FREE UP - NATHAN HIRSCH

"Every startup makes mistakes, and you can't please anyone. For me, that's motivation. " Nathan Hirsch, owner and CEO of FreeUp.com

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ABOUT NATHAN HIRSCH:

On this episode of Fueled By Death Cast, meet Nathan Hirsch, the co-founder and CEO of FreeUp.com. Nate started his first eCommerce business out of his college dorm room and this gave him valuable insight into how to start a business, and the hardships of hiring once your business grow. This led Nate to create Free Up, a marketplace that connects businesses with pre-vetted virtual assistants. Nate talks about his journey in business and what fuels him to keep remaining motivated.

TRANSCRIPT:

Jeff: Nate, thanks so much for joining me. I want to start this conversation kind of in the now, in where we are right now, with FreeeUp. Can we talk about what it is, and how you came up with the idea?

Nathan: Yeah. First of all, thanks so much for having me. I was a long-time Amazon seller. I started a pretty large Amazon business, not Death Wish size, but good for a 20, 21 year old, back in the day. As I was scaling this business, it was really hard for me to hire people. I was 20, 21. College kids super unreliable, and no 30 year old wanted to work for me, so I found myself going on the remote job platforms. There I was, just browsing through lots of applicants, and doing interviews, and test projects. I just kept thinking that there had to be a better way.

Nathan: So, I kept looking and looking, and when I couldn't find one, I built it myself, as a side project. The concept is, we get thousands of applicants every week, virtual assistants, freelancers, agencies from all over the world. We vet them for skill, attitude, communication. Top one percent get in, and then we make them available to people quickly, whenever they need them, with great 24/7 support available on the back end. And then, also, our no turnover guarantee. If they quit, we cover replacement costs.

Nathan: So, what started off as a side project, people really liked, and we branched out from Amazon to Shopify, and Walmart, and other eCommerce, to the marketing space. Now, we work with different clients all over the world, in a lot of different industries.

Jeff: So, this really bore from the idea of trying to help yourself, first and foremost, because you couldn't find this anywhere.

Nathan: Yeah. I really built what I wanted, what I was looking for.

Jeff: How do you ... Okay, so the idea itself, seems simple enough. I'm an entrepreneur, and I need help with the day-to-day tasks, the stuff to get my business off the ground. I don't have people right in front of me, so I can go to FreeeUp, and I can hopefully be connected with that right person. But, on your end of that, how does that idea become a reality? Was it hard to get this body of people together, to really get this business off the ground? To get people to trust you? Were there obstacles right out of the get go?

Nathan: Yeah. This is how I started. First of all, hiring is hard, and it took us years to create our hiring process. We realized, a long time ago, that when you vet people just for skill, you only look at their resume, and their experience, and their reviews, that a lot of times, you get burned. We figured out that the skill's important, but you also need someone with a great attitude, that's passionate about what they do, that can take feedback, that doesn't get aggressive.

Nathan: You also need someone with great communication skills, because it doesn't matter what their skill and their attitude is, if they can't communicate at a high level, it's not going to work out. So, we came up with a list of things that we cared about when it came to communication, like responding within a business day, being able to speak English at a high level, being able to get on the same page quickly. We have 15 pages of that.

Nathan: So, we had this hiring process, and we had built this Rolodex of reliable Amazon VAs and Amazon freelancers. Not all them were lower level. We had a lot of higher level people too, like you do listing, and PPC, and customer service. Running an Amazon business with freelancers, you don't need everyone full-time, and we were doing drop shipping. So, when you get to the end of the year, you need more people. And then, you get to January, and it slows down, and you don't have hours for them. So, I really took the Rolodex that I had built, and I started offering it to other Amazon sellers.

Nathan: I said, "Hey. Next time you need to hire, instead of going on the other platform, just come to me, and I'm going to personally refer someone that I work with. You do the billing through our platform. We'll back it up, if they ever quit on you, or do a bad job, no questions asked customer service. We will make sure you're taken care of," and that's really when the concept took off. Once we ran out of the people in our Rolodex, then we started recruiting, and advertising, and getting applicants. To the point, now, where we get about 3,000 applicants a week, to get on our platform. People from 5-$100 an hour. So, that's really how it started, and it took off from there.

Jeff: Wow. So, 3,000 applicants, that you're getting at any given time, and you said that you have an extensive vetting process. What is that like in a business like this?

Nathan: Yeah. We have a whole freelancer success team, that spends 8-12 hours a day going through applicants, interviewing them, putting them through our process. It's all based around that skill, the attitude, and the communications. There's an application they fill out, and depending on the application, we'll go through it, and decide if we want to interview them. If we want to interview them, we put them through skill test. So, if they're an Amazon expert, we have Amazon questions. If they're a graphic designer, we look at their portfolio. If they're a web developer, we have a dev test that we have them take.

Nathan: The skill is different, depending on what exactly their skill set is, and we don't need everyone to be a 10 out of 10. You can be a 5 out of 10, or a 3 out of 10, as long as you're honest about what you can and cannot do, and your priced accordingly. If you're a data entry person trying to charge $50 an hour, it doesn't make a lot of sense to get on our platform.

Nathan: Once they pass the skill test, then we do the one-on-one interviews. We're really looking for red flags here. We're trying to figure out, what is this person showing us, that shows they don't have a great attitude? We don't want people that are just in it for the money. If I hire a bookkeeper ... and I hate bookkeeping, I'm guessing you hate bookkeeping, most entrepreneurs do ... they have to love bookkeeping as much as I love being an entrepreneur. Those are the type of people we want on our platform.

Nathan: So, we do the one-on-one interviews. We look for their attitude. If they pass that, we have our 15 pages of communication best practices, that I actually wrote when I was stuck overnight at an airport. They have to memorize and get tested on those, before they get on our platform. Once they're on our platform, we hold them to those initial expectations. We're pretty quick to remove people, if they're taking on projects they can't do at a high level. We're not a place to experiment on our clients. If they show any signs of a bad attitude, or if they don't communicate, if they don't respond within a business day, if we have to chase them, if clients are complaining, very quick to kick them off. So, it's tough to get on, and then, we hold people to those expectations, once they are on.

Jeff: Wow. You guys have been now in business for three years, and I was reading that you've worked with 700+ clients, which is incredible. Congrats on all of that.

Nathan: Thank you.

Jeff: From the start up of this idea, again, this is from your brain, you're facilitating this, but, FreeeUp, as it stands right now, how many employees work for FreeeUp?

Nathan: Yeah. We bill around 1,000 clients a week. We have a lot more than that. Not every client is continuous. People might have three month projects that end, and stuff stops and starts when you're dealing with freelancers. So, we bill about 1,000 clients a week.

Nathan: We've got about 2,500 freelancers on the FreeeUp platform. Those are our service providers. They don't work for me, but they're offering their services on the platform. We have no employees. This is my home office. We have no office. My business partner, Connor, who lives in Denver, he's actually downstairs visiting, for our quarterly meeting. I'm in Orlando, and we only hire people from our platform.

Nathan: So, all the day-to-day operations, the billing, the customer service, the freelancer success team, which is recruitment, the social media, all that is done by virtual assistants in the Philippines, that we got on our own platform, that other clients could've gotten first. Some of them have side clients, too. All the high level stuff, the Facebook ads, the writing for our blog, the building our Word Press site, our developers, are all high level freelancers on our platform, or agencies that have other clients, both on and off of FreeeUp, and we're just one of their many clients. So, we've really built our entire business practicing what we preach to everyone else.

Jeff: Wow. That's incredible. You mentioned that you have clients, and people that you work with, all over the world. Does that make it a harder space to be in, because ... To preface that, for a layman hearing that, we've all gotten robocalls, we've all gotten these disconnect type scenarios, where we're dealing with someone from a different country, or a different skill set. Is that an obstacle for FreeeUp at all?

Nathan: Sometimes. I've found that the clients, that they might struggle to communicate, a lot of times, end up being the best clients, because if you can prove to them that you can get them someone reliable, that they might have struggled just going on UpWork and making a free-for-all, then they're going to be loyal to you long-term.

Nathan: Now, unfortunately, I only speak English, and my assistants speak Tagalog, which is the language of the Philippines, and they speak English. So, if someone only speaks Hebrew, they're probably going to have a hard time just using the FreeeUp platform in general. No fault to them, but we just don't have the capabilities to have customer services reps in every single language. But, for the most part, if they can speak English at a high level, we have clients in the UK, and China, and Japan, all over the world, that can take advantage of the platform. We have translators in different languages as well.

Nathan: We haven't really struggled with that. Although, I will tell you, when I first started FreeeUp, I really looked at us as a place for U.S. clients to get Filipino virtual assistants. It's really branched out from there, where now we're about 40% U.S. freelancers, 40% Philippines, and 20% scattered, and like I said, we have clients all over the world. So, we blossomed a lot bigger than I thought the initial game plan was going to be.

Jeff: Yeah. That's incredible. I want you to speak a little bit on this too. When you were starting the company, did you get any blow back? Did you get any kind of bad feeling, initially from clients, because, at the end of the day, and I agree with you, the hiring process is very hard. It can be very trying, especially on a startup business, or an entrepreneur just getting into the game, but your idea's born from why don't you go from this pool of vetted people. I feel like, did you ever get to that obstacle of like, "Well, you're taking a job away from someone who could be doing it as a full-time position"?

Nathan: We never really got that blow back, although I totally get that there's a certain percentage of people that think that way. I look at it as, we have clients who have hired people in the Philippines, to get their business off the ground, and two years later, they're running an office with full-time staff in the U.S. If they didn't have those Filipino virtual assistants, they might have not gotten to that point.

Nathan: There's lots of different situations. I've yet to have a client that comes to me and says, "I'm just going to fire my entire U.S. staff and replace them with people in the Philippines." Maybe that will happen at some point. It hasn't happened in three years. But, you also remember, we have plenty of U.S. freelancers. We have a freelancer on our platform that made $200,000 a year off our platform. So, if you're someone that, for whatever reason, believes that I only want to hire people in the U.S., you have that option. We're not taking that away from you.

Nathan: Now, there's certain businesses that can't afford it. There's certain businesses that will have U.S. people in the office. Let's say they're making $50,000 a year, and they want those people only doing $50,000 a year tasks, so they'll give them a virtual assistant. That way, that person's really focused on those high level tasks.

Nathan: When we first started FreeeUp, the initial feedback was, "Great, another freelancer marketplace. That's what we need." So, we took this little while to get over that, and now, fortunately enough, the people that bash us online are usually freelancers that don't get onto the platform, which is not much I can do about that, and usually that says a little bit about the attitude. Those aren't the type of people that we want on the platform anyway, that handle failure in that way.

Jeff: Right. Also, on the side of working with a lot of Philippines workers, and that kind of thing, correct me if I'm wrong, you yourself have a lot of hands-on with that. You actually travel to the country a lot, correct?

Nathan: I've actually been to the Philippines one time. They got me that bobble head. When I first started FreeeUp, I actually had never been to the Philippines. A lot of people, they see a picture of my girlfriend online, and they think that I'm dating a Filipino, which I'm not. She's Vietnamese, and she has nothing to do with FreeeUp. I met her long before that. So yeah, I've been to the Philippines once, where I had a meeting with my internal team, and we set a goal of 5,000 billed hours in one week. Now, we're over 16,000, but this was a few years ago.

Nathan: We said if we hit that, I would go there. We threw a conference, and we said, "Hey, no pressure. If anyone wants to come, they're welcome to. Free food, free drink." We had over 100 people show up. It was really cool. People showing me pictures of their cars, and their houses, and stuff they were able to buy because of FreeeUp. So, that was a rewarding experience, and I'm sure I'll go back, but I've only been there once.

Jeff: Oh, wow. That is rewarding. That's really, really interesting, and very cool. I wanted to ask, too, now being in the business for three years, do you have clients that you've been working with that entire time, or people that have been with the company throughout it?

Nathan: Definitely. I build really good relationships with the freelancers. Obviously, I don't know 2,500 freelancers, but there's a good portion of them that were there since the beginning, and I know them. I talk to them on Skype. That's one of the beauties of Skype, is I can quickly communicate with people, and yeah, we have clients that we were with me for day one. I launched my own podcast, and today, I interviewed one of our, probably first 10 clients, that still uses us today.

Nathan: It's so humbling, that, whenever you start a business, those initial clients who give you a chance, who give you an opportunity before you have any track record, those are the people that you want to build relationships with, and you want to always be thankful and grateful for. Without that, it's really tough to scale a company.

Jeff: Wow. Yeah. Let's speak on the business side a little bit. I know you went to school for business, and you actually cut your teeth on that Amazon company that you were talking about, Portlight, right?

Nathan: Yes. Portlight was my Amazon business. I got into Amazon at a great time. This was back in 2008, before people actually knew what Amazon was, and I started experimenting. I did books to start, and then, I experimented with outdoor equipment, and sporting equipment, and video games, typical college guy stuff. I just failed, over and over and over. The only thing I could get to sell on Amazon were these books. And then, one day, I branched out of my comfort zone, and I started experimenting with baby products. That's when my business really took off. So, if you can imagine me as a 20 year old single college guy, selling millions of dollars of baby products on Amazon, that was me. People thought I was crazy. People thought I was running a scam. No one really understood ecommerce at all.

Jeff: Wow. And you're doing this in conjunction with going to school for business. Where does this drive come from for you? You're so jazzed about entrepreneurship, and business, and that kind of thing. Where does that come from? Where does that stem from in you?

Nathan: My parents were both teachers, and they were awesome ... they are awesome parents. They were really supportive, no matter what I wanted to do, but I always had that game plan, that I was going to go to college, get a real job, work for 40 years, retire. That's what they did. They're retired now, and they're traveling the world. There's nothing wrong with that lifestyle, but I learned at a young age that, that is not at all what I wanted.

Nathan: My parents made me get 40 hour a week summer jobs, every summer, from when I was 15, and legally able to work. I learned a lot about customer service and managing people, and all of that, but I also learned how much I just hated working for other people.

Nathan: When I got to college, I looked at it as a ticking clock. I had four years to start my own business, or I was going to have to get a job to pay the bills. Once you do that, it's really tough to turn back. So, that's kind of how I looked at it, and now, it's just fun. There's so many things you can complain about in life, right? No one has a perfect like. But the fact that I can work remote, and be anywhere, and work with my business partner, who I trust, and we have a great relationship, and people that have been working with me as VAs the past 8 years, who could ask for more than that? I get to make a difference, and help entrepreneurs scale their business, and help freelancers provide for their family and scale their business. There's not much better than that, in my opinion.

Jeff: Wow. What do you think was the biggest ... and this might be a loaded question ... but what do you think was the biggest thing you learned from that Amazon business, when you were in college, that has helped you get to the point you are at now, with FreeeUp?

Nathan: I was on top of the world at about year one, one and a half. I was crushing Amazon. I was making more money than any 21 year old should. Paid off my student loans, and I thought, man, "I'm working a lot of hours. I want to hire a manager of the day." So, I hired this person, and I trained him for six months, to run all aspects of the business: the customer service, the listing, the repricing. There was no Amazon repricing software back then, it was all manual. Once he was done, it was great. I could sleep better at night. He could run my entire business.

Nathan: Now, on the flip side, I had this one manufacturer, this one supplier, who was doing about 80, 85% of our sales. I said, "Why are we focusing on the other 15%? Let's just work with this guy," and we started crushing it, only using that supplier. So, there I am with one person running everything, and one supplier. The business is on autopilot. Money is flowing in. I think, "Okay, I deserve a vacation. I've been working really hard for a year, year and a half."

Nathan: So, I go to Myrtle Beach, and I'll never go back. On the first day of my vacation, I get three phone calls. One from my manager of the day, telling me that he was quitting on me. The second from our supplier, telling me that they didn't want to work with my anymore. The third, just to top it off, from my accountant, telling me someone had filed a fake tax return in my name, for $40,000, and my identity was stolen.

Jeff: Oh my gosh.

Nathan: So, I went from this unbelievable high, that I'm this 21 year old, no one can tell me what to do, some punk, to man I just lost everything. Let's start all over from scratch. I went back, and I saw a man. I got 20, 30 grand, whatever was left in the bank account. I've got X amount of people that know how to do small things, and let's see what we can do. Let's go all out.

Nathan: We started contacting tons of suppliers, and built relationships with over 200 manufacturers. On the flip side, I learned how to departmentalize and hire people. One person for customer service, or a team of people for listing. So, if one person quit, you could easily replace them. It wasn't the end of the world.

Nathan: It wouldn't be the last supplier that dropped me, or the last person that quit on me, but next time, it wasn't that big of a deal. So, I learned a ton of lessons from that, about diversifying your business, about not getting too high or to low as an entrepreneur, and really being prepared for anything. I'm so happy I learned that in year one and two, and it's really prepared me for FreeeUp in a lot of different ways. You get rejected all the time, whether it's going on podcasts, or contacting influencers, or clients. You can't get too low on yourself. When you're having a really great month, you've got to stay focused. You can't take a step back and be on top of the world. Even now, we diversify. We've got separate teams for everything. We offer a lot of different services. We try to not just be on Amazon, but in eCommerce, and marketing, and different communities there. So, a bunch of lessons there.

Jeff: Wow. They say failure's the best teacher, so you were able to do that early, and really see, okay, these are the lessons I need to learn. That's inspiring. That brings me to the question that I always get to on this show. Through it all, through your humble beginnings in college, to your great success with FreeeUp in the last three years, and right into today, and just your infectious attitude about business and doing what you do, what fuels you to keep doing it? What fuels you to want to continue to better this business, and to keep going out there, and making FreeeUp even better?

Nathan: Yeah, it's a great question. I look at it as, a lot of people are depending on me. I don't necessarily look at it in a bad way, like, "Oh my God. I better do this, or I'm going to let people down." I look at it in a good way, that we get to provide opportunities for lots of people, whether it's my business partner, or the freelancers on the platform, or my internal team, or the different clients, who I've kind of been a small part of helping them scale and grow their business, all of that is motivating. When I talked to the client today on the podcast, and I've seen their business multiple times 10, since I started working for them, stuff like that just keeps you going.

Nathan: Even any bad feedback you get, because no business is perfect. Every startup makes mistakes, and you can't please anyone. For me, that's motivation. Someone told me this morning, that they thought our application process was a little bit confusing, so Connor and I, we sat down and we said, "Okay. How do we make this better? What tweaks, what changes can we make?" Just listening to that constant feedback, to me, is constantly motivating, and moving you forward.

Jeff: Wow. That's really, really awesome. You brought it up a couple times, so I want to talk about it, what made you start a podcast? Give me the name, and where we can find it, and all that.

Nathan: Yeah. I've been on, I don't know, 150+ podcasts. It was actually a really great way that we scaled FreeeUp, and just met a lot of great people. It's always something I wanted to do, but I didn't want to lose focus on what we were doing. Keep in mind, year one of FreeeUp, we didn't have 50 virtual assistants working under me, like I did today. It was me and Connor doing a lot of the work. Now that we have a pretty large team, I'm still pretty busy, but I felt like I had enough time to make that commitment, it's something that we took on.

Nathan: The name of the show is Outsourcing and Scaling. It's all about growing remote businesses. We interview, not just clients, but people in the marketing industry, people in the eCommerce and the Amazon industry, that have scaled businesses remote, or partially remote, and how they did it. I think that's a big fear factor to people. I think a lot of people want to take advantage of the gig economy, they want to hire remote, they want to outsource, but they don't know where to begin. They don't know what to expect. They don't know what lessons that they're going to learn along the way. By hearing big name people, that have been there and done that, to me, that only helps the cause.

Jeff: Yeah. For sure. Podcasting is such a great way, like you said, to connect with people, and everything. That's really awesome. I'll put links to your show in our show, as well, so people can see that, because I think one of the greatest things about podcasting, is the sharing of information. Like you said, the American dream is to work for yourself. It's to start your own business and to do that.

Jeff: That is one of the most daunting things in the fricking world, for anybody who's ever tried, or has known anybody who's ever tried, to start their business, to become an entrepreneur. I think having that information out there, and readily accessible, is insurmountable. It's something that's really great, and I'm glad that you're doing it.

Nathan: Yeah. The podcast industry is fun. If you had asked me a few years ago, if I'd be the host of a podcast, I probably wouldn't have believed you, but, it's like anything else. It's a learning experience, and you just get to meet a lot of awesome people, and you never know what stories and lessons you're just going to learn along the way.

Jeff: Totally. Totally. So, let's talk about the future then. Where do you see the future of FreeeUp, in the next five years?

Nathan: It's funny, because I'm always a very short-term thinker, even with the Amazon business. My business partner, Connor, he's much more of a long-term thinker. So, the biggest fights we had, back in the day, was when Connor was thinking five, ten years down the line, and I'm like, "Listen, man. We've got stuff to do today, like this week. Let's focus on that."

Nathan: In the past few years, we've both drawn to the middle, where I'm focused a few quarters ahead, and he's not five years in the future. He's planning the year, and the next year. So, it's tough for me to imagine five years. If you had told me when I was 15, that I'd be selling baby products on Amazon when I was 20, I probably wouldn't have believed you. And if you had told me five years ago, that I'd be running a freelancer platform, I probably wouldn't have believed you.

Nathan: We're really excited about FreeeUp. We're excited to see how far we can push this thing, especially keeping it entirely remote, not taking funding, all the stuff that we're really proud of. I don't know. We kind of branched into eCommerce and marketing, and there's so many different industries that can hire remote, whether it's nonprofits, or real estate agents. You could go on and on, with software companies, and different opportunities there. So, I'm excited for that. I'm not 100% sure where I'll be in five years, but hopefully I have a lot of fun along the way.

Jeff: Oh. Well, good. Well, good. I also hope, that since your terrible Myrtle Beach vacation, that you've taken another vacation since then, because it sounds like you just are never ... Do you ever stop? Do you ever just calm down for a minute?

Nathan: I had Alex Sharpen on my podcast. He said the number one question, you can tell if someone is an entrepreneur, is, can you ever turn it off? The answer is no. It's really tough. There's nights, where you're thinking about it at night. You might be out at dinner, and an idea pops in your head. It's really tough to turn it off.

Nathan: Now, do I travel and take vacations? Yes. I'm pumped. I get to go to Croatia in June. I'm really excited for that. Just with conferences ... I know that I met Michael at Resonate this year in Atlanta, so I get to go there, and extend a few days, and turn it into a trip. So, there's different creative ways to go about it, but I think that work-life balance is something that every entrepreneur struggles with, on some level. As you get a little bit older, I actually just turned 30 today, you get to-

Jeff: Happy birthday.

Nathan: Thank you. You get to realize that life is short, and you got to take advantage of that time.

Jeff: Oh, of course, of course. You mentioned that you travel a lot for conferences, and stuff like that. Do you speak at these conferences? Do you hold panels and stuff?

Nathan: Yeah, different conferences. I've kind of stayed away from the booth thing now. I used to do that, but the one downside of having a remote business is, if I want to send someone to a booth, I'm sending myself. So, that we've kind of stayed away from, but different events, depending on what they are, I'll either speak, I'll either sponsor, or I'll go.

Nathan: I got into speaking onstage last year, for the first time. I wouldn't say speaking in front of 1,000 people is my natural comfort zone, but you learn a lot along the way, and I don't know, I like sharing information, and lessons that I've learned, or hiring tips. If people want me to talk in front of their audience, within reason, I'm usually happy to do it.

Jeff: Well, you have a great energy, and a great attitude towards the business industry at large, and I think that you should be doing that a lot more, because I think you have a lot of great information to tell giant crowds of people. For our listeners and viewers, what is the best way to follow your journey? I know I'm going to put in all the information about FreeeUp, in this episode as well, but you personally, do you social media? What's the best way to follow your journey?

Nathan: Yeah, Instagram, Twitter. You can follow me on Facebook. The Real Nate Hirsch are my handles. LinkedIn is a great way as well. I'm very active there. If you want to join my community, the Outsourcing Masters Facebook group, we post a lot of content in there, as well. I'm probably one of the easiest people to contact, so feel free to follow me, or contact me, or reach out to me on any channel.

Jeff: That's excellent. That's excellent. Finally, I got to ask, on the outside of business, what gets you jazzed in life, outside of like ... You are so all-in, and like you said, you never turn it off. That's a great mentality, because if you do, someone else is going to get a little bit farther. You got to be always going for that carrot, and that's great, but outside of it, what does Nathan like to do for fun? What gets you going outside of the business realm?

Nathan: Yeah. I'm a big of just working out, and taking care of your body. I go to the gym five days a week. I've played sports my entire life, whether it's softball, or adult baseball leagues, I'm all about, so anything active. I live in Florida, so the weather here is pretty nice, when it's not 100 degrees out, so anything active, anything outside.

Nathan: I always wanted a dog when I grew up, and now I have two, so spending a lot of time with them, whether it's running, or dog park, or whatever it is. Spending time with my awesome girlfriend, Quinn, and yeah, that's really what surrounds my life here. Obviously, I have different friends, and family, in different places, and just finding creative ways to get away from your business, and spend time with the people that you care about.

Jeff: That's excellent. That is true, because as much as you need to have that drive, you need to also have the good time, too, and that's awesome. Man, it was really great to talk with you about this, because you have a very inspiring story. Through everything that you've been through, you're still excited about what you do, and that's a rarity, especially in the business industry. I think you should be really proud of everything you've accomplished.

Nathan: Yeah. Jeff, I really appreciate you having me on. Are you going to be at Resonate?

Jeff: I will probably not be, because someone's got to stay back and hold down the fort. I'm just kidding. I think Mike will be again, and I know that Death Wish loves with FreeeUp does, and we will always be kind of tangentially together. It's great meeting people like you in this industry, again, because it's not only like-minded, well thought-out ideas in the business industry, but we here at Death Wish, we love to fuel people's passion. We love people that are passionate about what they do, and that is you to a T man, for sure.

Nathan: Awesome. Well, we love Death Wish, and yeah, I look forward to connecting with your audience, and helping them however I can.

Jeff: Excellent. Excellent. Thank you so much.