Join CJ Rosenbaum as he interviews Nathan Hirsch of Freeup for this week’s Webinar Wednesday.
Learn how hiring freelancers can free up your time and other important tasks.
Nathan Hirsch is a serial entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring and ecommerce. He started his first ecommerce business out of his college dorm room and has sold over $30 million online. He is now the co-founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com, a marketplace that connects businesses with pre-vetted freelancers in ecommerce, digital marketing, and much more. He regularly appears on leading podcasts, such as Entrepreneur on Fire, and speaks at live events about online hiring tactics.
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What Is FreeeUp?
As a former Amazon seller himself, Hirsch has a lot of experience in the world of ecommerce and understands that it can be very difficult to find the right types of people to help you run your business. FreeeUp is designed to help you find the right candidates to fit your needs and to move your business forward into the next generation.
According to FreeeUp’s home page, the company “recruits, interviews, and vets thousands of freelancers every month then gives you access to the to 1% of applicants. Get introduced to a freelancer from the marketplace matching your needs within 1 business day.”
If your business has become big enough that you feel ready to start hiring more employees, or even if you’ve been working with help for years, FreeeUp should make that process easier.
Why Is It Important to Hire Help?
While many Amazon businesses out there are run by one person or a very small group of people that know each other well, it can often become challenging to keep up with the daily tasks of a business, especially if your business is growing at a high rate.
Hiring helpers can not only take some weight off of your shoulders, but it can also allow you to continue to grow. If you have an employee or two handling some monotonous tasks, you can instead focus your time on developing your company in other ways.
Additionally, more people managing your company means that you’ll have more time to double and triple-check the logistics to ensure that you’re up to Amazon’s standards and avoid account suspensions over easily-avoidable mistakes.
How Can I Find the Person I Need?
FreeeUp offers three different types of freelancers: basic, med-level, and expert.
“Basic level freelancers [are] $5-10 an hour and non-U.S,” Hirsch says. “They have years of experience because we’re not a marketplace for newbies, but they’re there to follow your systems, your processes, your direction. So if you have those in place and you know what you want, that’s perfect for the basic level freelancer.”
Basic freelancers can help execute plans that you’ve already set up, but they’re not likely to be as innovative and creative as the other levels of freelancers. The more experienced you are in your business and the less you feel the need to innovate further, the more you’ll need basic-level employees.
Mid-level workers are “specialists. They might do bookkeeping or a graphic designer, Amazon listings,” Hirsch says. “You’re not teaching them how to do graphic design, and they’re not really consulting with you either, they’re doers. They’re there to take projects off your plate to help you grow your business.”
The expert-level freelancers are the ones who will help reshape a part of your business or completely take over something that you don’t have as much knowledge in as a business owner. Maybe you need help developing a website or creating advertisements on Facebook. Those will require the minds of an expert-level freelancer.
“So as you’re growing your business, you’re going to have to decide when do I need followers?” Hirsch notes. “When do I need doers? When do I need experts? We have over 100 skillsets on the platform and you can decide which level you need for that skillset.”
In some instances, you might find a candidate that you didn’t even know your business needed until you made the hire. Hirsch uses the example of hiring a candidate to take over his businesses’ Isntagram account.
“It costs a few hundred dollars a month, I try it out for three months, “Hirsch says. “Worst case scenario, I loose $600. Best case scenario, I find someone who can [run my Instagram account] way better than I can and they help me get leads and drive traffic to my product.”
Great! How Can I Start Hiring People?
The FreeeUp website is very easy to follow and can answer a lot of questions you may have. The hiring process itself is quite simple too since the company takes the hassle of finding qualified candidates off of your plate.
“I try to make it as simple as possible,” Hirsch says. “You create an account, which takes a minute. Whenever you need a freelancer you click “request a freelancer” inside your account, tell us what you need, within a business day we introduce you to 1-3 people, you can meet with them. If you like them, click “hire” and get started. If you don’t like them, click “pass” and provide us some feedback. We’ll get you someone else to review. It’s really that simple.”
FreeeUp essentially weeds out all of the unqualified people from your hiring list and selects candidates that they think would work well for you.
Once you hire your candidate, they’re yours to work with. FreeeUp is hands-off at that point and frees you up to communicate with your employees in any way that works for you. There’s no need to have anyone serve as a mediator in your communication.
Conclusion
It’s always smart to think about the future of your business and what to do when your operations become too difficult for you to handle alone. Whether you’re a small business that just needs a helping hand or if you’re a bigger one that could use some help innovating the way you operate, there’s always something you can do to improve your outreach.
Before you get started, Hirsch does offer a couple of warnings to those who want to hire FreeeUp employees:
The first one is to make sure you know what you want from your employee up front. “If you don’t identify what you’re looking for, it’s gonna be very hard for you to find it. That means really defining that person. What’s your budget? What’s the hourly rate or fixed price cost? How many hours a week? Is that person US or non-US?”
Additionally, “set expectations up front. If you hire someone to run your social media, before you just get them going and check in on them in a month and see where they’re at, get on the same page. Tell them, ‘this is how we’re going to communicate,’ and, ‘these are the goals we’re trying to hit.’”