Remote Hiring Tactics With Nathan Hirsch

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your Conscious Pivot.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markell and I am sitting here. It's the afternoon and sunny afternoon finally. We've had rain and it's been cloudy and cold in sunny, normally sunny San Diego. So I know I'm not going to get any sympathy from anybody about the weather here, but it's just good to have sunshine. I was sitting outside getting prepared for this podcast and doing a little reading and a little writing and just feeling so grateful in the moment to be in sunshine and in the warmth and knowing that I'd get to have this conversation, to be spending time behind the microphone. Today I've got a great guest, somebody that I really, I love this guy. You guys gonna love this guy, gonna love his story, gonna love what he's, what he's up to in the world. So I knew I was gonna speak to him and that was that had me feeling good. And in this moment, I just feel very grateful for being alive. I can't give thanks. It seems I cannot be grateful enough for each moment because I know intuitively that I have no idea what the next moment is going to bring or what's going to happen other than what I have control over in this moment, which is to be here, to be present. And that's a blessing. So I am going to introduce this gentleman that I think you guys are going to learn a lot from. You're going to get a lot of great resources from as well. And I'm going to read his bio, it's a short bio. And then we're going to dig right in with it. So Nathan Hirsch Nate, as we call him, is a serial entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring and E commerce. He started his first E commerce business out of his college dorm room and has now sold over $25 million online. He is now the co founder and the CEO of FreeUp. That's f r e e e up.com, a marketplace that connects businesses with pre vetted freelancers in E commerce, digital marketing and much more. He regularly appears on leading podcasts such as Entrepreneur on fire, and speaks at live events about online hiring tactics. Nate, it's a pleasure to have you on the show, buddy. Welcome.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I've been looking forward to this.

Way cool. Way cool. I'm going to ask you right now, what's something. I know you've been doing some traveling. You've had a lot going on in your world of late night. I saw you a couple of weeks ago at one of our trainings. What are you grateful for? What's something you're appreciative of in this moment?

Well, I just got to spend 10 days in the Philippines meeting with people that I've worked with for over six years, some of them, and they were nice enough to welcome me into their homes, to feed me, to show me a great time, show me around their beautiful country. And it was an unbelievable experience just meeting so many people that I've been able to help over the years, and they've really been able to help me learn and grow as a person. So I'm very grateful for that. And I'm also grateful for being home after about 20 days of traveling.

Boy, I mean, I can really identify with that. When I started my more conscious pivot journey out of practicing law or doing anything that really my heart wasn't fully invested in and moving in this space that I've been in now for almost 10 years, I remember the travel was super exciting. I just so loved being able to travel internationally and all that. And yet I also. I remember what it was like to come home from that travel, especially when the time zones are different. You got, you know, your days and your nights are mixed up and, you know, that kind of thing. And you got a little sunburn. I can see you got a little sun on your face there.

I did. We stayed at a resort next to a beach. We were outside almost all the time. Definitely got a little sunburn. And, yeah, I'm a homebody. My parents, when I was little, we traveled all around the world. I always enjoyed just getting home that first few days. Just hanging out on the couch. Yeah.

Yeah. Way cool. We have that in common as well. Nate. The bio is great. I mean, I love reading people's bios. I love to look past the bio because there's so much that we could write or have written about ourselves. And yet the things we write aren't really often the things that are most important to us. They're important, but they're not always the most important. What's something that's not in this bio that you think is really important about you. So.

I'm a dog lover. My parents, when I was little, they never let me get a dog. And I always wanted one more than anything in the world. So about a year ago, I adopted this little guy that you can't see. And now I spend as much time as possible with him. It's an unbelievable experience just from not having a dog for 20 years to finally getting one and having that responsibility and knowing that it loves you unconditionally. Just a great feeling.

Yeah. Oh, man. That's the truth. It's so funny, too. I was just on the phone with my mom just before I was starting this podcast. My mother called me. And so blessed and appreciative that she's. She's around and doing really well. And, and she was, she was talking to me about. About dogs as well. We have two big dogs. You, you know, you've. You've met our puppies and all that, and, and we grew up with dogs, my brother and I. So he just got. He just found out he got a puppy, like a Bernese, Like a big. A big dog. A big puppy for his, you know, four kids. And it is, it's, it's a really nice thing to have a dog around or a cat around or some other companion that. And you use the word unconditional love that you know, that they just, they appreciate you, they love you unconditionally, which is pretty special, right?

Yeah. And even working from home, you can go a little crazy sometimes being by yourself, even though you're taking calls and talking to different people, just having someone always around something. I wish I did earlier, back when I started working remote, but it definitely makes a huge difference.

Yeah. So, you know what? Let's rewind the tape. So you didn't get a dog when you were younger and you weren't crazy like, I guess as crazy as Randy and I. So we got a dog when we were in college, actually, which was. Which is pretty nuts. I was a resident assistant, an RA and had my own room, and we picked up a puppy from a litter of puppies that, you know that we were working at a summer camp and took one home with us and then I brought it to school and quickly found out that that was against every rule, especially to be an RA and have a dog in my room. So my mom ended up being a surrogate to our beautiful puppy, Maggie, so many years ago. So you also did some crazy stuff in college and little different than Bringing the dog and the girlfriend into the dorm room. But would you share with us what that was all about? And because that's a pretty, pretty wild story, I think, for college time.

Yeah. So my parents, although they didn't let me have a dog, they were always really supportive. They wanted me to do whatever made me happy and really pursue my dreams at the same time. They were both teachers and they thought that the correct way to go about life was to graduate high school, get into a good college, get good grades in college, get a real job, work for 30, 40 years, retired with the family, and that was life. And they really threw me into that at an early age. When I was in high school, I always worked a full time summer job, 40 hours a week every summer. It didn't matter what my friends were doing. That was my goal. And as I was privileged enough to get some pretty awesome jobs working under some CEOs at the Aaron Corporation at Firestone, which is a huge company that I learned a lot about customer service, I also realized that this is what life was like after college. You're working 40 hours a week, you're working for other people. A lot of the times I was watching the clock and I wasn't as motivated as I thought I could be if I was in more control, if I was actually making the decisions of the company. So I kind of got a little taste that I wouldn't be happy doing that, pursuing that. And when I got to college, on one of the first days, they had just started an entrepreneur program. And the new professor came in and she said, if you want financial freedom, if you want life freedom, the only way to do it is to become an entrepreneur. And that really stuck with me. It was kind of my wake up call, okay, this is what I want to do. So I signed up for the entrepreneur program and I started learning a lot about marketing, about budgeting, running financials, all of that. And I knew I wanted to start a business at the same time. The school bookstore, I thought was ripping me off. I was buying books for hundreds of dollars every month, no kidding, selling them back for pennies on the dollar. And I was pretty pissed off, as most college students are. So I wanted to change that. And I opened up my own bookstore out of my dorm room. And I was selling to all these online retailers that I could find. And before I knew it, it blew up. There were lines out the door. I was just sitting at a desk. Imagine just lines going around the corner of people selling me their books to the point. Much like you, I Got a cease and desist letter from the school telling me to knock it off because I was stealing too much of their business.

We had a lot in common, buddy. All right? Yes. And you were taking their business away from the school store is what you were doing. Right?

Exactly. Rules are meant to be broken. So from there, I knew that I couldn't sell books for the rest my life. I actually thought we'd stop using books right now and it'd be all on tablets. Hasn't exactly happened. And the book business kind of became under the table. I couldn't exactly have lines out the door anymore. So from selling books, I came across Amazon, because you don't sell books for very long without learning about Amazon. And back then, this was 2009, they were just starting to take that peek away from the bookstore into different products. And I started trying out different products and things that I was comfortable with. Sporting equipment, computers, DVDs, stuff I thought was really cool. And I failed over and over and over. The only thing I could get to sell was books. And it was pretty frustrating. So one day I was just going to find some cheap products to sell, and I came across a baby product. And it was one of those toy laptops, the ones that fold up and down, that the kids can press buttons and hear sounds. And I got the idea in my head to drop ship it years before I even knew it was called drop shipping. That I could sell this product I didn't actually have possession of and make the difference between what I sold it from what I sold it for and what I paid for. And the supplier would ship it to the customer. And in my mind, I would try this a few times, and if it worked great, I would keep going. If the customer complained, then I would stop and try something else. And luckily, the client or the customer never complained. And I started selling that product over and over and over. And kind of the light bulb went off that if I got out of my comfort level a little bit and started selling things that were very popular, like baby products, home goods, people, things that people buy a lot, I could make a lot of money. And from there, I continued to grow and grow this business, drop shipping from different suppliers, building relationships. And that's really how I got off the ground. Before I knew it, I was running this multimillion dollar business out of my college dorm room, making every good and bad decision that young entrepreneurs make. And from that, that's really where it led to hiring.

And like a lot of entrepreneurs, you also hit a wall at a certain point. Right. Did that business continue to grow and are you still working in that business now?

Yeah. So the business continued to do very well. When we got to year one, we really hit a hiccup. We had been working with this one supplier. We had this manager of the day. I had to start hiring people. So I hired this one manager of the day to run everything from customer service to listing to repricing products, and everything was going great. I was a young guy making more money than I could ever imagine making at that age. And I go on.

You're still in college at this point, right?

Still in college. Still in college. I think I was a junior at the time. So I decided to take my first vacation that I've taken in over a year, year and a half. I had been spending 247 working on this business. And I took a vacation, planned it all out, Myrtle Beach. It was going to be incredible for all my friends. Some people I work with, some people I didn't. And on the first day of the first trip or the first day of the trip, I got a call from the manufacturer telling me that he no longer wanted to work with me. Then I get a call from the manager of the day telling me that he wanted to focus on college and that he couldn't work for me anymore. So my six months of training, I put in out the window. And then just to top it off, I get a call from my accountant telling me that someone had stolen my identity and filed a tax return in my name. So I went from this unbelievable high to this terrible low where I thought I lost everything. Everything I'd worked for for a year and a half, seven days a week, was just gone. And not only that, but the end of college was creeping up. It's time to go out and get a real job. So.

And wait a second. So, dude, this is the first day of vacation I want to go. I just want to set the context here. You're away. You take a. You're there with your mates. It's the first day. You get three pieces of information that you're one supplier. So I guess this. Your main supplier says, we're no longer doing business. You find out from the guy that's running your business that you've left in charge of the. Of the, you know, in charge of the house. And he says, I'm out of here, can't do it anymore. And then you also get a notice from. Or at least your accountant says that your. You've got. Somebody's taking your identity, filed a tax return you got to deal with that. All this is on the first day of your vacation.

First day. So vacation ruined. Didn't enjoy the rest of that vacation.

You drank. You drank the rest of the night and the following three days in a row, right?

Absolutely. I honestly couldn't wait to get back. Because when you know you're coming back to a big mess, how do you focus on vacation? You know what I mean? So, I mean, I learned so many lessons from that day, and I'm so happy that I learned them as a young entrepreneur. I mean, step one, don't invest a lot into college kids. Right. Because their number one priority is college, and rightfully so. It's not a great investment in terms of hiring people. Two was diversification. I mean, if you're going to diverse in your stock portfolio, you should definitely diverse in your suppliers. If you're a business owner, diversify in your hiring as well, making sure you don't have one person that is in charge of everything, making sure that you departmentalize. And there was also less insecurity as well in keeping your personal information a little safer. So from that, I came back and I was pretty determined. I looked at the bank account, and I was like, okay, we have X amount of money left. This is when we run out and shut down. Let's do everything possible with the manpower that we have to get this back on track, and let's actually learn from those lessons and not make the same mistake again. So we started reaching out to all these different suppliers. Hey, will you work with us? Hey, can we partner? We started departmentalizing. We got one person for customer service, one person for listing, one person for price, Shortened our training so that it didn't take six months to train someone. We could get them in and going within a few weeks. And within six months, we had not only grown the business bigger, but we were safer, we were more diverse. And it was kind of that calling card that. Okay, when a problem happens, because as an entrepreneur, you go up and down, you can always kind of work your way back up.

Yeah. All right, I want you to just dial us back for a minute, because you went through that pretty quickly. And I think people that are watching, listening to this can identify with one of those days. You know, it's like one of those days where everything that could go wrong kind of does go wrong and then some. And fairly ironic that that happens on the first day of a vacation. How often has that happened? I mean, geez, we used to. We used to take vacations, and it would be like clockwork that within the first couple of days we're on vacation, we're going to deal with something that's unexpected. It was so unexpected we'd expect it because we knew, like clockwork would happen. So I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this thinking, geez, that's exactly what happens to me, which is why I don't take vacations or why I take as few vacations as possible. And I, you know, because the. Getting yourself out from under the heap, you know, digging yourself out of the mess of sometimes taking some time to yourself is a sort of a way that we program ourselves not to go away, not to leave things unguarded, unprotected. And that's really a problem. I think it's a major problem, major issue that people don't take time for themselves, don't take time for their families. They don't have a work life balance is what it's sometimes referred to. Because the idea is, yeah, man, I don't want to deal with that heap of trouble afterward. It's too much. You know, that kind of, that stuff is just too much shit to deal with. And it doesn't make the vacation. You know, the vacation is kind of gone when you get back. So what did you do to deal with that? In the moment you're away, you've got a vacation ahead of you. You had to gather yourself. I want to get into the details a little bit of how it was that you transitioned out of that bad day into getting yourself back on track, making some changes, learning some things, and then getting into momentum. And then where that, let's call that the pivot point. I mean, I'm not sure that's the exact pivotal moment, but you go away, you think everything is great, you get to your destination, find everything, all the wheels are falling off the bus kind of all at once. Take us back to that point and then, and then drive us forward from there.

Sure. So for me, as you know, I'm a very logical person. So you kind of, you see the emotional element of it for a little while, you're like, this sucks. What was me? How could this happen? And as an entrepreneur, you have to get over that pretty quick and you gear into problem solving mode. The first step of problem solving for me, whether it's a customer complaint or a big issue like this, is to get all the information. Because if you don't have, have all the information, you can't really proceed forward or you're going to make decisions based on that information. So for me it was figuring out why did this supplier drop us? Is there anything that we can do to get them back? Why did this person stop working for us? Is there anything we did wrong? Was it his side? Was it something that we could have prevented early on? Same thing with the identity. How did it happen? Are there any leads for that? Really just gathering overall information, making phone calls, getting the whole picture. From there you figure out what resources you have left. So for me it was I had X amount of money in my bank account, I had a business partner, I had these two part time college kids working with me. So for me now with free up, same thing. If it's a customer complaint, it's like, okay, I'm running into some meetings. I have two people available, I have this kind of budget, whatever it is. So figure out what resources you have. Three is developing that plan. Okay. If we're going to move forward, how do we execute it? You're going to be contacting manufacturers, you're going to be writing the sales pitch. You're going to be starting interviewing new people as a replacement. Really dividing and conquering and figuring out how to spend your time. And then four is really adjusting based on what's going on. If we're not getting responses from new manufacturers, if we're not able to hire those replacements. Tweaking and adjusting. And the final thing that people always forget in the problem solving is you put steps in place to never let that same thing happen again. And really driving that home so that you're you in this case when you're diversifying. I don't ever want to be relying on one thing again. I don't want to ever be relying on one person again. I want to make sure that I'm not investing in college students. If I'm problem solving today. Let's say it's a customer return on the Amazon store. Okay, the package got lost in the mail. What do I have to do to prevent this or from lowering the chance of that happening again? Maybe it's contacting FedEx or changing shipping companies or upgrading it, whatever that system and process change is.

Yeah, that makes sense. So what I tracked from what you said was, and I think this is really important because I can hear you.

Hold on one second. Get out of here.

What's your puppy's name?

Charlie.

Charlie. Hey, Charlie. How you doing, Charlie?

Sorry, my girlfriend's coming home soon.

No, no, all good. All good, buddy. So what I've got are five steps and I think this is really, this is really key. Get, get all the information. So you went into information gathering. So just to catch everybody up here, Nate told a story of a day when the shit hit the fan and basically got the trifecta of bad information or bad, bad news on about his business. And the first part was you gathered information. The second part was you started to ask why? Why? Why did this person leave? Why did the supplier decide, you know, they didn't want to do business? Why did you know why? Why were you vulnerable to the kind of attack you were in regard to your identity and the tax return and all that? So that was second asking the question why so many people bury their heads in the sand and when something bad happens, the last thing in the world that they want to do is stick their head back into that beehive, so to speak. But you were willing to do that. 3. New plan. So you created a new plan. Number four, you looked at the plan for what needed to be or could be. Adjusted things that, you know, maybe the plan is working decently well because you created a new plan. Maybe it's not working so well, so you adjust the plan from there. And lastly, you put steps in place so that you didn't revisit the same issue. The same thing might not happen again. Is that a fair summary of the process?

Yeah, and it's something I actually teach my assistants to this day. Especially when they're coming for me. I'm like, problem comes up, follow the same structure. Don't just jump into solving it before you get all in the information. The plan is not working. If you see that maybe the client's not happy with your execution, tweak it. It's the same thing, no matter how big or how small the problem is.

Yeah. Beautiful. Fantastic. So was it all smooth sailing from there, or did you have more. More challenges? I mean, the guy that left, did you ever speak to him or have you, you know, give it. Give us a sense of what that might have been like, because that must have been tough when you have a right hand person that you put in charge of something. And we've all been there. In fact, I meet a lot of entrepreneurs and have. Who are kind of solopreneurs. And the reason they're solopreneurs is because they don't feel like they can trust anybody. And they got to kind of do it all themselves. They think they're the only ones who can do it perfectly. And that's a big part of their problem because they can't really scale from there. They can't grow very much when they're responsible or they make themselves responsible to be chief cook, bottle washer person, licks the stamps, sends the envelopes, everything. So you had that person you were delegating, and then the rug got pulled out from under use under you. What was that like?

Yeah, I mean, it's tough. It's tough to trust people again after that happens. Whenever I think about not hiring or not expanding, I always go back to when I first started the business, and it was starting to take off a little bit. I met with my accountant. I thought it was a good idea to start paying taxes. And I was like, hey, life is great. I'm working seven days a week. I love what I do. All the money is going into my pocket. I don't have to pay anyone else. And he just laughed at me. He was like, listen, man, you're gonna have to hire. And you can either listen to me or you can figure it out for yourself. And I didn't listen to him. I went out and I went through my first busy season alone. And by the end of it, I had ruined the relationship with my girlfriend, my friends I hadn't seen in months. I was working nonstop. I was a wreck, wasn't sleeping. And I got to January, and I was like, okay, I can never let that happen again. So I started hiring, and that led me to hire the manager of the day and learning a very valuable lesson. And when I came back from that vacation and I started diversifying and hiring for different tasks, things started to go really well. And we were growing, and we were growing. Now, a buddy of mine when I moved to Florida had mentioned the odes, the upworks of the world, the remote hiring community, and I became addicted with it. I was obsessed with it. I thought this was so cool. I'm paying someone $50,000 a year in the office, and he's spending 40% of his time doing tasks that are way below his pay grade. So let's get him an assistant. Let's get him the assistant assistant. Let's delegate these tasks out to people all around the world. Let's stop competing with the businesses around me for all the local talent and get access to all these people. So as I continue to grow and hire people, I quickly found out that I moved from doing the things I really liked, marketing, to the things I didn't really like, which was all HR posting jobs, going through applicants, doing interview after interview after interview. And at the same time, my turnover was just through the roof. Every time I would hire someone and invest in someone, they would walk out the door. And it wasn't until I had for the same position, I had three consecutive people quit. And that was a turning point for me. I was pissed off. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get people to stay. The company was doing well. I thought I was treating people okay and no one wanted to work for me. So I decided enough was enough. And I asked the guy for one hour of his time for an exit interview. And I'm sure you know how uncomfortable that can be.

This is a guy who's told you he's leaving, Is that what you're saying? Somebody said, I quit. And you said to them, I need to take an hour of your time if I could. Yeah.

And he was nice enough to do it. And we both knew we would never see each other again. He was probably not happy with me, didn't like me. Obviously, he's leaving. And I was pretty pissed off at him too, for wasting my time, wasting my money. But we sat there for an hour where he was just brutally honest with me. He would hit me in the gut with everything that I was doing wrong as an entrepreneur, everything that I wasn't doing that would have kept him in the company if I had just done it. And it was such an eye opener for me to actually get feedback from the people on the ground doing the actual work. And that really changed me as an entrepreneur.

What's some of the things that you heard from him? This ought to be good.

Yeah. So some of the things that he told me was the whole interview process. I was focusing on really talented people. I've always been good at finding talented people, surrounding myself with talented people. But the talented people in the other room, it was a cancer. There was no. We weren't factoring in anything in terms of attitude, anything in terms of communication. It was all just skill, skill, skill, skill. How talented are you? How fast can you work? And he said, you really need to focus on attitude and communication. You need to find people that aren't just in it for the paycheck. People who are passionate about what they do, that care about, in Free Up's case, the client, in my case, the company, the Amazon business, People who want to be there. If I hire a bookkeeper because I hate doing bookkeeping, they have to love being a bookkeeper as much as I love being an entrepreneur. So that really stuck with me. Focusing on that and their ability to communicate, their ability to get their message across, hit deadlines, update you if they can't work instead of just not showing up. Or not missing, not doing a project on time. And it really helped me restructure my entire interview process where I value skill the same way that I value attitude and communication. And if someone has two out of the three, they don't work for me.

So basically, in his exit interview, he said to you that. That a part of the reason he was leaving was because you had poor hiring practices or the people around you had poor attitude. Fill in the gap here a little bit.

So he said one of the reasons he was leaving was that it was a cancerous culture. And the reason it was a cancerous culture is because we were letting people in that were talented but that didn't have positive attitudes. And if you let one person, never mind 2, 3, 4, into a group that has a bad attitude, it brings the entire company down. In this case.

Got it. So this was a revelation for you?

Absolutely. He also told me that in the. In the three months he had worked there, this was the only time I had asked him for feedback on that exit interview. I never asked him whether he was enjoying his job, whether he liked being there, whether there were any ideas or situations that we could improve within the company and going back to problem solving. I never let that mistake happen again. I put steps in place where we're constantly sending out surveys. We build a culture where it's not only. It's required for you to bring ideas to the table. We don't want to work with robots. Some of the best ideas, the ones that have made me the most money, cut the most cost, have now come from other people because I've given them that platform to share, where it's no longer the boss talking down at people. This is what I say because I said so. It's okay. We're all working together. Everyone bring your best ideas to the table every day.

Beautiful. Beautiful. That's terrific. Anything else that this guy was able to share with you? Teach you anything else?

A lot about setting expectations for people. He said that during our interview process, we would interview someone, they would get the job, and we would just throw them into the fire. Okay, we hired you to manage our products. Go manage our products. We didn't spend that time after they were hired to get on the same page with them. Hey, this is what's expected. This is what we like. This is what we don't like. This is what's acceptable at the company. This is what's not. This is what Bob, Michael, and Sam do over here. Why don't you meet them and figure out how your job actually goes along with them instead of just throwing me into the fire. So it actually had me create more, I call it onboarding packets where people could read them, ask me any questions, get on the same page pretty quickly instead of just being thrown in to do what we think that they're supposed to do when they might think it's totally different.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, so what I've got is your onboarding procedure. This was three, basically three things. At the time you were hiring for skill only, you know, anybody that was kind of an all star, you'd bring on the team. And what he said was, look, that's great to have great skills, but if you've got crappy attitude, if your communication skills are poor, it creates a toxic environment. And clearly this guy didn't want to work in a toxic environment. That was first. Second was feedback that you hadn't given him. You hadn't been interested in getting his feedback or finding out how his. His life and his job was during the period of time. So he didn't feel like you had any interest in him, basically. And thirdly, that there were no. There were no expectations, so he had no way of measuring whether he was meeting those expectations. Not meeting those expectations was tracking according to what would give him an opportunity to advance in the company or moving backwards. Is that correct?

Yeah. I mean, there are other personal things like how I would treat people, how I would send out emails, how I could be more harsh and direct, logical thinker here instead of feeling the emotional elements that go into play when you're dealing with real people. But those are definitely the three takeaways that had the most impact with me going forward.

Yeah, it sounds like this guy hit you right between the eyes.

It was needed. Honestly, I didn't think I needed it at the time. But I mean, if you go into a restaurant, the last thing you want to do is ask the restaurant owner how everything's going. You want to ask the waiters, the chefs, the people that are actually on the ground making the food, interacting with the customers. That's how you get the best feel. And when you're dealing with people, it's the same way you want to go directly to the source if you're going to fix the overall process, the overall problem.

That makes sense. So this was all relative to the drop shipping business that you started in college. But that's not the business. That's not how I came to know you and came to meet you. And in the bio we talked about free up the company, which is your freelance Business now. So give us a little quick catch up on how that business got started and what it is that how you applied these early lessons, these pivotal lessons from your first entrepreneurial venture and how that informs your business today.

Sure. So we fixed our turnover problem. We redid our entire interview process, setting expectations, created this incredible culture. And over years of doing that, we had a pretty good hiring system. We were keeping people at 95% retention. We were finding talented people remotely from all over the world. We actually ended up getting rid of the office and moving it back to remote because we realized we had just added overhead to a business that required no overhead. Not one of my best business decisions. And again, I was spending all this time doing interviews after interviews after interviews. Even though we were good at it, it wasn't a good use of my time. And as I was talking to other business owners, other Amazon sellers, other people in the ecommerce world, I realized that other people were having the same issue. And I just wanted a way to get faster access to talent. I didn't want to post a job and go through all the applicants. So that's when the idea of free up really came about, where we could create a freelancer marketplace to compete with the big ones out there. But our difference was we were going to take that eight years of hiring process that we created and put it into effect with free up, where we get hundreds of applicants every week. We vet them for the skill, the attitude, the communication, take the top 1%, let them in and then make them available to clients quickly, rapid fire whenever they need them, and then adding protection on the back end that we knew the other marketplaces didn't have. With 24. 7 support, if anything goes wrong, where if a freelancer quits, recovers all replacement costs, you don't have to go in and post a new job and interview another hundred people to get that replacement. And whenever you start a new business, you never know what the reaction is going to be like, but it's really taken off. People love the idea of getting access to talent quickly and being protective. Protect it.

Yeah. Well, I think what's incredible is that it was a solution you had to your own problem. And I hear that a lot, actually. It's pretty common in seeing companies that succeed in they're pivoting in their model. And part of how they pivot is to solve a problem of their own. And once they've solved that problem of their own, then they go, well, holy smokes. I mean, this is something of a solution point for other people. As well. And it sounds like that's exactly what happened for you.

Yeah, I mean I was always looking for a way that I could just get access to fast talent. After trying it over and over and over, it's like, alright, I'll just build it myself.

Yeah, exactly. So that business is growing today and you're still applying the same learnings. These pivotal learnings are part of how it is that you've structured your new business, I assume. And this is a part of how you onboard freelancers that so that meaning I as a business owner and an entrepreneur want to bring somebody on. I don't want to go through that whole vetting process. I want to make sure I've gotten somebody that's been pre vetted and has that sort of trifecta that we talked about or that you mentioned earlier, which is skills, attitude and excellent communication. And what I'm hearing you say is that you guys do that so I don't have to do that.

Exactly. And yeah, applying the same principles. I was just in the Philippines. We took our entire team out, our internal team to get massages, to stay at a resort. We treated them really well. And part of that was also asking for feedback. How do we improve? What do you like? What do you not like? It's something that we don't forget. You don't forget those moments where that light bulb just goes off and you always want to keep that involved. We also ran an event where we had hundreds of freelancers from all around the Philippines driving in, flying in to just come to this event to hear us talk. And it was a room of really positive people. You could tell that we had vetted people for attitude as much as communication and for skills. So it was kind of cool to see it all come together. And yeah, I mean it's awesome to just see a client who's struggled to hire. Maybe they are that solopreneur that you mentioned that has stayed away from hiring because they've had those bad experiences to submit a worker request, get introduced to someone within a few hours and then just hit the ground running. And it becomes addictive after a while when you realize you can take stuff off their plate and give it to reliable people that will communicate and have a positive attitude every day.

Yeah. So what's the hardest piece of feedback that you got that you got while you were in the Philippines?

In the Philippines? That's a good question. A lot about our software, to be honest. Whenever you're competing with the upworks of the world, people with multi million dollar Software budgets, you're always going to lag a little bit behind. And when you're trying to, there's three parts of the business. You're adding clients, you're adding freelancers, and you're working on the software. So I think we got a lot of brutal, constructive feedback on our software and how it compares to the other people in the industry. And now it's on Connor and I to figure out how to invest in that and improve it and bring it up to standard.

Yeah. Beautiful. And what was the best piece of feedback that you think you got or you feel that you got?

The best piece of feedback was how much we've meant to other people, how much we've changed people's lives. I have a picture with a freelancer that's in the network standing next to a car with his thumbs up, and it's a car that he bought through making money on the free up platform. And we paid out over $3 million to freelancers last year all around the world. And just to see, meeting their families, people that we've actually made a difference with and knowing that they appreciate us as much as we appreciate them, and we know that we're nothing without them, so we appreciate them a lot. Lot. It was just an incredible feeling.

Wow. That is absolutely beautiful. You know what? We're running toward that time where we've got just a couple of minutes left. But, Nate, do you have rituals or practices, conscious practices, that you have to maintain a great attitude to be open? Because one of the things that I would remark about you is your level of openness that you're okay to have a conversation about just about anything. You seem to be really open to feeling. I mean, nobody sits down after, you know, somebody says, hey, you know, I want to leave, and says, you know, before you leave, I want you to tell me everything that you can about what, you know, what's wrong, or what you see is needing improvement or why you're leaving even. I mean, that's not an easy thing to sit down as the founder of a company and ask people for. And so I'm just thrilled with, to me, the person you are, how you show up is. Is wonderful. What are the kinds of practices or rituals that you have that help you to show up as that best version of yourself?

Sure. So one thing that I've adopted over the years as I get older is getting up early before everyone else. I get, as I'm sure you do, you get a lot of emails, a lot of Skype messages, a lot of phone calls. During the day, to have an hour or two alone to focus and get organized for the day is huge. The random days that I sleep in that I maybe after getting back from a trip on the Philippines and I'm sleeping in that extra hour, it's not as productive. It's a little bit crazy. So getting those extra hours in the day away from other people just to focus and get organized and get stuff done is huge. And the other thing that I do, when it gets to 4 o', clock, 4:30, the phone goes off, the laptop goes away and I work out hard for an hour. I. It's my stress reliever. It's the best thing that I adopted about three years ago when I hired a personal trainer just to really focus on the body, focus on relaxing the mind, because we all know how stressful this can be. So the other thing is giving my cell phone to my girlfriend when we're out so that I'm not even tempted to check emails and take phone calls.

That's good. So you actually, you get rid of your cell phone. You're not even allowed to touch it, is what you're saying.

It's the only way. If it's in my hand and I tell myself not to look at it and going to look at it.

Yeah, exactly. Well, listen, Nate, it has been, it's been awesome to have you on the show and I think it's one of those incredible things when you, when you can recipe how we. Where you've seen results in life, whether it's been business results or personal life, personal life results. I think it's really important to put them into. Into systems and processes. And I know that's one of your strengths is in taking things and systemizing them. So whether it's that system or for onboarding new people or it's that system to get feedback and apply feedback in your business, the system is really, really important. So I appreciate very much that you shared your system and that you were vulnerable and shared even some of that feedback that you've even more recently received. That's really powerful. And I also want people to be able to get access to what it is that you guys are about. Because one of the things I think is really cool is that your company offers solutions kind of across the board. And these are virtual solutions. So it's not about necessarily hiring somebody to be an employee. It's not a, it's not an employment service. It's a service that fills gaps for folks, whether those are short term or long term. And you do a Lot of the heavy lifting for them in terms of the vetting. I can speak as somebody who's used your company services, our company has used your services a number of times. And we've been thrilled both with the quality, the people, the skills, the attitude, the communication of those folks that we've hired, but also even when it wasn't 100% fit. And I think once or twice we've had some folks where we said, well, it might not be a great fit. The way that you guys handled that situation, how your client care, the experience from a client standpoint was really impeccable. And I think that speaks a lot to the fact that you didn't just hear the feedback, you've applied it and now it becomes a strength. And I think that's one of the things that people don't realize is that sometimes when we get bad news, when we, when the client complains about something that's such an opportunity for growth for us because that feedback is invaluable and it creates almost a call to action to improve. And if you meet that challenge, meet the client who's difficult, or the client that seemingly can't be satisfied, or the client that's just relentless and you're able to satisfy that client, or put systems and processes in place to even meet that person where they are and, and give them more love and give them more attention, your business improves in that process. Would you agree?

Yeah. I always tell freelancers that those angry, unreasonable clients, those are the best long term clients because other people won't deal with them, other people won't put up with them. If you can make them happy and obviously set expectations so they're not calling you at 3am and really get on the same page. They're going to be lifers because you're the only people that can put up with them, that can make them happy. And, and I changed a lot of freelancers mindsets with that. But yeah, people can contact me@freeup.com with three E's. My calendar is right on the site. I'd love to set up a meeting to talk to you about your business, what we offer, how we can help you. Creating an account is free. There's no signup fee, no monthly fee, no minimums. It's really in our best interest to find people that help you and help you grow your business.

Beautiful brother. Well, listen, thank you so much for being on the conscious pivot today and, and sharing your story. And again, I know it's one of those things where we don't Always think that those days, like the day you described, where kind of everything that can go wrong seemingly does go wrong. It's hard to always see how that moment can be pivotal. And three years, five years, 10 years later, you look back on it and go, man, that day was a blessing. And it sounds to me like even as tough as that day must have been for you, where so many things were going wrong, to look back on it and think that was really a pivotal time, you might not have. Your trajectory might have been a little different had that day not occurred. So that's really special, and I want to take note of that. And as we finish up, as you shared your ritual with us, I want to remind our community. And for those of you that are new to the show and are listening for the first time, I'll also let you know of the ritual and the practice that I get to share with all of you. Each, each. Each podcast and had the blessing to share this all around the world, and that is that we're all going to wake up tomorrow. So, Nate, you, me, and everybody that's listening to this show, we're all going to get to wake up tomorrow. And that is both a hope and a prayer. It's a wish, and it's something that we're not guaranteed either. Because as we take that for granted, sometimes as we're waking up, there is no doubt that there are people in the moment that we wake up, that we're taking that first deep breath of the day. There are people who are taking their last breath in that moment, and that's something we can appreciate. And there are also babies that are being born who are taking their very first breath of life in the moment, we can appreciate that as well. And what that means is that that moment, not just a moment, it's a special moment. It's a sacred moment. It's a holy moment. It's something that we can appreciate. And so the first step is that we wake up. Nate, you willing to wake up tomorrow?

Yes.

Me, too. I'm gonna put my hand right on my heart and say, yes, I'm gonna wake up tomorrow. And that's also a metaphor as well for life, that we get to be just a little bit more awake, a little bit more aware, a little more conscious and alive tomorrow than we are even today. And that next, we can be grateful. So, first part is wake up. Second part is to be grateful. And regardless of the challenges that may be happening in your life, in my life, or in the world around us, and we see them Everywhere, politically and economically and everywhere, there are challenges. We can still be grateful in that moment. And thirdly, if you're willing, as you're waking up, as you're lying in bed, either in that moment or when you put your feet on the floor, declare out loud, I love my life. I love my life. I love my life. And with that, I will say thank you. Thank you, Nate, for being on the show. Thank you to everybody who's listening, everybody who's consuming this content, either in itunes, if you're on itunes, please leave a review. We'd love to hear from you. The reviews are really important and we actually will be rewarding someone very soon. We've got a sweepstakes where somebody's going to win one of our amazing programs, our Pivot Incubator program for leaving a review on itunes. We'd love to get that. And if you haven't yet subscribed, please go ahead and do that as well. You can join us on our Facebook community at StartMyPivot. StartMyPivot community on Facebook and you get there using a short code, a short cut URL that we've created. It's pivotfb.com, pivotfb.com that's where you can find us there. And we will see you soon. I will say this. I wish for all of you that your heart's desires come true, that you have a blessed day, and that you truly love your life. Wake up, be grateful and declare out loud how special you are in the moment. We'll see you soon. Ciao for now.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own Pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over@adammarkel.com podcasts for more tips, strategies and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love. Join our Pivot community on facebook@pivotfb.com.

Sam.