickly and then the last thing is knowing that that me and the rest of the team had their back so when a client issue did come up and a client was being sketchy with them we had a client who like sexually harassed just one of our va’s or like there’s random like this didn’t happen a lot but over four years stuff happens we would make sure the VA
(27:04) was taken care of hey we blocked that client you get an apology from us we paid you something we help you get a new client like that’s the kind of things that that people remember and again not all issues are black and white that it’s the va’s fault or the client’s fault so people after a while knew that we had their back we weren’t just saying hey like clients always write or something even though we make sure the client was happy so combination getting them to buy in communication listening their
(27:29) feedback and treating them well when when stuff just happens because that happened stuff happens in business inside of the so obviously you’re a proponent of va’s uh inside and it makes sense with the story that you have in your journey through selling on Amazon leveraging va’s for that while you were building free up what was the makeup of your own team how many full-time employees did you have internally and how many va’s were you utilizing to execute that Yeah we actually had a case study if someone
(28:00) goes to outsourceschool.com case study or just go to outro School scroll down on the bottom you can grab it and it shows the exact hires we made year one through four um by the time we sold it we had 30 full-time va’s in the Philippines running everything from customer service to hopping on sales calls to recruitment to matching what we call tickets matching the the jobs that came into the Freelancers um and we had no us employees so when we sold it we were doing 12 million dollars a year no office no us employees 30 va’s
(28:29) on the in the Philippines running all aspects of the company we had thousands of va’s and Freelancers on the platform but our internal team was 30 people wild so you and a business partner in 30 vas yep um my partner Connor Gill event follow them on LinkedIn if you’re not already he’s awesome and our developer Russell who we still work with to this day and outside of that it was all all va’s in the Philippines wild that’s awesome uh and where did Russell come from did you say you found him on one of the platforms no Russell
(29:01) was actually the developer on our Amazon business that helped us build the Phil website not anything his fault he’s a great developer he’s just a bad idea to invest the time and money to to do that so um we we got to know him and learned about development and with free up I mean one of the things that helped us when we sold it is we had our own Marketplace we built it from scratch it was an MVP we got it out there it did very little it just tracked VA and freelancer time and and that was it um but by year four it did everything it
(29:26) had the affiliate programs built in um it did payments automatically new clients sign up job boards you name it and we sold it that was a valuable piece of the sale because no one else had that software uh what caused you to sell it yeah so to kind of put it in perspective this is 2019 so pre-coved we didn’t enter the year saying hey we gotta unload this thing but we’re making a good amount of money super lean business very cash positive very profitable um and we we kind of knew that there would be interest in selling it but we
(30:00) we love the business and we loved our team and one of our buyer one of our clients actually approached us and said hey uh we own a company called the hawk we have a conglomerate conglomerate of businesses uh Mark Hargrove David Martin two great entrepreneurs we buy businesses we don’t start them we want to get into the VA freelancer space we use free up we like free up would you guys be interested in talking about an acquisition and like anything else we heard them out and they ended up making us a really good offer life-changing
(30:26) money and at the time you’re weighing a bunch of stuff I mean first of all we had gotten this business to 12 million to get it to 25 What It Takes taken some pretty big structural changes I don’t know if we could have done it with just 30 va’s maybe we would have had to hire us people and could have gone well could have gone poorly we’d also had seen what had happened with our previous business the Amazon business where things are going well and it can change quickly and we had to lay a lot of people off and we
(30:52) didn’t want to go through that we wanted to to take a large percentage of the sale um I should say large percentage but a good chunk of money from the sale half a million dollars and give it to our team um in the Philippines and make sure they were taken care of and could we sleep at night if we turned that money down and then drove the business into the ground again pre-covered economy was at an all-time high real estate was looking good everything was looking good so we thought hey it might be a good time to
(31:17) buy a year from now it might not look the same um and these are really good buyers it was a cash offer they they knew what they were doing they’d grown other businesses they we did do diligence on them they took really good care of their their team um and their their clients so we didn’t want anyone to sell it to someone who’d heard our reputation so all that was weighing in our mind we we kind of said hey if we’re going to sell this thing we gotta make the best decision possible with the information we have we there
(31:44) can’t be regrets there can’t be looking back um so that’s what we did we moved forward making the best decision possible and at the time kind of crossing our fingers and it all worked out we couldn’t have sold it to better people that they honored their their word they paid us every penny they chewed our team well our team still works there our reputation is still intact hopefully knock on wood and um yeah it all kind of worked out but the most stressful six months of My Life by far so cash offers uh I mean you can

(32:12) structure purchases A Million Ways and very often entrepreneurs are pinned to the business and do not get the entire thing on the way out the door right it’s not like oh we’re gonna buy your business bye-bye and they just take it from you usually there’s some sort of earn out and some situation where you’re expected to stay for a period of time were you on as an employee after the sale for any period of time yeah I should have said cash offer there was a portion up front there was an earn out which we ended up

(32:40) getting all of it but they were very successful entrepreneurs they didn’t have to get some huge bank loan or something that’s kind of what I meant by that so um yeah they so do we have to stay on so they we did not stay on I did not want to this is the advice I tell people because I’ve seen I have friends of entrepreneurs who sold the company and became employees of that company and hated it and wanted out so quick so for me it was like if we’re selling it we’re done we’re moving on to something else I

(33:05) think the agreement said 90 days we were probably out of there in 40 days um and we were part-time pretty quick so they bought the companies before they know to get the founders out as quickly as possible they had a good plan they hired people we were there if they had questions and for the next few years like here and there they’d be like hey we want to make this change we want to run it by you first and stuff like that but we were out of there pretty quick and um that was that a lot of people again there are a million ways to sell a

(33:35) business uh people that proactively Tee things up to sell frequently talk about structuring things for the sale looking at ways to amplify the value uh and then go out and seek buyers do you have and it sounds like for you it was fortuitous timing seemed to line up uh and you took an opportunity it was a burden hand situation do you have any regrets about the exit and is there anything that you would have done differently now I don’t have any regrets I mean there might be a world where maybe we could have gotten

(34:08) it more money but I’d rather get slightly less money and sell it to good people um that I wasn’t going to end up in like a lawsuit with down the line or arguing for years like there’s a certain peace of mind that that was good and uh I mean it was life-changing money it kind of allows Conor and I to start businesses and like every entrepreneur just try stuff and see if it works see what see what works what fails and all that and it’s a lot of fun and it allowed me to buy a second house and move to Colorado

(34:32) and become foster parents and all the stuff that we were able to do so no re no regrets there I think we we did we build our businesses to be sellable in the sense that they’re they’re very lean they’re cash flow positive there’s no office there’s no overhead we hire a lot of va’s um so those are the kind of businesses that I think people like and I think the biggest key and I heard for four years that like I wouldn’t be able to sell free up because I was the face of free up but it’s very easy for someone to

(35:00) come in with their own marketing team with a different marketing plan and get clients in a different way I wasn’t like running the operations I wasn’t doing the Fulfillment we had a great team that did that without me and that’s what people look for when they’re buying no one wants to buy a company where the owner is doing every single piece of fulfillment and really involved in the operation so I think that was the the key there and the the best advice I ever got was to do due diligence and buyers

(35:26) just like they were going to do it on us and we wanted to know everything about them their net worth their success their failures how they treat people their plans for free up we want to know everything and we we kind of came to the conclusion that they had the same values as us and like to their credit so we sold it in November 2019 covet hit like five months later so it would have been very easy for them to be angry and hey you guys screwed me over and like blah blah blah but they were like hey we made the best decision based on the

(35:53) information available no one could have seen it we’re gonna do the best we can to to get through covet and no guarantees we want to keep your legacy going we’ll want to pay you your earn out we’re going to do our best and luckily they did and free up still running to this day but like those are the kind of people you want to sell it to you don’t want to sell it to to people who are who are going to come after you over some obsolete thing you want to sign a legal agreement lock-in is safe never look at it again and if

(36:18) something comes up talk it out like like human beings and figure out a solution and that’s how how I’ve always done business so it was good to sell it to someone like that somebody told me something a long time ago uh which stuck with me and it was you should never marry somebody that you can’t see yourself divorcing and the sentiment is that you should never get involved in a relationship if you can’t see a path for navigating the worst case scenario together and I think that that story of an exit

(36:50) and vetting the buyer is super relevant and not just for an exit but for any relationship you have in business period I agree I mean my like my business partner um I I tell people this all the time it’s easy to be business partner so if you’re making a lot of money and everything’s going well uh you really learn if you can work together when hits the fan and uh your Amazon account gets suspended or um you make the wrong decision like all that stuff happens when you’re an entrepreneur so I think

(37:17) that the beauty of Connor and I and why I’ve been able to work well we’ve kind of been through all these ups and downs and when things aren’t going well we’re able to stay focused and say Hey We’re not gonna be homeless it’s a problem we gotta solve we’re gonna figure it out and when things are going great we we say hey things are going well now we got to keep the foot on the the pedal and keep going and there’s going to be other problems that pop up and and that that’s that’s tough to tough to do

(37:41) it is yeah it’s one of the reasons that I like doing uh extreme athletic Feats because at some point in the journey and it’s not a question of if it’s when in the journey is it going to go sideways and are you going to be completely mentally and physically and emotionally exhausted and confronted with the reality of interacting with humans in that state uh and the parallel is of course the Amazon account getting shut down things going sideways how do you confront each other as partners um yeah I love that uh one of the things that

(38:12) you said when you were talking about the the possibility of scaling between 12 and 25 million taking it to the next level was hey uh I’m not sure if we could do it or if we did I don’t know if we could do it with 30 va’s in the Philippines we might have had to start hiring U.S employees and I love the notion of three people on your core team in the US and everybody else being outsourced like that’s a beautiful thing um as somebody that well I’ll leave my own preferences aside I think they’ve

(38:47) been well stated on the show in the past but I think it’s a beautiful thing what is what is the difference for you so in your head when you say hey going from 12 to 25 might have required internal employees what is it that full-time employees in-house offer you that va’s don’t or vice versa yeah it’s it’s less about that I mean so we’ve got like a full-time us controller for for econ balance and accounts balance and she’s awesome and she’s great and she offers a different skill set than a lot of the

(39:17) the Filipino bookkeepers that we have um I think my mentality from it was we we might make less money short term and or in order to get to making more money and you don’t necessarily know you’re gonna get to making more money like there’s companies that invest in growth but they end up in a position where instead of being at 12 million with a great profit margin they’re at 18 million but they’re making less money than what they did at 12 and and that was a real possibility because we would

(39:42) have had to hire way more expensive U.S employees and maybe we could have figured it out and we made the wrong decision selling and we could have gotten into 50 million and be making way less money made way more money but there’s always a possibility of the other way too and we would have had to invested a lot more into infrastructure and that would have cut down on on the kind of the beauty of free up the Simplicity the leanness the the flexibility that we had so there would have had to just be drastic changes that

(40:10) came with their own risk and if someone’s offering you that money up front you kind of have to weigh that verse the chances of you getting to that next level with a higher margin if that makes sense yeah it makes total sense and I think it’s hilarious when uh drop shippers Ecom stores Etc talk about their gross and the volume they did uh when I know that they’re all ad driven running at like a two percent margin right you get it exactly yeah it’s hilarious uh but still there was this there’s this seed

(40:42) in that sentiment that is higher quality Talent is the in-house Talent versus the VA that’s what I heard anyway that was my mental takeaway was I could pay more for higher quality Talent tab in-house people and that would allow us to accelerate growth but it would compress margin and then we’d be taking kind of a gamble on the future um is that an accurate sentiment yeah very accurate I mean there are va’s that I’d put against any U.

(41:10) S person out there and their va’s that um the the va’s for a reason and they serve a purpose and we love working with them but if we hired someone in the US it would come with a much different uh skill set and and obviously cost a lot more yeah so skill set might be one of the reasons to go in-house versus Outsource then from that perspective um are there others do you think communication is better or do you think it’s easier to get a culture fit what are the other things that would have allowed you to accelerate with a

(41:37) full-time in-house versus outsourced VA yeah I mean we probably would have had to hire more high-level developers to automate a lot of stuff if we really wanted to get scalable um that’s part of it we probably would have had to hire like a full-time U.S manager at some point to kind of oversee more of the operation stuff um yeah there’s different stuff like that I mean we we focus on communication so I think our our VA has communicate at a very high level if anyone here uses us for bookkeeping like they talk

(42:04) one-on-one with our bookkeepers they speak perfect English they they can explain stuff in a way that most entrepreneurs can understand so um I definitely think about it that way but you’re right I mean I think there’s an expectation when you get to a certain size that someone can always talk to you as person and that’s not really what we offered at Fria it’s an interesting question for me it’s an interesting discussion point because there’s this illusion for and maybe it’s not an illusion but there’s a there’s a

(42:36) narrative out there for kind of the nomadic entrepreneur where everything is outsourced and they’re living on their laptop in Bali most of those people do not make very much money most of them most of them have a lifestyle and post on Instagram and are and that’s it that’s the gig and you know what awesome that’s great the only the only point of contention that I have there is purporting that that is a path to scale and that you are making a shitload of money doing that and it’s very rare so I

(43:10) think it’s uh for people that are running you know eight nine-figure companies or working towards that the question of when you use a VA and when you don’t is an important one and you’ve clearly done a very good job of utilizing them and are a huge proponent um are there roles in so I like digging into this but you know I want to go to the next chapter as well but one of the takeaways that I’d like to hear are um sort of delineating when you think people should use va’s when you think they shouldn’t are there certain roles

(43:44) that you think are relevant for um entrepreneurs or is it not role-based how how do you approach which one you pick and when so I like to push the limits on what you can hire a VA for um for if anyone’s in outdoor school I mean we we have Sops on how to teach your VA to close clients and be sale to be salesmen how to have va’s uh build your website or do development work do your SEO like you can push limits now there there’s a expectation that I have where if you’re doing anything for the first

(44:14) time there’s certain things you want to try before others like I always encourage people let’s say you want to go on podcasts we have a podcast Outreach formula that’s one of our most popular Sops and outdoor school it’s a pretty great place to start hiring a VA for you’re going to learn a lot you’re going to get comfortable working with someone in the Philippines they don’t get you on podcasts you’re going to be completely fine like those podcast hosts are going to forget who

(44:36) you are in a year um and so like starting small and building up is the way to go like hiring your first VA and making them A salesperson representing your company could work if you follow our Sops but there’s a pretty big learning curve there so Connor and I are very experienced doing that and there’s no any role that comes up we always think VA first and if that’s not possible then we’ll turn to the US um but that’s because we’ve been doing it for 10 years and you want to kind of start somewhere and and that’s kind of

(45:04) why after we solve free up we created Outsource school where it’s like hey here’s our process for interviewing onboarding training and managing DA’s keeping them around um and plug that into your business and then here’s all of our Sops from podcast Outreach to customer service which is a lot more training intensive to sales to lead generation that you can kind of pick and choose where you’re at and what you’re comfortable with um and kind of over time input those Sops into your business

(45:31) I like it so what I heard was if you have a very structured role where there’s a very clear sop that you can hand off that’s a very good use case for a VA yeah there’s three types of people you can hire you got followers doers and experts the followers or the va’s they have years of experience but they’re there to follow your system your process if you don’t have a sales process a lead gen process a customer service process you can’t just hire VA and say hey go get me sales go get me leads um they’re

(46:01) there to follow your systems the the doers or the Freelancers graphic designers writers you’re not teaching someone how to be a graphic designer but they’re not Consulting with you they’re there to do that one thing they do that one thing 10 hours a day and that’s what you’re using it for and they’re hiring them more Project based and over time the beauty of it is you can build a Rolodex reliable people that whenever whenever I need a website page or a graphic designer or a Blog article I

(46:25) don’t have to post a job I just have these people I’ve used in past companies that I can just go to uh and then you got the experts the high level agencies coaches Consultants that should be coming in with their own systems and processes and as an entrepreneur you shouldn’t you can’t learn everything you can’t take a course on everything at some point you’re gonna have to hire someone that is an expert in something you’re not good at that can just come in and hit the ground running so knowing

(46:49) before you make any higher whether you need an expert a doer or follower is incredibly important and your hypothesis here is that the experts are easier to hire in a non-va fashion I mean experts kind of their own challenges hiring because you got it’s tough to test people on something that you’re not an expert in and there’s ways around that like getting referrals like for bookkeepers we have our CPA you can help us tell if uh bookkeeper is good so there’s creative ways around that um but it’s not necessarily they all

(47:20) kind of come with their own pros and cons they just need to be managed differently like a VA the whole goal is to find out if they’re good before you spend two months training them you don’t want to train them for two months and then realize they’re not good that’s a bad use of time and money for the expert you want to make sure that they actually are an expert and that they have the same values before you sign on to their retainer or six month contract um and for doers it’s all about setting

(47:44) it up so that you’ve got different segments you’re not hiring someone to build a 10 a 20 Page website and looking at it when they’re done you’re having them do one page giving them feedback making sure that they can address feedback then you’re giving them two more so each one kind of has their own managing style that we go through in outsourced School that’s a cool framework uh Okay so you I guess before I close the free up chapter what was what was something you would have done differently in building a Marketplace

(48:17) what do you feel like you did not execute well and you would have taken a slightly different path on if you were to redo it um so one of the I’ll give two things one is kind of silly but we we ran the whole business on Skype if you can imagine this and Skype was is not the the best tool looking back on it it’s like laggy we had a few times that our Skype accounts like got blocked they got all blocked but it worked because we had clients on Skype and we had Freelancers on Skype and we could connect them but
(48:45) the second that the the the hawk bought us they got rid of Skype and moved everything to slack and now I love slack and I use slack on all my companies and would never go back so that’s kind of a silly one that if I could go back I probably would have just done everything on slack from day one um and the second one was just the software I mean I’m a big proponent of minimum viable product I’m not a big risk taker even though I’m an entrepreneur like I start my companies with five thousand dollars or less I

(49:11) don’t really invest into them until they prove that they can actually make money but in this case free up probably would have grown faster if we had invested in software earlier if we had had a bigger software budget in year one two or three now it could have gone sideways I could have wasted a lot of money on software and I’ve seen a lot of people do that where they spend 200 000 on software and then they realize there’s no market for whatever it is they built um but in the Freehouse specific case we probably

(49:34) could have invested more and had more functionality uh by the time we sold yeah that’s an interesting conversation for people that have always done things with their own money and taking the bootstrap approach versus the funded community and it’s just a completely different mental outlook on how to grow a business I talked to I’ve talked to people on many people on the show but also just friends who communicate with me and say things like what’s your burn rate I’m like you’re you’re not asking

(50:07) the right question sir I’m not negative um so you close the free up chapter which opens the doors to do something else um entrepreneurs handle exits differently uh sometimes there’s a crisis period afterwards sometimes they dive immediately into the next thing I want to hear what you did but I also want to hear what you obviously you went into a new business what do you look for when you’re starting a new business and how did you approach this transition yeah so we sold it in November 2019 the original plan was to take a year off and

(50:43) travel and I had all these travel plans I didn’t think I’d see my business partner for a year covered hit shortly after that so very weird spot to be we had no business to run we were out of free up we had no business ideas we had just spent four years focusing nothing on free up and all our travel plans were canceled and we were just stuck inside like everyone else and um at the same time you’re kind of wondering hey is free up gonna go down like that’s not a great place to take over a company right before kovid so

(51:09) very very weird place to be in we started brainstorming ideas a buddy of mine reached out and said hey you know would go really well is if you taught people like your hiring process and so we launched a course called crack in the VA code if people hated it we’re just going to refund everyone if people liked it we’re going to build it into Outsource school and people liked it and so we turned that into our membership and that kind of bought us time over the next few years to just brainstorm a lot of bad business ideas uh before coming

(51:37) across bookkeeping and for for us like we look for big markets we never try to create a market uh for every Uber that’s a brand new market that no one thought existed there’s a thousand others that people thought was a market but didn’t really exist uh so just like every entrepreneur needs to hire every entrepreneur needs to do bookkeeping whether they like it or not we look for reoccurring Revenue uh that’s a big thing we look for like competitors and how good they are at marketing a lot of

(52:04) bookkeepers are not good at marketing um not good at SEO not good a lot of stuff that we’re good at um and we we look for like uh what else I guess I’m biking there but like how how like lean can we get it off the ground like what will it actually cost to to go like I said I like starting companies with five grand and I don’t I don’t want something that’s going to invest it take a lot of software and stuff like that so that’s kind of the basis and we’ve always loved finances whether it’s personal finances business

(52:31) finances um we kind of went through our own Journey with bookkeepers where we tried doing it ourself and we tried hiring college kids and we tried dumping our CPA the year and then doing it quarterly and then finally realized we need to do it monthly and hiring a bookkeeper from day one of free up one of the best decisions we ever made because when we went to sell it we had Immaculate books going back to to day one and helped us make good decisions along the way so we had a lot of just bad ideas over the next two years before coming across

(52:57) bookkeeping and we really like the space and and it’s been fun kind of doing something outside of the VA freelancer space [Music] uh is it outside of the VA freelancer space so you you started with a course functionally on how to uh hire and train a VA how to get the right vas and then you moved into Ecom balance as the current Venture right yeah and are you supplying bookkeeping va’s in that proposition or what’s the business model there no so we have two bookkeeping companies accounts balance and Ecom

(53:30) balance they both offer the same thing we only do one thing monthly bookkeeping charging on the first books by the 15th each month income statement balance sheet cash flow and an easy to read format for you to make decisions on uh with great customer service around it we don’t do tax we don’t do Consulting you’re not hiring like bookkeepers from us it’s a bookkeeping service you’re assigned a bookkeeper they have a senior above them a controller about that um and that’s all we offer so it’s a

(53:54) little bit more of an agency model it’s definitely not a Marketplace um and yeah I mean we we use a lot of the stuff for hiring because we use that in all of our companies but the bookkeepers you get these aren’t like va’s we top bookkeeping these are high level bookkeepers we just hired a CPA equivalent in the Philippines to be one of the bookkeepers on our team and it’s a hybrid we’ve got U.

(54:14) S bookkeepers as well so it’s not just the Philippines it’s kind of the The Best of Both Worlds it kind of fair pricing with a high level of service that’s that’s what we shoot for so of course you you take everything that you’ve learned in other businesses and apply them to current ones but we’re definitely not offering va’s dig it yeah that makes sense but you’re leveraging them as a part of the ecosystem right yep I love it um would you so you I you kind of skirted around it we got the story but not how you think about it

(54:44) entirely you gave me a couple things that you look for when starting a business which was size of the marketplace competitiveness of the marketplace um uh some other things that I’m forgetting I got more that we also want a business that’s around that we think is gonna be around in 30 years um now you could always be wrong and 30 years is a tough place to to project but in 30 years I would guess people are still going to hire other people in 30 years I’m going to guess entrepreneurs are going to still do their own

(55:12) bookkeeping so we try to avoid like fads like any kind of oh it’s covid like we can sell Mass online like we avoid any of that we want we want long-term businesses that we see will will be there so yeah those are just some of the things that we look for um yeah I don’t know if there’s more to that question no I mean I think it’s just a curiosity is it so you know and I guess the the direction or one of my questions always as we start going down a path or almost always as do you think that there was a Divergent

(55:43) path that might have been interesting or obviously you’re happy with the direction you’re going Etc um were there other ideas that were competing when you were thinking hey we’re gonna create the next business here yeah we had some e-commerce like product ideas um that that never took fruition uh we had more like local business ideas because we’re pretty good like marketing SEO so finding something boring whether it’s a a bike shop or concrete or something that we could just be really good at marketing and find other

(56:14) fulfillment partners and we still might do some of that stuff but bookkeeping was the only one that we took a lot of action on we do a lot of Market Research in anything before so when we come up with the idea we start reaching out to competitors we start trying to talk to our ideal client uh if you go to the econ balance blog you can see we interviewed 100 e-commerce Sellers and published them to the blog uh just asking them hey can you name five people in the space what do you like it about your bookkeeper what do you hate what do

(56:41) you what do you think about bookie like all sorts of different stuff to get information and we we had this idea for like a luggage business we kind of did the same thing but we never got past market research because we said hey we don’t think there’s a market or be too expensive to start or something like that so we kind of follow a process where we we look for something see if it checks boxes and we do a lot of brainstorming we do market research and then from there we try to get the minimum viable product out there usually

(57:04) by giving people free work so with free up we gave people free hours of va’s with accounts about with that outdoor school we gave people a discount on the course uh with econ balance we gave people two free months of bookkeeping and let us break everything and kind of be our guinea pigs and if people don’t stay on after that then you know you don’t really have a business so it’s a great way to prove that you can actually land clients if I’m like hey two months free bookkeeping two months free

(57:28) bookkeeping and no one takes me up on that or after two months they leave that’s a pretty good sign that you don’t have a business so but you’ve also not wasted a ton of time and effort on it either so that’s kind of how we approach anything that we start that’s great uh okay I have to ask um I have to ask a question one of the things that you said before we started recording was that you’ve been on 700 podcasts why are you on so many podcasts what is your and maybe it’s just you enjoy it

(58:01) but what’s your what’s the goal for a podcast for you because and today by the way getting on a podcast could serve and maybe does serve totally different purposes for people than it did when you started on podcast number one because 700 unless you’re doing one a day every day we’re talking years ago you started this yeah it’s heavily skewed like at the beginning right so when I just like timing I always say time is everything um and it’s the same with free up like when I was on my first podcaster free

(58:28) app there weren’t that many podcasts I got on entrepreneur on fire and that kind of blew up and it was like a big deal and it was like a quick easy way to network with people in the space and a lot of the influencers had a podcast and I get in front of thousands of people at once and I would just try to go on every e-commerce podcast um and and I kind of I definitely overdid it like there was one week that I went on five podcasts a day for five days in a row so I did 25 podcasts that week and by Friday I lost my voice and I

(58:55) didn’t want to talk to anyone for the next next week so there’s lessons for it from that as well but I mean for Me podcast is a great way to just get in front of your ideal Audience Network it’s good for backlinking it’s good for SEO um it’s good for getting your like sales pitch and just like talking points down um and sharing stories and it’s very relatable so now I’m a little bit more picky like I try not to go on smaller podcasts I’m going up maternity leave in a few weeks so I won’t be going on any

(59:22) podcast for a bit and I’ve T I’ve had time since we sold free up where I’ll take six months off from podcasts and stuff like that so out of the 700 500 of them are probably during the free up days or maybe early after school days um but but yeah I I still believe in going on podcasts and I think if you’re running a B2B business it’s a great way to build Authority and I mentioned we have the podcast Outreach formula if anyone Googles that that a lot of people use my method for getting on podcast you
(59:48) can see the one pager that I send you and I’ll hosts and plug that into your business um but I probably like now I limit it like I don’t do more than one podcast a day I’m very I’m a little bit more picky uh but I mean podcasts were a big reason why why we were able to scale free up awesome I love it man well I appreciate you carving our time I think there’s lots of uh tactical and strategic takeaways there uh you have mentioned a few resources uh but are there any other places you want to point people or if

(1:00:16) they want to find out about Nathan Hirsch or Ecom balance or anything else where should they go yeah follow me on LinkedIn I post daily content every morning on the the boring parts of business hiring bookkeeping scaling companies and um yeah go to outsourceschool.com we got a free hiring packet you can grab and plug that into your business if you go to accounts balance or ecombalance.

(1:00:36) com we’ve got a lot of free resources our monthly Finance agenda you can start running every week we’ve got case studies all sorts of different things and uh yeah appreciate you having me on I’m pretty easy to find online feel free to reach out if you’re listening I love meeting other entrepreneurs Nathan thanks so much man thanks love it I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed doing it I need your help there are three places you can find Beyond a million the podcast itself beyondthemillion.com which has some cool

(1:01:07) free resources including a free course and we finally launched the Beyond a million YouTube channel I would love it if you would go there and subscribe and if you don’t want to you still would probably enjoy seeing the visual content check it out youtube.com forward slash at Beyond a million [Music] foreign