How to Master Your Finances without actually doing the bookkeeping With Nathan Hirsch

Nathan Hirsh is a lifelong entrepreneur and currently the CEO of EcomBalance and Outsource School. Nathan is best known for co-founding FreeUp.net in 2015 with an initial $5,000 investment, scaling it to $12 million in yearly revenue, and acquiring it in 2019. Today, he leads EcomBalance, an online bookkeeping service for eCommerce and digital businesses, and Outsource School, a membership teaching business owners how to hire effectively online. Nathan has appeared on 400+ podcasts and is a social media personality. He and his wife live in Denver, Colorado, with his two dogs, where they are foster parents.

Episode Highlights Here:

Nathan:

This is how we decided. Hey! we should hire more people and invest in marketing. These are the services that are selling? Well, we should find more freelancers for that.

Pierce:

We have a full team of VAs out in the Philippines that does a lot of the stuff for us already, you know, so it’s outsourced and whatnot. So it’s right up the right up. We’re using the same things you are. So I want to kind of get back to that too and just kind of ask you a little bit about econ balance and what you’re doing there and how is that whole thing. Working with the value, you get from that?

Nathan:

So I think I like unsexy businesses, hiring processes, and bookkeeping, but they’re the core of every company. Like, there are very few entrepreneurs who make bad hires that have success or who have bad processes, who have success or who don’t understand their finances and have success. So a big thing we did to free up early on was hiring a bookkeeper from day one, even before we were profitable and we had a good monthly bookkeeping process. So the month would end within 15 days, we would get the income statement and balance sheet cash flow, and then we had a meeting on our calendar. My business partner, Connor, and I were we would go through all the numbers and make decisions based on the numbers and that’s what everyone listening should add to their calendar every month.

We have a finance agenda needed or a meeting agenda for you to grab come down and start calm so that you can go through with your partner. But this has to happen with our Amazon business. We made the mistake of doing our books ourselves, which is a disaster Entrepreneurs should never be doing their bookkeeping, it’s not a great use of your time, and most entrepreneurs are just not good at it, and you have to pay to get it redone afterward. Or we would dump it on our account at the end of the year, and they would file taxes with it, which is fine. But we wouldn’t be able to make decisions every month, and we would just be flying by the seat of our pants. So with free up, we set up a good monthly bookkeeping process. The month would end we’d get reports we go through and make decisions and this is how we decided, hey, we should hire more people. We shouldn’t invest in marketing. These are the services that are selling well. We should find more freelancers. With this, we could make those decisions on a month-to-month basis. And there are a lot of benefits to having clean books. If you’re gonna sell your business, you can do it and pass due diligence as we did. It makes tax season a lot less stressful because, with all your books, you can get funding and investments. But to me, the number one thing that applies to every entrepreneur is the ability to make good decisions based on what the numbers tell you. That is the key.

Pierce:

Absolutely. Okay, so. So let me ask you this, right? So it’s called econ balance. So are you only doing it for online eCommerce stores? Or tell me a little bit about the breadth of the services you guys provide.

Nathan:

Yeah, so we do have a team of very high-level bookkeepers and we service a lot of E-commerce businesses, and I’ve been in the E-commerce space for a while, so it made sense to target them. We are launching a separate brand called accounts balance. The site’s going up right now. But we have a separate team that just does non-eCommerce businesses. So if you’re a non-eCommerce business, we can still do your bookkeeping eCommerce. Bookkeeping tends to be more complicated than regular bookkeeping. So we can help you out there.

Pierce:

Yeah, absolutely. So for those of you who are, you know, these Mom and Pop entrepreneurs who have commercial real estate and have businesses in their commercial real estate or have businesses that you’re doing on your own, and you don’t have the bookkeepers? You know, it sounds like you guys got your processes squared away. You know, and you have a very specific.