Episode #555 - Hustling Benefits: Freedom, Independence and Above Average Income with Nathan Hirsch

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Now talk about the. Let's touch on virtual assistants. And it's undeniable that if you're going to move forward, that you'll either take advantage of this or you're going to be left behind. Your growth is going to be handicapped if you're not taking advantage of virtual assistants. And over the last five, well, since my book went out in 2015, serial winner, I, you know, to market the book and to put courses together and whatever. I've dealt with people in Copenhagen and Bali and, you know, New Mexico City and, you know, all over the world and it's, you know, once you get the relationship going, boom, you're in business because it's a phone call, because you can be in these big corporate monoliths like you could be an Apple headquarters out in Cupertino and never see any of these people that you're working with and they're right in the same compound and so you don't have to see them. Zoom broke down a lot of barriers and made a lot of people aware that these things were possible to operate at a high level without, you know, physical presence. And so talk about how. But, but it, but you do want to be sure who you're working with and not have to waste a lot of time figuring that out. Because I think a lot of people have a couple of bad experiences. It's kind of like rejection. You know, they have a few bad experiences, like, forget the, the virtual assistant, but talk about your experience with that and kind of success stories you've seen with companies.

Yeah, I mean, hiring virtual assistants is a game changer. We live in a day and age where you don't have to hire people in your town or the towns next to you. You don't need an office to go to. Opening up an office was probably one of the worst business decisions I ever made that we quickly got rid of. We were working remote before it was cool to work remote. And we hire a lot of VAs from the Philippines. We focus on skill, attitude, and communication. And we teach our interview and onboarding process at outsource school. If anyone goes to outsourceschool.com you can also grab our virtual assistant calculator there to see how many bas you can afford. And it's all about, like, hiring good people is a game changer. There's very, there's entrepreneurs out there with good ideas that can't grow their business because they can't hire well. And there's entrepreneurs that have mediocre ideas, but they're good because they hire great people. And hiring is the difference between success and failure. It's not something they teach it at a lot of schools when it comes to business. But if you can't hire, you're going to really struggle as an entrepreneur. It's something that we struggled with our first few years as an entrepreneur and when we finally figured it out, it changed everything. It limits the amount of things that I have to focus on as an entrepreneur. I'm good at one to three things and everything else my partner either does or we delegate it out and we have an awesome team. I mean, when we sold Free up, we had a 30 person internal team in the Philippines. No office, no US employees. They were doing everything from sales to customer service to billing to ticket matching. Name it. And it's just a game changer. So check out outsourceschool.com if you're listening. It's what I consider the best hiring process out there.

Now is it your goal to teach other people to do it for themselves or is it your goal just as big to do it? You know, DFY do it for you? What is your the biggest, best use of your time have you found?

We teach you how to hire so you're going to get our interview process, our onboarding process, our training process, our management process that you can plug into your business. We're not finding you a va, we're not recruiting you a va, and we're not necessarily teaching you how to do it yourself. We teach you how to hire great VAs and we give you all of our SOPs, our standard operating procedures that you can plug into your business.

Okay, talk about now let's go to your experience with putting $5,000 up and starting. Was it freeup.com?

Yep.

Yeah, let's talk about putting $5,000 in. And how did that unfold the origami growth of that business?

Yeah, so we had VAs and freelancers from our Amazon business. So it's kind of like what comes first, the chicken or the egg? When you have a marketplace and we were lucky enough that the freelancers and we had before the clients and we used the $5,000 to get a website up to build a minimum viable software that allowed VAs and freelancers to build time and keep track of it. And we hired a few initial VAs for our team and that was it. And from there it was a lot of networking and going on podcasts and building an affiliate program and putting out content and finding partners, people in the e commerce space that would promote us and we promote them. And that's really how we got off the ground. The minimum viable product. And once we got a few, let's.

Talk about that minimum viable product. What exactly was your mission statement? What was your purpose when you started that thing?

Our whole purpose, our whole sales pitch was come to us, it's free to sign up, there's no monthly fees. You tell us what hire you need, whether it's a customer service rep, a graphic designer, writer. You give us a little information, we match you up with someone we've already vetted. You do the billing through our platform, the VAs or the freelancers, they set their rates, you can negotiate with them. We take a percentage of every hour build and we're there. If anything goes wrong, even in the smallest thing goes wrong, come right to us, we'll fix it, we'll make it right. And that was, that was our message. That's how we got off the ground. And, and our goal was to create a great environment for VAs and freelancers to get jobs quickly so they don't have to apply for 50 jobs all the time. We just get them clients they can start with right away. And same thing on the client side. They don't have to interview 100 people. They get someone pre vetted, ready to go, who can start today.

And how did that grow? What were the numbers and the revenue and how did that happen? It happened fast, happened gradually.

We did a million dollars in the first year, 5 million in the second, 9 million in the third, and 12 million in the fourth. When we sold it.

And you decided to sell it, why?

Yeah, so I mean, selling the business is a tough decision. We didn't go into that.

How old were you when you decided to sell?

31.

At what point were you in your life? You said, I'm going to sell this because at a 31 year old, he's got a business that's launching like this. You said, I'm going to take over the world, I'm going to do this, that I got my future in front of me, my best years, I know how to do it. This is a proven need, I'm going to march forward in the future. But no, you spun it off. Now what motivated that?

Yeah, so you got to remember, this is pre Covid. So Covid didn't exist. And we were kind of at the point where we, we didn't think we wanted to sell the company. But one of our clients reached out to us and said, hey, we buy businesses, we don't start them. We want to get into the freelancer space. We love free up. We use free up. We'd be interested in buying it. And we kind of heard them out and they ended up making us a really good offer. And then it was decision time. And there were a lot of factors. One factor was we got this business at 12 million. We'd never gotten a business bigger than that. If we were to get to 25 or 50 million, we would have had to make drastic changes. What gets you to 12 doesn't get you to 25. So once you start making big changes, anything can happen. We could succeed, we could fail. It's uncharted territory. On top of that, the economy was at an all time high again pre Covid. So we thought maybe it was a good time to sell. We also did a lot of due diligence on the buyers and they were great and we have a good relationship to this day. They bought companies, the people they bought companies for in the past. They honored their word. They, they treated people well. They had a history of treating employees and our team well. And we wanted our team and our clients to be taken care of. We negotiated $500,000 from the sale to be given to our internal team in the Philippines. So that was a big part of it. In addition to that, we had been doing it for four years and we knew that we had put our heart and soul into it. And we were also excited at the possibility of doing something else. It was enough to set up financial freedom in both of our families and allow us to get into other companies that we wanted to and be pat and take kind of the pressure and the hustle and the grind away where we wouldn't have to do that anymore for the rest of our life. So a lot of factors and you never really know if you make the right decision until after the fact. But it worked out really well. We got paid every penny. They honored their agreement. Free up's doing great. We were able to start two other companies, Outsource School and Econ Balance. Our team was taken care of. We still use free up. Other clients still use free up and ended up being the right decision for us.

And you use free up for the billing and processing. And that's when, if you want someone to do it for you, I guess that's the DFY piece. Would Be to go to Free up for the billing and things like that. If you don't want to fool with it yourself.

Yeah, we hire people from Free up and we have a good relationship with them. So yeah, absolutely. So we use Free up. We promote Free up and they're nice. They promote us like they promoted econ balance to the Free up list. They didn't have to do that. There's nothing in our group of that.

You must have done something right in setting up Pre up in the sense that when companies come in to buy a lot of times, you know what they want to make sure is the management team is in place. You know that there's a functioning group there that's going to continue to function. It's not pulled, you know, pull the leader out and the whole, you know, it's like a car, you know, card tower and the whole thing comes tumbling down. You had to have some pretty top level manage, pretty good top level management in place so you could be pulled out of the thing from the top. It's one thing. 30 people in the Philippines is another thing to, you know, drive it and grow. How did. So that's a tribute to you, by the way, whether you're aware of it. And so where you could get out, where you could get out. And a company would say, I'm going to buy that thing without Nathan. And obviously it's worked out because it's still going. You still got the good relationship. How did you set that up?

Yeah, I mean it's good people. It comes down to good people and good processes. And when they were going through diligence, we had a process for every little thing. They said, what do you do if this happens? What do you do if this happens? How do you run customer service? How do you run marketing? And we had everything documented. The crazy thing is they didn't meet anyone from our team before the sale. We wouldn't let them meet them. But they knew that we wanted to give that $500,000 to our team. So we obviously like our team a lot if we're willing to do that. So I think that had a, a part of it as well. And yeah, I mean they, they got to see the work being done. They got to see billing period, every single week getting billed, working clients coming in, clients leaving good reviews. And, and they got to kind of see all our processes in action. I think this is where a lot of people go wrong. Like I was the face of Free up but the, like, you can always replace the face of marketing. Like you can Come in with different marketing strategies. Different marketing tactics. What really mattered is that customer service ran without me and matching freelancers ran without me and billing ran without me. That's what they cared about. Every. On the marketing side, you can always change the marketing. It's more about the operations of the business that needed to run without me.

Elaborate on that. I mean, that's a point that people would do well to get really clear on because at some point it's just nice to have an exit strategy, you know really well, I think well, well run companies grow. And part of making your company well run is to make sure all those areas are solid and can function on their own. Because you really only have a business when that business can operate at a high level without you there. And so it's one thing to look at the business as a whole, it's another thing to look at the pieces. And so talk about that, you know, spend a little bit more time on that because I think people could get a lot out of just having those ideas solidified in their mind a little bit more. Because most of us will go to the point of least resistance. You know, whatever the squeaky wheel is that gets the attention. But while you're fixing the squeaky wheel, if you raise your sights a little bit, you can notice what, why that thing ever started to squeak. And if that's whatever caused that, over in this side might be something that is going to cause you a squeaky wheel in another side. And you can be putting systems in place. My idea about systems is like solve a problem but then put a system in place where it's very unlikely that's going to come up again. And it sounds like that's how you went about it.

Yeah, I mean, it's a system for everything. It's step one, step two, step three. This is how billing day runs from the morning you wake up till the morning you go to bed. This is what happens when a customer service issue comes in. This is what happens when a new client signs up and how we reach out to them. It's a documented process for every single thing in your company. And also giving those SOP ownership to other people. My customer service reps, they were in charge of the customer service SOP and they'd keep it updated. Marketing people, they were in charge of the marketing sop. They'd keep it updated so it wasn't all on Connor and I. And Connor and I could leave for two weeks and the business would keep running without us. And that's what allowed us to sell the company. And yeah, that's just a key piece that I think a lot of people miss out on.

How quick did you get going with new companies? And did the. Did you start that with totally new people or did you carry over some of your key players? You know, like a head football coach will take some of his, you know, some of his closest coaches over to the next team.

We, per agreement, we couldn't take anyone over, which is unfortunate because we like them a lot. Although freelancers like designers and stuff. We could. But yeah, so we, we got started on our new venture sooner than we would like. So we sold. We sold free up in November 2019. The the original plan was to travel the world for a year. I didn't think I would see my business partner for a year. Then Covid hit. We were kind of stuck inside in a weird position where we had nothing to do, no business to run, and you could only watch so much Netflix. So we got to work. A buddy of mine told me that gave me the advice that if I sold a hiring course, people would listen because we had a lot of experience hiring. And we launched Outsource School. We didn't know if people would like it or hate it. We did a promo for it. It knocked the COVID off. And. And we launched Outsource School. And we've been running that for four years. And people can go to outsourceschool.com to learn more. And meanwhile, I mean, Outsource school is pretty passive. It's a membership, it's a course. And. And we started brainstorming other ideas and dabbling in things. Real estate, consulting. And we learned pretty quickly that we hated being consultants. But the common theme was every business we would consult with needed a better bookkeeping, good data to make decisions. And that kind of led us down the path of launching our own monthly bookkeeping service for online businesses. And the rest is history. So outsourced school was a little pandemic baby. And econ balance came over time through a lot of brainstorming and trial and errors.

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