There is quite a demand for working remotely nowadays. Businesses see it as an alternative instead of setting up a physical office. Nathan Hirsch, an expert in remote hiring, talks about the online process of hiring a virtual assistant or a freelancer to work from home through the FreeeUp platform. As Nathan gives the distinction between a virtual assistant and a freelancer, he also shares the advantages of having them working with business owners. Being clear about what you want and what your personal preferences are, Nathan for sure can find a match that fits your needs so you can focus on growing your business.

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Hiring Remote Workers with Nathan Hirsch

Our guest is Nathan Hirsch. He is a serial entrepreneur and an expert in remote hiring and eCommerce. He started his first eCommerce business out of his college dorm room and has sold over $30 million online. He’s now the Cofounder and CEO of FreeeUp.com. It’s a marketplace that connects businesses and pre-vetted freelancers in eCommerce, digital marketing and much more. He regularly appears on leading podcasts such as Entrepreneur on Fire and he speaks at live events about online hiring tactics. Nathan, thank you for joining our tribe.

Taylor, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

I’m excited to talk to you because online hiring is an awesome opportunity and tool that most people are learning about. Personally, I’m scratching the surface with running my podcast and some of the real estate investing I do. What is the distinction between virtual assistants and freelancers, if there is one?

There are almost two types of people that you work with. The first type is where you already have the systems and the processes in place. You’re hiring someone and teaching them how to follow them and then they become a part of your business for the long-term. For that, you’re either hiring an internal employee in the US or you’re hiring a virtual assistant, what I consider the outsourced labor. For me, I hire a lot of people in the Philippines. They run the majority of the day-to-day operations of FreeeUp. On the FreeeUp platform, there are about 40% from the Philippines. When people need something for their day-to-day operations, whether it’s customer service, fulfilling orders or whatever applies for their business, that’s when I think of virtual assistant and outsourcing.

The flip side of that is the mid-level specialists and the experts that are on the platform. These are freelancers from all over the world, but they have their own system, their own process and their own expertise that they bring to the table. When a client hires them to run their Facebook ads or to write a blog, they’re bringing their own expertise to the table. The client isn’t teaching them, they aren’t training them, they aren’t doing the day-to-day operations of the business. They’re doing that specialty or that expertise and that part of the business and it may or may not be the core component of that client’s business.

When I think about virtual assistants, they do require a bit of training, but they only cost a couple of bucks an hour. If it takes you a little bit of time to get them trained up and eventually, they can do the job perfectly well with minimal direction, then it’s worth getting them trained up. Freelancers have that background already. They’re more of a plug and play and they’re a little bit more expensive if I had to read between the lines.

Keep in mind that these are real people and they don’t always fit in perfect boxes. A virtual assistant can be a vague statement. I’ve had clients who have hired a very high-level freelancer and for whatever reason, they call them that a virtual assistant. They’re virtual and they assist them with their business. There’s no right or wrong way, but in my mind, that’s how I differentiate the two.

I have a friend and colleague, Whitney Sewell who runs a real estate syndication show. It’s a daily podcast and his virtual assistant is US based. She is significantly more expensive than the people that I’ve hired in the Philippines. She’s been more plug and play, but she’s four to five times pricier per hour. There is quite a bit of variability out there. There are a good number of places to find VAs these days and freelancers. They all vary and they all offer something different. What do you offer a uniquely at FreeeUp.com?

I grew my first business using virtual assistants and freelancers and I got good at it, but I always wanted better and faster than going on Upwork or Fiverr where you post a job, get 50 people to apply, interview them one by one and it took forever. I wanted something faster. With FreeeUp, we do it differently. We get thousands of applicants every week, freelancers and agencies from all over the world. We vet them, not just for skill, but for attitude and communication as well. We take the top 1%, let them in and then make them available to our clients quickly whenever they need them.

Our clients like it because it’s free to sign up. There’s no monthly fee, no maximums, no minimums, no obligation. You can stop using us at any time, but you get fast access to talent whenever you need it. We have 24/7 support on the backend including my calendar right on the website. We also have a no turnover guarantee. If freelancers quit in the middle of the project for any reason, we’d cover replacement costs and get you a new person right away, so you know you’re protected. That’s how we’re different. The pre-vetting, the speed, the customer and the protection.

I use a couple of other VA services including Fiverr. I found Fiverr to be the most frustrating out of all the services that I’ve used. Especially on Upwork, you post a job listing and you get 50 resumes and then you have to sort through. It’s easy to get rid of a bunch of them because they threw something out there, but then you have to interview them. You have to try them out and hire maybe three or four of them just to see what they end up doing to hire one. It takes a lot of time depending on what you’re doing. It can be a much bigger cost than you were expecting. I definitely see the value in your service but assuming that your price is higher, how is that all funded on the backend? It’s got to come from somewhere. Do you have a little bit more premium of service than Upwork?

We don’t have the bottom of the barrel. We’re not the Walmart of freelancers. We don’t want to have freelancers for a dollar an hour or anything like that. Our prices are very close to market value. We’re a marketplace so the freelancers are setting their own rate. It’s not as if we’re taking someone who’s $5 an hour and charge $20 and we take our 15%. If someone is $10 an hour on another marketplace, they should be about $10 an hour on our marketplace. Since they set their own prices and these are freelancers and they offer their services in different places, we don’t control whether they offer higher or lower in different places. It’s usually around there and clients can negotiate rates. They can agree to fix prices. That they can set limits and pause and un-pause freelancers. They’re in complete control of the billing.

None of us are flat earthers here. The earth is round so people are in different time zones throughout the world. You have freelancers on your platform all throughout other freelancer setting their own schedule and saying, “I’ll be available Eastern Standard Time even though I’m in the Philippines.” Do have any standards around that?

We have freelancers that work all different time zones. If you put in your request that you want someone that can work Saturday mornings, we’re only going to introduce you to someone that wants to work Saturday mornings. We have lots of freelancers who only want to work their time zone and who are flexible. From my internal team, I mentioned I have 24/7 support. I have some people that work 9 to 5 Eastern and I have other virtual assistants that are working the night shift, which is their day shifts. As long as you’re clear about what you want and what your personal preference is, we can find a match that fits your needs.

Even though I’ve been using virtual assistants for a while, I’m scratching the surface. I’m a newbie. I haven’t built a $30 million business off of primarily working with virtual assistants. I’m confident that most people in the world or in the United States, for example, have not worked with a virtual assistant for anything. If we’re getting started, and maybe we don’t know what task that we could just try out using a virtual assistant, but we know we want to get some of the things in our life or in our business off of our plate. From an expert position in this, if somebody wants to get started using virtual assistants and learn how to hire people, what would you suggest to try it out?

I would pick small tasks. Something that you do a few hours every week. How do you get a few hours in your day back or a few hours in your week back? Create a list of everything that you do on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. Prioritize it from easiest to hardest. Start with the easiest things and try it out and you’re going to learn so much from that experience. Even if you don’t have success, you’re going to learn what not to do going forward. What I did back in the day is I talked to these virtual assistants. I said, “How do you work with other clients? How is my communication style? How can I better communicate what I need and get a better result in the end?” By talking with them and having it back and forth and meeting different people in different cultures with different skill sets and different backgrounds, I learned a lot about hiring. That’s usually a good place to start. Small tasks, talking back and forth, learning and asking questions. It becomes addicting when you get good at it and you realize, “I can offload 50% of my work and focus on bigger picture stuff to grow my business.”

One of the things I’ve been thinking about and a lot of people that I know have been thinking about is that we’re real estate investors in one degree or another, either passively or actively. We’ve been thinking about underwriting deals and that’s a fairly sophisticated type of activity. This is something that can be learned and developed over time. One of my virtual assistants helps me send emails and book guests because it’s not his skill. His English skills aren’t terrible, but they’re not great and it would be difficult to get him up to speed on that activity. If we’re getting into fairly more sophisticated business things like underwriting deals or maybe determining pricing strategy if you’re on an eCommerce store, how hard is it to get someone on board for that if we’re on the higher end of the freelancer’s spectrum? Is this possible? What can we do there as we get into higher value tasks?

I like to focus on three levels. The basic, which is more of followers to follow my system, the mid-level people who are in that 10 to 30 range that are more specialists that do one or two things well. They’re the graphic designers, the bookkeepers, the writers or the experts who can consult and project manage HQ high-level game plan. When it comes to that, I usually start off by saying, “Do I want a specialist who is going to execute or do I want an expert who’s going to execute and consult and bring his expertise to the table?” Once I decided on that too, I use my own platform FreeeUp and I find the person, I start off by setting expectations. What constitutes success? What is a failure in terms of this project in this work? What do I like? What do I not like? If I can show examples of that, it’s always helpful. How do I communicate? What milestones are we setting? How often are we going to check in or meet?

Those are all the things that I look to establish up front. The more time and effort you spend up front getting on the same page, the less time you’re going to spend down the line on he said, she said or back and forth that is going in the wrong direction. As these projects or the work gets started, if she realized we’re not on the same page or it’s drifting off in a direction that I don’t want it to go, I pause everything. I take a step back, we meet, we get on the same page and only then do we move forward. I found that as an effective tool when you’re working with those high-level freelancers.

As far as your personal experience working with virtual assistants, what’s the best experience you’ve had in hiring a virtual assistant or freelancer? What’s the worst? What’s your spectrum of experience in this world?

I’ve had every good and bad experience you can imagine. I have a virtual assistant who started off with me doing data entry work and now she runs our freelance success team, which is our recruitment team. All the freelancers that are getting on the platform, the 1%, the one out of every hundred applicants that get in, she’s vetting those people. She’s worked with me for several years. I’ve met her in person when I went to the Philippines. We’re very good friends. I’m the godfather of one of her kids and we have a great working and personal relationship. On the flip side, in terms of worst experiences, I’ve had freelancers that have tried to scam me, not in terms of stealing my stuff. I hired two sisters and instead of both of them working, only one of them was working and billing me twice and it took me about a month to figure that out. It’s all small stuff like that.

You can always get the money back. As an entrepreneur, you can always make more money. What you can’t get back is your time. I realized that when you’re having these bad experiences, the real key is to catch that stuff as early as possible. That’s what I’ve gotten good at because no one has 100% hiring record. I just hired eight customer service representatives and out of the first eight that we hired, six of them were great and I had to replace the last two. I figured that out in the first week or so that they weren’t a good fit and I replaced them with two people that are all-stars. Finding that out early no matter how bad of experience you have is the key. There are always going to be things outside of your control, whether it’s personal issues or people not telling the truth or work ethic or whatever it is. You have to focus on what you can control.

We can always go and make more money, but we cannot get our time back, especially for those of us who are either running multiple businesses or doing things that require more time than the number of hours in a week period, let alone sleeping, exercising and having personal relationships. We need to leverage this. From my perspective, leveraging virtual assistants and freelancers is really a tool for our business, not to dehumanize them as people, but in principle. These things and your service at FreeeUp, you’re a tool for us to use in our life and business so that we can get some of those lower value tasks off of our plate. Maybe it’s something easy that we can crank out on a Saturday like sending emails. You can hire somebody for a few bucks an hour to handle those emails and then you can go enjoy your Saturday or do some other high-value task in your business and replace that time. This is very important for people to try out in any business. Nathan, what is the best investment you ever made?

The best investment for me is always the people. That’s what’s gotten me over the hump. I didn’t grow both of my businesses because I put in an endless amount of hours, which I did. I grew up because I surrounded myself with people that were talented and smarter than me. One of my best decisions was one of my first hires, Connor, who ended being my business partner eight years later. We’ve worked together on both companies and we both contributed to each other’s success. We work well together. There’s no one I trust more in terms of business than Connor. That was a decision that I made early on as an entrepreneur. That would be my best one.

Give us a little bit of background. What was your easy eCommerce story?

I started off buying and selling people’s textbooks out of my college dorm room. From there, I got good at selling on Amazon, which was more of a bookstore back then. There were no gurus or courses back then. I was just doing a lot of trial and error to see what I could get to sell. I tried everything that I was very familiar with, sporty equipment, DVDs, computer games and I failed over and over again. The only thing I could get to sell were these books. It wasn’t until I branched out of my comfort zone and found the baby industry by accident or by trial and error that my business exploded. If you could imagine me as a twenty-year-old single college guy selling millions of dollars of baby products out of my college dorm room, that was me.

As I’ve gotten further and further away from my college education, I’ve been selling off my old college textbooks on Amazon and getting more money on Amazon than I would have got when they were essentially new books from trading them in at the bookstore. That’s an incredible racket they have going. I can see why you would target that business. I have a lot of respect for building that baby business. That’s impressive. What is the worst investment you ever made?

The worst investment I ever made was opening up an office. I had this remote eCommerce business that had no overhead, which was a huge advantage and I had all these remote people. I created an office and I moved all the remote people into the office thinking that they’d be more productive, and we’d be able to grow faster. Having an office was the last step and it didn’t work out that way. I added overhead to a business that didn’t need it for no reason so our costs went up. By moving all these people remote, I had almost added control of their lives, which added stress and they were less productive. Putting a lot of people in a closed room led to drama and other issues there. I eventually got rid of the office and went back to going remote. With FreeeUp, we started off remote and we have no plans to not be remote in the future because of that lesson. With my work style, I enjoy the remote environment and with the office, I almost felt that I created a 9 to 5 job for myself where I had to go in every day, which is one of the reasons why I avoided getting a real job and became an entrepreneur, to begin with.

If I hadn’t made the same decision in your shoes, I would’ve wanted it back out of it quickly. I get that. What is the most important lesson you’ve learned in investing or in building your business?

I only work with people that can honor their word, people that are honest and that tells the truth at all times. Let’s say I hire a virtual assistant and we agree that they’re going to work Eastern Time. This is just a random example. In the weekend they tell me, “That’s not going to work with me. Can I do the night?” I might have a spot open at night, but I only want to work with people that honor their word, to begin with. I found that if you continue to compromise and you continue to adjust and you don’t hold people accountable to what they agreed to originally, it leads you down a path that’s very hard to recover from. That is in all aspects of life, whether it’s your friends, your family, your business partners and your investments. Surrounding yourself with good and honest people that when they tell you they’re going to do something, they agree to something or they commit to something, they do it.

I appreciate you sharing everything for the audience. You’re somebody who is independent, you run your own business, you’re up early getting things done, I give you a lot of respect for that. I’m sure you’re going to continue to be successful. I would highly recommend for everyone that’s reading to give it a shot. If you haven’t hired a virtual assistant or a freelancer before, find something that you can try and learn how to use this business tool, this structure, this idea of hiring people and multiplying your time and getting some of your time back. It’s been very valuable to me and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to grow any business they’re doing or get some of their time back. Nathan, thanks again for joining our tribe. Where can our audience find you?

If you go to FreeeUp.com, my calendar is right at the top. You can book a free meeting with me. I’d love to talk to you about your business and how I can help. If you’re a freelancer, you can apply right on the website to join the platform. If you’re looking to hire, create a free account, mention this blog and get a $25 credit just to try us out.

From my perspective, that’s enough to try to be convinced. That’s more than I spent on my first attempt at using virtual assistants. I’ve gotten far more value than that over time in continuing to hire. That’s a fantastic offer. Nathan, thank you for joining us. If you’re enjoying the show, please subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you know someone who would benefit from the information that we’re bringing, please share the show with them, bring them into our group and introduce them to all the content that we’re bringing to you. I hope you have an awesome day, an awesome week and we’ll see you on the next one.

Important Links:

• FreeeUp.com
• Entrepreneur on Fire
• iTunes – Passive Wealth Strategies for Busy Professionals
• https://FreeeUp.com/freeeup-worker-skill-sets-infographic/
• https://FreeeUp.com/how-it-works-infographic/
• https://FreeeUp.com/free-up-your-business

About Nathan Hirsch

Nathan Hirsch is a 28-year-old serial entrepreneur who is an expert in hiring online and building eCommerce businesses. He co-founded his first eCommerce company out of his dorm room in 2009 drop shipping products on Amazon.com and built it to sell over $25 million worth of product over 5 years. While scaling, Nathan discovered the power of outsourcing and ended up building a remote army of freelancers.

In 2015, Nathan co-founded and became the CEO of FreeeUp, an online hiring marketplace that allows business owners fast access to a hand-picked network of top talent freelancers in eCommerce, digital marketing, web development, and much more who have already been vetted for skill, attitude, and communication. FreeeUp interviews hundreds of freelancers each week and only allows the top 1% of applicants into the network. The company has been growing at rapid paces (500%+ YoY) and has quickly become a top destination to hire online for over 3,000 businesses around the world.

Nathan has built his personal brand to be synonymous with online hiring and entrepreneurship through 75+ guest appearances on top podcasts: Entrepreneur on Fire with John Lee Dumas, Eventual Millionaire, and more. Nathan has also become a regular speaker at industry conferences where he teaches other business owners how to hire freelancers and gain back more time in their growing businesses.

• Here’s How »

• passivewealthstrategy.com