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Chad Kodary (00:01.326)
What's going on everybody? Welcome to another episode of behind the revenue. And this time we have my good friend, Nathan Hirsch from accounts balance coming on here. Now, Nathan, I've, I've once again, I've seen your journey for many years now. I know we're friends on Facebook. You've, you've, you've had companies, you've exited companies, you're starting new companies. Your, your momentum is crazy and infectious. Um, just for some context for the viewers, if you can just tell them.
Tell everybody what you do, who you are, give them a little one or two minute spiel here.
Nathan Hirsch (00:35.65)
Yeah, and Chad, pumped to be here. I don't know what year you started DashClicks, but I think it was around when I started FreeUp. So we've both kind of been on Facebook, following each other in connection. So it's fun to connect on this podcast. I'm a long time entrepreneur. I've never had a real job. I started out of my college dorm room, buying and selling textbooks. And that led me to the Amazon space in the early days of being an Amazon seller, 2008, 2009, and really just capitalize on the timing, created this.
Chad Kodary (00:42.572)
Yeah.
Nathan Hirsch (01:04.258)
really cashflow positive Amazon business and ended up selling $25 million over six years from my sophomore year in college to four or five years after college and really grew that business using virtual assistants, using freelancers. I was in my twenties, hiring college kids was unreliable, hiring adults was scary. So I started hiring a lot of VAs and freelancers and that became the next company free up. I started offering these VAs and freelancers to
different e -commerce sellers, eventually other businesses, real estate agents, market agencies, stuff like that. And that became the free on marketplace. We competed with Upwork and Fiverr. We created a platform that was pre -vetted where you could go and get, hey, I need a graphic designer. And we'd introduce you to someone same day that could hit the ground running. And that business was a lot of fun. It was our first B2B site. We weren't dependent on Amazon. We could build our own website and learn SEO and partnerships and...
marketing and all the stuff that went into it. We started that with $5 ,000. We scaled it organically without any paid ads to doing $12 million a year by year four. And we were acquired in 2019 by an SEO company called The Hoth. And our claim to fame it is we had no office, no US employees. We had thousands of VAs and freelancers on the platform, but our internal team was 30 VAs in the Philippines doing everything from.
bookkeeping, to marketing, to customer service operations, you name it. And since then, my business partner and I have been growing our new portfolio of businesses. We have Outdoor School that teaches people our hiring process that they can plug into their business. We got Accounts Balance and Econ Balance, our two monthly bookkeeping brands, the same monthly bookkeeping systems that we build on our own companies. We have True SEO, our new SEO business. So my whole thing is trying to make business simpler.
focusing on hiring, finances, marketing, SEO, the boring stuff that you need to focus on to do well and really building businesses that do for other companies what we've done in the past for our companies.
Chad Kodary (03:10.67)
Dude, I love it. And most of these podcasts, I've been shamelessly asking questions that I am truly interested in. Once again, it gets, it gets the, it creates so much momentum for these conversations that we have because so a lot of the things that you said I can relate to, obviously we have a software company, you know, in regards to free up very similar space, right? We work with a lot of digital marketing agencies doing white label fulfillment. I want to kind of go back to the beginning of the journey. I want to actually start with free up.
So when you started free up, um, you said that you scaled it to $12 million per year. Um, and that was just with a team of 30 VA's, right now, how long, how long were you running free up for? How long was, you know, what was like kind of the growth period?
Nathan Hirsch (03:55.03)
Yeah, four years. So we did a million, five million, nine million, 12 million, and then exited in year four, the end of year four.
Chad Kodary (04:01.422)
And what, what do you think? Like, and you said organic without paid ads. What do you think was the biggest, or what do you know that was the biggest driving factor for such fast growth without paid ads?
Nathan Hirsch (04:12.194)
Yeah. So it's a lot of things. I mean, you start with timing, right? I had great timing for the Amazon business, free up timing was important too. Like now there's lots of different agencies, lots of different freelance services. Back then there weren't that many. And if you were an e -commerce seller, you could go to Upwork and Fiverr, but you're vetting through a lot of people that didn't have e -commerce experience. So I got to become someone who, Hey, I'm an e -commerce seller myself. I have all these VA's, e -commerce freelancers. No one else really has this and the timing helped there. So.
Chad Kodary (04:22.444)
Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Hirsch (04:41.602)
That's part of it. The second part of it is just getting that MVP out there and minimum viable product and really getting feedback early on and finding out what people like, what services people want and more of what we could do to really perfect the experience on both the client side and the freelancer side. Because whenever you're building a marketplace, you kind of have a chicken and the egg situation where like, what do you have too many clients, too many freelancers? And we had a competitive advantage because we had all these VAs and freelancers.
Amazon business that we already trusted. And then we could get them in there, get feedback from the clients, get feedback from the freelancers and make adjustments. So we did a good job doing that. Another factor is just documenting the journey. We would share everything we were doing in our newsletter, on social media, what services we're offering, who we're hiring, what process we're building, what we were doing in our software. And I think a lot of people wanted to be along for the ride and really followed us through those four years.
Chad Kodary (05:37.038)
Oh yeah, they love that.
Nathan Hirsch (05:39.618)
kind of like you do now in the podcast, just how you create content matters. And the last thing that was really important and I'll stop talking is affiliates. We create an affiliate program for the freelancers where if they referred someone, they would get paid ongoing for every hour that person worked forever. And same thing on the client side. If clients referred, they'd get reoccurring. So on both sides, people would say, hey, I like free up and just tell everyone else about it. So we would just be getting constant referrals and
people that were on the platform, because leakage is a big issue with Upwork and Fiverr, they would want to stay on the platform because the more people that they would refer, if those people stayed on the platform, they would keep making money as well. So it was like this big community that wanted to stay on the platform and wanted to keep building and wanted to keep growing with us.
Chad Kodary (06:26.254)
and were most of the v a's that you guys have what countries primarily was it primarily philippines
Nathan Hirsch (06:32.226)
Yeah, I think the breakdown when we sold it was 40 % Philippines, 40 % US and 20 % scattered around the world. That wasn't necessarily by design. We knew a lot of people in the Philippines, so we got a ton of referrals from there, but we would get thousands of applicants every week and just let on the best of the best, regardless of where they were from. And it just ended up being that breakdown.
Chad Kodary (06:54.542)
So year four, $12 million in revenue. What made you want to exit? Did somebody did the, I know the Hoff brought you guys out. Did they approach you? Were you guys in talks? Were you ready to sell and start maybe went to like an M and a broker and started, you know, going through the sales process. What did that peel back in there?
Nathan Hirsch (07:13.186)
Yeah, so, and I had this conversation with someone yesterday. We build all our businesses to be sellable in the sense that they have really good teams, really good processes. I'm not personally in fulfillment and they make money or they hopefully make money, have good cashflow. So we were in the position going the year forward, we had this super profitable business. It was really lean, right? We didn't have an office, no overhead, some software costs, some team costs. That was pretty much it. And it was incredibly cashflow positive. I think you and I both live in the cashflow.
positive space, but a lot of companies are not cash flow positive. I work with e -commerce companies that are constantly buying inventory and selling it and all that. With us, we would get paid by the client, take our percentage, pay the freelancer on delay. So we always had cash on hand. So we were kind of the position where, hey, we've gotten this to 12 million. Things are probably going to have to change if we were going to get it to 25 million. Maybe we would have to hire us people, hire an office, increase expenses, maybe find ourselves in a position where.
We're doing more revenue, but making less money because we've had to increase expenses there. This was pre -COVID, so economy was at an all -time high, definitely a factor. And we got approached by one of our clients, the Hoth, who their message was, hey, we like free up, we use free up, we don't build businesses, we buy them, and we want to get into the freelance space. Would you guys be interested in being acquired? So we kind of heard them out and...
Chad Kodary (08:22.094)
God bless you there.
Nathan Hirsch (08:39.618)
Like I said before, timing is a factor too. When we started, not much competition. By year four, lots of competition, lots of people trying to copy us. So all factors and obviously that the money is a factor too. They offered us life -changing money and we did a lot of due diligence on them to make sure we were selling it to good people that weren't going to hurt our reputation or run the business in the ground or hurt our team. But that's kind of a little glimpse into what was going through our head and all the things that we were weighing at the time, pros and cons.
Chad Kodary (09:09.358)
Yeah. Were you guys considered at the time when selling, were you getting multiples as if you were a SAS company?
Nathan Hirsch (09:14.914)
Kind of the in -between, we were in kind of that six to 10 range. I think SAS can go even above that if you have the right SAS model.
Chad Kodary (09:21.806)
Yep. And it's just, you said it was you and you have a partner, right?
Nathan Hirsch (09:25.154)
Yeah, we were 50 -50 partners. We had a developer too that had a small equity percentage as well if the company sold.
Chad Kodary (09:31.82)
Nice. And when you were doing, I don't know if you're allowed to share these numbers, but I'll ask anyways, when you were doing the $12 million, what were you guys netting? Like what does the net look like at a company of that size?
Nathan Hirsch (09:42.434)
Yeah, I won't share exact numbers probably against our NDA, but I mean, we were having months that were well over 100K in net profit. So the company was doing pretty well.
Chad Kodary (09:50.894)
That's awesome. Yeah. And what was, I guess, from the vision from the Hoth, what did they really want to do with the cut? Like, what did they actually do with it? Because I think when you sold it, honestly, I just stopped following. I stopped following it. I really know nothing about free up for the last couple of years. So like, what are they doing right now? What did the Hoth ended up? How they integrated into their ecosystem?
Nathan Hirsch (10:11.362)
Yeah, the free up still running. Connor and I were just chatting about this the other day. It's approaching the 10 year mark, which is kind of cool. Like not many businesses hit the 10 year mark, even though we don't own anymore. It's kind of a proud accomplishment of ours. And I mean, they own a conglomerate of businesses. The Hoth is the one everyone knows, but they really own 15 different companies and they're constantly buying companies too. So they kind of saw two sides of it. One, they can offer it to their current client base and continue to grow it and offer freelancers and VAs. But...
Chad Kodary (10:18.158)
Wow.
Nathan Hirsch (10:41.162)
all of a sudden they could get VAs and freelancers at cost for their other companies. So they now have gone and become free apps, biggest client and just have gotten all these VAs and freelancers to support their other companies and lower the overhead there. So that was kind of their mentality and why they were interested.
Chad Kodary (10:47.052)
Mmm.
Chad Kodary (10:57.902)
That's cool. That's, that's actually genius. Uh, so the, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
Nathan Hirsch (11:02.242)
Yeah, smart, right?
Chad Kodary (11:18.798)
10 points on that, whatever your EBITDA was. Like we can imagine obviously that it was life changing money. You're talking about, I'm assuming multiple seven figures or eight figures was the exit.
Nathan Hirsch (11:28.898)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was life changing money. I could probably not work for the next 40 years and be fine, depending on what I decide to do with money. But yeah, it allowed me to buy a second house. My wife and I became foster parents. I moved to Colorado. I think one thing that doesn't really get talked about is the original plan was to take a year off and travel. I didn't think I would see Connor for a year. I thought he'd be traveling the world, but we sold it in November 2020, COVID or 2019, sorry.
Chad Kodary (11:37.678)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (11:42.958)
Amazing, dude.
Nathan Hirsch (11:58.21)
COVID hit like five months after that. So then we were in a weird spot where we were stuck inside like everyone else with nothing to do and no business ideas. All we had done for four years was 24 seven free up. And so we kind of had to start brainstorming or we didn't have to, but we decided to start brainstorming business ideas before we probably would have it if COVID hadn't happened.
Chad Kodary (12:18.286)
did it. I think just as entrepreneurs, like most people say that they'll sell them, they want to retire, right. But in air quotes, it's very hard to do that. Because when you retire, you really just sit at home. And for us as entrepreneurs, like we want to do things. It's like a game. I would just, I just interviewed Alex Sharpen yesterday on our podcast. And we were literally talking about how business is like a game, like there's levels and you just want to just keep going and achieving and like, it's like playing Mario or whatever, trying to get to this next world, right?
And, um, and I think for you, I am assuming now your next world is accounts balance, econ balance. I know you have the two brands, right? And they just launched a, an SEO company, I think not too long ago. So like, I know that you're, when you say portfolio, how are you structured this portfolio? Is it just, are you just going to keep building these brands, setting up these processes, getting them scaled up to a certain amount, you know, whatever that amount is, and then putting a leadership in place.
Nathan Hirsch (13:14.402)
Yeah, we're kind of flipping that. We put the leadership in place first. So we're on the hunt for operators. We have all these business ideas and when we find the right operator, that's when we actually go and implement and start it. So like bookkeeping, I'm not a bookkeeper, Connor's not a bookkeeper. So if we're going to start a bookkeeping business, we need a bookkeeper. We look for a while to find our controller with a lot of experience and someone who's run a bookkeeping business before. And when we did, we put her in charge, we built around her, we hired a team around her, built the marketing process.
Chad Kodary (13:18.926)
Mmm. Cool.
Chad Kodary (13:32.174)
Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Hirsch (13:43.874)
all the stuff that we know how to do, but Connor and I aren't doing the bookkeeping from day one and we're really out of operations and did the same thing with SEO, looked for a year plus, finally found Steven Snyder, a really good SEO guy, ran an SEO agency before again and put him in charge and built the team around him. So that's kind of what we're always looking for. And you're right. It is kind of a game. Like hopefully none of these businesses fail and I still want them to succeed, but if they do, it's not like I'm going to be homeless on the street, but we're treating it as something that's
Chad Kodary (14:06.446)
Yeah. Of course, of course. Yeah.
Nathan Hirsch (14:13.314)
fun, we want it to succeed. If it does succeed, it helps a lot of other people, our team, our clients, but besides us. And we're kind of looking for those opportunities of how do we find something boring like bookkeeping, like SEO, outdoor school, like stuff that isn't creating the next Uber, but that we can just go into the market, take our small percentage, have a really good customer service experience behind it, a really good operator and spin it up and see what happens. And that's kind of the fun part.
Chad Kodary (14:39.182)
and these businesses that you're building, what do you, cause you've built a couple of them already. You just named three of them. Um, how long does it usually get to the point where it's like, cause when you, you know, from idea to actually like iteration phase, like, especially if you're building software, it takes time, right? How long do these take? These businesses take to just get off the ground to where you can actually start selling the product.
Nathan Hirsch (14:58.914)
So I am always in the mentality to sell as soon as humanly possible with the caveat that you tell the initial people like, hey, I'm going to hook you up on price or something free, some kind of promo in exchange for feedback. Understanding the process is going to break, hopefully a testimonial once we actually hit the ground running. And so even to back up, this is what kind of frustrated me when I would go to entrepreneurship communities in Florida. Everyone would be like, all right, once I get $500 ,000, once I raise all this money,
then I'll go out and get a client, then I'll go out and like prove it. And to me, it's always backwards. It's like, I'll prove it, I'll sell it. And if I can't sell it or I can't give it away for free, like for accounts balance, the econ balance, we gave out two free months of bookkeeping. If I can't give out two free months of bookkeeping, there's probably no market. Or if I can't give out two free months of bookkeeping and keep those clients around afterwards, again, probably not a good business idea. So even like free up, we gave out free VA hours, out for school, we gave a discount to people who...
Chad Kodary (15:32.268)
Yeah.
Nathan Hirsch (15:56.77)
bought pre -sale before we even built the course. So we had sales before we even actually built everything. That's kind of been my mentality for every business is like prove you can get sales and everything else you can build as long as you set the right expectations with those initial clients and treat them well and have that trust factor. So they spin up pretty quick. There's always a low period after you get those beta clients where you don't want to grow too fast and add a lot of people before you build out all the processes, but that's kind of how we approach it.
Chad Kodary (16:26.382)
these these three brands that you have right now what's like team size for each one of them how big are they?
Nathan Hirsch (16:31.106)
Yeah, Outdoor School is super lean. We've got three VAs there. One of them is part -time. Econ Balance is probably a little bit different than other businesses we've run because it's like a bookkeeping service and bookkeepers behind it. So we've got about 15 bookkeepers and a controller. And we actually have a marketing team that works on Conner, my personal brand and all the companies. So the expenses for that is split between the companies. And then at Trio SEO is small. It's like six people.
Chad Kodary (16:52.238)
Got you.
Chad Kodary (16:58.702)
Gotcha. And what's like, I know you and your partner, Connor, what, what do you do? What does Connor do? What's like, cause there's always like in these, this, these partnerships, I'm assuming you guys are not holding the same role or doing the same thing. Like who's good at what? What do you guys do when you, when you log in in the morning?
Nathan Hirsch (17:14.338)
Yeah, I'm much more on the operations, customer service, face podcasts, stuff like that. We both have personal brands that we use, but inside the company, Connor's much more on the marketing team, the creating content, and then working with the developers as well. He's more out of the operation.
Chad Kodary (17:32.366)
Gotcha. And are any of the companies that you're running right now, are you running paid ads or are you still using organic to kind of grow it?
Nathan Hirsch (17:39.714)
Still user organic. So we have this crazy idea for like our media company, just for lack of a better word, where Connor and I use our personal brands to promote these different businesses. And we kind of have stepping stones. So we got kind of the foundation in place early this year and the last year where we've got craft designers, video editors, social media people. And then really the next step off of that is how do you improve strategy? How do you incorporate paid ads? So it's something that's on our horizon.
Chad Kodary (17:41.934)
Wow.
Nathan Hirsch (18:08.034)
It's probably my weakness as an entrepreneur. It's something that we've never really conquered. I think part of it is we never really had to conquer it. We've been in positions where we've gotten more clients than we know what to do with without it. But I do see the benefit of it and I do see opportunity there. And some of it's also a business model, like free up is just a hard business to run ads to because it's a lot of stop and start. Someone might hear about you today, create a free account, need a freelancer in six months.
Chad Kodary (18:13.198)
Me too.
Nathan Hirsch (18:35.714)
Some people might hire someone full time. Some people might be project -based ongoing. So it's hard to measure like ROI on ads, whereas like Outdoor School would be way better for that because you can track how many core sales you get, you know.
Chad Kodary (18:45.934)
instant.
Yeah, that's instant. It's funny because we're, we're very similar. Um, uh, in fact, I believe 99 % of our traffic and signups come from organic. Whereas like a slither comes from ads. We barely even run ads. We, in fact, we just really started running ads. We brought on, uh, an ads person that's just doing ads for DashClicks now full time. Um, and we started with Facebook and IG, and this was like, maybe like a couple of months ago, like three, four months ago. And we've been in business for like six years. So it's like organic for me is fun.
Nathan Hirsch (19:14.914)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (19:17.602)
What's the what's your favorite? Let's peel the onion back here because this is this is my cup of tea now What's your favorite organic channel that you see that maybe not your favorite? But what works best for you guys? What brings you guys the most revenue and leads?
Nathan Hirsch (19:30.178)
Yeah, so we have this organic marketing blueprint and if anyone wants to grab it, go to OutsourceSchool .com slash organic marketing and it's really the same thing we've been running for years. Number one is podcasts like this. Podcasts are great. You get in front of thousands of people at once. You can repurpose it into other content. It's good for networking like you and I know each other, but for plenty of times I'll go on podcasts and meet someone that is an influencer in a space that I never really would have met if I wasn't on the podcast.
It's good for SEO. I don't think that gets talked about enough backlinks. Hopefully you add backlinks for all of our companies and the show notes and stuff like that. And so SEO or podcast is a big part. SEO, sorry, jump in.
Chad Kodary (20:07.598)
question for you before you. Yeah. Quick question. Cause I want to say one thing about the podcast. So your podcast strategy, you have, you guys have your own podcast or you just jumping on other people's podcasts.
Nathan Hirsch (20:18.338)
other people's podcasts. So we had a pod, we hit, we created a podcast in year, like the beginning of year four and free up. So we had it for like six months or so, maybe more before we, we sold the company. So I personally am trying to create businesses that don't require me to say, Hey, you gotta be here at this specific time. So I don't want to be a podcast host. It's the same reason I'm retired from conferences and any work travel. I'm, I'm really only interested in running businesses that don't require to meet, be anywhere at a certain time. And.
I'll go on podcasts and I didn't reschedule on you, but like if I can't do it, I'll easily reschedule and stuff like that. Um, I dunno, for me being a podcast host doesn't really interest me.
Chad Kodary (20:57.294)
And the people that bring you onto POSC podcast, is it just people that invite you or do you have some, cause I know a lot of companies actually hire company that will get you on just a bunch of podcasts.
Nathan Hirsch (21:07.714)
So we have a podcast outreach formula that you can, it's part of Outdoor School. You can grab it separately, Outsourcedschool .com slash podcast. And it's essentially how to have a VAB or podcast booker. So you can hire different companies. We've done that in the past. For me, I always ran into issues cause I'm pretty good at getting on podcasts. So I'd hire these companies and say, I'll pay you, but you can only get me on top podcasts that I approve. And they didn't really like that that much. So we kind of got away from that.
And now I'm a little bit, I do less podcasts. I'm a little bit pickier on podcasts that I go on. So I don't do that much outreach. Usually it's people reaching out to me or someone connecting me with someone, something along those lines.
Chad Kodary (21:46.51)
Gotcha. So, okay. So podcast, I know the next one you're about to jump into is SEO, right? And I know that I think Connor's like an SEO whiz.
Nathan Hirsch (21:50.978)
Yep. Yeah, Connor has just been crushing SEO. Really when we started FreeUp, he just dove into that and became a master. And if you go to like any of our blogs, econbalance .com slash blog, afterschool .com slash blog, we just put out really high quality content from the day one of the company and continue to rank over time and compete against the giants with really good SEO. So I know you're an SEO guy. You get that, but our blog is just always running in the background. All for that is partnerships where...
Chad Kodary (22:14.638)
Yeah.
Nathan Hirsch (22:20.386)
Big proponent of that, again, any of our sites slash partners, you can see our partner directory. That's kind of a quick hack that we build out. And it's good for backlinks, which is also good for SEO, but it's good to just get in front of other people's audiences. We have all these lead magnets and we'll go to someone and hey, promote ours to your newsletter, vice versa. And we're always trying to do guest posts, blog articles, videos, whatever mutual distribution we can do of stuff. So partnerships is a big piece there.
I don't know if you want to jump in before I keep going.
Chad Kodary (22:52.494)
No dude, yeah, keep going man. Yeah, this is the stuff. This is the stuff that turns me on. So go for it.
Nathan Hirsch (22:56.674)
Yeah, yeah. Me too. Social media, I know your social media game is strong. I like to think mine is okay too. So we're constantly posting on all social media sites and I have a social media team now that helps for that. You can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, you name it. So yeah.
Chad Kodary (23:11.918)
So.
I have a question on that too. So let's dive into that one. Cause that's something that I'm working on right now. Um, in fact, with this podcast, my whole strategy, I've been doing organic, um, marketing and I think one of my, I guess I'll say talents or something that I've been just doing it for a long time is, um, creating content and finding good ways to repurpose it. Right. Um, so just rebus redistributing it across many different channels. So for this podcast is an example, we basically shoot these podcasts and then I have an admin that basically runs my whole podcast.
and she'll actually take the podcast. She'll chop it up. We put it on YouTube. We put it on transistor, which distributes it to like 20 different networks.
Then we create reels out of it. And then we create blogs from the podcast, post that to our actual website. And obviously all the reels go across all socials. Um, what is, what's your strategy for content? Because I'm doing this now and maybe I can learn something that you're doing that I can kind of plug into my ecosystem. Like what's working now that's crushing it. I know I hear all this talk about, you know, viral and trying to go viral, right? Trying to get viral videos on Tik TOK and Instagram and all that stuff. I just had a Rachel Miller on, we did a whole talk about.
you know, creating like viral organic content. But what's your spin on it? What are you doing? What's the secret sauce?
Nathan Hirsch (24:27.522)
Yeah, I love Rachel. She's the best. She's another person that started like right when I was starting at FreeOps. So it's been cool to see her grow. Yeah, for me, I tend to focus less on what is the latest hack of each particular platform. My team's always doing research and I kind of leave that on them. It's more about putting out consistently good content. And again, keeping it simple, focusing on the fundamentals, which is a strong hook.
Chad Kodary (24:30.766)
Awesome, dude. Yeah.
Nathan Hirsch (24:52.162)
really good content that actually helps people around my brand of keeping entrepreneurship simple and using my systems and some kind of call to action. Usually my lead magnets or one of my websites or an offer or something like that. So we have this big database of content. I think that's my biggest tip is as you're making content, make sure you're keeping track of it in some way and you can reuse it and repurpose it. And for me, I'm kind of doing the same thing as you are where instead of my own podcast, I go on these podcasts.
I asked you before for the raw footage, we'll take that, we'll chop it up, we'll do the same thing. And everything can be used in lots of different ways. Like I'll have a video that'll also be a tech that will also turn into a carousel. And it's a lot of testing and experimenting and trying. Rachel's probably the expert in going viral over me. But for me, it's just consistently putting out good content on channels and then having a system with my team that's connecting with relevant people.
Chad Kodary (25:21.376)
Yeah.
Nathan Hirsch (25:46.946)
people who are clients, people who are leads, people who are partners. So I'm connected with you hopefully on all these different channels that you're also on and getting in front of the same people over and over and over.
Chad Kodary (25:57.166)
And when you, when you create, let's say, you know, at the end of this, I give you this, this raw video, you, you hand it off to your team. Um, they're just going to chop it up. They're going to create a bunch of reels, uh, and where are they posting it? What channels are you really just, are you district? Like the norm is it tick tock, IG, Facebook reels? What are you doing with the content? Where do you put it?
Nathan Hirsch (26:16.578)
Yeah, so they'll make long footage, five to 10 minutes of this and put it on YouTube. Each of our companies have a different YouTube channel. I have my own personal YouTube channel. So it just depends on what the content is. I'm wearing an accounts balance shirt. So they'll probably try to put it on the accounts balance channel. And yeah, then the reels, like you said, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, I'll turn the one minute clips. I'll put them all on YouTube as well. They all get put there. And then we'll put them on like LinkedIn once a week, not as much, but do they, we, we,
Chad Kodary (26:22.028)
Okay
Chad Kodary (26:40.174)
Yep.
Nathan Hirsch (26:45.878)
Experiment with video and carousels and everything on LinkedIn as well.
Chad Kodary (26:50.126)
What's what's channel do you think brings you guys the most traffic?
Nathan Hirsch (26:54.338)
For me personally, my Facebook and my LinkedIn are ahead of the others. If I could do it over again. So when I sold free up, I kind of just took a break from social media. I just disappeared off of it. If I could do it over again. Yeah. If I would have started just building all these brands like Instagram has always been kind of that middle one. And then I kind of ignored Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. And so we're kind of playing catch up on those and just kind of letting it play out and being consistent. But.
Chad Kodary (27:05.312)
Dude, I'd do the same thing.
Nathan Hirsch (27:20.8)
Most of it right now is Facebook and LinkedIn and the other ones are starting to see traction.
Chad Kodary (27:25.774)
And you have basically all of these social channels for each one of the brands. Plus you also have your, your personal brand at the same time and Connors. So.
Nathan Hirsch (27:33.866)
Yeah, yes and no. So like, like we'll have a Facebook page and a LinkedIn page, but that's not a big source of traffic. It's not something we put a lot of effort into. We'll have a YouTube for every single company that we put more effort into. And then Connor and I really use our personal brands on the different channels to drive.
Chad Kodary (27:42.646)
Got you, okay.
Chad Kodary (27:51.47)
So you're saying personal brands is really where most of these posts are going out where all the the contents getting pushed out into?
Nathan Hirsch (27:57.286)
Correct. And then we'll have blogs for each of our company. We'll put out content there as well. Connor and my strategy is use our personal brand to promote or phone them people to the different businesses.
Chad Kodary (28:07.694)
Dude, it's working. I mean, you're, you're running organic companies that are doing millions of dollars in sales. People can't even do that with ads. Yeah. So.
Nathan Hirsch (28:13.954)
I appreciate it. Hopefully you and I figure out how to be fun.
Chad Kodary (28:18.286)
Yeah, well, I'm, I'm, I'm working. Well, I'm technically not working on it. Somebody's working on it, but hopefully they figure it out. Um, but, uh, yeah, but, uh, I'm just the dude who creates a bunch of videos for him. Um, so I got another question for you. So you have all of these processes that you guys have, you have multiple different companies. Where do you, where do you have, or where are you putting AI in place?
Nathan Hirsch (28:40.738)
Yeah, it's a -
Chad Kodary (28:40.782)
Are you using like for me, like I just, just to kind of like get this combo started about all AI, like for me, I would love to use AI to take these videos and chop them up into reels with like Opus .ai or like, you know, all these other different AI tools. Are you using air? Are you taking advantage of it?
Nathan Hirsch (28:58.178)
We're using AI in certain things. So a big thing that we try to do is empower our team to be testing and do research and development and be using AI. There's a lot of stuff in operations that we're able to use AI to benefit. So an example of that is our bookkeepers are very good at bookkeeping. They're not the best at like writing emails to clients. So we want a really good client experience. So we've used AI to help them create templates and baselines to...
Kind of get over that hump of being scared to email people. Uh, so that that's part of it too, but like in content creation, we'll, we have different AI tools for like our SEO business for, um, creating outlines and stuff. We still use real writers to write the articles, but there'll be parts in the process that we're using AI to save us time and research and really taking data and putting it together. Um, and then our own content, like I won't really use AI cause I'm not editing the videos, but our video editors will use AI incorporate that in the process. And.
Chad Kodary (29:43.822)
Sure.
Nathan Hirsch (29:53.986)
they're always keeping track of how things change. So it's more about empowering my teams to do it. And kind of similar to like you, I find myself sometimes where I'm the guy creating videos and I'm just passing it to my team and they're kind of going through the process that I created. Now, if you go back six months ago, I was taking the video, I was uploading that, I was building a process and then I hired a team to do it. So I've kind of been able to take a step back and empower my team to take that over.
Chad Kodary (30:17.614)
Yep. Another question I have for you is I know you you're working on, uh, uh, three different brands right now, and maybe some others that you got up your sleeve that you're probably working on. How do you have the time to work on multiple companies and still make them successful? It's very difficult to do that. I know that because, uh, like right now we run two companies, we run DashClicks, and then we run our marketing agency, social agency, which has just been open since Oh nine. Right. And, but how, how do you, how do you do that with multiple different companies?
Nathan Hirsch (30:47.842)
Yeah. So this has kind of been our like personal challenge. Cause before, if you go to free up, all it was for four years was easily free up. We didn't think of it. We weren't brainstorming other ideas. We weren't working on anything else. We didn't have side projects. It was just free up 24 seven. And it's great cause we exit and all that, but it could have also gone in the other direction where you put all your eggs in one basket and it doesn't work. And that happens to lots of entrepreneurs. So from, from our side, we like the diversification and it really comes down to the operators. If, if Connor and I were in the operations of
Chad Kodary (30:56.686)
Yeah.
Chad Kodary (31:09.9)
Yep.
Nathan Hirsch (31:17.602)
three plus different businesses, we'd be stressed out all the time. We wouldn't have any time to do anything else. So really removing ourselves and empowering our team to like put out files, fires, make decisions, like implement technology, buy things that they need. And that's a big part of it. And really just run high level strategy or like bigger issues bias where we can have like three meetings on a Monday, go through each company, meet with the operators and put things in place that they'll go implement for the next year and over the next week.
And for us really being able to focus a lot on the customer experience, the strategy, the hiring, and then the marketing and working on our brand. So we'll spend 50 % plus of our time on the marketing, on the strategy, on the content and working with those teams because we know the operators are in place. And then the other 50%, we can divide between the companies, really helping the operators make decisions. They become operators because...
They have an entrepreneur spirit. They like entrepreneurship, but they don't want the risk and having to like put it, their own skin in the game and stuff like that. So we balance that out by saying, Hey, based on our experience, this is what we would do. These are the hires we should make. Here's what, here's where you should be posting the job. Here's what you should factor in. Here's how you should run this meeting or solve this problem and then empower them to do it. So we almost find ourselves as like executives or consultants on the operating side, helping them and then empowering that. And then spending most of our time on the marketing. And when we're doing on the marketing.
that goes into all three companies. We're spreading out our content to help all three companies get clients, if that makes sense.
Chad Kodary (32:48.846)
Yeah, it's genius. Yeah, it's great. And I think a lot of your companies during the similar space, they serve very kind of similar people, right? So it's easy to also cross sell in between a lot of your a lot of the companies that you're doing, like I'm assuming like accounts balance and your SEO company can easily cross sell to each other, which is, yeah, it's the best dude.
Nathan Hirsch (33:06.594)
Yeah, absolutely. That's my favorite part when you have a client that signs up for all three or two out of the three or whatever.
Chad Kodary (33:11.63)
Yeah. Like in DashClicks we have three, DashClicks is like this, I feel like the way that we look at it, it's like almost this umbrella, but within DashClicks, there's really three businesses. And if you're like looking at DashClicks in the backend, it's run by like, there's three different leadership people. It's like, it's, it's, there's teams that are built out and we have our software, right? Which is like our development team and you know, our QA and all that stuff. Right. We have our fulfillment, right? Which is all of our fulfillment guys, the guys that are like literally doing a CEO and Facebook ads and all that stuff.
And then we have our coaching side, which is like our, our education products, our coaching program courses, things like that. Right. And then what's really cool about it is once somebody comes into that umbrella, they literally just go like a ping pong ball in between. They start eating up all of the products. Right. So it allows us to move super fast. We don't basically have to acquire three clients. We just acquire one as an example, and they'll start buying multiple things. People will come in.
and purchase fulfillment and then jump and start using our software or buy our coaching programs, right? And stuff like that. So it's been, it's been a pretty cool journey for us to be able to position that. Um, and that's basically what we, you know, we want to scale out and hopefully one day exit, right? I think everybody has the same thing in mind. So, um, so three businesses with one exit, where do you see yourself like, you know, one, two years or is your goal to just keep building like these portfolio companies and see how, how big you can get this portfolio to.
Nathan Hirsch (34:26.498)
Love it.
Nathan Hirsch (34:38.786)
Yeah, absolutely. That's really the goal. We have other ideas that I probably won't share, but things that if we find the right operator, we'll implement. And that's pretty much it. I mean, I'm just enjoying it. I think I told you I'm a new dad. It sounds like you are as well. So trying to balance it. Like I took a paternity leave at the end of last year and just trying to, not even trying. Like if you free up, I was young, I was hustling 24 seven, like now I'm done at three. I don't work weekends. I don't travel for work. So I kind of have like,
Chad Kodary (34:44.59)
Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't.
Chad Kodary (34:53.71)
Yep.
Nathan Hirsch (35:07.81)
my thing that I'm doing every single day, but then I'm also able to just live and enjoy life and everything kind of around it. And that's my goal is to hopefully own 10 companies, but not be working 80 hours a week on them, you know.
Chad Kodary (35:20.494)
Yeah, I love that. Is your goal to when you, when you want to do this exit, is your goal to exit with the entire portfolio? Are you going to sell these companies separately? Like, do you guys have like a vision for how you want to attack the exit?
Nathan Hirsch (35:33.026)
So I build, we build them to be sellable, but we're not pushing to sell them. Like we'll listen if someone comes with an offer for all companies, one company, two company, we'll hear them out and make the best decision possible. I mean, the other thing you to keep in mind is like, if I hadn't have sold free up, that would be probably a different answer too, because then you want to like get your first exit cash out a little bit. Now we're in the position where sure, if someone knocks our socks off or for whatever reason, we don't want to own another company, we would do it. But.
We don't have to do it. We'd rather just keep it, buy it and hold it. And the people that bought the Hoth, Mark Hargrove and David Martin have kind of become mentors to us as well. And they kind of just buy and hold companies. Kind of like I do with stocks. Like I just buy a stock and I just hold onto it for the rest of my life. I'm not really buying and trading and day trading and all of that. And I kind of look at business the same way. But I mean, if I see a stock that's crazy overvalued, sure, I'd consider selling it. Or if I get an offer that I think is really high and worth doing, I'll consider it. But the goal is to...
Chad Kodary (36:16.878)
That's cool.
Nathan Hirsch (36:29.698)
be out of operations, have a profitable cash flowing business that doesn't require a lot of my time and build a portfolio of those and then whatever happens from there happens.
Chad Kodary (36:38.798)
Yeah, I love that.
I want to, I want to ask one more question. I know we're running out of time here, but, um, another question that I have, cause I'm always curious about these, uh, you know, I had a Mikhail Dia from funnel. Lytics come on. He was talking about his whole funding process. You know, he raised, I think he said it was $3 .3 million. He was telling us the whole story was such good content. Um, and is it something that I'm truly interested in? Right. And also the exit side, right? So like when you were exiting, what did the process look like? Like, let's say like they reached out to you, right. And you're all like, cool, let's do this. We want to sell. Like, what is.
How long was that time frame? What did the process look like? Was it a headache? Was it hell? Like, can you walk me through that?
Nathan Hirsch (37:16.77)
Definitely, one quick note on funding. I'm very anti -funding. I don't wanna go to bed at night knowing that I'm working with other people's money. That seems stressful. I'd rather go slower with my own money and only be risking my own stuff. I don't wanna be reporting to other people or have investors or anything like that. So that's not my thing. Yeah, so they reached out to us and they had an initial call with us and asked us some like high level questions about the company and.
Chad Kodary (37:33.422)
I like that. Yeah. We're bootstrapped too, so I get it.
Nathan Hirsch (37:44.546)
They were clients of the company too, so they were already very familiar with how it worked. From there, they ended up making us an offer and submitting an LOI and Connor and I talked about it for a while, went through the pros and cons that you and I went over and made a decision to accept it. And then the due dill, what?
Chad Kodary (38:00.686)
How long did that take? Like, how long did you sit on that? How long did you sit on that? That's a big decision, dude. That's your like a baby, right? It's like, like, it's like DahsClicks like my baby, right? So it's like, it's, it's a hard decision to two weeks made a decision. Obviously the decision was yes. What happened from there?
Nathan Hirsch (38:04.578)
Probably like two weeks, like a week or two. Like we didn't want to take too long, but.
Right.
Nathan Hirsch (38:18.786)
Yeah, and we went into it saying, hey, we're going to act the entire time. Like this deal is not going through. That means we're going to stay focused on growing this business. We know they could drop out at any second. And on the flip side, if the deal goes, does go through, there's no regrets. We're making the best decision possible based on the information that we had. And if they go turn free up into a billion dollar company, like we can't be pissed off about that either. So that was our mentality and we were both very much on the same page.
But then the due diligence began and it was supposed to be 30, 60 days ended up being six months. It was the most stressful six months of my life. I mean, they're firing over questions at us. We're sending questions right back to them. We want to know everything about them, what they were going to do with free out their past deals, their net worth, everything. That was the best advice we got is to vet them as hard as they were going to vet us. And we, the beauty of us, of what our setup is,
Chad Kodary (39:05.614)
And this is.
Nathan Hirsch (39:13.25)
We had everything ready to go. They would fire us 20 questions. We would respond same day. We had clean financials going back four years. We had numbers for everything. We had detailed SOPs and they even told us that we responded faster than anyone else they had ever gone through a deal with because we just had all the processes. We knew our numbers really well. So that was a few weeks back and forth of questions and then the lawyers got involved and that's when it just grinded to a slow stop. I mean,
For us, it was the biggest moment of our life. For our lawyers, it's another Tuesday. They're doing these deals all the time. They go on vacation. They have other projects that come up. And it wasn't really their fault or our fault. Both lawyers were great, in my opinion. But their lawyers are trying to protect them. Our lawyers are trying to protect us, going back and forth over every little detail. And every day we'd wake up and we're like, hey, are we going to get an email that the deal's off? Are we going to get more red lines from one of the lawyers?
Chad Kodary (39:45.262)
Yeah, they don't care.
Chad Kodary (40:07.182)
Gary, dude.
Nathan Hirsch (40:09.216)
saying, hey, we need to go through this part. And like months and months went by going back and forth. And finally there were like two or three things that we were not on the same page from, and there was a possibility the deal was going to fall through. And I just went around the lawyers, I called those owners, I said, could we just try to meet in the middle on these three things? And we talked on the phone for two hours, agreed on them, told the lawyers what it was and said no more conversation there. And Connor ended up flying to Orlando where I was.
We drove down to Tampa where they were, met at their headquarters, signed the documents and they wired us the money. And it was six months of just craziness.
Chad Kodary (40:46.126)
Dude, what does it feel like when that wire hit the bank sign of relief or cause that's a dude. You know what I mean? Like a lot of people work for a long time to make big chunks of change life, you know, life changing. And it's like, is it like a, like a breath of fresh air? It's like, Oh my God. Like I, I am okay now.
Nathan Hirsch (41:04.8)
Yeah, that -
There were three feelings. One was the relief that the process was over and just like joy and all that. There was a second feeling. If you go back to my Amazon business, so we didn't talk about this, at the beginning, we thought we were going to take down Amazon. We thought we were young, we were immature. We thought we were going to be like this next e -commerce giant. And we grew too fast. We hired too many people. We ended up, as Amazon got harder and more competitive and Amazon changed its algorithm,
we ended up laying off a lot of people, people that really cared about us and put a lot of work into the company. And that like aided us for years. It was like a big failure that was in the back of our minds. And this was like, like coming over that failure. It was like, all right, like the Amazon business, we went through it, we learned a lot, we implemented free up, free up is only around because that Amazon business failed. So it was kind of like that, that feeling of redemption, that all that hard work and all that failure had finally amounted to something.
And then third was just the emotions. We had to tell our team right after that. And we loved our team. I'm still talk to them all the time. They're great. And we had to tell them that we were selling the company and they were sad. We took $500 ,000 from the sale and gave it to our team, our internal team in the Philippines and made sure they were taken care of. And I think once they kind of saw the money, they were a little less upset, but like it was the...
Chad Kodary (42:17.39)
Amazing, dude.
Nathan Hirsch (42:26.026)
everyone's like, all right, am I going to lose my job? And you can tell them a million times, you're not going to lose your job. But in the back of their mind, they're all thinking that. So we made sure that the new owners are going to take really good care of them. But we had to have a zoom with them and tell them and go through all that. So it's kind of three different things going through our head at the same time.
Chad Kodary (42:42.062)
Did did your employees or your team know that you were selling the company when you were in the process or did you have to just kind of like hold it down and and just wait until the end?
Nathan Hirsch (42:51.266)
One of the more interesting things is we put a hard line that they couldn't talk to anyone on our team before the sale. We didn't want our team to know, we didn't tell our team, we made sure that our team was gonna be taken care of and if we couldn't secure their jobs and give them a lot of money, then we would not have gone through with the deal. But, and I don't know if I would buy a business without being able to meet the internal team. So I think the fact that we spoke highly of them, we showed them all of our SOPs, they had used FreeUp so they had the experience.
Chad Kodary (43:15.916)
Wow, yeah.
Nathan Hirsch (43:20.93)
And I think that the fact that we were giving our team a lot of money kind of showed that we like our team, obviously. So I think they put a lot of trust into that. So our team really had no idea. They were pretty shocked.
Chad Kodary (43:32.846)
And then one last question and we're going to wrap it up. When you, when you exit a company for that amount, there's always that tax, uh, that you have to pay the government. Um, what does that whole process look like? Do you just get instantly taxed at the end of the year after that big sale? Did you do some type of like exchange where you can invest? Like how does that process work?
Nathan Hirsch (43:53.762)
Yeah, so it's a good question. You definitely get a tax bill at the end of the year. It's something that we plan for. I've always been someone that holds back money for taxes. I've never really had a big issue with that. I mean, I'm also just a decently frugal person. I bought a house, but it's not like I went out and bought five different cars and spent all this money. I put the money into the SV500 and a bunch of CDs. I'm pretty boring. So we have the money, we pay taxes on it.
Chad Kodary (44:19.15)
I would have done the same.
Nathan Hirsch (44:20.672)
Whenever you do these deals, you have the money upfront and then you have the earn out. And the earn out can be dangerous too. One of the advice that I tell people is make sure you're good with the upfront money because the earn out's not guaranteed. If they run the business into the ground, you might not see it. Now, luckily that didn't happen.
Chad Kodary (44:35.502)
So can we put context on there? Put context on there really quick. What do you mean by earn out? What does that, what does that actually mean? Okay.
Nathan Hirsch (44:39.874)
So if you sell a company for five million, most deals you're not just getting five million upfront. Maybe you'll get half upfront or third upfront, or I don't know how familiar you are with the aggregator space. There were all these e -commerce aggregators that bought up all these Amazon sellers, but they did it on really bad terms for the Amazon sellers. You might be doing a five million deal, but 10 % of that you're getting upfront and the rest is earn out and the earn out is based on performance. Well, all these aggregators had no idea how to run an Amazon business.
Chad Kodary (44:50.926)
I'm not.
Nathan Hirsch (45:07.746)
ran all these businesses in the ground and people lost their baby, their business and didn't really get much out of it. So make sure you structure the deals. From our side, we approach it like, hey, this money upfront is still really good. If we don't get the earn out, we're treating the earn out as a bonus. Luckily we got the earn out. But the good thing about an earn out that you actually get is you're taxed at different years. So the earn out was spread out over the next three years. We got half upfront with the big tax bill and then you would get, you'd pay the taxes as you go, if that makes sense.
Chad Kodary (45:30.094)
Mm. Oh wow.
Chad Kodary (45:35.982)
And when it was spread out into the three years, you said it was performance based. Were you on like, did you, by the way, also maybe I had some context. Did you have to stay on for a specific amount of time after the sale?
Nathan Hirsch (45:46.658)
Yeah, good question. We wanted out. So I have my mentality again, just like I won't, I don't want to report to investors. I don't want to work for someone else. So if I was going to sell free up, I I'm happy to like answer questions here and there. Like I want free up to succeed. I want it to be a win -win deal. But I want to be out of there in like 30, 60 days. And they're, they're also not new entrepreneurs. They've done these deals before. So they know once you sell it, the owners want to be out. They, I think they, our contracts said 60 days. We were probably out of there in 30 days. They,
They wanted us out of there and we wanted the same thing. So we were out of there pretty quick here and there. They'd hit us up with questions or our advice and we were happy to do that. But we did not want to stay on. I have a buddy, I won't tell his name, but he sold a larger business in free up and his contract was like, Hey, he's got to be up for on the working for them for three years. And I told him after the sale, I'm like, dude, are you sure you're going to hate this? Like you are not going to want to work for this company for three years. And.
Chad Kodary (46:35.918)
Oh. Dude.
Nathan Hirsch (46:41.25)
Sure enough, a year in, he renegotiated and got out and he said that was the worst year of his life. So be careful staying on. And to go back to your point, another thing with earn out you don't want to do is make it so that they're based on the business doing better, right? Like you only get the earn out if we grow from 5 million to 10 million. Like that's pretty risky.
Chad Kodary (47:01.23)
That's what I was getting at. Yeah, that's what I was getting. I was what I was going to ask you. So what was, are you allowed to say what the earn out performance was?
Nathan Hirsch (47:09.442)
Yeah, so the best way to do it, in my opinion, and what's fair for both sides is you do it a percentage of revenue. So every month the company has revenue, you're just getting a small percentage of that up to a certain amount with a certain length of time. So four or five years, you get a percentage and then it's good for both sides because if the business does really well, you're getting your earn out money faster and the business does poorly unless they just shut down tomorrow. You're still getting paid each of those months until it does get shut down.
Chad Kodary (47:21.9)
Mmm, I got you.
Chad Kodary (47:29.614)
rather than, yeah.
Chad Kodary (47:37.39)
Wow, dude, I learned a lot on here. All right. I know we're out of time. I know I can go on for days. Uh, Nathan, if somebody's interested in anything that you said today on the podcast, where's the best place that they can hit you up.
Nathan Hirsch (47:49.538)
Yeah, check me out, Nathan Hirsch on any social media channel. If you're an agency listening and you need bookkeeping, check out Accounts Balance or Hiring Outsource School. And yeah, appreciate you having me on.
Chad Kodary (47:56.406)
Yeah.
course man thanks so much and enjoy the rest of your day.
Nathan Hirsch (48:01.698)
You too.