Dillon: Hello everybody! This is Dillon Holst and today, I am joined by the founder and CEO of Freeeup, Nathan Hirsch. Nathan is a serial entrepreneur. He is an expert in remote hiring and e-commerce in general. Nathan, thank you for being on with us today. Nathan: Dillon, that's for having me. Dillon: One of the things that I found interesting, just browsing through your site, how many people it seems, really have latched onto this idea of remote hiring and are really excited about the things that it can do, just in terms of either augmenting, or completely staffing their workforce. Maybe you could just give me a little bit of background about how you were introduced to the idea of remote hiring and how you decided to kind of make this your thing. Nathan: Sure, so, going way back, when I was 20, I'm 27 right now, I started an e-commerce drop-shipping business out of my college dorm room. It quickly blew up. I was running a multi-million dollar business before I knew it. Hiring my friends for the first time. I hired my first employee before I could legally drink. I really just had no idea what I was doing. I got lucky and I made some really great hires. People who are still with me seven years later. Like every entrepreneur, I made some bad hires as well. My business was always drop-shipping, so you never have to touch any products. So, I could hire people that could work at their place or across the hall in a different room, or whatever it was. It didn't really matter whether they were with me at any point. We would have group meetings and what not to get on the same page, but, for the most part, we could be in different states or any part of the world and still do your job. When I graduated and I decided to become an entrepreneur full-time, and I moved to Florida, I actually did end up opening up an office, which I think was one of the biggest mistakes that I've made. I've hired a lot of full-time people, employees. I quickly realized that if I'm paying someone $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year, I need to get the most out of them, because I'm an efficiency person. It was really bothering me that they were spending a lot of their time doing very easy data-entry work or answering simple emails. It didn't feel like I was getting good value. I didn't feel like I was challenging them either. They enjoy their job more when they're being challenged and building rather than doing. So, a buddy of mine that was actually on my softball team when I moved down here, introduced me to oDesk, which was Upwork at the time, and I just fell in love with it. I mean, in my mind, and I'm a pretty logical person, I'm very limited in the talent that I can get in Orlando, Florida. If I open myself out to the entire world, the possibilities are endless. Not to mention the other benefits of no payroll taxes for hiring contractors, hiring, maybe outsourcing certain tasks, although, I did remote hiring, so, it wasn't all international. But, I was determined to build this army of remote workers, which I did. I found that hiring these remote workers allowed my full-time people, the people who I was paying to think rather than do repetitive tasks, would really excel and would be able to put a lot more of the company, enjoy their jobs more. We just grew so much faster, to the point where I got rid of the office and made the entire company remote, and I kind of had the idea that I wanted to help other businesses do the same thing, because, there are tricks to the trade. It took me a while, just like it took me a while to learn how to hire employees correctly, it took me a while to learn how to hire remote workers and even international workers correctly. I created Freeeup to help other business owners free up their time the way I have for the past seven years. Dillon: Sure, okay. In terms of just building a workforce, I love the fact that you identified that your most valuable employees were maybe not using their time in the most efficient manner, or the way that they might have wanted to be spending their time, do you feel like that is something that exists across all industries or is that specific to the tech industry? Basically, remote teams, is that something that can work for every industry or is it just specific industries that you see as being in need of augmentation via remote teams? Nathan: I mean, there's certainly some industries that it might not apply, if you own a bakery or something like that. But, for the most part, most businesses are online in some way, shape, or form. Even if you own that bakery, someone should run your social media, someone should build your website and run it, and all that. If you're not tapping into remote workers and talent from across the world, you're really missing out on a huge opportunity to expand your business at a fraction of the cost of what it would require to hire internal employees. Dillon: Yeah, sure, okay, so let's say somebody comes to your site and they're looking for somebody to do some specific thing, let's say data entry. What should that person be looking for in terms of qualities. What should we be looking for in people? What makes somebody a good, remote team member? Nathan: Sure, and that's one of the reasons why I created Freeeup, because, there are a lot of places out there, where you go to them, and you want to post a job, but it's hard to really figure out what you're looking for. Especially if you've never hired before, or you've never hired remotely before, and you're trying to pick out from 50 people that are in the Philippines, it can be challenging. A lot of times you don't know what to look for. From my past seven years of hiring, I have a pretty good idea of what I want to look for, and I'll get into that a little bit later. So, the cool thing about us, is we identify these people, we vet them, we test them, we have a strict communication policy that they have to follow, which I'm sure we'll touch upon later as well. Then, we make these workers available to our clients. On our site, there's very little thinking involved. You tell us what you want in terms of skill, "Hey, I have this project day, I need this full-time position," whatever it is, and we pick someone from our network that's already been pre-vetted, that we already know has those qualities, and we introduce them to you. It's really that simple. Dillon: What kind of metrics are you testing people for when they come to you and they say, "Hey, I want to be a freelancer. I want to work for you guys."? Nathan: Sure, so there's three things. One is skill. Obviously, if you're hiring someone to build your website on WordPress they have to have years of experience in WordPress. We're not that new, freelancer marketplace. People that are freelancing for the first time, they don't get into our network. Dillon: What's the requirement like there? Nathan: We want people with three plus years of experience for the most part. It can be less if it's a newer platform or something that just came out, but that's a baseline. There are really talented people that learn fast that are the exception to the rule, but, for the most part, three plus years. We have people on our team that have 10, 15 years of experience. We're really looking for that. A track record of success with past clients and years of experience. Two is their attitude. We want people that care more about money. That are workaholics. That really like working. Where work is the number one priority, or close to the number one priority in their life, and that can really care about our client's business as if it was their own, and not just doing it for the paycheck, like I said before. Then, quality number three is communication. Because, to me, communication is everything. I don't care how talented of a person that you hire, if you can't communicate with them, it's going to go south so fast you won't even believe it. Those are really the three things that we look for when we're hiring a worker. Dillon: Okay, somebody might argue that building a remote workforce could leave yourself open to people leaving early, or maybe they'll feel like you, as a company, are not investing them because you're remote. Is employee turnover more difficult to handle, I guess, when you're dealing with remote workers? Nathan: If you treat your worker like they're not part of the team, like you're just using them, and you're just giving orders, and they don't care at all about your business, the turnover is going to be high. What I teach is to change that mentality. Make them a part of the team. Make them care about your business. Make them want to be part of the journey in growing your business, and your turnover will be pretty low. I mean, we have a pretty large network of workers, and our turnover is extremely low. The lowest it's been in either of my two companies at this point. It's all about how you treat people, how you vet people. Whatever your company culture is, if you're adding people to the team that are like that culture, or if you're adding people that are more of that corporate mindset, but you're a start up, or vice verse. Anything that you can do to make people fit in to what you're building, is going to reduce turnover. To me, it's not the fact that their remote workers that leads to turnover, it's your whole attitude and how you treat people in general. Dillon: You say what you teach, do you offer resources for business owners who are using a remote workforce for the first time? How does that work? Nathan: Definitely. I mean, we offer free consulting. I do a lot of webinars and podcasts about it. We have e-books that we have continued to come out with. We have our Freeeup blog that you can check out. We always talk about building a culture, and managing people, and how to hire, and stuff like that. We have an online masterminds Facebook group that people can post questions in. We're pretty responsive. We try to answer every single one in as m
