We can be the bottleneck for growth in our businesses. When we get out of the way and hire virtual assistants to do the work for us, we free up our time to do the things that make even more money. Nate Hirsch shows us how to hire a virtual assistant to grow our businesses even larger than we ever thought possible.
Today, I am excited to have Nate Hirsch on the podcast. Like Nate, you can be successfully unemployed.
How Nate Hirsch Makes Money Without Having a Job
Nate’s company, FreeUp, was recently acquired, but he has been a long-time entrepreneur. He has been an entrepreneur since he was 20 and he is now 30. While growing up, his parents were both teachers.
They encouraged him to go to college, get a degree, and get a job with a pension. They did a great job saving for retirement and are now traveling the world and enjoying their time together. Nate learned how to be frugal from his parents.
Nate knew from a young age that this was not what he wanted to do. His parents made him work summer jobs, 40 to 50 hours every week. He worked at several different places and learned a lot about business and marketing, but he also learned it wasn’t for him.
Nate Starting a Side Hustle and Before Hiring a Virtual Assistant
Nate got a glimpse into the future and when he got to college he started hustling. He started a textbook business, where he would take all of the money he made during the summer and at the end of the semester, he bought other student’s textbooks at a discount, but more than the bookstore would give them.
He sold these books at the beginning of the next semester.
Nate created an affiliate program and told people about it. Before he knew it, there were lines out the door of people trying to sell him their books. He got a cease and desist letter from his college, because he was stealing too much of their business.
Nate stopped the textbook resell business, because he didn’t want to get kicked out of school. He finished his degree and made the dean’s list every semester, because he wanted to get the most out of it, since he was paying for it.
Nate pivoted into drop shipping after he stopped his used textbook business. This was before he even knew what drop shipping was. It was 2008, and many people didn’t know what Amazon was.
How to Quit Your Job with Passive Income
Get the Best Selling Book FREE!
He had a 24-hour storefront and he had to figure out what to sell. He started experimenting with manufacturers who made and sold products and Nate sold the products on Amazon, because the manufacturers didn’t know what Amazon was.
Nate told the manufacturers he had an additional sales channel and all they had to do was keep his credit card on file, charge it, ship it, and Nate would take care of customer service and sales.
It made a lot of sense for him, because he didn’t have a lot of money and he didn’t have the space to store what he was selling.
Nate did a lot of experimenting trying to find what would sell. He tried selling sporting equipment, video games, computers, and typical college student products. He ended up landing on baby products. That business quickly took off.
There Was a Time Where Nate’s Business Venture Didn’t Go Very Well
Nate had a lot of success with the Amazon business early on and hired a few people to help him.
Eventually, he hired a manager and spent six months training him on how to run the business, including customer service, listing, pricing, etc. It was all manual and all Nate’s processes.
He had one baby product manufacturer that was great and was doing 80 percent of his sales. Nate ended up working with just that one manufacturer, because it was easier.
Nate’s business was on autopilot, and he had one person running everything. He was sleeping better at night, his manager was handling everything, he had one supplier, he was crushing it, and at 20 years old he was on top of the world and making more money than his parents.
After six months of training the manager, Nate decided to take a vacation. On the first day of his vacation, he received three phone calls. The first call was from his manager telling him he was quitting, because he wanted to focus more on school.
The second call was from his supplier telling him they no longer wanted to do business with him.
The third call was from his accountant telling him someone had filed a fake tax return in his name, stole $40,000 in his name from the government, and he would have to deal with the mess when he got home from vacation.
Nate Had to Start His Business All Over Again
Nate went from an unbelievable high to a bad low. That night, he went out for drinks with his business partner, Connor, and they talked out what they could learn from this.
They decided that hiring college students for important positions was not a good idea. They also decided that putting all of your eggs in one basket was not a good idea.
When it came time to hire again, they decided to hire two people for customer service and two people for listing. This way, if one of them quit, they just needed to plug one hole.
On the flip side, instead of having all of their eggs in one basket with one manufacturer, they reached out to many manufacturers and ended up working with over 300 of them. Manufacturers drop out all of the time and the next time it happened, it wasn’t a big deal.
Watch the entire Hire A Virtual Assistant Interview
Nate also dealt with the tax return. It was a big hassle with paperwork, but he didn’t end up losing any money. It worked out the best it possibly could.
Nate was very happy this all happened in years one and two, instead of in years seven and eight. He learned so much from the whole experience.
The Process of Selling His Business That Helps People Hire A Virtual Assistant
The Amazon business grew and Nate and Connor ended up making over $25 million. They never sold the business, they just phased their way out of it. Amazon was becoming more popular with gurus and courses.
At the beginning, they thought they were going to take over the world with e-commerce, but that wasn’t going to happen, because they weren’t selling their own products.
On Amazon, you don’t have a brand, you are just one of millions of sellers. The business wasn’t doubling anymore. They were still making money, but they weren’t growing their own brand or selling their own product.
After Nate got frustrated with hiring college kids, and nobody in their 30’s wanted to work for a 20 or 21 year old, he looked into the online hiring world. He looked into sites like Upwork and Fiverr and hired a lot of great virtual assistants to do different work for him.
Nate hated the hiring process of posting a job and finding someone and interviewing them. He kept looking for a better platform where he could find someone who was pre-vetted, and, if anything went wrong he could hold the platform accountable and they would make it right.
Nate couldn’t find this platform, so he decided to create it himself. This was the concept of FreeUp. He and Connor launched it with $5,000 crummy software, where people could log in and log out.
They took a Rolodex from their Amazon business of freelancers and virtual assistants and people they weren’t necessarily utilizing and offered them for hire to other people. They were proven hires and Nate placed them in other jobs and they offered to make it right if something went wrong.
People loved the idea, and they eventually ran out of freelancers and had to start recruiting. They invested more into the software and became a software company in a marketplace that pre-vets freelancers and virtual assistants.
Continue to Scale Your Business When You Hire Virtual Assistants to be a $12 Million Business
That business continued to scale. Nate and his Connor grew that company organically from $5,000 to $1 million to $5 million to $9 million to $12 million last year.
They didn’t go into the business planning to sell, but it is in the back of every entrepreneur’s mind that there are only a so many ways it can go. Either you run the business forever, you run the business into the ground, you get investments, or you sell the business.
When they were approached by one of their clients, their client said they loved what Nate and his partner were doing and wanted to talk about acquiring their company.
Like any other business situation that comes up, they decided to find out more about them, what their plans were, and about their past businesses.
Their client made a fair offer and then it came down to due diligence. Nate and his partner had a million questions for their client and their client had a million questions for them.
Nate and his partner wanted to make sure they took care of the business and their freelancers and everything checked out. From there, it was a tough decision, but they took the offer.
Saying goodbye to their internal team, their virtual assistants, was difficult. Nate and his partner took $500,000 from the sale of their business and gave it to their team in the Philippines. They also made sure their jobs, pay structures, and bonuses were all kept in place and nobody would lose their job.
Hiring Other People is the Only Way to Scale Your Business
There are very few solo, $1 million per year businesses out there. That is very hard to do. Even if you get there, you are not going to get to $5 million or $10 million. At some point, you are going to have to hire people to help you, unless you don’t want to scale.
If you are the only person running your business, it is very stressful. Everything is on your shoulders, and you will be working every weekend. There will be no time to take a vacation or even a day off.
Look at your numbers, see how much you are making each month, and figure out how aggressive you want to be. For a free tool to help you, go to outsourceschool.com/vacalulator.
Figure out what percentage you want to spend when yohttps://successfullyunemployed.co/outsourceschoolu hire a virtual assistant, and the tool will tell you how many virtual assistants you can afford. If you can’t afford a part-time virtual assistant, think of it more as project based.
Create Two Lists to Help Guide Your Search When Hiring a Virtual Assistant
Before figuring out where to hire good virtual assistants, create two lists. On the first list, write down everything you do on a day to day and week to week basis and write down how many hours you spend.
You may want to take something off your list that takes you a long time or something you hate doing. This will give you a starting point and it will give you a better idea of who you need to hire.
On the second list, write down all of the things you are not bad at.
Average entrepreneurs are good at one to three things and you shouldn’t be spending your time trying to turn all of your weaknesses into strengths. Determine what you are good at and what you are bad at and hire someone according to that list.
Nate always goes to the Philippines when hiring virtually.
They are smart, hard working, speak high-level English, they work U.S. times, etc. Nate still recommends using FreeUp.
He is a client of them and he negotiated a lifetime discounted rate to use their service. There are a lot of different marketplaces out there, but he would definitely go through FreeUp and go to the Philippines.
How to Find the Right Person When You Hire A Virtual Assistant
Nate focuses on the virtual assistants experience and on their attitude. So many people are only looking for experience.
For him, that is part of it, but if someone has a lot of experience and a bad attitude, it is going to be a nightmare as an entrepreneur.
In his course, Nate doesn’t recommend using video one on ones, he recommends using Slack, Skype, or something else to chat and go through the CARE Method:
- Look at how they communicate
- Look at their attitude
- Look for any red flags
- Look at their experience
What does this person care about? What is their past experience? Dive deeper on those fronts, and you will find the virtual assistants that is right for you. The best virtual assistants in the world are not the best for every client in the world.
Onboarding Process When You Hire a Virtual Assistants
When you hire a virtual assistant, you want to bring them on AND give them a chance to back out before you hire them.
The thing that many people miss through this process is the step in between interviewing and hiring, which is onboarding, or setting expectations. After you interview and decide who you want to hire, give the virtual assistants your offer.
Make sure the person is good with the rate you offered, but also make sure the person is right for the job, by going through the SICC Method:
- Talk about the schedule
- Talk about how to handle issues
- Talk about how and when you are going to communicate
- Talk about the culture and how they are going to mesh with your team
Make sure you are on the same page and give them a chance to back out. Nate would much rather they back out, before he invests time, money, and energy into a virtual assistant instead of them backing out in two months.
Nate’s Thoughts on Negotiating Rates When You Hire Virtual Assistants
Negotiating is a little different if it is a one-time project or if this is someone you want to work for you for years to come.
For a project, you can negotiate the price and it isn’t a big deal, but Nate doesn’t want the price to affect the quality at the end. He wants the person to be happy with what they are making and he wants to create a win-win.
For everyone Nate works with, if he is happy and they are not, it is going to come back to him eventually. If he gets 10 percent off, that may show he is a good negotiator, but if it is not fair, it is going to cause bad feelings.
With long-term hires, Nate is very hesitant for new clients hiring virtual assistants to lowball. If a client wants $5 an hour and you tell them $4, they may really need a job right now, so they are going to accept it.
However, if someone else offers the client $5 an hour, they are going to leave. You need to be okay with the risk.
Nate hired virtual assistants when he first started for $3 an hour, with increase conditions.
How to Quit Your Job with Passive Income
Get the Best Selling Book FREE!
As FreeUp grew, the virtual assistants made more and more per hour, and by the end of it, they were making $20 an hour and they were team leads. This could have backfired on him, where two months in they could have left for a higher paying job.
There is always a risk if you lowball virtual assistants from the beginning. Nate’s rule of thumb is to pay people what they want to make, or find someone who want to work for the amount you want to pay.
If your highest rate is $10 an hour, find someone who wants to work for $10 an hour.
How to Make Sure to Continually Utilize the Virtual Assistant
Nate’s mentality is to make sure everyone else is organized and has things to do, before he works on his own stuff.
If he has a team of 30 people, they should know what they are doing and they shouldn’t be waiting for him to assign tasks.
Entrepreneurs need to first determine what they actually need, whether it is full time, part time, or just a few hours. What you want to avoid is on-call and urgent.
You can’t hire a virtual assistant where you can just pop up and tell they you have something for them. A newer virtual assistant may agree to this for a short period of time, before they realize how terrible it is for them.
As a business owner, at some point, you need steady, scheduled people to work when you hire a virtual assistant.
Start off from 9:00am to 11:00am, or five hours a week. Nate has a bookkeeper right now that he plans on using in the future. He is paying her five hours per month and he asked her to hold those hours for him.
If he doesn’t give her five hours, she can bill him five hours. If he gives her more than five hours, she can bill him the extra time.
He doesn’t want to come to her in three months when Outsource School is booming and find that she is booked up with other clients. Get creative and book people’s time up front.
Be prepared and know how many hours you are going to need, upfront. You want to get this right.
You don’t want to tell someone you have ten hours of work and only give them five. If that happens, you want to set the precedent that your word goes and they can bill for ten hours. If you are paying someone for ten hours, make sure you are giving them ten hours of work.
How to Set Your Virtual Assistant up for Success
SOP, standard operating procedures, are the key to any business. You need to start there. You can create them in a Google Doc, because you can edit it moving forward.
The top are the goals, the background, and the “why”. Find out why they doing this work when you hire a virtual assistant.
So many people miss this part and just jump into the steps. Include past hires that didn’t work out. Give them a background of what went wrong and tell them what you are looking for in the future.
The middle part are the steps. Be as clear as possible and assume nothing. You won’t get it right the first time, but you can update it as you go. Eventually, you will give the process when you hire virtual assistants to update as it evolves.
Lastly, the bottom part include the reminders, or the “do not do for any reason” list. If someone is monitoring Nate’s email, he may say that if his lawyer or accountant emails him, they are not to respond.
Don’t scatter this in your 50 steps, make sure it stands out and put these at the bottom so they remember.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When You Hire a Virtual Assistant
Power and internet issues is a big one. You want someone who has backup plans. You don’t want to hire someone who is one issue away from not being able to work for an extended period of time.
When you are interviewing, make sure to talk about back up power sources or what they plan to do if the power goes out. Even some of Nate’s best virtual assistants lose power and sometimes there is nothing they can do.
Nate sets the expectation that they communicate, they have a backup plan, and they actually try to get back to work as soon as possible.
Another common mistake is not diversifying. Nate sees a lot of entrepreneurs who fall into that trap. Hiring is hard, they make a few bad hires, they finally find someone they like, and they load that person up with everything.
They don’t realize how risky that is for their business.
From the client’s side, a mistake is not being clear in what you want. Nate suggests using the BARF Method when you hire a virtual assistant:
- Get the client to Buy in
- Show Appreciation
- Build a Relationship
- Treat your team as a Family
If you are going to invest all of this time, money, and energy into someone, you don’t want them to walk away and leave.
Nate has talked to tons of virtual assistants, and the most important thing to them is not the money, it is everything in the BARF Method.
Once you build a family inside your team, they don’t want to leave, even if there is a higher paying job. You need to find ways to protect your investments and you need to treat hiring as an investment.
Steps for People to Become a Virtual Assistant
Make sure that being a virtual assistant is really what you want. You need to treat yourself as a business. Businesses have websites, businesses market themselves, businesses find leads, businesses keep track of their books.
You need to get into that mindset. People need to hire a virtual assistant that has the right mindset.
If you are treating yourself like a business, and you are doing all of the things around that, it becomes all about how you create systems, how you create processes, what services are you offer, what is your price point, etc. You are building a virtual assistant business, even if you keep it to yourself.
As a virtual assistant, you want to diversify. You don’t want to only have one client, because if they drop you, you are out of luck. Build a client base and when you get big enough, hire an assistant. It is very similar to building a business or agency.
Virtual Assistants Don’t Need to Be Exclusive with One Platform
FreeUp and Fiverr don’t require virtual assistants to be exclusive to one platform.
Exclusivity tends to be more when you work for an agency, not an online platform. Nate honors his agreements and contracts.
It is tough to measure if someone is circumventing the platform, but for Nate, if he is going on a platform to offer a service, he is going to stay on the platform for that service.
If he is going outside of the platform to find his own clients, he will be able to have a wider selection of people who want to hire a virtual assistant
There was a virtual assistant that Nate knew who went around and was hired by someone outside of the platform. The client’s company was acquired by another company on the FreeUp platform.
When Nate was talking to the client, he mentioned the virtual assistants name and Nate told him what happened. The client ended up firing the woman who was going around the platform. It can backfire when you circumvent the contracts you agree to.
How a Virtual Assistant Can Scale
It all comes down to systems, processes, and packages.
You need to get creative. You can charge an hourly rate, but what if you sold $1,000 packages or monthly packages instead.
This is how Nate would go about it.
Hiring a Video Editor from FreeUp When You Hire a Virtual Assistant
Nate is currently having virtual assistants edit three videos for his Outsource School. He is paying them $7 an hour and they are crushing it. They are doing a much better job than he could ever do.
He outsources a lot of things.
We have access to people at different price points all over the world. This is a competitive advantage and your competitors are doing this.
If you outsource for awhile and you don’t like it, you can stop. You may choose to hire someone from the U.S., if it doesn’t work out. That option isn’t going anywhere. You owe it to yourself and your business to look into outsourcing.
Nate is Growing His Business by Outsourcing
Nate is building an education platform. He and Connor are starting with the first course called Cracking the hiring a virtual assistant Code using their IOTM Method:
- Interviewing
- Onboarding
- Training
- Managing
Nate and Connor are going to teach people exactly how they do it. They have perfected a system over the past ten years of hiring virtual assistants.
They wish someone would have taught them this years ago, because it would have saved them a lot of time and work. They think it is going to help a lot of entrepreneurs.
They have a lot of other ideas to help entrepreneurs, including courses and software. They are looking at bringing in different guests and experts. It starts with this first course that launched in mid-March.
Successfully Unemployed Rapid Fire Round
What Nate is Doing to Make the World a Better Place
Nate and Connor recently finalized a partnership with Teach for the Philippines.
They are going to give a percentage of anything they sell through Outsource School to Teach for the Philippines.
This organization helps people who are in terrible situations get education and learn technology, so they can become virtual assistants or whatever job path they want to pursue to make better lives for themselves.
The Legacy Nate is Building
Nate doesn’t want to get to the top by himself. He wants other people to look at him as someone who honors his word and does business the right way.
If he isn’t the right fit to work with someone and if he thinks someone is going to hurt his community, he speaks up about it.
If someone gives him their money or their time, he is going to take care of it and make sure they leave feeling good about the transaction.
The Advice Nate Would Give to Anyone Who Wanted to Stop Being the Bottleneck for their Business
Find one thing that takes you five to ten hours a day and, in the next 90 days, get it off your plate. In the first month, throw things around and make sure you have a good system and process.
In month two, follow that process every day and perfect it to make sure it works.
In month three put in a request on a platform to find a virtual assistant. Spend the last 30 days getting that task off your plate.
The Advice Nate Would Give His Younger Self
Invest in real estate in 2008 and buy more Amazon stock.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but he would tell himself that entrepreneurship is the right route for him.
The Tools Nate Uses in His Business
WordBoard. This is an app where Nate records canned responses.
It has links to all of his social media, links to his calendar, and responses for requests he gets all of the time. It saves him time typing.
The Non-Fiction Book Nate Suggests
Hatching Twitter, by Nick Bilton
Find Nathan Hirsch Online
Website: outsourceschool.com
Virtual Assistants Calculator: outsourceschool.com/vacalculator
Instagram/Twitter: @realnatehirsch
LinkedIn/FaceBook: Nathan Hirsch
Find out more about Outsource School