E211: Strategic Staffing: Nathan Hirsch's Key to Scaling Businesses through Effective Team Building

[00:00:00] Ronald Skelton: Hello and welcome to How2Exit Podcast. Today I'm here with Nathan Hirsch and we are going to talk about all things growth, acquisition, exiting businesses. Man, this guy has got the skill set and the history. Looks like a young man, but he's got, he's got a lot of experience behind him and I'm looking forward to this story.

[00:00:17] Nathan Hirsch: We were chatting a little bit already. Nathan, thank you for being here today. Thanks so much for having me. I'm honored that you invited me on and I'm sure we can have a good conversation. You have a lot more experience exiting companies than I do, but I've gone through one.

[00:00:29] Ronald Skelton: I've got a couple, but the funny thing is I was doing them wrong. So I went and got trained on it. And that's kind of how I got this podcast started up is like,there's actually a whole world of this stuff that I didn't even know existed until I started interviewing people that have been there, done that.

And there's just a million ways to do deals in a twice, 2 million ways to exit them. So, and I've done most of the ones I've done wrong. So, let's start with the origin story. We always have the running joke. Hey, you kind of, you were born, now you ended up on a show about mergers and acquisitions.

How the hell did you end up here? So, uh, give us, give us kind of the background and who you are and how you ended up where you're at?

[00:01:04] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. So I grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. My parents were both teachers and I grew up with a middle class life. I mean, my parents were both loving and supportive and I had food on the table and all my friends, their parents were doctors, lawyers, dentists, entrepreneurs, business owners, whatever.

And so I always grew up feeling like I wanted more. They always had the latest video games, big houses. And so I think that was part of the drive, but my parents also made me, made me just get a job anytime I wanted something. So if I wanted to buy a video game or eventually buy a car, they weren't going to pay for it.

I had to get a job as an umpire in my town or, work at Firestone or, or rent a center type place called Aaron. So I was always working since I was a young kid. And I think that helped me just develop sales skills and customer service skills and, managing people and just being able to see what life was like after college.

And even though I gained these skills, I really looked at it as a glimpse beyond college and I want to know part of that. I hated having a boss. I hated driving to work. I had friends who would spend all summer doing fun things and I was there working and getting a paycheck. So when I got to college, I kind of looked at college as four years to either start my own business or get a real job.

When I was done, my parents made it very clear that I couldn't move back in with them afterwards. So I had to figure it out. And so I started hustling when I was in college. I competed with my school bookstore, created a little referral program for this textbook business. And I was selling these books on Amazon.

This was 2008, 2009. No one really knew what Amazon was. It was kind of just a place that people would buy their books here and there. And I got a cease and desist letter from my college telling me to knock it off and stop competing with them. So that was my first glimpse into being an entrepreneur. And probably one of the best things that happened to me. I have this Amazon account.

I started experimenting and trying other products. Came across baby products and toys and created this dropshipping business that exploded. It was just great timing. Amazon was getting bigger and more well known. Amazon selling wasn't a thing. There weren't courses and influencers and stuff like that.

None of that existed. So I had to be one of the first of thousand like real Amazon sellers out there. And, I met my business partner in college. We sold 25 million on Amazon over a six, seven year period. And we really struggled to hire. College kids were super unreliable. That's how I got into the VA, the freelancer space and hired a lot of great people to grow this Amazon business.

And when Amazon started to become harder and more competition and there was more sellers, we started offering these VAs and freelancers to other sellers. And that became free up my next venture, which was fun. It was my first B2B business. I had to learn marketing and Conor learned websites and SEO.

And, we had clients for the first time instead of doing B2C. So, that was fun. And I'm sure we'll dive into it. That's the business we scaled from a $5, 000 investment to doing $12 million a year and exited it in 2019. And now I run a bunch of B2B companies. Like you I'm growing a portfolio of different businesses.

We have accounts balance, my bookkeeping business. Outsource school that teaches people how to hire. Trio SEO, our SEO business, and we're growing a media company around our personal brands to promote those businesses. So that's kind of me in a nutshell at the short long version and happy to dive into whatever you want.

[00:04:26] Ronald Skelton: How long has outscores,uh, school been around?

[00:04:29] Nathan Hirsch: So, the real story behind that is we sold FreeUp in November, 2019. So our plan was to take a year or two years off, travel the world. Instead, COVID hit and we were stuck inside with nothing to do. And we had no business ideas. All we had done for four years was think about, think about FreeUp and a buddy of mine reached out and said, Hey, what if you taught people your hiring process, gave people your SOPs.

And we created Outsource school around like,May of 2020. So it's been a few years now and it's still going strong.

[00:05:00] Ronald Skelton: So I take one of our business partners might've been one of your students there. The reason I say that is, they always bring in stuff like, uh, you know, material and stuff. And I asked them where they got it. And they said, well, they went online and bought a course on how to outsource. 

You know, funny thing is, is, the, the VA I have now that I, I, she's listening to when she edits this thing because I love her to pieces.The way I hired her was a different way. I have a good friend, somebody like you who, that's all they do is VAs, right? I called him up and I said, Hey, his name Scott. I said, Hey Scott, are you about to hire any VAs anytime soon?

Because he has VAs run everything. He goes, yeah, I'm going through a bunch right now. I was like, cool. Gimme the one you, the number two pick. The person you, like he's all, his VAs are rock stars. I've worked beside him. I've done work for me before. I said, give me the one you almost hire. So he gave me, so I'll give you the three or four that hit the top five.

So I picked one of those and I interviewed all four of them. And then I, I picked one of those and she's been with me nonstop for two and a half, three years now. So, I don't know any,

[00:05:53] Nathan Hirsch: I love it. Referrals are great. I would argue you still need to learn how to like manage them and retain them and all that, but referrals are a great way to get good people. When you get to a point like me where you just have a big network in the Philippines, I mean, referrals is always the first place I go.

[00:06:08] Ronald Skelton: Right. I don't know if very competitive or not, but I use that onlinejobs.ph to, to farm, like short term gigs. So, probably in the next month or so, I'll actually hire another one. So, I'm going to do a, I'm going to hire a growth manager. Fancy word for a social media manager.

[00:06:25] Nathan Hirsch: The founder of that John Jonas, met him a few times. I've done a podcast with him. Great, great guy. We were competitors back in the day. Like I told you before this, we have a non compete with FreeUp. I don't know if we'll ever get back in the space or not, but, it's a great space. We, we love the VA space.

[00:06:39] Ronald Skelton: Cool. So let's talk about like, you've got some stuff out there on growth and, hiring is, you know, selecting the right person and stuff. Let's focus a little bit on that. Let's focus on what did it take to take FreeUp from $5, 000 to $12 million. And then afterwards we will get definitely get into what did the exit look like for you?

But, what were the lessons learned that you now apply and help other people do growth strategies through that? Cause that's pretty rapid growth.

[00:07:06] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. So we have this organic marketing blueprint that we do on all of our companies. You can actually grab it if you go to outsource school. com slash organic marketing. And it comes down to, going on podcasts like this, it's a great way to get in front of thousands of people, network, good for backlinks, good for SEO, putting out really high quality content.

My business partner is an SEO guru. It's why we launched an SEO company. So, whenever we started business from day one, we launched a blog and we're putting out high quality content that has a real keyword strategy behind it. Social media is a big part of it. For anyone that follows me on social media, Nathan Hirsch, I'm always putting out a good content and I have a social media team. 

Number four is partnerships. That's one of my, what I think is underrated. We create partner directories for all of our businesses. If you go to, accounts, balance. com slash partners, you can check out an example. But essentially with FreeUp, we, we said, Hey, we provide e commerce VAs that by year three or four, we provided like non e commerce VAs, but to start it was e commerce VAs.

So we went to every other e commerce service provider that did not provide VAs. Every software company, every e commerce lawyer, every e commerce brand protection person. We said, we provide VAs, you don't. You provide something we don't, let's cross promote each other. Let's put, let's do a guest blog post on each site.

Let's blast each other on our newsletter. Let's do a YouTube video together, a podcast together. Back when I would go to conferences, I'm retired from conferences now, we would sponsor VIPevents with other people. So constantly just getting in front of other people's lists and vice versa and building authority in that space. 

Number five is affiliates. We create really good affiliate programs for, for all our companies. So FreeUp, it was 50 cents for every hour. We would build a someone forever on both sides. So freelancers would refer other people, clients would refer other people. We do the same thing with our bookkeeping businesses. If you refer anyone to us, you get $50 a month reoccurring for as long as they're a client.

So, and then we use that to do number six, which is influencers. We would find someone with a gigantic e commerce Facebook group. Someone with a big following on Instagram of e commerce people, and we'd offer them our affiliate program plus something. If it was $50 a month, we'd offer them a hundred dollars a month.

So we would find those influencers to promote us. So each of these kind of goes into each other. You might make a partnership that also has a podcast. You might, find an influencer that also has to blog to do some SEO stuff, but that's really the organic marketing blueprint that we do for all our companies.

And anything you do and pay dads is only going to be complimented by that blueprint.

[00:09:33] Ronald Skelton: You know, it's funny as the mergers and acquisitions world, it's just waking up to that. The whole influencer partnering. If you look at like Ryan Reynolds and some of these other guys who have made hundreds of millions, if not close to over a billion dollars already, is exactly what that was. Right? 

Mint Mobile, Ryan Reynolds partner with him, put his name and brand on it, took some equity in it, became part owner of it, took it all the way through an exit. He's got a, I think he's got a tequila brand the same way. So it's an advanced version of your affiliate plus some. But,you know, it's an equity play. But, I think it's going to come down to the lower level influencers quite quickly, because it's, it's very lucrative model.

You find somebody, if you've got a company, if you're a company out there, you've got a product and you find an influencer that that product truly appeals to, they've already got the know, like, and trust, which is a key element of getting business done. 

[00:10:27] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah and you don't even have to go after like the Ryan Reynolds of the world. I, some of our best influencers, they've got a small tight knit community that listens to everything they say. So, Ben Cummings in the e commerce space I think he's retired now, but he had a small community and the turning point of FreeUp was when he promoted us to his community.

And he told me, he's like, you're going to get a lot of people. I need to make sure you can handle them and treat them well. And for, for two weeks after he promoted us, we, I was just doing sales calls nonstop and I made sure every single client was taken care of. So sometimes those smaller communities are even better.

They're a little bit more, tight knit. They have a little bit more influence over them and they can be great as well. Same thing with podcasts. You never know. Sometimes you go on a big podcast and a flop should. You want a small podcast and it's your ideal target market and that takes off.

[00:11:14] Ronald Skelton: Let's go back to like growth strategies and the, you got the organic marketing.Surely you staffed up. You didn't step up like a lot of guys do. They go find all their college buddies locally.

You got really smart pretty quickly and found highly confident people in the VA space. And I'm assuming all over the world. Primarily probably the Philippines. And lately everybody's been telling me about Egypt. So I don't know if I haven't tried one to anybody over there yet, but everybody's claiming I have to try that out.

What was the, I know for me, it was money. Like when I was, when I was trying to get the online dating site running, I had a staff of 27 people at one point. Putting money into that, writing all the software, doing everything. And probably 90 percent of them were in the India. But, um, what led you togo overseas for your employees?

[00:12:03] Nathan Hirsch: So when we were in college, we, we hired a lot of college kids and we, they ended up, they were drinking on the job, smoking weed on the job. We were banging on their dorms to try to get them to wake up and actually work their shift. And we finally, and at the time we were 20. So hiring like a 40 year old in the U S was very intimidating to us.

So, a buddy of mine introduced me to my first VA in the Philippines. And that was a game changer. Now it wasn't all smooth sailing. We had plenty of disappearing VAs and all the horror stories that I, in fact, if you go to outsource school. com slash mistakes, you can see all the mistakes that we made throughout the years.

And it took us years to build this really good hiring process that we now use in all our companies, that we teach and give you in Outsource School. But that was really it, I mean, we gave up hiring college kids, they were super unreliable. VA seemed like a great solution. It fit our remote business lifestyle.

And we never looked back. I mean, the cool thing about FreeUp is yeah, we got it to 12 million and we sold it, but we had no office. We had no US employees. They were thousands of VAs and freelance on the platform. But my internal team was 30 VAs in the Philippines, doing everything from sales calls to customer service, bookkeeping, marketing, like you name it.

They were running every single part of the company. And even now we push the limits on what virtual assistants can do. I have a VA that goes on podcasts for me. That'll guest on podcasts. Like we really try to just experiment and not that everything works just like an entrepreneurship things fail, but like we have an all star VA team in all of our businesses. We hire really great operators and our companies are 99 percent VAs right now.

Just depending on how you hire determined VA. It's like our bookkeeping business. We have bookkeepers in the Philippines. We have a controller in the U S. I wouldn't call them VA's, like a lot of them are CPA equivalents, but we essentially outsource all parts of our business and it's something that, that we believe in.

[00:13:52] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, I don't consider Mariel my, I don't consider her a VA anymore because she's just one of my people, right? Like a virtual assistant or, you know, something like that. The VA term is used quite,once, I think once somebody has been with you for more than a year, it's like, is it a really a VA or you just hired, you've got somebody really good.

You're going to keep them on, right. I don't, you know, yeah, it's virtual. I, and I see, I've never shaken her hand or I've never seen her in person. We rarely even do a zoom call where we're face to face. We just chat on Slack, she gets everything done. And once a quarter or so we'll, we'll have an actual call. It's not very, not as often as it was in the beginning.

What's your selection, I'm going to dive through your material. I know it's in the material too, but for the listeners here, what's the selection process look like? How important it is that is it to do things like, deep job descriptions, or is it more getting on a zoom call and filling people out?

[00:14:43] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, definitely job descriptions. I mean, we break down hiring into four parts. You got interviewing, onboarding, training, and managing. So for interviewing, we call it our care interview process. Communication, attitude, red flags, and experience. And so what a lot of people do is they just interview for skill.

Skill's part of the equation. We want someone who can communicate at a high level and has a great attitude. And we want the trifecta of all three. And when we're interviewing someone, we're not looking for the right answers. We're looking for the red flags. What is this person telling me that shows they don't have a good attitude?

They can't communicate a high level or they don't have the skills that we need. And not to go through everything, but for, for onboarding, which is equally as important, this is where most entrepreneurs mess up, we have our SICC method. S I C C, which stands for schedule, issues, communication and culture.

And we go through again, all the common issues that people have with VA is a schedule that doesn't work for them. Power issues, internet issues, personal issues, communication. How our company communicates compared to past people. What the culture is like. So there's no surprises when they get in there. And we give them a chance to back out because we don't want them to work for us.

We don't want to invest time, energy, and money training them if, uh, if it's not going to be a good fit. So that interview process and onboarding process alone, in my opinion, makes Outsource School worth it because all those VA horror stories you hear, it gets prevented in that upfront part. Now you still have to manage them and treat them well and keep them around and run effective meetings and fire people correctly and all of that.

But the interviewing and onboarding is so important and you'll see entrepreneurs all the time who they might have great ideas. They might be good at doing things themselves. But they just can't scale because they're bad at hiring and vice versa. You can find a very average entrepreneur, but if they're really good at hiring, that's going to make up for a lot of things they're bad at.

And that's going to accelerate their business way past that, that person that can't hire. So I believe hiring is a skill that you can learn. And it's one of the first things you have to learn as an entrepreneur. And it just makes everything else easier.

[00:16:48] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, I did it totally wrong on the online dating site. And one of the things I did is, I hired for skill right off the bat. Like if you had the programming skill and stuff like that, but, I was also, I was quick to hire and some often, very often quicker, quicker to let them go. So it was very expensive train because I would hire them, get them trained up.

They have to get familiar with the code and where we're at in the project. You assign projects to them and you just realized, they either couldn't deliver or they had integrity issues, right? One of the big things I have with my Indian and this is just for my people back in the day. I'm sure it's changed by now, but, uh, they would say that, yeah, they're working and they're pulling in 40 hours a week, but they were not, right.

An average programmer can write more than a hundred lines of code in a 40 hour week. So, you know, and I actually didn't know, but I actually had software tools that I could, you know, our tools would tell me how many. Who was checked in and checked out and how much they, I got reports on who checked it was, you know what software looks like. You know, I got reports on, who checked one in and how many lines it was and stuff.

So I had employees that were saying, Oh yeah, I worked 45 hours this week. Like you checked in 25 lines of code. What did you do?You know, like I can write,

[00:17:54] Nathan Hirsch: We've had all that. I mean, we had, we had a pair of twins that we, or we had twins that we hired. And they, it turns out they were just, one of them was working and they were billing us twice. So we, we've had every VA horror story that you can imagine. And you learn from them. And you kind of, you have to approach it as, Hey, how do I put a system in place so that this never happens again?

And that's kind of what I like about Outsource School is it just, you skip the learning curve instead of spending years making the mistakes, it just, here's how you avoid them upfront. And I wish I had that back when I was 20, 21. And I had no idea what I was doing hire wise.

[00:13:26] Ronald Skelton: I definitely agree with that. I had the same problem with the, I developed some thick skin over it. We actually would have, two of the girls in the office for me would, would send me messages going, Hey, so and so is working two jobs. Well, one of the two guys, it was, she did that two or three times.

You know, one of the guys I let go, cause he just wasn't getting much done. And I found out he's working two or three jobs. One of the other guys got four times the work anybody got done and I don't care if he's working four jobs. He was writing. He was proficient in what he was doing for me. I give him a project.

It would take him a third of the time of anybody else on my staff I gave the project too. So if he can do that and still pull a second or third job, God bless you, right? So, and I had the same in the real world. I was in the IT management space. I had an employee who was, had moved away in the same thing.

One of my employees came to me and said, Hey, I think he's working two 40 hour a week jobs. How's he allowed to do that? I was like, the day you can outpace him and get stuff done faster than him is a day I say a word to the guy. To this day, you know, he's probably still one of the smartest computer techs I've ever seen.

You give him a ticket, it's done. You give him something, you know, he estimates this isn't gonna take him a week to finish. He does it two days. So if he's got a second job and he's pulling that off, I don't care. I haven't found anybody else that, you know, I could bring in to, at his rate that we could do it any better.

So, do you run into that where you kind of know they're doing other stuff, but they're just so proficient, you don't care?

[00:19:45] Nathan Hirsch: Honestly, our mentality is we like to hire people full time and exclusive. And that's one of the questions we ask them. It's, I mean, they're sure they're, we have like graphic designers and stuff that are part time, but for like a bookkeeper, we don't want them to have other clients. We, like, even if they can get it done, it burns them out.

And then you're always run that risk that the other client wants to hire them exclusive. Offers them more money, stuff like that. And we don't want to get into that. So from our side, we, for the most part, only hire people if they're full time and exclusive to us. And it doesn't really happen. I can't remember the last time it happened, but if we did find out that they lied to us and had another job, that would be it. I mean, we take honesty and integrity very good, but we're, we're, again, we're upfront and honest with people.

If someone wants to be a freelancer and they want to have four different jobs, we're just upfront and honest that that's not what we're looking for. And there's plenty of other opportunities for them.

[00:20:36] Ronald Skelton: It's interesting cause uh, I was gonna say, everybody that signed up on our, in our, for that particular project, it was supposed to be exclusive, right? There was stuff that they were doing for us that, uh, you know. The other thing is, is I ran into some cultural stuff. Stuff that, because it was a dating site where, it was, it was, everything was, you know, guys could date. Guys, girls could date girls, and some of the, the, the belief systems are they, Oh, we can't write code for that.

I was like, well, I'm sorry. I can't exclude that, right? This is a dating site. Anybody can date anybody they want. So long as it's human, they could post a picture of it and say, that's what they're looking for.

Let's go to, you know, kind of, you already talked about growth. You talked about the, the process there. What, what made you exit? Was just it, wasn't an offer you couldn't refuse or what led up to you actually selling FreeUp?

[00:16:21] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. So we, at the beginning of 2019, we didn't go into the year thinking, Hey, we're going to exit this thing by the end of the year. One of our clients reached out to us. They said, Hey, we like FreeUp. We use FreeUp. We don't start businesses. We buy them. And would you be interested in being acquired?

And we had a conversation with them and they ended up making us an offer that was a life changing money and all that. But, there were other factors that went through our head. I mean, we were coming off an Amazon business where, at the beginning, we thought we were going to take down Amazon and be the next e commerce giant.

And by the end, it was really hard to run the business. And so things change. And even though we weren't dependent on Amazon anymore, we knew that things can change very quickly. So we had a bitter taste from that business. We had to lay some people off. And we wanted this to be more of a success story. Obviously, life changing money, economy was at an all time high.

This was pre COVID. So in our mind, we're thinking, Hey, this might be a good time to, to sell it before the economy changes. You, we also know that, or we knew at the time that you want to sell your business when you don't have to. We were incredibly profitable. We were having a hundred K plus profitable months. Very lean, no debt, cashflow positive, no, no, whatever.

So, it was a good business, but we had gotten this to $12 million a year. Would we have been able to get it to 25 million without, making serious investments and we could end up in a position where the business is, has more revenue, but it's making less money or the margins go down. And we grew it from 1 million, 5 million, 9 million, 12 million. So we were growing but we weren't growing as fast as we were in year one. And we didn't want to plateau and then try to sell it or get burnt out and then try to sell it. That would have made it harder to, to sell.

So there were lots of factors there. We want to take care of our team. We took $500, 000 from the sale and gave it to our team in the Philippines. And we, we thought of it as something like, Hey, we get to take chips off the table, put money in our pocket. The rest of our life can be a lot less stressful business wise and, be able to start different businesses and not have all our eggs in one basket and build more of a diversified portfolio.

So, we kind of looked at it as, Hey, we're going to make the best decision possible with the information we had. And no, looking back, we wanted to vet the buyers, make sure that they were good and they would honor the agreements. And yeah, we also knew during the due diligence, you can talk about the deal can fall through at any minute.

So we had to stay focused on growing the business and we were comfortable. Hey, if the deal didn't did fall through, we still love FreeUp. We're still making money. We still can grow it. But if the deal does go through, we can't look back and say, Hey,we should have done something differently. We made the best decision that we possibly could with the information that we had.

[00:23:55] Ronald Skelton: It was extremely insightful. So most people don't do what you did. Most people either ride it until the, you know, until the plateaus. They don't want to sell it now. It's the best it's ever been. Or they take the foot off the gas because they're in the middle of the,the sales process. And, to be honest, it's distracting.

You got due diligence and stuff. You got homework, you got other stuff that's not normal to your day to day operations. So, you end up getting distracted and taking the foot off the gas and then it starts to level off. And, then there's, the retraining that happens because it leveled off and it wasn't what the original LOI agreed upon.I'm impressed with your logic and the thought process you went through. The fact that, it's like selling your favorite car, right? You had just had a detail and you're like, I'm gonna sell it and get something better. And you're like, you know, you're driving around like, Hey, if the guy doesn't buy this thing for what I want, I'm going to continue driving it, right. 

So, uh, there's something to be said about the prep work for selling too. Cause there's some of the stuff you would do to get the best price, that just made it run better. Some of the systems and operating procedures, it seems like you're already keen to, to put in place. You would be shoring those up and doing other stuff to get your best sales price, so.

[00:25:02] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. I mean, we, we definitely got great advice along the way. And, we just treated it, my overall mentality on business and this sounds bad. It's just like most businesses fail. Like one way or another. Like even Amazon at some point will probably fail. Businesses just don't last forever. 

And so if you look at that mentality, when you're starting businesses, investing in businesses, when you have that opportunity to sell, like failure is a real option. And so that kind of helps it as well. And we're super fortunate. We sold it to really great people. They honored their word. FreeUp is still running today. It's approaching 10 years.

Most companies don't last that long. And they paid us every penny. Our team is still there. We're still in contact with them. So it couldn't have worked out better. Now, in, in real time at the time, we're crossing our fingers, even though when we sign on the dotted line and get the upfront money and hoping they don't burn the thing into the ground and hurt our reputation and all of that.

But super fortunate how it all worked out. And I've heard plenty of horror stories where it didn't work out that way.

[00:26:01] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, I did an article once where I kind of did the research. Like, okay, how many companies have been past a hundred years and there was, it was quite a few. And then, 200 years. You know, quite significantly less. And I think once you hit, I think it was 700 years, there's only two companies that are ever survived longer than 700 years.

So eventually everything either gets bought, sold or, and one of them just sold. The longest, one of the oldest companies on the planet was a company that, built temples. And, it was in the same family for, I think it was, I don't remember the number on 900, 1200 years or so. And then they finally hit financial difficulties and had to, had to sell to a competitor.

So eventually they all sell or get shut down or fail for some reason, right. So have you looked at, have you, have you looked at doing acquisitions? or like to grow through acquisition?

[00:26:49] Nathan Hirsch: We did. Right when we sold it, we spent a lot of time like researching and talking to people and this was during COVID. So it was kind of a crazy, scary time to do your first acquisitions, whether that's right or wrong and not using that as excuse. But I don't know if you remember, but like prices were at all time high. E commerce businesses were getting crazy multiples.

A lot of the aggregators that bought a lot of e commerce businesses during that time all went bankrupt. So I'm kind of happy that we didn't do that. It's probably something that we should do. I think, every time I start a business in my mind, I'm like, this is the last one. I'm never starting another business again.

I'm only going to acquire, but we come up with these ideas. And I think one of our skill sets, at least it seems is, like just starting businesses with small amounts of money. Hiring an operator from day one and hitting the ground running and being able to market it. So. It's definitely something you want to do.

I mean, I invest in a lot of like public companies and, I have a good stock portfolio and all of that, but yeah, I don't know. It's on my radar, but by the time like that we felt like the market actually corrected itself, we had already started, Ecom balance and Outsource School. And we were kind of into the weeds on our own portfolio.

[00:27:56] Ronald Skelton: I looked at a few companies here recently where there's no reason whatsoever where a hundred percent of their employees are US based. And they're getting killed on salaries.

A good one was a podcast, a guesting service, right? I looked at a podcast guesting service. She had 32 employees. Doing multi million dollars worth of revenue a year. All of her employees are U. S. based, and all of them are doing tasks that I could easily, you know, and they're all making between, say, 40 and $70,000 each, times 30. 

And I could replace every single one of them with decent VAs in other countries for a fraction of that. And get more people doing the work and get better work done. When I asked him about it, there's all this language barrier. I don't think that's not true. Cause my VA probably speaks better.

I'm from Oklahoma. I have a bad accent. Occasionally I, I slur some words. My VA speaks better English than I do. And most of the ones I've worked with, they speak bigger, better English than most of us do.I think that's a fallacy that most people have.

[00:28:58] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, I mean, even if you want to keep you as people, I would argue, give each of them a VA and figure out what tasks are they doing that is not worth $70, 000 a year and have them focus on $70, 000 a year test. So it's not like you need to fire everyone and replace it with VAs, but the VAs can get those US employees focused on the higher level tasks.

[00:29:19] Ronald Skelton: That's funny when you said that's exactly what we were going to do. We were going to start that way. Every, every single employee gets their own VA. Some of them will get too, cause some of the people are actually, that she had, we're needing to work 50, 60 hours to get the work done. So some of them would get too.You know, depending on, It would have been so much more efficient to, because that was their limiting to growth is bringing people in, training them.

They thought they could grow more if they had more employees and it's just hard to find the right people here. And I was like, why aren't you looking at other places, right?

So that said with your skillset, like, so the other reason is, is I didn't grab it. For them, what I didn't reason I didn't acquire that one is, they've made management shifts in their business. So they were in a declining business. The revenue had dropped and stuff. Mainly because of the way they were managing things and they hadn't passed that curve after making all those big changes and getting comfortable with it and moving back up. So there was recovery in sight of that, but they're in a market that was becoming more and more competitive.

There's no, there's very little to any barrier to entry to putting people on podcasts as a guest hosting service, right? Even though they were one of the first ones, anybody can hire a team of VAs and kick that off and have it going pretty good, pretty quickly. So, there's just more and more competitors on that space.

But the reason I brought that subject up is there are a ton of companies out there. Especially in your accounting business and other stuff, that would be excellent. They're profitable now. And if you applied your skillset to them and, not even just replace employees, but augment the employee staff with VAs and that you go through your system and train. That profit margin would definitely increase, right.

You could buy a company that's, accounting companies do well. They 10, 15, 20 percent profit margin is not unheard of. I'm probably being generous. You can probably do way better than that. That said, you know start augmenting them with the, you know, VAs and that number really shifts.

[00:31:11] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, I mean, there's definitely opportunity. It's a, it's on my to do list. I should add, I recently became a dad. I have an eight month, eight month, eight month old. So, yeah, right. I don't know. I don't really have a response to that. It's definitely a good thing that I want to do at some point.

[00:31:26] Ronald Skelton: Being an entrepreneur and being especially somebody like you who can, easily delegate something, you have a skillset that a lot of people don't. 

A lot of people build something. They try to do everything themselves. It seems like you have the skillset is, as fast as you can delegate something off, you know who you can hire and hire people in to do the right work. That's a mindset that a lot of entrepreneurs could really use.

[00:31:47] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah. I mean, I, I know what I'm good at. I'm good at strategic stuff. I'm good at hiring. I'm good at some marketing stuff, but, like I'm not trying to learn how to code. I'm not trying to, write really good articles. Like there's so much that I just don't want to do. And I think, like I'm not a bookkeeper.

So opening up a bookkeeping service, forces you to get out of that. Like I couldn't do bookkeeping if I wanted to. So we have to hire a good operator. We have to trust her. We have to hire bookkeepers around her and have them put systems in place. So I like doing stuff like that. That forces me to get out of my comfort zone and gets me to, to back off and let the smart people do their thing.

[00:27:23] Ronald Skelton: You know, one of the, I tried once, and I might do this again at some point. To get the best employee. Have you ever done the, a little contest thing where you, you bring on like, like for this growth manager I have, instead of bringing on one person, I bring on eight or 10 people for a month. And I make a contest out of it and say, here's what, here's your goal.

Here's your content. Here's what I want you to write on here. Here's my social media accounts. Here's how you track, you know, your scorecard and, the top two people at the end of the month I'm bringing on full time. Do you ever put anything like that where you put contests out to find like, very skilled labor? Or is it just you're so good at interview and you can actually identify that skillset?

[00:33:03] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, we haven't done that in a while. We definitely have done that in the past. It's not a terrible approach. I think we're very confident in our hiring process that we believe that normally it's going to produce the best person. But, like there's no wrong way to do that. Like that's worked. I know other entrepreneurs that do it and it's a viable strategy.

[00:33:22] Ronald Skelton: Just curious. I'm looking for, what's the best way to find somebody that just really, like from my growth manager. They're gonna have to love social media because the channels change constantly. What you can do this week on LinkedIn or TikTok or one of those changes. I, uh, I'll give you an example.

You get knocked out of the algorithm if you put a link inside of your comments or your, or not your comments, but your posts for a lot of these algorithms, right. Used to, you could put that link in the first comment. Now the algorithm looks at that and it'll knock you out of their algorithm if you do it right away. 

So you have to kind of wait an hour and come back and put it in there. But there's all these weird quirks on how to get the most social media bang for the buck. And, somebody has to love that stuff. Eat it, live it, sleep it. So how would you go about finding somebody who not only,

[00:34:08] Nathan Hirsch: That's what we're building right now. We're building a media company and I'm okay at social media. I think I have a decent following. People read my content, but I, by no means like an Instagram expert. I don't know all the little hacks. And right now that's, that's what we're interviewing for. We're looking for someone who can take that over that can crush YouTube SEO and all these different things.

So, yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a challenge. We definitely spend more time on those roles where we're not an expert in same thing, hiring a bookkeeper, hiring a developer, stuff like that. But, we're not afraid to fail. Like, like, sure, worst, really worst case scenario they get my account banned or something. But like real worst case scenario, they just don't perform and we just hire someone else and we probably learn a lot from that experience. And going through that first hire helps us with that second hire.

[00:34:51] Ronald Skelton: What I'm trying on this, and this is probably what you do too. Is when I ask them to tell me how the TikTok algorithm works or how the Instagram algorithm works. Like how are you going to get the best thing? When they tell me what they know, I want to hear a sense of enthusiasm in their voice, right?

Like they figured out something that somebody else does. There's gotta be an, sense of curiosity or enthusiasm, or there's got to be a spark. Because it can be very frustrating. And you got two different types of people that do this stuff. The people that just love the fact that it's constantly changing and it's a challenge for them, right?

They're the, in the, the kind of the chess master of social media. They kind of know the piece, the strategy is going to change on them. And, uh,they're ready to play the game. The other thing I look for is people are really in the gaming because it's the same thing. The game, the, there's cheat codes for this.

I found that, avid gamers are really good at beating online strategies and algorithms and stuff like that. And in, in, in a white hat method. Not in gray hat or black hat. Do you, do you have any propensity to certain types of people you're looking for?

[00:35:50] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, we, we like, we like entrepreneur mindset people, but like people who have either started business in the past or want to start businesses. But usually they hate one part of it. Like our operator for our bookkeeping business, ran her own bookkeeping business. Loves building, loves systems, has an entrepreneur mindset, but she doesn't want to do sales.

She doesn't want to do marketing. There's just things she doesn't want to do. And ideally, those are things that we like doing and we're good at. We'll do sales and marketing all day. So that, that's really what we look for. And then the old phrase, like we have to be able to get a beer with them.

We have to like them as people. If we're going to be working with them, they have to have the same values as us. The same beliefs in customer service and treating people well. And like, when you mess up, you just own up to it and make it right. I think one of the reasons that I've just gained a reputation throughout the years is like, like FreeUp.

We had a lot of happy clients, but not every situation was perfect. Like they were freelancers that messed up, VAs that messed up. And we just went to the client and said, how do we make this right? Do you want credit to another VA? Do you want a refund? Like, what can we do to just make this whole with you?

And even if you're not going to use us again, we just want to leave on good terms. And a lot of times those turned into our best clients because they wanted to stay with us. They knew we'd always make it right. And we want people that same mentality. We don't want people who argue over an invoice or take things personally.

That's just not our mentality on business. It's not our mentality on life. And we don't want to work with people where it's not aligned. So to us, that that's really important as well.

[00:37:13] Ronald Skelton: Awesome. I've noticed that, for my Philippine, VAs. One of the things I have to very clearly make sure they understand of, is I have no intentions on being an asshole, but I come across this one is quite often in email and stuff. I'm extremely to the point, right? Somebody asked me questions and I'm, like I said, before we started, I'm sitting here staring at four monitors.

I usually got five or six thing going on. So if somebody says, Hey, just so and so on there, I just say, yes. I'm like, Oh, then they start, their gears start turning as I don't give them a warm, fuzzy answer, right? I'm hyper logical. So I have to prep all my, my Philippine VAs and they're, they're more than others because a lot of times if I've, if I say something offensive or I say something that seems to be mean, they'll just clam up, right?

Mariel's really good about it. Now she knows I,I might be slightly on the spectrum because I just don't know how to interact with people in a normal way. But, uh, do you have, you, the culture fit, like you have to explain people how you operate and how the culture is and like, do you find that with all your VAs too?

Is like, look, this is how, I guess you already said you do a communication plan. But, uh, I'm really cautious of that because I've had VAs before that like they work for a couple of weeks and then they quit because they thought I was mad and I wasn't mad. I just answered the, they asked me a question that could be answered yes or no. And I said no and went back to work. 

Like, why did they quit? Like, well, I get ahold of them a month later, cause they ghost me. And then, they were like, well, I thought you were super mad. You just, I asked you if I could do this and you said no. And like, you asked a yes or no question.

I gave you an answer. Like I didn't realize you needed a justification for the answer. So, let's, let's jump into like, you're managing multiple businesses right now, right? You've got two or three currently?

[00:38:50] Nathan Hirsch: Four if you, yeah. 

[00:38:51] Ronald Skelton: So four. Are you acting? Cause that's what acquisition entrepreneurs do. A lot of times we'll buy multiple companies, but that's because we put great general,we got great teams in place. You buy something, you get the team solidified. You may not give somebody a CEO title. Sometimes the top guy's kind of a general manager, but sometimes there's a CEO in place.

And then you, the whole goal of the game for a lot of us in this space is, you're more of the chairman of the board than you are like the CEO and daily operator. Sounds like you have that mindset already. Is I'm kind of, you're kind of acting as the chairman of the board. You're on the board. You've got these multiple things going, but do you still roll up the sleeves and get in and do sales for all 4 of them?

Or what, what is your day to day look like? How do you manage 4 companies?

[00:39:31] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, we bring in opera, we don't start a company unless we have an operator in place. So like we had the S O, S E O idea six months a year before we found that right person. Same thing with bookkeeping. So we have the operator from day one. We're out of fulfillment. I'll do sales and marketing all day. We've got other people that can do it too.

But, we all, all our businesses we only do one thing. Like monthly bookkeeping. We charge you on the first, books by the 15th each month. It kept saving balance sheet cashflow. We have no other add on services. We don't do consulting. We don't do expedited books. We don't do payroll. So sales calls are pretty straightforward and pretty easy and I don't mind doing them, but I have other people that can do them as well.

And then marketing, we have, we kind of have a, an economy is a skill thing going where we have one marketing team that does it for all the different companies. So that, that, that's kind of like my normal day is get on, focus on whatever the most important thing. I should say, my normal day is hanging out with my eight month old for two hours.

Then my nanny comes. Then I, whatever the most important thing is for those two days, like right now I'm working on a social media revamp. So I was working on that this morning. Then I usually have any like meetings with the operators. Podcasts right after that, hence it's like 10 a. m. my time. So that kind of fits there.

And then right after this, I do a one hour intense HIIT workout in my custom gym downstairs. That's part of my lifestyle. And then the afternoon, I'm usually either doing some kind of outreach or wrapping up projects. Some kind of social media stuff. Any phone calls, any sales calls, any networking calls I have to wrap up the day.

So, yeah, that's what my, my normal days looks like. I'm done by three and, uh, yeah.

[00:41:04] Ronald Skelton: So you really got, uh, not quite the four hour work week, but you, you've got it down to where you have a systemized process that you're, you know. I joke, I always joke, there's no such thing as, of, uh, passive cashflow or passive income. And there's no such thing as, uh, the four hour work week. As an entrepreneur, you're going to do more, but you can, and I don't think there's any such thing as true, like they call work life balance.

I think it's a fallacy, but you can, ebb and ebbs and flows, right? You're in a stage in your life right now where you can actually gear towards where it feels like you got great work life balance. And then when it comes down to the wire and you need a 50 hour week, it's not going to hurt you to pull one, right?

It's not every week. I'm a big fan of like, like that's what I'm doing now. Like, I've had a couple opportunities to get in and be part of something that like, if I acquired it, I was going to, it's going to kick 60, 70 hours a week to do something with. And I just have to pass on those.

I'm 52. I'm a little bit older than you, but I have a 13 year old and an eight year old who likes, I'm still cool to hang around with right there. Daddy's still cool. Like I can take them to the beach and I can run them to wherever we want to run and it's still okay. I've only got a couple more years of that, right?

My son's 13. He's already at the point where he's, run around doing games with his kid, you know, his buddies and stuff. I maybe have a year left before it's not cool to have dad take you somewhere. So, maybe, maybe when I'm no longer, you know, cool to be around, I'll pull something that requires 50, 60 hour weeks again, but I don't think so.

And it is possible. You're doing, and I know a dozen people that are doing it. A lot of people think that it's not possible. Though, there's actually people I've on the show like don't go, don't buy a company. If you can't pull 80 hour a week. That's just them.

[00:42:43] Nathan Hirsch: My mentality is hustle in your 20s, take lots of risks. You can always go out and get a real job. That was my mentality. If Amazon failed, I would just go out and get a real job. And when you have more, like, I had no responsibilities back then. I didn't have a wife. I didn't have kids. I didn't have a house.

Like now I have responsibilities. Sure, I could take risks, but they're a little bit more calculated. I don't know, like I'm lucky enough to have gone through an exit. So for me to make like a little bit more money and sacrifice time is almost never worth it. Maybe opportunities will come up where it is worth it, but you definitely have to change your mentality a little bit.

[00:43:15] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. The, uh, I purposely don't put myself in situations where like, we don't have a mortgage. I paid cash for the house. Even our prior house we just sold, we paid, we paid cash for that one. And they weren't anything substantial that, you know, we had a little farmhouse on 5 acres. We sold that. We, now we own a tiny home that we take with us.

We bought that. But, uh,this is a portable studio that I'm in. I can take it with me. It's a 10 foot by 10 foot shipping container. I converted to a studio. So my office is portable. I used to rent an office everywhere we landed.

You know, a lot of the guys that use all the VAs and stuff, they've adopted the, the, kind of that digital nomad lifestyle. Cause they can go anywhere and be anywhere. It frees them up. You've got that luxury of being able to go anywhere and live anywhere to do your work. What has you choosing to be where you're at now?

[00:44:00] Nathan Hirsch: I grew up in Massachusetts. I went to school in Connecticut and lived in Stamford, Connecticut for a year. Didn't love living in Stanford. And, one of our business partners for the Amazon business got into a college, a postgraduate college in Florida. And in our mind, we were like, Florida's cheap.

We can probably hire cheap people there. We'll move there. I ended up meeting my girlfriend there. I told you what happened with the Amazon business. But I mean, Florida was a great place business wise to grow and sell a company, right? Like no, no state income tax, all of that. But once we exited FreeUp, we didn't have to be in Florida anymore.

My business partner moved to Colorado a few years before we sold FreeUp. So I love Colorado. I knew my parents loved the outdoors. My sister loves the outdoors and, I told everyone, I told my partner, if I can convince my wife to move to Colorado, my sister will move here. And if we're both here, my parents will move here too, and that's exactly what happened. 

So we're all in Colorado. It works out pretty perfect because my parents get to see my, my, my son all the time. Colorado is great. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I mean, great outdoors, great sports, like it honestly has everything that I want to play. So I'm happy here. I probably stayed in Florida too long.

My girlfriend probably had something to do with it, but super happy with Colorado and you're right, I can be anywhere. But I mean, my whole family's here now and I'm fortunate enough where I have a house. I still have a condo in Florida. I don't see us moving at any time soon. Plus I bought during COVID.

So I have like a two point, I don't, I don't really believe in mortgages either, but I got a 2. 5 percent mortgage. So it's like free money. It's tough to turn that down. But with our condo, just like you, paid cash. And I probably would have always paid cash if, if mortgage rates weren't just crazy cheap. 

[00:45:37] Ronald Skelton: You have to, for me, when, when the mortgage rates were that cheap, my wife wanted a tiny home and it just didn't make sense to, and they wouldn't mortgage all anyway. So it didn't make sense. And I, I owned a real estate investment firm at the time. So I, when I say I don't like mortgages, it's because I owned a foreclosure, a foreclosure company that basically negotiated foreclosures for, for people. 

And I seen what the banks did, right? And, I still use banks, but it's always for invest, if I do, if you do, if I do a mortgages for a, uh, it's an investment property, it's not something we live in. And mainly it was because, it's always because of a girl, right? When I first started, uh, seeing my wife 16, 17 years ago, actually 19 years ago.

When we first started dating, we've been married for 16. She was real nervous. Like I was an entrepreneur. I want to do entrepreneurial things. And I was, you know, I had a six figure job. And I told her, I said, what if we've just paid cash for a house and we'll always have a place to live?

Cause that was the biggest concern. What if you lose your job or get sued and we don't have a place to live? We'll be homeless. I was like, okay, what if we wrangle up enough cash? I'm a hell of a negotiator. If I didn't negotiate a deal and we buy the house, it's cash. We put it in a trust. I get to live there by the good grace of God.

You don't kick me out. I can't even take it in divorce. The trust is in your name and your family's name. What if we do that? Would that make you comfortable if I was an entrepreneur? And she's like, absolutely. So that's, all of our properties I don't own a single one of the, the houses we've ever lived in.

I just put them in a trust. It's in her family's trust. And, I don't have a, I don't have a house problem because like I have other properties I can go live in. I just have to ask a renter to move.

Well, let's talk about like, give me, give me the rundown of what each one of the companies does, and, what a great customer would look like so that everybody listening today can know what that is.

So, I, I see Accounts Balance on your shirt. I guess we can start there and then run through your companies and give me your ideal customer.

[00:47:18] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, so I have two bookkeeping brands, Accounts Balance and Ecom Balance. Accounts balance is monthly bookkeeping for online businesses, whether you're a SaaS, an agency, we even have like lawyers and real estate agents, etc. Monthly books charge on the first, books by the 15th. Don't buy entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

Everything we do is just designed to be as fast and easy as possible for you with accurate reports and great customer service. Ecom Balance is the same service, but a higher price point for e commerce businesses. A little bit more complicated bookkeeping. Outsource School, we talked about, you get my exact hiring process.

You can plug into your business, all of our SOPs, whether they're marketing or operation that you can choose in, or you can plug in. You get on our Facebook group, live coaching calls once a month, that's our program there. Trio SEO is our new SEO business. Pumping out really high quality content for your blog, the same thing we do on all of our other businesses that we now offer for other people.

You can go to trioseo. com and get a free audit and see if you're a good fit for that. And then my newest thing, Nathanhirsch. com, took me seven years to get this domain. I finally have it. So feel free to go there. You can grab my newsletter that goes out once a week. I have an exit blueprint that, if you go to Nathanhirsch. com slash exit, that shows you exactly how I build my businesses to be sellable. Even if I don't want to sell them and everything I learned during, going through the sale process. 

So that's what I'm working on now. And hopefully next time we talk, I've got some other ones in the portfolio.

[00:48:41] Ronald Skelton: I'll do my best to have my team put that exit, a link to that one in our show notes. 'Cause that that would be a great resource for everybody listening here. Our audiences are always looking to grow things to exit. So, the one thing I do wanna ask before we go, and we never even covered the topic real quick, is how do you see AI impacting all this stuff that you do?

I just seen an AI tool this morning. That is a, they're, it's Y Combinator backed and they're building AI employees is what they're calling it. And their first one's outbound sales. It can do outbound sales calls, email, outbound outreach, and all kinds of email work with the CRM, augment the data for, for your list, do all kinds of stuff.

They have 25 million B2B or something like that. Something you, 255 million B2B contacts in their database to go from raw. So it was like, AI is quickly moving into a lot of our spaces. How do you see, are you guys already using it across the platforms you have? Or?

[00:49:35] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, we use it more on like the back end. Like we won't use it for the writing, but we use it during the research stage, for example, for, for Trio SEO. I mean, the real answer is I don't know. I can't predict the future. AI is always gonna be part about we do, what we do. We stay on top of it. I'm sure we'll have to make adjustments.

Do I think it's just going to put every small business out of business? No, but there will probably be changes that need to be made. And that's part of what's great about having a diverse portfolio. If hell breaks loose and it does take down the company, you've got others. But our goal is to stay on top of it and make adjustments that are needed.

And I think with all the AI stuff, that, that personal touch and personal approach becomes even more, or I should say less common and more important. So yeah, I don't know. I wish I could give you a better answer, but I try to stay away from predicting the future really in anything.

[00:50:19] Ronald Skelton: It's funny as a, I kind of use it. Like we talked about earlier, where you take your, your augment your US employees with a VA. I've augmented all my VAs with a different AI tools they can use. So, just to make their job easier. I'll find the ones they can use. I'll actually, figure out how they can use it right.

A standard operating procedure for using it and we'll switch the tool out. Saves them time getting in, they, I still pay them for their 30 to 40 hours a week, but 30 to 40 hours a week, depending on what they want. They have a choice between 30 and 40. That said, you know, it gives them more like they get, they get more tasks.

So, I'm sure I'm getting more done now than I was before these tools came out. There's still a lot of room to play them, but I'm curious as like, like some of these, like this one that's backed by Y Combinator, I just seen this morning. it is, about the price of a entry level VA.

It's about 450 bucks a month to get it, kind of get it up and running to, to be a full-blown thing. But it looks like it could do the job of a, I would say a low level VA. I wouldn't put, you train somebody really well and you'll smoke this thing. The same way with, uh, the AI copyright. An AI can be as good as a copywriter to somebody that's doing, five figure copy, right?

But if you want a really good one, you better have somebody that knows what they're doing.

Augment it and read it and at least change it up. There's just, there's some, something missing. There's a, a good AI, a good copy actually has kind of have a soul to it in my mind. It has a, there's a vibe to it or something.

When you read it, you know that that's really well done and AI is missing it as far as I can see. But, um, where are you guys headed? And as far as like the next couple of years here, you just growing these or?

[00:51:52] Nathan Hirsch: Growing the media company, growing my portfolio of businesses and trying to be a great dad along the way. That's, that's really my, my focus.

[00:51:59] Ronald Skelton: Well, if somebody wants to, what's the best way that you want somebody to like make that initial contact. If they want to work with you or, maybe they've got a business idea and they're a great operator and they want to be on your radar for the future or I don't, you know, for every reason, if there's somebody wants to reach out and contact you directly, what's the path you want them to take?

[00:52:15] Nathan Hirsch: Yeah, I'm pretty easy to contact. Connect with me on LinkedIn or whatever social media platform you use. You can go to NathanHirsch. com, join my newsletter. Or if you go to any of my websites, it's pretty easy to get a quote or sign up. And, yeah, it would be honored to, for you to trust us with your business. We'll take really good care of it. And we really appreciate you having me on.

[00:52:32] Ronald Skelton: I will call that a show, hang up for just a second.