Maintaining Balance
How can you start maintaining balance in your life? In this episode of Incorporating Superpowers, host Justin Recla welcomes guest Nathan Hirsch to the show. Nathan is the co-founder of FreeUp and a successful entrepreneur behind EcomBalance and Outsource School. Being in business can cause problems with balance, so it’s important to prioritize and determine your goals for life. Tune in today to learn all about maintaining balance!
Justin Recla:
Welcome back to Incorporating Superpowers. Today we are going to be talking about Maintaining Balance and balance and finding balance in your business. Especially if you’re in the E-com world or indeed you’re not in the car world how do get do your books, how do you? Is that something that you as a business really need to be doing? Or is that something that you should be given to somebody to do so you can go out and do the things that you want to do not because it’s something you have to do in your business? My guest today is Nathan Hirsch the co-founder of EcomBalance. He’s been on the show multiple times. He’s absolutely brilliant in this space, Nathan, welcome back.
Nathan Hirsch:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me excited to be back.
Justin Recla:
So talk to me now, you young Carter built up, FreeUp, which was a freedom that service which by the way, just give a huge shout out because it’s exactly how our entire business our entire world here to our network works and operates on so thank you for that because it’s amazing. And now you’ve duplicated that success because you sold that business and you duplicated that success with EcomBalance. So talk to me about EcomBalance. What is it? And it was just the start there? What is EcomBalance?
Nathan Hirsch:
Yeah, I mean, EcomBalance is a monthly bookkeeping service for E-commerce sellers. And we own another brand accounts balance, which is a monthly bookkeeping service for non-eCommerce businesses. I mean, it all came about we sold free up in November of 2019 months before the pandemic, which was kind of crazy. And the original plan was to take a lot of time off and travel the world. Little did we know we’d be stuck at home with not much to do and you can only watch so much Netflix. So I started just brainstorming different business ideas, a lot of bad ideas thrown in there. We did end up starting to outsource School, which is our membership, which we teach our hiring process and that continues to do well, but it definitely doesn’t take up a large portion of our week. So through we started doing a little consulting with different e-commerce businesses, and we learned pretty quickly that we hate being consultants. But the common theme was before we could help give advice or point them in the right direction, we had to revamp their bookkeeping processes and make sure they were getting good numbers they could compare to the previous month, the same month last year, and actually make decisions based on what the numbers were telling them. And this is something that we did very wrong in our Amazon business before FreeUp. And with free up, we did a really good job hiring a bookkeeper from day one, and just having a Mac that books every single month that that we can make decisions on and eventually sell. So that kind of gave us the idea. Hey, what if we launch our own monthly bookkeeping service with a view as entrepreneurs? What is the perfect service that entrepreneurs want? Because we’re not bookkeepers. We’re good at hiring bookkeepers. But we’re entrepreneurs first, not bookkeepers first, and we speak entrepreneurship. So we did a ton of market research, we built a team, we did a beta round with about 25 clients, gave them a few free months of bookkeeping, and use them to kind of build our systems and break everything. And here we are with about 70 clients, hopefully at a turning point where we can start hitting the ground running and take bookkeeping off a lot of people’s plates.
Justin Recla:
Yeah, and it was brilliant, because the way you built businesses in the past, you’re carrying that for because free up is was as it is still an amazing business that’s helping so many entrepreneurs with outsourced work right with hiring virtual assistants, and you duplicate that process with EcomBalance, and I think is especially in the accounting realm. You demystified the process, right? Because it gets turning over your books to somebody you don’t necessarily know and can be a bit scary, but you’re passing on your trust to the people that you’re bringing on because of the processes that you use to hire your bookkeepers. And I think that’s absolutely brilliant.
Nathan Hirsch:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the same thing that we teach an outsourced school the same thing that we use to build our amazing internal team that FreeUp is the same thing we’ve done to build our bookkeeping team. Here at EcomBalance, we actually went a little off-brand I mean, with FreeUp, we had no US employees. We have a team in Denver, Denver, led by our controller, who’s got 30-plus years of bookkeeping and accounting experience and she’s kind of leading the building out of all the systems and managing the team there. But I mean, the bottom line as an entrepreneur, you should not be doing your own bookkeeping. There’s no situation where you should be. First of all, it’s just not a good use of your time. You shouldn’t be spending your time growing your business, getting clients just game planning all that. And second, most entrepreneurs are very good at bookkeeping. And anytime that you spend doing your books, it’s just gonna have to get redone later. And cleanup is always more expensive than catching up. So you got to be able to have a good monthly bookkeeping process where the month ends within 10 to 15 days of the month being over, you get an income statement, you get a balance sheet, you get a cash flow statement, you understand how to read those and make decisions based on what the numbers are telling you. But you shouldn’t be taking courses on how to do QuickBooks, you shouldn’t be opening up QuickBooks every day or categorizing transactions, you should hire a bookkeeping service or an internal bookkeeper to help do that.
Justin Recla:
I absolutely agree. And it’s one of those. It is a check-the-box type of task within a business that has to be done. But you’re absolutely right. It doesn’t have to be the business owner who shouldn’t be the one doing it. I absolutely love this. And when we get back from break, I want to go down a little bit more down the rabbit hole and what is the experience for the user on EcomBalance. But before we do what, what’s a good URL or location where people can go find more information about you? And he comes dozens?
Nathan Hirsch:
Yeah, I mean, you could find me Nathan Hirsch on any social media channel. And I mean, the URL is ecombalance.com or accountsbalance.com. If you’re not in the E-commerce space, and that meeting that you should be having every single month we actually have an agenda, the same meeting that Connor and I have run every month for the past six years, and all of our businesses you can grab that right on the EcomBalance site and do it with your team with your business partner every single month to help you make decisions and go through your books.
Justin Recla:
Fantastic folks, stay with us. We will be right back. We’re going to dive down this rabbit hole a little bit further. Stay tuned. We’ll be right back.
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