From Burden to Bliss: Nathan Hirsch’s Insights on Outsourcing Bookkeeping ​- 91 Days Success Podcast

Video u200aTranscription:

We have two Bookkeeping brands, EcomBalance and AccountsBalance.

EcomBalance is just for e-commerce sellers, so Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, stuff like that tends to be a little bit more complicated. Bookkeeping accounts, balances for other. Agencies, SaaS service providers, different online businesses, and we tried to create a, really straightforward service. It’s, we only do monthly bookkeeping.

We don’t do tax we’ll. We’ll work directly with your cpa. We charge you on the first, you get books by the 15th in income payment balance sheet, cash flow on time every month in a way that you can understand. We’re all about speaking entrepreneurs. I’m not a bookkeeper. My business partner’s not a bookkeeper.

We, we have a great controller. We have a great team of bookkeepers I’d put against anyone, but. We know entrepreneurs, we know how to create good process and make it efficient. We, did a lot of market research in what entrepreneurs want in a bookkeeper, and that’s what we’ve really tried to, ud83dudccd build with these two bookkeeping companies

Hi, and welcome to the 91 Day Success podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Mast, and today I am thrilled and honored to have Nate Hirsch with me, and he’s gonna share so many amazing things with us. Nathan’s got an incredible history. He’s got some incredible stories. He’s got multiple businesses to talk to us about today.

So Nathan, before we get going, if you could for people that maybe aren’t as familiar with you, could you give us kind of an elevator pitch of who’s Nathan and tell us just a little bit about yourself and your companies. Yeah. And, thanks so much for, having me on. So I’m a, longtime entrepreneur.

I’ve never had a, real job. I started my, Amazon business outta my college dorm room. But I really started buying and selling textbooks competing with my school bookstore to the point where I got a cease and desist letter from my school telling me to knock it off and stop competing with them.

And, My parents were both teachers. I didn’t want to get kicked outta school. So I pivoted and I had this Amazon account that I was selling books on. I started experimenting and building relationships with different manufacturers that, that didn’t really know what Amazon was, and built this multimillion dollar drop shipping Amazon baby product and toy business outta my college dorm room.

And it was a, wild time. This was 2008, 2009. I really struggled to hire hiring college kids was, super unreliable. So that got me into the, wonderful world of virtual assistants and, freelancers. And then I started offering these VAs and freelancers to other e-commerce sellers and, that’s became the, free up marketplace, which was a lot of fun.

It was our first B2B business. We had to learn. Websites and SEO and partnerships and, conferences and all the stuff that kind of goes into that. And we scaled that business over four years to, doing about 12 million in sales a year. We were acquired in 2019, which is a whole nother story we can talk about if you want to.

And yeah. From there, the pandemic hit shortly after and, because we were stuck inside with nothing to do, all our travel plans were canceled. We launched outsource school, which is our membership where we teach people our hiring process. And from there we, recently launched two monthly bookkeeping businesses because bookkeeping was a big part of us.

Not only selling the company and passing due diligence but just making good decisions every single month. So I like to focus on the, boring and unsexy parts of business hiring and bookkeeping. And that’s where I’ve had my success throughout the years. Thanks so much for sharing some of that.

I gotta tell you, I wanted like doing a fist bump with you cheer. When I heard that the the bookstore at the university got mad at you. What a what, more could a college guy ask for than to get in trouble with the bookstore? Cuz he was out competing with them on their own game. I love that.

Not to mention where you’ve taken it from there. Fact of the businesses you’ve grown up that and the ones you’ve sold. I’m just you. Yeah I’m, totally impressed and I’m so looking forward to our conversation. You specifically, you and I connected through your bookkeeping business, and I think, actually, I think I responded to a lead magnet you had, and then we started chatting and I’m like, wow.

I, want to talk to Nathan and learn more about what you’re doing. Talk to me a little bit about why, as part of your entrepreneurial journey, did you, or do you think you found that the unsexy parts were the great. Ways for you to build a business. Yeah, it’s a, that’s a great question. I think it goes back to, so I had some internships in high school and college and they taught me like sales and customer service and kind of like the core of businesses.

And I think what compliments that is good hiring and surrounding yourself with good people. Finding a really good business partner that has the same values as you, but an opposite skillset. And then, Also just being really on top of your finances. And I had parents that always preach that from a personal level and learning that from a business side I, always thought was equally as important.

So for me it’s about prioritizing and there’s no higher priority in business than like sales, customer service, hiring and finance. And if you’re knocking those four things outta the park, everything else really. Takes care of itself. And I try to stay away from like the, fads of the world, like TikTok ads or Clubhouse or whatever.

Like I’ll hire people to try different things and, do stuff from the marketing side, but from my side, as the entrepreneur, you can’t master every little thing. So I like to, focus on what I’m good at and focus on what I consider the, core of business. Oh, I love it. And again, it reminds me so much of a one of my mentors who’s always said, if you want to build a great business find something that rich people wanna pay to get solved.

And in his definition, rich people are most businesses. And, therefore you take a look at bookkeeping and, staffing. Both are things that I think so many businesses, myself included. We don’t like those parts. Those are the, difficult parts to deal with. Thankfully I’ve got a great operation staff that doesn’t mind those, but I know I can’t stand those, and that’s definitely the type of thing I’d want to pay for somebody to take care of.

So I just, brilliant. Yeah. And I think that’s the beauty of it. Like I, I always say that you shouldn’t take a course on how to do bookkeeping. That’s a terrible use of your time. You shouldn’t do your own bookkeeping or know how to reconcile an account like the, most entrepreneurs that do bookkeeping, either a waste a lot of time doing it and their time could be better spent elsewhere.

Or b, they do it incorrectly and they just have to hire someone else to clean it up and do it right. And, I’m guilty of that too with my Amazon business. I. I did bookkeeping myself, which was terrible and pulled me away from, the business. I hired a college kid, actually my business partner, to do bookkeeping, and he wasn’t a bookkeeper, so I didn’t really save money there.

Neither of us knew what we were doing. I, tried dumping it on to my CPA at the end of the year, and, Hiring someone quarterly and eventually I realize, hey, you gotta be doing it monthly. And I think for, me, as an entrepreneur, what I try to teach for, people that follow me on podcasts or LinkedIn or whatever it is, just like how to avoid those mistakes.

Whether it’s bookkeeping mistakes, hiring mistakes, a lot of mistakes get made in that boring part of, business, what I consider boring or what a lot of people consider boring. I, actually like it. And, those are things that, that just crush you in business and anything you can do to get through that learning curve and, learn that quicker and not make those mistakes is only gonna help you. Oh abs, absolutely. And certainly if we’re talking, a lot of our audience is entrepreneurs and business owners and when you take a look at the value of your time doing something, it’s far more valuable for you to go out.

I’m gonna pick on myself and slay another drag and make another sale serve as in a consulting capacity where I can bill out a much higher rate than it is for me to start doing my bookkeeping. Just do doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Let’s, take a step back if we can, a little bit to free up.

If I’m not mistaken, Nathan, free Up was one of the companies that you started and under your leadership, you grew that to 12 million, I believe, and then did an exit. Is that correct? Yeah, that’s correct. We started that in, in 2000 to the end of 2015, 2016, and we ran it for four years. I started out with the, this my same business partner, Connor Gill that, I’ve been working with for, years.

I saw that. Can you tell us just a little bit about that’s a tremendous growth over a four year period. What types of things were you doing that allowed you to. To have that growth other than obviously solving a problem that a lot of people wanted to pay for. Yeah, and I mean there’s like the core of, the business.

Like we were all about customer service and making sure both sides are happy. Whenever you have a marketplace, you have the supply and demand. And we had an advantage there cuz we had a lot of great VAs and freelancers from our Amazon business that we were able to move over and, give out.

But like the core of marketing and keep in mind this is our first time learning marketing on Amazon. You post a product, Amazon gets you the customer and sells it. With free up, we had to learn it from scratch, and we came up with this organic marketing blueprint that we just do on all our businesses, and we do it with virtual assistants and we give all our SOPs on how to do these in outsource school for our members there.

But it’s getting on blogs and back links, getting on podcasts like these, which is a great way to network and SEO and meet people in the space. Doing networking calls with other people in the space every single month, connecting with influencers and having a good affiliate program. That, that pays out reoccurring so that people wanna promote you.

Obviously you have to have a good service to, to do that. And then lastly, just putting out content. My, my business partner’s a, really great at SEO and putting out lots of different content, and by doing those five things, That’s really what’s allowed us to, scale all our companies, whether it’s free up, outsource goal, econ, balance accounts, balance and then anything you do in paid ads on top of that is only gonna help.

But for me it’s consistency. I, would wake up every day for free, up for four years, and I would pitch five blogs, five influencers, five potential partners in the space. I reach out to five entrepreneurs in the space for networking calls. Connor would put out five new pieces of content and. If you’re doing these every single day, eventually you’re gonna connect with so many great people.

You’re gonna get leads, you’re gonna get referrals, you’re gonna get in front of different audiences. Your business is gonna become well known and, be out there in so many different places. And it’s all about that small, consistent effort every single day with that organic marketing blueprint. And like I said that the beauty of it is VAs can do a lot of it for you.

I used to wake up every day, do an email with those things. Oh, that’s awesome. I so appreciate you sharing that part of the story and, that, as I know we have a lot of business owners here. What advice would you give to them based on the fact you’ve now went through an exit and a sale? Any, quick bits of advice that you’d have for owners and entrepreneurs that, that want that to be their next step or part of their long range goals?

Yeah, so we built the company to, to run without us. Like I was the face of the company, but it’s very easy to go in with a different marketing strategy and replace the face. But the actual operations ran without us. We had a great team, we had really good SOPs. All the operations ran without me, and I think that was a big key to it.

We also had a lot of things that, had value. Like we built an internal software that was the marketplace that no one else had. We could have used a third party tool, but it was proprietary, which added a lot of value to the sale. We had a, just a great like industry that every entrepreneur needs to hire, just like every entrepreneur needs bookkeeping.

So we like to focus on the boring parts of that. And I think the best advice that I ever got when we are actually going through the sale, two pieces of advice. One, stay focused on the business. Pretend like the sale’s not gonna go through. There’s a chance it falls through every single day. It was a super stressful six months, but we stayed focused on growing the company.

So even if that deal fell through, we had a good company to go back to. And B, due diligence. Due diligence, and vet the buyers just like they’re gonna vet you. I. We didn’t wanna sell it to someone who’s gonna hurt our reputation or treat our team bad, or run the company into the ground. And we wanted to sell it to people that were gonna honor their word, paying us every penny, keeping our team around.

We didn’t wanna end up in a lawsuit down the line. We wanted to send it to people that had the same values as us as entrepreneurs and. We couldn’t have sold it to two better people, mark Hargrove and David Martin that we look up to as entrepreneurs and we have a great relationship to or with, to this day.

So that’s the advice that, that I got from entrepreneurs in MySpace and advice that I’ve given to other people looking to sell. Make sure that you’re vetting who you’re buying to and act like the deal’s gonna fall through at any time. Boy, two great pieces of advice. I love both of those. I think that it has so much value and it’s one of those areas that so few of us have any experience in.

So thank you so much for, being open with that and sharing that. Let’s shift a moment, and you mentioned during Covid, obviously we all got stuck inside and travel plans got changed and you guys opened up or launched outsourced school. Other than the fact that you were Stuck and didn’t maybe have that travel, those travel fans, what caused you and your partner to say, Hey, we need to go in a different direction here and launch outsource school.

Can you give us the story about what caused you to take that move? Yeah. A buddy of mine named McAlister reached out and he said, Hey, you know what people would real would really help other entrepreneurs as a course on hiring. And we’d never launched a course in our mind. We had never really thought of building a course.

And we, said, all right we don’t have any other business ideas. We’ll keep brainstorming, but in the meantime, we’ll. We’ll start putting this stuff together and we’re big proponents of minimum viable products. So like with the Amazon business, we drop shipped a few products and if people gave us bad reviews, we would’ve refunded them and tried a different business model with free up.

We gave our initial clients some free hours of virtual assistance and. Got feedback and used that to tweak the processes. And same thing, if people didn’t like it, we’d just refund them and, maybe try something else. And we did the same thing with bookkeeping. We gave people two free months of bookkeeping, used that to break everything, get feedback, make sure people liked it and, would stick around and.

With your school, we have the mentality, Hey, we’ll launch this course, we’ll launch it a discount. If people hate it, we’ll just refund everyone and move on to something else. And if people like it we’ll, build on it. And that initial feedback was overwhelmingly positive and it allowed us to turn into a membership and and make it so we, kind like our, the main course has cracked me the A code where.

You get our interviewing, onboarding, training, and manage process. That’s easy. You can plug into your business. But then on top of that, we just took all our SOPs, like how we use VAs to get on podcasts, how we use VAs for customer service, for sales calls, for all these different things, and put that in there as well for people to pick and choose.

What they can apply, what they, what makes sense for their business. So that was the, mentality behind it and, how we use minimum viable product to test the waters before we just put money and, time and really build something out. Very cool. I love how you, again, you leveraged so much experience that you had that expertise and made that available and from what I can see, outsource school is thriving and providing just tons of value.

Talk to me a little bit about in the outsourcing, I know different people have different perspectives, but do you have a favorite location or country you like to outsource from? I know I’ve read a couple things. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but where, do you guys like to look or do you find that the maybe country or part of the world isn’t necessarily as important?

Yeah there’s great das and freelancers from all over the world. We primarily hire from the Philippines. And my overall mentality for, people that are, let’s say, hiring a VA for the first time is you don’t wanna go out and hire one person from the Philippines, one person from Pakistan, one person from India.

There’s time differences, culture differences. You gotta get them to work together and. You’re just adding a lot of extra work to your plate. It can be done, but again, it’s just more challenging than just, oh, hiring from one place. And if you’re gonna hire from one place the, Philippines is a pretty great place to start.

They’re used to working US hours. They speak English. They learn English in school. They have a lot of the same media and culture that we do, and I just have a lot of great relationships there as well. If you go to outer school and grab our free trial we have a whole free mini course on like benefits from hiring from the Philippines and obviously cost of living and price point is a factor there as well.

But that’s my take and there are plenty of people that like, Build great agencies, great businesses, hiring VAs from all over. But I, primarily hire from the Philippines and I have a few freelancers, graphic designers, stuff like that, that are outside of the Philippines. No, that, that’s great feedback and really good information and, we’ll make sure we absolutely publish a link to your free, offer there.

What a great way to learn if this is something new for businesses on how they should be doing that. As, part of that obviously and, we’ve gone through it in our agency as well as in learning how to do this, but what are some of the common mistakes that business owners make when they start to hire?

Offshore or online like we’re talking about. Yeah, so if you think of hiring in, four parts, you got interviewing, onboarding, training, and managing, I’ll give you the biggest mistake on each one. Thank you for, interviewing it. It’s all, people only hire for skill and they’re not focused on attitude and communication.

We look for the trifecta of all three, and that’s a big part of our hiring process. We want people with a great attitude that wanna learn, that want to grow. And we want people that can communicate at a high level that soup communication’s a, big value in our companies. For onboarding. This is the step.

Most people miss it. It’s all about setting the right expectations. You want to know, do they have a backup, internet backup power? What schedule are they gonna work? What do you expect when they actually start? And a lot of times, people. Don’t set the proper expectations and the VA gets going and they, don’t know what they’re in for and then that doesn’t work out.

So taking that extra 20 minutes to really set expectations is gonna avoid most of the VA horror stories that, that you hear online with Tons of personal issues and, stuff like that. For training, it’s all about just having really good SOPs. I think a lot of people, they try to just do one-on-one training instead of actually documenting and writing stuff down and structuring SOPs and the why, the steps and, the important reminders.

And for, managing we call it our BARF method, which is a, funny acronym, but it stands for buy-in appreciation getting, creating a, family and, building a relationship. And the, key to running a business long term is avoiding turnover. Turnover crushes small businesses, and there’s always gonna be a.

Business out there that can pay your virtual assistance more than you can. So you can’t just focus on money. You gotta create a good culture. Get them to buy into what you’re building, build that relationship. Show appreciation. Don’t just talk to them when they do something wrong. And, build a family inside your business where people don’t wanna lead that family.

And that’s really the key to, reducing turnover and keeping people around and, for free up like the same people we hired in month one. We’re with us for four years, or still with us even after we sold, because we really preached that, barf method. Great advice and, really good nuggets there.

That’s, fantastic. One of the things I, read is I was doing some of my prep for this interview, Nathan, was I. Read somewhere that you really talked about how delegation is a, very important skill for entrepreneurs to develop. I know I’m going through some of that right now. Learning to dev to delegate better.

We’ve got an incredible team and, trying to be focused on what I’m really good at. Talk to me a little bit about your perspective on that and why do you think entrepreneurs struggle so much with that delegation aspect? Yeah, it’s a good question. I think. So I’ll I have a story. When I was a young entrepreneur, I was running this Amazon business.

My parents told me I should probably pay taxes. So I met with an accountant and the first question he asked me is, why are you, or when are you gonna hire your first person? And I shrugged them off and I think this is what a lot of entrepreneurs go through. I was like, why would I do that?

That’s money outta my pocket. They’re gonna steal my ideas, they’re gonna hurt my business. They’re not gonna do as good job as me. They’re like, I’ve been, I can do this seven days a week forever. I love this business, whatever. And he just kinda laughed in my face and said, you’re gonna learn this lesson on your own.

Sure enough, my first busy season comes around Black Friday, cyber Monday. People are buying a lot of toys, a lot of baby products, and it’s just me and I get destroyed. I’m working 40 or 20 hours a day. My social life plummets. My grades go down. And I worked my butt off for six to eight weeks to get through it and get to Christmas, get to January, and I learned my lesson.

I think to myself in January, man I gotta hire people. And so I think a lot of entrepreneurs go through that. They have those excuses and it really takes that wake up call and, then it’s too late. And then you gotta learn how to hire on the spot. And, hiring takes time and you’re gonna make mistakes early on.

And, that’s why we build outsource school to hopefully save those mistakes. But you always wanna hire too early than too late, and you gotta get in the mentality that. You can’t do every little thing. Most entrepreneurs are, only good at one, two, maybe three things, and you really have to learn how to hire and, really delegate everything else to, to other people.

And when you get to a, there’s very few seven figure sole entrepreneurs out there. If you want to grow a business, you’re going to have to hire one way or another. And you might as well learn how to hire and delegate early. No, so very true. Talk to me in as a before we move on, talk to me a little bit about a wrap up here about outsource school.

Who, should be taking a look at this free trial and, who’s outsource school really designed for and how, does it help? That business owner? It’s a great question. So I’m a big fan of nicheing down, but what’s happened with outsource school? Like we’ve got people in there who are just starting and they just wanna master hiring from day one and they don’t wanna make mistakes and they’re, hiring their first part-time va.

We have people in there who have hired more VAs than me. They have a hundred plus VAs already and they just want to. Take some nuggets and plug into their business and, make it more efficient. And then you got and got everything in between. So I really believe outsource school can help entrepreneurs no matter what size, one way or another, you’re going to have to learn how to hire if you haven’t already.

And you’re either gonna do it by trial and error mistakes, you’re gonna be do it by learning from, other people’s processes and, that’s my mentality. And I know your course is incredibly affordable from a business perspective, the amount of value that comes out of that in exchange, the amount of money you could save by just making one bad hire the course is at a great value.

If you’re watching this and you’re have any interest in outsourcing, let me really recommend Nathan’s program. Take a look at it. I, think you would learn a lot. And having gone through a lot of this myself, as our company has done some outsourcing this would’ve been something I, definitely wish I would’ve known about.

About two years ago. Really, cool. Let’s take a little look at, you’ve got a shirt on today about e-com balance. Talk to me a little bit about that and accounts balance to other companies that you’ve got. Tell me a little bit about those. Yeah, so

u200awe have two Bookkeeping brands, e-com, balance and accounts balance.

E-com balance is just for e-commerce sellers, so Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, stuff like that tends to be a little bit more complicated. Bookkeeping accounts, balances for other. Agencies, SaaS service providers, different online businesses, and we tried to create a, really straightforward service. It’s, we only do monthly bookkeeping.

We don’t do tax we’ll. We’ll work directly with your cpa. We charge you on the first, you get books by the 15th in income payment balance sheet, cash flow on time every month in a way that you can understand. We’re all about speaking entrepreneurs. I’m not a bookkeeper. My business partner’s not a bookkeeper.

We, we have a great controller. We have a great team of bookkeepers I’d put against anyone, but. We know entrepreneurs, we know how to create good process and make it efficient. We, did a lot of market research in what entrepreneurs want in a bookkeeper, and that’s what we’ve really tried to, build with these two bookkeeping companies u200aand.

The real story is after we sold Free up, we spent years just brainstorming bad ideas and we build outro school into a, nice passive income stream for us. And over time we, realized, hey we, like boring businesses. Everyone needs bookkeeping. We Bookkeeping was a big part of our success with our, with Free Up.

And we wanted to, build a service that, that we could offer to other entrepreneurs. And we don’t necessarily wanna be the lowest price, but we shoot for fair pricing and a high level of service. Great value all the way around. That’s obviously what, sells and what matters. In your experience, I know we talked a little bit about some mistakes people make when they’re hiring VAs, but under the bookkeeping side, what are some of the most common mistakes business owners making there, other than just obviously taking it on themselves?

Yeah taking on themselves is a big one. Not having the right setup is big. You gotta have QuickBooks online or, zero. Those are the top two accounting softwares. You, shouldn’t really try anything, any others, even if they’re free or cheaper. Own your own QuickBooks account. Own your own Zero account.

Don’t make it to your bookkeeper. Or account. Or account or owners. I’ve heard her stories of, those people disappearing and they have all your company’s data. Make sure if you’re an e-commerce seller, you have a connecting tool, like a two x to pull in the fees and, connect to the marketplaces.

Don’t intermingle personal and business. Make sure you have business checking accounts, business saving accounts, business credit cards that allow view only access so you can add your bookkeeper and not download statements every month and send it to them or give them more access than they need. And, that monthly finance meeting you should have on your calendar every single month.

Your, book should come in from your bookkeeper. The 10th of the 15th meeting on the calendar, 15th of the 20th, and we, if you want our agenda, you can go to accounts balance.com/agenda. But we’ve been running this meeting every month for the past six years and. You’re going through all three statements.

You’re comparing this month, the last month, this month to the same month last year, and that’s the meeting that you’re making decisions on. You’re, not making it on a random Tuesday based off gut. You’re not looking at the money, your bank account making decision. You’re making decisions based on what the numbers in those three reports are actually telling you.

And the trends on your business. And, that’s really the key. Having clean books helps you sell a company or get funding. Most entrepreneurs don’t do that like we talked about. And yes, it’ll make tax season less stressful, but the real reason to do monthly bookkeeping is all about decision making.

Entrepreneurs don’t go out of business because they, because of their bookkeeping expense. Bookkeeping is relatively affordable. They do go out of business because they don’t know their numbers or they’re not making good decisions based on what the numbers are, actually telling. Oh so true.

I’ve seen that happen so many times over the years. As we’ve got somebody watching and they’re wondering why, when, how? How do, when do I decide I need that bookkeeper? When’s the right time to hire a professional like you guys? At what point do you recommend entrepreneurs consider passing that, those bookkeeping responsibilities off to a professional?

Yeah I’m always about hiring a bookkeeper from day one. I mentioned that the best decisions we ever made was hiring one and free up. And whenever entrepreneurs are like, I’m gonna wait. I’m gonna wait till I make more money or whatever. Like I said, you’re not gonna go outta business with because of your bookkeeping expense, but you will because of bad decisions.

And it only costs more as you wait, cleaning it up, catching up if you try to do it yourself. Entrepreneurs just waste a lot of time and money there, and it’s always cheaper to just. Do it right from day one and like our minimum is 2 99 a month. There, there’s other people that, that might be cheaper, but you gotta have a bookkeeper from day one, just like you should pay your taxes every year and register correctly and, have a website and hosting and domain and all that.

Bookkeeping is just a necessary business expense. If you’re starting a business, you need a bookkeeper and. It’s funny, a lot of veteran entrepreneurs we work with, they know that whenever they’re launching or buying a new company, they’re hiring a bookkeeper from day one before they’re profitable.

And even if their business fails, it fails, but they know it’s not cuz of their bookkeeping expense. And the, a lot of times the newer entrepreneurs are the ones that’ll wait months and months or even years before they hire one. And it almost always comes back to, to bite them. Oh, absolutely. Again, really solid advice, Nathan.

I appreciate that so much. Obviously a lot of the, people that are starting businesses are of an entrepreneurial mindset and entrepreneurs aren’t known for necessarily understanding financials super well. If you had to distill it down to just a couple of key things that the average entrepreneur should be paying attention to or business owner what, would you recommend?

Versus getting overwhelmed with everything that’s going on. What are some of the key metrics or indicators they should be paying attention to in your mind? Yeah, this is honestly my least favorite question, and maybe I need to come up with a better way to answer it. But every business is different.

It’s so hard to be like, Hey, here’s a kpi. There’s some obvious ones. Like you should know the margins and have, make sure your books are segmented so you know how, what your each product and each services is doing. And me like checking cash flow and making sure you’re not gonna run outta cash because.

There’s lots of businesses that are profitable that go out of business because they just don’t have, they run outta cash. Those are, like the, basic ones, but watch a YouTube video. Go through your own income statement, balance sheet, cash flow. Those are three reports you’ve gotta learn how to read.

The income statement shows your, profit and loss balance sheet shows the healthier business your, assets compared to debt. And then your cashflow shows the actual cash going in and outta your business. And these are three things that you really just have to master and. It’s gonna help you not only in your own business, but if you’re gonna invest in other businesses or if you’re gonna invest in stocks.

Like these are things you have to be able to read. No, and again, I think that’s exact. I think you’ve got a great answer for it. I wouldn’t rework it at all. I think those are three of the most important things. And again they’re, relatively easy things for a business owner, an entrepreneur, to get their arms around and understand.

And I think especially when you watch that on an ongoing basis, month to month, it can teach you a ton about your business and as you said, help you make much, much better decisions about where you’re at and identify any, potential problems, hopefully before they become too big to solve or. Too big to hurt the business in any substantial way.

Absolutely, a hundred percent. As you look forward, and I don’t know how good your crystal ball is, mine’s kind of cracked, but I always like asking Anyway, as you look forward what do you see in the next couple years for. Both e-com balance and accounts balance. Where, do you see those businesses heading and moving?

Or yeah, I guess what do you see in your crystal ball? Yeah, it’s funny, I, a lot of people are like, oh, you sell companies, so you’re gonna flip these. And we had one exit, but we look at bookkeeping and, outdoor school as something that’s gonna be around for, years to come. So we’ve plan on holding onto these, growing these and building a portfolio of different businesses that help entrepreneurs.

And from our side we wanna buy other businesses. We wanna start other businesses and keep the bookkeeping, keep outdoor school is like the core of our portfolio, and things play out in different ways. You never know what’s gonna happen, but right now that’s the, rough crystal ball. Oh, I appreciate that Now I can absolutely appreciate that.

Nathan, if our viewers want to get in touch with you, they wanna learn more about outsource school or they wanna learn more about account balance or e-com balance, what’s the, I know we’re gonna put all your links up here and Mike’s got those, our producer, to get those listed. But what’s the best way, maybe they’re driving down the road right now, they’re listening to this podcast on their car and they go, man I need to, do something.

What’s the best way for them to reach out and find out how you can add value to their business? Yeah. Go to outsource school.com. You can use coupon Scale 50. You’ll get a 50% coupon or 50% discount. You can go to e-com, balance.com or accounts balance.com. Mention this podcast, you’ll get your first two months free.

And connect with me, Nathan Hershey on LinkedIn. I post a lot of daily content on the, boring and, unsexy parts of business hiring and, bookkeeping. Yeah. But such important parts and total, value. One of the things that I love to ask Nathan, and we talked about this, is and, I love your perspective as a finance guy as well as being an entrepreneur, but if you had to start over and you had a thousand dollars in your pocket, you didn’t have to worry about living expenses and stuff, but your goal was to build a business generating $10,000 a month and you had three months or 91 days to do it.

Off the cuff, what would you say, Hey, here’s what I’m gonna do in the first three months to build this business and get it where I want to go. Any, thoughts on that at all? Yeah I would pick something boring that applies to any business. I’m not trying to create the next Uber I. I’m trying to, find something that I can just take my small market share, like bookkeeping, like hiring, like building websites, things that apply to every business out there.

So that’s one key. Then I would come up with a minimum viable product, something that cheaper free that I can give away and exchange for feedback. And I would reach out to my network and, try to use, build off relationships that, that I’ve already had. And then lastly, I would do my organic marketing blueprint where I try to.

Go on podcast, get featured in blog articles, connect with some influencers, network with other people in whatever industry and space I’m going into, create an affiliate program. Find partners, other people in the space that have the same audience, but do something different. And that’s really the approach that, I would take and that I do take for, any business that I start to, to get it off the ground and get that first 10 k and Mr.

R relatively quickly. Awesome advice. Awesome. Thank you so much for that. I appreciate it. Any final pieces of advice you have or key takeaways that you’d like to share with our audience of entrepreneurs and business leaders? Anything you’d like to leave them with? I. No, I appreciate you having me on.

Feel free to connect with me. You can also follow my partner, Connor on LinkedIn. He posts a lot of great advice on SEO and yeah thanks for having me on. Thank you for taking the time, for joining us, for getting the schedule, and for sharing just so much valuable information. Let me encourage you, if you’re listening to the podcast or watching it however you’re partaking.

W you’ve got a business, you need a bookkeeper, you need help. You need to learn how to hire VAs. Life is changing here and Covid changed a lot of that. And there’s so many ways that you can grow your business and so many nuggets that Nathan shared here today take it or advice, reach out and talk to him and find out how he and his team can help you grow your business.

With that, thank you for joining us on the 91 Day podcast. Make it a great day and we’ll see you on the ud83dudccd other side. Thanks so much.