Nathan Hirsch is the Co-founder and CEO of EcomBalance and Outsource School. EcomBalance is a monthly bookkeeping service for e-commerce businesses selling across multiple channels. Outsource School teaches business owners effective hiring methods for hiring and retaining top-tier, offshore virtual assistants. In 2015, he co-founded FreeUp.net, scaling it to $12M in yearly revenue before exiting in 2019. Nathan has appeared on over 400 podcasts and is a social media personality.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Nathan Hirsch discusses his e-commerce journey that led to co-founding FreeUp
• Nathan shares the challenges associated with outsourcing talent
• Proven methods for attracting, hiring, and retaining top-level virtual assistants
• Are you using test projects for skill-type roles in the interview process?
• Nathan explains why it’s advantageous for business owners to promote within the organization
• The benefits of using Outsource School
• Why EcomBalance expanded to AccountsBalance
• Common bookkeeping mistakes entrepreneurs make

In this episode…

Offshore outsourcing involves contracting individuals or service providers located in different geographical regions. In-demand business functions and industries such as IT services, software development, finance and accounting, customer support, and data entry have sparked a need for outsourcing virtual talent. Additionally, there are a multitude of benefits to using this type of service, including cost-effectiveness, scalability and flexibility, time zone advantages, and access to specialized skills.

As with any type of business, outsourcing comes with many challenges. Nathan Hirsch, a longtime entrepreneur, experienced years of hiring trial and error. The lessons he learned along the way led him to scale businesses beyond seven figures using only virtual assistants. Eager to share these methods as an online educational resource for other business owners led him to co-found the Outsource School.

In this episode of the eComm Breakthrough Podcast, Josh Hadley interviews Nathan Hirsch, Co-founder of EcomBalance and Outsource School, to discuss finance and business operating systems. Nathan shares the challenges of outsourcing talent, proven hiring methods for acquiring offshore talent, the benefits of using Outsource School, and business owners’ common bookkeeping mistakes.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Josh Hadley on LinkedIn
• eComm Breakthrough Consulting
• eComm Breakthrough Podcast
• Email Josh Hadley: Josh@eCommBreakthrough.com
• Hadley Designs
• Hadley Designs on Amazon
• Nathan Hirsch on LinkedIn
• EcomBalance

Special Mention(s):

• Kevin King
• Roland Frasier on LinkedIn
• Michael E. Gerber on LinkedIn
• Chad Rubin on LinkedIn
• Mike Mayer on LinkedIn
• Profasee
• Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

Related Episode(s):

• “Kevin King’s Wicked-Smart Tips for Building an Audience of Raving Fans”
• “Seven Acquisition Strategies to Scale to Eight Figures and Beyond”
• “Chad Rubin’s Proven Strategies to Transform Your eCommerce Business With AI”

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure ecommerce owners grow to eight figures. Of course…

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

As a special bonus to my podcast listeners, this month I’m giving away one $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit session at no cost. Email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com with the subject line “Strategy Audit” and tell me why your business should win the free audit for the chance to win and don’t worry, if you don’t win the free strategy audit this month, you’ll automatically be entered for future months.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:04

Welcome to the eComm Breakthrough Podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level. Join Josh Hadley, an eight-figure e-comm business owner and investor, as he interviews highly successful business owners get ready because you’re going to learn specific actions you can take today to help your business reach its full potential and leave a lasting impact on the world.

Josh Hadley 0:37

Welcome to the eComm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host Josh Hadley where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Roland Frasier, and Michael E. Gerber, the author of the E-Myth. Today I’m speaking with Nathan Hirsch, CEO of Ecombalance and Outsource School. And we’ll be talking a lot about finance, and business operating systems, and all the cool stuff that Nathan has been able to do. This episode is brought to you by the eComm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven-figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. Listen, Nathan, I started my e-comm business back in 2015. And I grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years. But I certainly made a lot of mistakes along the way that made the path of getting to eight figures take a lot longer than it really needed to there were times where I had self doubt in myself as a leader, could I lead a team of people, I had doubt in regards to you know, the finances of the business, could I have the cash flow to continue to to sustain the business. So for our listeners, if any of you have hit those similar plateaus, and you want to avoid them and also know the next steps to take, then go to eCommBreakthrough.com? That’s e-comm with two M’s to learn more. And as a special bonus to my podcast listeners. This month, I’m giving away one $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit session. At no cost. All you need to do is email me at Josh@eCommBreakthrough.com and in your subject line say Strategy Audit and then plead your case as to why I should choose you and your business to work with for this month. And don’t worry if you’re not selected this month, you’ll be entered to win for future months to come. I also want to give a special a special shout out before introducing today’s guest to Chad Rubin and thank him for referring Nathan and EcomBalance to us as a guest Chad Rubin leads prophecy. It is an AI driven pricing tool for Amazon sellers and ecommerce businesses. So definitely go check out his episode Chad Rubin talked about ChatGPT and implementing AI into your business and then also go check out Profasee. But today I’m super excited to introduce you to Nathan Hirsch. Nathan is a lifelong entrepreneur and currently the CEO of EcomBalance and Outsource School. Nathan is best known for Co-founding FreeUp.net in 2015 with an initial $5,000 investment, then scaling it to 12 million in yearly revenue, and then having it acquired in 2019. Today, he leads EcomBalance an online bookkeeping service for e-commerce and digital businesses and Outsource School, a membership teaching business owners how to hire effectively online, Nathan has appeared on over 400 podcasts and is a social media personality. Him and his wife live in Denver, Colorado with their two dogs, where they are foster parents. So welcome to the show. Nathan.

Nathan Hirsch 3:35

Josh, thanks so much for having me excited to be here.

Josh Hadley 3:38

Nathan, I am one of your subscribers to FreeUp back in the day. That was definitely where I kind of cut my teeth initially with you know, hiring overseas talent. And, you know, I’m amazed with the business that you built there with FreeUp and I want to just have you know, I think a lot of people have followed you. But for those listeners that surprisingly haven’t heard about you tell them about FreeUp and the team that you built there because as you shared with me, you had built that team where you didn’t really have any US management staff other than yourself leading that business. So tell us more about that.

Nathan Hirsch 4:17

Yeah, I mean, I started off as an Amazon seller out of my college dorm room i i had to be one of the first people that came up with dropshipping years before I even knew was called drop shipping. And I had this Amazon account that I was using to buy and sell people’s textbooks in college to make a little extra money and I started experimenting with different products eventually found baby products that I would drop ship from different retailers and eventually went around the retailers right to the manufacturers and this was 2008 to 2010 When I first got started, and these manufacturers didn’t know anything about e commerce, so I went to them and said, hey, I’ll list your products. I’ll get you more sales. You keep my credit card on file, you ship the product where I tell you to. We both weighed in this situation and they loved it. And it was obviously a great thing for me because I was in college and I had no money to buy inventory, no place to store inventory. And it was kind of the perfect business model. But that business exploded. I mean, we sold my condo, my business partner, and I sold $25 million over seven years. And we struggled to hire for the first half of that. We started off trying to hire college kids, which were super unreliable. Then we tried to hire adults, which was really hard as a 20 year old college kid that no one took seriously. And that kind of led us by default to the virtual assistant world. A buddy of mine told me about a VA in the Philippines that I hired part time and she introduced me to more VAs and we made every possible hiring mistake you could imagine when hiring virtual assistants, but eventually figured it out. And when we did figure it out, that changed everything. Not only was my life less stressful for the Amazon business, because everything was running without me, the business grew. And we had all these VAs and freelancers. But Amazon was starting to get harder, they were starting to crack down on dropship, they changed their algorithm, there were a lot more sellers and courses on selling that didn’t exist for that initial time. And well, while our Amazon business was still making money, it wasn’t experiencing 100% growth year over year like it was in those first few years. So we kind of lost passion for selling on Amazon, we weren’t selling our own products, we we were kind of dependent on Amazon’s algorithm. And we just felt like everything was out of our control. But we had this awesome team of Bas, that all knew Amazon very well, we had taught them how to do listings and customer service and all this stuff. And some of them were even seasonal, we didn’t need them either full time or we didn’t need them throughout the whole year. And we’d been using Upwork and Fiverr for a while. And we always wanted like a faster, more efficient way to get ecommerce, virtual assistants who wanted to put in a request get matched up with someone have them start right away. We didn’t want to interview 100 people and figure out who knew ecommerce and who didn’t. So that kind of gave us the idea to start offering our VAs to these different Amazon sellers. And we kind of did it as an experiment. We gave some sellers some free hours, I started to go to a conference or appear on a podcast or just network with other sellers. And people really liked it. They would say hey, I need a ecommerce graphic designer, we’d match them up and that person would do the project the same day. And that was a way better experience than interviewing a lot of people on Upwork. And that’s really what the free marketplace started as we took that $5,000 Like I said we we built or like you said, we built a very basic software that did very little clients could log in into their account and see their VAs hours and the VAs could track their time on their end. And that’s pretty much it. It didn’t do anything else. And we kept track of everything on Google Sheets. And this business quickly surpassed our Amazon business to the point where we shut down the Amazon business we started focusing on FreeUp, it was exciting. It was our first opportunity to have our own website and our own brand and do b2b instead of b2c and learn SEO and marketing and podcasts and all the stuff that kind of goes into it. So we spent four years really focused only on free happily living, eating, breathing FreeUp, starting to network and meet every possible person in the E commerce space, go on every ecommerce podcast, get in front of every e commerce community and be the go to place for E commerce, virtual assistants and freelancers. And we think that that one of the things that we find cool is we got the business to doing like you said $12 million a year. But we never hire a US employee. Our internal team was 30 Vas in the free in the Philippines that we hired off our own marketplace. And obviously the marketplace had 1000s of freelancers, US non US, whatever. But our internal team that would talk to our customers that would help to communicate with the VA and freelancers. It was all from the Philippines. And when we finally sold it, we took $500,000 from the sale and gave it to our team and made sure their jobs are secure and that the new owners would kind of take good care of them. So yeah, it FreeUp was a great adventure.

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