#230: The Journey of an Entrepreneur - The BEST and WORST Moments

Norman Farrar   0:01  

Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with Norm the Amazon FBA and Ecommerce podcast. Alright, today on the show, we’re gonna be talking about the journey of an entrepreneur, the best and the worst moments. So joining me today is Nathan Hirsch many of you know of him already. He is a repeat guest. He’s a lifelong entrepreneur and currently the CEO of ecom balance and the outsource school. Nathan is best known for CO founding free up, I think a lot of us know that free up dotnet and back in 2015, with an initial $5,000 investment and he scaled it up to $12 million dollars. I don’t think that’s too bad. That’s not too shabby. So today, I think there’s gonna be a fantastic podcast about the Ecommerce entrepreneur journey. So stay tuned. And now before we get into it, just a quick word from our sponsor. I wanted to give a quick shout out and say thank you to global wired advisors for sponsoring this episode of lunch with Norm. Global wired advisors is a leading digital investment bank focused on optimizing the business sales process. For more information, please call Chris Shuffling and his team over at globalwiredadvisors.com. Alright. Where’s the squire?

Kelsey  1:41  

That’s me. Hello. Happy Friday. How are you Norm?

Norman Farrar 1:47  

You look like you’re in a different area.

Kelsey  1:50  

I am at your house. Actually, for those that don’t know. I am Norm’s son. This isn’t weird. I’m not sort of creeping up on you.But yeah, and Norm is somewhere different to where are you?

Norman Farrar  2:05  

i Right now in Fort Lauderdale. Right after this podcast heading over to Festivus down in Miami.

Kelsey  2:11  

Ooh, sounds alright. And the beard nation. Where are you watching from? We’d love to know. Looks like we have Jessica Rabbit joining us. We have AMZ elites, Marina Howard. It’s great to see everyone welcome Steven, it good to see you guys. Let us know in the comments we’re going to be talking about, I think something that everyone can relate to today, the entrepreneur spirit or the journey, and the ups and downs. And what you can expect if you’re just joining if you’re becoming an entrepreneur thinking about it. So to get this thing started, smash those like buttons, give us those thumbs up, share this episode out to your friends, you can tag them. Also, let me see, don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel. If you’re watching. That’s the red big red button down below. And yeah, we have a really incredible prize today. It’s awesome. So stick around for that. And also, if you’re

Norman Farrar  3:05  

everybody hanging until the end, I

Kelsey  3:09  

usually do. But uh, if you want more of the beard, we do have a great membership program. We had Steven black do a special guest lesson with us. But basically it’s a an a way to support the podcast. If you’re interested in private group sessions with me and norm and a special guest every month. You also get a cool mug and some other cool things. You can check out the lunch with Norm website and just hit the membership button. It’ll give you everything and welcome Manny from Germany. We got Daniel joining from Brazil. welcome Jeff and Howard from Scottsdale, Arizona. So we got a international crew today. It’s great to see everyone. And I think that’s it for me.

Norman Farrar  3:52  

Okay, so if you do have any questions, just throw it in the comment section. So now just sit back, relax, grab that cup of coffee, and enjoy the episode. Welcome, Nathan.

Nathan Hirsch 4:03  

Norm. Thanks for having me. I tried to prepare a little bit. I shaved my head. I grew my beard out for a few weeks and tried to match yours, but I’m not sure I came that close. I don’t know

Norman Farrar  4:13  

so much on the beard side. That might take a couple more weeks. Yeah. So how you been?

Nathan Hirsch  4:20  

Oh man, light. Life is good. I moved to Colorado. My whole family moved here. So that’s been fun. Yeah, it’s snowing here for the first day. So I’m in a little bit of a winter wonderland. But yeah, tough to tough to complain.

Norman Farrar  4:34  

I had no idea that you moved less. I like I thought you were in Orlando.

Nathan Hirsch  4:37  

Yeah. Now right. Yeah, right now. spots.

Norman Farrar  4:42  

Oh, man. So yeah, and we just had snow coming down here. So like when I left Toronto, so anyways, he like it for the first day Nathan. The second day, third day it starts to go downhill. But anyways, no, Colorado was beautiful. So I’m sure you’re gonna love it there. All right. You know what? When I think about an entrepreneur, I don’t like using the word serial entrepreneur. I think it’s overused. But just the guy that goes out and does it does it? Does it right. You know, I think about you, like when you I heard you first believe it or not, I heard you first. I don’t know how far you are into your journey at this point. But you were with Scott Volker. On the seller, the Amazon Seller podcast? Yeah, me. Yeah, that’s right. Sorry about that. If Scott’s listening, and I’m sure he’s not. But anyway. Yeah, I mean, I listened to your story and what you were talking about, and like I was into VAs at the time, you know, I had been hiring a few here and there. But I was just listening to what you were doing. And it was fantastic. And then you nailed it. Like, you seem to be everywhere. I’d be at an event, you’d be there. You’d be at this other event, you’d be on these podcasts, you’d be everywhere. So I do want to touch on that, like that passion that you had. But first of all, like what got you when did you know that you were an entrepreneur?

Nathan Hirsch  6:11  

Yeah, so my parents were both teachers when I was growing up. And I kind of grew up with that mentality that I would go to college, get a real job work for 40 years retire. That’s what they did. And my parents always instilled upon me a really good work ethic, they made me get a full time job when I was 15. I was working every summer working every winter. And I kind of learned that there’s a lot of different ways to make money. There’s hard ways that are labor intensive, there’s more easy ways on line, or I get sales for Firestone and stuff like that. And I really learned pretty quickly that I did not like working for someone else. It it definitely didn’t help with creativity that was going on in my brain. And I when I got to college, I really wanted to be an entrepreneur, I didn’t want to leave college having to get a job to pay my bills. And, and I just started hustling, I tried everything, I used to go to the dump this little tent that was next to the dump, and grab books and textbooks and toys and list them on eBay and Amazon and and see how I could make money and and that was just me trying everything possible, which kind of led me down the path of Amazon. So it was really just having all these jobs from the time I was 15 to 20. And trying to find some way for me not to have to get a job after college.

Norman Farrar  7:29  

You’ve probably talked to a million different people getting into online sales or becoming an entrepreneur, what are some of the characteristics that you need to have to be a successful entrepreneur?

Nathan Hirsch  7:45  

To me, it’s a consistency. I think that’s something that that not just me, my business partner, Connor and I do really well. It’s chipping away at things little by little by little. And along the way you get rejected people turn you down problems come up, things don’t work out the way that you want. But you focus on the process. And one of the best examples to this. And you kind of mentioned like, by the time we got to year two of free up, we were everywhere. That’s because every single day, we weren’t spending eight hours reaching out to people. But we reached out to five podcasts every single day, we’ve reached out to fly five blog articles, we’ve reached out to a few influencers like you and four to five of them would reject us. And maybe one of them would respond to us a month later. But because we did it a little bit every single day that started to add up. And it’s the same thing, whether you’re building a software or going after clients or going at it from a marketing standpoint, that consistency is key. And I think a lot of people that fail at entrepreneurship, they either go really hard and burn out or they’re taking a week off here or whatever it is. And we’re just able to focus on doing small things every day to move everything forward. And as we hire people and get more manpower, more woman power, getting them to kind of keep take that same mentality. Because it’s very easy to get overwhelmed. There’s, there’s so much going on, you got a million things at all times. But if you look at it as hey, let’s prioritize let’s chip away little by little, those are the people that I think have the most success.

Norman Farrr  9:16  

One of the other things that I would probably if you don’t have you might as well give up right now. And it’s resilience. Definitely. It. It happens. You know, things happen all the time. And if you can’t bounce back, or if you don’t have that ability to bounce back. You’re already behind the eight ball, you might as well get out. Would you agree with that?

Nathan Hirsch  9:44  

Yeah, we I’ve so many just failure stories. There was a time when we were selling I think we’re doing like $3 million a year on Amazon. We had just hit the ground running. I was just 2021 year old or maybe yeah 20 year old just on top of the world. making more money than I thought any college students should. And one of our suppliers, our biggest supplier, that was 90% of our business just cut us off, they just dropped us instantly in one day. And, and that was devastating. And we had to recover from that. I mean, I got to the point with free up where I was getting rejected for podcasts, every single week, we had large clients drop us, we had someone that hack on our website, and we had to wake up at one o’clock in the morning and fix it. There’s just stuff that comes up. And you have to be able to overcome those things. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur,

Norman Farrar  10:35  

we had to one of the mic companies, that somebody hacked her website, held it for ransom, to get the to get the domain name back and then had insult or injury, they came back to us to see if they can get some work from us.

Nathan Hirsch  10:51  

Oh, my God, we so we had someone create a bot that would just create a new free up, sign up a new client sign up, like every three seconds just ongoing over and over and over just fake accounts that just crashed our software. And we had to put in all these rules in place to stop it. Crazy stuff happens. They don’t teach you that in business school.

Norman Farrar  11:12  

Right? Yeah, you know, there’s a lot to being an entrepreneur. Where’s the starting spot?

Nathan Hirsch  11:19  

Yeah, I mean, the starting spot is finding something with a market. And I think Connor and I have done a decent job of this is it’s like, where do people actually need your services, because there’s a lot of good products out there services out there that just don’t have a market, people don’t need it. And even before we started our new venture econ balance, we interviewed 150 Different ecommerce sellers to just see, hey, is there an actual need for E commerce? bookkeeping? What are people’s pain points? Is the problem already solved? Are there already people doing it, and we just want to learn every little thing, we did that with free up? We did, we did not do that with our Amazon business. And we just got lucky for five years getting in early before other people did Amazon and selling some products. And once they got crowded, we got out of the space because we didn’t know what products people actually wanted. So to me that starting point is trying to figure out a market that you can actually do and get good at even if you don’t have all the skills right now and doing the actual market research and talking to the real people that would be buying your services and seeing do they actually need it? And can you actually fulfill what they want. So when

Norman Farrar  12:27  

you talk about going out there and talking to all these people that actually need your services are using a focus group are using How are you finding those people?

Nathan Hirsch  12:35  

Yeah, and a lot of people, maybe people listening, if we’re friends on Facebook, you might have gotten a message for me in the past 90 days just saying, Hey, do you mind if I pick your brain on how you do bookkeeping for your ecommerce business, and we created a questionnaire, we hopped on phone calls, we reached out to every possible ecommerce seller that was willing to talk to us and like anything else, you you get rejected people are busy, people don’t want to talk to you, but you stay focused, you reach out to those 10 new people every single day. And if your target market is real estate agents, or a certain type of mom buying your toys on Amazon, or whatever it is, you got to figure out where those people hang out and talk directly with those people. But I’ve seen so many people invest $100,000 into a business or spent six months working on the idea when they haven’t even talked to their ideal clients yet. And most of the time, you’re not your own ideal client. And sometimes you are and you forget, you’re fortunate enough to be but most of the time, you need to find someone that is your client. And you’re going to learn so much just by talking to them just by asking them questions.

Norman Farrar  13:41  

Yeah, that’s that’s a very good point. You know, you and Connor, I’ve known for some time, we’ve talked a bit more than I’ve had a chance to talk to Connor. But you’ve got this very good partnership. And there’s so many people that go into Amazon or go into some sort of E commerce platform. And they joined together with a partner, but it’s a disaster. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like what made what makes you a success with your partnership?

Nathan Hirsch 14:14  

Yeah, I’m fortunate enough that I met Connor when we were in college, we were in the same business law class together. I actually hired him he was my first employee in my Amazon business when I was buying and selling textbooks, way back in the day and I think what makes Connor and I work well together is we had the same values. We have very different skill sets. He’s much more in creating websites and behind the scenes marketing and we have very different personalities as well. I’m a little bit more high energy rah rah, he’s a little bit more calm, cool and collective all the time. But we have the same values. We believe in treating people right and when we make a mistake, owning up to it and making it right. We believe in the same family values and and all the stuff that goes with that. And to me, that’s key. Because even if you find someone where you have different skill sets that complement each other, which is definitely an important piece of it, if you have different core values as human beings, that partnership from what I’ve seen normally blows up, and I think that’s what we’re able to kind of do well together is, we have the same, we want the same thing in our personal lives and our financial lives and our business lives. And because we’re very aligned in those things, we’re able to work very well together. And we’ve had partners that that we’ve cut off that we dropped over the years, because they came from from different backgrounds that the values just just weren’t in line. I mean, one example. I mean, Connor and I both come from like middle class, where you’re kind of this hard work ethic to, to achieve something. And we’ve worked with people that came from families that had way more money, and they didn’t grow up with that same mentality, and they would take different risks than than we were comfortable taking. And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. But it’s very tough to work with someone for five years plus, when you aren’t in that same value mindset.

Norman Farrar  16:06  

Yeah, one of the things and I’ve dealt with a lot of partners, for the most part, they’ve been great. But there have been the odd ones that never want to see again. But is it and what I’ve learned is that really weigh the pros and cons, what are what’s their skill set? What’s my skill set, and then see if there’s a mesh, if, if you come at it with an angle where you both have the same skill sets? That’s tough. That’s really tough. Especially if you have kind of the same personalities. You know, it’s it’s a, it’s failure waiting to happen.

Nathan Hirsch  16:47  

Yeah, I completely agree. And we’ve had partnerships that we’ve cut off that we’re still friends with the people you can, you can have a personal relationship with someone and still not be good business partners. And some things didn’t work out, even if we had the same values, because there was just too much overlap. Like exactly like you said, if two people have the same skills, it’s a little bit hard to divide and conquer people want things done a different way. We Connor and I kind of have this nice synergy going where I’m a little bit more on the front end, and the processes and the sales, and he’s a little bit more on the back end with the software and the marketing and, and that works out very well. And like I kind of said earlier, there’s a million things going on with any single business that you’re starting. And you have to be able to divide and conquer among your team among your business partners. And if there’s no clear lines, that makes it very tough, and, and we’re at the point now, because we’ve worked together for 10 years, when a problem comes up, when a project comes up, we know Hey, this is a Nathan thing, or this is a Connor thing, and we don’t step on each other’s toes, we might give input, we might ask each other questions, but we know who’s leading what.

Norman Farrar  17:53  

So another one that, uh, that comes up another thing that comes up for entrepreneurs. And you’ll see this and this could be either dealing with vas, which you’re very familiar with, it could be with suppliers, and that’s managing expectations. That’s something that at least over the years I’ve learned, you can go into a relationship or dealing with a supplier or dealing with anything, if you don’t manage the expectations good, bad or ugly, right up front. There could be a problem and that goes with partnerships. If you don’t say, Hey, we’re in our honeymoon stage right now. But what happens if there’s a disagreement? Now? What do we do? I think it’s so important that my whole team always hears me talking about managing expectations. And how long is a piece of string? Because you know, if you don’t give the answer, you’re just left hanging.

Nathan Hirsch  18:50  

Yeah, and you’re part of our school, you’ve kind of seen what we teach with hiring virtual assistants about how to set all the expectations up front from from rate to future raises and bonuses, to schedule to work hours to the actual tasks they’re doing. All of that needs to be upfront in writing, so that you can go back to it. And so you don’t just start off great. And in six months that it blows up in your face, like like you said, you want to keep it going strong. And on the client side. Econ balance is a great example. We were we got this off the ground and the past 90 days. We hired bookkeepers, we build processes, we had 60 beta testers that we gave some free months to, and we set expectations with them to to bear with us a little bit. We’ve got people to train, we got processes to build, we’re going to hook you up, we’re going to take care of you. We’re going to make sure the end of the day everything’s going but we want to set those expectations up front. If you want a bookkeeping company that had 10 years and you wanted to just hit the ground running. That’s not what our beta group is for. And, and we’re fortunate enough that we got great clients in there that really helped us perfect the processes and it was because we set expectations up front, and we were willing to say, hey, this isn’t a fit. And I’m sure you’ve done this, where you’ve kicked off clients. I know, with free up, we had clients that we said, hey, sorry, you can’t use the free up platform because you’re you’re abusing freelancers, you’re yelling at them, like, we’ve got to protect our people. And you’ve got people that you let go, because they didn’t, they didn’t match the expectations that you set up front. And we’ve done consulting, where we’re consulting, or we did some consulting with this Amazon agency, where we had to go in and just reset expectations with the whole team, because he had people that had been working there for years that were all over the place. They weren’t consistent. And we really just laid down all the groundwork on anything. And with that, there were some casualties, we had to let some people go. But what really happened was most people stepped up and abided by those expectations going forward. And it’s so important as an entrepreneur to have that.

Norman Farrar  20:55  

Right. Yeah. 100%. So, before I forget, because I usually do, we have a great giveaway, a really incredible giveaway. And thank you so much for this. This today, Nathan, but can you just give a little description of what it is?

Nathan Hirsch  21:13  

Yeah, so anyone listening right now you get two free months of bookkeeping, for econ balance, if you go to econ balance, calm, you can book a sales call mentioned norm, and you get two free months, our offer on the site as one free months are hooking you up with an extra free month there. And for one person listening, we’re going to give you a full free year of voucher school, and four free months of bookkeeping, with econ balance. So one lucky winner will get that on. And if you’re not one of those winners, you can still get two free months of econ balance. And we’ll also give you 30% off outsource school if you want to check that out.

Norman Farrar  21:48  

Okay, what a great deal. I mean, that’s, I’ve I’ve purchased outsource school. I love it. Like he was talking about your lessons that you’ve put in the very detailed, and anybody can go through and learn how to hire a VA, you’ve also got like, it’s called crack, crack the VA code, you’ve got all these other individual smaller courses in there. You’ve got the it’s simply SOP I think it’s called. But it’s a super giveaway. So thank you so much. Hashtag we’ll have Kelsey tagged to people, you’ll get a second entry. And also Kelsey, while we’re almost halfway through, why don’t we have another word from our sponsor. Thank you, solarize for sponsoring this episode of lunch with Norm solarize is your comprehensive solution for your everyday business needs. Everything you need to grow and scale your Amazon business is just one click away. For more information, contact demon his team over at solarized calm and remember solarize is with one our Okay, sometimes stroke Kelsey off when I ask all of a sudden. Alright, so um, um, by the way, I’m gonna be seeing Deema. And I think Chris, at the at Festivus later on today. But Nathan, can you tell us some of the key lessons that you’ve learned over the years?

Nathan Hirsch   23:15  

Yeah, so it really being an entrepreneur, at the end of the day comes down to three things. It’s about hiring really great people, because I think you’ve learned very quickly, you can’t do it all yourself. And even if you’ve code, you’re normally only good at one to three things and you need to find people that whether it’s a business partner and a US employee or virtual assistant, or a freelancer, someone that complements your skill set wise, and that can put in more hours than you can put it in a week. So hiring great people that you can train and retain is key. Next is processes. Processes are everything you need a process for onboarding clients, you need a process for fulfilling orders or fulfilling services need a process for recruitment and how you’re going to add more people. You need marketing processes, you need accounting and billing processes. All of that stuff needs to be built out over time. And processes are things that you’re going to tweak and you’re going to get input from, from clients, from customers, from people on your team. And when you focus on people and processes. That’s all great. But the last missing key is the financials. And that’s really why we came up with the idea of econ balance is to help people understand their numbers and make really great decisions based on those numbers. One of the things we did really well at free up is we had our books onpoint. From day one, we knew how much we were making, what our expenses were, what our most profitable and least profitable services were. And we could make decisions every single month by removed by reviewing the month from before and from that that really helped us sell the company going through due diligence, being able to build trust with a potential buyer and walking them through exactly what was going on in the business from top to bottom and having no To every single finance due diligence question that they had. And what really blew my mind is when post free up, we did a little consulting with some different people in E commerce. And we learned pretty quickly that we didn’t love consulting and we liked growing businesses more. But they didn’t know their numbers, they weren’t making decisions off anything besides a hunch, and we would spend the first month or two, just revamping their entire finance system. So the month would end on autopilot, they get reports with all the data that they need p&l balance sheet, cash flow, and custom KPI reports. And then we meet and see what are the numbers actually telling us and make decisions on the numbers and, and that kind of gave us the idea for for econ balance. And helping people not only get clean, accurate books every single month like clockwork, but being able to really understand the numbers and what’s going on in their business and making decisions there. And when you combined hiring great people and building really good processes that improve over time, and understanding your numbers, getting accurate numbers and making decisions based on numbers. That’s a powerful combination to grow any business.

Norman Farrar  26:12  

I’ve talked to some really successful, who they think they’re successful businesses. And I’m talking about eight figure Amazon sellers. And I’ve, I had one as a client, and I’m looking at an eight figure seller, over 10 million in sales. And they were when we, when we dug into the numbers that we’re losing, I have or not have $100,000 a year on 10 million, and they thought they were successful.

Nathan Hirsch  26:42  

Yeah, and there’s so much that goes into to being an E commerce seller, right? You could have different brands, different skews, you might have one product that’s super profitable, and another product that you’re just hemorrhaging money on, you could have a product that you’re selling more volume wise, but making less money than a product that you’re pushing less of it and have a higher profit margin. And, and most sellers don’t actually know what their margins are per product, right? How PPC is factoring in per product. So that’s definitely a goal of ours to help ecommerce sellers really understand what’s going on. Because then you can make decisions, you can decide, hey, I need to raise this price, or hey, I need to stop selling this product. Or hey, I need to find a better PPC agency or service provider, whatever it is that you can’t do that if you’re just looking at top line revenue, or cash going into your bank account, or the the Hey, I’m an eight figure seller, which a lot of people like to brag about, you have to know what’s going on inside your numbers,

Norman Farrar  27:39  

right. And if you want to break the rules, you have to, you have to have the knowledge enough to break the rules. And I’m just going to clarify something, you could be doing eight figures and losing $100,000 a month and it’s perfectly fine. If you’re investing in your brand and you’re growing that brand out, then that’s a different story. A this is investing in the future revenue that’s going to be coming in. But if you’re trying to just sales if you’re trying to get sales on Amazon, and you’re thinking that you’re doing great because of your top line shows that you’re doing X Yeah, and you don’t know what your bottom line is, or you don’t know the rules at the end of the day, then you’re running into a bit of trouble. So I just want to make sure that that’s really clear. So you can be who you can lose money at but you’ll hear most people say that you know, you you’ll you won’t use the example that I gave the previous example that I gave people aren’t usually building their brand to lose money, right? But you might be putting it into a Super Bowl. I look at Dr. Squatch you know, and I don’t know their finances but they spot I think the sponsor UFC, they sponsor, this is bar soap. Okay, is a bars of soap. And there’s some sponsoring the Super Bowl. Well, I guarantee you that cost a little bit of money. I don’t know how many bars of soap, but they’re investing in this brand. And anyways, I mean, that’s another great group of entrepreneurs. I don’t know them. But anyways, I love what they’re doing with their brand.

Nathan Hirsch   29:12  

Yeah, and like you said, it’s okay to lose money up front, but you should know how much you’re losing. Right? You know, what, how much cash is going in and out of your business. We have a client for econ balance that’s seasonal, and we help them project cash flow, because during the summer, they’re not selling that much during certain times they are and they need to be able to pay employees, manage suppliers, all that they need to know well how much cash they have and how much cash we’ll have in three months. And each business is a little bit customized of what’s going on. But you have to know your numbers.

Norman Farrar   29:44  

And one of the things when you’re looking at your cash flow statements and you know, it’s so important, there’s courses out there, just take a bloody course and you know, it’s great that your your bookkeeper or accountant can come to you and tell you about this. But if you just get even a small grasp of understanding what it takes, but you typically will get back your profit and loss, it’s so important to get a cash flow statement. So if you don’t know your cash flow, that’s the killer. And for me, anyways, most people are going to go down because of poor capital, you know, they’re not capitalized properly.

Nathan Hirsch   30:27  

So I forget what the stat was, but it was something like 70% of businesses would go down. Because Because of cash, not necessarily because of profit, because you can, you can be very profitable and be very cash poor. And if you can’t manage cash, that could be game over at some point. I mean, as we saw with the pandemic, when Amazon might might make a change, or stop inventory, or shipments might be delayed, or whatever it is, you have to know how much cash you have, and how much cash you need.

Norman Farrar  30:55  

Right? So I just want to any of the listeners that are listening. If you have any questions, please post them, I’d be really interested to hear if you have, you know, an incredible story, a credibly bad story, or just an outright ugly story, post them, I’d love to be able to hear what your stories have been during your entrepreneurial journey. And you know what, most people don’t think when you’re an Amazon seller, you’re an entrepreneur. I mean, you were a true sense you that that is the purest form of entrepreneur.

Nathan Hirsch  31:30  

Yeah, and I think we live in the day and age of building the brand. I mean, even if you go for when I started free app, which was six years ago at the time, Shopify wasn’t as big as it is now and, and even the brand building that a lot of sellers are doing, it’s been fun to watch. I know so many people in the E commerce community that started off just as a seller, and here they are with a brand and and there, they have Amazon sales, they have Shopify sales, they might be on commerce, or whatever. And that’s cool. So that to me, obviously, you can be an entrepreneur, if you’re mowing people’s lawns, or if you’re an Amazon seller, or whatever it is, and there’s different levels of it. And you can grow over time, and you never really know where the entrepreneurial venture is gonna take you. I mean, if you had told me, I’d be selling baby products on Amazon, I probably wouldn’t have believed you are running a freelancer marketplace or having a bookkeeping service, that all that stuff comes up as you learn the market. As you talk to more people, as you have it trials and tribulations all along the adventure.

Norman Farrar  32:31  

I don’t get to see a lot of the online sellers, I probably miss a gazillion of them at these events. But I, I’ve had the privilege of talking to a ton of people that have either just started, I remember back in the day with Amazing Selling Machine and they’d have the huge events going on. And you’d have people coming up and asking questions. I remember Deema Kubrick at the time, you know, coming up and very timidly asking questions. Now he’s a gazillionaire. And, you know, not everybody’s gonna hit homeruns. But one of the things and this comes back to just an action step that you can take is being cut, becoming an expert in whatever you’re going to be doing and going to these events, networking with people that, you know, just with a group of like minded people, there are so many people that I’ve met. I mean, there are countless numbers of people that are in a much better economic situation now than they were even a couple of years ago, three years ago, two years ago, just because they just committed and went for it.

Nathan Hirsch 33:39  

That things change fast. I mean, we’re in the day and age of speed, as we saw with that pandemic, or hurt some people, it really helps some people people had their their sales, quadruple overnight. And, and it’s about taking advantage of opportunities. I mean, a lot of a lot of these, these companies are buying Amazon brands. And that might be an opportunity for you or might be something where you double down on what you’re doing. But it comes down to that consistency and being able to put yourself out there and become an expert at what you’re doing. And then when those opportunities come up, like like we had with free up and the opportunity to sell it, taking advantage of it or making the best decision you can based on the information you have. And then you look back and and you’ve come a long way in a short period of time.

Norman Farrar  34:26  

I remember you talk about change. Way back in the 80s. I had a company that made some office furniture but grandfather clocks. So we had these big contracts for like Bulevar was one of our biggest contracts. And this was in Canada. Well, then the NAFTA agreements came through overnight, my business closed. The American companies could come in with a cheaper product, they could produce one year’s worth of my product in a single shift. And okay, so that happened when COVID hit, our family owns a factory in China for the last five years or so I think, which was doing a screen wipes and wipes. Well, there’s a positive thing that happened. You know, all of a sudden, we we had six months, a year’s worth of backorders. You know, but it just you don’t know where it’s gonna go. And it comes back to my initial thought, which was resilience. So yes, the clock business closed, it was closed, it just went under zero sales. Why would you come to me? You know, but you just get up and you go on to the next one.

Nathan Hirsch  35:39  

Yeah, I mean, we had that with our Amazon business. We were up and running. We had an office, we had a team and Amazon suspended us one day, and we’re fortunate enough, we got it back. But we kind of learned that overnight, things can change. And yeah, even fast forward to free up. I remember pitching influencers and going after people and getting rejected, and the super nice Amazon influencer, Ben Cummings, if anyone knows him, he was nice enough to have him have us on and, and blast us his community. And I woke up the next day to like 100 people reaching out to us free up. And that was kind of a turning point for us after being rejected by everyone for the past 60 days. So things change quickly, and you just got to keep going after every opportunity.

Norman Farrar  36:22  

Oh, that’s great. I think I even heard you on that.

Nathan Hirsch  36:26  

Okay, Ben’s a great guy. I told him the last time I talked to him, even every time I talked him, I just thank him for for giving us a chance. I mean, we were he at the time, he had no way of knowing that we would take really good care of his customers. And I like to think that that we did, but he trusted us. And sometimes that’s what it takes is getting someone else to trust you with their client base, their audience, whatever it is,

Norman Farrar  36:46  

right? Yep. And that’s where it comes. Sometimes if you work hard enough, and you just keep plowing away that one single moment just happens. So I want to just kind of lead into one other thing. And I call it on my other podcast. The I know this guy podcast, I call it failed to succeed. What’s your what? Oh, what a failure. I hate your failures. But What things have you had to bounce back at to succeed?

Nathan Hirsch  37:22  

So it’s funny kind of looking back at it now. But now that I’ve done 400 Plus podcasts, I like to think I’m okay at it. But my first podcast that I went on, I recorded for an hour and at the end of it he told me he forgot to hit the record button and then the next podcast I did I bombed it was not good. And I remember speaking at my first event and talking to the owner the event afterwards and she just gave me an awful report card I had no idea how to speak in public and and I had no idea what I was doing I was trying to get the word out about free up and and that could have been the end of it. I couldn’t say hey, you know what we got to focus on ads, we got to focus on SEO and all this other stuff, but I pretty much just kept booking spots people that would have me and and slowly getting better and more comfortable and, and learning tricks like making sure people record at a time and stuff like that. But I mean stuff like that can’t can be embarrassing and going back and looking at my first 10 podcasts. I cringed a little bit to be honest but it stuff like that you can overcome it. If you kind of had the mentality that it’s okay to fail. It’s okay to do something wrong. People have a grace period. Even in free up like we 9% of the clients were happy. But if something came up, we would make it right even if it costs us money, if it cost us time, if we had to give someone some free hours if they were nice enough to give us another chance. You have to have the mentality that you’re going to fail things aren’t going to work out whether it’s your fault or someone else’s fault or your team’s fault, whatever it is. You have to take those responsibilities and keep moving forward and finding solutions.

Norman Farrar  38:56  

Yeah, excellent customer service exceptional customer service and I know free up was known for that. I mean we’ve had some things that were minor and all of a sudden hey, you know don’t worry we’re gonna take care of this we’re gonna You didn’t have to do it but you did which was fantastic. Now I was going to talk a bit more about photos because I I love I don’t love hearing people go on stage and talking about they did 10 million in sales. They have a Lamborghini they post it they have a Lamborghini. They’re sitting on their Lamborghini flashing cash. It’s a tough go. So I want you to start talking about this. Did you have any struggles? Yeah, I

Nathan Hirsch  39:39  

mean, endless struggles I mentioned for my Amazon business I had this supplier that that dropped us while while I was on vacation, I was in Myrtle Beach enjoying some some much needed time off after after growing this great company for two years and then having our supplier cut us off and having to cut my vacation short early on. then go back and find other suppliers. At the same time I had my identity stolen. So someone filed a tax return to my name stole $40,000 from the government and I spent the next few months fighting that and trying to get my identity back. i We had Amazon suspend us and coming back from that, with free up we had, we had our software or website hacked and that person set up the bot. We had influencers reject us, I think I got rejected every single week. Off of that, even like going through selling free up, there was lots of ups and downs, we didn’t know if people were if the person who’s going to drop out, it was six months of due diligence and dropping money on legal fees and, and stuff like that. I mean, there are unbelievable amounts of just ups and downs. And as you go into as you become an entrepreneur for longer, you get a little bit numb to all the ups and downs when when things aren’t going well, you, you you’re like, Okay, we’re going to figure it out, we’re going to problem solve, we’re going to get this going. When things are going great. You’re like, Okay, you’re on top of the world right now, but we have to keep going for things aren’t going to go well. And we’ve had people that we’ve invested six months in the training them and they quit. We had people who tried to circumvent us and and go out the free platform and steal clients like all that stuff happens through the course of being an entrepreneur.

Norman Farrar  41:23  

Okay, so this is just last call. If you are interested in this incredible giveaway today. That’s one free year of outsourced school, and two months of your new accounting platform. And what’s the new accounting platform called again for everybody? Econ balance, econ balance, okay. All right. So hashtag we’ll have Kelsey and take two people you get in, you get an extra ballot. I share your pain, Nathan. Okay, Marsha. Yeah, I do, too. Okay, so Kelsey, are there any questions?

Kelsey  41:58  

We don’t have questions. But we have a lot of, I would say comments. Yep. I’m just talking about entrepreneurs. So we can go through those and see what you guys think about them. So let me just find one. So Jeff Lasseter, he’s saying it’s all about the journey, a bunch of speed bumps along his journey. And something from Manny, I think that’s pretty cool. Or something to think about is the other thing is be responsible for your success. And don’t blame the bad on bad competitors, or a bad market, etc. So is there anything that we can touch on about this comment?

Nathan Hirsch  42:30  

Yeah, I can talk about a little personal grill. So without naming names, we partnered with a company and we were doing some different contents swaps. And this was back with free app. And all of a sudden, they came out with a competitive product to free up and kind of blindsided us. And for the first like, 30 days, mentally, I was pissed off, I was angry. And at some point, you have to kind of get over that and realize, hey, people are entrepreneurs, people are trying to have success, just like you’re trying to have success. I’m not the first person to start a bookkeeping business or marketplace, and stuff like that. And, and just kind of getting over that that personal mindset of, hey, there’s, there’s scarcity, there’s really abundance. There’s ways that you can go after different client bases or work with people that in the past, you would think were competitors. I remember when I was an Amazon seller for the first few years, I didn’t want to talk to other Amazon sellers. I wanted to keep all my secrets internally, I didn’t want someone to steal my way of selling on Amazon. And you realize as you get older that collaboration and learning from each other, and networking, all those things are super important for growth, and you get farther together than you do looking at everyone as a competitor or being jealous of what someone else is able to do.

Norman Farrar  43:46  

One of the things that one of my pet peeves, I guess, and usually happens with younger, I don’t want to I don’t want to just hit up the young guys that are out there. But anyways, first time with a little bit of success. And when I don’t like seeing is it going to their head, they haven’t been humbled yet. And you know, sometimes, okay, you made it, you did a great job. But instead of flaunting it and doing just some stupid stuff, you know, just be better, you know, be kinder help share, you know, do stuff like that, rather than sitting on your Lamborghini. And, you know, it’s it really, if it doesn’t infuriate me, I just feel bad for them.

Nathan Hirsch  44:33  

I remember being at a conference and we were talking to a group of Amazon sellers and someone was like, like, my goal is to go to these conferences and be in the VIP room like away from the normal people and only be talking to the best people there and, and I’m there thinking like, my goal is to always be here. I want to be with people if I can, if I can help someone who’s a new entrepreneur hasn’t had as much success as me or has had more success than me or whatever it is, like that’s where I want to be like the second I get to a point I feel like I’m better than everyone here. Like someone needs to tap me on the shoulder and tell me how it is. And I hope I never get to that point. So don’t remember, don’t forget where you came from. Don’t forget the people that have kind of helped you along the way or the people that need help, because none of us got here by ourselves. You didn’t get to your where you are without help. I didn’t get to where I am without help. There were people like, like you like Ben Cummings, like other influencers that were nice enough to give me a chance when I was nothing and you got to pay it forward.

Norman Farrar  45:29  

Absolutely. And, you know, so I, I was out with a, I’d say a very wealthy well known individual, okay, not in the Amazon game, but a business entrepreneur. Probably more like a, I probably say, well, now he is a billionaire, for sure. But anyways, he brought me out to his club. Okay, so I’m at his club. And I’m thinking, wow, this is really cool. You know, I’ve made it I bet this club is I go back and get a drink. And I everybody, most people that are listening, though I don’t drink so it’s a Coke, Coke product, right? Like Coke, Diet Coke or something. I’m walking back to my seat, thinking, wow, this is so cool. And I have to drink and I got to take a sip. I forget there’s a straw. Okay, it goes right up my nose. And while I’m walking, and I can’t do it stayed there. So I get I don’t imagine like I’m sure people saw this. And I just went talk about humbling, right. Like, just I wasn’t doing anything. It was just at that point of the I was thinking to myself, Wow, this is so cool. I made it now I gotta start stop my nose. I basically had to pull it out.

Nathan Hirsch  46:46  

You got to be able to laugh yourself, right? Like no matter how successful or unsuccessful you got, you got to be able to laugh at yourself. Like we’re all human. We make mistakes, things happen. You have embarrassing moments, there’s failure and just everyday life, whether it’s personal or business, so never take yourself too seriously. At least I try not to for myself.

Norman Farrar  47:05  

Yeah, being an entrepreneur is basically a bipolar moment, right? You’re gonna have extreme highs, and possibly extreme lows unless you learn how to handle it.

Nathan Hirsch  47:15  

We’re all weird in some sense, right? Like you don’t become an entrepreneur, just being a normal everyday person. We all have our own weird quirks about us. And you have to not only appreciate that, but just be understanding of other people’s weirdness as well.

Norman Farrar  47:29  

All right. Any other comments or questions?

Kelsey  47:33  

Yes, we do from Pietro. Hi, Nathan, do you have a podcast about outsourcing delegating management’s? Where can we learn more?

Nathan Hirsch  47:41  

We don’t have a podcast but if you go to outsource school comm you can sign up for a free trial. We have a bunch of videos there. And yeah, we you kind of the coupon a join there. And I mean, if you follow me, Nathan Hersh on any social media channel, I’m always putting out content, whether it’s about people processes, or finances.

Norman Farrar  47:58  

And, again, just for outsource school, what I like about it is the professional quality videos, the action sheets, and like the PDFs that are put out, and just a simple step by step process that for any of the products, or services that Nathan has, it’s fantastic.

Nathan Hirsch  48:20  

Appreciate it. Yeah, our school was a lot of fun to build post free up, we got to, we get to teach everyone our exact hiring process the exact interview questions, we asked how we hire for different roles, how we structure bonus and raise programs, and it’s the same thing that we use to build all our teams are in all of our businesses.

Norman Farrar  48:38  

Right. Okay. Is that it, Kelsey? If it is we can go to the wheel.

Kelsey  48:42  

Yeah, I’ll just read a couple of comments here. So for many, yes, also take advantage of the competitors, you can advertise on their ASINs in some way their partners helping you to be seen. And from Marcia, whatever can happen probably will happen both good and bad. Make sure you build a great strong network as they help as a sounding board. And I know norm, you’ve had a story. I think that you’ve told me where you’ve gone to conferences before. And you’ve been with friends that are like dressing down or just wearing a t shirt and jeans. And you’ve had some guests kind of or some people at the conference kind of ignore them. And just kind of not even look at them because they think they’re not anyone special. And it’s kind of backfired on them. Do you remember that story?

Norman Farrar  49:28  

Not particularly callous, but I’ve seen that happen. I Oh, I know. Another This is a billionaire that I know. He went into a Harley dealership just dress down, not an event, but he was going to buy his employees all Harley and they wouldn’t nobody came up to him to service them. And they were actually he said that the one guy did but he wasn’t taken seriously. So he went to another Harley dealership. Another town bought the Harley’s got all his employees to ride over to the parking lot, and just kind of wave at them. You know, it was crazy. But yeah, you never know who you’re sitting beside, I used to live in Hawaii. Hawaii was the mecca for, you know, the who’s who. And they were in T shirts, shorts and sandals. I loved it. You just didn’t know who it was. And I look at that right now, when I go to a conference and somebody asked me a question. I stopped. I’ll answer the question. I’ll ask them a question. If I’ll go up to you, Nathan. Hey, what do you know? What are your thoughts on this? You know, I’m hoping that people will, you know, respond and just not give me a snub, because I don’t wear designer shoes or you know, the right shirt.

Nathan Hirsch  50:44  

I dress like a bomb. If you ever see me dressed nice, something’s probably going wrong. For whatever reason, like cars and clothes and stuff doesn’t do it. For me. I like experiences. I like great food. I like hanging out with people and getting to enjoy stuff and, and I have my own set stuff just in life that I like. But yeah, if I can help anyone, even if it has nothing to do with people process or finances reach out to me, I’m easy to contact. If I don’t respond to you. It’s probably a mistake. I try to respond to everyone. So feel free to follow up and I just want to help people enjoy life and hopefully grow their business.

Norman Farrar  51:18  

Okay. All right, guys. Let’s get to the wheel. Oh, right.

Kelsey  51:21  

Here we go. It is the wheel of Kelsey. Enjoy everyone.

Kelsey  51:41  

All right, thank you, everyone who entered. Let me see we have a year of outsource school and four months of bookkeeping from Nathan. So this is awesome. Can’t wait for this to see who’s gonna be the big winner. And if you are the winner, please email us at K at lunch with norm.com. And we’ll get you that you have 48 hours to reply before we spent again. So let me see who the big winner is. All right, Marsha. Of course.

Norman Farrar  52:14  

Of course. Congrats.

Kelsey  52:17  

Congratulations, Marsha.

Norman Farrar  52:20  

All right, super. So I, Marsha I know you’re gonna love that. So we all know Marsha here on this podcast. So she is an incredible seller. She’s an inventor. She’s, she’s had over a billion dollars in sales. So the processes that you can learn from outsource. I can’t I’m she’s gonna love it. I know it. Okay, so Nathan, I just saw this it kind of snuck up there too. I don’t think all success is due to your genius. It’s like not all failures are due to your stupidity. There we go.

Nathan Hirsch  52:56  

Marcia, feel free to shoot me an email Nathan at econ bounce, calm and I’ll hook you up.

Norman Farrar  53:02  

Alright, okay. So Nathan, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

Nathan Hirsch  53:08  

Yeah, thanks so much for having me always good to catch up. I’ll work on my my beard growing skills. And if I can help anyone in any way, reach out, check out econ balance if you want to free months of bookkeeping, and outsource school if you want 30% off and and want all of our hiring processes. And thanks for coming. Thanks for having me on.

Norman Farrar  53:26  

You’re awesome. Thanks, Nathan. We’ll see you later. Okay, everybody, I hope you enjoyed that. I can’t tell you enough. If you don’t check out outsource school, you’re missing out, especially if you’re trying to do the hiring process yourself. I know we’ve had some podcasts about it. But this really goes through this the step by step, especially the one module crack the VA code. It’s so good. So check it out. Anyways, uh, let’s see, we have a special guest first time guest Howard tie, otherwise known as the Amazon, the professor of Amazon, I meet up with him everywhere I go. He’s an awesome guy. And we’re gonna be talking about something very important. The new TLS policy and what does that mean for Amazon sellers? So that’s going to be is that I guess that’s Monday. And let’s see, is there anything else I got to get to before we get to a quick word of our sponsor? No. Kelsey, a quick word from our sponsor, please. Thank you Z CO for sponsoring this episode of lunch with Norm. Are you looking to take your ecommerce business from local to global, you can with the help of z and their brand new app? That’s right. You can track live shipments with push notifications. Get detailed lead times for each stage of your shipment, and store all compliance and VAT reclaim documents in the palm of your hand. All while listening to lunch with norm, ready to expand your E commerce empire and take your Amazon FBA business global. Use the link in the description to learn more about Z’s new app that’s now available on desktop and mobile. That’s z.co z e dot C O. Okay, Kelsey, where are you?

Kelsey  55:23  

Alright, hello, everyone. I hope you guys enjoyed today’s session. And don’t forget to smash those like buttons and give us those thumbs up. It’s great to see everyone. I hope everyone has a fantastic weekend. I also just want to mention that we do have training if you are interested. This is our Patreon group. It’s basically a private group mentorship program that helps support the podcast. So if you are interested in private group sessions with me and norm, I talked about social media. No one talks about Amazon in E commerce. We also have guest lessons as well, you get a free mug and some goodies is along with that as well as a monthly SOP. So there’s a bunch of fun toys and a whole bunch of great stuff. So if you’re interested, you can either go to patreon.com/lunch with Norm with the banner going across, or you can just go to the lunch with Norm website and hit the membership area nice and easy for everyone. Also, in our Facebook group lunch with Norm Amazon ecommerce, Amazon FBA and ecommerce collective. I just posted a question to the group if you have any. Anyone that you know, that hasn’t been on the podcast before, let us know that if you’re interested in we’re going to be reaching out to some guests for the new year. And if there’s anyone that we’ve missed out on that you’re you’re dying, and you’re like, Ah, why aren’t they on, just let us know in the group. And we’ll get them and we’ll see if we can lock them down. And I think that’s everything for me.

Norman Farrar  56:58  

Okay, so tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. Thank you everybody. Thank you for being part of the community. Thank you for watching today and enjoy the rest of your day and your weekend.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai