Josh Hadley 9:12
That’s an amazing journey and amazing story. And what I think is interesting about that is you’re able to build a team that resided outside of the US and a lot of these people were making decisions for your business. And that’s one of the myths that I love to kind of dispel. A lot of people think that you know, outsourcing is only meant for just finding virtual assistants, right? Just meaningless mind numbing tasks. These people just need to, you know, do a bunch of data entry. Right. And that’s the first thought that comes to people’s mind when they talk about offshore hiring people offshore from my own experience with our 25 team members and definitely with your experience. I would argue that you can find management level talent overseas overseas that can even run circles with a lot of US based talent. Would you agree with that statement?
Nathan Hirsch 10:06
Yeah, I mean, I would put our free op team against anyone, any US team out there. And that was the thing, once we learn how to master virtual assistants, which wasn’t easy, it took us a few years and we try to speed up the process with people in Outsource School, then we started to kind of push the limits, like we started off with just data entry tasks, like, you gotta remember I was selling on amazon before, there’s a lot of software. So there were a lot of manual tasks like we would have to adjust our pricing because there was no repricing software or to update our inventory, because there’s no inventory management software. So they were doing all that stuff. And then we started to kind of push the limits and have them talk to customer service, talk to Seller Support and any kind of like, not suspensions, but any type of just issues that would come up with an ASN or whatever. Then I mean, even past that, and FreeUp, we push the limit even further, if people wanted to set up a sales call, they’d be talking to someone in the in the Philippines, if that people go to outsourceschool.com Right now, and they’re just enjoying and they book a sales call, you’ll talk to someone on my team in the Philippines, and you’ll be wowed I’d put them against any salesperson out there for FreeUp. One of the best hires we ever made was a bookkeeper in the Philippines named Maurice and not only was he in charge of the monthly books, which we made all our decisions on. But he also was in charge of billing clients every week and paying freelancers every week. And all that is incredibly important to a marketplace because the second you miss of virtual assistants payment, they don’t trust you anymore, and they don’t want to work with you anymore. So we tried to push the limits as much as possible and give them as much responsibility as possible. And it really paid off even though it was nerve racking maybe at the beginning.
Josh Hadley 11:43
Awesome. I love that. Nathan, I want to dive into you know, your experience a little bit more with FreeUp, how did you source a lot of your talent there? Did you have to go over into the Philippines and kind of get integrated into colleges and things like that to build your your pool of talent there? Because I think outside of Upwork and Fiverr. Those are like the standard things that you know, come to people’s mind. But I would assume you are you weren’t just going to Upwork and finding your talent there for FreeUp. How are you finding really good talent outside of those two platforms?
Nathan Hirsch 12:24
Yeah, it’s a great question. So first of all, I’ve only been to the Philippines once about year three of FreeUp. And we only read it for four years, we did a big like celebration, the Philippines, we run a conference we said whoever wants to come can come. And it’s optional. And we had lots of people show up. And we then took our internal team out to resort so we were not going back and forth to the Philippines to find talent only been there once. So we kind of it whenever you start a marketplace. And this is why starting a marketplace, it’s hard. There’s always a chicken or the egg situation right you got you get clients first or VAs first. And if you don’t have a good balance there kind of throws off the entire business. With FreeUp we had an advantage because we already had an Amazon business with all these virtual assistants and freelancers that we knew we trusted, we knew they take good care of our clients. And we could communicate with them and we build trust with them. So we started off with those group of people. And we quickly ran out of people, because they were all being given out to our clients. So then what we did was we created a referral program, we said anyone that you refer to FreeUp, you get 50 cents for every hour that we build to that virtual assistant worked forever. So it was a big incentive for VAs that like free opt to tell other people, then we would our marketing plan for FreeUp was pretty much podcast partnerships, content, networking, and just relationship building and then influencer. So while we were doing all five things on the b2b side, on the client side, we’re doing the same thing on the VA side. We found influencers in the Philippines that ran a Facebook groups of virtual assistants or that taught a course or that were coaches, we found all the VA and Freelancer blogs and got backlinks and all those places. We did different email blasts with people that had audience of Bas and freelancers. And our biggest thing was, it was very tough to get on the marketplace, we would accept one out of every 100 applicants, and we’d get people that were pissed off because they didn’t get into free. After all, that’s kind of unavoidable. But the people that got into FreeUp, we made sure they were extremely happy, not just the client, obviously want to make sure the clients are happy. But the VA is in the Freelancers too. And we want to make it so they felt heard. Now, there’s some basic stuff you do like pay them on time, which we kind of talked about, where if you don’t do those things, you break trust. But there’s other things you can go do to go above and beyond where we would ask them for feedback and what they liked and what they didn’t like. And let’s say that there was an in between where the client the VA weren’t happy with each other. Yes, if the VA got bad reviews, we’d kick them off the platform, but sometimes there were just disagreements where FreeUp would just bite the bullet and make both sides tappi in the VA would go make us money working other clients. And hopefully the client would stick around and vice versa. So as much as possible, we tried to just keep everyone happy with the platform and moving forward. And that kind of created this Aurora around FreeUp as is this great place to work. And then you throw in that referral program, and all of a sudden, you’ve got free marketing going out everywhere, have all these applicants to the point where we’re getting 1000 applicants a week to get on our platform.
Josh Hadley 15:25
Yeah, I love that. Well, and I think on that note, this kind of will transition our conversation into that Outsource School in that program, that you’re currently teaching other business owners of how they can go hire overseas talent. And but I think the most important thing, and you alluded to this is you are turning away 99 out of 100 applicants. Right, right. And, you know, I was, I was recently on a podcast with Michael Gerber. And one thing that he said, When I asked him the question, how do you find a level talent? Right? What he said is you need to turn your recruiting in to what they’ve done with the Navy SEALs, right? How easy is it to get into the Navy SEALs, it is not easy. And they put you through everything in order to just apply and get into the program. Right? So likewise, I think for business owners having that different mindset shift of, I’m not just I’m not just looking for a warm body, or somebody that says, hey, I can do marketing, right? You have to take them through their own, you know, program that’s going to vet them out. So, Nathan, I would love to hear what was you know, your process in terms of vetting these candidates out to where you were able to weed out 99? And how did you find that one diamond in the rough?
Nathan Hirsch 16:45
Yeah, I love all my Gerber said, I think the one thing I’d add to that as some people miss is you have to make it a place that people want to work, whether it’s an internal team, whether it’s freelance in the platform in my situation, like you got to make it so they’re they’re paid well, that the hours and the schedule, they’re happy with that they’re going to be treated fairly, a lot of people will try to hire VAs and put these in, put them in these really bad positions. And they wonder why they don’t get any applicants. But in terms of our interview process, and this is what we teach it Outsource School. It comes down to skill, attitude and communication. That’s what we look for. We don’t, a lot of people fall into the trap of just hiring for skill they want, they get someone with five years of experience on Amazon, they’re like boom, this person’s hired, and then it blows up. And they wonder why it doesn’t work out. And then they don’t trust hiring people anymore, even with a good skill. For us, we treat skill as one part of the equation, it’s one of the three and we weigh it just as high as the other ones. For obviously, skills import, we want someone who knows what they’re doing, I always give the example of we had this client with FreeUp who’s a great client who sold auto parts on on eBay and on Amazon. And he would hire customer service people. You don’t want to teach someone cars and teach them customer service, and then teach them how you want to done. You want someone who already liked cars, who already has years of customer service experience, and then you just teach them the way that you want it done. So that’s kind of how we look at everything, we want someone with the relevant experience that’s done 90% of it. And then we can just teach them that last 10%. For communication, we want someone who can get on the same page quickly. A lot of times, there’s language barriers, there’s cultural barriers, but you need someone that you can communicate with at a high level. And when we interview people, we interview people in the same way that we’re going to normally communicate with them. If they’re gonna be doing a lot of calls and zoom calls, we’re going to zoom with them. If we’re mostly going to communicate with them on Slack I’m going to do I’m going to communicate with them via slack and do the whole interview on Slack and an outside of school. We have videos of us doing slack interviews, so you can see exactly what it looks like. And if I’m expecting to work with this person on slack for eight hours a day, and I’m interviewing them and they’re not responding quickly, I can’t understand what they’re saying they can’t understand what I’m saying we’re not, there’s no meeting of the minds, we’re not on the same page. They’re not giving me clear direct answers. Well guess how that’s gonna go when I’m slacking with them for eight hours a day during their normal working. So that’s kind of an example there. And then attitude is, we want people and this can be different depending on what your culture is. But we want people who love doing what they’re doing. If they’re a graphic designer, they love being a graphic designer more than anything else in the world that they’re a bookkeeper. They love being a bookkeeper more than anything else in the world. We don’t want people who are just in it for a job just in it for the money. We don’t want people who are where money is more important than anything else. We want people who care about growth and opportunities and and maybe they care about stability and they want something long term and they want to problem solve and they understand that startups are not perfect and there’s gonna be bumps in the road but they can handle that and they can handle stress. So we have a list of questions we give out in our schools to our school where we go through part by point part in the interview skill attitude communication and only The when someone has all three, then do we move on. And then that next step that a lot of people miss is the what we call onboarding, which is really just setting expectations. This is the schedule, you’re expected to work, you’re expected to have backup power backup internet, this is what happens when you lose the internet, you don’t just disappear for a week, you go somewhere where you can work. This is what we will and will not put up within the company. And for lack of a better word, you almost want to scare them a little bit. Because you, you don’t want it, you you want them to know what they’re getting into, you don’t want there to be any surprises down the line, you don’t want them to not be able to handle it. If they can’t handle what is hopefully your high expectations. You’d much rather they back out during that onboarding than to figure that out four weeks down the line when you’ve already invested time, energy and money into training.
Josh Hadley 20:48
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I love that onboarding process that you just mentioned, that you’re setting the expectations up front, right. And I also believe that a level talent is attracted to a level talent, they want to be playing with the ballers, right? They want to be associated with another team of highly skilled individuals that can rely on each other. They don’t want to be the one that has to be making up or, you know, taking on additional work because somebody else isn’t keeping up with the pace. And so likewise, in our own business, that’s something that we value, it’s one of our core values, is we do what we say we’re going to do. And that’s what our team knows. So right from the onset, those expectations is so so important. So I appreciate you sharing that. I wanted to also follow up real quick here on the idea of you know, you’re assessing candidates on skill, attitude and their communication. But I don’t think you are interviewing, right? I don’t think you’re probably spending 30 minute interviews with 100 applicants just to find one, right? Is there a way that you found to kind of streamline that process so that you could, you know, even have 1000 applicants so to speak, in that’s not taking you 1000 times 30 minutes in order to go through all of those applicants?
Nathan Hirsch 22:13
Yeah, no, great point. So there’s a few ways you can go about this. One is you have your job posting, right, that is all the specifications that have what you’re looking for in someone, it could be schedule, it could be background, or skills, or whatever. And you create some kind of type form where you have where you go question by question and how to actually answer that, because you’ll find a lot of people will apply to jobs when they don’t fit all the criteria. And if you make them go through a type form where they have to answer each question one by one, then you can just quickly eliminate all the people that don’t fit their criteria, you can even add some open ended questions on why you want the job or tell us about yourself, and then that’ll help you quickly narrow down to those people. The other way is if it’s a skill type role, so an example is e-comm. Balance my monthly bookkeeping service, we’re obviously not going to hire someone if they’re not good at bookkeeping, I don’t care how good of their their attitude and their their communication is. And like an interview, you’re not necessarily going to figure out how good of a bookkeeper they are. So we created a bookkeeping test. And with FreeUp, we had different skill tests that we would put people through if they were an Amazon Lister, we had an Amazon skill test. So before they even get to the interview, they have to pass the test. Most people won’t pass the test or won’t teach them the time to take the test. And then only the people that pass the test, then go to the interview. So you’ve already verified the skill before you even get to that last level.
Josh Hadley 23:31
That makes sense. So you are using test projects, then for almost every single role to make sure that they can even complete that they have the skill, right? That’s your prerequisite to even get get your foot in the door, then we’ll talk attitude and communication. Is that correct?
Nathan Hirsch 23:46
Yeah, if it’s a skill type role, if it’s something like customer service, you’re usually not going to do that, although you could create a customer service test. But you are giving them open ended questions and the type forum where you can see their writing or say, hey, respond to an email, write a fake email, whatever it
Josh Hadley 23:59
Okay? What’s your experience with hiring like senior management level staff? Do you have any advice or recommendations as to how do you go find like a sea level or director level position? Overseas,
Nathan Hirsch 24:17
it’s tough it is by far, one of the hardest things to do. So this is kind of how I look at it. You can hire managers and senior people that come in, there’s a lot of things working against you. Not only do you have to find someone with the right skills and the right manager experience, but it’s also a very tough thing to test for. But you also have to find someone that instantly fits in with your team, and that your team will respect so if I already have five VAs, and I’m bringing in Bob to manage these five VAs, I need to know that those five bas are gonna like Bob trust Bob, and that Bob has been able to handle it and it takes a little bit of time to figure actually figure that out. So you could go a month or two before actually knowing if someone’s a good manager. My strong preference and this is what we’ve really been able to do at all our companies is to always promote from within for managerial roles. And it also makes it so that your first hire than any company are unbelievably key. If you’re making your first four hires at your company, you want to hire people that have management experience that have leadership experience that wants it that a lot of people don’t want to be leaders don’t want to be managers. So these are conversations you want to have with your initial hires, you don’t want to just hire the data entry VA, you want to hire someone who’s maybe overqualified for that initial role, and let them know if they prove themselves, you’re going to be looking for a leadership role in the future. And we did a great job with that at FreeUp. We had chicky, Anne, who was on our Amazon team, who we promoted from within there, and she became head of recruitment, we hired a bookkeeper and then made him the head of bookkeeping, Maurice, like I said, and then we had two people, Jane and Layton, who started off just doing like customer emails, and then eventually became the two heads of customer service, we needed to have them because we had 24/7 customer service. But that’s kind of how we’ve always done it. And with EcomBalance, the initial bookkeepers we hired, we made sure they had leadership and management experience, and they’re now the senior bookkeepers and the team leaders of e-comm balance. So it’s always easier to promote from within, it’s less risky, it’s usually cheaper leads to less issues, there are situations where you’re not able to do that. But my personal preference is to always promote from within.
Josh Hadley 26:24
And it makes a lot of sense. And I would echo 100%, what you said there, in terms of those key those initial hires are key hires. Same thing, even when we’ve hired a customer service role for our business, or an Amazon assistant or an Amazon specialist or supply chain specialist. It’s not just to do the data entry or the current tasks that we have assigned to them. Each one of them, I have wanted to see that they have management level talent with inside them that they’ve had that experience managing other people, they’ve been promoted consistently in the past, in the hopes that you’re going to fill this role and then be able to fill even more roles in the future. So I think that’s super important. Nathan, is there any experience that you have then with a poaching at all, like management level staff?
Nathan Hirsch 27:20
Ah, no, I don’t think I’ve ever poached like that. I’m trying to think there have been situations where we’ve talked about it like hiring bookkeepers initially was a little bit different. And so we were like, Hey, should we try to get bookkeepers from other companies, but we never really went down that with FreeUp, it was kind of nice, because like, we had a marketplace of Bas and freelancers, so we didn’t really have a need to go poach them that I think the closest thing to that is, if we always want to hire full time, in long term, that’s always the goal. Now, when you’re starting a business, you don’t necessarily know if your business is going to succeed or be able to afford that. So there’s been plenty of situations where we’ve hired someone part time, and then we essentially have gone to them and said, What do we need to do to make you full time with us exclusive to us and drop all your other clients, and then we’ve negotiated a rate increase? They dropped their their clients, and that’s probably the closest we’ve ever done to poaching. But I don’t think we’ve ever gone into another person’s company and just tried to steal them away.
Josh Hadley 28:14
Fair enough. Fair enough. Nathan, is there any Watch out? And this is not legal advice, or tax advice? But are there any watch outs for hiring overseas talent in terms of when it comes to, you know, taxes, right, or when it comes to setting up those contractor agreements? To make sure that if you get audited by the IRS that they see that as a valid business expense? Number one, right? Or that you don’t get fined? For anything else? Do you have any experience or clients that have been audited, they came through it, you know, clean or anything like that.
Nathan Hirsch 28:52
I know many clients that have been audited, I think my overall advice is one talk to your CPA about it, it should be something that you should disclose to them and get their advice and handle it the way that they want to be handled it and to just read the Terms of Use of any marketplaces, agencies that you’re working with. Because there’s kind of that there’s different ways to go about it. You can do a direct hire where you pay them via PayPal, you can go through an agency where they’re an employee of that agency, you do a marketplace where you’re hiring through the marketplace, but the payments are through the marketplace. So all three of those are a little bit different from like a legal and a tax standpoint. So my advice would be to just talk to your CPA, if you have a lawyer, talk to your lawyer about it. Everything’s a little bit different. It usually ends up being not as risky as some people think it is. But yeah, that’s kind of the only thing I’ll speak to add on that.
Josh Hadley 29:39
You mentioned there’s kind of multiple ways that you could hire outsource staff, right you could go direct to them right and hire them on a marketplace or go through an agency or you could just hire them direct right you find them from the Philippines could be like an indeed job posting and you hire them direct um
Nathan Hirsch 30:00
123 and four are free options, you can kind of follow our path there, we’ve got a hiring packet for you, free trial, all sorts of different stuff and our newsletter there gives out a lot of great content too, if you just want to follow along.
Josh Hadley 35:11
Amazing, amazing, that’s a great resource. Definitely encourage our listeners to go check out Outsource School. Now Nathan, I want to pivot our conversation now to the accounting side of things. So it seems odd that of all things you’re focused first on, you know, outsourcing talent, and then you know, Outsource School that makes sense. You’re teaching your processes and sharing them with everybody else super valuable book. So why why go into the accounting with e-comm balance now?
Nathan Hirsch 35:42
Yeah, so do you mind we so FreeUp we have a non compete with FreeUp, we probably wouldn’t start a new virtual assistant business anyway. Even if we didn’t have a non compete and Outsource School. It’s a nice segue, especially during the pandemic, people were asking us for our hiring process. We’ve created that but we’re probably not doing anything else around VAs and freelancers. Now, bookkeeping is something that is been a backbone of all of our businesses. When we started an Amazon business, we had no idea what bookkeeping was, we made all the mistakes in the world from trying to do it ourselves to paying someone to redo it to hide to doubling on our account at the end of the year to hiring someone quarterly to finally figuring out hire a good bookkeeper monthly to give us good information to make good decisions every single month. And that’s really what bookkeeping comes down to. There’s a lot of perks like not being stressed during tax time, and obviously filing accurate, accurate taxes and all the stuff around that. But the real reason that you want bookkeeping as an entrepreneur is to make good business decisions based on real numbers every single month, not making decisions based on gut not making it by guesses that waiting to the end of the year, or when it’s too late. You want to be making those decisions every single month. So that’s something that when we put in place in our Amazon business, we’re able to grow and make better decisions. And with FreeUp one of the best decisions we ever made, was hiring that bookkeeper Maurice, from day one. Before we were even profitable. We just had a monthly report come to us, the month would end. By the 15th of the month, we got income statement, balance sheet cash flow, we had a financial meeting on our calendar every single month, which we’ve been doing every year, every month since where we go through it top to bottom, me and my business partner. And that’s the meeting that we make decisions are we gonna offer a new service, cut back on software, hire more people, all those decisions are based on what the books come out with. Now, there’s an added bonus that when we went to sell our company, we had immaculate books going back for years. And when we had those initial conversations with the buyer, Mark Hargrove gave in March, two really good entrepreneurs, they asked us a lot about the business. And a lot of those questions had to do with numbers. And since we had gone through these finances, finances in the finance meeting, every month for the past four years, we knew these numbers inside and out. And then when we got to due diligence, and we turned over our books, not only were the books clean and easy to read, but they also matched everything we told them on those initial calls, because we knew our books very well. And that built a lot of trust. So bookkeeping, although it’s boring, and it’s the most unsexy topic in history when it comes to being a business owner. It is the core of your business. And if you want to talk about two things that are not talked about enough, it’s hiring and bookkeeping. If you don’t know how to hire, you’re not going to go very far as an entrepreneur, there’s very few eight-figure solo entrepreneurs out there, if you’re not good at not necessarily doing the bookkeeping, but being able to read financial reports and setting up a good bookkeeping process in your business, that’s only going to hold you back. It’s going to be impossible to ever sell your business or get funding or good investments, or whatever you decide to do. And you’re also not going to be making decisions based on accurate numbers. So that’s kind of how we we’ve always looked at bookkeeping and we kind of saw an opportunity where most bookkeeping firms are bad at hiring bad scaling bad and marketing, bad process bad speaking entrepreneurship and center speaking bookkeeping. So we’ve tried to build bring the entrepreneur mentality to bookkeeping, where I’m not a bookkeeper, my business partner is not a bookkeeper. We’ve always been good at hiring bookkeepers and setting up good bookkeeping process. But we know what the entrepreneur wants. We know how they want to get a quote, get on boarded, get communicated with what kind of customer service they need, how to support them long term. And that kind of gave us an idea years ago to create not only e-comm balance for E commerce sellers, but we have a second bookkeeping brand called accounts balance. That’s for digital businesses.
Josh Hadley 39:35
Awesome. Amazing. With that, Nathan, I think that the finances are so fundamental to a business. And just as you alluded to in the accounting and being able to make decisions around that. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that they are scared about numbers. They don’t understand how to read financial statements. And so they just kind of tried to turn a blind eye to it. and they just look at the overall numbers. So, Nathan, I’m curious, what are the top mistakes that you see entrepreneurs making when it comes to bookkeeping and documenting their finances?
Nathan Hirsch 40:11
Yeah, so the number one mistake is trying to do bookkeeping yourselves. And this is why it blew my mind when we created e-comm balance, we were looking at their bookkeeping services, and they were selling courses on how to do bookkeeping. And to me, that’s crazy. As an entrepreneur, that is a terrible use of your time to learn how to use QuickBooks, and then try to be in QuickBooks. And even if you are good at it, like that’s time that could be spent on sales, marketing, expansion, growing your business, not a good use of time and nine times out of 10, you’re not, you’re still not going to know what you’re doing, even if you’re taking a course. And you’re just gonna have to pay someone to redo it all later. And it’s not going to work out. And even if you are a bookkeeper or CPA in a past life, I would still argue that it’s not a good use of your time. Another mistake people will do is they’ll have their CPA do also do their bookkeeping, or they’ll dump it on their CPA at the end of the year. Well, not only are CPAs more expensive, but they’re doing bookkeeping in a way to file their taxes, your taxes, they’re not doing bookkeeping in a way to actually help you make decisions on your business, which is what you need. And we’ve always found that dividing and conquering having a bookkeeper and a good CPA is important, that are both focused on what they’re good at there’s our CPA saves us money on taxes. Our bookkeeper provides us books on time that we can make decisions on and they can communicate there’s conversations and meeting of the minds and be able to use both people’s talents to get you the best outcome. And CPAs get busy. They have their own tax season in busy season in April and October, where it’s tough for them to be on a good monthly schedule, and you want your books on time every single month. So I try to get entrepreneurs out of the mentality of using their own books of doing their own books out of that mentality of using a CPA for books, and out of the mentality of anything other than monthly bookkeeping, not quarterly, not every six months. If you want to do it even more than quote, then monthly, that’s fine, too. But at the very least a good monthly bookkeeping process with that finance meeting every single month in your calendar that you do not miss for any reason.
Josh Hadley 42:11
That makes a lot of sense. And in your experience, you’re able to find an outsourced accounting manager right that was able to produce those books for you. Do you believe that people can bring that internally?
Nathan Hirsch 42:24
You can it’s probably one of the harder position to to hire for I mean, if you do join Outsource School, we have a whole course on hiring virtual assistant bookkeepers essentially out of the Philippines, it can be done. If you don’t know bookkeeping, if you’re not going to be on top of them. If you’re not going to manage them, then it could lead to disaster. But I mean, that’s definitely an option. And we’ve tried to provide a hybrid I mean, our team free counterbalances both us and non us in the Philippines. And so you kind of get the best of both worlds where it’s fair pricing, but a high level of service and things are reviewed by the US people before they go out. And I mean, you can go a step above and hire CFO, you can hire a US bookkeeper, there’s no shortage of options, you just have to figure out what the best option is for your business. There’s even businesses that hire full time us bookkeepers because their business is so big, so complicated that they need $80,000 A year bookkeeper only working for that. So everything’s kind of on the table, you just have to figure out what the best fit is for you.
Josh Hadley 43:21
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Now, Nathan, as we begin to wrap up, I want to go back the question popped in my mind, if you want to go and approach or if you want to go higher direct, right? We want to go find in Amazon PPC Manager over in the Philippines or anywhere else? What are some of the best platforms or ways to get your job posting out there? In order to attract that outsource talent? I know we’ve talked about marketplaces such as Upwork, FreeUp and we’ve got Fiverr and those type of things. But outside of that, how do you go direct and hire for those people?
Nathan Hirsch 44:01
Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, if you’re not gonna go marketplace, if you’re gonna go direct Facebook groups are are a good place to start. You can use those. There’s different free job boards, there’s my personal favorite, which is referrals and talking to other ecommerce sellers talking to other Amazon freelancers. That’s a good way to kind of go about as well. And the other one that I haven’t done a lot of but I know people that do is running ads, you can run ads on Facebook, you can run ads on LinkedIn, places like that, where if you do get the applicants, you’re able to actually hire them directly.
Josh Hadley 44:31
Awesome. So Facebook groups, LinkedIn, those are some great recommendations. Now Nathan, as we begin to wrap up the episode, I love to leave our guests with three or I love to leave our listeners with three actionable takeaways from each episode. So I’ve jotted down three actionable takeaways, Nathan, let me know if you think I’m missing something after I go through these. Number one, as you begin to build your team. Nathan alluded to this you’re not going to be able to be a solopreneur with an eight figure business that is extremely rare does it happen? Yes, it has happened. But that is much more of a rarity. So if you have desires to grow your business, you need to understand that you are going to have to be a be able to build a team and you yourself have to become a leader and a manager, and you will have your own evolution. So number one, what you need to do is get really good at identifying the roles that you need for your business right now. And then project over the next 24 months. What are the future roles that I’m going to need for this business as the business continues to grow and scale. So number one is kind of creating that organizational chart for your business. And then being able to project what that org chart should look like 18 to 24 months from now, so that you can start strategically planning your growth. Action Item number two, Nathan did a great job highlighting the importance of this when we asked him, Hey, how do you go hire management level staff overseas. The key here and the action item is when you hire a VA, or for any role in your business, you should be hiring that person with the intention that this person has management level abilities and skills so that you could see them not just filling this role today that you’re hiring them for. But you see them filling management level roles, and being able to continue to grow within the business. Because obviously that type of player or team member is going to be an A level team member and bring a level talent with them. And in addition to that, you talked about referrals, they are also we’re going to be associated with other a level talent as well. Now, final action item. Step number three here is getting your books in order so that you can make business decisions based off of those books. If you are not currently reviewing your financials on a monthly basis, we do that as well with our business, Nathan talked about the importance of doing it with his business as well. If you’re not doing that, and making your business decisions, based off of the results that you see coming out of those monthly financial meetings, then start doing that today. Because in order to scale to those eight figures, and beyond the bookkeeping, and having that finance those finances in order is the backbone, backbone and life structure of all of that. So Nathan, is there anything that you think I missed? Out of those actionable takeaways, though? Those
Nathan Hirsch 47:38
are those are great. That was a good summary.
Josh Hadley 47:41
Awesome. All right. Nathan, I love to ask each guest my final three questions. So we’ll go from the top here. What’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why
Nathan Hirsch 47:51
I like Start With Why that always kind of changes my perspective on just entrepreneurship in general, I think my why has kind of changed over the years, it started off as like a broke college kid. So you’re why is money, but it’s kind of evolved from that and being able to work with people around the world and help other entrepreneurs succeed and accomplish their dreams. And even now, just like being a foster parent, and a soon to be biological parent, your wise kind of evolved over time. So it’s a great book.
Josh Hadley 48:20
That’s amazing. And congrats on the upcoming birth. And, you know, congratulations on what you’re doing. foster parenting is so important in this world as well. Appreciate it. Let’s go to question number two, what is your favorite productivity tool or software that you’ve recently discovered that you think is going to be a game changer?
Nathan Hirsch 48:38
That’s your question. I productivities tool. Honestly, I use Apple just notepad more than anything else. I’m always just leaving myself notes, writing notes, any ideas that I have, like working out or on a run or whatever it is, I’m always just jotting stuff down. So that’s probably what I use more than anything else. I mean, we use Slack and Trello and all that kind of stuff. But I’m not like a huge app guy where I’m like tracking my sleep or anything like that.
Josh Hadley 49:04
Easy enough. Simple, simple is the simplicity of it, right? You don’t need to get too complicated. I love it. Alright, last question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect in the E commerce space and why?
Nathan Hirsch 49:18
It’s funny, I was actually gonna say Chad Rubin. And then I remember that Chad referred me this podcast. Michael Mayer, who was actually a freelancer on free apps. I met him there and then he was a client of FreeUp and now he runs a ecommerce agency and crushing it and I kept seeing my conferences and stuff. You’ve nodded your head, so maybe you already know him. But yeah, he’s a good guy in the space.
Josh Hadley 49:38
Awesome. Very good recommendations from you, Nathan. Nathan, if people want to continue to follow you and learn more about what you have going on, where can people find you and reach out to you?
Nathan Hirsch 49:49
Yeah, go to outsourceschool.com, ecombalance.com, Nathan Hirsch on any social media channel feel free to hit me up. I always love networking with other entrepreneurs and thanks for having me on.
Josh Hadley 49:58
Awesome Nathan has been a pleasure. Thanks again for joining us. Thank you.
Outro 50:04
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