From College Hustles to Multi-Million Dollar Ventures with Nathan Hirsch

Unlock the secrets to entrepreneurial success as lifelong entrepreneur Nathan Hirsch joins us for a deeply insightful episode. Nathan’s journey from college hustles to co-founding and scaling FreeUp to a multi-million-dollar enterprise is nothing short of inspiring. Nathan discusses his strategic approach to hiring and managing teams, focusing on the trifecta of skill, attitude, and communication. He shares invaluable lessons learned from his entrepreneurial experiences, offering practical advice for anyone looking to become a more effective leader and build successful businesses.

Effective hiring can make or break a business, and Nathan underscores this by sharing his personal experiences and strategies. He recounts the creation of Outsource School, a platform designed to help entrepreneurs master the art of hiring. Additionally, Nathan opens up about the complexities of selling FreeUp, shedding light on the challenges and strategic decisions involved. He emphasizes how good hiring practices can dramatically accelerate your business growth and help avoid common pitfalls, steering your entrepreneurial journey toward success.

Remote work is the new norm, and Nathan has mastered it. He shares his insights on managing remote teams, especially virtual assistants, using tools like Zoom, Slack, and Google Docs to maintain effective communication. Beyond business, Nathan also discusses the importance of work-life balance, sharing personal strategies for maintaining productivity and personal well-being.

Connect with Nathan Hirsch on social media channel and visit nathanhirsch.com/newsletter to subscribe to his newsletter.

Books Mentioned:

• The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
• Tools of Titans by Timothy Ferriss 
• Start with Why by Simon Sinek
• Catalytic Leadership: 12 Keys to Becoming an Intentional Leader Who Makes a Difference by Dr. William Attaway

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Transcript

Dr. William Attaway: 0:00

I am thrilled today to have Nathan Hirsch on the podcast. Nathan is a lifelong entrepreneur. He is on a mission to make entrepreneurship simpler for millions. Nathan's best known for co-founding FreeUp. net in 2015 with an initial $5,000 investment, scaling it to $12 million in yearly revenue and having it acquired in 2019. Today, he owns a portfolio of companies with his partner, C connor Gillliven. A few you might know Ecom Balance and AccountsBalance, two monthly bookkeeping services and Outsource School access to Nate's hiring process and SOPs, as well as Trio SEO, a premium blog writing service. Nathan has appeared on over 750 podcasts and I'm so glad you are here today, nate. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

Intro / Outro: 0:58

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:15

I want to start with your story. I hit some of the hot points there, but I'd love to hear more, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader. How did this whole thing get started?

Nathan Hirsch: 1:26

Yeah, so I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. My parents growing up had me working jobs since I was 14, 15. I was a Little League umpire babysitting. Eventually I got some internships at Aaron's, which is like a rent-a-center, firestone, a tire place. I just learned a lot about customer service and sales and people and managing people and all of that. But I also learned that I hated having a boss and I kind of got a glimpse into what the real world was like after college and I didn't want a part of it.

Nathan Hirsch: 1:57

So when I got to college I kind of looked at college as a time to experiment, to try things. If I failed and couldn't build a business in four years, I would go out and get a real job and I was hustling. I was always looking for some way to make side money and create a company and it led me to textbooks. I created a competing bookstore or book company to compete with my school bookstore, quinnipiac in Connecticut, and that was going really well. I built a referral network of people that would buy books for me. My dorm room was just full of textbooks. I was selling them on Amazon. This was 2008, 2009. So Amazon was just bursting onto the scenes and I essentially took all my internship money, bought books and then you eventually sold them over time to make more money.

Nathan Hirsch: 2:41

And when I got, I ended up getting this cease and desist letter from my college telling me to knock it off and stop competing with them. And that ended up being one of the best things that ever happened to me, because I had this Amazon account that I was selling all these books on and I started to experiment with other products. I knew I didn't have a place to store inventory. I didn't have a lot of money to buy a lot of inventory, so I started building relationships with these different US retailers and eventually manufacturers, to sell their products on Amazon. They didn't know what e-commerce was. I didn't have a way of building or making products, so it was kind of a win for them because it was additional sales, a win for me because they could just keep my card on file and ship it where I told them to, and that created this.

Nathan Hirsch: 3:22

Essentially, I was running this multimillion dollar Amazon business out of my college dorm room, learning everything from finances to hiring people, managing people, firing people you name it as a 20 year old. So that's really how I got a lot of my real life experience. I did major in entrepreneurship. It was a newer program, but I mean everything you learn actually doing. It is way better, as you know, than any class you could take.

Dr. William Attaway: 3:45

That's so true. So what are some of the things that you learned? I mean hiring, firing leading teams. As a 20-year-old, I meet people two and three times that age who struggle with those skills. What are some of the things that you learned as you began that journey?

Nathan Hirsch: 4:03

I think setting expectations was one of the first things I learned. I got really lucky. My first hire, I posted a job on Facebook. A guy in my business law class, C connor Gillivan, shot me a message, said, hey, I need a job, and I just hired him on the spot and I didn't even interview him, I just needed someone, and he ended up being my longtime business partner. We got along great. He was a great employee for the first year, crushed it, hardworking, loved business, loved Amazon, and we were working together.

Nathan Hirsch: 4:30

But there I was as a 20-year-old thinking man. This is easy you post a job, someone shows up, it makes your life easier, and I couldn't have been more wrong, obviously. And I made a lot of bad hires after that. Kids that were not reliable, didn't take my business seriously, were drinking on the job, smoking weed on the job everything you would do as a college student. So I learned very quickly that setting expectations is super important and then letting go of people super early on was really important too.

Nathan Hirsch: 4:58

I had some college kids that worked with me for two years and I didn't want to fire them because they were in my fraternity or whatever it was, and it also led me down the path of virtual assistants. A buddy of mine introduced me to a VA and this was a solution to all my hiring problems, of hiring people in person, hiring the people around me, and I learned even more about just setting really good expectations with VAs and what to look for. We talk a lot in Outsource School about hiring for the trifecta. You want someone that doesn't just have the skill and experience but also the attitude and the communication skills, and we found out how important it was to really look for all three and for looking for the red flags. What is this person telling me that says they don't have the communication they need, they have a poor attitude or obviously they don't have the skill set that I need for the job.

Dr. William Attaway: 5:46

Do you look at people and see potential? In other words, do you see somebody that you're like? They don't quite have the skills yet, they're not quite there, but I want to give them a shot and I want to pour into them and invest in them. Or are you looking for people who already have a defined skill set?

Nathan Hirsch: 6:06

Yeah, it's a great question. We go both ways. So there's one part that, as we set up these businesses, we always try to hire operators. Whenever we start them, we don't want to be in the fulfillment. So our bookkeeping businesses, for example, I'm not a bookkeeper, so me hiring someone with potential and teaching them how to do bookkeeping or how to run a bookkeeping business, that's not gonna happen. That can't happen. So for that role, no.

Nathan Hirsch: 6:27

But take our media company, for example Connor and I have a media company. We use and promote our brands and we're trying lots of different things. Social media is a big, big experiment and I'll hire someone who loves social media but maybe hasn't worked for a social media company for 20 years and see what they can do and see where they fit in. It just depends on what you're looking for and you also need a lot of hiring experience to do that. Like me as a 25 year old couldn't have done that successfully.

Nathan Hirsch: 6:56

Me, as a 35 year old, where I've hired a lot of people and I know what to look for with attitude and communication and I'm not afraid to fail, and I understand that that person's to struggle and that I have to support them here and there it's a lot different. So there's a time and a place for both. But if you're just hiring for the first time and maybe you've made bad hires before or you've been scared to hire before you definitely want someone who's been there done that. It's very hard for you to nail everything and help them grow at the same time.

Dr. William Attaway: 7:24

There's a lot of wisdom right there, and I hope the listeners are really jotting this down, because I think that that sounds like experience that came out of mistakes.

Nathan Hirsch: 7:35

Oh yeah, we made every possible mistake you can make as a business owner from waiting too long to hire, which I mentioned, to those expectations, to hiring people that had terrible attitudes, who were just mad at everything or only cared about money. We hired a set of twins who were scamming us for like a year. One of them was working and they were billing us twice. We had people who not took our data, but just wouldn't treat our data like we wanted to on the developer side. So we've had every single issue that you can imagine and we spent five years really perfecting the interview process. And when we finally figured it out and we believe that hiring is a skill and you can create a really good process that's when our Amazon business grew.

Nathan Hirsch: 8:20

That's when we started our next business, FreeUp, a hiring marketplace, and built a really great internal team with 30 VAs that were with us for all four years on our internal team, that are still with FreeUp even after the sale and just learned so much doing it. So every time we would make a bad hire, we would go back to the hiring process and say how do we make this better? How do we prevent this issue from ever happening again? And now it's become our proven hiring process that we teach to our members at Outsource School, because we know it works. We know it produces A players and, more importantly, it helps you keep those A players over time. Because you can't compete with people on money. There's always another company out there that can pay your people more than you can. So what can you do around the money? To? Obviously money's important, but around the money to keep them around, keep them motivated and get them to treat the business like it's their own.

Dr. William Attaway: 9:12

As I was researching what you do in preparation for this interview, one of the things that really impressed me was that you are living out something that I talk about pretty regularly when I speak to entrepreneurs and agency owners and business leaders. I believe that every experience in your life is important, there's no such thing as a wasted experience, and that those experiences are not just for you, that if you are intentional, they're also for the benefit of those around you. But you have to learn to be a conduit of what you've learned instead of just a reservoir, and what you have done through Outsource School is really create a conduit for so much of what you've learned to benefit other people. I'd love to hear more about Outsource School and how this can really make a difference in the lives of the people who jump in.

Nathan Hirsch: 10:09

Yeah. So my mentality on entrepreneurship is there's a lot of skills you can learn right, you can learn marketing, you can learn finance, you can learn whatever but hiring is the first thing you need to learn how to do and this is coming from someone who didn't want to hire anyone my first two years as an entrepreneur and I finally met with my CPA and he asked when are you going to hire your first person? And I was like, why would I do that? That's money out of my pocket. They're going to steal my ideas, they're going to hurt my business. Why would I do that? I can work seven days a week forever. And he just laughed in my face and said you're going to learn this lesson on your own.

Nathan Hirsch: 10:44

And sure enough, my first real busy season comes around Black Friday, cyber Monday and I just get destroyed. I'm working 20 hours a day, my social life's gone, my grades go down and I'm still in college and I get to January. I somehow survived because I'm a hard worker and I didn't want to lose this business. But I think I come to January and I learned hey, I can never let this happen again. I need to start hiring people. And that set me down this path of learning how to hire, and there's so many what I would consider good entrepreneurs with good ideas, but they struggle because they can't hire. Well, there's always turnover. Turnover sets you back, it's stressful, it costs you time, it costs you money and vice versa. There's pretty average entrepreneurs out there Like how many agency owners do you know? Or something in a very generic field. That's nothing like special. They're not creating the next Uber, but they succeed because they're making a plus hires, that that kind of support all of their weaknesses and are really good at what they're bad at, and they keep those people around. And that's the difference between success and failure as an entrepreneur.

Nathan Hirsch: 11:46

If you learn how to hire, everything else becomes easier, because whenever something comes up, whenever a task comes up or something you don't know how to do oh, I don't know how to run Facebook ads, I can hire someone. I don't know how to write blog articles or I don't have time for it, I can hire someone and it just makes your life way less stressful as an entrepreneur. It actually helps you grow and scale and if you ever want to sell your business, you can't do that if you're in the fulfillment. I mean the reason we were able to sell our business outside of clean finances and reoccurring revenue and stuff like that is.

Nathan Hirsch: 12:15

We had SOPs for everything, standard operating procedures and a great internal team that handled everything from sales calls to bookkeeping to customer service fulfillment, you name it and I could go on vacation for two weeks and the business would still run. So that's kind of what Outsource School breaks. The table is you can be like me and spend four or five years going through trial and error and building your own hiring process, or you could just take a hiring process that already works that thousands of entrepreneurs are using right now in their business. Plug it into your business quickly and skip that learning curve, and that's what it's all about.

Dr. William Attaway: 12:50

I think that's brilliant, because if you can go farther, faster, right. If you can leapfrog over so many of the mistakes that you would hit otherwise and avoid the ditches that you would steer into, why would you not do that? Why would you not leverage the power of other people's mistakes and their learnings so that you don't have to repeat them?

Nathan Hirsch: 13:13

Yeah, absolutely. It's funny because after we sold FreeUp, the original plan was to take two years off, travel the world, kind of enjoy the fruits of our labor. And COVID hit shortly after we sold it, in November 2019. So we were stuck inside, we had nothing to do, we had no business ideas, because all we had done for four years was eat, sleep, breathe, free up. And a buddy of mine reached out and said hey, what if you just teach people your hiring process? And that's how Outsource School was born and we, like all of our businesses, we launched it with an MVP. We gave the initial user the discount and people hated it or it didn't work or whatever it was. We were just going to refund everyone and move on to something else and luckily, people really liked it and then that became Outsource School. That's amazing.

Dr. William Attaway: 13:56

I want to talk about FreeUp for a minute. Selling a business is the dream of many entrepreneurs. They want to build something and then they want to exit. You accomplished that. You had a successful sale. What did you learn through that process?

Nathan Hirsch: 14:14

Yeah, I actually think the opposite. I think people get to that sale and they can't pull the trigger because it's their baby. They've been building it. They don't know what they're going to do next. And don't get me wrong, there's plenty of people that want to sell.

Nathan Hirsch: 14:21

My point is is with the Amazon business, we sold 25 million over six years. We had success, but we peaked out around year three at about 5 million and at the time we thought we were going to take down Amazon. We thought we were going to be the next e-commerce giant and we made decisions accordingly. We didn't think anyone could take us down. We probably could have sold that business at that time, but instead Amazon got harder. There was more competition. We ended up laying a lot of people off, which left a really sour taste in our mouth. Anyone that's ever gone through that knows and that aided us for years.

Nathan Hirsch: 14:52

It was like a big failure that we wanted to go over. So fast forward ahead. We had free up. It was very profitable, no debt, very cashflow positive. We enjoyed doing it. We didn't need to sell it, but we got a really good offer from really good people and one of our clients reached out.

Nathan Hirsch: 15:08

We ended up getting a life-changing offer and things are going through our head like, hey, the economy is at an all-time high. We saw what happened with the Amazon business. We don't want to go through that again. It's a chance to take chips off the table and put money in our pocket and allow us to build businesses in the future and diversify and not be out of it and have to maybe get a job later if the businesses don't work out. You're kind of playing with house money at that point. So I think going through that initial experience, where we probably held on to it too long, made it a little bit easier on that next experience. And I mean that whole process was so stressful. It was the most stressful six months of our lives. Every day you're waking up thinking, is the deal going to fall through? Like, are they going to come in with something else that's going to change the offer or some concern they have or whatever it is.

Nathan Hirsch: 15:55

And we could not be more fortunate. Not only did we sell it to really good people, but FreeUp is still around. It's approaching year 10. Our team's still with them. We still talk to them. We have a great relationship with the owners. They paid us every penny, so we were lucky that we had that good situation. But there's also I don't know how familiar you are with the e-commerce space, but a lot of these aggregators came in heavily funded, bought up all these e-commerce companies, but they structured all these deals with earnouts that the person who built the company would only get if they hit certain milestones. And these aggregators were just terrible at operations and almost all of them went out of business and the people who created a business and had that baby sold it didn't get much money for it and then they ran that business into the ground. So we've kind of been around and seen all different sides and we're very fortunate how ours turned out.

Dr. William Attaway: 16:46

You know, I think there's so many lessons there and what it sounds like is that you are really good at evaluation. You're really good at learning from your mistakes, learning from what has happened and saying, hey, I don't want to make the same mistake twice. We're all going to make mistakes, right, we're all going to drive into a ditch here and there, but it sounds like you're very intentional about evaluating your wins and your losses so that you can learn from it going forward, and other people's too.

Nathan Hirsch: 17:15

I had a buddy who sold his company for a lot of money and part of the deal was he had to be an employee of the new company for years and he was miserable. Every time I talked to him he was like I shouldn't agree to this. Like they're doing all these decisions, I wouldn't have done so. When we got to our deal, that was off the table. If we're selling it, we're out. We're moving out into something else. We'll stay on for like 90 days. We'll support you. You have a question? Reach out to us. We want to make sure the internal team still has jobs, but we are not going to be employees of this new company. So it's a combination of your own mistakes but also learning from other people in your network's mistakes, so when you get in those situations, you don't make them.

Dr. William Attaway: 17:56

That's so good. You sold just before COVID. You went through COVID. Now there's outsourced this side of COVID. There's definitely an explosion of remote workers. This is a big challenge in finding hiring, interviewing, onboarding, managing a team of people that are all over the world. In some cases that's a different skill than being really good at marketing or really good at whatever it is that you're doing in the agency space.

Nathan Hirsch: 18:40

Do you have any suggestions or tips or ideas for people who are trying to navigate remote employees, particularly VAs. Yeah, I always say I was working remote before. It was cool to work remote. I've been running remote businesses since 2008. And we actually opened up an office for two years and it was the worst business decision I ever made. It wasted a lot of money and time and I felt like I created a job for myself that I had to, like, go into the office every single day and we went back to remote and anything we, anything we build now is a hundred percent remote.

Nathan Hirsch: 19:04

And we've been taking a step further. Like I'm retired from all work, travel, I don't go to any conferences. I'm only interested in building a business that doesn't require me to go anywhere or be in a specific place. So, and the people we hire are the same way. Now, again, it comes back to just good hiring in general setting expectations, hiring people with a good attitude, getting them to buy into what you're building. Because, like I'm sure you have friends I have friends who work remote and they use that to their advantage and they're whatever. They're running groceries during the day and there's a certain level of flexibility.

Nathan Hirsch: 19:39

That's great, but at the end of the day, are you getting stuff done? Is your team getting stuff done? Can they communicate? Do you know what they're doing? Are you updated? Are they helping growing the business? And that's more important than what hours do they work or are they in an office or something like that? So you do have to double down on the whole culture thing. Like we'll do virtual happy hours, culture meetings. We don't just have people, one person over here, one person over there, they're all working together and communicating. So that's a big part of it. And the tech stack as well. We keep it super simple Zoom, slack, google Docs Like you don't have to overcomplicate it, but you do need a system for communication and setting that up early, you know I, but you do need a system for communication and setting that up early.

Dr. William Attaway: 20:20

I want to dive into something you said a minute ago and I think this is a trap that I have watched more than one of my clients step into and that is creating the thing that you were trying to get away from Creating a job, creating an office, creating a culture and expectations and that's the very thing you were trying to get away from, but you just end up recreating it because it's the only way you know how you're doing something dramatically different no work, travel, complete remote. What? What is it about that? That drew you like what? Why did you make that choice?

Nathan Hirsch: 20:55

yeah. So my mentality is hustle. When you're in your twenties, when you don't have responsibilities you might not have a wife and kids or a mortgage, or like if you fail you can always go and get a real job. You got plenty of time to work, like that's when you can take risks, and that's what I did, Like in college. That was the time to take risks. I can always get a job after college. Like jobs aren't going anywhere.

Nathan Hirsch: 21:16

And so with FreeUp I was working all the time. I was hustling, I was working weekends, I was going to every conference. My mom would laugh at me because she ran a preschool for years, that she started and she bootstrapped and all of that and she was working all the time. And when I was younger I would always give her a little crap, just being like, hey, you're always working long hours. When I run my own business, it's going to be my hours. And there I was with FreeUp just working all the time, and she would kind of give it back to me when I was up at 5 am and work until 8 or 9 or whatever.

Nathan Hirsch: 21:46

But after we sold FreeUp it obviously put us in a great position financially to not have to do that anymore. And I got married, I have an eight-month-old, and so putting restrictions in place where, hey, if I'm going to grow a portfolio of companies, we have to have an operator for every company before we start, we have to grow a team around them. I don't want to work weekends, I'm not going to do any work, travel, my family has become my priority and being able to kind of have that work-life balance. But I think a lot of people skip that step of the hustle of the grind and they think People skip that step of the hustle of the grind and they think, hey, I can create a lifestyle business from day one.

Nathan Hirsch: 22:21

And there's some people that are very fortunate that they whether it was timing or a good idea or whatever it was got in and were able to set that up. But for the majority of people, starting a business is hard. It takes a lot of time and if you're going to hustle, there has to be an end game there. There has to be somewhere to get to a place where you can enjoy life, because you're going to burn yourself out. You're either going to neglect your family or not do things that you want, or just get to the point of exhaustion where you're not able to sustain that level. So there's kind of that balance of work-life balance. But if you do want to dream big, you're probably going to have to work hard at some point and make sure you know what the end game is.

Dr. William Attaway: 23:02

I love the intentionality that you put into that. And the next question I've got is around this balance, this whole work life thing that you're talking about. What does a healthy, sustainable pace look like for you? We've already defined no work travel priority of your family, but what does it look like for you? We've already defined no work travel priority of your family, but what does it look like for you to run in a healthy, sustainable way now?

Nathan Hirsch: 23:25

Yeah, so I've always been one that likes getting up early. So morning is my productive time, so I'll get a lot of stuff done between 6 am and 10 am. That if I only did that that day it would still move the needle. And then I always have a break midday. So after this podcast I go. I work out for one hour every single day, not a minute more, a minute less. I'm going for a one hour run after this. So that's my way to take a break from work get away from my computer, get away from my phone and just get workout high intensity workout, turn my brain off, think about something else and then come back and do any phone calls. I have stuff like that.

Nathan Hirsch: 24:02

I also like to structure my day in a certain way. So I mentioned, I stop work at 3 pm every day. If people try to get me on a podcast at 5 or I've had people try to do podcasts on weekends, I respectfully turn that down. But also I know that I like doing podcasts from like 9am my time mountain time to like 11. That's like my sweet spot. So I try to put everything into that time, all my podcasts into that time.

Nathan Hirsch: 24:26

I'm not trying to do a podcast as my last thing in the day, and I'm not trying to do a podcast my first thing in the day because that's my most productive time.

Nathan Hirsch: 24:34

I have another thing where I don't do zoom calls unless it's a podcast or an internal meeting that needs a Zoom call or something like that. So if I'm taking a call with a client or a networking call or whatever it is, I'm outside, I'm walking my dogs and I'm taking that call and I respectfully decline anything that requires me to be at my desk when I really don't have to. Obviously, if I'm like going through a document with someone or something like that, maybe it makes sense, but if we're just talking like there's no reason for me to be in front of a camera, then I just find myself in front of a camera for six hours every single day. So there's certain just guidelines I put into place that work for me and again, I this is just my like I try to be respectful for it Like I get invited to different conferences and try people that will only do zoom calls and stuff like that, and I just kind of explain where I'm coming from and try to build a lifestyle and a work style that works for me.

Dr. William Attaway: 25:24

Again, I love the intentionality of that and I applaud your commitment to your family, Because I think a whole lot of entrepreneurs will sacrifice their family on the altar of pursuing success and, at the end, they have neither Thinking about your growth and your development. I mean, obviously you're a continual learner, but I'm curious. I mean your companies are going to need you to be a different level leader a year from now, five years from now, than you are today. How do you continue to grow and develop? How do you stay on top of your game and level up with the new skills that your team is going to need you to have?

Nathan Hirsch: 26:05

I do a lot in networking. I love just meeting other entrepreneurs, see what's working for them, see what resources they're using. Social media, if used the right way, can get you a lot of different information. I follow a lot of really great entrepreneurs that teach the way that they're doing and you're always kind of. I never try to like take what someone's doing and just copy it exactly, but I take bits and pieces from what people are doing and try to implement them in my business. I also just treat entrepreneurship as a lot of testing, a lot of trial and error. Like what works for someone just doesn't work for someone else.

Nathan Hirsch: 26:37

Just because I built and sold free up does not mean that other businesses I start is going to be successful. So you have to. You have to go into mentality that you're trying lots of different things and the more people you follow, the more books you read, the more podcasts you listen to, that gives you more things to try to see what works in your own business. So that's more how I approach it than like I don't have a mentor or coach. I don't. I don't like like, read EOS and be like this is the system we're going to follow. It's taking small bits and saying, hey, how can I take what we're doing and improve it or try something new that might actually move the needle?

Dr. William Attaway: 27:12

I describe that as eating the fish and leaving the bones. There's always fish in a podcast episode or a book that I'm reading. There's also bones. I'm going to take the pieces that are fish right and I'm going to use those. What's a book that has made a big difference in your journey.

Nathan Hirsch: 27:31

Yeah, I think like the four-hour work week obviously like getting into the VA space that back in the day was a big one for me. I have a whole bookshelf here like Tools of Titans is one of my favorite ones. That's beyond here. I start with why. Like there wasn't a real big why with my Amazon business. It was just to sell a lot of products and make money. And now everything I start now there's a why behind it. With FreeUp, we paid out millions of dollars to VAs around the world and helped them buy houses and cars and I got to see pictures of their family enjoying all this stuff that they had when they had stability. So we try to have Ys in all of our businesses. We try to help not only us but our clients and our team as well. So everybody grows and that's a great book.

Dr. William Attaway: 28:14

Brilliant, Brilliant. Often people walk away from an episode like this, from this conversation. They'll take one big takeaway, one big idea. If you could define what you want that one big idea to be, what would you want it to be?

Nathan Hirsch: 28:35

So one of my mottos is I'm on a mission to make entrepreneurship simpler for millions, and the reason I say that is people overcomplicate entrepreneurship or they chase the shiny object syndrome. There's so much you can do and for me, every business comes down to a few things Really good hiring, really good processing processes, diverse marketing strategy and good, clean finances. And when you stick and you focus on those, that makes everything simpler. You don't need to go viral on TikTok, you don't need to do all these different shiny object syndromes. Focus on the basics, the boring parts, like clean books, making decisions off real numbers not the most sexy topic to listen to on a podcast.

Nathan Hirsch: 29:11

But the good entrepreneurs that's what they do. They hire a bookkeeper from day one of any business you start. That's what I do. They look at their numbers every single month. They don't make decisions based on gut or instinct or looking at their bank account. They make it based on income statement, balance sheet, cash flow. So stuff like that where you just take hey business is hard. We all know that. How can we make it simpler? That's what I want people to take away from this.

Dr. William Attaway: 29:35

So good. I know folks are going to want to stay connected to you, Nate, and continue to learn from you. What is the best way for them to do that?

Nathan Hirsch: 29:48

So I'm on another goal to get 500,000 followers on social media. So I would be honored if you find me, N nathan Hirsch, on any social media channel. Give me a follow. Check on my content. Feedback's always welcome. You can also subscribe to my newsletter if you go to nathanhirsch. com/newsletter.

Dr. William Attaway: 29:59

And we will have those links in the show notes. Nate, thanks so much for your generosity today and sharing so openly from your journey so far. I can't wait to see what's next for you. Thanks for joining me for this episode today. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast.

Dr. William Attaway: 30:30

Second, if you don't have a copy of my newest book, catalytic Leadership, I'd love to put a copy in your hands. If you go to catalyticleadershipbook. com, you can get a copy for free. Just pay the shipping so I can get it to you and we'll get one right out. My goal is to put this into the hands of as many leaders as possible. This book captures principles that I've learned in 20 plus years of coaching leaders in the entrepreneurial space, in business, government, nonprofits, education and the local church. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about and if you're ready to take a next step with a coach to help you intentionally grow and thrive as a leader. I'd be honored to help you. Just go to catalyticleadershipnet to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, leaders choose to be catalytic.

Intro / Outro: 31:30

Thanks for listening to Catalytic Leadership with Dr William Attaway. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode. Want more? Go to catalyticleadershipnet.