Nathan Hirsch is the CEO of FreeeUp.com and the COO of Portlight. Nate has been an entrepreneur in the eCommerce industry since 2009 and has grown into a leading expert in the field with experience managing multi-million dollar businesses. He has extensive knowledge in creating business systems and processes, personnel management, hiring remote workers, the Amazon Marketplace, and advanced sales tactics. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge with others and has been featured on leading industry podcasts, webinars, and blogs.
Nate is determined to build FreeeUp into the top hands-on platform for hiring remote workers where thousands of businesses and remote workers are connected. If you're interested in connecting with Nate, shoot him an email at Nathan@FreeeUp.com.
The Transcript
NPC Interview with Nathan Hirsch – 6/13/17
Hugh Ballou: Greetings, everyone. This is the Nonprofit Chat. Tonight’s guest is Nathan Hirsch. I just met Nathan a month ago. I was smart enough to recognize this guy had talent, so I am giving myself credit for that. I posted a little information about you, and I’d prefer for guests to give us a synopsis of what brings you to this discipline that you do so well. I’d like to say your company is called Freeeup.com, and it’s an outsourcing company. The reason I wanted you on this series is because I see so many people who are working at the leadership level that are overfunctioning and doing way too much. We are going to talk about how to leverage time by putting in part-time employees. Nathan, speak a little bit about your journey and why you are so good at what you offer.
Nathan Hirsch: It’s funny. When I first talked to you, I was like, “My mom owns a nonprofit.” I’d seen her journey from being a one-woman show to finally retiring and upgrading the location she was at, having a huge staff, taking more and more off her plate. I got that business, entrepreneurial, delegating mentality from a very young age.
When I was in college, I started a textbook business trying to cut off the school bookstore because I was mad at them for ripping me off and giving me pennies on the dollar when I thought I could get more. Before I knew it, I had lined my college dorm room buying people’s books. That led me to Amazon.com because you don’t sell books for very long without learning about Amazon. Before I knew it, I was running this multi-million-dollar drop-shipping business on Amazon, working with all these different vendors and suppliers, selling stuff out of my college dorm room. It was just me doing everything, from filling orders to answering customer emails. I was driving myself crazy. I was going to college at the same time, trying to have good grades, trying to balance a girlfriend and a million other things that happen while you are at school. I remember going to my accountant one day, and he was like, “So, when are you hiring your first employee?” I was like, “Why would I do that? I don’t want to give my money to someone else. I really enjoy what I’m doing. This is fun. I am going to work seven days a week.” He just laughed in my face.
After that meeting, I quickly got to hiring. I opened up an office and moved stuff around. I ended up getting rid of that and making my company remote. I always ran into hiring dilemmas because I would make really good hires, things like Connor, who was my business partner for a long time. But then I would make bad hires, who cost me time and money and set me back. Although I got better at hiring, the amount of applicants got greater and greater because I was hiring for all these different things. Yes, I perfected this hiring process, but then I found myself in the interview room six hours a day interviewing people, going through multiple rounds and resumes, only to find that some of them, even though I’d vetted them properly, still didn’t work out and cost me money. So I got really frustrated at that and thought there had to be a better way. There had to be a company where I could tell them what I wanted—if I needed a graphic designer, I don’t want to wait three weeks to get one by vetting through fifty applicants. This is what I need, and I could get them by the end of the day.
This is how I came up with the idea of Freeeup, where instead of the marketplace being a free-for-all, it is very organized. People apply to get into the marketplace, they are heavily vetted, we make sure they have a good attitude and communication, and we make them available to clients so they can get access to talent quickly, no matter what it is.
Hugh: I love it. Our co-host, Russell Dennis, has joined us. Russell, say hello to Nathan.
Russell Dennis: Good afternoon. Good to meet you, Nathan. I love the concept of Freeeup and pre-vetting virtual assistants because they are practically everywhere. I have just had that one follow me on my Twitter feed who looks like they are doing the same thing or something similar. These agencies are starting to turn up, but I haven’t seen anything quite like what you are doing before.
Nathan: Thank you. Great to meet you as well. You’re right. There are so many different agencies and marketplaces. I have hired from all of them. I kind of took what I liked and what I hated and put together a concept that really works for business owners. The downside of agencies is you never know who is doing the work. You don’t get that one-on-one touch. A lot of times they switch people behind the scenes and you don’t know about it, so the quality goes up and down. The problem with the marketplace is the time and effort it takes to get a good freelancer, and if you invest the training and they decide to quit, there is no one held responsible for that, and you have to start right over. With Freeeup, we have our no-turnover guarantee, where we cover replacement training costs if anyone ever quits. That was the concept behind it. It has been a lot of fun so far.
Hugh: Having run multiple businesses and church programs and non-profit programs, hiring people is not a skillset that I had. I have it now. Previously, I had a lot of bad hires. You have come at this very early in your life. You have developed this level of expertise. Russell has worked inside a non-profit for 11 years. He also worked for the IRS, so he had to visit a lot of nonprofits, I guess. This whole thing of accomplishing our mission is very elusive, and we are so passionate about it that we just jump in and forget that in this realm of the charity, there are people who will step up as community leaders and work with us. They will say, “I want to help.” There are some tasks that we need to have somebody who is paid, that regular work ethic that someone will do what we have assigned them. There is an exchange of value for pay. We can do that in a charity, actually delegating some things. Part of what we teach at SynerVision about leadership is learning to take things off of your plate. I guess the piece that you just talked about is having the confidence that the person is going to be capable of accomplishing it. We invite people who have businesses and expertise. We are talking about Freeeup, which is Nathan’s business. The people that referred Nathan to me were our friends in Phoenix who do the background checks, former military intelligence people. If they said he is clean, it’s good.
Nathan, we have to get over this fear of having somebody else do the work. From a leader’s perspective, I have noticed you have a team around you that performs at a pretty high standard. Speak from your own personal perspective. How were you able to make the transition to getting things off of your plate, delegating them?
Nathan: Sure. Whenever you talk about delegating, you have to be in the mindset that the business has to work for you. You can’t work for the business. If you find yourself trying to catch up and clearing out customer emails and calling everyone back and doing this Excel project and building the website, the business isn’t working for you; you are working for the business. You have to get out of that mentality. You have to get into the mentality that you are a delegator as the owner of the company. There should be a specific thing, or a few things if you are very talented, that you are really good at, that your core competency can really help you excel at. You need to identify those things. If you are good at sales, 80% of your time should be sales. If you are customer service, you should be building customer service programs. If you are a website developer, you should be constantly upgrading your website, and other people should be doing those other things.
It’s really important that you get into the mentality that the beginning of every day is getting your team organized before you get yourself going. The first thing I do every day is I have a list of people and prioritize them. I go to them one by one, following up with what they are doing, making sure they are on the right track, making sure I answer any of their questions to get them to the next level because if they are sitting there waiting, that is incredibly unproductive. I am not going to start on my project because I get them going.
On top of that, I make sure things are constantly running at full speed, whether it’s someone working at night or someone working on the weekends. Even when I am on vacation, the business is not going to stop. My whole thing as a business owner is to get into the mentality that I have to get this train running. It takes a lot of organization upfront to build that team, which we will talk about, but the end goal is to have a team that never stops, that keeps moving forward whether you are there or not, and that you are contributing value when you are there to keep them moving further and further along.
Hugh: We think, and I’m saying we because I am not innocent of any of this, we are essential to the work of the organization when in fact, we don’t need to be essential. We are the cheerleaders; we are the visionaries. It’s the people we bring on board that actually perform the duties that are important to the success of the organization. That thing you just talked about is a paradigm shift. Did you have to make a paradigm shift to make a mental flip that you were going to learn to delegate? Or did that come easily to you?
Nathan: I came easier to me than it did to my business partner Connor. I remember when I first started delegating after that meeting with the accountant, it becomes addicting. I am a business owner. I am passionate about what I do. I like getting things done. All of a sudden, when I added a few people, I realized I was getting four times the amount of work done, and not only that, but they were doing the work better than I could even do it. They were talents that I didn’t have. When I realized that, then it became easy. You almost become lazy as a business owner because it’s like, “Yeah, I could spend the next three hours doing Quickbooks, or I could pay someone $40 to do it for me.” You just start passing stuff off your plate. You get a lot more done, which leads to more revenue and expanding your company, which leads to hiring more people. It is a really great circle once you get those wheels churning.
But I remember my business partner Connor managing the company one day when I was on vacation, and he was literally doing everything. Every single tracking email at my Amazon business, he was responding to. When I came back from vacation, I sat him down and said, “You’re stuck. If this is how you want to do business, you are never moving forward. You can’t be my business partner. You are just going to be in this spot forever. There is no way to be on top of your business if you are doing every little thing. You have to take stuff off of your plate. You have to get over that fear of letting go. It’s not until you actually do that that you can accomplish something as an entrepreneur. No matter how big or small your business is, you are going to hit a ceiling, a road block. Right now, if you get sick for two weeks—I had shoulder surgery a month ago. Nothing stopped, things accelerated. I got my team motivated to work because I wasn’t there, and a lot of stuff got done while I was out. You have to look yourself in the eye and figure out if that is going to happen in your business while you are out.
Hugh: David James Dunworth says, “The real measure of a successful leader is that the operation operates as or more effectively and smoothly when the boss is not there. I call the job of establishing systems and processes to get that point is owner-proofing.” That is getting out of the way, isn’t it. Owner-proofing. We have launched some questions during the interview. You sent me some good questions, and we are sharing them out there on social media. The first one: What would you do if you had two extra hours each day? Russell, what would you do if you had extra time every day?
Russell: Two extra hours. I would probably be outside walking. Definitely would be outside. It’s not a cloud in sight. It’s about 82 degrees here. That is what I would be doing. I took a break today to walk outside and get around. I love the fresh air. I made a decision to get in a really good condition this spring. I made major changes to my diet. From my last doctor’s appointment about five weeks ago, I am down 27.5 pounds. And I am sleeping better.
Hugh: Wow. I was with a client today, and they had a management team of about 14 people. They were talking about one of the aspects of one of the department’s work, and they were streamlining and automating. They estimated it would save 3.5 hours a day of the employees, which totally revamped how they were going to assign duties in that department, which is huge. They are installing some automation, which frees up people with a higher level of skill from doing something routine to utilize that skill. Nathan, what would you do with two extra hours if you had them?
Nathan: I think that’s the difference between running a lifestyle business and trying to get back toward that lifestyle versus a workaholic. For me, when I am freeing up time, which I am constantly doing because I get more and more on my plate, I am just freeing up my time to focus on some other part of my business. I like working ten hours a day, and I am doing that no matter what. If I free up three hours, I may take an extra day off here and there, but I am reinvesting it back in the company. That content video that I didn’t have time to make, now I have time for it. That PR company that I never called back, let’s give them a phone call. For me, I am freeing up time to get more time in my business that focuses on sales, marketing, and expansion. If I am not doing something that focuses on sales, marketing, and expansion, my business is stalling. I am not moving forward as fast as I can. I owe it to the other people on my team to do that. We have all been around that boss where all they do all day is walk around and look over your shoulder. My mentality is if you are doing that, you are not doing what you are supposed to do as a leader. You are not progressing anything forward. You are not making a process better. You are not fixing anything for the future. And you are definitely not growing and expanding your company. Yes, there is a time and place to double-check work and make sure everything is going well, but the goal should be to free up your time for anything that involves expansion.
Hugh: Why do you think that it’s so hard for people to do that?
Nathan: Expanding is hard. Get to a point in your company that you are comfortable. You are making money for the first time. You have a stable client base. Anything past that is unknown territory. What happens if you invest in advertising here? What happens if you do 20 phone calls for lead generation and you get rejected 20 times? People don’t want to do what it takes to get to that next level of your business. You eventually stall out. There are people who are very comfortable running a $1 million company or a $4 million company instead of being like, “Hey, every year, I want to grow non-stop. Yes, I am setting goals and guidelines, but if I didn’t get bigger from year to year, I did something wrong that year. I am too involved, or I made a bad decision, or I wasn’t focused on expansion.” A lot of it is fear. Fear is incredibly motivating or unmotivating when it comes to people. Along with delegation, it is something you need to let go of. As a business owner, you need to figure out how to take your business to the next level, whether it is taking that online mastermind class or reading a new book or trial and error, which I am a huge fan of. Figure out a way to free up your time to take the business to the next level.
Hugh: I’d like to point out that expansion becomes easier after you get older and your metabolism slows down. Not what you were talking about, I don’t think.
Russ, do you want to piggyback on what he just said? That is so aligned with our philosophy at SynerVision.
Russell: It very much is. With that extra time for me, I was thinking I needed to take better care of myself so I can do things. Over the course of the day, if I am not learning something or out here reaching out to people or trying to grow that business, then I am in a place where I need to look at getting some of the smaller things off my plate. I have been leveraging technology. I have some people I work with here in my office who are here to help me do some things. I have been able to get more traction by connecting with other people who can help me along in my process, and that is true for anybody. The people who are clients of mine, I actually help them do that. What you are talking about is filling gaps. Those don’t necessarily have to be weaknesses. It could just be things we simply don’t want to do or are not the best use of our time for what we need to do. Nathan hit that on the head: What am I best at, and what are the things only I can do? Those are the things I try to attend to, and I try to hand other things off and find other ways to get them done.
Hugh: So true. Once we can hand off things, we can focus on what we are supposed to be doing and what we do best. Really, Nathan you talked about what kind of business, a lifestyle business. When we are in business, we need to stop and look at our life plan and make sure the business is fulfilling our life. You are getting ready to go to Mexico in a couple of days. Sounds like you got your act together, boy.
Nathan: Yeah, I mean I have assistants who monitor my Skype and my email almost 24 hours a day. It took a lot of time and training and investing. There will always be some frustration. You hire four people, and maybe one of them doesn’t work out. They can’t be a reason to give up. You have to learn from those experiences, come up with better systems, come up with better processes, and figure out a way to do it because your competitors are going to do it. At some point, they are going to figure out how to automate it, how to hire the right people, how to make it so their business is getting bigger while you sleep. You have to figure out a way to do that.
Hugh: Absolutely. I didn’t mean to call you “boy.” I am three times your age, so the perspective…
Nathan: You can call me “boy” then.
Hugh: That’s right. And you’re not catching up either.
The next question that we posted out there, and I did talk about the real time research that people tell me they are struggling with leadership and burnout, the Meyer Foundation did a research project a few years ago and found that the burnout rate for nonprofit executives is 45%. 75% of executives are looking at the door as a way out. We feel like we are trapped and have to do too much. Let’s flip that coin. We are focusing on burnout, we don’t have enough money or time, nobody volunteers. Let’s flip it over. If we weren’t burned out, what would that mean? What could we accomplish?
Nathan: If you’re not resting, if you are burned out on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis, you are not going to have the productivity that you can. You won’t hit your potential. You’re not going to motivate the people around you. You’re going to be short. You’re going to talk down to people. You’re not going to figure out a way to take your business to the next level. The easiest way to get burned out is by doing a lot of things you shouldn’t be doing. I spent years of my life entering data into Quickbooks. I would get hundreds of orders every week, and at the end of every month, I would go in and reconcile them. It would literally take me hours and hours and hours. If I could go back, I would honestly yell at myself. It was a terrible decision. I could hire someone from the Philippines to do it for $8 an hour. They would probably have been more prepared than I was and done a better job. There were times I would wake up at 5 am to do these Quickbooks. It was a complete waste. I could have woken up rested, ready to go, on to expand my company.
Hugh: We don’t call those mistakes. We call those learning opportunities.
Nathan: Exactly. One more thing. When I started Freeeup and had all these clients, I started bookkeeping. The first thing I did was hire someone else to do it right from the very beginning.
Hugh: Damn. That’s good. All right. Russell, what would you do? You’re not burned out. You probably experienced in your career lots of burned out leaders, didn’t you?
Russell: I have run into a lot of burned out leaders. I became one because I found myself at the back end of my career working as a tribal administrator. And I had 70 employees. But I didn’t relinquish my development responsibilities. That was burning the candle at both ends there because I didn’t understand delegation. Even though I had other people there, I didn’t understand at that point in time how to hand things off. I found myself in time constraints. Everything was a crisis. I found myself overfunctioning and doing things that would have been better to hand off to other people.
Nathan: Like what? Could you give us an example?
Russell: Some examples there would be working on grants and trying to get those ahead in time. Working on budgets and approving other projects. I should have been able to rely on my program directors to get that done, but at that time, I was a bit of a micromanager because I wanted to do what I wanted to see the organization do well. That was a part of a hard education coming through. That was really a baptism by fire. I had to learn to do a lot of things and learn to do a lot of things other people didn’t know how to do. At that point in time, I learned how to teach other people. But the largest number of people I had working for me prior to that was five when I was in the Air Force. A bit of a shift to go from five employees to 70.
Nathan: Absolutely. That is where a lot of people get frustrated, too, is that teaching side. There are two ways to go about hiring. You hire someone who is really talented and is bringing their own experience to the table to do something that you can’t, or you are hiring someone to come in that may have some kind of background but you are teaching them your system, your way of doing it. A lot of people, especially the first few hires, don’t know how to teach. They don’t know how to give that information to someone else and do it properly and have someone get the same results or even similar because a lot of times it’s worth it if someone can do it 85% of what you can. You want to take it off your plate. A lot of people can’t accomplish that. They get frustrated and think they can’t hire, when a lot of times it comes down to their teaching, how they trained them, how they integrated them, and how they motivated after they taught them. Once you give someone the keys on how to do something, how did you make sure you were getting the most out of them every day because if you did it yourself, you would get the most out of it every day.
Hugh: There are also things I do okay, but I have people who can do them better than me. Once I can back off of that and accept they are going to do it differently, the responsibility rests on the leader to identify the ending point. What is the outcome? What does it look like specifically? We are there to mentor people. There is a huge difference from micromanaging to mentoring, to empowering people.
Let’s talk a bit about equipping ourselves as leaders. Suppose we want to free up and got a really good person to do some administrative assistance. The responsibility is on the leader to have a really good plan so that when someone comes in, we can define the quantifiable outcomes. As you are working with leaders who haven’t been successful or are new at having someone else to delegate things to, what kind of advice do you give them as far as being able to quantify the end result and empower anybody, your people or others, to accomplish those goals?
Nathan: Sure. The first thing you have to understand is that no matter who the person is, you need them more than they need you. They can go out and get another job. You are the one who is investing training, resources, and your own time, which is invaluable. You are the one who is putting it all in. You have to be the one to get out of it. You go into it talking down to someone or being mean or not with a positive attitude, and you will get burned in the end, not them. They will walk away being like, “This boss was terrible. I hate him. I’m going to get a new job.” That’s step one.
Step two is identifying what you want. What are your goals? What are your expectations? I see so many clients who will give someone an assignment and just walk away and go back to exactly what they were doing without outlining any goals or expectations. The worker, if they are good, in their mind they will look back and go, “I have client A, B, and C, and they liked it this way. I am going to do that.” If that client comes back a week later and gets the assignment and says, “This isn’t at all what I wanted,” then the worker is baffled because they have been doing this the same way the entire time, but no one set their goals and expectations. That is why I encourage our workers to not start anything until that discovery or scope is lined up. Even if the client is too busy or says, “You should know what to do,” that is not acceptable because that just leads to issues at the end. The worker has to step up and make sure that discovery happens so the work gets done.
Hugh: I want to capture the sound bite. When you don’t have a clear definition of what you want, it leads to issues. We are setting up conflict if we do that, don’t we?
Nathan: Absolutely. A mess is bound to happen. Yes, there are all-star workers out there who can read the client’s mind and do the job without any instructions, but the majority of the time, there is going to be some kind of issue. It will also save you time and energy. There will be revisions. Even if you are someone who likes revisions, if you just set a discovery and scope up front, it will save you a lot of time. It’s worth it.
Hugh: Wow. Russell, you want to weigh in on this issue? It’s a big one.
Russell: Yeah. It creates that accountability, and when the worker becomes involved, they have that accountability. Once it’s clear they understand what it is you want and you send them away, it’s like the Colombo technique when I was auditing businesses in the IRS. This is how you outsmart a lot of $500 an hour attorneys. You walk in and ask questions like a second grader until you are absolutely clear on what it is they are saying. I found that they volunteered more information. They probably thought I was the village idiot asking questions until they got the tax bill from their clients, and it looks like this guy is smarter than he looks. You want to be flexible, but you want the result. You don’t want a lot of wiggle room on that result. But flexibility as far as how to get it. You leverage that talent, and they will approach stuff in ways I would never think of. It works better for them. It doesn’t matter how they get it done as long as they got that standard that is set and they know what’s expected and they deliver, and that is what I am all about: delivering that ned result.
Hugh: Just for Nathan’s benefit, he is stealing my lines. I am smarter than he looks. That is the one I use often. Last time I used it, somebody said, “That’s a good thing.” Russ, you’re so right.
What is really annoying to the team members is when the boss does things they are not the expert at. If we started inventorying the things we’re good at but not excellent at, and maybe someone else should be doing it. I am sure you interview people who do it all, and it is hard to convince them that someone could do it better, save them time and money, free up their time. How do you approach that conversation?
Nathan: I get to that point now where I rarely do anything that isn’t directly involved with something I am really good at. I realized it’s a total waste of time, and it usually ends up backfiring. I usually have to redo it down the line anyway. Even if I put something together makeshift that lasts me a few months. So I usually want to get it right the first time.
What I tell clients is a story I have with my business partner Connor. We rarely fight; we have an awesome relationship. The biggest fight that we had, the time that things escalated the most, led to the best conversation. We were sitting out on our patio. We had been stepping on each other’s toes, and there was a lot of uncertainty on who was doing what. We found an activity online where we would tell each other what we were good at and what we were bad at. Connor was like, “Nate, you’re a bad writer.” I was like, “Connor, you don’t delegate properly.” We went back and forth on this for a solid hour until we had a list of everything we were good at and everything we were bad at. Can we work together? We noticed fortunately that we had a lot of complementary skills, as we were polar opposites in terms of skillsets, which was why we had such success earlier on. From there, it was fairly easy to divide everything. I am not going to do anything with writing, so Connor, you have the blog, the website. I’m better at talking on the phone, so I handle all phone calls. We were clearly able to divide the line, and as we hired people, we would have them work under us to where it related, where it was relevant.
What I advise people to do is have an honest conversation with you, your employees, and your business partner to figure out who is good at what, and, I think Russell said this earlier, to identify where the holes are at because usually you don’t get that perfect synergy where everything is covered. You realize you don’t have a bookkeeper on your team or a developer. Those are the next steps.
Hugh: I can see where people starting out in the first stages of a charity or a business need to do a lot of things. From the very beginning, especially in charities, we have all these people who want to give their time. There is an emotional release of I have to do it to feel worthy when that’s not true. You have a vision. You do what you’re really good at. And you allow other people to perform up to their highest standard and fulfill their passion. If it is worthy work, there are other people who want to join us in that work. We just have to be better at recruiting them and telling people why it’s important and what impact they are going to have in the lives of others. Russ, you might know better than I, but there are something like four million 501(c) somethings with 10s and 6s and those that are government. There is an abundance of charitable organizations in this country. Many of them have a really good mission, and many of them are compromised in that mission because of the kinds of things we are talking about here. The culture is a reflection of the leader, and as John Maxwell says in his Law of the Lid, the organization cannot grow any further than the leader’s ability to let it grow, to lead it. Finding really talented people to work around you is one of those strong secrets.
If we were all to ask ourselves, “What could we take off our plate if we had someone who worked a certain number of hours?” There are two sides to this. What could we take off our plate, and what additional important thing could we do if we had that kind of assistance? There are two sides to that question. Nathan.
Nathan: I always recommend starting small. Very few companies, especially nonprofits, will just start off hiring six full-time people and take everything off their plate. It has taken me two years of running Freeeup to get to that point and a few years into my first company as well. But what I did do was hire someone to run my social media page one hour a day. It cost me $7 a day. It took it off my plate. They did a great job in building that. Then I mentioned Quickbooks. Let’s get someone in place once a month to do that. So I get an entire day back at the end of every month. In the beginning of every day, I spend the first hour answering customer and client emails, so let’s hire someone to answer these emails an hour before I wake up so I can get a head start on every day. I started small with those three hires over the course of four to five months, and it freed up my time to invest back into expansion. From there, the business grew. So we just had a good month, and let’s hire a fourth person for four hours a day to do some small tasks. The beginning of the day is a little hectic for me, so it’d be nice if I had someone on there who I could just assign different papers to write or projects to do or contacting clients. I put that person in place, and I got an extra few hours every day, so I invested that into expanding my company. You get the point. That is the correct and proper way to go about it if you are a nonprofit, if you have a limited budget. If you are ahead of that curve and making money, then you can go ahead of that and start hiring people for 20 or 15 hours a week and start taking this off your plate. Have a meeting. Once you get your time back, have a brainstorming session on what you should be doing so you can maximize that extra time. Or if you are a lifestyle business, figure out where you are going to go on your next vacation.
Hugh: An hour a day is five hours a week. That is 25 hours a month. That is 300 hours a year. If we just outsource something for an hour a day, that is quality of life. Wow. Russ, what are you hearing here?
Russell: I am hearing that I should get somebody to do my email because the pile is growing. I could do that. I could have somebody do some of the email and some of the posting. I have some things automated. That has been my big push of late is to get some things automated. I have been doing some rework on my website and some other things are in the works. As I get more resources, I am going to get more people involved. It’s a lot of hours, and I don’t mind a lot of hours, but those hours could be spent a little better because I am still doing a lot of small things.
Hugh: Aren’t we all.
Nathan: A quick note on email. I have a lot of clients who notice those emails are piling up. It costs you business not to respond to emails. It costs you opportunities. You have to find a way to get on top of your email. That should be step one. Hugh, if you emailed me and I didn’t respond back for a week and a half, I would not be here right now potentially. There are people out there who respond fast. You have to figure out a way to do it. That is just one example. There are other parts of your business like falling behind on taxes and stuff like that that you have to figure out a way to keep up. Sometimes the only way to do that is to hire an assistant for an hour a day.
Russell: Several times a day, I clean out my email inbox, and I don’t leave it over the weekend. I do get response to it, but the point is that I am cleaning it out, and it’s time that I am spending cleaning it out to make sure I don’t miss anything that I need to gain. It’s that time cleaning it out.
Hugh: We offer these sessions to nonprofit leaders to offer some best practices and good business tips for charities. Like Russ said, you can’t help but think about yourself. I teach people that we are always working on our skills. Even old guys like me can learn new things. Nate, you brought up some really good stuff. Nate Hirsch is principal at Freeeup.com. As you see, he has a lot of energy and a lot of wisdom for such a young guy. You have done a lot in such a short period of time. Thank you for being here tonight. As we wrap up, I am going to ask you to do a parting thought for people. What is some wisdom you’d like to leave us with, a tip or a closing thought?
Nathan: When you are hiring, you want to hire people that are passionate and have a great attitude about your company. If you are hiring someone—I don’t care if it’s the smallest project—if it’s one graphic design project, get someone who is emotionally involved. Get someone you can tell actually cares about you and your company. You will get a better result. You will never know when you will use someone again. You also don’t know how it will affect the people around you. If you bring someone in who has a bad attitude, even for a day, even for a very small project, that can have lasting effects on your business that can last months. Make sure you are bringing in high-quality, high-caliber people for every little thing. Just because you have something due, don’t take a shortcut and give it to someone who could ruin your business down the line. That is my word of advice. It’s something I wish I knew upfront. I became addicted—for example, I needed Excel work done, and I would hire someone who had a bad attitude but were very good at building this formula. When they were building these formulas on my computer at my desk, I realized they were interacting with all the other people on my team. And the next week was a terribly unproductive week because everyone had the mentality that Nate would go around and hire any Joe-schmo that he could find that wasn’t passionate about the company. It took me a while to get that back on track. That is a good piece of advice that I wish I had when I was hiring the first time.
Hugh: That is excellent advice. Everything you said in this interview has been spot-on with what Russell and I teach. We have reframed the word “consultant” to “Wayfinder,” and we help people find the way to better leadership. Nathan Hirsch of Freeeup, thank you for spending your hour with us tonight.
Nathan: Yeah, thanks for having me. Don’t forget to check out Freeeup.com. Right at the top, you can book an appointment with me and I can talk to you about your business. If you mention Hugh’s name, you get a dollar off your first worker forever. It’s free to sign up with no monthly fees.
Hugh: My name is worth a dollar.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Avoid Leadership Burnout with Outsourcing Staff | The Nonprofit Exchange: Leadership Tools & Strategies podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
