How FreeeUp Gives You An Easier & More Efficient Way To Outsource Featuring Nathan Hirsch

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, welcome back to Bacon Wrap Business. This is Brad Costanzo and today we're going to talk to an expert on the topic of delegation and outsourcing and specifically his platform for helping entrepreneurs get more done in less time with better quality workers. Now, if you're anything like me, the concept of outsourcing is not new to you. And the idea that you can use overseas virtual assistants for everything from general admin and data entry to really highly skilled marketing and technical tasks should not be new. I know I discovered this when I first read the book like 10 years ago, the four hour workweek and it was new to me back then. And since then, a lot of the entrepreneurs that I talk to and work with, I mean virtual assistants and.

Outsourced workforce is a very big part of the way that small businesses get the leverage to grow and become big businesses. Because if we all had to hire labor at full price, full time employees, it would just be too burdensome on a lot of small entrepreneurs. That being said, I brought Nathan Hirsch on the call today and Nathan is a serial entrepreneur. He's an expert in remote hiring and E commerce and he started his first e commerce business out of his college dorm room and sold over $30 million online. And he's now the co founder and CEO of FreeUp.com and that's free with three E's f r e e e up.com that'll be in the show notes a little link and it's a marketplace that connects businesses with pre vetted freelancers in E commerce, digital marketing and much more. And he regularly appears on podcasts such as Entrepreneur and Fire My Friend, John Lee Dumas and obviously now this one. And we're going to dive in deep about some questions that I want to have because I'm always looking for good resources to bring in new team members at all levels. Nathan, welcome to the show.

Brad, thanks so much for having me. I'm pumped to be here.

Yeah, I'm pumped to hear a little bit more about your story and about free up and how this came to be. As I mentioned that I think most people understand that you can outsource. You can go overseas. You can go to India and Philippines and China and like anywhere in the world and get people to work for, you know, tap into the skill sets of a global workforce. So I don't think we need to convince anybody there that that's something they need to do. One of the first questions I want to get to though is kind of like, what makes Freeup different? And what kind of gap in the marketplace did you fill? And why, you know, why should somebody choose to use your service versus some of the other ones out there? But before I dive in, I have you dive into answering those questions. I'm just kind of setting it up. I do want to dive back into your bio a little bit here and understand a little bit more about your experience as an entrepreneur in an E comm business and what you are doing, because that's really fascinating. So take me back to your college dorm room and the E comm business you started. What was that?

Yeah, so I started off as a broke college kid and my parents were both teachers. So I always had the mentality that I was going to go out and get good grades in high school, good grades in college, get maybe an internship, a job and work for 30, 40 years, retire. And I always kind of rebelled against that principle. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to be my own boss. I wanted to be in control. But I didn't know what that was going to be. And being in college, you have that opportunity to try different things and see what works and what doesn't work. So I started off buying and selling textbooks because I noticed a school bookstore was ripping me off. Classic story. And I started to find these online websites. I would give people more cash than the bookstore and hold onto them for an extra semester and sell them at the beginning of the next semester. Before I knew it, I had lines out the door of people trying to sell me their books. I did a pretty good job marketing it to the point where I actually got a cease and desist letter from the school telling me to knock it off because I was taking up so much of their business. So that was my first real entrepreneurial experience, first success from selling books. I learned about Amazon because you don't sell books very long without learning about Amazon. And I became addicted to it. This was back in 2008, 2009. So Amazon was mostly a bookstore. They were just getting into other products. And I was committed to becoming an Amazon seller. And I tried everything. I tried selling cool products like sporting equipment and DVDs and computer games. Stuff I actually used. And I failed over and over and over. The only thing I could sell was books. So one day I was coming across this deal site and I found a deal of this baby product. It was a toy laptop, but it was for babies. And I had the idea of drop shipping it. And I actually didn't find out it was called drop shipping until two years later. But the idea that I could sell something I didn't have from these people that specialized in making products. So I sold that product and I ended up selling five or 10 in one day. And I saw this was awesome. And I just went at it. I was listing products 10 hours a day. I was sitting in the back of class listing products.

And before I knew it, I was running a million dollar Amazon business out of my college dorm room selling baby products as a single college guy.

That's great.

I was kind of thrown into it. I had no idea.

What was going on. E commerce was new. No one knew what I was doing. Everyone thought I was running a scam. There was no such thing as Amazon sellers. There are no courses or gurus like there are today. And so I'm selling these products and I go through my first busy season and I get destroyed. I get crushed orders, emails, pricing issues. I'm working 20 hours a day, I'm rushing a fraternity, I'm balancing college and I finally make it out alive on the other end. I was like, okay, I need to start hiring people. So I was really thrown into that hiring world early and I made some great hires, like my business partner Connor, who still works with me for eight years. But I made some awful hires, people that cost me time and money. Eventually I learned about the remote workforce and the upworks, the fiverrs online jobs. And I started hiring a VA army. I called it much very similar to the four hour work week. I wanted my assistants to have assistants just to do everything so that I could just focus on expansion. And I became so addicted to it that all my time went from expanding the company to just doing interviews all day. You know how long it takes to go through 100 applicants and interview them and give them tests and set expectations. And one day I was sitting in my office and I threw something at the wall because I just done eight hours of interviews and it was driving me nuts. And I thought there just had to be a better way to get access to talent. I didn't want to vet the interview these people anymore, even though I come up with a pretty good vetting process over the years and that's when I came up with the idea of free up a marketplace where we get hundreds of applicants every week. We vet them not only for skill, but for attitude and communication. Take the top 1%, make them available rapid fire to clients all around the world, and then on the back end, have great customer service and a no turnover guarantee covering replacement costs if they ever quit. So that's how I went from a broke college kid to starting two businesses.

Love it. Okay, so let's dive deeper into the, you know, to the gap you, you filled. And it's a little obvious to me because I know that like, I've got a lot of experience with like two of you mentioned upwork and fiverr and I've, and I've, I have sourced assistance from other places as well, but those are the two that I, you know, upwork used to be odesk and whatnot. And you're right, like one of the biggest pains is, is kind of like the filtering process. You can find people really quickly sometimes if you're lucky, but oftentimes you go through a big old painful filtering and reading all these, you know, qualifications and whatnot. Then you talk to somebody and you get them and they just drop the ball. And I hate that. And it's actually caused me a lot of grief because I hate it so much. I end up not outsourcing stuff that I should outsource because I don't want to go through that pain.

Exactly.

So with yours, walk me through the client, like a client side, like if I want to be a hirer, what makes this a little like more specifically, what makes this different? I go in, I sign up, create my account, which I did the other day actually.

Just to kind of test this out. What is it you're doing that like the upworks and the fibers aren't doing? More specifically?

Yeah, so a lot of it factors around time. I mean, no one wants to interview two weeks worth of applicants to get a two hour graphic design project done. It doesn't make a lot of sense. So most people end up going to some old designer they don't like or skipping the project or doing it themselves, whatever it is, or they go through the process and waste a lot of time with us. You create a client account, it's free. There's no monthly fee, there's no minimums. You can end the agreement at any time. Once you have a client account, anytime you need a freelancer, whether it's a Facebook ad expert in the US a customer service rep in the Philippines, you click request a worker Inside your account, answer the eight questions that are there so we know exactly what you want. And then you sit back and you get back to work. And within a business day, usually faster, we have clients that start working with people within hours or minutes. We introduce you to one to three people. You can meet them, interview them for 10 minutes. You know that we've already vetted them. You can either click hire and get started right away or click pass and provide us feedback. And we'll take that feedback and get you some other options. So the process is incredibly fast and it takes very little time on the client side.

Okay, excellent. So you guys have, when you guys are vetting the people.

They are, you're not vetting that. You've already kind of pre vetted them. Like, if I'm coming in here, I need a web designer or a WordPress expert or something like that. These are people who've kind of already. You've searched out, recruited or they've applied and you vet them. You don't have to go, you don't have to wait until I make the request and then go do all the recruiting. Or do you.

Correct. We're not a recruitment service. You don't tell us what you need and we go find it. We already have these. You've got to stay ready to go.

Okay, excellent. And then I guess you guys probably have different tests and different ways that you screen to make sure that these people kind of can come on. Now when, when we're paying, like, what is it, what does it cost to, to use your services? I know, like some of the ones are like, oh, they take 10% from the freelancer.

Right.

Or so like, how does the pricing work with free up?

Yeah. So if we tell you Bob is 10 bucks an hour, you pay 10 bucks an hour, nothing else. So our billing periods are Wednesday to Tuesday. We charge you every Thursday, he works two hours, you get charged 20 bucks. And then we pay in the following Thursday. We take 15% with the $2 minimum on every hour worked.

Okay, cool. So the freelancer just gets, if I'm Pay, I'm paying 10, but he's getting like eight and a half.

It would be the $2 minimum, so eight, but yes.

Oh, cool. Gotcha. Perfect. Okay, now are there any specific.

I mean, from looking on your site and from talking to you, et cetera, it sounds like you guys have a lot of the skill sets kind of covered. Are there any specific skill sets that you found that you guys are particularly adept at? And really, really good because some, like anything there's you got 65 skills here. Some are you going to have better.

Stable than others?

Yeah. So we have clients that use all the skills. What ends up happening is we have more skill, we have more people for more skills than others. And that's because we started off as more of an Amazon marketplace. It was fairly easy to say, hey, I'm an Amazon seller, I've sold a lot. I have this Rolodex of freelancers come use them and people love the service and they started telling people in their e commerce community. So all of a sudden we start getting Shopify requests and ebay requests and we fill those and people love that and then they tell their real estate agent friends and their digital marketing agencies and their software companies. So we have more Amazon more e commerce people than let's say web developers. But I would still say that the web developers are incredibly high quality and they do a great job for the clients that we give them.

That's great. Do you have a concentration more so in certain countries like Philippines, India, et cetera than others or.

Is it kind of just spread out pretty globally?

Yeah, it's a great question. We're about 40% US, 40% Philippines and 20% scattered around the world. It's not necessarily by design, although I love working with people from the Philippines. I was actually just there a month ago. But they tend to do a way better job in our vetting process for whatever reason.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I actually like, you know, the area that I'm trying to in my business become more proficient at is working with. And I recently hired her like one kind of overall project manager who's us based here in San Diego where I live. And having her interface with a lot of the people because to a degree I like working with, you know, like the overseas like the Filipinos have always been a great resource for me except it drives me crazy to have to communicate all the little micro details of the projects to them. So I'm always looking for, you know, a way to kind of like put one more layer or one more buffer between me and the people doing all the micro work.

Because I do go crazy having to try to explain and spoon feed and it is true like the, you know, the delegations only is, you know, if you put garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. And sometimes I, I give the high level details and I expect people to read my mind.

So yeah, I mean it really depends. I have plenty of us free or non US freelancers that I would put up against any US Freelancer. But I agree there's always going to be some kind of culture difference or something that you assume that they don't assume.

Yep. The. One of the things just for my listeners aspects, one of my former guests who Tim Francis, who has a company called Profit Factory and great assistant and they, I mean they don't do this stuff. They just help you find like an admin assistant and they get them all trained up. But he has a really, he has a really good process called 360 delegation and he's like use this everywhere you are.

You know, every time you're doing. What do you call it? Like delegation is just this process by which you, you map out all of the, you know, the expectations, the resources, what done looks like, etc. It's really been helpful for me when I'm delegating is to.

To utilize a framework that allows you to.

To delegate better because it like I literally am the cause of most of the problems of my, of my delegation issues. I think you go to like, by the way, I'll put this in the show notes but if anybody wants to see it, I think it's like profitfactory.com360 delegation and it's just a great way to tell people how to delegate better so they can get a better experience. What about.

What like on the. Are there any skill sets? One of the questions was that.

Are.

There any particular that you're better at than others? Your skill areas? What do you find most people using you for? Is it in the E Comm space? Is it in general admin stuff? Is it kind of a soup to nuts? Overall marketing strategy or web design? Is there anything in particular that you're finding that people are using you more?

It's such a tough question to answer. You never really know what you're going to wake up to. We get these worker requests every day and there might be a day where it's all Amazon on or it's all bookkeepers. Like right now, before tax season.

When Facebook ads became really, really hit or really popular year and a half, two years ago, all of a sudden that's all anyone was requesting. And now you're seeing other stuff like Pinterest. So it's kind of cool. You kind of read stuff in the news and then it kind of resembles in the worker request but you never really know what's going to come in. And I mean you might have clients that are doing $100 million a year, you might have people that are just getting off the ground and everything in between. It and everyone needs something different, whether it a low level person that they can follow the systems and processes, mid level person that's more specialized that does the same thing eight hours a day, or that expert to come in and consult or project manager or audit a business and execute a high level game plan.

Nice. So if I go in and I put up.

A job posting for WordPress expert, for instance, am I only going to get certain, like a certain number of applicants or like three, or am I going to get 30? Or how does that work?

So most people come to us because they don't want us to send them 30 applicants. And so we usually send one to two per ticket. If it's very specific and we think we have a fit, we'll send one. If you mark a very vague price range, let's say you say 10 to $50 an hour, we might send you one at 15 and one at 50. But we'll also honor your request. If you say, hey, I want to meet five people, we'll send you five people.

So you guys are an extra layer, which as I mentioned is very valuable. It's not like it just gets posted to a general board and every freelancer who's out there can all go apply at once.

They can all go apply at once. We do post it on a board just for efficiency so people can see it, but we also send them to different people that we know from our network. And then based on who responds, we send the top one to two people for that particular worker request.

Love that. So yeah, as I mentioned, that's like having those extra layers in between, you know, to take out some of the, some of the wasted time and energy is really cool. Let me, let me shift gears and instead of just asking you about your stuff, let me ask you about how you're growing your business. What's been like, when did you set Free Up Up? Like when did you start up Free Up?

So we started Free up. This is year three. And what's cool is we bootstrapped the entire thing. We started at $1,000 in a bank account. We didn't even use that because the business is very cash flow positive. We get paid from the client more than before. We pay the freelancer. And so we've grown this really all organically. And the best ways is our referral program. Any clients that come to us through Referral, they get 50 cents for every hour we bill forever. And last year we paid out over $150,000 in referral money. So that's been huge. People tell Other people, they tell communities, we partner with influencers and do webinars. And they like it because we make them look really good. Their clients or their community get access to fast talent. Their businesses grow. They obviously get the kickback too, which is nice. And then we also go on podcasts, we do blog swaps. We've really grown the entire thing organically. We spend a few thousand dollars a month on Facebook ads. Nothing crazy, but everything else is through referrals, through partnerships, through affiliates, all that stuff. So that's kind of what makes me excited, is there's a lot more potential, there's a lot more opportunity there. And right now we're really concentrating on different marketing efforts, whether it's LinkedIn or Google, trying to figure out, doing some trial and error, figuring out what the best ROI is. It could be going to conferences, which we started to do more and more. There's a lot of different things that we have to play with. Right.

Has there been any one thing that's been. Is the referral program been the most effective?

I would say the referral program has because there's no real upfront cost and the ROI is always positive, and it's just taken off to another level.

Nice.

Have there been any big obstacles, kind of in your way that were unforeseen when you started it? Like crap. This part's harder than I thought it would be when it comes to growing your business, not managing the operations.

No, definitely. So in a marketplace, there's three parts, right? You got finding clients, fighting freelancers, and then you have the software that holds it all together. And I think the first year of the company, I viewed us as a marketplace, a service provider. I didn't really view us as a software company, but I realized that that's so important. And as the client side grew and the freelancer side grew, all of a sudden you have all these people that love the service, but they're really let down by the software every time they use it, because the software isn't getting pulled up as fast as the other two things. So that took a refocus to look at ourselves. Okay, the software has to come first. We can't compete with the UpWorks and their software budget, obviously, but we can invest more and more into our software. So we just spent six months investing heavily into it. We just launched a new ui, a new payment system, two Sundays ago, and we've seen a really positive response, and we've seen more worker requests, more client retention. So it just kind of. It was that lesson that we learned that, hey, we have to keep the software up to par as we get bigger and bigger. Especially if you want to keep attracting bigger high end clients that are used to these other marketplaces that look at themselves as software companies. I love it.

What are your. Do you have long term plans that you've seen on this? Is it to grow it to a.

Like, get really efficient, take down some competition, like become the bad boy in the marketplace and then exit or continue to run it for a long time? I mean, have you really kind of thought about that ahead of time or no?

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm a very short term thinking entrepreneur. My business partner Connor is much more long term. Yeah, it's a great combo. I think when we started working together, his head was always in the clouds. What are we going to do in 10 years? And I was always like, we have stuff to do this week. Why are we talking about this? But I've kind of compromised. So I'm looking months ahead, quarters ahead and he's kind of come down, so he's looking a year or so in advance. So I mean we've talked to venture capitalist firms, we've talked about among us. I mean there's always the option of getting bought out by a big company which might not be what we want to do. I don't know. I'm curious to see how.

Until they start waving that big old check.

Exactly. There's always a price. But I mean the gig economy is booming. Within 10 years, over 50% of jobs are going to be remote. So who knows how this industry is going to change. Hold on. I apologize. Can you get him away please?

I don't know either, but can you bring him downstairs?

I got, I got one too. It's the fun part about either working at home.

I mentioned the parents here. My dog's not used to having other people in the house.

It's all good. But yeah, you're right, the gig economy is. I mean it kind of feels like it's. Oh man. It's because a lot of the people in my world either work on gigs or hire people for gigs, but you forget that there is an entire enormous, enormous corporate workforce that is changing quickly into a gig economy. So yeah, I do think this is. These kind of marketplaces are being, you know, it's definitely still in the early stages of adoption, I think.

Yeah, I mean I want to change the way that people hire. When we first started, everyone was like, no, not another VA company. Right. Because there's so many out there. But they all do it the same way. Either they're an agency where they kind of hide everything they're doing and they have a project manager, or they're this marketplace that starts off pretty good but then just becomes this huge free for all. Yep.

You know, one of the things that comes to mind as far as unsolicited advice.

And it's because it's something that I don't know how hard this would be, but I think it would be a pretty unique selling proposition because it's something that I would pay for. Right. Which is if you guys took one more step. You guys may have thought about this before, but as you're starting to hire and look for people and whatnot is to look for those true project managers and people who are super skilled at a, you know, project management and organization, but also recruiting, working with others, managing deliverables, etc. Because there's one thing to just let me hire somebody, but one opportunity I see for you guys is to almost create like in house project managers that people can pay extra for. Like this could almost be an upsell. Or there may be another way to do it to where I come in and let's say I've got a new project that involves web design. Like I need a new WordPress setup encoded, I need, I need design skills, I need some copywriting, I need some articles and you know, whatever.

Right.

Just, you know, because you don't just hire one person to do everything. You usually have to hire like four or five people. If you guys were to create almost a, I don't know, a free up, certified project manager position, it's still totally freelanced. And I know that when I come in I can obviously go in and pay for people who are like, I can go in and hire all those people that I want and that's cool, but I still have to manage them if I don't have my own project manager or I have to go hire a project manager on there and interview them. But if you guys reach out to some of the PM skill sets that you've got and let them know that you might be able to. And I don't know, this is literally coming to me off the top of my head, so feel free to shoot it down. But.

That would be valuable if I knew that I had one point of contact who I could say, hey, this is great. You work inside, free up constantly. So you know it really well. These are the things I want done. And he or she is like, I got you, bro. This is, you know what I'm saying I think that that is something that is unique that I haven't seen anybody else do, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But to almost have like one teed up project manager who knows a lot of the, you know, the ins and outs of your system as well, that could even save the client like myself even more time because I don't have to manage all the little aspects of it.

Yeah, that's a great idea. We do have project managers that people hire that would be taking it to the next level. It's funny how as a business owner. So I'll give you another example, very similar. I love getting feedback from clients because it's always stuff I wouldn't think of. We have that worker request and I spent a lot of time on this to make it as simple as possible. So in my mind I'm thinking, what business owner wouldn't want to fill this out? It's way faster than posting a job on upwork. But I'm getting this feedback from clients. I don't want to fill out a worker request. Some of them are just too busy to even do that. So what we did was we added another assistant to my team, the client client success assistant and what he's there. So if clients want to just Skype him or want to just email him whenever they have a request, he'll fill out the ticket for them. And the feedback we've gotten over the past two weeks since we implemented this has really blown my mind because I didn't even know that that's what people wanted. So hearing stuff like that is great.

Yeah. And it's really similar to what I was just saying. It's like one little extra layer of not having to deal with, with all of the minions, if you would. Right. Like, and in some cases, in some cases I want to deal with them. But yeah, having that, like, I love that. I don't know, it was just one thing that kind of came to my mind where it's like, if I ever know that, hey, this is a. This is person who's kind of teed up for me, who knows how to work within the system, who knows how to hire, who knows how to manage your projects, I don't know where it is, but I was just thinking of different ways that might make me. My ears really perk up. Especially if I'm comparing going to you versus going to an upwork or any of the other, you know, or resources out there. So do you guys have all. Is it just, Is it all pay by the hour? Do you have like project based fees as well? Kind of depends on how you want to do it. Or is it like if I want to spend, like, if I, if I only want to spend like $500 for a project, can I, can I bill like that or does it have to be by the hour?

No, I mean the freelancers are free to offer their services however they want. The defaults hourly, but we have plenty of them that charge fixed prices. Might be an ad person that charges a monthly price. Could be one time. Obviously if it's a huge project and your, your budget's small, I can't force them to take the smaller budget. But, but they're more than welcome to offer their services however they want.

I love it. Well, I think what you've done here is like, I really like your, your UI and you know, the feel of the site. I like a lot of the things that you've done here and I like some of the gaps that you filled which is taken away, you know, the need. Because I mean, I just, just the other day, just the other day I did an upwork listing for something that I needed and I think I got like 60 applicants and I didn't hire any of them. I just, I literally decided because it wasn't a big project, but it was something that I was like, I should probably get this done. And I was like, I would rather not do the project than have to filter through 60 different people looking for the right one. And then do I base it on price? Like, do I go for the cheapest one? Do I go for this? Right? Like, I just decided not to do it because it just clogged up my brain too much. So I like the fact that you kind of simplify.

That's a real problem. That's a real problem that a lot of entrepreneurs have. They don't want to go through those 60 applicants.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the. I really think that kind of using one of the value propositions that you really are simplifying the outsourcing process, which I think is big right now because it's still so cumbersome for a lot of people. And if I'm just giving you a little more unsolicited advice as I'm sitting.

Here, I love it. Keep coming.

And I'm looking at your website like you talk about hire top freelancers to grow your business. You know, we interview and vet hundreds of freelancers each week. Now that's good. That's a unique selling proposition that we interview them.

I might find A way to put more prominence on that. Because that is kind of your unique selling proposition that is going to make me look at you and not lump you in with, I could use free up or I could use upwork, but there's a world of difference, right? It's almost like when you're.

You know, when you're tired. I'm just riffing here. Like when you're tired of.

You know, when you're tired of filtering through dozens or hundreds of unqualified applicants looking for the diamond in the rough, you know, we've already mined the diamonds. Like, that kind of a feel, like, oh, shoot, that's really cool. Like, because that's the pain. And there's two sides to it, right? Which is higher, top freelancers. But, like, I would dig more into the pain and that gap that you're. You're filling in the marketplace. Because truthfully, it is a little bit crowded. There's a lot of resources that people can go to, but if they know that, yeah, that's the pain you're solving, then I think you'll. You'll have a little bit more.

A little bit more success in turning people who are just browsing your site to being like, oh, this is the. This is the one for me.

I love it. We're doing a big website revamp soon, so I'm gonna share that with the people doing it.

Nice. You know, that's one of the things that I see that a lot of people just don't quite focus on enough is the pain that they're solving. And what everybody tends to want to do is talk about the solution that they have, but nobody's. A lot of people are thinking about the solution, but they're really thinking about the pain they're in. Like, they have a project they want to do, and they're like, and every time I have to do this too, it feels like I'm starting from scratch. Like, oh, man, I gotta go hire somebody. Oh, I'm starting from scratch. I gotta just. This is gonna be painful. I know. You know, like, hiring freelancers shouldn't be painful. It should be simple, efficient, affordable, and fast. Right? Like, that's. That's what we help you do. So I don't know. I can't help sometimes. Just give.

No, I love it. I mean, the big. I credit so much of my success with this company, and the last one of just listening to feedback. I meet so many entrepreneurs that they have this big vision of what their business is going to be, and they're not willing to Open up their ears or read what the market's telling them, and I feel like they miss out. And when you create an environment for feedback, whether it's people that you network with or people that are on your team or even freelancers, some of the best ideas that have made me the most money came from people that I hired. And so for me, that's a huge part of me as a business owner.

I love it. Well, I think you're doing a great job. So if people want to go check it out, it's free with three E's. What. Who'd you say owns Free up with two E's? Verizon or somebody.

Verizon owns it. And so.

Yeah, the 30 stands for E Commerce, because that's what it was supposed to be, a VA service for E Commerce, but we've kind of branched out beyond that.

I love that. I love that there's some E Commerce things that I've got. Maybe we can. You and I'll talk a little bit offline here because I may have some stuff that would be interesting.

But, yeah, so free up. Free f r E-E-E-U-P.com that'll be in the show Notes. And I ask everybody this, but what is a particular nut you're trying to crack right now? I understand that one of the biggest nuts you're trying and a nut you're trying to crack could be money you're trying to raise, skills you're trying to learn, people you're trying to meet, getting new customers. And I know that just getting more awareness is probably the biggest nut you're trying to crack. That free up is a solution. But is there anything else particularly challenging or kind of keeping you up? Like, man, if we had an idea or a resource in this space, life would be easier.

Yeah, for us, it's all about communities. When we get in front of a community, when we give them, I mean, we have a lot of content about hiring, about outsourcing, about managing freelancers. They usually love it and they usually have a great experience and their businesses grow. A lot of times there's these gatekeepers in different communities. And I've had people that I spent two years not harassing them, but politely asking them and kind of showing value before they let me in. And there's still others that we want to get through. So that's really our focus is continuing to, yes, get the agencies, get the business owners, get on podcasts, but also continue to get to these communities that have a lot of business owners that in Our opinion, need our help.

I love it. I love it. Well, Nathan, thanks for being a guest on Bacon Wrap Business. This kind of brings us to the, you know, to our time here. But if people want to reach out to you personally, do they do that on the website? Is there any, is there any other thing you want to give them?

Yeah. So I'm very easy to contact. My calendar is right at the top of freeup.com I'd love to meet with you free of charge, talk about your business. Free up how we can help. Check out the free up blog for a lot of great hiring tips and obviously check us out on social media.

Fantastic. Hey to my listeners, anybody who's still, who's still out there, I want to, I'm going to make a plug for myself and something I'm trying to crack. I am actively looking to acquire e commerce businesses and I've done a couple of these last year in the past year and that's one of the reasons I took a break here from podcasting for a couple months and I have got some interesting opportunities. If you are running an e commerce business with ideally a couple of years history, ideally a half a million to about 10 million or so, potentially a little more in top line sales and you are doing okay, but potentially either topping out, struggling, trying to crack a nut you don't know how to crack and think that you might be open to either selling your company or maybe even partnering in a very specific case. Reach out to me@askbradakenwrappedbusiness.com I may want to get in a conversation with you because I've got some very interesting resources and opportunities here that have been going well and I'm looking to work with some more people of that nature. It doesn't really matter what the product is as long as it's not just a just a simple dropship website with no unique qualities. So just although I don't mind drop ship products but as long as there's something that makes it like stable, not just something you threw together and went on Oberlo and you know, threw a bunch of stuff together. That being said, shoot me an email to ask bradbaconratbusiness.com that is my personal email. Follow me on social media. Go check out freeup.com and see if this will work for you. And stay tuned for the next EPA sizzle. Got some good stuff coming up. Until next time. Nathan, thank you very much for being a guest on the show.

Brad, thanks for having me.