Optimizing Business: SOPs, Hiring and SEO with Nathan Hirsch

We welcome entrepreneur Nathan Hirsch, founder of FreeUp and other ventures, to discuss the importance of standard operating procedures (SOPs), effective hiring practices, and leveraging SEO for business growth. 

Key Takeaways:

• SOPs are essential for scalability: Nathan emphasizes the importance of creating detailed SOPs for every part of the business and regularly updating them to maintain efficiency.
• Hiring the right people is critical: Nathan shares his strategy for hiring A-players and the importance of setting clear expectations and processes during onboarding.
• Market validation before investment: Before fully launching a business, ensure there is a market for it by testing ideas with potential clients and proving your ability to retain them.
• Balancing automation and human touch: Nathan explains how automation can help, but emphasizes the importance of keeping a personal touch in customer interactions, especially in SEO and customer service.

Episode Highlights:

• “Prove that there’s an actual market for it. Prove that you can get clients for it and prove that you can keep clients for it.”
• "We always want clients to feel like they’re one step away from talking to me."

Listener Action Items:

1. Create or refine your SOPs: Start documenting your key business processes, and schedule quarterly reviews to ensure they stay updated.
2. Review your hiring process: Focus on communication, attitude, and red flags during interviews to ensure you hire the right people for your team.
3. Test your business ideas: Before investing significant time or money, run tests to ensure your product or service has a viable market.
4. Optimize customer service: Balance automation with personal touches to ensure clients feel valued and heard.

Resources & Links Mentioned:

• Free SOPs for SEO: TrioSEO.com/SOP
• EcomBalance (E-commerce bookkeeping): EcomBalance.com
• Nathan Hirsch: Linked In

Chapters

• 0:00 prove that there's an actual market for it.
• 0:01 Prove that you can get clients for it and prove that you can keep clients for it.
• 1:04 Nathan's Entrepreneurial Journey
• 3:28 Building and Selling FreeUp
• 4:57 Learning from Mistakes
• 6:28 Importance of SOPs
• 8:22 Creating Effective SOPs
• 12:22 Starting a Business with Limited Funds
• 15:31 Market Research and Viability
• 16:13 Market Research and SEO Strategies
• 17:18 Understanding E-commerce Bookkeeping
• 18:12 Specialized Bookkeeping Services
• 19:36 Importance of Hiring the Right People
• 20:48 Creating and Updating SOPs
• 24:01 Effective Customer Service Practices
• 26:09 Balancing Automation and Human Touch
• 32:45 Final Thoughts and Next Steps

Transcript

Optimizing Business with Nathan Hirsch: SOPs, Hiring, and SEO

[00:00:00] Nathan: prove that there's an actual market for it. Prove that you can get clients for it and prove that you can keep clients for it.

[00:00:05] When we gave out two free months of bookkeeping, if we couldn't give out two free months of bookkeeping, we didn't have a business. 

[00:00:10] Or if we couldn't keep those people that we gave two free months past the two month mark, we didn't have a business. 

[00:00:15] So those are just some kind of tests we do early on before we put a lot of time and money into something.

[00:00:20] Crystal Waddell: Welcome to the third season of the Simple and Smart SEO Show. The podcast dedicated to empathy driven, brand building SEO. I'm your host, Crystal Waddell. I leverage my obsession with user experience to help business owners just like you optimize your website with confidence. 

[00:00:36] Thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:37] Let's jump into another great episode.

[00:00:39] Crystal: Well, Hey guys, welcome back to the simple and smart SEO show podcast.

[00:00:43] I'm your host, Crystal Waddell. And today I'm here with Nathan Hirsch, who is an amazing entrepreneur. And he's going to be talking to us today about creating standard operating systems. procedures. And just what it's like to manage well. So Nathan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. 

[00:00:59] How are you doing today?

[00:01:01] Nathan: Doing great. Thanks so much for having me. 

[00:01:02] Crystal: Yeah. So I'm curious 

Nathan's Entrepreneurial Journey

[00:01:04] Crystal: About these businesses that you've owned and started. 

[00:01:07] And are you a tech guy, like by trade? Or, like how did this all happen?

[00:01:12] Nathan: Yeah. I'm not a tech guy. I've been building businesses since I was 20. I had a bunch of high school jobs and college jobs and learned a lot about sales and marketing and managing people. And I was a hustler.

[00:01:25] My parents made me buy everything that I wanted. If I wanted a video game, a car, a toy, like from the time I was 12 on, I had to pay for it. 

[00:01:33] I was always trying to earn extra money and just learning skills. And also learn that I hated working for other people. And so I, my, I launched an Amazon business in college, which was lucky.

[00:01:43] It was just great timing. Amazon was bursting onto the scene. Freeup is what most people know me for. That was all I did for four years was 24 seven. How do I grow Freeup? 

[00:01:53] And I was in my twenties. I didn't have a lot of responsibilities outside of my girlfriend. Now my wife. My girlfriend at the time.

[00:01:59] And after that business sold, it was like, okay, I don't want to ever do that again. I can't work 80 hours a week forever. I have a son now. I want to grow businesses that don't require me to go to conferences. Or be on zooms all day. Or work weekends, work nights, stuff like that.

[00:02:15] We've really tried to build the, these different boring businesses in big markets.

[00:02:21] Not creating a market, like not creating the next Uber, but Hey, let's take a hiring process we can sell. Let's take bookkeeping, SEO, which, cause you interviewed Steven. 

[00:02:30] Stuff that just applies to every business stuff that we do inside our own businesses. And how can we hire operators from day one?

[00:02:36] So that I'm not doing the fulfillment. Connor, my partner is not doing the fulfillment. 

[00:02:41] And we can support the operators and we've got one marketing team that markets for everyone. We can use our personal brand to push towards the businesses. 

[00:02:48] And make sure that they have high customer service. And we're happy with everything going on there. But that's been the fun experiment.

[00:02:55] With everything in business, you never know if it's going to succeed or fail. 

[00:02:58] And past success does not mean future success. So that's what we're working on. It's a fun blend of challenge and diversity, but also making it so that I don't have to do things that I don't want to do. 

[00:03:09] Crystal: Yeah. It's funny.

[00:03:10] You're like, I don't want to go to conferences. I love going to conferences. 

[00:03:13] If that was a job. That might be like my favorite, like dream job, it's Maybe I'll do that. 

[00:03:18] I'll be like, y'all can hire me out to go to conferences on your behalf. You know what I mean? Whatever it is that anyone needs me to go to a conference for, I am now officially for hire.

[00:03:27] But that's really fun. 

Building and Selling FreeUp

[00:03:28] Crystal: So FreeUp. What was that? What was this first major business venture you had? 

[00:03:33] Nathan: Yeah. And free up still running. It's about to hit the 10 year mark, which is cool. 

[00:03:37] But it. It's a freelance marketplace. So we were big Amazon sellers, like I said, and we had all these VAs and freelancers running our Amazon business. 

[00:03:45] And we used Upwork and Fiverr, but they, it just took too long to interview people, go through a hundred applicants.

[00:03:51] It wasn't tailored for e commerce. 

[00:03:52] And we started offering our VAs and freelancers to other e commerce sellers. We turned that into a marketplace. Hired a developer and put software behind that. So it was more of a Airbnb or an Upwork or like a platform that you would go to. And yeah, it eventually branched out outside e commerce.

[00:04:08] We'd get real estate agents that needed VAs, agencies, whatever. But yeah, the top 1 percent of freelancers would get on the platform. 

[00:04:16] We were picky on who we would take on. We would match people up with clients quickly. Would make sure both sides were really happy and would really guarantee everything.

[00:04:24] If a VA quit, for example, we'd cover all replacement costs and get you a new VA. So just a extreme level of customer service. And we were fortunate enough to exit that in 2019. 

[00:04:34] Crystal: Wow. That's amazing. And I think a fun takeaway that I'm hearing from you is that... sometimes it's by the it's through the doing that you discover the opportunities. Because it's you guys have created new businesses out of the opportunities from your needs of your own business. 

[00:04:49] So that's super cool and super motivating. Like you better go ahead and get started on whatever dream you have so that you can figure out the next thing that's going to be awesome. 

Learning from Mistakes

[00:04:57] Nathan: Yeah, and it's all mistakes we made too. Like we, we were bad at hiring for the first four years of running the Amazon business.

[00:05:03] And then we figured it out. And it really helped our business grow. We ignored bookkeeping through the entire first business. 

[00:05:09] And when we started Freeup, we. hired a bookkeeper from day one and that ended up being one of the best decisions we ever made. 

[00:05:16] Because not only do we make good decisions every month, but we passed due diligence because we had immaculate books going back four years.

[00:05:22] So now we offer bookkeeping as a service. So everything we do in our own business, it's mistakes we made or processes that we now have built that we do it inside our company that we also offer to our clients. 

[00:05:32] Crystal: What does it look like to be bad at hiring? 

[00:05:35] Nathan: Constant turnover, people not loving working with you lots of drama. Stuff, not getting done.

[00:05:42] Yeah, we went through every potential hiring issue. We had people scam us where it was, we hired. These two twins to work from us out of Nigeria or something. 

[00:05:51] And one of them was working and they were just billing us twice. Stuff like that, where you just don't really know what you don't know until it happens. 

[00:05:58] And you waste a lot of time and a lot of money.

[00:06:00] And we had once hired a developer for the software project. We spent a month planning with him. 

[00:06:05] And on the first day of the project, he just didn't show up and we never heard from him again. 

[00:06:09] So just. Horror stories like that we eventually put a hiring process of how do we hire A players? How do we never make those mistakes again?

[00:06:17] And how do we keep those A players around for years to come? 

[00:06:20] Crystal: Yeah. Oh my gosh it's funny. It's not funny, but it's funny. 

[00:06:24] Nathan: It's funny now 10 years later. At the time, it was crazy stressful. 

Importance of SOPs

[00:06:28] Crystal: Yeah. We talk a lot on this show about optimization and how like optimization is beyond just SEO,. 

[00:06:35] And I have a small group for small business owners and entrepreneurs where we talk about the importance of brand. 

[00:06:40] The importance of SEO, the importance of gosh, all the things that I have written down.

[00:06:45] I actually have a graphic for it. I can't even remember right now. 

[00:06:48] But the fact that like optimization is so many things up front. User experience is one, those type of things. But then on the back side, then there's this element of systems. 

[00:06:57] And so in our chats back and forth, you were telling me that through all of these experiences have really developed strong systems.

[00:07:05] And so that's what I wanted to talk about first. What are the foundational standard operating procedures or S o. P. S. That every small business should have in place? When they're starting their business? Let's just start there. 

[00:07:17] Nathan: Yeah, it's almost two different things. Like when I think of processes, my overall mentality is I want to value the client's time at the highest possible level. 

[00:07:27] Take bookkeeping.

[00:07:28] For example, the client needs to be able to do. Give us information to get a quote, accept the quote, get integrated. 

[00:07:34] So give us view only access to their banks, credit cards, stuff like that. Have a kickoff with called my team. 

[00:07:40] And get going, getting easy to read reports every single month. So the first year of us running our bookkeeping business.

[00:07:47] We had to figure that out. What is the fastest way for a client to get us information for the quote? 

[00:07:51] How do we get it back to them quickly. Because you don't want someone to send you information And then two weeks later you send them a quote. 

[00:07:56] So there needs to be a one day turnaround in there and then how do you integrate them?

[00:08:00] How do you get them directions do it with them whatever it takes to get that done quickly? 

[00:08:04] Without clients ignoring it or getting busy with other stuff. Entrepreneurs are, we're always doing a million things. 

[00:08:10] So my overall mentality is like the process isn't done. You're always trying to improve it.

[00:08:15] You're always trying to make it better. And you don't really have a good client experience until someone tells you that you have a good client experience. 

[00:08:21] You can't assume it. 

Creating Effective SOPs

[00:08:22] Nathan: That's the external processes. And then you have the internal process. Every part of your business has a process. 

[00:08:29] For FreeUp, we had customer service SOPs. We had internal billing and bookkeeping SOPs for billing clients and paying freelancers. Marketing SOPs. 

[00:08:37] What do we do with the podcast? Once it's recorded where are we sending it? How are we marketing it? Lead generation SOPs. 

[00:08:44] Every part of the business has it.

[00:08:45] And then we put team members in charge of those SOPs and updating them every single quarter. So when we sold FreeUp in year four, we turned over 50, a hundred pages of SOPs. 

[00:08:57] That had all been updated every quarter for four years, and that really helped us sell the company. 

[00:09:02] And even if we didn't sell it, that's what helped us operate the company.

[00:09:05] That's what helped us. If we did have turnover or we wanted to replace someone, it wasn't that hard to plug someone in there. 

[00:09:12] And all of our SOPs are broken into three parts. It's the why. 

[00:09:17] The steps and the important reminders. The why is why they're doing this task. How does it impact the big picture and what does success and failure look like?

[00:09:26] A lot of entrepreneurs miss this. They'll hire a VA for lead generation or something. 

[00:09:32] And it'll be that VA off to the side. And they have no idea. The VA has no idea how their impacting the company, they don't know what success or failure looks like. 

[00:09:40] When I hired a bookkeeper for FreeUp, the first bookkeeper was terrible.

[00:09:44] The second bookkeeper was great. But when I hired the second bookkeeper and I created the SOP, it was, this is everything that was wrong with the first bookkeeper. 

[00:09:51] I didn't personally, I call him out or anything. 

[00:09:53] But I wanted to know this is what failure looks like. This doesn't work. Success is paying the freelancers on time, charging the clients correctly. Stuff like that.

[00:10:01] So breaking down that, why? The steps, the one, two, three, this is how you do it. And that part is always changing and you're always trying to improve it. 

[00:10:09] And then the important reminders. What are the things you don't do for any reason? 

[00:10:14] The easiest way to break trust with your team is to pay them late.

[00:10:17] We do not pay people late for any reason. 

[00:10:20] And we lay that stuff out. So there's no assumptions being made because some other client they had might not care about the stuff that I care about. 

[00:10:27] Crystal: Wow. That's really helpful. I like how you broke that down. Every time I do an episode like this, I always do another episode called follow through Fridays.

[00:10:36] And so I think about what you're saying. 

[00:10:38] And then I try to walk through it so that my audience understands like how I applied it. 

[00:10:43] So then it gives them that much better of an idea of how they might be able to apply it to their business. 

[00:10:47] So you've already given me like 15 things that I'm like, Oh, I need to follow up on that.

[00:10:51] But what about like for SEO? Are you familiar with a search engine optimization s O P? 

[00:10:59] It's a lot of lots of letters. 

[00:11:00] Nathan: I'm not the SEO expert. Connor, my partner is Steven, who you interviewed.

[00:11:04] They're the SEO people. I know enough to be dangerous. I know certain things about it, but I'm definitely not the one creating the SEO SOPs. 

[00:11:12] And if you want to take it a step further, so yeah. I had I mentioned that I would give my team ownership of the SOPs. 

[00:11:19] The new way that we run businesses that Connor and I run businesses is we don't start a business unless we have an operator from day one.

[00:11:25] So when we were starting a bookkeeping business, we're not bookkeepers. 

[00:11:29] We can't run a bookkeeping business without hiring a controller first. So we hired Shelly, a 30 years of experience. 

[00:11:35] Once she's hired, I'm not creating the bookkeeping SOPs. I'm not a bookkeeper. Just like when we started to partner with Steven.

[00:11:41] I'm not creating the SEO SOPs. Connor might be proofreading them. But he's not building them. 

[00:11:46] Shelia and Steven are building them. So once you get to that point where you're hiring those operators, those fulfillment people, they should be able to create those SOPs. 

[00:11:54] And in the perfect world, you're hiring someone who's already been there and done that.

[00:11:57] Shelia ran a bookkeeping business. Steven ran an SEO agency. So they're not starting from ground up. They're coming with saying, Hey, this is what processes look like. They might need to rebuild them, revamp them. 

[00:12:09] But that's where we're at now. And then once we have those initial SOPs, then you give ownership to certain people on the team. To keep them updated.

[00:12:16] So long answer, but the short answer is like SEO SOPs are not something that I personally create. 

[00:12:21] Crystal: Okay. 

Starting a Business with Limited Funds

[00:12:22] Crystal: Maybe I can get a hold of one as an example to maybe drop in the show notes or something. 

[00:12:27] But your approach to business is so different, than mine, although mine has lately shifted. 

[00:12:34] Because like you said, you can't work 80 hour weeks forever. You can't do everything forever. 

[00:12:39] And a lot of people who listen to the show are solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, and that's not something that think about. They don't think about. The time away from work, can you take a vacation?

[00:12:48] I think you might've even posted something about this on LinkedIn recently. Can you really take a vacation? 

[00:12:53] And when you're starting a business in, from your perspective, you're hiring people. So where does that influx of income, come from to be able to pay them, to build a business in that way?

[00:13:05] Because for me, I have to sell something first. And then I get the money and then I make it and then whatever. 

[00:13:12] But like, how could you build a business the way that you guys have done it? 

[00:13:16] Nathan: Yeah. We've started most of our companies with 5, 000 or less. 

[00:13:20] The Amazon business started with 5, 000. FreeUp started with 5, 000. Outsource school started with 5, 000.

[00:13:25] The bookkeeping and the SEO were a little different just cause. 

[00:13:27] We had to hire a bunch of bookkeepers to get that started. And with SEO we needed Steven, although we landed clients pretty quickly. 

[00:13:34] And I am a little bit more on your side than you probably think. 

[00:13:36] Like with free up, we gave away free VA hours and got our initial clients before we really invested in our software and stuff. 

[00:13:43] Outsource school, which is our course. We sold it before we even made it. So we had all these pre sales and then we use that to hire video editors and stuff like that. 

[00:13:52] And then bookkeeping and SEO is a little different. Yeah, I had an exit. 

[00:13:56] So that kind of gives me the flexibility to put money into different ideas. 

[00:14:00] And a part of being entrepreneurs, knowing when to pull back too.

[00:14:03] It's not all butterflies and rainbows. We started this SOP building software called Simply SOP. 

[00:14:09] We put five, 10 grand into it, split between me and Connor. And there was just no market for it. People didn't need it. 

[00:14:15] There's Google docs. There's loom. I don't know why the Trainual, or how the Trainuals the world do well, but.

[00:14:21] After a few months, we were like, Hey, there's no market. We sold it back to the developer and we moved on to something else. So I'm a fan of doing that. Create a set amount. 

[00:14:28] You probably can't start a business with nothing, but most businesses, you can start with five to 10 K if you want to go a little higher, 20 to 30 K.

[00:14:35] If you have a business partner, you're splitting it. 

[00:14:37] You're not, we're not talking about crazy amounts of money. 

[00:14:39] But before you invest tons and tons of money into it, even if you love your idea, even if it's your baby. 

[00:14:45] Prove that there's an actual market for it. Prove that you can get clients for it and prove that you can keep clients for it.

[00:14:50] When we gave out two free months of bookkeeping, if we couldn't give out two free months of bookkeeping, we didn't have a business. 

[00:14:55] Or if we couldn't keep those people that we gave two free months past the two month mark, we didn't have a business. 

[00:15:01] So those are just some kind of tests we do early on before we put a lot of time and money into something.

[00:15:05] Crystal: Yeah. And again, because I work with so many entrepreneurs and like Startup Shopify stores. 

[00:15:11] There's a statistic, about like the majority of businesses fail, right? I think the Shopify statistic is even higher. 

[00:15:18] Even though Shopify doesn't release the like formal statistics or whatever.

[00:15:22] But a lot of people say, Oh, I want to open a Shopify store. But there's no real strategy or goal or basis of how we're going to be successful in this. 

Market Research and Viability

[00:15:31] Crystal: And so I'm curious. Like how do you find that viability of a business before you launch it. 

[00:15:38] Nathan: Yeah, we do market research. So Ecom Balance, which is our e commerce bookkeeping business.

[00:15:43] If you go to the Ecom Balance Blog EComBalance.com/blog. You can see interviews we did with e commerce sellers. 

[00:15:49] Before we even hired a bookkeeper just when we had the idea. After we sold free up and launched house for school we just brainstormed a lot of bad ideas for about a year and One of the ideas that came up with bookkeeping.

[00:15:59] So we started reaching out to e commerce people we knew, and we asked them, can you name five e commerce bookkeeping companies? What bookkeeper do you use? How much do you pay? What do you like? What do you not like? What do we not know? And we got a lot of really good, honest feedback. 

Market Research and SEO Strategies

[00:16:13] Nathan: And if we had let that, let those meetings Being like, Hey, the price point's too low. Or everyone's happy with their bookkeeper. Or there's too much competition, then we probably would have moved on to something else.

[00:16:25] And then we're also doing research into stuff like SEO. The beauty of bookkeeping is a lot of bookkeepers are not good at the stuff around bookkeeping, the marketing, the sales, the customer service, the SEO. So when we did our research, we said, Hey. We can compete with the big players on SEO. Same thing with FreeUp.

[00:16:41] Sure there's Upwork and Fiverr, but these are funded publicly traded companies. There's not much else going on at the time. Now there's a lot more. 

[00:16:49] So we can compete with the big players on SEO and we did. So those are all kind of market research things we do before we actually figure out, Hey, how are we going to launch this thing?

[00:16:58] What's our initial offer going to be? How are we going to get those initial clients? 

[00:17:01] Crystal: Yeah, and that's such a great example of user experience research, and it's something that we talk about within the group. Of like actually identifying a problem that people have that you can solve. So kudos to you guys for, going out and actually listening to your customer and building something that they could use.

Understanding E-commerce Bookkeeping

[00:17:18] Crystal: And you're right. Like with e commerce, I'm sure you've heard this a thousand times, but like even my accountant. E commerce is so bizarre to her because she works with brick and mortar here in the town that I live in. 

[00:17:28] And, I have income coming from Etsy, from Amazon, from Shopify, from QuickBooks, from PayPal. Like different invoices coming from every direction.

[00:17:38] And that's very bizarre, for a bookkeeper who's, used to Cash comes in, checks come in, checks go out, whatever, in one spot. And how did you guys leverage that and like really integrate that into helping e commerce sellers? 

[00:17:52] Nathan: Yeah. This is the point of the show where I convince you to use e comm balance for bookkeeping.

[00:17:55] But so I've been e commerce is just its own beast. I went through the same thing. I, when I started selling on Amazon. 

[00:18:01] I went to a local CPA and I turned over these credit card statements. That was me buying from all these different manufacturers that have my credit card on file. And he looked at me. I was crazy.

[00:18:11] He had no idea what it was. 

Specialized Bookkeeping Services

[00:18:12] Nathan: So I think that kind of evolved and now there are specialists. 

[00:18:15] And it's the same thing if you're in real estate, you don't want, if you're a real estate investor, you don't want to go to a bookkeeper for agencies or a bookkeeper for e commerce. And you don't want to be the first e commerce client.

[00:18:26] For your bookkeeper. You want a bookkeeper that actually understands your niche.

[00:18:29] Like we have two bookkeeping brands, e comm balance and accounts balance. E comm balance is a higher price point. There's additional software. There's a lot more that goes into it from the different fees, different marketplaces, inventory, cost of goods sold.

[00:18:40] If you don't know bookkeeping, which most entrepreneurs don't, and they shouldn't spend the time to learn. You want to make sure that you're putting in the hands of someone that does. And any bookkeeper that joins Ecom Balance has Ecom bookkeeping experience or like our controller, she was a seller herself.

[00:18:54] So all that's very important. 

[00:18:56] Crystal: Yeah and then to go back to that thing that you were talking about with the SOP builder or whatever that you had that you sold back to the developer. 

[00:19:04] I think that's an amazing idea.

[00:19:06] Yeah. Who knows, maybe that's just at this point in time, it's just a GPT prompt or something. 

[00:19:12] But I think that's so helpful because even my father, he's a a lawn service guy. 

[00:19:17] And over the years, the past 40 years, hiring has been difficult for him. 

[00:19:22] And it really comes down to having something measurable That you can hand somebody to say, Hey, this, these are the expectations and then being able to objectively evaluate it versus, Oh, or not.

[00:19:35] You know what I mean? 

[00:19:36] Nathan: Yeah. 

Importance of Hiring the Right People

[00:19:36] Nathan: To jump around a bit. Hiring is what separates good entrepreneurs. There's plenty of entrepreneurs with great business ideas. 

[00:19:42] Or maybe they're good at fulfillment, but they never take off because they can't hire people. And vice versa, there can be a pretty average entrepreneur that hires the right people and is good at hiring.

[00:19:52] And if you're good at hiring, it makes every other part of the business easier. 

[00:19:55] All the red flags and, or all the fires that come in as an entrepreneur, I should say. And just stuff that comes up and new products on your plate and things you have to deal with are all way easier if you're good at hiring. And you build that A-Team and it turnover just crushes small businesses, it always holds you back.

[00:20:12] It's stressful. It wastes your time, your money. Makes you never want to hire someone again. And. Good hiring is addicting and it pushes you to see what else you can delegate. 

[00:20:20] Crystal: Yeah. And, but I think also too, there's some people who don't really see themselves going beyond themselves, as an entrepreneur.

[00:20:27] And then all of a sudden they have success. And now it's time to hire. But again, where's the manual on how to be an entrepreneur and hire someone. 

[00:20:36] Nathan: That's why we build Outdoor School. It's just our hiring process that you can plug into your business and make good hires right away.

[00:20:42] Crystal: Yeah, awesome. I love how you guys are just like constantly solving problems. That's like my favorite entrepreneurs, right? Okay. 

Creating and Updating SOPs

[00:20:48] Crystal: So how can you design your SOPs to be flexible? Because you said that you revisited them every quarter? That's pretty intense.

[00:20:57] How did you guys do that?

[00:20:58] Nathan: We make the team leaders put it on their calendar every quarter to go through the SOPs. And this is something we ran into at the SOP software.

[00:21:06] Videos are probably the best form of SOPs, but they're the hardest to change over time. So our software would let you edit clips and stuff like that.

[00:21:14] But for us, like Google docs is just the way to go. It's text. You can easily change it. You can put screenshots in there. If you have something that's finalized, that's probably not going to change. Then you add a video. But your goal is to make the McDonald's of S. O. P.'s. 

[00:21:28] Where it's just so easy that you can take someone put him in there and make it understand it.

[00:21:33] And All their questions or concerns or the stuff that there's nothing that's vague in there. So that's how you want to approach it. That's it's a living, breathing document that you're always changing. You're always improving. And we use new people as a test of our SOPs. If we give someone an SOP and they can't handle it or stuff's missing.

[00:21:52] Sure. It could be a bad hire, but it could also be a opportunity for us to improve the SOP and say, Hey, this person messed up these three things. How do we address that in the SOP now? And when you have that mentality, your hiring process and your SOPs are always improving over time. 

[00:22:07] Crystal: Yeah. And that was going to be my next question is okay how do you know, if it's working or not. But that's great that you have people go through it and then you take the feedback and put it back into practice.

[00:22:16] What if someone, like you said, they failed they didn't do it right or whatever. Like, how do you handle that in the, just the communication back with feedback

[00:22:24] Nathan: to your employee? 

[00:22:25] Yeah. 

[00:22:25] Anyone we hire we go through our interview process, which we focus on communication, attitude, and red flags. 

[00:22:31] And we try to find someone that has a trifecta and we look for all the red flags that's called our CARE process. 

[00:22:38] And we set really good expectations. Onboarding is where a lot of people miss. And then when they start on day one, they have to prove themselves. 

[00:22:45] We want them to show us that they can read an SOP and spit information and retain information back to us. And this kind of goes in different stages.

[00:22:53] At first we need them to understand our companies or if they're on our marketing team, they need to understand me and Connor. 

[00:23:00] They need to know me. They need to know what companies I started. What's my story. And if I have them listen to a bunch of podcasts and these documents I've created that have stuff about me. And they can't retain that information. We don't even get to the marketing task at hand because I can't work with that person.

[00:23:16] They've failed that initial test. And then same thing with the different SOPs. If you hire a web developer for your website, don't just hire them to do 20 pages and look at the end. Have them do one page. 

[00:23:27] Give them feedback on that page. Have them prove to you that they can handle feedback and make adjustments, and then give them two more pages or three more pages.

[00:23:34] And SOPs are no different. I, if I'm hiring someone for customer service, prove to me that you can handle the most basic emails. 

[00:23:41] And then I'll let you handle a little bit harder and a little bit harder. So That's all about valuing your time at the highest possible level. 

[00:23:48] Because a terrible spot to be an entrepreneur is you've invested three months into someone and then you're in that spot where you don't want to start over, but they're not good enough.

[00:23:56] You've got to figure out early on whether they can actually handle the job you're going to give them. 

[00:24:01] Crystal: Yeah. 

Effective Customer Service Practices

[00:24:01] Crystal: So with your customer service SOPs, are they, like the robot readings? 

[00:24:06] You know how some companies you call and it's I would like some help with my microphone.

[00:24:11] And they're like could I ask you a few questions first to make sure you are handled the right way? And they ask you like, are you calling about your TV or your microphone or your light fixture? You know what I mean? It's hello? Human, like how do you handle those types of things?

[00:24:26] Nathan: Yeah, it's probably a little less technical than that because we're not selling like cameras or things that have to be diagnosed. 

[00:24:32] But yeah, I mean we've got canned responses for every single situation. We have steps of the customer service people follow which is usually around getting information up front. 

[00:24:42] Like for FreeUp, you're getting full information from the client up front because the last thing you want to do is Solve a problem, but then you really didn't get the whole problem.

[00:24:50] So there's usually follow up questions there. It's looking at data. 

[00:24:53] Okay, the client's not happy with the work. How much was the client billed? Review that what is the total amount going to the freelancer? Did they have approval in writing? What how what is their side of it? And then there's different solutions Are we refunding the customer in full?

[00:25:07] Are we splitting with the freelancer? Is the freelancer willing to refund anything? If we have to, are we splitting it three ways? 

[00:25:13] So everyone's losing a little, but everyone's happy. And felt like that we treat it fairly. And then all these canned templates, you don't just copy paste them. You take them and you customize them to actually fit the situation.

[00:25:24] And just depending on how angry or upset the person is, adding some fluff in there as well. So they're all structured that way where. Different situations that you get over and over again. There's a process. Another just example of the time I had with Amazon. People would email us for tracking numbers.

[00:25:39] So we'd have a canned response. Hey, your order was shipped on this date. Here's the tracking number. This is how you get it from the manufacturer. Double check the tracking number before you send it to the client. 

[00:25:48] And make sure it was actually shipped because you don't want to send them it. And the client's Hey, I checked and it never left the warehouse.

[00:25:53] So certain process like that, where you try to cover the bases. 

[00:25:56] And there still needs to be critical thinking. From your customer service rep, but they are following it step by step. Every single time. 

[00:26:02] Crystal: Gotcha. And you just answered part of my next question was like, okay where does automation fit into these processes?

Balancing Automation and Human Touch

[00:26:09] Nathan: Everything can be automated to some extent. We probably believe in. In humans, maybe a little more than other people, like for SEO, we use human writers. We'll use AI for research and stuff like that. 

[00:26:19] But yeah, and that'll change over time it with AI and stuff that comes out there.

[00:26:23] But we also hire people that are probably better at automating stuff than I am.

[00:26:27] Like I have a research person I just hired that's researching podcasts for me to get on and stuff like that. 

[00:26:33] And it's connected to Slack and I get an automatic Slack message when it's ready for me to review every single week. So you can set up certain automations like that. And I didn't do that.

[00:26:41] She did 

[00:26:42] Crystal: that. 

[00:26:43] That's nice. So do you have like a general rule of what things can be automated and what things cannot? 

[00:26:51] Nathan: So SEO wise, I defer to Connor and Steven, and they strongly believe that human writing and the quality that it is at this point is to that's the way to go. And then we always want clients to have a good customer experience, so we won't jeopardize that at all.

[00:27:07] For automation. We have a reputation that we've spent a lot of years building. 

[00:27:11] And hopefully people think highly of that reputation and we don't wanna do anything to hurt that reputation. So we'll never sacrifice quality or customer service for automation, but we're all about finding extra hours for people on the team.

[00:27:25] So if we can take someone's 40 hour a week, automate five hours, and give 'em a new five hour thing to do, that's what we're trying to do all day long. If we can.. 

[00:27:33] Crystal: Yeah. And I'm so curious about, post purchase optimizations. 

[00:27:38] The customer service after the sale and, just building relationships.

[00:27:42] Like what, have you guys created anything along those lines? 

[00:27:45] Nathan: Yeah. 

[00:27:45] We have email sequences that, that go out. So if someone grabs, like we have SEO SOPs, if you go to TrioSEO.com/SOP that you can grab.

[00:27:53] Yeah. I knew you'd like that. I will totally drop that in the show notes. And after you grab them, you'll get an email saying, Hey, it's Nate.

[00:27:59] I'm with Trio SEO. Would you want a free audit and stuff like that? And all that, like bookkeeping, like when someone has a kickoff call with their team, they get an email afterwards saying, Hey, how was the call? How can we improve? We're always trying to improve parts of the business. 

[00:28:11] So we have all that set up and we're tweaking it, but we try to balance it and make it personal.

[00:28:16] We want, we always want someone to feel like they're one step away from talking to me. 

[00:28:20] Even if they're talking to someone on our team, Usually people don't have to talk to me because we're fortunate enough to have a great team that doesn't have a lot of issues. 

[00:28:27] Not that I don't like talking to people. But we always want people to feel like they can get ahold of me if needed, because we love that feedback and we love that, that just customer service approach.

[00:28:36] Crystal: Yeah. So what if someone like let's just say even yourself, for example, or any one of your employees, is there ever like a point where say they've worked for you for so long? And they've essentially gotten the SOP memorized. Is there ever a point where it's okay not to follow the SOP exactly? Or is it an expectation for everyone to follow it exactly, no matter what?

[00:29:00] Nathan: We try to set the expectation to follow it. We'll even tell our bookkeepers, you're not doing it from memory. We use ClickUp. You have ClickUp open when you're going through bookkeeping tasks, stuff like that. And they get it, and they're, they get it. There's certain leadership stuff and critical thinking stuff, especially around customer service that you have to be able to problem solve. And all of that we encourage.

[00:29:18] So I don't know if I have a perfect answer for that. I think for the most part, we want people following SOPs because stuff gets forgotten when you don't. Even buy the best people, even if it's on purpose. But there, there are 

[00:29:29] situations that you have to go off the SOP. 

[00:29:31] As an entrepreneur, this there are situations I've handled 25 times over the past 10 years and then it will come on my desk another time, but it's slightly different and you have to approach it maybe different than you did in the past. 

[00:29:43] I don't have a good example of that off the top of my head, but that's just how life is sometimes.

[00:29:47] Crystal: Yeah. I've got a very easy example, I think, because we had someone come on who was an expert in HoneyBook. 

[00:29:55] And up until that point I had, managed everything in my mind, right? Really great system, by the way. Not really. But then I realized I was like, you know what?

[00:30:04] I don't necessarily need an assistant. I just need a system that reminds me to do certain things when they need to be done. Because I could be, managing a podcast. I could have, 15 orders in Amazon and then 20 in Etsy and 10 in my Shopify store or whatever. 

[00:30:18] And that's a lot of different moving parts to manage, especially when I do custom things, right?

[00:30:24] So what I did was I set up a system for myself in HoneyBook that reminded me. So as soon as I wish I had a zap for this, but I still do it manually, but let's say I'm doing a custom project for somebody. 

[00:30:36] I put it into the system and apply an automation and then the automation reminds me every day Hey, you need to do this or this is up for this particular project.

[00:30:47] So when I have 50 different projects going on, I don't have to worry about keeping it straight, missing a step, any of that. I get the step by step reminder. 

[00:30:56] And so then I can check it off and know exactly where I am with any client at any time. 

[00:31:00] And so it's, neat because a lot of people think I have more people working for me than I do. 

[00:31:05] But it's because I have those types of automations working, which is really helpful.

[00:31:10] Nathan: Yeah, I love that. That's great. I, those reminders are so key. We do that with people on our team. Like Back when we started the bookkeeping business, we would have reminders like what's a good one. It's like Thursday is clean up update day. So if we're doing it, let's say we're catching up the three months of books, six months of books or whatever.

[00:31:28] While we're working on that project, we update the client every Thursday. So on Slack, a message automatically pops up, Hey, bookkeepers, don't forget to message your clients. And then we . This just makes it easier. 

[00:31:38] Crystal: Yeah. 

[00:31:38] And then I can't remember another person called it like a white glove customer service.

[00:31:43] And it's those types of moments that make people really feel cared about. It's Hey, don't forget to, touch base with this person, follow up, like, how did they like it? Whatever that touch point is, people feel like, I am so special.

[00:31:57] And they are. It's just sometimes if we don't remind ourselves to, actually touch base with them and reach out with an email, it's a very small thing.

[00:32:05] But when it's forgotten, it's a really big missed opportunity. 

[00:32:09] But when it's done, it builds a connection with someone. 

[00:32:12] And since I implemented this system, I have, I've got screenshot after screenshot of people who have been like, Thank you so much for all the communication. 

[00:32:22] Thank you so much for following up with me.

[00:32:24] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, this was I should have been doing this years ago. 

[00:32:29] I never thought about actually intentionally creating those touch points. 

[00:32:32] Nathan: Yeah, those are all great points. I don't know if I have anything to add, but I'm all about you want clients to feel like you're just always around and that you're checking in with them from point to point.

[00:32:42] And I'm a big believer in that. 

[00:32:44] Crystal: Yeah. Awesome. Okay. 

Final Thoughts and Next Steps

[00:32:45] Crystal: So what should people do next? You've mentioned a few different companies, like who should go where? What is the best next step for someone who's listening? 

[00:32:54] Nathan: Yeah. If you're an e commerce seller and you're looking for monthly bookkeeping, go to ecombalance. com. Mention this podcast, get two free months of bookkeeping. You can check out any of my other companies or just my website, nathanhirsch. com and follow me, Nathan Hirsch on any social media channel. Connect with me, say hi. I respond to all DMs and love just networking with other entrepreneurs. 

[00:33:13] Crystal: Okay.

[00:33:14] And one more time where's this, these SOPs at SEO SOP. 

[00:33:20] Nathan: Okay. 

[00:33:20] Crystal: I'm going to drop that link definitely in the show notes, going to go grab it right after I'm done recording. 

[00:33:25] And thank you so much, Nathan, for coming on the show. It was super fun to hear all about how you guys stay organized. 

[00:33:31] Nathan: Thanks for having me.

[00:33:32] Crystal: Catch you next time, guys. 

[00:33:33] ​