The Home Service Expert Podcast - Hiring Remote Workers to Scale Your Business Faster

Episode Date: January 23, 2019

Nathan Hirsch is the founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com, a talent marketplace that connects thousands of freelancers with businesses all over the world. He started hiring virtual assistants for his Amazon ecommerce business, which has over 10,000 customers, and earning up to 7 million dollars a year. Today, Nathan manages over 500 prevetted virtual assistants and freelancers on the Freeeup.com marketplace, and is passionate about helping businesses scale through working with remote talents. In this episode, we talked about customer service, hiring, processes...

This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Hey there, home service expert, Tommy Mello back here with you. I've got Nathan Hurch on the phone.

Nathan, how's your day going today? I'm doing great, Tommy. How are you? I'm having a great day. The weather's perfect out right now and excited to have you on. You know, Nathan, you started your entrepreneurial journey early on. I mean, you just told me you were in college just looking for some extra beer money and you stumbled onto something huge. Can you tell the audience out here exactly what you do and how you become who you are today? Yeah. So it's funny. My parents were both teachers. So I always had the mentality that I would get good grades in high school, go to college, get good grades, get a job, maybe an internship, a four job, work for 30, 40 years, retire, have a family. And that would be my life. And from a young age, my parents always had me do these internships. They would have me work 40 hours a week every summer.

And so when I was doing these internships, I quickly realized that this wasn't what I wanted my life to be. I didn't want to work 40 hours a week for someone else. I didn't want to be stuck with no freedom, no flexibility. And so I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wasn't really sure how. And when I got to college, they had an entrepreneur program where that was just getting started.

And I remember one of the teachers got up and said, if you want financial freedom, the only way to do it is to become an entrepreneur. And that really stuck with me. So I was a broke college kid looking for extra beer money on the side. And I started buying and selling textbooks because I thought the school bookstore was ripping me off. I was paying

hundreds of dollars on these books and selling them for pennies on the dollar. And that business took off. I had wires out the door, people trying to sell me their books to the point where the school actually sent me a cease and desist letter to knock it off. So very many books without learning about Amazon. And one day I came across it and I became pretty addicted to it. And from trying everything, trying to sell everything on Amazon, I kept failing over and over again. I kept trying to sell cool products, DVDs, sporting equipment, stuff I was familiar with. And the only thing I could sell was books. So it was pretty frustrating. And one day I came across a deal site of a baby product and I had the idea to try dropshipping it. Years before I even knew what dropshipping was,

I would sell the product I didn't have, get it shipped from wherever I was buying it from, right to the customer and make the difference between what I bought, what I sold it for and what I bought it from. So I did that a few times to try it out and it worked really well. And I started doing it over and over again. And next thing I know, I'm running a multimillion dollar Amazon dropshipping business as a 21 year old single guy in college. And I was totally overwhelmed. I started hiring people because there was so much work to do, made a lot of really good hires, like my business partner, Connor, who still works for me today, and a lot of bad hires as well, and really learned from them. And as we got bigger and bigger, most of my time was spent on hiring. And I, of course, got introduced to the remote

hiring world, the Upworks and Fivers of the world. And I became determined that virtual assistant was the best way to go, but I just didn't have the time for it. And when I talked to other business owners, they had the same issue. So that's really when I came up with the idea for freeup.com, a marketplace where we vet people for you and quickly match it up so that business owners don't have to browse and interview 100 people to fill one position or one project. So that's really the summary of how I went from a broke college kid to starting two companies. So tell me, explain to me exactly what I would be looking for on FreeUp, just so the audience has an understanding.

Yeah, so we started off in the Amazon industry. That's just because that was my background. That's what I knew. So we had all these Amazon contractors we had used on and off. We went to other sellers and we were like, hey, we have these great workers. Do you want to try them? And they did. And they loved them. And they loved that we could provide them pretty quick. And then we expanded e-commerce because all the people that were Amazon sellers went out and told their e-commerce community. So we got people with their own website, people that sold on eBay or Walmart or other sites coming to us for workers. So we started supplying those. And then the word got out to other bigger communities of just business

owners, whether it's real estate agents, home service providers, agencies, to the point where now we service everything. And we're providing writers, graph designers, people who can build websites, people who can do customer service or data entry work or bookkeeping or online marketing, very high level stuff, but also low level as well. So it's kind of taken off from being an Amazon VA service to a full-fledged marketplace where you can find pretty much any freelancer. So, you know, you mentioned there, I mean, I'm pretty familiar with Upwork and there was two companies that I used to use that merged into Upwork and then, but I've always been on Fiverr, whether I'm making videos or anything,

what's the advantages? Is it because you vetted them and you've used them in the past? Yeah. So there's a few different advantages. If you go on Fiverr or Upwork or any of the marketplaces, you post a job or make a listing, you get a hundred people to apply, you interview them one by one, and it just takes a very long time. And you never really know what you're going to get. And even if you make a good hire, if they quit on you or disappear, you're right back where you started interviewing all these people again. So what we've done is we pre-vetted these workers. We vet them for not only their skill, but their attitude and their communication skills as well. And then we also provide them fast. So if you're a client, instead of posting a job and interviewing

all these people, you just put in a worker request, takes less than a minute. And within 24 hours, usually faster, we introduce you to one to three options that we know are available, that can fit your request, that will have a great attitude and get the project done. Then on the back end, we have 24-7 support in case anything goes wrong. So you always have someone to go to. And then we're also insurance against turnover. If the freelancer quits or disappears for any reason, we cover all replacement costs, get you a new person right away. So you never take steps back in your business. Genius. I so one of the things that i gotta tell you is i've always struggled with time i mean even to this day i'm bouncing around i actually got done with a eight hour conference

and rushed over here to do this with you and uh i'm an assistant and i think i get a lot done in a day i'm a big fan of the 80 20 rule. And I really focused on large things. I can say every week that I've got some huge things accomplished, but at free up, I mean, you guys take a lot of pride in being hands-on your website has all your contact details. So anyone can reach you at any time. And you've mentioned in previous interviews that you get on your big group chats with all the freelancers and you interact with them on a daily basis.

My question to you is a lot of us out there have a big network of people and employees. You know, I've got a couple hundred. How are you able to maintain the time and keep that open door policy and maintain that communication? Yeah. So I have a great team. My team is A++. They monitor my Skypes, monitor my emails when I'm on podcasts with you, when I'm traveling at conferences. So when I'm available and I like to make myself available, I know that the marketplace is only as good as the clients and only as good as the freelancers that are on it. And if they don't like it, if they don't feel like they're being valued, if they don't feel like the CEO of the company cares about them, then it will fall pretty fast. So it's something that I prioritize a lot. But I also use people, actual freelancers on the marketplace to cover for me, to help me get

projects done, to make sure that I can continue to spend that time with them. And I'm not online all the time. There's times where I'm with my girlfriend or doing something fun, or there's times where maybe I'm working on a project and I can't be contacted. So they do an incredible job covering for me and making sure that, hey, when I pop on Skype, everything's caught up. And then I can just check in with people and talk to new clients and spend the time that I feel like is incredibly valuable for growing their business. I love that. How do you manage the processes? Because one of the things I've been focusing on is I believe the processes dictate the people they dictate, you know, and having a handwritten handbook of what needs to be, and it's a living, breathing document. Tell me a little bit about your processes, how you get the same outcomes every time. Yeah, I'm a big process

guy. Like you said, that's the key for everything. If you go back to just the dropship business, you have no control over your inventory. You're essentially selling something you don't have, and someone else is touching it, shipping it, packaging it. And so you're processing your system is all you have. And so I learned at a young age to put a lot of systems in place to double check everything that's going on. And more importantly, when you start a startup, you never know what the end result is going to be. You never know what clients are going to like, what they won't like, what issues are going to come up. So while you do the best you can to create the process originally, like you said, it's living and breathing. And what's important

is that you have a structure in place to get feedback, to find issues, and to problem solve them, and to continue putting things in place to make sure that the same mistakes aren't happening over and over and over again, while also being proactive and thinking of possibilities of things that could happen and then trying to get ahead of them. Okay, so let's say you had an employee that just was not living up to your expectations. There's the carrot and the stick philosophy. How do you deal with that employee? Yeah, so it's the same thing, whether it's an employee, a freelancer or contractor. I like to get to the bottom of it first. I like to talk to them directly. I'll give a good example. One of my VAs in the Philippines, he's a bookkeeper,

does an incredible job for me. He's made my life so much better over the past few years. And we got to a point in January last year, and all of a sudden I saw his performance go down and I couldn't figure it out. It was kind of freaking me out a little bit. And I talked to him directly to try to figure out what it was. And he explained to me that he was burnt out. We had just finished a crazy October, November, December. He didn't take much time off.

He did a great job. And going into January, he was burnt out. So instead of overreacting, I talked to him and I figured out what the problem was. And I gave him a week off and he came back and he's been crushing it ever since. Now, on the flip side, if I talk to him and it didn't go well, at that point, I've already invested a lot of time and money into someone, into him. If I haven't invested a lot of time and money, I'm pretty quick to cut shit because if I haven't invested time and they're already showing red flags, yes, they could turn it around, but the percentage says that they won't. So it's better for me looking at it as an investment

to try to find someone else and start working with them. But if I've already invested time, I'm going to hire someone else and slowly start taking tasks. But if I've already invested time, I'm going to hire someone else and slowly start taking tasks off their plate little by little. And one of two things is going to happen. Either he's going to quickly realize what's going on and he's losing his task and turn it around and get back into gear. Or eventually I've taken everything off his plate. I haven't set my business back by firing him and starting over, but he's no longer as valuable to me as he was before. So that's kind of my hack for dealing with people, whether they're a contractor, employee, freelancer that are going in the wrong direction.

So as a home service guy myself, I think some of the biggest challenges that I face is we're scaling very, very fast and we've got some really good handbooks and policies and procedures, but opening the funnel for great employees is not easy to do. You know, you could be on Indeed and Craigslist. I mean, for your type of work, Upwork, you could be on Monster, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn, and I could go on and on. I mean, there's so many of these companies now. What do you think the secret is to getting great candidates and actually vetting them? Because that's the hardest problem in our business. Yeah, I agree.

I mean, it's the hardest problem with hiring. I spent years hiring really talented, smart people. And you would walk in the room and think that you were with the smartest people you've ever met. But something wasn't right. Something didn't click. There was something going around. The turnover was high. Something wasn't right. And I quickly realized that I was vetting people just for skill. And too many people will do that. They'll look at a resume and they'll be like, wow, this is great. You got good grades. You have 10 years of experience. But you don't focus on the other two things, which is the attitude and the communication. When it comes to attitude, I look for people who are really passionate about what they do. If I hate bookkeeping, when I hire a bookkeeper,

they have to love bookkeeping as much as I love being an entrepreneur, or in your case, running your home service business. I want someone who comes in with a smile every day, who doesn't consistently have bad days or let personal issues get them down. I want someone who comes in with a smile every day, who doesn't consistently have bad days or let personal issues get them down. I want people who really want to be there. I don't want to be in a position to have to beg them to come to work. They have to need me more than I need them. Then for communication, I mean, communication is everything. I don't care how talented you are or what your attitude is. If I can't communicate with you, if I'm constantly chasing you down, if you're missing deadlines or you can't give me updates on stuff, we can't work together. So we have 15 pages of communication guidelines or best practices that we make people memorize

and get tested on. But in your case, you should be looking for people with excellent communication skills. And there's a lot that you can do during the interview process to almost trick them into seeing what red flags pop up that, hey, this person doesn't have a great attitude or, hey, this person's communication skills might be questionable. And when you combine that with someone who has a lot of skills, that's when you make a really good hire when you have all three. Yeah, that's good info. You know, you I make a lot of mistakes in business. I got to tell you, I think I made every mistake in the book and it's costing me a lot of money. But more than anything, I'm not going to make the same mistake twice.

I believe in making mistakes and learning from them and just really kind of going in slow. If you don't have this uncharted territory, make the mistakes. Don't make them with one hundred million dollars. Make them with one hundred thousand dollars. What's the biggest mistake that catches most entrepreneurs off guard when they're trying to scale? Yeah, when they're trying to scale. So too many entrepreneurs, I'm a very short-term thinker. And what I see a lot of entrepreneurs, they're planning out five years, 10 years down the line. They have this whole vision of what their business is going to be, what services they're going to offer.

But they don't let the market dictate that. They don't let the feedback and the ideas dictate that. And so many people, if they sit back and they think of, hey, five years ago, this was my plan, very few people are like, yeah, I'm exactly where I said I was going to be. My business is exactly the way I expected it to be. It just doesn't happen that way. You have to live in the present. You have to adjust to what the market is telling you, whether it's adjusting your pricing, adjusting your services, adjusting maybe the radius that you're going after or whether your location is even good. There's so many things that you have to continue to try to do trial and error with that will eventually point

you in a different direction. And I see too many people that they have this goal, this vision of what their business is going to become, and they're not willing to change or audible at any point. And I think those are the people that fail. Wow, that's great. You know, the home service industry, we've got a lot of people that might not be used to hiring freelancers. What kind of benefits can they get from hiring a freelancer? Give me some examples of how you can benefit someone that might not have SEO or a good website or give me some detailed explanations of what you guys could offer. Yeah, I mean, we live in a world where remote working is taking over within five to 10 years, it could take over over half the workforce. So if you're not taking advantage of freelancers, I promise you your competition either is right now

or they're going to at some point. And it's really a way for you to get a competitive edge. If you want to design your website, you're not going to really hire an agency, which is going to cost a ton, or you can hire an employee, which you might not even need after the website's built, or you can hire a freelancer.

And if you limit yourself to just the talent around you in the town that you're in or the town next to you, not only are you limiting your talent, but you're also competing against all the businesses in that area for that exact same talent, driving the price up and making it really hard for you. When you open yourself up to the world of remote hiring and freelancers, you get access to talent from all over the world at different prices. There's always someone that can do what you need. And a lot of times you can build really strong long-term on-call relationships where you don't necessarily need to hire someone for 20 hours a week. Now, some people do need a 20-hour-a-week VA in the Philippines, which is fine.

But you can also have a lead developer that whenever you need something, you can just reach out to them. Or you might have a graphic designer you really like that you can keep in your back pocket. And stuff like that are hacks that you can use to accelerate your business without spending a lot of time and without having to constantly be looking in your area and posting on Indeed in order to get someone to do small projects for you. So the audience out there, just so you know, right now we have currently 14 VAs. We're looking for six more. And I'm going to be talking to Nathan about a lot of things that I'm working on after the podcast. But I just wanted to let you know that I'm a big fan of virtual assistants. I'm a big fan of process-oriented specialists. The philosophy my dad always said is he used to run Amco transmissions and he'd say, people could go, I can get it done for the dealer for that. He goes, do you go to a general doctor when you

want heart surgery? No, you came to the best transmission shop out there. Well, do you go to a general practitioner that might know a little bit about websites when you get somebody to build it and get exactly what you want done for less time, probably less money, and get it done the right way a lot quicker. So big fan of EAs. I'm a big fan of what Nathan's doing here. Nathan, tell me this.

I'm sure you've made a mistake a lot by hiring the wrong people. What's one hiring mistake that you'll never forget and why? Yeah, so I hired these twins from somewhere in the world. It wasn't the Philippines. I want to say South Africa, something like that. This was a while ago. And we hired both of them to cover, to work together because we were getting a lot of emails. And so we spent time training them.

And months later, where it took us forever to pick up on this, we realized that they were billing us twice, but only one of them was working at a time going back and forth between laptops. And it wasted countless hours, countless time and money. At the time, we were definitely new to hiring virtual assistants. So we were terrified to ever do it again. But that really stood out in my mind. And I actually had a client that had a very similar situation where they had built trust with someone and they broke that trust. And they came to me and they're like, hey, I don't think I can ever trust anyone again. I can never hire a VA again. And I told them my story and how I kind of recovered from that. I told them, you're going to make bad hires.

Stuff like that's just going to happen. You can't let it stop you from hiring. You're going to limit yourself as a business owner. You have to focus on your system, focus on your process, learn from your mistakes. And no one has 100% hiring record. And the only way to go is to move forward, to continue to figure out who you need to hire and build that trust again and learn from those mistakes. Yeah, you know, I was with a consultant the other day and he said, do you absolutely have every single person sign off on everything they need to do? And I know that it's a little bit harder, but there's such a thing called DocuSign. I'm pretty sure everybody's familiar with it.

But a lot of times we assume that employees know what to do. We assume that we've given them the direction they need. And it's a delegation problem because realistically, if I have a call center rep that I want to learn something and I say, why didn't you transfer it the way I taught you? I'm really not being fair to them unless they actually transferred it right in front of me. And I had them sign off that said, that's the perfect way to do it because the day they don't do it right. I said, remember on March 13th, 2016, when you did this perfectly and you explained to me, so now it's just a negligent problem, right? Now to me, you're showing me that you knew what the right way to do it is. So I'm going to give you a verbal warning, but I think this is a kind

of segue for me because people like to have employees one-on-one that you can see face-to-face and talk to and document things. In your business, you don't have that. And that has a lot to do with the culture you've built. Explain to me how you keep track of it all and how you meet deadlines and how you make sure that the work's getting done when you're losing a lot of the control by not having them in the office with you. Yeah, I mean, we're providing the freelancer. The work is really between the client and the freelancer.

So it is up to the client to know how to manage people and how to come up with good processes. And there's great software out there. I mean, if you're someone that cares about tracking time, which I don't personally monitor people's times, I don't have time for that and I build trust, but we have our own software that you can see when they work. There's additional ones that go the extra mile like Time Doctor that'll actually monitor their screen so that you can watch what they're doing. But a lot of it comes into your systems, your processes. If you're using Trello or Asana, figuring out a way to have them confirm when stuff is done, getting hard estimates and delivery dates up front, getting everything in writing so that you can clearly point out black and white, you did this or you didn't do this.

All that stuff comes with being an entrepreneur and learning how to deal with remote workers. And we put out a lot of great content on the FreeUp blog. If you go to freeup.com with three slash blog, all about how to get the most out of remote workers, because you're right, they're not sitting right next to you, but you can still have a great relationship with people and trust them and hit deadlines,

even though they're remote. You know, I learned a lot from the four-hour work week. I think that's when I really started to get into VAs and learn the power of enjoying life a little bit more. Although I still work a lot, but I enjoy work. But yeah, there's a lot to be said about the right way to delegate. And delegation is not dumping. And I think that we make that mistake very commonly is we assume that delegation just means, you know, this is what I need done. You don't do any check-ins.

You don't have them repeated back to you. And it causes problems. And I think there's a whole different mentality when you're communicating with somebody from Russia or the Philippines or India. And I definitely encourage. What was the website that you have all the details on that? If you go to freeup.com with three E's, which is my website, and then go to slash blog, we have a lot of great content on working

with virtual assistants and just freelancers in general. So I have a garage door business. We're in 10 states. Anybody could choose any garage door company in any one of my states. There's 500 in Phoenix where I'm at right now. There's a lot of companies that do your business and they have a lot to choose from. Tell me a little bit about the customer service secret that helps you stand out and helps you scale your business. Yeah. So customer service has been huge for me. When I worked at the Firestone Corporation as an intern in college or in high school, they really entered into my brain. I went through classes and classes on this stuff. And I really took a lot of it and moved it up. And part of it is fast response time.

Clients are amazed when they use our service how quickly they get a response either from me or one of my assistants. They don't have to wait in line in a chat. They don't have to wait until it's business day. It's fast. The best way to resolve an issue is to respond quickly. A client comes in yelling and screaming. If you respond right away with a solution, most of the time they're going to be reasonable and give you a chance to stay. And I guess my second tip is

we just make it right. Whatever it takes to make the situation right. We're dealing with real people. We're dealing with real businesses. Stuff comes up, people make mistakes, things happen. And at the end of the day, you stand up and you take responsibility and you talk to the client and you figure out, hey, what does it take to make you whole again? What does it take to regain your trust? What does it take to give us another chance? To me, that's where customer service is. And I feel like a lot of people, they think way too short term.

They don't want to give the client $200. That's $200 out of your pocket. If you just made the client happy, if you just made the client whole again, you'll make way more on them long term. And it surprised me that more businesses don't understand that. Yeah, I think I probably send 20 checks a week back to customers out of my roughly a thousand clients a week to 1500. So it happens. You can't please everybody. And it's worth keeping a great reputation because you could use that reputation and advertise on all of your mailers, the radio, TV, billboards. And that comes to the next subject is you've got hundreds and hundreds of testimonials on your website and social media. Let me ask you this. What advice

would you give a business owner who's struggling to give past clients to put up with a good word for them? So I'm always asking for feedback, whether it's from the freelancers, from the clients, always asking for it. I want to from the freelancers, from the clients, always asking for it. I want to know what went well, what didn't go well. I want to know how I can improve as a business owner, how the business can improve. So as I'm going through this normal feedback process and I'm listening to what they're saying and writing stuff down on the process that I want to change, when someone comes in, they're like, hey, we've had a great experience, which when you start a new business, like I did with FreeUp a few years ago, you never know what the client reaction is going to be like. But it's been very positive.

People are like, hey, you saved me so much time. Hey, I had a great experience with this worker. That's when I ask them, I say, hey, would you mind leaving us a testimony online? I make it easy for them. I have a link ready to go that I can just copy and paste for them. And most of the time they're happy to do it. I think a lot of people, they don't ask or they don't ask at the right time. For me, feedback is a constant part of running a business. And that's just part of the feedback loop. I love that.

You know, asking bad feedback is really good because you can change those things in real time. And I think so many people are afraid to ask for feedback because they're afraid of what they're going to hear. And I've heard it a million times. We're opening up a can of worms by asking that. I think a lot of people listening right now, a lot of business owners are saying, yeah, I know we mess up a lot. I don't even need to hear about it.

But guess what? Hear about it. Make the changes you need, but make the stuff that is good viral. Get it on Facebook. Get it on Yelp. Get it on Nextdoor and all these other places. So you manage a lot of projects

at once i'm a big project guy i've worked on everything from infusionsoft to zoho to you name it salesforce i've worked on every crm and base camp and you name it what do you like as far as project management tools that you swear by you said tre Trello. I mean, there's Exana or whatever. There's a million of them. Yeah, so I'm a simple guy when it comes to tools. I get pretty frustrated when tools don't do exactly what I want them to do, so I tend to build my own, like the free up software

and build my own stuff when it comes to processes. In terms of managing projects, I use Skype. Skype is a huge help, especially when you're dealing with VAs all over the world. I strongly encourage everyone to have a Skype account, at the very least, have it in their back pocket. I use Trello a lot for organizing my personal projects, whether they're short-term or long-term. And then when you're dealing with developers, which can be a huge pain, they're a whole different animal, I use a program called Jira,

which has turned out to be way better. For some reason, they like it a lot. It's pretty easy to organize. Those are the three tools I use pretty consistently. So I'm going to ask you some other questions here, and then we'll finish up. But search engine optimization is a huge thing, and getting found on Google for home services. I mean, 70% of all services are found online. 70% of that's Google. That means half your marketing dollars should be put towards Google.

Tell me how some of your VAs or your workers could help someone out there really enhance everything and get found and make themselves found on the internet. That's a loaded question. Keeping in mind that I am not an SEO expert. I hire people to do my SEO. Every situation is very different. And usually, if you have no idea what you're doing, whether it's SEO or Facebook ads or building a website,

the best idea is to hire a freelancer to do an audit of what you're doing now. So an expert freelancer and free up is $30 to $50 an hour. Pay them for an hour or two. Tell them as much information as you can about your business, about your competitors. Let them do their own research. Look at what's working, what's not working, and come up with a custom plan for you. And off of that, I would also come up with a daily checklist of three to five things you can do every day that are very small, but build up over time. We talked about asking for reviews.

That's something I do pretty consistently. But there's other stuff like posting in Quora or getting a blog article out. Just small things that you don't just submit it and boom, you're higher ranking on Google. But if you do those three to five tasks every day, by year one, by year two, all of a sudden you're showing up in higher rankings in more places. Customers are finding you here and there. And it really sets a good foundation for you to use going forward. Awesome. I like the fact that you're finding experts in every field, and it makes a lot of sense to me. I'm a huge fan of delegating and finding the right people.

Do you have a rating system that you rate your VAs to actually keep track of the best and the best graded? How does that work? Yeah, it's a good question. So I'm actually not a fan of rating systems. I think if you go on some of the other marketplaces, you can hire a three-star worker and have a great experience. You can hire someone with five stars. Maybe we talked about skill versus attitude and communication. They might be a five in skill, but the star is not necessarily telling me the full picture. So I really don't take a look at that that much. With FreeUp, it's pretty simple. We're looking for only five-star workers.

We reject 99 out of every 100 applicants we get on the marketplace. We only accept 1%. And once they're in the marketplace, we have incredibly high expectations for the attitude, the skill, and the communication. And we're very quick to remove people if they get client complaints, if we feel like they're not touching on one of those three things. So for us, we're trying to build a marketplace of all five-star workers. And so we have not implemented a review system for that reason. That makes sense. I like that answer because everybody's so obsessed with reviews, but people usually figure out how to cheat the system. Nathan, tell me a little bit about the top few books you'd recommend, because that's one thing I always like to ask the people on the show here is, is there any books that

changed your life that really helped guide you to who you are today? Yeah, Delivering Happiness, the Zappos book. To me, I mean, I'm a big Amazon guy. I've been in Amazon since they were mostly books. So just kind of seeing behind the scenes and what it takes to build a company and the obstacles that you face with bigger and bigger competition. I mean, you hear people say, hey, getting to 1 million is easy, getting to 5 million is much harder because at 1 million, people notice you a little bit. At 5 million, people start to copy you a lot. And so you can kind of see the trajectory from start to finish of what it takes to build such a big business and to compete with other people. And then Start With Why is a huge book.

When I was selling on Amazon, I loved doing it for the first four years. I was passionate about it. But at some point, something was missing. I realized that I only helped myself. I wasn't really helping other people. And that's why I care so much about free up. I had the opportunity to speak on podcasts and conferences and help other people in that way. But also we've helped thousands of businesses all over the world get access to talent and grow their business and help entrepreneurs pursue their dream. And on the freelancer side, we paid out over $3 million to freelancers last year. I just got back from the Philippines. I had freelancer. We had a big meetup with over 100 people that just wanted to be there. No obligation to show up. And we had people showing me their

houses, their cars, things that they bought with that money. And to me, that's so rewarding. And that book is all about don't focus on what you do and how you do it, but focus on why you do it. And to me, that's my big why. I like that. Simon Sinek, right? Yep. So if somebody wants to get more of you, Nathan, where do they got to go and how do they get in touch with you directly? Yeah, so I'm a pretty easy guy to contact. If you go to freeup.com with three E's, my calendar is right at the top. You can find my Skype, my email, my phone number. You can email me at Nathan at freeup.com. You can check out the free up blog and on the site, it's free to sign up. There's no monthly fees. There's no minimums.

There's no commitment. You can end the agreement with us at any time. It's in our best interest to get you people. You actually like that, help you grow your business. So if you're listening out there, sign up, mention this podcast for a dollar off your first worker forever. And if you have any questions or you want to talk to me about your business and how we can help, I'm always available for you. Nathan, that was incredible. You absolutely killed it.

And I appreciate you coming on. I think the audience needs to understand the power of what you're giving. And most people don't. They don't have any clue. They say, I can barely get workers to come into my office and work. How could I manage a guy offshore?

But I think with your help and the platform you built, it's very possible. And I very much thank you for being on here. Yeah, I want to change the hiring industry. And I appreciate you getting me on and giving me a chance to do it. Well, listen, Nate, I appreciate it. And I want to stay on for a minute longer and talk to you. So I'm just going to end this right now. Thanks, everybody, for staying tuned. And I look forward to seeing you on the next show. Thank you.

Hey, guys, I really appreciate you tuning into the podcast. I want to let you know that my book is available right now on Amazon. It's called The Home Service Millionaire. That's homeservicemillionaire.com. Just go to the website. It'll show you exactly where and how to buy the book. I poured two years of knowledge into this book and I had 12 contributors. Everybody from the COO at HomeAdvisor to the CEO of ValPak, and of course, Ara, the CEO of Service Titan.

It tells you how to have the right mindset and become a millionaire and think like a millionaire. It goes into exactly how to turn on lead generation. Have those phones ringing off the hook for the customers that you want to be calling where you can make money and get great reviews. It also goes into simple things like how to attract A players. Listen, if you want a great apple pie, you need to buy good apples and you need to know where to buy those apples. And it also talks about simple things like knowing how to keep the score. You should have your financial check every week. You should know exactly what's coming in and out of your account. You should know when to cut

advertising that's not working. And more than anything, you should know how to cut employees that aren't making it for you. Listen, you might have a big heart, but this book is going to show you how to make decisions built on numbers. I hope you pick up the book and I really appreciate everything. I hope you're having a great day. Tune in next week. Thank you.