I recently was able to interview a friend and serial entrepreneur about his new business EcomBalance.
This business hits a sweet spot that is underserved. Handling the bookkeeping for Amazon and Ecommerce sellers. It's quite often that the books for those who are in this space are not as clean as they should be. This creates headaches when it comes to tax time and doesn't allow sellers to make educated decisions about their business based on their numbers.
EcomBalance is looking to change that.
Below you will find the video interview along with links to the podcast episode and a transcript. Wanted to make sure to cover all the bases on how you may enjoy consuming content.
If you have questions about the episode or bookkeeping in general be sure to drop a comment or an email and I'll pass it along to Nathan and his team to get you an answer.
If you'd prefer to listen to this on the go here are links for this episode on popular services.
Transcript
Christopher Grant: (00:12)
What is up Amazon sellers, arbitragers, and flippers of all stripes. Welcome to a impromptu live. I've got my friend Nathan Hirsch with me today, and we're going to be talking about a lot of things. So Nathan has quite an extensive background as an entrepreneur, an e-comm seller, Amazon seller, starting up a FreeUp and Outsource School. You guys may have heard of those two businesses and something new for 2021 called EcomBalance, which is specifically bookkeeping to help Amazon and e-commerce sellers, because there's been a void in the marketplace for that kind of thing, especially to have it done correctly. So we're going to dive into a bunch of different topics today. Nathan, I appreciate you taking the time to hang out with me, man.
Nathan Hirsch: (02:59)
Yeah. Chris, great to be back. I hope you're doing well. Hope everyone had a great Black Friday Cyber Monday.
Christopher Grant: (03:05)
Yeah, absolutely well. The numbers were a little junky, I don't know if you read any of the articles out there, things were a little down for Cyber Monday. I want to say they were pretty flat for Black Friday, but those sales have been stretched out over a period of time. So I see the numbers are supposed to be better this year compared to last year overall. So I've been hearing good things.
Nathan Hirsch: (03:34)
Yeah. I'm curious how it all plays out once December ends and we can look that the crazy year, 2021.
Christopher Grant: (03:42)
Yeah, I am ready for 2022 to be here.
Nathan Hirsch: (03:45)
Me too.
Christopher Grant: (03:47)
So, and hey guys, I see a couple of you saying, Hey. If you guys have questions, Nathan is a really open book and has a lot of experience in a lot of different things. And so feel free to ask them and I'll make sure that we get Nathan to open the kimono, if you will, on whatever you guys have questions about. And I've got plenty of them as well.
Nathan Hirsch: (04:12)
Yeah, Chris, let me just add in there, if you guys ask me something that's bookkeeping specific, that I can't answer because I'm not personally a bookkeeper, we've got a great bookkeeping team and I can always get the answer and make sure I get back to you too. I know good amount about bookkeeping and happy to share what I know, but if there's ever something specific that I can't answer, I'll make sure you get the answer.
Christopher Grant: (04:32)
Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. I saw the photo that you posted, I think. Your head bookkeeper, so she rides a motorcycle, right?
Nathan Hirsch: (04:41)
Yeah. It's pretty awesome. We have a great team. We actually just hired another bookkeeper today. She started this morning. She's awesome. She's got 20 years of bookkeeping experience where we plucked her away from this retail company here in Denver. She was the seller herself, which we love. And yeah, she's been working her butt off to help us get the shop, the ground and make sure we're fulfilling everything for clients. And we're excited to get her some help as well.
Christopher Grant: (05:06)
That's awesome. That's awesome, man. Well, let's start with a little bit of background for people who don't know you.
Nathan Hirsch: (05:12)
Yeah.
Christopher Grant: (05:14)
Why did you become an entrepreneur and take us down that journey a little bit?
Nathan Hirsch: (05:19)
Yeah. The real answer is, my parents always made me get real jobs when I was younger. From the point I was 14, 15, I was working 40 hours a week every summer, every winter, after school and all of that. And I always had that mentality that I go to school, get a real job, work for 30 years and retire. And just from working for other people, I realized that, that's not what I want to do. And if I was going to get a job and work for someone else, I was going to be miserable for a good portion of my life. So when I got to college, I started hustling, started buying and selling people's textbooks to make side money. And that really led me to Amazon back in 2008 in the Wow Wow West days and I became an Amazon seller, which replaced my internship at the time and I've never looked back.
Christopher Grant: (06:06)
That's awesome. That's interesting, you had job. I started working around... Well, my first 'job' was 12, but that was for family under the table and-
Nathan Hirsch: (06:19)
Babysitting, yeah.
Christopher Grant: (06:19)
Yeah, totally breaking all kinds of labor laws. And then I pushed carts and all kinds of stuff. And I had family make me, bail hay in the summertime at farms and whatnot, and you're right. You learn a lot, even though you're young, you realize that, that really sucks compared to the freedom that we have. And I know that you work crazy hard. I work hard, but still we get to make our own choices, which I think is why we do this.
Nathan Hirsch: (06:54)
It's a different kind of hard. When you're scrubbing dishes in the back of a Jewish nursing home that I used to work at, and it's a hundred degrees in there and you're working eight hour shift or you work for Arnold's Meats, which was another job I had or Aaron's rent center where you're standing all day and trying to sell people furniture. You realize there's different ways to make money and that not all of them are enjoyable.
Christopher Grant: (07:15)
Absolutely. So along that entire journey, what are some of the lessons that you've learned?
Nathan Hirsch: (07:24)
Yeah. A big thing that we learned in our Amazon business, was obviously hiring, which led us to FreeUp, an outsource school. I remember my first busy season I laughed at my accountant because he told me I should hire help. And I was like, why would I do that? That's money out of my pocket. They're going to mess up my business. And then my first Black Friday, I don't think Cyber Monday existed back then, but we just got destroyed and I was working 100 hours a week on top of school, on top of my social life, my girlfriend and all of that. And that was a hard lesson that I needed help. And after going through a bunch of virtual assistants that didn't work out, that I had to fire and I wasted a lot of time and a lot of money, I realized how important it is to surround yourself with a good team.
Nathan Hirsch: (08:10)
And that's the lesson that I brought forward on all the businesses from building a great internal team on FreeUp to the bookkeeping team we've built on EcomBalance. Before we even had customers, just getting those people in place, because I know that I can't do it myself. And the second big lesson is just knowing your numbers.
Nathan Hirsch: (08:31)
Amazon again, it was the Wow Wow West. You could post anything on the Amazon and it would sell. And because I was 20 making more money than any 20 year old should you, you loose track of what numbers are important, what you should be monitoring, how much you're actually making at the end of the day, because you just see Amazon deposits going into your bank account and fast forwarding to FreeUp and going through a sale. And seeing someone go through your numbers with a fine tooth comb, picking out every little thing, you learn how important those financials are. So I think building a strong team and knowing your numbers and having clean books are the two main lessons that I've learned that I want to apply and set up for any business I have going forward.
Christopher Grant: (09:13)
I love that. I'll be quite honest. I have a little bit of entrepreneurial envy when it comes to you because I have watched you. We met a long time ago, yeah, in Florida. I can't remember what event we're at, but I remember we met and I've watched you several times. Build up teams as you grow a new business and I've never been really great at it but I've watched you from the sidelines and I've always appreciated that. So let's jump a little bit to FreeUp. Because FreeUp was a great business, I know you guys were absolutely crushing it there. And then you guys sold a business and I have sold a little piece of a business. I haven't sold anything anywhere near what you guys have done, but I'm curious, how did that change your life and how did you find the right fit with somebody to acquire your baby?
Nathan Hirsch: (10:13)
Yeah. And I appreciate the kind words. It definitely changed my life in terms of just stress level and all of that. You mentioned that you saw me building different businesses and as a lot of people know, not every business succeeds. I'm lucky to have made some money on an Amazon business. Although that wasn't something that I was going to run for the next 30 years and FreeUp was an opportunity to exit and be able to buy a second house and become foster parents like my wife and I are about to do and give back too.
Christopher Grant: (10:43)
That's awesome.
Nathan Hirsch: (10:44)
A lot has been able to just change in what I'm able to spend my time on and what opportunities that I've been able to do. I feel like as a young entrepreneur, there's a lot of hustle, which is great, but you're also trying to take advantage of every little opportunity that comes up. Podcasting is a good example. I used to go on every single podcast. It didn't matter if I was there, a thousands episode or first episode. Now I'm a little bit more picky with my time and I can actually say no to things in a polite non rude way. So I think that changed a lot as well. We're unbelievably fortunate. We had one of our clients reach out to us and say, "Hey, we love FreeUp. We own a bunch of companies." They known for the HAW. They own a bunch of other like writing companies, SEO, PPC companies.
Nathan Hirsch: (11:33)
And they said, "Hey, we're looking to get into the VA freelancer space. We don't want to build it from scratch. We want to acquire someone like FreeUp and hit the ground running from there." And from there was the due diligence, which was very long. It took about six months, but we spent a lot of time vetting the owners, like the actual people that we were selling the business to. And we wanted to make sure that we are going to sell it to people that honored their word and that we're going to take good care of our clients, take good care of our team. And even today, which is two years later, we're still in contact with them. They've honored every single thing that they've said.
Nathan Hirsch: (12:11)
When you sell a business, although we got a large portion up front, there's always an earn out piece and you don't want to end up in court, fighting someone over money. You want people that actually honor your word and they've been great there. So across the board, just being able to sell to good honest, hardworking entrepreneurs like us, that have the same values and will take good care of this brand that we built was super important to us. And we couldn't be more thrilled on how it worked out. Although of course it was sad to say goodbye to our team and we have some great memories from FreeUp.
Christopher Grant: (12:43)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. I find that mergers and acquisition space really, really interesting. [crosstalk 00:12:54] watching other people do it, having some friends do it, it's been really interesting. After FreeUp, I know you guys started Outsource School. You guys, didn't even take a vacation. You guys were right into it. What made you start Outsource School right after you sold FreeUp?
Nathan Hirsch: (13:13)
Yeah. So it's funny after you sell a business and I've talked to a few people about this, you're in this weird phase where you have a good amount of cash in the bank, but you're not making any income. So this weird, like semi-retirement, which is fun for a little bit, but it also gets old. I didn't think I would see my business partner Connor for the next year. He was pointing to just travel the world and work remote for a while. I was going to do some traveling. I was still in Florida in the time and then the pandemic hit and we didn't really have a choice. We are locked at home. We didn't really know what was going on. And during that time, a mutual friend of ours that I'm sure everyone in this group knows Nate, McCallister reached out with the idea of doing a hiring course to teach people our process for interviewing, onboarding, training, or managing.
Nathan Hirsch: (14:02)
And in my mind, we were stuck at home anyway, and it was now or never. I was pretty well known in the hiring space or for being good at hiring. So it wouldn't have made sense to launch Outsource School in like four years or something. It makes sense to launch it right after we had sold a company all about hiring. So we got that off the ground. We built a great team. We turned into something that doesn't take up a lot of Connor in our time, although we're very active in the group every single week. Most of it really runs without us with a great team using the exact processes that we teach. And when you start a company, you never really know if people are going to like it or hate it, or what's going to go on.
Nathan Hirsch: (14:42)
But we've been very fortunate that people have really liked our processes. Have been able to implement it. It's been cool. Seeing people hire team leaders and build big teams using the exact systems we teach. And it was a fun thing to build while staying in the VA space while also buying us time to get into a new market. Because I think both Connor and I, didn't see us just being in the VA space for the next 20 years. Getting into something new, like bookkeeping is exciting. There's a lot to learn. There's a lot, we have to figure out and build from scratch instead of just going on podcasts and only talking about VAs for an hour, which I'm still happy to do a little bit, but it's good to get into something else as well.
Christopher Grant: (15:23)
Yeah, absolutely. I've got some questions about the bookkeeping space, but I've got one other question that, since we've got a bunch of Amazon sellers in our audience, one thing I find that they don't do quite often is delegate. And I'm not just pointing fingers, this is also something I have a problem with. So why do you think it's so important for entrepreneurs and business owners to delegate?
Nathan Hirsch: (15:52)
Yeah. The first part of it is you just can't do it all yourself. If you look at the seven and eight figure entrepreneurs that a lot of us look up to, especially early on in our entrepreneur career, they are not doing it by themselves. There's very few seven figure solo entrepreneurs out there. It just doesn't exist. You need other people. As an entrepreneur, you're normally only good at like one to four things. Maybe four things that if you're lucky and even Amazon, like the entrepreneur that's good at PPC might not also be good at listing and not be good at graphic design.
Nathan Hirsch: (16:26)
So you have to be able to surround yourself with different levels of people, whether it's followers to follow processes that you've already built so that you can move on to bigger and better things and learn new processes to help your business or doers for projects like graphic design or video. Stuff that is a complete waste of your time for you to get really good at or hiring high level people like PPC or bookkeeping or whatever it is, to just take something off your plate that you're not going to be good at, even if you try.
Nathan Hirsch: (16:57)
There are certain things that I could spend the next six months focusing 40 hours a week, trying to be good at it. And I still wouldn't be good at, as good as the experts out there that I can just hire part-time or full-time to work on my business. So that's a big mental stretch you have to take. Something that I learned the hard way in my Amazon business, where around year two or three, we just stalled out because I was at my max. I couldn't do anymore. And things were starting to fall through the cracks. And for anyone listening that wants to sell your business. And I don't know how much people here know about selling your business. But first of all, it's hard to sell your business if you're doing everything yourself. Most people don't want to take that on.
Nathan Hirsch: (17:39)
They want to see that you have a team in place, a system in place, but a lot of people buying a business will actually deduct your salary from the buy price. So they'll look at you and say, "Hey, to replace you and your business, it might cost $150,000, $200,000 a year, $100,000 a year, whatever it is. And they'll deduct that from your EBIDA before they give you an actual offer. So you need to make sure that if you want to maximize what you can get for your business, you have to be able to prove that your business can really run without you, or for the most part run without you, or the pieces that they replace you with are easy to do.
Nathan Hirsch: (18:13)
A good example of that is FreeUp where the actual business ran without me from customer service to billing to recruitment. And I did a lot of the marketing stuff. I went on podcasts and talked to partners and stuff like that, but they can hire a marketing person and go in with a different marketing strategy. They don't necessarily need me for that. So understanding how you get the most for your business is a big part of the hiring and the bookkeeping portion of running a business.
Christopher Grant: (18:41)
Yeah, that's really fascinating. I know in the arbitrary side, people don't necessarily think about selling their business very often. Although I think there are some ways to do it, especially if you have a well oiled machine that's running all by itself. All right. So let's dig into EcomBalance a little bit. E-com balance, it is bookkeeping specifically for folks in the Amazon, Etsy, Shopify space, right?
Nathan Hirsch: (19:07)
Yeah. And we can work with e-commerce agencies as well as someone who ran a marketplace which is a similar business model to an agency. We have a lot of experience there but, an e-commerce service providers. We service so many e-commerce sellers, service providers, agencies on FreeUp. That's the same market that we want to go after and it's interesting how this all came about. When we sold FreeUp, we spent a lot of time brainstorming what we want to do next. And every idea in the world was thrown out there. I know Connor and I took a lot of pride in our personal financial savvy, whether it's investing in real estate stocks, making a monthly budget, running the financial numbers in our business. And we always wanted to brainstorm away around that.
Nathan Hirsch: (19:53)
Do we sell a course about personal finances? Like what kind of things can we do there? And as we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do, we offered some consulting to different clients. We learned very quickly that we don't actually enjoy being consultants. And we enjoy building our own businesses more than that. But the common theme with all these businesses that we would consult with, is the financials were a mess. And we would spend the first month or two, just revamping everything, because we don't want to just give blind advice to people. We want to be able to look at numbers and say, "Hey, these are what the numbers are telling us. Let's make decisions based on these numbers." And you can't do that if the company doesn't have clean books at the end of every month, if they're not getting customer reports. They don't know how much they're making per product or per brand, opposed to just how much they're making in total.
Nathan Hirsch: (20:43)
So really breaking that down for people. And a lot of people we consult with, really appreciated that. And then on top of that, for Outsource School, we launched our bookkeeping formula, which if you're not ready to hire an EcomBalance service, you can join Outsource School and we'll teach you how to hire a VA bookkeeper. And that ended up being one of our most popular trainings out there. So all of that combined pointed us in the direction of bookkeeping before the light bulb finally went off, Hey, we could offer a bookkeeping service and all this revamping that we're doing for clients, we could actually offer to the masses through EcomBalance. From there we want to know, is this a good idea? And so we interviewed over 200 e-commerce sellers, and we actually have a blog article coming out tomorrow on the EcomBalance blog and everything we learned from the market research.
Nathan Hirsch: (21:36)
And one of the crazy things is, over 50% I think it was like 70% of the people we interviewed, we asked them to name one or two other e-commerce bookkeepers in the space. And they just couldn't do it. Even if they had been in the space for eight years and had gone to conference after conference, bookkeepers just weren't well known and most people were getting bookkeepers based on referrals. And on top of that, a lot of those bookkeepers weren't e-commerce specific, which led to hassles along the way of trying to teach your bookkeeper about e-commerce. And there's a lot of other cool market research we learned as well, but after interviewing 150, 200 sellers, we tried to perfect the perfect bookkeeping service for sellers. And from there, we hired the team and started building processes.
Christopher Grant: (22:23)
That's awesome. Yeah. There really isn't. There CPAs out there and I'm sure that some of them do bookkeeping and things like that, but there really isn't anybody that I can just say, "Oh, well, this person does bookkeeping." So it's going to be nice to have somebody to say, "Oh yeah, just go to these guys." So in your interviews, what are the biggest mistakes that you see sellers making when it comes to their own bookkeeping?
Nathan Hirsch: (22:49)
One of the craziest mistakes, and we've even come across this on clients that we've onboarded. You get a deposit in your bank account from Amazon, and people are just counting that as their sales, but really that's the net of sales after Amazon fees and a bunch of other stuff that Amazon will deduct or add in there. And if you want to get accurate books, you want to able to really break that down, using a tool like A2X, which is more on the expenses side. We've actually found a cool tool called Synder, which if people aren't using that or are using A2X, I recommend checking out. The cool thing about that, is it's cheaper and it connect to a lot of platforms, but you really want to be breaking down. You really want to be breaking down what goes into that Amazon deposit to have a full picture of your business.
Nathan Hirsch: (23:36)
And even if you're not using an EcomBalance, you almost have to use the softwares at this point. It's so complex to just go through Amazon reports especially as you get bigger and really figure out the full picture of sales. The other thing that blows my mind a little bit, as we were consulting with different sellers, they really didn't know what they were making per product or what their cost was per product, because you might be selling 10 different products, but really you're making all your money on one of them, or one of them requires a lot less work or whatever it is. And you want to be able to know that. You want to be able to see trends. You want to be able to go to suppliers and say, "Hey, I need to get a better deal on this particular product, or I can't sell it anymore."
Nathan Hirsch: (24:19)
So you have a little bit of leverage and being able to break it down by cost of goods sold per product, that's huge right there. And then this is like a random one. We're in the era of sales tax and sales tax liability. A lot of people will try to deduct their sales tax, which isn't exactly how you're supposed to do it. You should have a sales tax liability column set up in QuickBooks, and that's a little technical. We don't have to go down that road, but that's something that we fixed for a lot of sellers that have come into EcomBalance.
Christopher Grant: (24:52)
Interesting [inaudible 00:24:54] . I didn't know that, I'm definitely not a bookkeeper. What do you think is the right time for an Amazon seller or another e-comm seller to pass their books off onto someone else?
Nathan Hirsch: (25:10)
So the sweet spot that I've seen is in that $15,000 a month revenue range. If you're below that you can still hire a bookkeeper. Maybe you start with a cheaper option. Our bookkeeping surveys usually starts in that $150, $100 a month range. If you're like, "Hey, $150 a month is just unheard of, I can't afford it right now." Then it probably makes sense to not go that route or start off with a VA. The good thing is you can always upgrade later as you grow. Another factor is just how much time you're spending on it.
Nathan Hirsch: (25:42)
If you're spending more than a few hours every single month on your QuickBooks, that's a good sign that you could be using those hours better. So just looking for someone else to take that off your plate, and you can apply that to other parts of your business too. Like, how much time are you spending in emails? How much time are you spending in task X, Y, Z, that isn't a good use of your time. And then looking at, "Hey, can I afford to replace myself so that I can focus on sales, marketing, expansion" which is where you want to be focusing on as much time as possible, especially in year one, two and three of your business?
Christopher Grant: (26:15)
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. I try to share with people that we really need to understand what our time is worth. And if we can outsource that for less than what we need to pay ourself, it just makes complete sense. So let's talk a little bit about this. And I've had some conversations lately about the difference between RY and margins and things, but what are some of the financials that you think are the most important to know as a business owner and maybe even as an Amazon seller?
Nathan Hirsch: (26:56)
Yeah. So, there's three financial statements that you should be getting at the end of every month and the way that we like to do it is, set it up so it's like clockwork. The month ends, our bookkeeper gets started on your books. And within 10 days, 15 days at the max at the end of the month, you're getting the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow. And for income statement, depending on how big of a seller you are, it might be cash basis, or it might be accrual. And a lot of times what we'll see is, as someone gets bigger, you really need to move over to a accrual because you might have vendors on net 30, net 60 terms. You might be buying large chunks of inventory in January and not reloading again for a few months. And you really want to be able to see how much you're actually making per month based on what you're spending, not necessarily when cash is hitting your account.
Nathan Hirsch: (27:45)
And it's almost impossible to get exactly to the penny, how much your cost of good sold are like per everything, but you can create pretty good rules that divide stuff out over different months. So you can get a pretty good picture on how much you're making per month and how much you're making per product. So those are the things that you really need to know about. Knowing your advertising costs and your return on investment is incredibly important there, especially as Amazon just doubles down and triples down on PPC, being a big part of every Amazon's seller's business and just knowing inventory turnover.
Nathan Hirsch: (28:22)
Being able to predict when you're going to have to order the next inventory and what that looks like. And also cashflow, we work with a lot of sellers now, especially if you're coming off like a Cyber Monday, maybe you're paying yourself before the end of the year, or you might have a seasonal product where cash flow is important. You might not be able to nail it down again to the penny, but you want to know how much cash am I going to have in a month, in two months, in eight weeks. And being able to predict that and be on top of that and something that you can check every single week and project the next 12 weeks out. And this is all services that we offer depending on what you need. Those become incredibly important as you get bigger and bigger.
Christopher Grant: (29:04)
Absolutely. I've got a couple questions here from folks. One, is EcomBalance available for people who sell in Canada?
Nathan Hirsch: (29:15)
Yes. So right now we are just focusing on bookkeeping and with gap rules, bookkeeping is very similar no matter what country you're in. We'll use Canadian QuickBooks and all that. Eventually we will be offering an accounting service. We have some work to do on that, but we want to perfect the bookkeeping first. We probably will not offer international accounting services. That doesn't seem like something that we'll do. We will offer US accounting services. So if you have your own Canadian account and you just want someone to do your books, we can help you. We have Canadian clients already that we help. And if you want a US accountant referral, I'm happy to make that referral of a guy that I personally use to help us with the FreeUp sale, I don't get commission or anything on him, but he's a great person to use, especially before we start adding accounting services. And if you have your own US accountant, well, we're happy to work with them and just do the bookkeeping as well.
Christopher Grant: (30:11)
Awesome. And then another gentleman is curious, do you guys link with the Amazon accounts or do you just get reports, how does that work?
Nathan Hirsch: (30:21)
Yeah, this is kind of a common mistake that we've seen with bookkeepers where every single month, the Amazon seller needs to log into their bank, log into their credit card, log into Amazon, download all these reports, email it over to their bookkeeper, and then the bookkeeper is spending time manually, which on some level it doesn't help the Amazon seller when it comes to cost. So we're going to help you get everything linked up in QuickBooks. We'll use tools like Synder if needed and make it so that you don't have to do that downloading and everything is synced up.
Nathan Hirsch: (30:49)
This is something that we'll do once you actually agree to work with us. So to get started, we want to meet with you. We want to learn your business. We want to look at any QuickBooks you have now, so we can give you an accurate price. And if you do decide to move forward, then we'll help you connect everything. It's pretty straightforward. We have clear directions for everything, and we'll even zoom with you to help do all the connections. And hopefully, it's a one and done thing where everything's connected and you're good to go moving forward. And again, you can focus on just selling it and not on the bookkeeping side.
Christopher Grant: (31:18)
I love that. I'm curious, what are your are goals for EcomBalance over the next two, three years?
Nathan Hirsch: (31:28)
When we sold FreeUp, we had about 1000 clients. That's our goal for EcomBalance. We want to surpass it. Anytime you start a company, you want to do better than you did on your last one. So from a client side, that's a goal. I want to provide the best customer service and the best processes out there for bookkeepers. I think there are four Amazon sellers and e-commerce sellers. A lot of times, bookkeepers aren't necessarily the best entrepreneurs. They might be good at the bookkeeping side of their business. But I think Conner and I add a unique element being really good at hiring and building a combining culture and being really good at processes is going to help us along here because not every Amazon seller is the same. Some people might be selling on Shopify.
Nathan Hirsch: (32:12)
Some people might be an agency. Some agencies might need accounts receivable. Some Amazon sellers might need very customized cash flow reports, but what we're able to do since we have a good team and we're good at building processes is actually go into your business and create systems that make sense for you, even if it's customized and not the same thing as someone else. And I think that's what gives us an advantage over the benches of the world who have that same format that applies for every single person that plug and play, where we can offer a much more customized solution that still gives you a high level of customer support. Any business we build has 24/7 support or close to it. If you need to talk to a bookkeeper, we got people there for you. And another goal of ours is to actually help you understand your numbers.
Nathan Hirsch: (32:59)
If you have to meet with us every single month for an hour, we're doing something wrong. We want to make it so you're getting reports that are easy to understand, easy to interpret that come with analysis every month. So you actually know what's going on in your business at all times, and you can actually make decisions based on those numbers. That's really the key to all of this because the point up having clean books is not to pay taxes right at the end of the year, that's a byproduct of it, and you should pay your taxes correctly. The goal as an entrepreneur is to understand your numbers and make good decisions based on numbers. And I want to help as many people in the e-commerce community do that as possible.
Christopher Grant: (33:35)
I love that. Yeah. I think that's going to be really, really awesome. One thing I'm curious about, what is the best place for people to learn more or even get started with EcomBalance if they are interested.
Nathan Hirsch: (33:50)
Yeah. So go to EcomBalance.com. You can sign up right on the site. So what we did in the first 60 days, is we did a beta test, where anyone that signed up got two free months and we were onboarding one new client a day and we booked up all 60 of those spots. And now we're just wrapping up the baiting testing portion of it. And we'll be offering a free month going forward. But if you sign up and you mention that you came from Chris Grant, we'll give you the two free months, even though our beta testing is over. So you'll still meet with us. We'll set up a call. We will learn about you, learn about your business, get access to QuickBooks or whatever we need to give you a price. And if you want to move forward, you get two free months on us and we want feedback.
Nathan Hirsch: (34:29)
We want to make tweaks. We think that we have an amazing team. We think we've built good processes. And the only way to make the processes better is to put people through it and to fine tune it and tweak it and listen to feedback. So if you go to EcomBalance.com, you can book a call directly with me. That's not going to be on there forever, but I want to actually talk to people directly now and learn about your business. And you can just sign up for a free month and make sure along that process you mention Chris Grant so that we can give you that extra free month.
Christopher Grant: (34:56)
That's awesome. That's awesome. Now, before we head out, I know we're a little over time, I wanted to keep this to 30 minutes, but before we head out, one question I really always like to ask people is, over the last 60 days, what is a book that you've read or a blog post or anything like that, that's had the most impact?
Nathan Hirsch: (35:20)
Oh, man. So I have books that I read and then I have audibles. And the audible ones, I try to keep a little bit more personal. And a book that just came out is called, Will, it's about will Smith's life. And it's actually incredible because he went from a rapper to one of the biggest movie stars in the world. And he's just got a lot of great life lessons on how to look at life, how to approach adversity, how to take advantage of different opportunities, how to surround yourself with the right type of people. And it was just a really cool book. If you're trying to learn hardcore business tactic, that's not the book for you. If you're looking for a book about life mentality and how to approach things and how to get the most out of things and set yourself up for success. It's a brand new book that I strongly recommend.
Christopher Grant: (36:08)
I'll have to check that out. It's been on my book list, I just haven't pulled the trigger on it. So I'll have to do that. Awesome. Any parting notes or anything we didn't cover?
Nathan Hirsch: (36:22)
No. I appreciate you having me on... We're excited about EcomBalance. If you're looking to get better at hiring and you want access to our hiring process, go to Outsource School.com, check us out. You can book a call with our team there. And yeah, like I said, we want feedback. We want to make this the best bookkeeping service out there for e-commerce sellers and people in the e-commerce community. And we look forward to your feedback, you guys. If I didn't get a chance to answer any of your questions, feel free to reach out to me on social media, Nathan Hirsch, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, I'm pretty quick to respond to people.
Christopher Grant: (36:53)
Awesome. Awesome. Nathan, I appreciate you, man, for taking the time to do this and chat. Again, guys, if you want to check out EcomBalance.com, you can get two free months, which is cool and really know your numbers in your business which is a lot more important than a lot of folks realize. So Nathan, thank you so much, man. I hope you guys have a great holiday and appreciate you taking the time to do this.
Nathan Hirsch: (37:23)
You too have a good rest of the year and we'll talk soon.
Christopher Grant: (37:26)
All right. Happy Q4 everybody. I hope you guys crush it and I will talk to you all soon when we've got some more people lined up, have a great one, ever
EcomBalance Bonus
If you decide you are ready to outsource your bookkeeping and want to get two free months make sure to mention you heard about them from Chris Grant and they will get you set up.
Head over to EcomBalance.com to get started.
