The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast FreeeUp.com CEO Nathan Hirsch

Episode Date: June 2, 2019

FreeeUp.com CEO Nathan Hirsch

Hi folks, this is Foz here from thechrisfozshow.com, thechrisfozshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. As always, we have the best guests. And we've got some interesting stuff for you today as well. Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube.com. Hit that bell notification button so you can get all the notifications of all the shows we do. You can go to Spotify, RR Radio, Google Play, iTunes, all those different places to see the show, follow it, subscribe to it, and all that good stuff. Be sure to refer

to your friends. Today, we have another CEO on the show. It's Nathan Hirsch. He's a 30-year-old, 10-year entrepreneur, and an expert in remote hiring and e-commerce. He runs the site freeup.com. That's free with three e's dot com, or I should say freeup.com. And he started his first e-commerce business out of his college dorm room and has sold over $30 million online. He is now the co-founder and CEO of freeup.com, a marketplace that connects with pre-vetted virtual assistants, freelancers, and agencies in e-commerce, digital marketing, and much more. He regularly appears on leading podcasts such as Entrepreneur on Fire and speaks at live events about online hiring tactics. Nathan, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? Chris, thanks so much for having me. I'm doing great. Awesome sauce. So you guys have this website. It's freeup.com. That's F-R-E-E-E, three E's, dot com.

And how long have you guys been running this site? Yeah, this is the beginning of year four. Nice, nice. So you're past that two-year zone mark, and you're kind of in that nice sweet spot where you're starting to make some really good money and be super successful. Yeah, I mean, I started it with a $5,000 investment kind of as a side project, and we ended up doing $1 million in the first year, $5 million in the second, and $9 million last year. So I'm pretty excited about it, and I want to see how far we can push this thing. That is awesome, man. It sounds like you guys are doing all the right things. So tell us about the brief overview of the site. What does it do and how does it work?

Yeah, so I was a longtime e-commerce seller and I was 20, 21 when I started my first business. It was really tough to hire people in person. So I turned to the remote hiring world, the Upworks, the Fivers, and it was okay. I found some pretty good people, but it just took me forever to post a job, get 50 people to apply, interview them one by one. If I find someone I like and they quit on me, I was right back where I started and it just took up too much time. So I had the idea to build my own platform, FreeUp, where we get thousands of applicants every week, virtual assistants, freelancers, agencies from all over the world.

We vet them, take the top 1%, let them in, and then make them available to our clients quickly whenever they need them. You don't have to browse. You can just put in a request and we fill that request within a business day. On the backend, we have 24 seven support in case you have even the smallest issue and a no turnover guarantee.

If someone quits for any reason, we cover replacement costs and get you a new person right away. So that's what we're all about, the pre-vetting, the speed, the customer service, and the protection. And I really built it based on the marketplace I wish I had back when I was hiring for my first business. Wow, that's pretty amazing. You guys actually covered if the person quits and stuff yeah if someone leaves in the middle of a project or let's say you spend two weeks onboarding a new VA and in six months they quit we'll cover the first two weeks of the next person and freelancers on our platform rarely quit they like being there but it's real life stuff happens and when it does we want to make sure that you're protected wow that's awesome's awesome. I don't even know. Are there any other sites that

do that? I haven't heard of any. That's pretty great. So give us a, you've been on quite the journey at 30 years old. You've been 10 years an entrepreneur, I think probably a serial entrepreneur, I would guess. Give us an idea of your entrepreneurial journey, where you guys, where you came from, started out and all that good stuff. Yeah. So growing up, my parents were both teachers. So I always had the mentality that I'd go to school, get good grades, graduate college, get a real job, work for 30 years and retire. And it was never more evident than during my summer jobs. I was every summer, I was working 40, 50 hours every week while all my friends were outside playing and enjoying the summer. So I learned so much about sales and marketing and customer service, but I also learned that I hated working for other people. I was going to be miserable. I knew that if that was what I was

going to do for 30 years, I was going to hate it. So when I got to college, I started hustling. I started buying and selling textbooks. I kind of looked at it as a ticking clock. I had four years to start my own business or I was going to have to get a real job and never get out of the real world. So I started buying and selling textbooks, created a little referral program to compete with my school bookstore. Before I knew it, I had lines out the door to get by me to sell me their books. But my college sent me a cease and desist letter to knock it off because I was stealing too much of their business. Couldn't get on the college's action there. Exactly.

So that was my first glimpse into being an entrepreneur. And this was back in 2008. Amazon was just bursting onto the scene. No one knew what it was. I had sold some books there. I knew I had to pivot from books. So I started experimenting with outdoors equipment and video games the scene. No one knew what it was. I'd sold some books there. I knew I had to pivot from books. So I started experimenting with outdoors equipment and video games and computers and typical college guy stuff. And I just failed over and over and over. It wasn't until I

branched out of my comfort zone and through trial and error found the baby product industry. So if you can imagine me as a 20 year old single college guy selling millions of dollars of baby products on Amazon, that was me. And it was a crazy time. I was making money for the first time in my life. So I thought, okay, I should probably hire an accountant. So I meet with an accountant. And the first question he asked me is, when are you going to hire your first person? And I shrugged him off. Like, why would I do that? That's money out of my pocket. They're going to steal my ideas. They're going to hurt my business.

Pretty standard entrepreneurial excuses. And he just laughed in my face and said, you're going to learn this lesson on your own. Sure enough, my first busy season comes around and I just get destroyed. I'm working 20 hours a day. My social life plummets. My grades go down, and I somehow make it through to January working my butt off. And I think I can never let that

happen again. I need to start hiring people. So I know nothing about hiring. I post a job on Facebook. This guy in my business law class messages me, says, I don't know what you do, but I need a job. I say, you're hired. Ends up being an amazing hire. He's hardworking. He's smart. He brings a lot to the table, helps me grow my business, ends up being my business partner, my Amazon business, and eventually with FreeUp. So there I am thinking, man, this hiring thing is easy. You post a job on Facebook, someone shows up, you make more money. And I just proceed to make bad hire after bad hire after bad hire, just learning a ton of lessons along the way. I'm sure we'll cover some of them.

But that's when I really moved to the remote hiring world and eventually had the idea to build my own platform. So that's the short version of how I went from a broke college kid to starting my Amazon business to pivoting and growing the free app marketplace. Well, that's an awesome story. I mean, definitely you learn a lot of lessons when you start your own companies about hiring. And really, it's amazing a lot of companies don't get this. It's all about the hiring. If you put the hiring interviews and the work into the front end, you save a lot of pain on the back end. Cause I think,

I think most entrepreneurs go through that painful transition if they survive it, where they end up hiring bad employees and, you know, over the years, our contracts would just keep getting thicker and thicker and thicker, you know, for every employee that will pull some stunt,

we'd have to make a rule against it. But yeah, it's, it's definitely can be a pain. And so you took a lot of that experience, the pain of that experience and said, hey, I'm going to build a better widget. I'm going to build a better way to hire people with freeup.com. Yeah, well, I mean, we live in a pretty incredible time. Not only can you start a business with a laptop and some internet, but the gig economy is booming. I mean, over the next 10 years, they predict over 50% of the workforce is going to be remote. So if you're a business owner, you don't need to have an office. You don't need to hire 10

full-time people. You can hire a VA in the Philippines. You can hire a contractor in the US to do something project-based or part-time. You have all this flexibility as a business owner to hire people that fits the needs and budgets and projects of your business. And if you're not taking advantage of that, you're really missing out and your competitors are. So I like to teach people how to utilize a gig economy. Now that doesn't mean that you can't have an office. You can't have full-time people. I have a lot of clients who use VAs and freelancers to complement their internal staff. But the gig economy is a huge advantage to the business owners that use it correctly.

Yeah, and now that you can pretty much hire the whole world to come to work for you all around the world, and you don't have to pay for an office. When I started being a serial entrepreneur as a kid, you had to do brick and mortar. You had to. It was mortal. You had to, you know, buy a building or buy an office space or rent an office space, sign a big, you know, three-year contract. I hope you could grow into it or you wouldn't outgrow it or that you could pay the bills. And you'd have to buy huge phone banks, phone lines, pay a secretary to sit up front and meet people at the door.

And, yeah, there was a lot of overhead that you have to go into before you can even see if the business would have legs and if it would work for you. And people are really spoiled with that now. And now that you can just hire people to work for you all over the world in the gig economy and you can get these people that are really smart at what they do and tone into them, can make all the difference in the world economy and you know you can you can get these people that are really smart at what they do and tone into them uh can make all the difference in the world for your business and and if you don't like them then the the it's uh much more easier to dispose of them and in the old days when we used to have to fire somebody clean out the desk and have the security

guard escort in the front door it's a a little bit easier to fire him now. You just send him an email, I guess. Leave the last pass access and you're good. Yeah. I mean, it just always had to be a thing that we're just like, all right, we're going to have to have somebody pack his desk before he comes in. And when he comes in, we'll sit him down. Then we'll have somebody escort him to his car.

And bye-bye, you know, don't let the door get you on the way out. Always like drama. And then sometimes there's drama in the office. So, yeah, being able to do what people are doing nowadays is just incredible, especially in my mind. I'm still blown away. So what kind of challenges did you run into as an entrepreneur? How did you overcome them? Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest mistakes that I made as an entrepreneur back in the day was I wanted one person to do everything.

I hired someone and I taught them how to do listing and customer service and repricing it and all aspects of my business. And I spent six months training him. And it was awesome. Once he was set up, he could handle everything. I was sleeping better at night, less stressed out. And on the flip side of my business, I had this one supplier who was doing 85% of our business. And I said, you know what? I don't care about the other 15%. Let's focus on them and just work with them 100%. So I get my business to a really good place, this e-commerce business, selling baby products. It's on autopilot. It's running without me. I'm crushing it with this supplier. And I decided to go on my first vacation.

And on the first day of my vacation, I get three phone calls. The first from the person that I just trained quitting on me. The second from my supplier telling me they no longer wanted to work with me. And the third from my accountant telling me that someone had filed a fake tax return on my name, and I was going to have to deal with my identity being stolen when I got back, and they had taken $40,000 from the government. That's what you get for leaving town. You never leave town. Exactly.

You never take a vacation. I went from this ultimate high, Tom, this 22-year-old, 21-year-old crushing it to let's start all over again. But I learned a very valuable lesson about diversification. And when I came back, I started contacting a lot of different suppliers and making sure that they were just one out of 200. At one point, I was working with over 200 manufacturers. So if one person dropped me, it wasn't the end of the world. And on the flip side, when it became time to hire again, I diversified one person for customer service, one person for repricing, one person for listing. And it wouldn't be the last person that quit on me. But the next time that happened,

I simply plugged someone into that team. So I'm very happy I learned that lesson in year one and two. It was a big wake-up call as a young entrepreneur. But I also feel like a lot of entrepreneurs, they fall into that trap. Hiring's hard. They make a few bad hires. They finally find someone they like and they load that person up with everything. And short-term, it's good,

but long-term, it's incredibly risky. Yeah, diversification is a huge thing, especially when you're a serial entrepreneur. We found we had to own several different companies. Of course, we would get bored. So you have a business partner. What found we had to own several different companies. Of course, we would get bored. So you have a business partner. What's it like to work with a business partner for you? I love working with Connor.

I mean, he was my first hire. And I mean, we have the same values. We both care about treating people right and building a lean business and making sure that people are taken care of and problems get solved. And we have that right mentality in life and business, in my opinion. But skill-wise, we're totally different people.

And just people-wise, we're different people. I mean, he's a long-term thinker. I'm a short-term thinker. He's more behind the scenes, development, marketing content. I'm more front end, like sales, customer service, processes. But we complement each other very well. And we understand how to do business with each other. We understand how to reel people in. If I think that he's too far in the clouds and not focusing on what we should be focusing on, I can reel him in. If he thinks that he's much

more calm, cool, collective, I'm more all over the place, up and down. And if he sees me stressed out of my mind, he'll pull me back in and get me to focus on the bigger picture. So for me, it's been a great experience. And I'm very fortunate that I found a good business partner early on. It almost makes me scared to add another business partner down the line. But we also know each other's limits. We just had a lot of good and bad experiences together. And I think that's when you know you have a good business partner, not when everything's going well, but when things go poorly and you survive those and you get through them by problem solving and logical thinking and staying positive, that's when you know you're going to have a good business partnership.

You know, finding a good partner and having one and keeping one, I should say, is definitely a challenging part of business. I was lucky enough to have a good partner about 13 years and then he went bad on me People change What can you do But you know being able to Have one is really really rare There's so many people that as soon as the money Gets on the table they change

Their whole tune They get greedy People just get real short term oriented It sounds really cool that you guys have Talents that offset each other Because that gives the relationship a lot of balance. Plus, it brings all the strengths to the relationship that help overcome both weaknesses. Is that correct? Yeah.

I mean, we spend a lot of time making sure that we're delegating to our strengths. I think a while ago, we kept trying to turn our weaknesses into strengths, and we quickly realized that was not a good use of either of our time. So, I mean, an example of that is him taking over the dev team. I am bad at working with developers. I'm a logical, business-minded person, and developers stress me out. So one of the best business decisions we made a year ago is he's in charge of the dev team. Anytime I have feedback, I find a bug. I don't communicate with the devs. I communicate with him and I trust him to handle it from there. So

just stuff like that, where we make sure, Hey, I'm handling these, these teams, he's handling those teams and we communicate, we make sure we're on the same page with the plan, but the execution we divide and conquer. And for us, that's worked very well. It worked really well for me in my successful partnership that I had. I was a visionary. I was a leader. I was always, you know, coming up with the stuff to do. I was always the guy who would jump in, like, you know, in Vietnam. I was the guy who just threw in behind enemy lines and said,

he'll cut a path forward. And on the flip side, my partner was very rudimentary. He didn't like adventure. He didn't like vision. He didn't like doing crazy stuff. He liked doing the day-to-day stuff, the annoying accounting, the annoying data entry. He liked that. So what I could do is I could go create processors and go create stuff and then give them to him and he would do really good with them. A lot of times the business is like a kind of like two parents when it comes down to it.

You're even your employees. If you have both of you as partners aren't on the same page and, and don't know how to go down the road together. Employees can work. You, everything can work you and they can sometimes cause a lot of, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? A lot of static between you and your partner, because, you know, you gotta be on the same page, just like a mom or dad, you know, when

the, when the kid goes to the dad and he goes, Hey dad, can I buy, you know, I don't know, $50 or whatever. And kid goes, ask your dad, goes, ask your mom and you go to the mom, you know, I don't know, $50 or whatever. And kid goes ask, or dad goes ask your mom and you go to the mom and, you know, she's like, Oh, what'd your dad say? You know, uh, the one thing we had to teach my employees is that me and my business partner were always on the same page and we're always moving forward and they couldn't work both of the, one of us against the other. So that's always an important thing I've found. Yeah, I completely agree.

I mean, that's the other thing is just communication. Like who do you go to for what? That's an important thing to establish, whether it's employees in your office or virtual assistants in the Philippines or even some contractors that we work with. We have someone who might run our Facebook ads and we're one of 10 of their clients and their other clients might do things differently than we do things. So we have to set those expectations and communicate right from the beginning. Most definitely. I mean, a partnership can make or break your business. It will bankrupt you or it will make you hugely successful. Or I don't know, I suppose the third option is just kind of a lukewarm sort of relationship. But I mean, when you're leading a business, you've got to have good

partners and good successful employees around you. what motivates you to be an entrepreneur what is it that drives you yeah so before I mean growing up my parents were both teachers I mentioned and um I so my dad taught in Longmeadow I went I lived in East Longmeadow and so I got to school go to school in Longmeadow which had a better school system and the thing about Longmeadow is all the parents were doctors lawyers dentists dentists, like big entrepreneurs, like a very wealthy family. So growing up, money was definitely a motivator. I wasn't poor, but I was middle class. You're looking up at all your friends that have everything you ever wanted. And I think at the beginning, that was a driving force. And once you kind of get over that honeymoon period where you realize

that money doesn't really keep you warm at night, then you start focusing on people and actually growing a business to help other people get to the top with you. My team leaders, their pay goes up as our business grows. We treat them like family. The freelancers on our platform, we paid out $7 million to freelancers around the world last year, and people show me their cars, their houses, ways they've been able to provide for their families. To me, that's what motivates me. If I'm having a long day, I know earlier this week, I had a day where I did like seven podcasts in a row. And by the fifth podcast, I was tired. I was exhausted. But you got to rally. It's not just about you. Sometimes you're doing things for the greater good. And for me, that's what motivates me.

Yeah, definitely. It could be a grind. But that's the business of And for me, that's what motivates me. Yeah, definitely. It could be a grind. But that's the business of being an entrepreneur. It's 24-7. You don't clock out at 5 and go, well, we're done here. If you could offer advice to young entrepreneurs, what would you give them? For me, it's all about figuring out what your core competencies are. The average entrepreneur is only good at one to three things.

And if you know what those things are, then you can identify, hey, is it worth me taking a course to learn this? Is it worth me trying to turn this weakness into a strength? Or can I delegate? Can I hire someone that already has that skill? Can I, instead of doing this day-to-day task that I'm not good at and I don't like doing, can I get a virtual assistant and teach them how to do it? Really figuring out, hey, are you good at sales? Spend the majority of your time doing sales and delegate everything else. To me, that's where a lot of solo

entrepreneurs miss the boat. They try to do everything. They try to do things outside of their core competency instead of getting into that lazy entrepreneur mentality where you want to do the things you like, you want to do the things you're good at, and you want to hire A players around you to do those other things. Yeah, and that's the other thing where partners can come in. They can take up some of that slack if you have partners and you have good partners, as you're probably saying. So you guys took all this sort of experience and started FreeUp.com.

That's F-R-E-E-E-U-P.com. And what makes you guys different from other hiring platforms that are out there in the marketplace? Yeah. So, I mean, you go to any of the other places, you post a job, you get 50 people to apply, you interview them one by one, and it just takes forever. So for us, we only let in one out of every hundred applicants onto our platform. For me, it's a speed. You don't have to browse through 50 people either. You put in a request. We fill it within a business day.

We send you one person by default because most people that come to us don't want to meet 20 people. But if you want to meet more, say, hey, send me three, send me five. We're happy to do it. You can interview them quickly. If you like them, you can hire them, negotiate rate, agree to fix price. If you don't like them, you can click pass and provide us feedback and we'll get you someone else.

It's a very quick and efficient process. I would put our customer service against anyone else. My calendar's right at the top of the website. I have assistants that work under me that cover my Skype, my email, my live chat 24 7 if you have even the smallest issue. And we have that no turnover guarantee we mentioned before that I haven't heard of another business that has it. So for me, it's really those four things that differentiate us from all the other freelancer platforms out there. And, I mean, let's be honest.

There's no shortage of freelancer marketplaces, agencies, virtual assistant companies. But for me, those four things really make us stand out. So where are the freelancers that are on your platform? Where do they come from? So we get about 3,000 applicants a week to get on our platform, but they come from all over. And right now, the platform's about 40% US, 40% Philippines, and 20% scattered. Not necessarily by design. That's kind of just where we're at right now. But we accept applicants from all over the world. And as a client, you can request US, non-US or whatever you want. Wow. And it's interesting to me, so many of my friends that are programmers and sometimes they are freelance workers. They have these companies where they're just employees working out of their homes everywhere in the world, across the whole globe.

It's just amazing. And they tie a whole team and company together with that, using these freelancers, and away they go. It's just amazing, the economy, what you can do with it. Yeah, I mean, I have 50 VAs that work for me that do our customer service, our billing, our recruitment. I've got freelancers, high-level U.S. freelancers that write for our blog, that they run our Facebook ads. We have agencies that I use that I only hire from our own platform that do my Instagram and my Twitter. So we really practice what we preach and use people on the FreeUp platform to help us scale our business. And we work with a lot of clients that do the same thing.

So how does FreeUp, if I'm a business owner, how does it help me? I mean, you create a free account. Whenever you want to hire someone, whether it's a project, a part-time VA, whatever it is, you click request a freelancer. You tell us what you need. You go about your day. We send you someone within a business day, usually faster. And we have clients

that get started within hours or minutes of putting in their request. So it saves you a ton of time as an entrepreneur. So how do you guys determine who's the best person for me or the, I know it's on your website, it says the top 1%. How do you determine who that is? So, I mean, we literally let in one out of every 100 applicants that apply. We vet them for skill, attitude, and communication. For skill, we don't need everyone to be a 10 out of 10. Someone can be a 5 out of 10. Someone can be a 2 out of 10. What we care about is that they're honest about what they can and cannot do,

and they're priced accordingly. For attitude, we do one-on-one interviews. We want people that are passionate about what they do. They're not just in it for the paycheck. People that they can take feedback without taking it personally. They don't get aggressive when something doesn't go their way. And then for communication, communication is everything. I mean, if you and I hire someone and they have a great skill and a great attitude,

but we can't communicate with them, nothing else matters. So we have 15 pages of communication best practices that they have to memorize and get tested on. And once they get on our platform, we hold them to those expectations. If they're taking on projects they can't do at a high level, we're not a place to experiment on our clients. If they show any signs of bad attitude, if they don't communicate, if my team has to chase them, then we remove them or we block them from getting more clients. So it's tough to get in and it's tough to stay in as well. So are you guys more of an agency then or more of a job site? No, I mean, we're a marketplace and I'll tell you why.

I mean, the freelancers set their own rates. You can negotiate it. We're not controlling any of that. We're also not involved in the actual project. So if you hire someone, let's say you hire a graphic designer, the work is completely between you and them. They don't share the work with us. We're not managing them. We're there if you need anything.

If you run into any issues, we have got that 24-7 support. But it's much more of the marketplace model where the freelancers control their own prices. They control their own work. They're working directly with the client. We're just there as the platform that holds it all together. Is there anything else more than what you're just telling me that you guys do to vet the freelancers? I mean, we know what we're looking for. I mean, I've hired tons of people.

I've had good experience. I've got bad experiences. The person that runs our freelancer success team has been my personal assistant for eight years. She is a godfather of... Her kid is the person that runs our freelancer success team has been my personal assistant for eight years. She is a godfather of her kid is the God. I'm the godfather of one of her kids. So we go way back and she knows what type of people that we work well with and who would be a good fit on the platform. And we also just have a great community of freelancers. We've got chats with all the Amazon experts, all graphic designers so we're really building this awesome community i feel like if you go to the other freelancer platforms the freelancers are there because they have to be there that's where the money is that's where the

jobs are we're trying to build a place where the freelancers want to be there and for me that's a huge difference and it really translates into a good experience for the clients and probably for the freelancers as well because they know they're at the top of the heap. They're recognized for what they are. They're just not getting lost on some job site with 50 billion other people that are doing the same thing or seemingly doing the same thing with seemingly the same skill level, because it's just overload information to an employer.

But yeah, hiring is really important. We found, and it sounds like you guys do a lot of this on your back end, and a lot of employers don't. And when I talk to employers that are having trouble hiring, I'm like, you've got to put in the work, time, and effort into the interview. And because they're self-employed and, you know, they're entrepreneurs

and sometimes they're just trying to do everything, they don't put in the time to hire right. And we used to find, we'd put in two, three, sometimes four interviews. And what really became apparent to us over time was the more often the person had to be interviewed, the more you really started finding out who they were as opposed to what was on their resume. So like the first, the first interview, you know,

you, you'd meet completely someone different than what was on their resume. And then we'd have them come back for the second one. And at second one, they're kind of like, Hmm, I probably got this job. So I can let my guard down a little bit.

And then we put them through a third one. And by then they're like oh man i probably really got this job and you're finding out stuff like uh oh they went to prison somewhere in their in their timeline that they left out on the resume or you know they start behaving like the toxic person that they are and then you're just like oh okay so now we're fine we're figuring out who you are and so uh it's cool that you guys kind of do that work for companies because a lot of people don't have the time to do it or they just don't have the skill level to do it. One of the things I used to just beat into all my hiring folks was you've got to shut

up and listen. You've got to listen to people because what's funny is if you just listen to people and let them talk, they'll tell you everything you need to hear. You just need to give them a thing. But anytime we have a bad hire, it's usually because I had someone who, for some reason, they were too busy selling the company and us and talking, over-talking through the whole interview of the employee. And it's like, they wouldn't identify the issues they have. So it sounds like it's cool you guys do a lot of that back in work yeah i mean it's a completely different ballgame now than it used to be when you're hiring people and there's so many

people can jump around from from clients to clients people can cause issues in different ways and i mean part of itself regulates itself i mean when it's so hard to get onto our platform once they're on they want to stay on they don't want to do anything that kicked off to lose their clients, not get more clients from us. And because of that and the community and a lot of other regions, it just leads to a much better experience for clients all around the world. Yeah. And if it can save you some of the time where you guys, it sounds like you guys are putting a lot of work into that back, you know, checking out their references, seeing where they are.

And of course you guys know if they're good or not, because you guys have so many different other applications. You can be like, this one's better than this one. And you guys have a whole backend. It's almost like you're kind of your own sort of pseudo HR department for a company because you can handle them the top of the cream, if you will,

as opposed to, you know, giving them, I know there's a commercial on TV and I know people complain about it. They're like, oh my God, we got a bunch of, you know, job entries and we're overwhelmed. And then they're just trying to go through all the crap they have. If they can have a company do that pre-vetting for them, that certainly is much yeah i mean you keep saying employees i mean we don't provide employees you provide virtual assistants my apologies freelancers is um we do have people that buy out freelancers and make them employees and we had that happen this week actually where a client hired a contractor for a few months project and they liked the contractor and they bought them off free up and and add them to the payroll of their company so So while that's not how most people use the platform, it is that option there. But for the most part, we're a platform for virtual assistants outside

the US or freelancers and agencies both inside and outside the US. So Nathan, where's your company headed out in the next year? What are you guys up to? Yes, we have a bunch of exciting stuff coming. We just launched a brand new agency program. So we now have agencies on our platform. We usually work with smaller agencies, five to 10 person agencies that are all about quality assurance,

that we vetted, that we hold accountable. We just launched a brand new software update. So whenever you have a marketplace, you've got the client side, the freelancer side, and the software that holds it all together, which is a lot of the user experience. So we made a six month big investment into our software and that we just launched a big new update. It's awesome. It's a hundred times better than it was before. And we've got a lot more updates coming. And the other side of it is we're pretty well known in the e-commerce

community. We're starting to get more and more known in the marketing community. We want to branch into other communities, other business communities, whether it's real estate, nonprofit, other online businesses. It's free to sign up. There's no monthly fee. There's no minimum. So people usually are open to giving us a chance. And once they do, and they have a great experience. But for us, it's all about just getting people to know about our brand and what we're up to at FreeUp. That's awesome. FreeUp.com. F-R-E-E-E. That's 3-E-E's Up.com. So what are some of the advantages of hiring freelancers over employees? If I'm an entrepreneur, what's the difference for me? What makes it work? Yeah. So, I mean, we kind of talked about it before. I mean, you had to have

an office back in the day. Now you can hire people from all over the world at different price points. You can hire people just for projects. You can hire people where they've spent a lot of time becoming a specialist, coming up with their own systems, their own processes for executing Facebook ads or building a funnel. And you can hire someone to provide a service and really be an extension of your team for stuff that you might not be able to do in house. So it just opens up a lot of flexibility. And from the flip side, I mean, if you look at it from the freelancer side, they don't, I mean, if they just have one person that they're working for, it's risky. If that person business goes out of business, then they're out looking for more clients.

So for them to have multiple different clients and multiple revenue streams, there's a lot of advantages there. Not to mention being able to work from home, not to drive to work, work from anywhere in the world. We work with a lot of digital nomads. So there's a lot of advantages on both sides. Yeah, I mean, you save some on taxes. Just the hassle of having to have an office, how to maintain it, and then you got to have sexual harassment policies and HR policies. And the whole thing just becomes a complex menagerie. Most of my experience comes from

being brick and mortar employee. And I love this new gig and economy where you can take and hire just anybody and around the world. And you can find smart people that are willing to work with you. I mean, sometimes it's a great place to find people is different zones where they have either great coders, they have people who really know what they're doing in certain aspects of any given field and all that good stuff. So it can really help your business and save you a lot of money. I mean, like I said, I remember we used to buy an office and then we'd fill it and then we'd have to go buy a bigger office and we still had a lease. And then we're like, oh God, how do we deal with this growth?

Where with the freelance economy, you can expedite your growth just so much better with everything else. Where do you see business owners having the most success hiring from around the world? So for me, there's three different levels of freelancers you can hire. You've got the basic, the mid, and the expert. So for basic, think non-US. I like to hire from the Philippines, five to 10 bucks an hour. They might have years of experience, especially if you hire them on the free up platform, because we're not a marketplace for newbies, but they're followers. They're there to follow your systems, your processes to get you out of the day-to-day operations. Then you got the mid-level specialists, the graphic designers and bookkeepers,

the writers. You're not teaching a graphic designer how to be a graphic designer, but they're not consulting with you either. And you can go US or non-US. And then you got the experts, the high-level freelancers, the consultants, the agencies. Those can be US and non-US too. They're bringing their own systems, their own strategies, their own processes to the table. You're hiring them to execute high-level game plan. So you can use all three levels. Usually the basic level, it'll make sense to hire someone in the Philippines. But outside of that, it's really up to you whether you want US or non-US. There's obviously a price point and other factors as well. I think you can hire these folks really cheaply. I get hit up a lot for a lot of them to take a word with me. And I think part of it's because of the exchange rate, isn't it? It makes it

much more cheaper to deal with them. It doesn't cost as much in their part of the world. Yeah, cost of living. There's a lot of factors there. And we're not really controlling the prices. The market controls it. The market goes up and down. Yeah. Whatever the market will bear, if you will.

So it sounds like a pretty good program. Anything more we need to know about freeup.com? No, I appreciate you having me on. If you guys go to freeup..com my calendar is right at the top that's free up with three e's if you want to book a meeting with me and mention this podcast get a free 25 credit to try us out oh that's awesome you guys got a lot of really cool customers on their payability web retailer death wish coffee seller labs pain here uh or i'm sorry death wish coffee uh is one of my favorite coffees.

I drink that stuff all the time. They're an awesome partner of ours. We love them. They make really good coffee. And if you want to wake up in the morning, it's a great coffee to get into your system. So anyway, guys, we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. And thanks to Nathan for being with us. Go to freeup.com. That's F-R-e-e-e-e-up.com especially if you're in the top of your field it sounds like

it's a great opportunity for uh you to get some really high paying gigs and of course not get lost in the imagery of some of these giant job seeker websites where you're just uh you're just another resume and these guys are going to check you out. They're going to put you at the top of the list if you qualify. And what sounds better than that? And of course, if you're an employer, that sounds awesome too, because you can go right to the good stuff instead of having to pile through like a hundred applications and cross your fingers that you hopefully picked the right one. So thanks everyone for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys.

Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube, hit that bell notification, refer the show to your family, friends, relatives, all that good stuff. Tell people to download the show. They can go to Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Play. They can go to iTunes. There's just about every app in the world has the Chris Walsh show on it, including there's a new company that's out called Luminary,

which is a pretty interesting podcast. They have a lot of really cool podcasters on there. I think they're charging for the service, but they've added the Chris Foss show to there as well. So you can check that out. Thanks Nathan for coming by and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you.