How to Work Less and Earn More While Building Your Successful Credit Repair Business

One of the biggest and scariest decisions a credit repair business owner makes is when they start to think about hiring their first employee. It is so scary and so stressful that usually they wind up not hiring anyone and then their business never grows. But what most credit repair business owners don't realize is that hiring help, it's the number one way to grow your business. And with outsourcing, it can be super affordable. So our special guest today is Nathan Hirsch. He's an expert in outsourcing and he's going to tell you exactly how you can start to build an amazing team on a shoestring budget. So if hiring is a challenge that you are facing, you better stick around.

So the big question is this. How can we take our passion for helping people with their credit and turn it into a successful business without taking loans, without spending a fortune by bootstrapping it from nothing so we can help the most people and still become highly profitable? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Daniel Rosen and welcome to Credit Repair Business Secrets.

One of the biggest and scariest decisions a credit repair business owner makes is when they go to hire their first employee and, and then it brings up all these worries. Can I afford it? Can I handle it? And they worry so much they don't hire anyone and their business never grows. But what most credit repair business owners don't know is that hiring help is the number one way to grow your business and it can be very, very affordable. So our guest today is Nathan Hirsch. He's an entrepreneur and an expert in remote hiring. He co founded freeup.com with a $5,000 investment and then he scaled it to to over $12 million a year in annual revenue and then it was acquired in 2019. Now today, Nathan is co founder of Outsource School, which is a company working to educate entrepreneurs on how to effectively hire and scale with virtual assistants. Nathan has appeared on over 300 podcasts, he is a social media personality and he loves sharing advice on scaling remote businesses. So if you're just getting started with your credit repair business, it's probably safe to say that you're doing everything yourself and probably dealing with a whole lot of stress. So Nathan is here today today to give you tips and tricks to start outsourcing different parts of your workload at a fraction of the cost of hiring an in person team. So if you are running a credit repair business, you really need to hear this. So please welcome to the podcast, Nathan Hirsch. Hey Nathan, welcome.

Yeah, thanks so much for Having me quite an introduction. I'm excited for today.

I'm excited too. I'm excited you're here. And before we get into all of this, how did you become such an expert in outsourcing? What's the backstory?

So the backstory is I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I got to college. I started buying and selling people's textbooks, competing with my school bookstore before eventually getting a cease and desist letter from my college telling me to knock it off. And I had already learned a lot about selling books on Amazon. This was 2008, 2009, and I started to experiment selling other products and eventually came across through trial and error, baby products. And so I was growing this Amazon baby product business out of my college dorm room until I quickly became overwhelmed and I had to start hiring people. Well, I turned to college kids. They were my first hires and that was an absolute disaster. They were unreliable, they were drinking on the job. I couldn't count on them. Tried to hire people in the U.S. made some mistakes hiring 50, $60,000 a year U.S. employees, which was a big deal when I was 20, 21. And I don't think people really took me seriously back then anyway, so I really got into the virtual hiring world by necessity. A buddy of mine told me about the upworks and the fiverrs. I hired my first VA because I needed help. I didn't have another choice. And I then spent years and years learning what to do, what not to do, how to build really good systems before building my own marketplace that I scaled that completely with virtual assistants. And now teaching people everything that I've learned, giving people my systems, my processes, so they don't have to go through the years and years of turnover and bad hire and issues that I went through.

Wow, that's so cool. Now, I don't know if you know this, but I used to be your customer at Freeup. Yeah, at Freeup, back when we were first starting outsource, our team, we hired VAS and now we have real employees. We have 70 of them. But we first started by outsourcing VAS on free up. And it was amazing. It was really, really amazing.

Yeah, that makes me smile. That's like one of the coolest things ever, where just running into customers and. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot different selling baby products on Amazon where you don't necessarily feel like you're helping someone versus free up. That's B2B. And also paying out money to the freelancers and even outsource school. We get to donate 3% of our sales to teach for the Philippines and also help people scale their businesses in the same way that we did. So it's a lot of fun.

Wow. I am really impressed. In that first business that you ran from college, I'm really impressed that you even knew to hire. I mean, with our business here with credit repair cloud, the first 10 years, it was just me. And because it was just me wearing all the hats, I was Phil on sales, I was Tammy on support, because it was just me. Our business failed and went backwards and I was too afraid to hire. It was really, really, really scary. So it just kept failing and my health started to suffer from all the stress. But as soon as I started to hire, thanks to your help, that's when our business started to grow. And now looking back, I feel like the biggest mistake that I ever made in my business was not hiring sooner and not building a team. Now, I want you to know our listeners. They are credit repair business owners, okay, who can really benefit by outsourcing things like their client document processing, their sales, their support, their customer service. And at free up, you had a lot of customers that ran credit repair businesses, right?

Yeah, there were a good amount that did it. And I mean, the beauty of virtual assistants is there's so much trial and error, there's so much experimenting. There's so much that goes on in every business nowadays because every business is really 24, 7 and you have to figure out, hey, who's going to do that data entry work? Who's going to do that lead generation? Who's going to do that customer service? Who's going to post seven days a week on my social media wall? And you have to figure that stuff out early on. And. Right. I mean, I was, it's funny, I was kind of in the same boat. So the first two years that I was running my own business, I. I was doing everything. I was listing every product and responding every customer service email. And I remember meeting with an accountant and the first question he asked me is, when are you going to hire your first employee? And I kind of shrugged him off, like, why would I do that? That's money out of my pocket. I love this job. I can do this seven days a week for the rest of my life. They're going to mess it up. They're not going to do as good job as me. All the excuses that I'm sure you had for the first 10 years. And then my accountant laughed at me. He said, you're going to learn this lesson on your own. And sure enough, my first busy season comes around the fourth quarter and I just get destroyed. I'm working 15 hours a day, my social life is gone, my grades go down. And that's when I woke up in January. Once I got through it and it was just like, man, I can never let that happen again. I need to start hiring people right now. Wow.

I wish I had had that accountant. That was really, really good advice. Amazing. So how does a new business owner, how do they know when is the right time to start hiring for your business?

Yeah. So I think a lot of people are so focused on when the exact right day is that you're supposed to hire someone. Right. And you're either going to hire people too early or too late. That's just the truth of it. And what's great about the virtual assistant world is the risk of hiring too early just isn't that high. Like let's say best case scenario and worst case scenario on both sides. Like if you hire too early and you spend a few hundred bucks, a few thousand bucks on some virtual assistants for a couple months and the average virtual assistant is five to eight bucks an hour. Non us out of the Philippines, which we recommend hiring from then, and let's say you didn't prove your business model well enough and your business goes under, you're out a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. But the opportunity cost that you miss for hiring too late is well beyond that. I know now even when we started outsource school, we didn't even have a revenue stream yet and we just hired a bunch of VAs to handle my inbox to do our bookkeeping right away. Just keep me focused on building the business, building the high level stuff, the strategy while they do all of that. And again, if after school went under, which luckily we didn't, it would have only cost me a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. But I would have wasted months and months of time doing my own bookkeeping, responding to every single email. So you have to understand the opportunity cost is huge and the cost of hiring too early is relatively small. And I think the other thing that people have to understand is there's three different levels of people you can hire. You've got the followers, you've got the doers, and you've got the experts. So followers think non us five to ten bucks an hour. They're there to follow your systems, your processes. The doers are graphic designers, video editors. You're not teaching a graphic designer how to be a graphic designer. But they're not Consulting with you either they're there to do that one thing at a high, high level. And then you got the experts, the high level agencies, freelancers, they bring their own strategy to the table, their own systems, their own processes. And understanding what you really need before the right time to hire, or I should say as well as the right time to hire is equally as important. Because you might have systems in your business that you need the followers for, but at the same time you don't want to hire the followers and say, oh, I don't know how to run Facebook ads, go run my Facebook ads for five bucks an hour. That's not going to work out too well for you. And just like you don't want to spend top dollar on an expert and say, oh, you've had success your way, but I'm going to train you how to do it my way. So understanding what you need, the followers, the doers and the experts for and how to work with each one is just as important as the timing. Because you can hire people project based, flexible schedule, full time, you have all the flexibility in the world. You just have to understand which level you really need at this particular moment.

Exactly. And determine exactly what you want each hire to do. Right. A lot of people are not organized that way and I'm sure that's a big part of outsourced school. Hey, and we're going to get to that. But I want to add something interesting. I have a curious question. Why specifically hire in the Philippines?

Yeah. So two trains of thought here. One, I personally had a great experience hiring from the Philippines. I've been doing it for years. They speak English well. They speak English at a very high level. They learn it in school, which is great for someone like me that doesn't speak other languages very well. They for the most part care a lot about family. They care a lot about community, which might not seem like a big deal, but when you're building a team and you want to reduce turnover and you want to keep people around, you want to hire people that care about family. On top of that, they're used to working US hours. Some of the most popular jobs in the Philippines are call centers and U.S. companies. So it doesn't mean you have to force every VA to work 9 to 5. But you having some kind of overlap with US hours is pretty normal or UK hours or wherever you're from. They're used to working flexible times and it's not that hard to beat it. Price point. So minimum wage, $12 a day in the Philippines, we pay our VAs very well, at the very least five bucks an hour. But we had VAs that free up that were making over 20 bucks an hour. And we took $500,000 from our sale and we gave it to our internal team in the Philippines. So you don't have to low ball people and not pay them well, but it's just not that hard to give them a better opportunity than they already have around you. Plus they love working from home because traffic is bad. Think everyone during COVID likes working from home, but there's a lot of factors there. The second train of thought is, and I learned this the hard way, when you're hiring people from lots of different cultures, there's a cultural shift that you're going to have to make as a business owner. And if you go out and you hire two people from the Philippines and two people from India and two people from South Africa, even if all of them are rock stars, you're adding a lot of extra work to your plate trying to learn and adjust to all these different cultures at the same time. So no matter what you do, start with one place. And if you're going to pick one place, the Philippines is a fantastic place to start.

Wow, that's really good advice. We have employees now from the Philippines, but we also have them all over the world. It is really crazy because there are so many different cultures and we're trying to bring them together into our culture as a company. It is really fascinating, but it's been a great experience, especially with the Philippines. What are some common mistakes that you see people make when they're first outsourcing?

So whenever someone comes to me and says, hey, I've had these issues with the virtual assistant or VAs that just have never worked out for me. My first two questions I always ask them is how did you onboard them and what types of meetings are you having with them and with meetings, because I want to talk about onboarding more because to me that's the part that everyone messes up. But a short summary of meetings is have a Monday morning meeting with everyone. Have a team meeting each week with the customer service team, the social media team, whatever teams you have, and have a one on one meeting with virtual with your VAs, or it could be the team leader doing it, your project manager, whatever, some kind of performance, one on one meeting each quarter. And if you have those meetings, you'll keep people engaged, you'll know what's going on, you'll have stronger communication, there's a lot of benefits and I Can talk about that more. But the biggest mistake is really the onboarding, because this is what happens. There's four parts of hiring. There's interviewing, onboarding, training, and managing. And most entrepreneurs know that you need to interview someone, that you need to train someone, that you need to manage someone. But most people forget to onboard them. And I'll give you an example. Let's say that you interview Jane. Jane has a great interview. You want to hire Jane at five bucks an hour. The average entrepreneur goes to Jane and says, hey, Jane, that was a great interview. You're hired at five bucks an hour. Let's start on Monday. What we teach our members to do is what we call our sick method, which is S, I, C C, and that stands for schedule, issues, communication, and culture. And before, before we hire Jane, we're going to say, hey, Jane, that was a great interview. We want to hire you at five bucks an hour. First, before we do anything, let's make sure you're really good with five bucks an hour. Because who knows, maybe her other client just gave her a raise. Maybe they got. She got another job offer in the past 24 hours. Let's make sure she's good with that, and let's make sure she's good with whatever my bonus and raise program is. Because if she's expecting to make 10 by next year and I only give a dollar raise every year, that's not going to blow up on me now, but that's going to blow up on me in a year. So I want to get on the same page with money up front. Then if we're on the same page and she's happy and I only want to hire if she's happy with the pay, then we're going to go through the sick method. We're going to talk about schedule and what other clients she has and how many hours she's working and the time zone and whether that's an issue. We're going to go over the types of issues that people have with virtual assistants, which is weather, computer, personal power, Internet. And we're going to make sure that they have a backup plan for each issue and that they know they're going to be able to communicate if that issue happens. Because we don't work with VAs that are one issue away from not be able to work for three weeks at a time. And then we're going to go through communication, what channels we use, what's expected. Do they have to be on slack every day? Do they have to respond to emails within a business day? Make sure they're on the same page. And then we go through culture and we make it clear that we don't work with anyone if they're not a good culture fit. So this is a 20 to 30 minute conversation. It's not a four hour conversation. You're going to go over the rate, the bonuses, raises, schedule issue, communication, culture, and then you give the virtual assistant a chance to back out. Because I would much rather the virtual assistant says, you know what, your expectations are too high. They're not in line. I don't want this job anymore, whatever it is. And that's happened to me plenty of times. But that saves me so much time down the line because they're going to figure it out eventually. I'd rather that they figure it out up front. And when you set those expectations up front, you're going to avoid 99% of the issues down the line.

Absolutely. It makes everything transparent. They know what they're getting into and then you get a commitment.

Right, Right, exactly.

So I'm thinking about the people who are listening and watching our show. Many of them, they're still the solo entrepreneur. They want to build a team. They're scared. How do they even decide what to first start taking off their own plate?

Yeah. And for those of you listening that are the sole entrepreneurs that are scared, I want to kind of flip it a little bit because I had a 35 person team at free up before we sold it all full time. I didn't wake up one day and hire 35 full time people. That's not how it went. I started off small and I built up from there. And instead of focusing on hiring full time, focus on how do I get five hours a week back. What would you do with an extra five hours every single week? And if you do that, then math out, that's going to cost you around $1,300 a year. You're going to get about 260 hours back a year. That's six and a half weeks of your time back. Is six and a half weeks of YOUR time worth $1300? For the most part it is. So money's not really a factor there. Five hours a week is the goal. It's going to become fun, it's going to become addicting. You can build up from there, you can hire full time people later, increase their hours, whatever, but focus on five hours a week. So make a list of all the tasks that you do on a day to day, week to week basis that you have an actual system and process for you Know how to do it. You do the same thing every single week and take the easiest tasks. And that's what you're hiring the virtual assistant for. How do you fill up five hours a week of a virtual assistant's time with your most easiest tasks? And that's your starting point.

Wow, that's great advice. Because a lot of entrepreneurs, they're so worried about spending that money and they don't even take into account what their time is worth.

Right.

That's the crazy part. And they don't realize how much leverage this actually gives you. Like in our case, I noticed every time we started hiring people, our business grew, we got more customers, and it sort of felt like it was backwards, that it should have been the other way around. You get more customers, you hire help, but it's actually the opposite, right?

Yeah. And that's kind of the fun part for me and what we're teaching a lot of people at outsource school, it's like, listen, you know, you need to learn the fundamentals because you have to learn how to hire if you want to succeed in business, you have to learn how to hire. You're going to really hurt yourself if you don't. So learn the fundamentals. We'll give you our systems, we'll give you our processes, then get yourself out of as much operations as possible. You don't have to outsource your entire business on day one, but start getting your hours back out of the stuff you shouldn't be doing, which is the repetitive task. And focus more towards strategy, marketing, expansion. But then the fun begins because you can actually hire virtual assistants and to help you on the sales, the marketing and the expansion side. So we have playbooks for how to get on podcasts with virtual assistants, how to do lead generation with virtual assistants, how to run partnership programs, which you did a great job of at free up, all run by virtual assistants. How to get influencers to promote you by having the virtual assistants do all the research. So some of the stuff, the virtual assistant does 100% of the work, sometimes you do 10%. I show up to the podcast, but my VA does the research, pitch the host, books the meeting, sends the follow up email, I just show up. So that's that. I wouldn't recommend starting off that way, but you can get to a point where your VAs are not only running day to day operations, they're not only an expense to your business, but they're actually helping you grow your business as well. And if you have US employees, which I know you do. And some US, some listeners are they can compliment all your US employees. Because if you're paying someone $60,000 a year, you want to make sure that they're spending as much time as possible doing $60,000 a year tasks. So give your US employees an assistant. Have three assistants that anyone can go to whenever it's a small task. There's a lot of creative ways to really optimize your business to make sure you're getting your money's worth out of every single person.

What are some of the amazing things that people could do with VAs? Give us a whole list of crazy things we might not have thought of.

Yeah, so you've got your standard operations. So you got like bookkeeping, customer service. We have formulas for, uh, having a VA run your inbox, having a VA design, or you design your ideal day, but having a VA structure it and book all your meetings. Like, I do one podcast every single day. My VA books all of it. They make sure I do one podcast a day that I don't have meetings between 7 and 9am so handling all of your calendar, on the marketing side, stuff like lead generation, podcasts, partnerships, LinkedIn, outreach, every social media channel out there, uh, let's see. I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of the playbooks that we just have for front and center.

And there are people with experience in all these things, right?

Yeah, absolutely, there definitely is. I mean, even stuff like that's more on the creative side. So we have a graphic design playbook, we have a video editor playbook. This is all stuff that we're currently using with our graphic design and video editing team. And it just keeps everything super structured without the guesswork where, hey, step one, step two, step three. And this is how you implement in your business. And it's just designed to be very actionable.

Amazing. Now, I believe culture is really important at company. How do you build a company culture when you're working with so many people remotely?

Yeah. So for us, it's a combination of the small things and the big things. So one of the big things we do is we have a culture meeting once every month. And that meeting is designed, not really talk work. It's really to build that family and to give people an opportunity to contribute to the culture and, and also to explain our values. Because it's very easy to be like, hey, guys, this is what we stand for. Do it because we said so. It's much better to have a conversation being like, hey, here are some of the failures that Connor, my business Partner and I had in the past. This is what happened with our other businesses. Here's what we've learned. Here's why these things are part of our culture. Hey, here's what it would look like if these things weren't a part of our culture and get them to actually own it and believe into it and get to know each other at the same time. Then there's smaller things that you do to build relationships day to day. And we do stuff like at the beginning, our Monday morning all hands on deck meeting. First 10 minutes of the meeting, everyone shares a picture of their weekend. Takes five, ten minutes. People laugh, People share funny photos. Bill's engagement gets us a really good head start to the week. So you can incorporate small things like that over the course of time. You can do happy hours. You could have meetings that aren't just about work. You can reach out and ask someone about their family or encourage other people to. There's so many ways to go about it, but culture comes down to three things. It comes down to figuring out what your culture is, having a process to interview people and find people that are already a culture fit, because it's a lot harder to turn someone who's not a fit into a fit. Find people that already are, and then you have to focus on maintaining it over time. So figure out what it is. Find people that fit it and do activities like those meetings to maintain it over time. And that's how you continue to have a great remote culture.

Very awesome. I want to know, what are some other key lessons you've learned from your entrepreneurial journey?

Oh, man, so many. So for me, I don't want to have a team, and you're probably at. I know you're at this point, but you don't want to have 35 virtual assistants that all report to Nathan Hirsch. Like, that's too crazy. That doesn't go over well. So for me, it's important that you put team leaders in place, but you also don't want to wake up one day and say, oh, my God, I need a team leader. Who should a team leader be? And hiring externally for team leader positions, not impossible, just harder than promoting internally. I think that's a fair statement. You have to hire someone that doesn't know your business. You have to spend time teaching them your business before you even know if they're a good leader. And then you have to find a way to say, oh, by the way, you guys who have worked here for longer, this guy is now in charge of you. Not impossible. Just Very, very hard to do. It's a lot better to promote internally. So a much better way to go about this. And I'm actually building a playbook on this right now. So it's like fresh in my head. So give your virtual assistant ownership of their tasks, ownership of the SOPs that you create. And SOPs are a big part of hiring standard operating procedures. And have them prove to you that they can own the SOPs, that they can find mistakes, that they can improve it over time, that they can bring ideas to the table. They that if you give them feedback or that you give them a change, they'll go and update it. And then when you go and you need a team leader, the people who have taken the best ownership of their tasks, of the SOPs, then you go to them, you don't force them to be team leaders, but you at least have the conversation, hey, you have shown potential. This is what a team leader role looks like. This is the additional pay, this is the additional responsibilities. Is this something you've done before? Is this something you're interested in? And that's how we promoted some of the best team leaders at Free Up. We have an awesome one now at Outsource school as we grow it. And it's all been promoting within, following that same pattern of giving them ownership, having them prove themselves, having a conversation with them.

Awesome. Hey, I think our listeners could probably benefit by more explanation of how to create SOPs. Can you dive deeper into that?

Yeah, and this is why I'm super excited. So Outsource school is really held together by our software called Simply sop. It's the same developer that built the Free up marketplace. We really cool tool for creating and updating and sharing SOPs with your virtual teams, with your clients. And all of our stuff, all of our playbooks is in Simply SOP as well. And we also let people share sops. So sops are standard operating procedures. They are the systems that you want to own in your business. You hear so many entrepreneurs who say, oh, I don't want, I don't want to deal with customer service. I'm just going to hire an agency to handle my customer service team. But you don't, they don't realize that how risky that really makes your business. That customer service agency has all the leverage in the world. They can increase prices, they can drop you, you want to own the systems and processes in your business. And when you go to sell your business like we just sold free up, if we didn't own our systems, if we didn't know how every single part of the business worked. We're not selling our company. So systems are important for scaling, they're important for leverage, and they are important for selling your business. And the way that we teach people, and we have an SOP playbook as well, how to create SOPs is break it down into the why, the steps, and the important reminders. So many people get caught up on just the steps, but the why and the important reminders are so key. So for the why, we tell people why we're doing this task. We want them to really understand it. We tell them what success looks like, what failure looks like. If the past VA didn't work out, I'll put in the sop. Hey, the last hire didn't work out because of XYZ reason. So before they've even gotten to the steps, they understand the big picture, the why, the long term vision, they understand what success and failure looks like. Then we go through the steps. And videos are better than text. Having both is fantastic too. But the issue with video is they get outdated very quickly. All startup sops do. And, and then you have to hire a video editor or you have to refilm the whole thing. And that's what's cool about our tool, is you can actually just sub in and out steps very easily, saving you time. So try to keep your steps in video and text format. Everyone learns a little bit differently and keep them updated over time and then the important reminders. Because what a lot of people do is they'll take the most important stuff and they'll just hide it like step 10 part C. And then the virtual assistant is going to miss it. One day you're, you're going to get frustrated, you're going to get pissed off, you're not going to trust virtual assistants anymore. Take all the important stuff, put it last and the important reminders and say, hey, I have a VA that's running my inbox. If my lawyer emails me, if my account emails me, don't respond to those emails. Important reminder at the bottom. And if you build out all your SOPs with the why, the steps and the important reminders, your success rate hiring people is going to skyrocket. And that's exactly how we built our SOPs at Freeop that allowed us to become sellable.

Wow, that's so cool. I want to go to outsource school. Hey, how can people learn more about outsourced school?

Yeah, go to outsourceschool.cominsider. you can actually grab a free trial of our Membership, which is called Outsourcechool Insider. You get our hiring process, you get our SOPs, you get access to other people's SOPs, free access to our software, our community, our support. It's there no matter what level of entrepreneur you are, whether you've Never hired a VA before or or you're looking for the best SOPs to take your virtual team to the next level. You can book a call with us right on the website and feel free to follow App Store School or me. Nathan Hirsch on social media, we put out a ton of content.

Amazing. And I don't know if you guys out there realize this is gold. This is what really, really grows a business. And this sounds like it's all right there at your fingertips if you visit this link. Hey, I want to go into the rapid fire round of questions now. Okay. Are you ready?

Let's do it.

What we do is you're going to answer with the first thing that pops into your head. Okay? Okay. If you could go back in time, what do you know now that you wish you knew when you first started?

I wish I learned how to code, man. I feel like entrepreneurs that learn how to code just have such a competitive advantage. I think also think every entrepreneur spends their first like five few years working with developers, just not being very productive, not getting a lot done. And if I could go back in time, I would have taken a lot of coding courses.

Ah. What drives and motivates you?

For me, it's all about helping other people. Like I love helping entrepreneurs and I also love helping virtual assistants and freelancers. So it's one of the reasons why I wanted to stay in this space. Hopefully even though leaving Freeop because there's so many people that have just spent years struggling with the same stuff that I spent years struggling on if I can help them while at the same time benefiting people in third world countries who right now or if you think Covid is bad in the us, imagine what Covid is like in the Philippines. So creating these win wins for great work from home opportunities with businesses that need that help is really rewarding.

Is there a book that's changed your life?

There is. I usually say start with why is one that did. Because it really made me realize that I was not interested at all in selling baby products and I wasn't helping anyone in any in any way. But right now I'm actually reading Zig Ziglier's books on selling, which I always find fascinating. Human psychology I am always fascinated by. So just learning and I'M never going to be like a hard seller. That's not really my style. But understanding what's going through people's minds on the back end is fascinating.

Awesome. What does business ownership mean to you?

To me, it's rising the top with other people. We're a big proponent. One of the saddest things about selling Free up was saying goodbye to our team because we had started a lot of those people there at three bucks an hour, and we had never sold anything at free up. And by the time we sold it, some were making 20, they were making bonuses. We wanted to make sure their jobs are secure and they got a large bonus and all that. But that's because it wasn't just Connor and I up here and everyone else down here. We want people to grow the same way. And it's almost like you work for your team at some point, at some level, and really helping everyone grow together and get better together. Like, to me, that's what being an entrepreneur and a business owner is all about.

Absolutely. What's your definition of success?

So my definition of success is flexibility and freedom, being able to do anything you want, whenever you want. And that's kind of how I. That was why I became an entrepreneur. That's why I love being an entrepreneur now. And to me, I don't care how much money I have, if I have to work 9 to 5 every single day or be in a specific location, like, that's not success to me.

Awesome. And what's your advice to anyone who's at ground zero just starting out with their business?

We're in the golden age of trial and error. It has never cost less to just try different things. Throw stuff against the wall, see what works. With your business, you can grow. I started three businesses now with less than $5,000. When we started Free up, we had no idea how to market. We didn't know what SEO was, We didn't know what organic marketing was, and we just used virtual assistants. We did work ourselves and just kept trying every little thing and everything that worked. We would double down on everything that didn't work. We'd pull back on small investments that are low risk, high reward. Keep doing those until you gain some traction.

Awesome. Nathan, I really appreciate your time today. This has been amazing. Please tell everyone again, where can they get more information about outsourced school?

Yeah, thanks for having me. Go to outsourceschool.com. all the resources are there. You can check out our software Simply sop, You can check out our insider program. You can check out all our different playbooks, formulas, all that stuff, and feel free to follow me.

Nathan Hirsch Awesome. I'm going to head there right after this interview. Thank you again for your time today. You're so awesome. And you guys watching. I hope this was inspiring. And if you know somebody with a business who needs this advice, please share this podcast with them. And if you're out there trying to launch or grow your credit repair business, be sure to click below to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes and leave a comment or a question and I will answer them and I will see you on the next episode. And until then, keep changing lives. Hey everybody, it's Daniel again, and really quick.

I'd like to invite you to join what I believe is the best thing we have ever created inside the credit repair cloud community. And it is a challenge that we call the Credit Hero Challenge. If you're just planning out your business or you're just getting it started and you dream of having a successful business of your own so you can quit your 9 to 5 and fire your boss and have financial freedom, or so you can add another revenue stream to your existing business, if that's your dream, you need to get into this challenge. We created this challenge to help you to create and launch your very own credit repair business to build a proper foundation for a really successful business. This challenge is going to help you to understand the strategy, the tactics, and all the things you need to be successful at credit repair. It really is the greatest thing we have ever built and it will change your life. So I recommend you do it right now. So stop everything, pause this audio, go online and go to creditherochallenge.com that's creditherochallenge.com and join the next challenge. And there's a challenge that's starting in just a few days. So go get started right now@creditherochallenge.com.