In this episode, Josh interviews Nathan Hirsch, CEO of Ecom Balance and Outsource School, about hiring overseas talent, especially for senior management roles. Nathan shares strategies for promoting from within, the pros and cons of direct hiring, agencies, and marketplaces, and key legal and tax considerations. He outlines Outsource School’s step-by-step hiring and training process, emphasizing the importance of leadership potential and strong financial management. The episode concludes with actionable tips for team building and scaling, plus resources for listeners interested in effective online hiring.
Chapters:
Introduction to Nathan Hirsch (00:00:00)
Host introduces Nathan Hirsch, his entrepreneurial background, and current ventures.
Challenges of Hiring Senior Management Overseas (00:00:49)
Nathan discusses the difficulties and risks of hiring senior/managerial staff from overseas.
Promoting from Within & Key First Hires (00:01:11)
Nathan explains the importance of promoting internally and hiring initial team members with leadership potential.
Examples of Internal Promotions (00:02:09)
Nathan shares real examples of promoting team members to management roles in his companies.
Coaching and Poaching Management Staff (00:04:09)
Nathan addresses whether he has experience poaching or coaching management-level staff from other companies.
Transitioning Part-Time to Full-Time Hires (00:04:53)
Nathan describes negotiating with part-time hires to become full-time and exclusive.
Legal & Tax Considerations for Overseas Hiring (00:05:02)
Discussion on legal and tax implications of hiring overseas contractors and the importance of consulting a CPA.
Hiring Methods: Direct, Marketplace, Agency (00:06:26)
Nathan outlines the pros and cons of hiring direct, via marketplace, or through an agency.
Risk Management When Hiring Direct (00:07:41)
Tips for reducing risk when hiring direct, such as collecting identification and emergency contacts.
High-Level Hiring Process Overview (00:08:47)
Nathan provides a step-by-step overview of the hiring process taught at Outsource School.
Training, Onboarding, and Problem Solving (00:10:25)
Details on training, onboarding, and handling issues with new hires.
Outsource School Resources & Offer (00:11:31)
Nathan plugs Outsource School and its resources for business owners.
Three Actionable Takeaways Recap (00:12:16)
Host summarizes three key actionable takeaways from the episode for listeners.
Where to Find Nathan Hirsch (00:15:08)
Nathan shares where listeners can connect with him and learn more.
Links and Mentions:
Tools and Websites
“Free Up“: “00:01:11”
“Podcast Outreach Formula“: “00:09:35”
“Outsource School“: “00:11:31”
“VA Calculator”: “00:11:31”
Additional Resources
“Hiring Packet”: “00:11:31”
“Case Study”: “00:11:31”
Social Media
“Nathan Hirsch” on LinkedIn: “00:15:15”
Transcript:
Josh 00:00:00 Today, I’m super excited to introduce you to Nathan Hirsh. Nathan is a lifelong entrepreneur and currently the CEO of Ecom Balance and Outsource School. Nathan is best known for co-founding Free Up 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 Ecom Balance, 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 00:00:47 Josh, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Josh 00:00:49 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 C level or director level position overseas.
Nathan 00:01:05 It’s tough. It is by far one of the hardest things to do. So this is kind of how I look at it.
Nathan 00:01:11 You can hire managers and senior people to come in. There’s a lot of things working against you. Not only do you have to find someone with the right skill and the right managerial 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 VA’s and I’m bringing in Bob to manage these five Vas, I need to know that those five Vas are going to like Bob, trust Bob, and that Bob’s going to be able to handle it, and it takes a little bit of time to 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 hires at any company are unbelievably key. If you’re making your first four hires of 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.
Nathan 00:02:09 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 Free Up, we had chicken, 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. Marius, 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 two of them because we had 24 over seven customer service, but that’s kind of how we’ve always done it. And with econ balance, 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 econ now.
Nathan 00:02:59 And 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 00:03:12 That 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 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 coaching at all, like management level staff.
Nathan 00:04:09 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, so we were like, hey, should we try to get bookkeepers from other companies? But we never really went down that with free up. It was kind of nice because like, we had a marketplace of Vas and freelancers, so we didn’t really have a need to to go poach them. I think the closest thing to that is if we always want to hire full time and 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.
Nathan 00:04:53 They drop the other clients. And that’s probably the the closest we’ve ever done to to poaching. But I don’t think we’ve ever gone into another person’s company and just tried to steal them away.
Josh 00:05:02 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 00:05:40 I know how many clients 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 there’s different ways to go about it.
Nathan 00:05:58 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 could do a marketplace where you’re hiring through the marketplace, where 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 it on that.
Josh 00:06:26 Fair enough. 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 with your outsource school.
Josh 00:06:49 Is there any advice or recommendation that you try to point people towards, and maybe what are the pros and cons with each of those three alternatives?
Nathan 00:06:57 Yeah, so we point people to either hiring through a marketplace or hiring direct. We try to avoid the agency thing. There are good agencies out there where it works. There’s also agencies out there where if you don’t know a lot about hiring, you can get fast ones pulled over on you, where they’ll switch people on you and you won’t know, or you won’t have control over your people, or they’ll take your people away from you. And if you’re going to invest time, energy and money into working with someone, you want to have some control. And from there, it’s kind of like pros and cons. So like the nice thing about a marketplace is the payments are automatic. If you use a marketplace like Free up and a VA quits, they cover all replacement costs and get you a new person. If you have an issue with the VA, you have someone to go to and contact their customer service and hopefully they make it right in some way.
Nathan 00:07:41 And obviously the pro of hiring direct is it can sometimes be cheaper, but the con is you’re on your own. If you hire someone direct and you spend a month training them and they disappear, you don’t really have anyone to go to. There’s no repercussions or anything like that. So it’s it’s less about like the right way and more about the pros and cons. And in outdoor school, we just try to teach you the pros and cons while also educating you on ways to prevent some of those cons from happening. So a good thing if you hire someone directly, for example, is to get a copy of their license and get an emergency contact number and it’s super easy. Most people aren’t going to just give you their license and then just disappear without notice. They still could. But it’s all about just lowering the risk and protecting yourself as much as possible.
Josh 00:08:24 Yeah, no, that that makes a lot of sense. Now, as we kind of recap this entire conversation that has centered around, you know, hiring a level talent outsourced, you know, overseas, what is the process? Could you give her a give us a high level process that you walk through and you teach on outsource school? that, you know, this is where you start.
Josh 00:08:47 Here’s the first thing you need to do is XYZ to, you know, step 20 is onboarding, right? Would you mind giving us kind of a high level overview of what that process looks like that you teach?
Nathan 00:08:59 Yeah. So let’s say that we’re taking someone that has never hired someone before. Chances are you’re not just going to go out and hire five full time virtual assistants. You want to start small. You’re going to make a list of all the things you do on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis. You’re going to outline them by how long they take you, and also the difficulty of the task and how long they and how it actually impacts your business because you want to start on something low risk. If you if you’re hiring a VA for the first time, you’re probably not putting them in charge of the inventory of your e-commerce business. I go on podcasts and I always use podcasts as a good example. It’s a great way to to get your foot started hiring your VA.
Nathan 00:09:35 Hire a VA for five hours a week to get you on podcasts. We have a podcast outreach formula you can give right to your virtual assistant. It’s part of outsource school. It’s pretty easy. It’s very effective. And what’s the worst thing that can happen if the VA messes up? You don’t get on podcast. You’re not going to really burn any bridges. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Very low risk. At the same time, you’re going to learn a lot about hiring VA’s. You can give them a different role if they if you learn to trust them, you can increase their hours. You can do all sorts of things. So try to find something that’s low risk to start with and something that’s just part time to to get your foot wet. From there you create a job posting, which we provide templates for over 100 different job posting and outdoor school that you can just grab and use and save yourself a bunch of time from there. It’s about what we talked about with the type form and setting up any tests.
Nathan 00:10:25 From there. It’s an interview via slack, which we give you the interview questions you. We give you a video on how to do it. You just go through it from there. It’s setting expectations. Same thing. We give you all the things to set expectations for. You just go through the list. Both the interview and the setting. Expectations takes about 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how complicated that the role is. and from there, it’s all about training them. And we break you through exactly our step by step process on how to train them effectively. And once you have someone trained, that’s where the the fun begins. And it’s all about setting up meetings and incentives and, handling any issues that come up effectively. Because the solution to all issues isn’t just fire the person, get a new VA. There are ways to problem solve the issues and turn things around. So that’s kind of the the the process that outdoor school looks like. But it all starts with figuring out what you’re going to hire for, having a good job posting and doing that, interviewing and onboarding to get that person rolling.
Josh 00:11:19 Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Sounds like there’s a lot of content there at outsource school. so why don’t you go ahead and give a little plug to outsource school? Then where can people reach out and learn more about that?
Nathan 00:11:31 Yeah, go to outsource school comm. You can book a sales call with my great virtual assistant, Anna, and she’ll blow you away. And we have a lot of free resources on there as well. If you want to grab our, our VA calculator to figure out how to budget for hiring VA’s, we have a case study that shows exactly who we hired in year one, two, three, and four free apps. 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 00:12:00 Amazing, amazing. That’s a great resource. Definitely encourage our listeners to go check out Outsource School now, Nathan, as we begin to wrap up the episode, I love to leave our listeners with three actionable takeaways from each episode, so I’ve jotted down three actionable takeaways.
Josh 00:12:16 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 able to 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.
Josh 00:13:25 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 in the action item is when you hire Ava 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 talk about referrals. They are also are 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.
Josh 00:14:35 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?
Nathan 00:15:05 No. Those are those are great. That was a good summary.
Josh 00:15:08 Awesome. 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 00:15:15 Yeah, go to school.com. Com. Com Nathan Hirsch and any social media channel. Feel free to hit me up. I always love networking with other entrepreneurs and thanks for having me on.
