When building our business, how do we start outsourcing those things that are not part of our core expertise? One solution is to hire a virtual assistant. Start outsourcing that work to someone that can do it at a fee that makes sense for your business and will do it better than you can. Your time is better spent on the things that you’re an expert at.
However, there can be challenges to outsourcing. Today we talk all through the processes of how you build outsourcing into your business, how to get through those initial barriers, and why outsourcing certain tasks is so important.
If you’re going to take those steps, what are the things you should do to be successful in it? How do you bring the right people into your business at the right time?
Our thought leader today is Nathan Hirsch. Nathan is a 28-year-old entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring and e-commerce. He’s the co-founder of FreeeUp, a marketplace that connects businesses with pre-vetted freelancers in eCommerce, digital marketing, and much more.
He’s sold over thirty million dollars online and regularly appears on leading business podcasts around the world. He started his first business by buying and selling textbooks before moving on and finding his niche in baby products, home goods, and outdoor stuff.
Nathan got the idea for FreeeUp because he got frustrated that he was spending too much time on the hiring process and wanted to get easier access to top talent. I’m sure a lot of you have felt that same struggle. Nathan still does his eCommerce business, and it makes him five to seven million dollars a year. He runs it through Amazon’s drop shipping.
Just recently he exited FreeeUp and sold that company. He’s now working on Outsource School. It is a course that will teach business owners and entrepreneurs on how to interview, onboard, train, and manage virtual assistants to scale their businesses with outsourcing.
He built a VA calculator that you can find at outsourceschool.com/vacalculator. It helps you know what kind of VA you can afford or how many VA’s you can afford, and what you should be investing in this.
He’s also worked with his business partner, Connor Gilligan, on the book Free Up Your Business–50 Secrets to Bootstrap Million Dollar Companies.
WHAT WILL OUTSOURCING DO FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:04:48] Why is it outsourcing so important, specifically to virtual freelancers, assistants, and that kind of thing?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:05:52] If you think about it, there are very few solo entrepreneurs that are doing a million dollars or five million dollars a year out there. If you want to scale your business, you have to hire help.
We live in an amazing time where you now get access to people all over the world at different price points with different skill sets. You can hire people part-time, full-time, or project-based. You’re not limited like you were before, where you needed an office and you had to hire people in your town and the towns around you.
It gives you a lot of flexibility as an entrepreneur. I just hired a bookkeeper for my new company Outsource School, and I’m hiring her five hours a month, five bucks an hour, twenty-five bucks a month. My books are good from the beginning going forward.
A lot of people don’t realize how powerful that is when you can focus your time on what you’re really good at, the high-level parts of your business. You can quickly delegate a lot of the smaller stuff or the things that are outside your core competency.
OUTSOURCING IS A PART OF GROWTH
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:06:47] A lot of people never take that first step. What I’m trying to figure out is why do people shy away from even investigating a virtual assistant or pulling the trigger? I wonder what’s stopping people. Have you kind of encountered that yourself?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:07:06] Yeah, it’s weird. If you think of different parts of running a business, you’ve got marketing, you’ve got bookkeeping, et cetera…but for some reason, people don’t put hiring into the categories of everything that you need.
Or they take the approach that they struggled to hire and so they say, “Oh, I’m not going to hire any more.” However you wouldn’t do that with other things, right? If you tried to market your business for two months and you failed, you wouldn’t just say, “Oh, marketing’s out for me. I’m just not going to market my business anymore.”
EVERY BUSINESS WILL BENEFIT FROM OUTSOURCING
For some reason, people do that with hiring. It’s something that’s not natural to a lot of people. It’s something that people think is risky, although being an entrepreneur, in general, is risky. Hiring is no different. It’s something that requires systems and processes to get better and better at over time.
I try to encourage people to not focus on things you can’t control. Focus on the things you can control, which is your system for interviewing, onboarding, training, and managing virtual assistants or hires in general.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:08:01] Is there a perfect candidate for outsourcing, or are there people where outsourcing shouldn’t be for their kind of business? Is it really for everybody?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:08:12] I think it’s for everyone. When I was running FreeeUp (the platform for pre-vetted virtual assistants,) I had a sushi restaurant that was down the street. They were using virtual assistants to run their social media. I had a guy who used VA’s to run his fantasy football team. I had real estate agents, I had Amazon sellers and marketing agencies.
It’s something that can apply to every business, even if you have an office and you have U.S. employees that are there. If you’re having an employee that’s making fifty grand a year spending 25% of their time on very low-level tasks, give them a VA and let them focus on the $50,000 tasks.
There are a lot of creative ways to go about it. It applies to any business, no matter what industry you’re in.
HOW DID NATHAN OUTSOURCE USING VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS?
FreeeUp was an eight-figure business that was run completely by VA’s. It was me, my business partner, Connor (he’s in Denver, I’m in Orlando), and thirty-five VA’s from the Philippines. That’s it.
They handle all our customer service, all of our billing, all of our social media. We had leadership; we had team leaders and assistant team leaders. We had certain team meetings each week so our billing team would meet, our social media team would meet, and our customer service team would meet.
You can structure a business depending on how you want to. Right now I have a VA that does podcast research for me. I wake up every day to a list of podcasts to review and see if I want to reach out to the host and get on them.
I don’t need a leadership team for that. That’s a one-off task she does every single day, but as we grow and as we get bigger, we’re going to need customer service.
I don’t want to have ten customer service reps that all report to me. I want to put a team leader there and maybe an assistant team leader there in case that leader can’t work. You can structure it depending on what makes sense for your business.
UNDERSTAND THE THREE DIFFERENT TYPES OF OURSOURCING
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:10:26] What are some of the most common projects a business should consider outsourcing first?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:11:02] If you want to truly understand hiring and outsourcing, I like to divide it up into three different levels. You’ve got the followers, you’ve got the doers, and you’ve got the experts.
FOLLOWERS
The followers are what I consider a virtual assistant that makes five to ten bucks an hour and are non-U.S. They could have years of experience, but they’re there to follow your system, your process.
This could be customer services. It could be lead generation or podcast research. There are tasks inside the day to day operations of your business that you know how to do; you create a system for it and you delegate it.
You don’t hire a follower or a virtual assistant and say, “I don’t know how to run Facebook ads, go run my Facebook ads”. That’s not going to work out very well for you.
DOERS
Then you’ve got the doers. They’re the freelancers, the specialists. They do that same thing, eight to ten hours a day. You’re not teaching a graphic designer how to be a graphic designer, but they’re not consulting with you either.
They’re doers. They’re there to do that one thing at a high level. They could be video editors, they could be writers. They’re specialists.
EXPERTS
Then you’ve got the experts. They could be thirty bucks an hour, they could be a thousand bucks an hour. High-level freelancers, coaches, consultants, agencies, and you’re hiring them because you want the strategy.
You don’t know how to run Facebook ads. You don’t know how to build a brand, and they’re coming with their own systems, their own processes in place.
From there, just like you wouldn’t hire the VA and say, “Go run my Facebook ads,” you wouldn’t hire an expert who’s had a lot of success doing it their way with other businesses and say, “Hey, I’m going to hire you, but I want you to come in and do it my way.” That doesn’t make a lot of sense either.
KNOW WHAT YOU NEED
Understanding what different levels you need is the first step of hiring. Then you can get creative on exactly what you want to do. You can hire an agency to handle everything. You could hire one person to post on social media, following your process, but then put some doers in there, a graphic designer, a video editor, or writer to get them the content.
You can have someone create a strategy and then turn that strategy into systems and add the VA. There are lots of ways to do it, but you have to make sure that you understand the different levels and that you’re hiring appropriately.
TALK ABOUT WHAT YOU EXPECT FROM OUTSOURCING
The most common I see is people just hiring the wrong level and not being on the same page, or at least not having the conversation about collaboration and how you’re going to work together.
If you hire that expert, maybe it’s a collaboration where you both give input and then you work together. Maybe it’s more of something where you say, “Hey, I don’t know how to run Facebook ads. I’m going to go focus on what I’m good at. You handle the ads and just keep me updated.”
You want to talk about that relationship upfront so you don’t run into situations where you want different things.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR WHEN HIRING
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:14:03] I also think part of it is figuring out how you determine this person is actually an expert. Are they as good as they say they are and I can trust them with minimal handholding? What is the right way to make sure you’re getting the right amount of experience you need for the job you are outsourcing?
DO YOUR RESEARCH
Nathan Hirsch: [00:14:26] What Connor and I try to do (Connor is my business partner,) we try to learn enough to be dangerous without actually knowing how to do it. A good example is with development. With FreeeUp, we built an entire platform.
Neither Connor nor I can code but we did a lot of research into the different programming languages, the pros and cons for each, enough to have a conversation with the developer. We knew whether they were full of it or actually understood it.
When we were interviewing developers, there was always going to be that trust and leap of faith, but we at least knew what we were talking about.
LOOK FOR A GOOD PERSONALITY
The flip side of that is that experience is one part of the hiring equation. You also want to focus on attitude and communication as well, which is a key part of hiring that people miss. With attitude, you want someone positive, the bigger the man, the bigger woman.
When there’s some kind of adversity, you want people that don’t just care about money above all else. You want people that care about self-improvement and they care about being part of something great, people that don’t get aggressive when things don’t go their way.
CLEAR COMMUNICATION IS KEY
For communication, you want someone that not only speaks your language at a high level but can also get on the same page quickly so that you can run meetings and move forward and not find yourself going in circles. They can communicate clearly what they need and what they want.
The funny thing is when you find people that have a great attitude and great communication skills, they’re more honest about what they can and cannot do on the experience side. It all goes together.
NATHAN’S PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:15:54] That makes sense to me. What I like is that you have the experience. You’ve done this for yourself. Can you talk a little bit about how you shifted from your outsourcing company, FreeeUp, into what you’re working on now?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:16:21] Yeah. With FreeeUp, we started it with a $5,000 investment and a minimum viable product. We just got it out there and we were fortunate enough that people liked it. We were able to grow and invest in the software. We scaled that $5,000 investment to $1 million to $5 million to $9 million to $12 million by year four, in 2019.
HOW THE SALE HAPPENED
Halfway through 2019, we got approached by one of our clients. They’d been a client for years. They reached out and said, “Hey, we love the service. We want to get into the freelance VA space but don’t want to build that from scratch. Would you guys be interested in hearing an offer to be acquired?”
At the time we said, yeah, we’ll hear it out. We’ll get the information at the very least. They ended up making an offer that we thought was more than fair if not aggressive. From there the due diligence began. They wanted to know everything about us, everything about the business.
We had just as many questions for them. We wanted to make sure we weren’t selling the business to someone who was going to drive it into the ground, ruin the relationships that we had built, and not treat our internal team well, or the freelancers and clients.
THE SITUATION WAS WIN-WIN
They’re an hour and a half from us. We had the opportunity to go to their office, meet the other people that had worked with them for years, and learn about a lot about their other success, failures, and acquisitions.
We were really impressed. We felt like they were the right people to take FreeeUp from that $12 million to hopefully $50 million and beyond. They treat people well. They’ve won Employer of the Year for a number of years in a row down in Tampa.
From there the mind-numbing part came in that, which is the lawyers. It wasn’t really their fault or our faults. It’s part of the process. We ended up making that tough decision and we felt like it would be a win-win for everyone.
ALL THE JOBS STAYED SECURE
We had that internal team that was thirty-five people. We made sure all their jobs were secure and we also took $500,000 from the sale and gave it to our team in the Philippines to thank them for helping us scale the business.
By far, that’s the hardest part of not being a part of FreeeUp, is not being able to work with them anymore, although we’re still in contact and still good friends with all of them. That’s how it went down. It kind of came out of nowhere. It’s tough to turn down something that you feel is going to be a win-win for everyone.
Even after the sale, we’ve been checking in and the internal team could not be happier with them. Obviously they miss us on some level but it seems to be going well and we’re excited for other things.
WHAT IS OUTSOURCE SCHOOL?
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:18:34] You built this opportunity where you’re helping people now learn about outsourcing and taking on that coaching role. What inspired you to stay in the outsourcing space and move into this coaching side of things?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:18:47] Right now we’re not really doing coaching. We might add that later on. There are two components of it, where we’re selling courses on our exact processes interviewing, onboarding, training, and managing VAs.
Then there are specific things like the Podcast Outreach Formula, which is how to use VA’s to get on more podcasts.
We’re going to have other courses like Lead Generation, how to use VA’s for bookkeeping, stuff like that. We’re also going to build VA software to help people on that side. Hopefully, it all comes together. We’re excited for it.
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CREATING COURSES FOR THE OUTSOURCING INDUSTRY
It’s something that we’ve been asked for years, to create courses on how to crack the code of using virtual assistants. That’s something that we wanted to do after we sold FreeeUp, but it’s also a chance for us to stay in the VA space.
We have a lot of great relationships with VA’s in the Philippines and all over the world. We didn’t want to just say we sold FreeeUp, so goodbye, see you later.
We’re donating a percentage of all the sales for Outsource School to our favorite charity, Teach for the Philippines, which provides education to Filipino children, whether they want to be VAs or pursue other careers. That’s something we’re very passionate about.
It’s a combination of staying in a space that we know very well that we think we can give back to. It’s fun helping other entrepreneurs grow while also giving back to the VA’s in the space.
CREATE OUTSOURCING SYSTEMS BEFORE YOU HIRE
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:20:03] I think a lot of us read The Four Hour Work Week book. One of the main concepts in that book is about outsourcing what you can. However, I don’t think it got as deep as it should have.
It got a lot of us curious about outsourcing, but then a lot of us dip our toe in the water and we have a bad experience because we don’t know what we’re doing. Have you experienced that yourself with getting started?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:21:06] Yeah. It took us years to figure out outsourcing in general. I remember we made one really good hire, Jeegan, who I’ve been working with for 10 plus years. I’m actually the Godfather of one of her kids.
After that, I made some really bad hires, people that quit on me, people who couldn’t follow directions. There’s a certain sense of self-responsibility. It was my system, and my processes were bad. I sat down with Jeegan and said, “What am I doing wrong?”
THINK THROUGH YOUR OUTSOURCING PROCESS
She let me have it and told me everything about how I communicate to how I run things, how I interview and onboard, and the culture and the family environment that I was or wasn’t creating.
We broke it down into the interviewing, onboarding, training, and managing, figuring out how to make each part of it better.
Years later, we finally had a really good process. This was for my Amazon business and we took that process over to the internal team at FreeeUp. It’s one of the reasons we were able to put that team together quickly.
We didn’t just wake up one day and hire thirty-five VAs, cross our fingers, and hope it worked out. We had real systems, real processes that we put into place. Everything from bonuses and raises to how we ran meetings, how we reduce turnover, to how we fired someone if it didn’t work out.
All of that is really what we want to teach people in Outsource School. We have a course called “Cracking the VA code”. It is our exact system and process.
We always wish back when we were first starting and spending years wasting time, energy, and money that someone had just said, “Hey, follow this process and you’ll make better hires.” Obviously, people can take that process and improve it or tweak it however they want to, but at least they have a baseline of something that works.
PITFALLS TO AVOID WHEN YOU START OUTSOURCING
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:22:40] People should definitely take the course, but I want to ask this: is there a common mistake that people are making when they start outsourcing? What are some of the easy things we can do to just avoid those pitfalls so that we stay confident in the process?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:22:59] I mentioned there are four parts. You’ve got interviewing, onboarding, training, and managing.
Most entrepreneurs know you have to interview someone. Most entrepreneurs know you have to train a virtual assistant, and most entrepreneurs know on some level you have to manage the virtual assistant.
DON’T FORGET TO ONBOARD
However, the step that always gets missed is that onboarding. It’s key. As an example, let’s say you interview three virtual assistants. You want to hire Jane at five bucks an hour.
What a lot of entrepreneurs will do is just say, “Jane, that was a great interview. I want to hire you at five bucks an hour. Let’s get started training.”
What I teach people and what I strongly encourage listeners to do (if you take anything from this podcast about outsourcing, it’s this) is sit down and say, “Jane, that was a great interview. I want to hire you at five bucks an hour. Let’s make sure you’re good with five bucks an hour. If you are, I’m going to take you through what I call my SICC method.”
We’re going to talk about Schedule. We’re going to talk about Issues. We’re going to talk about Communication. We’re going to talk about Culture.
Only if we’re the same page with everything, will we move forward to training.
DISCUSS YOUR SCHEDULE
With schedule, I’m going to go through and tell her the schedule I need and make sure she’s worked that schedule before. There’s a 12 hour time difference in the Philippines. If I’m hiring her to work the graveyard shift, I’m going to make sure she has experience with that and that it’s not going to cause issues later on.
I’m also going to find out what other clients she has. A lot of VA’s have other clients. What are the hours for those clients? Is there any overlap? Is she working a hundred hours a week or ten hours a week? I make sure that it makes sense before we move forward.
RESOLVE ISSUES YOUR VA MAY FACE
Then I’m going to go through issues. We’re going to talk about computer issues, internet issues, power issues, weather issues, and personal issues.
I’m going to make sure that she has a good working computer. I’m going to see if that computer breaks, is there a backup somewhere in here house or is she unable to work until she gets it back from the shop?
For internet, does she have a backup internet? How often does she lose internet? Similar with power. Does she have a backup generator? How often does she lose power? Does she have a friend’s house she can go to if she loses power or is she unable to work until the power comes back?
Then we’re going to talk about the weather. Does she live in a rural area or a city? Cities are usually affected less in the Philippines when it comes to weather. What should I expect with the weather?
Obviously, they don’t have a lot of control over that, but you want to make sure if you’re hiring someone that needs to be on at a certain time and they get a lot of bad weather, they might not be the best fit for that role.
Then we go over personal issues and how personal issues can interfere with work for an extended period of time. We don’t want to work with someone that’s one personal issue away from it not being able to work.
Maybe they’re taking care of their five kids and their entire family, and there’s no one else to help besides her. If one person gets sick, that could affect them working with us. So we go through issues.
DISCUSS COMMUNICATION STYLES
Then we talk about communication. The way that I communicate might be different than the way that Brandon does. I go through emails and prefer responses within a business day. You need to be on Slack when you’re working, responding, and pushing updates there.
You have to have Viber on your phone so if there’s an emergency, I can reach out to you and I don’t get a message back saying this person doesn’t have a Viber account when I really need to get a hold of you.
DEFINE YOUR COMPANY CULTURE
That’s communication, and then for culture, what do I care about? I care about someone who comes with ideas, feedback, and a positive attitude and wants to get to know the other people on the team. We go through what kind of culture we are.
Again, at any point, they can back out. At the end, I really give them a chance to back out. If they’re on the same page with everything there, only then do we move forward to the training.
What that does is that saves you so much time and hassle down the line. What a lot of people do is they will have a vague job post. They’ll give a little bit more information during the interview, but the VA doesn’t really know what they’re getting into until you’ve already started investing time and energy into training.
By then it might be too late. Spending that extra thirty minutes in the beginning to go through that whole process is going to save you hundreds if not thousands of hours down the line.
USE OUTSOURCING TO HELP
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:26:45] It sounds like a lot of work. That shouldn’t be a bad thing, but I worry that it would scare people away from outsourcing. Obviously, if you’re taking a course like what you have at Outsource School, you have templates built into this to help people. You don’t have to come up with all of them yourself.
Nathan Hirsch: [00:27:01] Right. It is a twenty to forty-minute process. You have a cheat sheet, and we have videos of us onboarding four different VA’s. You can watch us do it and then go do it.
It’s not a four-hour process. It’s twenty to forty minutes, and it’s honestly the best twenty to forty-minute investment that you can make. You’d much rather waste thirty minutes talking to someone and realize they’re a bad fit than realize they are a bad fit a month into training them.
We have a guide and you go through question by question. It tells you what you’re looking for. You can do it with the VA and if you have any issues or they say something you’re not sure is good or bad or a concern, you can reach out to us and we’ll help you based on our experience.
However, it’s built for you to go through yourself and turn everything into a repeatable process. If you’re going to build a team of ten VA’s, then onboard all ten VA’s and they all know what they’re getting into before you jump into it.
HOW TO WRITE A JOB DESCRIPTION WHEN OUTSOURCING
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:27:49] I appreciate you going into the nitty-gritty here with me. The other part of the process is coming up with a job description or request for your outsourcing project. It’s daunting and intimidating. What do you do to help people with that? What would you say to someone doing it for the first time?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:28:48] We have a cheat sheet that makes it easy for you to make a job posting. It is about clarity. You want to give as much information as possible upfront and you want to know is it a flexible schedule or set schedule? What are the hours? What kind of skills do they have to have? What should they know before getting in?
A good example of that is there are programs out there called Time Doctor or Hubstaff that monitor the VA screen. I personally don’t use that. I like building a relationship and all that, but there are some clients that do. However, they won’t put that in the job posting.
The VA goes through everything and finally gets trained, then the person says, “Oh, by the way, I need you to use Time Doctor,” when the VA wouldn’t have applied for the job upfront if they knew they had to use Time Doctor.
There are certain things like that that you have to make sure to put in the job posting. The goal is to give them as much information as possible.
The last kind of hint that I’ll give about the job posting is to put three to four sentences about your business, about your passion for your business, and why you’re doing it. If you’re running something that coincides with what that other person likes and believes in and is passionate about, that’s how you’re going to find really good candidates.
YOU’RE HIRING HUMANS, NOT ROBOTS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:29:56] That makes sense. I think what people forget is the human side of it. You’re not just hiring a robot to do a job. You’re bringing a person into your business to help you get things done. If you can bring those human elements into it early, you’re probably gonna have a better relationship with the people that you’re working with.
Nathan Hirsch: [00:30:19] I completely agree.
WHO TO HIRE FIRST
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:30:20] We have a lot of different categories of people that can bring into the business. I guess every business has got to think for themselves what to start outsourcing first. My question becomes, do I hire a follower first or do I hire a leader first to help me figure out what I would have a follower do?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:30:50] You wouldn’t necessarily hire a leader first. You might hire an expert first. There’s no right or wrong answer there. You can go about it either way. It just depends whether you want to take the time to set up the system or process, or whether you want to build it yourself.
For someone like me who is a little bit more advanced in hiring VA’s, I personally enjoy the entrepreneur side of figuring stuff out and throwing it against the wall. I’ll do it with the VA and I just have to be okay that things that we try might not work. Eventually, I have the VA help create the process with me. That’s a more advanced thing.
YOU HAVE TO BE INVOLVED WITH OUTSOURCING PROJECTS
Some entrepreneurs will come in and they say, “Okay, I don’t want to hire. I’m not good at hiring, but if I hire a project manager or a leader to do the hiring for me and set up my entire business, that’ll go well.”
It sounds good in theory, but most entrepreneurs cannot pull that off unless you’re really hiring an expert to come in with the strategy and the systems to put into place and then building a team around that.
You’re still going to have to get involved. You’re still going to want to know how to interview, how to onboard, how to train, and how to manage people.
TIPS FOR BUSINESS GROWTH THROUGH OUTSOURCING
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:31:52] As someone who had to organically scale a business and bring something from just you to a bunch of people, do you have some things that you learned along the way that worked for you in terms of growth?
What were some of the things that worked for you in terms of going from just building to actually growing and scaling?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:32:46] This is my organic marketing playbook that we use for FreeeUp and we’re bringing it over to Outsource School right now.
CREATE AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM
First of all, you have an affiliate program or referral program. With FreeeUp we gave about 50 cents for every hour we billed with someone forever that you send to us. With Outsource School, we have our own affiliate program (outsourceschool.com/affiliates) where you get a percentage of every sale.
You have that as a baseline, you have it on your website. You tell everyone about it. We even taught people once we had VA’s taking client phone calls was that at the end of every phone call you leave off with, “Oh, by the way, we have this great affiliate program.” Make sure that you tell people about it.
NETWORK EVERY DAY
Next is step one, which is networking with other entrepreneurs. The first thing that I do every morning is reach out to three new entrepreneurs through Facebook or Instagram. Not really LinkedIn, but you can do it through other methods as well.
I just try to connect with them and set up networking calls. I’m not trying to sell them, I’m not trying to pitch them, I’m trying to learn about them and see if I can add value. If there’s some way to help each other or work together, great. If not, it’s always great meeting other people in this space.
That’s a small part of it, but it’s something that over time you’ll wake up years later and think, “Wow, my network has grown exponentially.”
GET ON PODCASTS
That’s part of it. Next is getting on podcasts. If you’re running a business and you’re not going on a podcast a week, there’s no reason not to. It’s great to get your message out like I am now to thousands of your ideal customers. It’s also good for networking and meeting hosts, and it’s great for SEO and for backlinks.
There are a lot of benefits. I could keep going on and on. Podcasts should be part of your marketing plan. If you’re going to dump $50,000 into Facebook ads, you should be going on podcasts as well. It’s a lot cheaper.
FIND PARTNERS
Next is finding partners (this is key), other people in the same space that have the same audience, but that do different things than you do.
For FreeeUp, we started in the Amazon space because I was an Amazon seller. We found Amazon software companies. They didn’t offer VAs and we didn’t offer Amazon software. We both went after Amazon sellers. We would set up content swaps.
Content swaps could be a podcast where we each go on each other’s podcasts. It could be a YouTube video together or could be a webinar, a blog post, or an email blast.
You set it up so every quarter, six months, or year, (however you want to set it up,) they’re going in front of your audience and vice versa. Over time, you’re going to build lots and lots of relationships. We had around two hundred partners at FreeeUp that were constantly promoting us to their audience, which was a big part of building.
WORK WITH INFLUENCERS
Off of that are influencers and micro-influencers. They are very similar to partnerships but are a little bit harder to land, and you’re not doing as many content swaps. You’re finding people that like your product and they value your audience. It might include the affiliate program, it might not. That will promote you to their audience.
There’s going to be some failure and rejection there, just like getting on podcasts. You’re going to get rejected too, but when you find the right influencer, that helps take your business to the next level.
ALL THESE WORK TOGETHER FOR GROWTH
They all go together because you might network with someone who knows someone that would be a really good influencer. You might go on a podcast and they become an influencer. You might do a partnership and that leads to you getting on the podcast.
They all go hand in hand, but when you divide it up like that, every day you focus little by little on building that new partnership, getting a new influencer, going on that one podcast, and having your affiliate program.
You’re going to grow and you’re going to scale over time. One last piece I forgot is putting out your own content consistently, whether that’s your own podcast, your own blog, being on social media, stuff like that. Consistent content kind of brings it all together.
CREATE A PODCAST TO ADD VALUE
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:36:14] You have a new show, right? You have Outsource and Scale, the podcast. How’s that worked for you?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:37:27] That worked well, and was actually part of the FreeeUp sale. FreeeUp owns that now, I’m no longer doing that show.
I might start a different podcast later. The beauty of having your own podcast is it gives you a reason to reach out to those influencers and higher-level people. It’s not the main reason, but it’s one of them.
I’ve had situations where I wanted to work with someone for years and they just rejected me. They didn’t want to hop on a call with me. The second I launched a podcast, they reach out to me and ask, “Hey, can I be on your podcast?”
PODCASTING HELPS YOUR BUSINESS
It kind of gives you a little bit of that extra-in. It’s also good for building your own brand, good for SEO and other stuff as well like I kind of said before. It is a way to add that instant value.
Sometimes if you do think it’s a little awkward, or maybe you’re a newer entrepreneur, you can’t always add value to other people. The podcast is an easy way to do it because you can always say, “Oh, by the way, do you want to be a guest on my show?”
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:39:10] What I want to get into is I’d like to hear a story about the impact you’ve seen in someone’s business, whether it was yours or in other people’s when they broke that barrier down and brought outsourcing into their business. Do you have some stories from that?
NATHAN’S IMPACT
Nathan Hirsch: [00:39:37] Yeah. I remember Tonia Reckler who is a great FreeeUp client, a big FreeeUp supporter. She owns a bunch of different companies. She and her husband were doing everything trying to run all these different companies. When I first met her, she had struggled with outsourcing before.
I helped her get that first VA, and looking back after a year with FreeeUp she was one of our biggest clients. She had VA’s doing everything, running her podcast, and doing all of that stuff.
She’s kind of a poster child of someone who didn’t think they could do it, who wasn’t sure they could implement those systems and processes. Now she is addicted to systems and processes and virtual assistants.
Now, it’s tough for me to get into specifics because I’m not involved in everyone’s business. They hired someone from FreeeUp. I’d kind of help on the outset, but they’re working with the VA one by one.
However, I do know that when you’re hiring and you’re keep getting bad hires, you never want to hire again. When you make good hires, it is addicting. You just want to keep doing it more and more, and it helps you scale your business.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:40:37] Have you thought about the impact that you’re having in general, about the good that you’re putting into the world and how you’re helping people? Has it sunk in yet that you’ve built this thing after you’ve been running for so many years to get it done?
Nathan Hirsch: [00:41:06] I hope that’s the case. One of the proudest things about FreeeUp, that Connor and I liked is that last year we paid out over $7 million to freelancers and VA’s around the world. They were showing us their houses and their cars, and how they were able to provide for their family.
HAVE A SENSE OF PURPOSE
I’m not a big fan of patting myself on the back, so to speak. I’m not sure what good that is. There’s a certain time to celebrate, hopefully when going in the right direction.
I always think back to my Amazon business. The reason why I got sick of it and eventually hated it was because I wasn’t really helping anyone. I was just helping myself, my bank account, and maybe my team.
I wasn’t even that good at managing teams back then. Now with FreeeUp and Outsource School, there’s much more sense of why and purpose and helping other people. It’s definitely something that motivates us
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:41:53] I bring it up because I think you are building something that is helping a lot of people. That’s where my mind goes. You’re creating jobs in a place that could really use it, in a way that is not taking advantage of it but actually building something that is helping.
I just want to express some gratitude and appreciate that there are good people out in the world that are also building amazing businesses. So I appreciate you. Thanks for taking the time to come on the show.
You didn’t have to do that either, but it’s always great meeting new people, and I appreciate you sharing your knowledge with our listeners out there.
Nathan Hirsch: [00:42:31] Thanks for having me. If I can help anyone in any way, definitely go to Outsourceschool.com or reach out to me.
WHERE TO FIND NATHAN
Website: outsourceschool.com
Social Media: @realnathanhirsch
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