How to be Successful in Business with Nathan Hirsch and His Journey.mp4
Interview with Nathan Hirsch
Tomer [00:00:00] I apologize, but due to a technical issue with Zoom while we recorded this interview with Nathan Hirsch, you couldn’t really see myself, but you can still see Nathan Hirsch. I hope you can still enjoy it and get the most value out of this recording.
All right. Welcome to another interview, and today we have Nathan Hirsch. Nathan Hirsch is a lifelong entrepreneur and currently the CEO of ECOM Balance and Outsource School. Nathan is best known for co-founding free up that net in 2015 with an initial $5000 in investment, scaling it to 12 million in yearly revenue and everything acquired in 2019.
Today, he leads ECOM balance and online bookkeeping service for e-commerce and digital businesses and Out Source school and membership teaching business owners how to traffic effectively online. Nathan has appeared on 400+ podcasts and believe me guys, it was hard to book him for this one. It took us a few months, but I’m sure we all going to really benefit from his knowledge and his story, and his journey. Welcome, Nathan, how are you?
Nathan Hirsch [00:01:16] I am great. Thanks so much for having me on, it should be a fun show.
Tomer [00:01:20] Yes, yes. So yeah, a lot of people will, you know, could benefit from the journey. And yeah, like, first of all, how are you today where you are talking to us from?
Nathan Hirsch [00:01:30] I am good, I mean, I’m in Denver, Colorado. It’s pretty warm here, it hasn’t snowed yet. I’m heading outside right after this and it’s funny. I took a little break from podcasting, so hopefully, I’m not rusty. But you’re the first podcast I’ve done in a long time, maybe a year or so.
Tomer [00:01:47] So that’s good. That’s good. I mean, after 400 podcasts, it’s like riding a bicycle, right? It’s like.
Nathan Hirsch [00:01:57] You can think so, hopefully.
Tomer [00:02:00] Yeah, tell us a little about yourself before we dive into how you came to ECON Balance out your school, what you did before. I think that a lot of people they see like success on, you know, for Amazon sellers or success, let’s say, with outdoor school, but they never really know what the people wind behind it behind the scenes, what they like, what struggles and what is the entire journey they had. And they just see the success.
But my mission is really to when I interview people like you are successful people that share their knowledge is to really bring the behind the scenes, what brought them to success. And I always say that if you never really compare yourself to other people because you never know what they went through, so why don’t you show what you are? First of all, I know that you’re very well known in the Amazon seller’s community, and that’s because you have been a seller. So why don’t you tell us how you got into Amazon, and you know, all of that?
Nathan Hirsch [00:02:57] Yeah, I mean, growing up, I had very, very great parents we were middle class. They always made me work for anything I wanted to buy if I wanted to buy a PS1 at the time. I had to get a job and work for it. So I was working 40 hours a week from the time I was 15 going on, I umpired in my league for the air, my town for the Little League. I worked at a meat factory. I worked at Aaron’s rental center, which is like the kind of like a rent a center type place, and then I worked at Firestone Corporation, which actually gave me a lot of experience in sales and customer service.
And one thing I kind of learned from doing all these jobs is I really hated working for other people. I was good at it. I could learn it, but I was miserable, and my parents always gave me the mentality to go to college, get a real job. You get benefits. You work for 30 years, you retire. That’s what they did. They actually live in Colorado now. They’re retired, they did a good job saving and that was kind of their life. But I knew that at an early age, that’s not what I wanted to do.
So, when I got to college, I started hustling. I started trying to do every possible thing to make money, which led me to buying and selling people’s textbooks, and I would actually go to the dump, buy my house. It was called the dump, but it was kind of like this tent next to the dump where people had books and toys and all these different things. And I would go there with my scanner, and I would scan them and see what I could get online, and that led me to Amazon. So, my first experience on Amazon was buying books. Eventually, I realized that was
Tomer [00:04:35] Will knocking about I’m sorry to interrupt just the way people can relate to.
Nathan Hirsch [00:04:41] So there was a question,
Tomer [00:04:43] Though, what year was it like, those bars and stuff?
Nathan Hirsch [00:04:47] 2008ish, maybe 2007, something like that.
Tomer [00:04:50] OK. Yeah, that’s a diner’s over years. Like, this is really all I know.
Nathan Hirsch [00:04:55] There was no one else doing it. There were no Facebook groups. There are no courses on selling on Amazon. And I pretty much learned from trial and error that textbooks were more profitable than regular books. And then I kind of learned that carrying around two pounds and pounds of textbooks all day wasn’t really sustainable. I didn’t really have any place to put these textbooks. At the same time, you could only really buy them at the end of the semester, the beginning of next semester.
And so that kind of led me to experiment with drop shipping, and at the time, I didn’t know what dropshipping was. I kind of had an idea that, hey, if I could build some relationships with some retailers, some suppliers, some small online vendors and sell their products for more and make the difference that I could make money.
And that’s how I started a drop shipping business out of my college dorm room, selling the most random products from like baby toys to bookshelves to I don’t know you name it, but I do a kid or baby carriages like all sorts of random stuff that I was just drop shipping. At first, we were dropshipping from like Wal-Mart and different online retailers like yard inflatables and stuff like that. But eventually, we went around those manufacturers, around the retailers directly to the manufacturers, and build relationships with them to sell their products directly. And that’s kind of how my whole Amazon journey started.
Tomer [00:06:20] Well, that’s amazing. And you had the moment where it was, you know, you just started and then it was like, you know, growing and scaling and they were like, Oh, there is some must be something here and lets like double down on that and work or when this moment came.
Nathan Hirsch [00:06:35] So it’s funny, I was making a good amount of money for the first time and my parents said I should probably pay taxes. So, I met with an accountant and his first question was When are you going to hire your first-person? And I kind of shrugged them off. I’m like, why would I hire someone that’s money out of my pocket?
They’re going to mess up the business, whatever it was. And I didn’t listen to them, and I got destroyed that busy that I was working like 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week trying to survive Black Friday. I don’t think Cyber Monday was a thing back then, but I burnt myself out. I was trying to balance schoolwork and friends in college and another job that I had at Firestone because I hadn’t put that yet. And it was chaos. And come January, I was like, Wow, that was a big mistake. I need to hire people right now.
So that’s when I hired my first person, got into hiring virtual assistants. And that’s what eventually led me to get really good at hiring because I had started doing it at such a young age and the idea of free up because I didn’t really like the other marketplaces out there. I wanted something targeted for eCommerce sellers where I could put in a request for a graphic designer or a virtual assistant or whatever it was, and get someone already vetted sent to me.
So as my Amazon business was growing, Amazon got more competitive. We got suspended. We got unsuspended. We lost relationships with suppliers. We got new suppliers. Amazon changed the algorithm. While that was going in circles, we kind of have this idea to start a new company free up where we could grow our brand, learn digital marketing, have something that wasn’t relying on Amazon. And when we started free up, that quickly surpassed our Amazon sales and we decided to just focus on that.
Tomer [00:08:19] Yeah, that’s amazing. And I want to talk with you more about free up but before. You know, I assume that before you opened three up, you had to go through mastering the skill of hiring. For me, it came just trial and error. I guess you had the same thing because there was no real resource, of course.
Actually, there was a guy. I forgot his name, but it was, you know, very like he was teaching an email serious that actually implemented. That was really good, like automating the hiring process with emails that, you know, when a VA would apply, there will a specific title, they will get their response back. I forget his name, but that was really cool to me back then. I think it was two thousand fourteen or and I forgot when was it?
But I went through all these struggles in that that you actually made the course or a platform that you were going to talk about outdoor schools, what you guys offer that really teacher teaching you how to not repeat those mistakes. So I’m curious about you like how long it took you to realize your mistakes, fix them and come up with.
Nathan Hirsch [00:09:27] yeah, I mean, we made it we spent years making bad hires that cost us time, cost us money. And like you, it was trial and error. It’s like, OK, we create an interview process. We put someone through it. They didn’t work out, OK, what can we improve in the process? We put someone through the new process. They didn’t work out, what can we do there? Then when you get someone that that did work out like chicken and who is one of the best virtual systems I’ve ever hired, and she’s actually very high up and free up, she was part of the sale. We hooked up with a lot of money.
Tomer [00:09:56] I went a deal with you, but I guess that it was part of the deal to keep her in Korea.
Nathan Hirsch [00:10:02] I wish them well, but we hooked her up and we still talk all the time. I was just talking to her before this. We have a great relationship. I’m actually the godfather of one of her kids in the Philippines, but she actually helped us improve on the process because finally, we had found what we were looking for in a VA.
We didn’t know much about hiring in the Philippines. We didn’t know about the cultural differences or how to communicate. And she helped us to not only teach us, but helped us really improve that interview process. And when we built free up, we put her as ahead of recruitment so she could just run the entire process of finding great virtual assistants for our community, for our clients.
Tomer [00:10:41] That’s more. And before you opened free up you, I guess you mentioned that it was more specific to eCommerce sellers. So that was your differentiation. You know, we always talked about you and Amazon, like, what was your USP with? We are because if I’m not wrong, Fiverr was there to like. And it’s more also for like online stuff like, you know, when you need the designer, you don’t have to have him as a freelancer, you just hire him for the gig. What is the difference? How you differentiate yourself from other platforms out there? I think that’s interesting to hear.
Nathan Hirsch [00:11:15] Yeah. So, I mean, we’re we were a marketplace just like Upwork and Fiber. The difference is we would get thousands of applicants every week trying to offer their services on the platform and we would vet them and only the top one percent would get on the marketplace. And then as a client, it was free to sign up and free to me, freelancers. You would get access to the best of the best. And we wouldn’t manage them, but all the billing would be on the platform if anything went wrong, we had great customer service. We make it right in every situation.
And we had very Amazon-specific services. So now there’s a lot of Amazon agencies, right, and Amazon virtual assistant. I like to think that we were one of the first people to do that. I mean, back then we offered PPC freelancers, we offered listing freelancers, graphic design freelancers like a lot of that was new and again, just very good timing, getting in early before a lot of these other people dead.
Tomer [00:12:06] Yeah, yeah. You were definitely pioneers there and kind of shifted down this, you know, whole VAS companies are looks like. So yeah, that’s great to know someone like you. No question about your Amazon business. You know, we’re talking about free up, but at what stage it was really growing? You mentioned before the recording or hear the recording that you sold twenty-five million total in sales. So, I guess you had years where you were selling eight figures in more like or maybe high seven figures don’t really matter, but you sold big, you know, big numbers.
You’re what kind of systems you had, or you had to change yourself to grow between a mindset of beginner to a mindset of hiring people and creating all these processes. I can tell that you’re a person of systems and processes, which is I’m also like that. I think that you do it one time you invest the time building a process and you don’t forget about it, but you can review it once in a while instead of doing it again and again and again.
So, I’m curious to know what kind of systems and processes and your mindset of going and when you needed help. Were you talked with, then, you know, because it was still new to a lot of people?
Nathan Hirsch [00:13:21] Yeah. So, I think in our peak, we might have done like $7 million in one year. So, we sold 25 million dollars over like a six or seven-year period, depending on how you count, like the bookselling at the beginning, which wasn’t a big part of the business there.
But yeah, I mean, it became very clear early on that you needed processes, especially for a dropshipping business. I mean, Amazon had they still do, but I mean, we weren’t doing fulfillment by Amazon. So when Amazon, when emails would come in, you’d have to respond to them within a certain amount of time. You had to keep a certain amount of reviews or you get kicked off. You had you ship orders in a certain amount of time.
And remember, we are shipping the orders. We’re relying on all these different manufacturers. I think at one point we were working with 300 manufacturers, so we needed systems for confirming orders as shipped and communicating with the manufacturers. We needed systems for price changes. If they increased a price or decrease the price, we would change it for inventory. If they went out of stock, we had to change it very quickly.
And this was before a lot of software was out there, that automated edge. We ended up building a little bit of our own software, but a lot of this was manual, and that kind of forced us to do is hire really good people who could follow directions and also help us build and improve processes and build processes for every single thing, every single situation. If a good manufacturer of ours just came out with 10 new products, we needed a way to get that information. Get it on Amazon, read the listings and then maintain the prices afterwards. Filled the orders. Handle returns later on with the manufacturers. It was a lot of system building, and then Amazon would change like one thing and you have to go back and revamp the whole system.
So it was definitely great practice early on. I think my first few years because Amazon was a wild-wild west and you could just list anything and it would sell. You kind of had that feeling of like, no one could touch me. I can just make money. I’m a 20-year-old college kid on top of the world, and by year two or three, as you’re growing and you’re hiring people and you make bad hires that waste time, you realize, man, we need a system for every single thing, including our recruitment order fulfillment, all of that stuff.
Tomer [00:15:32] Yeah. And when you add like issues and you know, I’m sure that your we’re communicating with other sellers, but were you we’re like, you know, consuming the information and knowledge and when you had questions and struggles.
Nathan Hirsch [00:15:45] Yes, I missed that part of your question, so honestly, no, because there were no Facebook groups out there like I would talk to my business teachers in college because I did get my degree. My parents are teachers, so. So me dropping out of college wasn’t going to happen, but they didn’t really understand e-commerce. They didn’t know Amazon online. It was very new. They could teach me like management of people and stuff like that. But there wasn’t really an e-commerce person.
So here I am as someone who has a lot of Amazon experience, had successes in Amazon launching free up and I used the free app as a way to get to know as many people in the e-commerce space as possible by going on podcasts connecting with Facebook group owners. We started our own podcast at some point in there that was part of the sale.
And so I was kind of going into free up blind and I really built up whatever you’d consider my personal brand or the free up brand from scratch. Because at the time, remember, I was very young when I started selling on Amazon, I was young 20. So you kind of that mindset of scarcity where I don’t want to share any, any secrets, other people, I doesn’t want to talk other sellers. They’re my competition, you realize by the time.
And that you can grow a lot more with collaboration with working with other people, and that was a big lesson I learned to free up and I wish I had learned on the Amazon site. Maybe I’d still be selling on Amazon or I would have moved to FBA or done other stuff there if I had done that.
Tomer [00:17:12] Yeah, under two percent. What year did you start to free up?
Nathan Hirsch [00:17:17] Two thousand. And it isn’t 15, 16.
Tomer [00:17:20] Yeah. So why don’t you share a little bit? I know that you have a lot of topics and things to talk about. Hopefully, we can cover all of them. If not, maybe in the future you can be here against again. But like in how you can describe the group and how long until the sale happened, they know that you exited this business, right?
Nathan Hirsch [00:17:40] Yeah, so we showed it in four years. We did a million dollars in the first year, five million, the second nine million in the third and 12 million and the fourth. We sold in November the fourth year, so we didn’t get like that December. And we finished around 12. Now how we started, it was super interesting.
So, Connor and I each put in $5000 or we had $10000. We had a group of virtual assistants from our Amazon business that knew Amazon very well, that we had already vetted them and we weren’t using them all full time. Some of them are part-time, some are project-based, and that was kind of the core of the initial group of freelancers on the free platform. I started cold, outreaching to sellers and podcasts and any and eCommerce communities that say, Hey, I’ve got this great group of virtual assistants. Do you want to use them through the free-up marketplace, which is brand new?
And I’m fortunate enough, and I’m still humbled to this day. People that gave us a shot when we were young and had no track record whatsoever. But they love those virtual assistants and everything was manual. We had no software. We were keeping track of hours and billing on excel sheets. We were matching clients via email.
And once that started, take off and we started getting some reoccurring billing. We took one of our developers who had built some Amazon software, Russell, who is now working with us on outsourced goal and ECOM balance. And he ended up building all the software for the free-up marketplace. And every year we would add more and more features where it would people could submit requests and you’re billing an affiliate and he’s in one of the bands. No, he’s in the US. He lives in Seattle.
Tomer [00:19:19] Yeah. OK. Sorry, go ahead.
Nathan Hirsch [00:19:21] Yeah. And one of the best decisions we made early on and something that we do in other our other business too, is creating a really good affiliate program. So, anyone that referred someone to a free app would get $50 or 50 cents every hour re-occurring for as long as someone was a client of free up. And the new owners tweak that a little bit, but that’s something that really got us off the ground. I mean, by the end of free up, we’re paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in affiliate money.
But every eCommerce seller was telling other people, and it started to blow my mind a little bit. Someone would reach out to free up and say, Hey, I was at a conference in China and someone was talking about free up and I had never been to China. So that was cool, and we’ve created similar affiliate programs and outsourced school and econ balance and a combination of those great VAS clients that gave us a shot, a software that was being built by a developer we trusted. And that affiliate program, plus eventually going on the podcast is how we really got that thing off the ground.
Tomer [00:20:21] Yeah, amazing. Amazing. The growth was like, it’s really inspiring to see how fast you grew up from really a $10000 investment to these numbers and you were able successfully to exit. Now I know that you mentioned that you didn’t do podcasts for a while. You took a little rest after, you know, I guess, after selling three, but that’s not the period they’re are talking about because now you’re taking a rest from probably another project you worked on.
But this is something that I’m personally curious about, and I’m sure many of are listeners about this of their business are also curious. how you deal with the day after the sale. Do you suggest preparing ahead of time to have a plan before you sell? Because I myself already have a plan, OK, I’m going to sell. I’m going to take probably like a week or two off and ride straight to my next project because,
Nathan Hirsch [00:21:14] you know, I like it a week or two.
Tomer [00:21:17] Maybe three weeks, because, you know, I really enjoy what I do. For me, it does not really work. And I guess was like that for you or for other people. I hope that they have systems and processes. So it’s like that because if you don’t, it could be very overwhelming. As you said in January, you felt like you were kind of overwhelmed and you know you need to hire people. But let’s talk about the exit the day after, how you dealt with it to suggest to people that are about to exit their business.
Nathan Hirsch [00:21:47] Yeah. So I mean, I can only speak for from my situation, for my situation. We love the free apps. We love the clients. We love the team. We love what we had built. We thought we’d be running free up for the next ten years. We really had no plans to sell free up.
We got approached by one of our clients, the Hoth, who owns a bunch of different businesses, and they essentially said We’re clients of a free app. We like the free apps. We want to get into the freelancer’s space. We want to acquire a company. We don’t want to build it from scratch. Would you guys be interested in talking about it?
And we had build buildout systems to be sellable like the business could pretty much run without us outside of me going on podcasts and stuff. But someone else can come in with their own marketing plan and kind of replace that. But the systems, the financials, which are so important, which is kind of why we started ECOM balance because we had incredibly clean financials that helped us sell. Free up.
Those are the things we had in place, and when they made us an offer that we thought was more than fair, it was a really tough decision. We went back and forth on it for a while when we made the decision to sell. We took the mentality that this deal could fall through at any point. And so to continue to stay focused on free up as if the company was not going to sell.
And the last month that we had right before we sold was our best month all-time at free up. And that’s because we stayed focused and we really thought that it could fall through. I mean, they’re located in Tampa. I was in Florida at the time I know you’re from Florida, too. So Connor flew in from Denver to Florida, and then we drove from Orlando to Tampa, and they could have pulled the deal like we could have walked into Tampa, and they said, Hey, we changed our mind. We don’t want to sell it anymore. So that was kind of our mentality there.
And then after we sold it, it was a little bit sad because we had to tell our team we did tell Chickie and the virtual assistants that I told before and we took five hundred thousand dollars from the sale. We gave it to our team in the Philippines. But I mean, they were still sad, like even though they were getting money, they enjoyed working with Connor .
And I know getting a new boss is scary, I think, from our side. We did a lot of vetting on Mark and David, the new owners. As people, we wanted to make sure that we were selling it to good people who would take care of our clients are freelancers and knock on wood. I mean, they’ve done a phenomenal job. They’ve honored their word. I still stayed in touch with them. So we’re very fortunate there.
But after the sale, all the things running through your mind, our like, is my team going to be taken care of? Am I going to miss them? Do I make a mistake? Are the new owners going to take good care of them? But we also had the mentality that, hey, if we were going to sell it, we needed to have no regrets. We made the best decision we could with the information that we had at the time. And if we were going to regret selling it, we couldn’t move forward. And so we had mentally kind of flipped that switch on.
So after the sale, it is kind of weird because you’ve got money, but you’ve got no income. So you’re almost in like this weird retirement mode and it does turn into what do you want to do next? Now, the other weird thing that happened is I didn’t think I would see Connor for a year. I thought he would travel the world. I do some traveling, but then the pandemic hit, so we were kind of stuck inside anyway.
And at that point, it was like, All right, what do we want to do next? And we reach it. We research real estate and stocks and on and learn from other entrepreneurs, just reading books and podcasts and stuff like that. And some people started reaching out to us asking us if we could teach them our hiring process. Since we had just built really an eight-figure business completely run by VAs, we had no U.S. employees. And that’s what kind of led us to outsource school. So it was a combination of people reaching out and the pandemic.
Tomer [00:25:38] Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Do all of you that want to hire VAs 100%? Check this out at your school because it will save you a ton of trial and error. It’s like I said things that I was really dealing with for years. I knew that there is something with Filipino VAs, but they just didn’t know the exact way to hire it. So here you have a ready-to-use formula that you can use to hire a successful or increase the chances of hiring successfully. And this is the most important thing hire the right people.
So, yeah, let’s talk a little about the outdoor. I’m sorry about the outdoor school. What we can find inside. I know that you have not just how to hire successfully VAs, but also the kind of jobs that they can do for you. Podcast Outrage. I’m not sure about Amazon-specific tasks, but I know you have a couple of categories or things like managing your inbox. I actually this is something that I took. I tried it, but in the end, I realized that they have. I still have to grow and have more in bookstores in order for it to be like something I can outsource.
But for now, I’m not. But you have very cool things that you can do. Ideas that you never thought that you could use that they already figure out, but will let you expand about the platform. Was there how many people are there and some more info and will tell you that you can share if you can share the coupon codes for people that interested in this?
Nathan Hirsch [00:27:12] Yeah, I mean, we’ve got hundreds of members out for school. At its core is our exact process for interviewing, onboarding, training, and managing virtual assistants. And we’ve got everything from job postings ready to go-to interview questions. The exact system that we used like we just hired a bookkeeper for balance.
We put them through the exact same process that we teach at outsource schools, and it comes with a lot of other bonuses of specific tasks and Specific roles like how to hire graphic designers, video editors, how to get on podcasts with virtual assistants. Those are kinds of bonuses. But the core is how to interview, onboard, train, and manage. We have a 30 percent off code. Now I’m forgetting what it was.
Tomer [00:27:59] I’ll let you share that by forcing Monster, I think I am pretty sure sourcing monster will put it in the description and also a link.
Nathan Hirsch [00:28:04] Cool, so, yeah, if you go to school, use that coupon, we have a great community you get in our Facebook group. You can ask Connor and me questions directly inside of that group. We’ve got a VA team that supports you there, and it’s all about improving, not the hiring percentage because if you are hiring at a ninety-five percent clip as opposed to a 70 percent clip in terms of making good hires, that’s a game-changer. Your business is going to grow so much faster and that’s really what our school is all about.
Tomer [00:28:30] Yes. Yes, amazing. Yeah, definitely give it a try. Even when I was starting my Amazon journey because I had experience with years was really two or three months after I kind of mastered the product research and bringing a product to kind of outsourcing and using VAs.
So I always recommend as long as you start to make some profits, hire first VA. It will even if you don’t or can’t fill all their day. Once you know that they are there, you will find them fast and you will kind of force yourself to think, OK, what else I can outsource? Definitely check it out. Again, we are not really sending anything on this channel or promoting things that you guys don’t need, and this is something that you definitely need. And yeah, check it out. So, the outdoor school I know it’s so it was open since the pandemic. We’re talking like the 2020 end of 2019.
Nathan Hirsch [00:29:24] Yeah, I think we launched it. I think we launch it. The week of the pandemic hits March 2020.
Tomer [00:29:29] OK, so you know, it seems that it’s been there for years that so but it’s really new. So that’s you did a great job with, you know, spreading the word about it. So you still own that business. What are your plans for that business? Do you have any ambitious plans being the best resource for hiring VAS? Or maybe you can share your goals with that?
Nathan Hirsch [00:29:54] Yeah, I mean, we want to be the go-to for hiring. We want to set the standard for hiring. I mean, it’s really cool seeing people use our hiring process for their marketing agency, their Amazon business, their real estate business and just having entrepreneurs come back to us and be like, Hey, this is Joe, the VA we hired and we’ve now promoted him to team leader and he’s helping us scale this other company.
So that’s really how I get fulfillment is by hiring people who are using the processes and implementing them. I mean, we add different bonuses and stuff in there on how to hire, but at the core, we’ve built a lot of that out and now our goal is to grow that community and essentially sold free up. We’ve kind of been thinking of like, Hey, what market can we get into that? That’s not hiring-related, right? Like, we had free up. We have outsourced school. I don’t think we’re starting another outsourcing business anytime soon.
So what is that next market? And we did some consulting with people and as we were consulting and helping people, we kind of realized, yes, we’re helping people with hiring, but we’re also helping people with their finances, helping them understand their numbers, making sure that we’re getting the reports needed. And they were getting clean, accurate income statements on time every single month. And we would spend a lot of time just helping people revamp their entire bookkeeping team and systems. And that kind of led us to ECOM balance, which is what we’re really focused on now, helping entrepreneurs, helping Amazon sellers get to on-time accurate books, but really understand the numbers and even things like, Hey, you might be selling 10 products, but do you really know how much you’re making per product and where are you going to be focusing your time?
So that’s what I’m excited about right now. The bookkeeping industry is the industry we decided to focus on, and it’s been a fun kind of growing a business outside of the VA space, and I am happy to answer any questions off of that.
Tomer [00:31:43] Yeah. So I was working forgot the name of this company. We interviewed them. It’s a VA company, it’s like a full, full service to like they hire the VAs and then they kind of give them to Amazon sellers and they’re kind of by their own. So I’m helping them with Amazon FBA related training.
And one of the training was about how to measure and how to look at numbers and what kind of reports and dashboards that I built for my business. You know, could help you understand the bigger picture because sometimes you’re so busy with the, you know, the day-to-day operations, optimizing the listing, checking what’s going on here or there. You don’t really look at the numbers, and it’s super, super important that you look at it from like, you know, thirty-thousand-foot view just to understand what’s going on.
So, yeah, definitely check it, but it’s there. So with ECOM balance as an Amazon seller I don’t have my business, have an accountant, they do the bookkeeping and all of that. But let’s say I don’t have how the process works. I contact you. You log into my Amazon business, are using like a 2x all the software that connects to QuickBooks. Maybe you can give us a little more details about the process.
Nathan Hirsch [00:32:59] Yeah, definitely. And first of all, my overall mentality on bookkeeping is one you shouldn’t be doing it as an entrepreneur. It’s just not a good use of your time. But you should be reviewing your numbers every single month. It blows my mind when people are just doing it at the end of the year and then handing it over to their account. Yes, you should bitcoin. Yes, you should pay your taxes, but you should be doing monthly bookkeeping.
And as you get bigger, there are even weekly reports that you should be looking at and you need to know your numbers, especially if you want to sell your business. And there’s even a certain trust factor there where like when we had the initial call with Mark and David and they were asking us questions, we knew our numbers off the top of our head. And when they went and looked at it later, it matched up exactly with what they were saying when we’re going through due diligence. They had specific questions. We could get them that information very quickly.
So all of that is incredibly important. So our goal is to make it as easy as possible to do the books for eCommerce sellers. Right now, we’re not offering accounting services. That’s something we’ll do down the line. We’re happy to refer to a great account that we personally use. We don’t get commissions on that. But right now we’re just focusing on the bookkeeping. And what happens is you go to ecombalance.com, you sign up, we’ll reach out to you. We’ll do a quick onboarding call. We’ll take a look at your books now. We’ll give you a monthly price and then we’ll get to work and take it off your plate and do it for you every single month.
And what we do during the onboarding call is really get to know your business, and there are certain things that might apply to your business that don’t apply to someone else’s and vice versa. Our goal is to create a process that makes sense for bookkeeping for your business, to get you the information you need every single month or even more frequently than that if you need it.
Tomer [00:34:42] Yeah, definitely. Guys that have messed with accounting or it doesn’t work as smoothly as they want. Contact Nathan here. And yeah, definitely. You know, I think that a lot of people will enjoy this interview. We already, I think like 40 minutes and I want to keep it as short as possible.
So people can, you know, really enjoy listening to it and keep engaging in it? They really appreciate you coming and sharing all these, you know, stories about all these companies that you create. And then it looks like you are very fashionable about what you do. And I think that’s the most important thing. And as an entrepreneur, you need that fire, you know, whether to move things.
And a lot of people, a lot of people that I coach or talk with, you see, it’s very like immediately they don’t have this fire. And I think that’s what really contributes to a lot of the success that you had or others in your partner. So, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. I know we will put a link to our school and the coupon code and we’ll also put, you know, for ecom balance. And but for other than that, is there any email or Facebook where people can reach out to you?
Nathan Hirsch [00:35:58] Yeah, feel free to connect with me. Nathan Hirsch on any social media channel. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. You can check outsourceschool.com or ecombalance.com. It’s just Nathan E. Campbell and Scott. If you want to reach out to me, I’m happy to personally chat with you to see if we can help you. And yeah, I really appreciate you having me on. It was a lot of fun. Hopefully, I wasn’t too rusty.
Tomer [00:36:20] And now I know. And one last thing if people want to copy your passion and your energy, one tip that will help them do it.
Nathan Hirsch [00:36:29] Yeah, I love being an entrepreneur. Like, for me, it’s exciting. It’s fun. I’ve kind of created the perfect life for me where I work, the hours I want to work, my schedule matches. I spend time with my family, time with my wife, my friends, my dogs, whatever it is. And for me, I don’t think you ever get that perfect work-life balance, but I make sure that I’m always doing what I enjoy 100% of the time. I didn’t want to do something, I’m not going to do it, and that’s kind of how I approach life.
Tomer [00:36:56] Yeah, yeah, 100 percent. I’m very similar to you with that. You know, it was, I think, the last few months that a lot of times it comes down to like, wow, I’m like living the dream that I always wanted to really live. And that’s amazing and I’m very grateful for it. And that’s what keeps the fire and my motivation.
So hopefully, you know, you can have this as a goal if that’s your goal to have this freedom and create the passion and what motivated in what you do. Nathan, thank you very much again. And hopefully, people will enjoy this. Learn and connect with you with the services that you offer. Thank you.
Nathan Hirsch [00:37:34] Thank you so much.
Tomer [00:37:36] Now, please, my friends, do me a favor and share these videos with other people that might benefit from this video. It will help me grow the channel, and I will really appreciate it, and I’ll see you in the next video. Thank you very much for watching.