Episode 096 – Connor Gillivan and Nathan Hirsch

Connor Gillivan  0:01  

A lot of it comes down to like team building and hiring. So, with FreeUp and then also with our first business and now with Outsource School, a lot of what we do is we try to understand the whole business model. We try to understand the teams that go into it. The people we’re going to need to actually run the operations and growth of the business. And then, we figure out the right processes that need to be handled. And then, it kind of comes down to like, how we hire that the right people, how we get them incorporated into a company culture that’s 100% remote, and how we keep them motivated and keep them moving forward. So, Nate and I aren’t always pulled into things on a regular basis. We can keep focused on growth, we can keep focusing on new projects. While we know we have this really core team that’s handling things for us. 

 

Richard Matthews  0:48  

…

 

Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and I’m live on the line today with Connor Gilligan and Nathan Hirsch. You guys there?

 

Nathan Hirsch  1:59  

We’re here. 

 

Richard Matthews  2:01  

Awesome, so glad to have you guys here. For those of you don’t know, Nathan’s actually been on the show before. Nathan was heading up a company called FreeUp.com, which recently you guys have got acquired and you guys are starting a new venture together called Outsource School. So, to start off with, why don’t you guys tell me what Outsource School is known for? What you guys are known for? And what is it that people come to you to get help with?

 

Nathan Hirsch  2:26  

Cool, I’ll take the first one. So when we were acquired when FreeUp was acquired, we were going through a transition period. We’re setting up the new owners to be successful. We really liked the new owners and people started asking us how we did it because FreeUp was an eight-figure business that had no office; no US employees. It was me, Connor, and 35 remote VAs in the Philippines running all day-to-day operations. And we didn’t just wake up one day and hire 35 people and cross our fingers and hope it worked out. We have real systems and processes for interviewing, onboarding, training, and managing them. So, we created this course called Cracking the VA Code that goes in-depth into those four parts of hiring. And we took it to market and like any new business, we don’t know what the feedback is gonna be, but it was overwhelmingly positive. And people started asking for more. So we came up with mini-courses on how to use virtual or how to hire virtual assistants for podcasts, get on there to do lead generation, do bookkeeping and do different things. And the way we’ve structured it is that if you buy our main course cracking the VA code, you get a one-year membership to outsource school where you get access to all our other courses for a year. So that’s what we’ve been working on. And there’s also a software component that I’ll let Connor explain.

 

Connor Gillivan  3:38  

Yes. So, with Outsource School, we’re also looking to create some tools that will help businesses help entrepreneurs better manage their remote virtual assistants or just remote teams in general. And so one of the first software tools that we’re coming out with is an SLP builder. So if you think about hiring and managing a large team of virtual assistants or virtual team members, a lot of that goes into it is actually training them, getting them up to speed, onboarding them, and getting them ready to actually handle the role. So you can keep focusing on growing the business. And so there’s a lot of ways you can do it. There are some other tools out there. We in the past have used like Gdrive and different things and just kind of hacked it together. And so we wanted to try to make a tool that made it very easy to create text and video, SOPs, store them in one place, and then easily share them out to your entire team. So that’s going to be one of the first software tools we come out with Outsource school and the whole kind of build off of that to make it easier to manage your remote team.

 

Richard Matthews  4:43  

That is incredibly wonderful. And we’re probably gonna have to talk more about that because I’m actually in the process of building an SLP builder called Push Button Process, which I because I saw a lot of the same problems, but it’s not really my core business. So I might have to, we might have to talk a little bit more about some of the things I would love to see in an SLP builder because I’ve got some stuff that we put together that I was like, works great, but I don’t want to build it. So, that’s, that’s really awesome. So my next question for you is your origin story. We talked on the show all the time, every hero has their origin story, we started to realize that you were different. Maybe you had superpowers, and maybe you could use them to help other people. So how did you guys and I would like to hear from both of you on this? How did you guys get into the entrepreneurial world, to begin with? And how did you end up here?

 

Nathan Hirsch  5:30  

So, I can kind of start so I mean, growing up, my parents were both teachers. And I always had these jobs where I was working 30-40 hours a week, and I learned a lot about business and sales and managing people. But I also learned that I hated having a boss and I kind of knew that I was if I was going to go into the real world, I was going to be miserable. So when I got to college, I started hustling, and I started off buying and selling people’s textbooks, competing with my school bookstore. Eventually, I got a cease and desist letter from my college telling me to knock it off and stop competing with them. And so I pivoted, and I had sold some of these books on Amazon. And I started doing a lot of trial and error and with sporting equipment and video games and computers before eventually coming across the baby product industry. And for whatever reason, I became really good at selling baby products on Amazon. And as I was growing this business, I became overwhelmed. I needed to start hiring people. So, I posted a job on Facebook and Connor was the person in my business law class that responded to that ad and he said, “Hey, I don’t really know what you do, I need a job.” And I really hired him without interviewing him very much. And that’s really how we got started. And kind of a funny story off of that is Connor’s first day when he was supposed to get started. He texted me and said, by the way, “Can you pick me up? I don’t have a car.” And in my mind, I’m like, “Who is this guy?” Like, I’m not going to pick him up every day. But those car rides ended up being very essential because we talk business on the way to my house on the way back from my house and that’s when we built a lot of our relationship and which turned into a business partnership shortly after.

 

Richard Matthews  7:02  

That’s really awesome.

 

Connor Gillivan  7:04  

And my story is similar too. I started in entrepreneurship pretty early on. One of my first jobs was working for a cousin who owned his own landscaping business. So I think I was 13 or 14 when I started working with him over the summers and after school and things like that. And I learned a ton from him. I saw him interact with customers, I saw him making money and kind of growing his life and building it how he wanted to, without really having to rely on anyone else. And that really struck a chord with me. And so in high school, I had some part-time jobs. But then, I also kind of started my own lawn mowing business and saw the power of that and saw how you could start something from the ground up. And then, like Nate said, once I got into college, I was very similar to Nate always like, I don’t ever want to work for the man, I never want to rely on anyone else. I don’t really want to be told what to do. I’d rather go out and build things and kind of make my own impact and so on. When they posted that job, I was always looking for something to put my teeth into. And I don’t think either of us could have expected what it’s become 10 years later. But, that’s really how it all got started. We met each other, we started working on things it can, it kind of became infectious for both of us, I think where we were pushing each other and challenging each other more and more. And then over the years, we learned that we could apply in other ways. And that was kind of how he went into FreeUp and now we’re kind of making another transition into Outside School. We’re always just trying to find the problems that entrepreneurs are having, and then try to solve them in a slightly different way with a big focus on the customer and making sure they’re having a good experience.

 

Richard Matthews  8:41  

That’s awesome. You guys have a similar story in mind. My first business was, I was buying candy wholesale. The big-box store and selling it retail on the campus at 13 years old and I got shut down by the school as well. They told me I couldn’t sell without a business license. So I tell people I had my first government shutdown at 13 cause similar kind of start into the business community. So my next question for you it has to do with your superpowers right. Every entrepreneur has their superpowers what you do or build or offer this world it really helps solve problems for them on the way that I’ve been framing this for my guests lately has been like if you look at your skill sets, like all the things that you guys are really good at. I have noticed myself and a lot of my guests have, that if you look at your set of skills, you have one skill that really sort of energizes and empowers everything else that you do. Right. For me, that’s always been and it was something that I didn’t realize until just recently, it’s systems and processes. That’s the thing that I’m really, really good at seeing like I see things and systems and all the other skills that I’ve built, all sort of came off of that right my ability to see things allowed me to get good at various different things. So, it’s sort of that one zone of genius that empowers the rest of your skills. So, for you guys, what would you say your zone of genius is your superpower that really helps build all your skill sets.

 

Nathan Hirsch  10:01  

We both have two or three things that we do very well. And we’re very good at dividing and conquering. I think one thing that that I’m good at is I’m able to look at different things and find whatever that bottleneck is and just fix it, figure out a solution for it, whether it’s talking to a customer on the phone, whether it’s getting a VA to do it, whether it’s fixing myself or talking to Connor and the other our affiliate manager – and just figure it out. So figuring out where those bottlenecks are in a very short term mindset of what do we have to fix today, this week to keep the business growing?

 

Richard Matthews  10:30  

That’s awesome. Now, you Connor.

 

Connor Gillivan  10:33  

Off of that for Nate to I need to really great at talking to people. I don’t know if we thought he would have been good at this years ago. But he’s awesome at like dealing with customers and making sure they’re happy and kind of giving them everything that they expect and want. So I would say that’s another of his superpowers. For me, I would say it a lot of it comes down to like team building and hiring. So with our with FreeUp and then also with our first business and now with Outsource School, a lot of what we do is we try to understand the whole business model. We try to understand the teams that go into it, the people we’re going to need to actually run the operations and growth of the business. And then, we figure out the right processes that need to be handled. And then it kind of comes down to like how we hire that the right people, how we get them incorporated into a company culture that’s 100% remote, and how we keep them motivated and keep them moving forward. So Nate and I aren’t always pulled into things on a regular basis. We can keep focused on growth, we can keep focusing on new projects. While we know we have this really core team that’s handling things for us. So, I would say that’s my superpower. And I’ve been doing a lot of that lately with Outsource School and it’s been a lot of fun.

 

Nathan Hirsch  11:43  

Connor has some others as well. He’s really good at designing websites. Working with developers I know I couldn’t man it with FreeUp we had to build this platform, the software and me managing developers didn’t go over so well. Connor took that over and handled it like a rock star. So, we each have two or three things that we master.

 

Richard Matthews  12:01  

It’s really interesting too. And I see how those skills really tie in what you guys have been able to build because I’m in the process of doing some of the same things like building our team and our staff to get some of our projects off the ground right now. And, like, particularly the stuff about building a remote culture is something that I’ve been I’ve been working a lot on recently. And I’m curious if you have any sort of just, you know, high-level tips for people who are in that sort of position now where they’re working on, you know, I’ve hired three staff members over the last year and we’re working on building that online culture. I think it’s going really well. But I’d love to hear if you have any just like high-level thoughts on how you manage that or what are some of your rules to live by or –

 

Nathan Hirsch  12:42  

I want Connor to take this question but a little background story. So I mentioned I had this internship going into college at Firestone and I that was the longest job I had. And I had this manager who would talk down to people he would stress people out everyone hated working for him. So when I went to be an entrepreneur and I started hiring people for the first time. That’s really the only management style that I knew. And I kind of acted in that way. And it wasn’t until Connor really sat me down and said, “Hey, Nate, our turnovers through the roof. People hate working with you. You’re not managing people.” Well, we need to fix this that we were able to turn a lot of it around. And I think to Connors credit from day one, he’s always been about culture. The same thing in year one, the same thing. Now, we have culture meetings every other week or every month on that Connor lead. So he’s definitely the best person to answer this question. But I personally have learned a lot from him.

 

Connor Gillivan  13:33  

Nice. A lot of it kind of goes and permeates into the whole organization, the whole hiring process, and the whole management process. So, I’ll just walk you through a few quick examples. So, the first thing is anyone we hire is always being hired for culture. 

 

So, we look for people skills, we look for their experience, but we really, really look at their values, their personal beliefs, and just how they aligned with how we think and how we do things in the business, I won’t hire someone if they’re the best copywriter in the world, but they have a – attitude and they can’t get along with us. I’m not hiring them, I’d rather find someone else that really aligns with us gets our vision gets who we are, and can work with us. 

 

So for me, it starts in that whole interview process, you need to find the right people that align with your values in order to build a good culture over time. And then, there are a few other things that go into it. So, what something I’ve been doing with all our recent hires throughout our school is anytime someone gets hired, they go through an initial onboarding process. And one of those meetings that are in that onboarding process is a culture and team meeting, where I share our culture doc with them. And I also share our org chart with them and I go through the entire team. I go through with the culture, our values, our mission, our vision, and really get them aligned with that so that they understand what the business is all about. And then touchpoints going forward is once a month. Culture and team meetings where everyone comes together. And we talk about different things around the culture and team. And then, we also hold an all-hands meeting every Monday, where Nate and I are giving updates. But we’re also just bringing the team together so everyone can interact and meet each other and kind of learn more about one another. So it like I said, it permeates through the entire organization. And it’s just really making efforts to implement it throughout that whole process. So, then eventually, they’re kind of like, they are the culture at a certain point, you don’t have to really worry about them. And then you put it on their shoulders that as new people come in, they’re helping you assimilate them into the culture as well.

 

Richard Matthews  15:39  

Interesting. So you guys do the culture meetings every, he said, every other week, can you actually just sort of discuss and do you do that on like some like this on the Zoom platform, and you just bring everyone on?

 

Connor Gillivan  15:50  

So, once a month, and we do it right through Slack? We just have a Slack channel where everyone is and we do it through chat. And, we do almost all of our meetings. Just through Slack chat, we stay away from video or audio calls as much as possible.

 

Richard Matthews  16:08  

The reason why?

 

Nathan Hirsch  16:11  

I can answer that. So first of all, you’re dealing with a lot of people that are international getting them all on a Zoom call without internet cutting in and out can be a little bit of a nightmare. There are also really great virtual assistants who just don’t like being on camera, I mean, Chicky and one of our best hires ever, she is shy, she doesn’t like being on camera. And if we required that during our interview and onboarding and stuff, we probably would have missed out to our best hire of all time. Having things in writing when you’re dealing with virtual assistants is incredibly important. There’s a clarity issue where things can get misinterpreted when you’re talking on Zoom, something cuts out for a second and they miss it and when you have it in writing, you people can reference back to it and also people that missed the meeting and go through and read the update. So there are more reasons too but that’s the basic idea and we found that you really don’t need video or audio calls. Now, you can do them here and there. If you do an interview and you want to meet the person face-to-face at the end of the interview, have them hop on for five minutes. But like I said, a lot of them are shy. So if you’re going to do that, make sure you give them a heads up, don’t just say last minute. Oh, by the way, we’re doing a Zoom call.

 

Richard Matthews  17:16  

So, you guys actually do your interviews via chat as well then. 

 

Connor Gillivan  17:19  

And our onboarding. 

 

Richard Matthews  17:21  

That’s awesome. I never even would have considered that. So, it’s interesting to see that you’re here that you guys are doing that. So, my other question for you this might be there’s my answer to this might be ‘no.’ But is your culture document secret? Is that something you’d be willing to share with our audience? We have like a copy of it for people who are looking to you know, have something like that to put together for their organizations.

 

Nathan Hirsch  17:43  

That’s you, Connor.

 

Connor Gillivan  17:45  

I mean, yeah, I’m open to that. It’s great, it’s not anything crazy. It’s something we teach in the Cracking the VA code course of how to actually build the culture doc. So yeah, be happy to share it with you guys. So, you guys can see kind of what an example looks like.

 

Richard Matthews  17:57  

I want to put a link to the actual course too for with it if they want to get more. But it’s just really interesting to me because I know we, I’ve just started putting together some of those like thoughts. So it’d be really interesting to see how you guys who are already doing this and have a much larger team than I’ve got. What you guys are actually doing on that front. So, that’s really interesting. What one of the things that we’ve been doing on the culture front is we started the same kind of thing. We have a Slack channel we called the Weekend channel and like, we just encourage all of our staff members to post things that they’re doing when they’re not at work. Right. And so we got everything from like their kid’s birthday parties to like stuff that’s going on, on the weekends to you know, crazy stuff that’s been going on with the lockdowns in their countries in our country and all over the place. And it’s been really interesting to actually like really get to know each other that way. And that’s been a helpful, helpful thing where, like, we’ve even got stuff going now, one of my team members, but everyone in the organization, a copy of a video game that he was playing, so that we’ve been playing that game, and that other thing. So it’s creating more of a more relationship than just work product output if that makes sense.

 

Nathan Hirsch  19:09  

I love it. We do a similar thing where people share pictures of their weekend and stuff like that. And not only is it important to build culture, but it’s important to reduce turnover as well. When you get a team that really likes each other and gets to know each other. They want to stick with the company long term.

 

Richard Matthews  19:26  

Awesome. Absolutely. So, out of move on the discussion a little bit and push forward into – So, the fatal flaw. So, the other side of the superpower coin is the fatal flaw and just like Superman had his kryptonite. For you guys, what is something that you have struggled with yourself that you’ve sort of, you know, beat your head against the wall kind of thing that’s held your business growth back? And I think more importantly than that, how have you worked to overcome that in your life? So like, for me, it’s always been perfectionism. I struggled with perfectionism. It kept me from shipping things because I was always like, I want to tweak just a little bit more and I would never have shipped. And I had to hand over a lot of the shipping stuff to someone on my team so I wouldn’t let perfection stop me from doing it. So, what what are those sort of fatal flaws for you guys and how have you sort of helped overcome them?

 

Nathan Hirsch  20:12  

So, if you go back and you look at every report card I’ve ever had in school the feedback says Nate rushes through everything. He goes as fast as you possibly can at all times and business is the same way I go as quickly as I possibly can and kind of really balances out very well. He’s much more calm, cool and collected much more long term picture and there are pros and cons sometimes it’s really good to move fast especially in the area where we are now, where things move quickly and you got to keep up and other times you need to take a step back and double-check things and move a little bit slower. So, I think that that can be a strength but a lot of times it’s a weakness and luckily I have Connor to bounce me out there.

 

Richard Matthews  20:48  

My favorite sort of thought on that is you’ve all heard the thing that money loves speed. But no one ever taught the other side, right. Money loves speed, but wealth loves time. Right? So you sort of have to have both.

 

Connor Gillivan  21:01  

Nice. And for me, surprisingly enough, I would say the thing I’ve struggled with consistently the most over like the past 10 years is actually taking things off my plate. So, Nate balances me very well there because he’ll yell at me if I have something on my plate for too long. And then, I pass it off to someone. And I’ve definitely gotten better at it. But there are still times when I find myself deep inside a process I’ve created recently, and then I’m the one running it and handling on a day-to-day basis. And I just struggle to like, pass that off to someone, maybe because of something similar to the perfectionism where I’m like, I’m doing this at such a high level. Could I even eventually trust someone to do this for me, but I’ve gotten a lot better at it, but still something that mentally challenges me from time to time.

 

Richard Matthews  21:45  

I have that same thing going on. Like I’ll build a process and then I’m doing all the work for it. And then, I don’t have anyone telling me I need to let go of it at this point. But I’m like that’s it’s a regular thing that I run into. I’m like, Oh, I need to, I need to actually get someone else to do it. And then what I find out is like, all of my staff members that I’ve got currently, like, if I have them do it, they do it better than I was doing it anyways. So it’s learning to hand things off and let go of it and just sort of swallow your pride and realize that you know, I’m probably not the best person to be doing this. My thing is like to build that process and then let someone else run it. Because I don’t do a good job. I’m the one running it. Agreed. Awesome. So I want to talk about your common enemy and a common enemy. I think I want to frame this inside of the Outsource School, your clients that you deal with there. And this is like the thing that you struggle with, regularly with when you bring a new client on our new a new student into the Outsource School. If you had your magic wand, you could just sort of like a wave it and remove a mindset that’s keeping them from getting better, cheaper, faster, a higher degree of results. What is that thing? You’re constantly like, man? I just wish people would understand this. That you know you’re fighting against all the time.

 

Nathan Hirsch  22:59  

True question. I think everyone that has not outsourced has their own reasons, I think one of the most common ones is probably security. People are scared to let go of their baby in general, never mind, let go of their baby, and put it in charge of someone in the Philippines or outside the US. So, I think that’s a common one. And I can kind of go into what I tell people there. 

 

And I think just that mindset that you can outsource everything that you can delegate everything and kind of the mindset that if you think you’re the only one that can do what you do in your business, you’re really just not that special. There’s someone else that can do it just as well. And I think that that’s a common mindset shift where people think, oh, only I can do customer service at this high of a level and they don’t realize that there’s someone out there that can do it even better than they can.

 

Richard Matthews  23:43  

That’s very true.

 

Connor Gillivan  23:46  

For me, I would say, I feel like the three of us, it seems like we’re very systems focus, right? When we think of something we’re like, okay, what’s the process? How do you break this down? What are the steps? Okay, now how am I gonna try to pass it off someone else? I think an issue or a mindset we run into is someone who’s running a really good business. But maybe they’re not as system process focused as they could be. And that may be a roadblock they have to get through to actually implement the things. We’re teaching them at Outsource School. Because if you really want to take it full advantage of it, you have to be thinking about, okay, here’s this part of my business. What is that step by step process? Who’s the right person that should be taking this over? Okay, now I can implement these interviewing, onboarding, training, managing strategies that these guys are teaching me. If you can’t get past that first systems idea or thought process, I think some people might run into issues there and not really see necessarily how it can be worked out in their business.

 

Richard Matthews  24:46  

I actually had a discussion with a couple of clients of mine over the past couple of years where they’re like, I don’t see, I don’t see how I could pass off the system that I’m doing and I think the reason for that is a lot of people have gotten really good at the thing they do. And when you get really good at whatever it is that you do, what that that I tell people all the time, you know, between stimulus and response, there’s a choice, and the closer the stimulus and response gets, the better you are at something, that’s where you get something when something becomes second nature, that’s when the time between stimulus and response is basically nonexistent. So when it comes to like learning how to build systems and processes, you have to learn how to separate those two things in your head and see what the stimulus is and what the decisions you’re making are. And then you can learn how to how to document those decisions, right? Like when you get this, this form of stimulus, here are the decisions we’re making and why. So you can pass those decision making things off to someone else on your team. And so when someone’s looking at their own systems, they’re looking at them and thinking, I don’t see any of this stuff that’s happening between stimulus and response because it happens so quickly for them. And when you actually sit down with them and help them break it apart, and actually what they’re doing, then they can turn around and turn that into a system. And that’s just like that’s a skill you have to learn how to do you have to learn how to how to break apart the details. Making processes that you’re going through when you go to build systems. So, anyway, all that say, I totally get you.

 

Nathan Hirsch  26:07  

Just doing it from day one, I think we’ve kind of gotten in the habit of Okay, as we add something to our plate right away we’re thinking we need to turn this into a process systemize it delegate it, rather than add it to my plate, do it for a while and then one day we’ll get to turning into a system. It’s kind of like a mindset shift.

 

Richard Matthews  26:24  

For sure. That’s one of the most important things that I’ve started doing in my business recently is like, I’m gonna add something new to my business. And I immediately start with the process building template, where it’s like, I’m not going to just do something I’m going to build the process and follow the process through and document as I go. Because you know, then you can have you end up with a system instead of a second nature skill if that makes sense. So anyway, I totally totally with you on that. Nathan. It’s a powerful thing to start with the system building process whenever you add something new, right? So, my next question has to do with your driving force, right? So just like Spider-Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What is it that you guys fight for at outsource school?

 

Nathan Hirsch  27:16  

I mean, I think I think at least coming from I’ll just kind of speak for both of us. I think we’re on the same page here selling on Amazon. It was a great entrepreneurial experience, right. It was our first business we learned a ton but selling B2C selling baby products. I think it got old after a while. And I think B2B was a completely different experience with free up. We liked helping other entrepreneurs. We like helping them scale their business, teaching them what we’ve learned, and also helping DBAs and virtual assistants grow their business and provide for their family. So, very similar to outsource school, we now have the opportunity to teach people things that have worked for us things that we do in our business every single day and watch their businesses grow from that education, and also continue to be in line with helping virtual assistants we’re donating 3% of all sales to our people. For charity Teach for the Philippines and we have a lot of great relationships with VAs that we refer through free op or stay in touch through FreeUp. So, it’s a way for us to kind of stay in the space and continues to help both parties.

 

Richard Matthews  28:12  

Yeah, it’s really interesting.

 

Connor Gillivan  28:15  

Yeah, for me to add to that, too.

 

I mean, I just I, I love the lifestyle we live to we run an amazing business, we ran FreeUp for four or five years, our team was completely remote, I was able to work from anywhere, me and Nate don’t live in the same place. But we have a great working relationship. Same with our software developer who is a co-founder on FreeUp as well and same with Outsource School. So, I really want to, you know, spread this, this ability to do these other people too. I think a lot of entrepreneurs start businesses and then they feel stuck, they’re – Or they feel like they have to get an office or they have to take these steps that almost feel burdensome to them. And so, without our school, I want to show people exactly how we’ve done it and kind of give them the power and empower them to be able to do it themselves too so that’s a lot of what I want to try to build it outside of school and find people you know hundreds eventually thousands of people that kind of go down this route with us and eventually find themselves in a similar lifestyle similar business.

 

Nathan Hirsch  29:16  

All for that it’s been super rewarding with FreeUp. I mean, I can’t tell you how many people came to me Oh, I’ve never hired before I’m scared to do it. Or I’ve had so many issues hiring VAs and then whatever. Months later a year later, whatever it is, they’re like, Oh my god, this is addicting. This is awesome. I have freedom. I have my life back. I can now scale my business. I now see a long term vision I didn’t see before. To me that that’s incredibly motivating and rewarding. And to both of us.

 

Richard Matthews  29:40  

It’s such an interesting thing. Because like I, I realized I was at a mastermind group a couple years ago now. And I was showing them everything. I was doing my business and one of the guys there, who I look up to a lot looked at me was like, you’re doing really great work, but you’re your own biggest bottleneck. And he’s like, he’s like the thing that I want you to do between now and the next time that we meet is like, he was like, you hire someone or basically I’m going to – slap you. He didn’t say that. But that’s essentially the mentality.

 

You must hire someone and do the stuff with your business. And what’s interesting is, I did that, and my business exploded. Because suddenly you go from – with a couple of things. If you have a team in place, and you have your documents, your system is documented in place. Now you can take one hour of work and get 10 hours of output. And that’s really minor.  So, I say it that way, because people will believe that but like, literally, I can put in an hour’s worth of work and thousands of hours get done over the course of time because you have systems in place. And what’s interesting to me is like, that’s what allows you to have freedom in your business. 

 

And a lot of people are building businesses because they want to have some sort of freedom, right time, freedom, location, freedom, financial freedom, whatever it is. It’s generally one of those three or all three of them combined. And it’s like my business has given me all of those things because I started to hire people. So, anyways, I love your mission because I wish more people could see what it takes and realize like because I remember one of the fears I had was if I hire people, what I’m doing is I’m, I’m, I’m actually making my business less free, right? I don’t want to have, you know, office space and like, I have to have like, all the different like, false things. People think about having a team right? It actually increases the freedom level in your business, right allows you to focus on the things that you’re good at allows you to have more time to do the things that you love. So anyway, I’m really excited for what you guys are doing. And I hope you guys knock it out of the park with Outsource School because I think more businesses need to do what you guys are teaching.

 

Nathan Hirsch  31:44  

And I think even if you look at FreeUp, our internal team, they were billing us like 2000 hours a week, Connor and I couldn’t work that many hours if we wanted to. So there comes a certain point when you grow a business that you just can’t do it without that help. And you have the flexibility of hire remote. I mean, you don’t have to have that office you get access to talent all over the world, not just your town and the towns around you and different skill sets different price points. You don’t have to hire full time, you can hire part-time you can hire project base we hire we just hired someone five hours a week we have a bookkeeper, that’s five hours a month, you can hire for whatever your business needs not necessarily everyone full time.

 

Richard Matthews  32:22  

And I really love that that that idea to have like, you guys were being billed 20 or 2000 hours a week. Can you imagine like someone on their own trying to get 2000 hours of work done in a week? It’s not even possible. Right? So yeah, it’s sort of a groundswell of getting stuff done and getting things moved forward. So the next question for you is more on the practical side, right. I call this your heroes tool belt, right? Maybe you got a match big magical hammer like Thor. a bulletproof vest like your neighborhood police officer. But what are some of the practical tools you guys use to build and manage your business. Things that you couldn’t live without these today, to either to build, hire, manage work with your teamwork with your clients? Some of the top one, two or three tools that you guys just, you couldn’t live without.

 

Nathan Hirsch  33:12  

Slack is a good one. I mean, we do all of our meetings there we communicate there. One tool that I use, I think I use it a lot more than Connor, is Word Board, which is a cool app on your phone that I have everything programmed into. So every single response, every single potential question that someone could ask, I just have it here so I don’t have to type everything out. over again. I use yet another Mail Merge, which is a great tool for emailing podcasts, emailing leads. We were actually talking about that in our lead generation course we’ve been using that tool, going back to our Amazon days when we were reaching out to manufacturers. Connor, I know you have a bunch more.

 

Connor Gillivan  33:45  

Trello is a huge one we’re using with Outsource School. And we’re setting up every single system every single team every single role through Trello and managing everything there. So, that one’s huge. I don’t think we’d be as organized if we weren’t using that. Trying to think of some other ones that are good.

 

I mean, that’s- 

 

Richard Matthews  34:08  

I’m a lone slacker. I’m a huge, huge fan of Trello. We manage all of our processes in Trello. I actually taught a three-hour class the other day on how to build systems and processes and use Trello as a management platform for it. So that it’s, it’s super cool once you sort of learn how to actually use it and how you how you move, move stuff from one end to the other, and actually get it done. Everyone can sort of have a view into what’s going on. So the next question for you. Your own personal heroes, right? Just like Frodo had Gandalf, Luke had Obi-Wan Kenobi or Robert Kiyosaki had his Rich Dad, who were some of your own personal heroes. Were they real-life mentors, speakers or authors? Peers who are a couple of years ahead of you, and how important were they to what you guys have accomplished in your lives so far?

 

Nathan Hirsch  34:52  

I mean, for me, it’s my parents. I mean, they kind of taught me finances from a very young age. My mom, my parents were teachers. My mom started a nonprofit And I remember when she got into that venture nonprofit kindergarten, she started at a small location. And I saw her upgrade multiple times. I also saw the good, the bad, the ugly of having an awesome board a bad board. And both of them spent their entire life saving, saving, saving, and teaching me the value of money and hard work. And now they’re retired and traveling the world and enjoying life. So I always look up to that.

 

Connor Gillivan  35:26  

Nice. I mean, mine in real life at first for being an entrepreneur was my cousin that I was mentioning earlier, just seeing him, build his own business, work with customers, hire people, get married, start having kids afford all of it through his own business. That was definitely a huge inspiration for me. I’m also a crazy reader. So I’ve read biographies on hundreds of entrepreneurs and inventors and people that kind of thing in different ways throughout history. So, I’ve got a lot of people that I look up to in that way as well.

 

Richard Matthews  35:58  

But okay, so now what I want you to do is just listed every one of them. I’m just kidding. 

 

…

 

So, just off the top of your head. What’s your favorite biography you’ve ever read.

 

Connor Gillivan  36:15  

So, starting out as an entrepreneur, real young Steve Jobs, that one was really big for me. I like Walter Isaacson. I think he’s a great author. He’s written like Benjamin Franklin, and one about just about Silicon Valley, and everyone involved there too. So I would say, I like him a lot. And I like Jobs. That was that was a big one for me when we were first getting started.

 

Richard Matthews  36:37  

Awesome, awesome. Maybe we’ll, we’ll get some links to books like that for some if someone wants to pick up a good biography to get started. So, I want to bring it home for our listeners a little bit and talk about guiding principles. So, top one or two principles or actions that you put into practice every single day that you think contribute to the success and influence you guys have enjoyed over the course of your many businesses. Maybe something you wish you had known or wish you would be implementing when you first started out in your business career.

 

Nathan Hirsch  37:05  

I don’t know about wish we’d implemented I think just, there’s a certain level of accountability that Conor and I just have for each other. Like when we say something’s gonna get done, it gets done. There’s also an element of brainstorming and new ideas and hearing each other out. And I think those are just some values that we have, that we had from the beginning that we continue to have now. And it’s really the foundation of our success. And how we built up so much trust is when we Hey, we say we’re going to do something it gets done. When we start brainstorming an idea. We can each pick apart the good ones, the bad ones, and get started on execution and really come together very quickly. I know I’m all about speed, but we have the ability to have a 10-20 minute conversation about something we’re not on the same page on and quickly get on the same page and move forward.

 

Richard Matthews  37:49  

Nice.

 

Connor Gillivan  37:49  

Kind of off of that one. So, one of our biggest values with FreeUp’s culture and with Outsource School now is just maintaining a very high level of communication with Nate and I, with our other partners now and then with the entire team and holding everyone to the same exact standard. So we don’t have the luxury of walking into an office every day and being able to walk over to someone and have a little conversation or have meetings where different ideas get thrown about. So high level of communication has always been huge for us. I think every single day, I hold all the people I work with to that standard. You know, if you’re going to miss a meeting, you have to shoot us a message. If you do miss a meeting, and you don’t let us know, there better be a pretty good explanation. If you’re missing meetings multiple times. That’s a big reason why we let people go because the communication, you know, and just being on time isn’t there. And it also comes down to me and Nate communicating with the team, letting them know what’s going on with the business, letting them know about the culture, letting them know about what we care about. And then also me and Nate staying in communication. We live on opposite sides of the country. But we make time for like Nate said brainstorming for going through different processes. In systems for going through roadblocks, and making sure that we’re both on the same page and really moving in the right direction. So, I think that’s something we do on a daily basis. And it really makes a huge difference for what we’re able to do with the company and how we’ve grown companies in the past.

 

Richard Matthews  38:41  

Awesome. So let’s turn him off of that I have a specific question because I’m curious on this myself, how do you guys time meetings when you have time zones all over the world, right, so like, most of my team is exactly 12 hours opposite of where we are. But I’m just curious, where do you guys pick meeting times?

 

Nathan Hirsch  39:37  

I mean, all this is in the expectations upfront. Like for FreeUp For example, we had plenty of days that work nine to five, we had some days that worked eight to 12 am and pm, and other people were a little bit more flexible. But when we first hire someone assuming they’re full time, we’ll say hey, we have a meeting every Monday at 10 am. Please confirm you can do that. And if we’re before we hire someone that’s US time or non-US time, we make sure that they’re 100% good at the schedule. So, it’s a little bit more just on the front end, making sure everyone’s good for it. I mean, Connor and I aren’t gonna wake up at 3 am to do a meeting. So everyone else kind of has to adjust to our time, but they know what they’re getting into upfront.

 

Connor Gillivan  40:13  

Yeah, we try to we also try to set times for meetings and then hold it to that time forever. So it’s never like ad hoc. Okay, can everyone meet at 4 pm? Eastern, it’s right, like, all right, these are the meetings, we have three of them every single week, they’re at these times, put them in your calendars, make sure you can attend them be on time. And that’s, that’s the meetings. That’s how they run.

 

Richard Matthews  40:36  

Awesome. That’s a good little, just thing to think about. Because I’ve been I’ve been struggling with that myself is like how do we off the seat of my pants, hey, we should all get together and have a meeting and then you have to figure that out. It’s like, No, you need to have a regular like happens this time. Everyone knows what it is and they can show up. And so you hire with that expectation in mind. 

 

Nathan Hirsch  40:59  

Exactly.

 

Richard Matthews  41:01  

That makes a lot of sense. So that basically wraps up the interview. I have a couple of last little things we do here. Last one here is called the Hero’s Challenge. And heroes challenge is simple. It’s basically this. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come on our show and share their story with our audience?

 

Nathan Hirsch  41:21  

I got one, Connor. That’s a good one. So one of our first hires with our Amazon business, his name’s Chris Meade. And he was probably besides Connor, he was the one of the only like really good college kids that we hired, everyone else ended up being a little bit unreliable. And so, he worked for us for a while when we moved to Florida, we got an office, he decided to not move to Florida and go I think he got another job. And then he decided to start his own business on creating a product called Crossnet, which is a four-way volleyball. It’s kind of like a combination of Foursquare and volleyball, a similar competitor to spike ball, you can play on the beach. And so we heard about that idea, and he’s been building it and he actually uses our podcast outreach formula to get on the podcast now. And we’ve been following his venture. And I believe he’s on pace to do eight figures this year in like year two or three of his company. So one of our employees at our Amazon business is now doing eight figures to me and to both of us. That’s really cool.

 

Richard Matthews  42:15  

So, it’s funny about that. I just interviewed him a couple of weeks ago. And we’ll link to that interview here in this one, but yeah, they’re on pace to do eight-figures. I got to talk to him and what they’re doing, we hooked him up with some of our ecom stuff where they’re they’re working on potentially hitting that that 10 million-mark which is super cool. And I didn’t realize that he came out of your organization a couple of years ago. So that’s really, really cool. Such a small world and really cool product that they’re, they’re, they’re selling over there. So anyway, at this point, thank you guys so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Where can people find you if they want to pick up and learn a little bit about hiring team members for their own organizations?

 

Nathan Hirsch  43:00  

Yes, I’m more of the contact point. I’m pretty easy to contact Nathan Hirsch on Facebook or LinkedIn, real Nate Hirsch on Instagram and Twitter. I love connecting with other entrepreneurs so feel free to reach out to me I go to Outsource school we have a lot of really cool free stuff.  We have a productivity course that you can spend one-hour taking and it’ll make you an hour faster every single day. We have a VA calculator that helps you figure out your VA budget upfront we have a case study that shows you our exact hires and your 1-2-3-4 FreeUp so you can see how we mapped it out and we also have our main course Cracking the VA Code that you get a one-year membership about your school and really our support our community to help you scale your business using VAs.

 

Richard Matthews  43:42  

Awesome thank you so much for coming on the show, both of you guys. Last thing, before we go. Do you have a just a final piece of wisdom for the audience before we hit this stop record button?

 

Nathan Hirsch  43:53  

I do unless Connor or something but

 

Connor Gillivan  43:56  

…

 

Nathan Hirsch  43:56  

Now, it’s a tough time for a lot of businesses and everyone is affected differently. I think an important thing is to communicate with your team, whether they’re in person, whether they’re remote, if you’re someone that’s had success in your business for the past five the past 10 years, and you’re running into hardship, now is the time to support your team to keep them on payroll, to even give them options if it comes to that of reducing pay or reducing hours. And if you’re someone that can’t afford to keep people on a tour or in a different spot, check-in with your people see how they’re doing, try to get them another job, give them a referral, give them a connection. And I think a lot of people, a lot of businesses are going to be judged on how they treat people during this time. And if I’m a VA, I’m a freelancer. I’m looking for a job, after all, this is over. The first question I’m asking every single client, every single employer is how did you treat people? How did you treat your team? What during COVID-19 and I think the businesses that treated people well, that continued to pay people or communicated or actually cared for the well being are gonna have a huge competitive advantage going forward.

 

Richard Matthews  44:57  

Absolutely.

 

Connor Gillivan  44:58  

I’m gonna go off the whole Systems processes seem that we’ve had this whole podcast and just challenge anyone who’s listening to sit down for an hour to you know, block it out in your calendar, get together with your co-founder or your business partner, and run through your business and just find all the places that you could actually take off your plate, or that you need someone to run. I do that from time to time, maybe once a month or so. And it surprises me every single time because we’re constantly building things and then I don’t realize they’re on my plate or I don’t realize they’re on Nate’s or we’ve created it and someone isn’t even handling it. And then, we can actually go out and create a plan to hire for it or to build a better system for it. So I would challenge whoever’s listening to actually take an hour to get off the computer and go try to brainstorm that. I bet it will help them in the long run.

 

Richard Matthews  45:49  

Absolutely, it is I completely agree with that. It will make a huge difference in your business. And to your point, Nathan, that was one of the things that I actually my some of our VA is actually reached out to me and thanked me for how we were handling the whole COVID-19 situation they were I remember, one of them specifically said, I feel like you’re fighting for us. And it makes a huge difference in how we’re doing. And it’s really cool to see that you guys are doing the same thing, and how important that’s going to be going forward to hiring staff members. And I think it helps draw the, we talked about culture a bit earlier, draw and keep the culture good. When it’s obvious that the people at the top of the company really care about the workers understand that the workers are the ones that make the business what it is. So great. Absolutely. So, again, thank you guys so much for coming on.