And I'm so excited today because we're going to learn from a monster entrepreneur. I'm here with Nathan Hirsch, who's a lifelong entrepreneur who focuses on his words, the unsexy or boring parts of entrepreneurship, things like bookkeeping and hiring. He's had an exit, which I think is, that's the crown jewel of entrepreneurship is when you can build a business that somebody else is actually willing to buy, which either means. You're great, or it's the law of the greater fool. And you just found somebody dumber than you. But I have a feeling, Nathan, that you're great. Thank you so much for being on perpetual traffic. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me here. Catch me at a crazy time. I got two foster kids staying with us for a week, a baby on the way, a basement being redone. But it's tough to complain. Life's good. Yeah. Nothing could be more important than perpetual traffic though. That's right. When's the baby due? Early August or mid August. So July 6th. Yeah. You're on the goal line, aren't you? Yeah. At the end. It's starting to get real. Yeah. Do you know, and do you mind sharing, is it a boy or a girl? It is a boy. And have you named picked a name out? We have picked a name. I don't know if I'm allowed to share it on a podcast. Then don't. Yeah, you can't let the cat out of the bag. I don't want to get you in trouble. But coming soon. We're excited. That's awesome, for you. I know I mentioned pre roll, but I'm going to do it again just because they're my friends obnoxious. There's a mastermind specifically for fathers called Front Row Dads. And I wish I joined later into my journey in fatherhood, but man, what I wouldn't have given to be able to go back and just surround myself with a bunch of dudes. Just guys that want to be better fathers and husbands. So if you're listening and you're a dad, regardless of the stage of life that you're in, go check out Front Row Dads. Shout out to John Roman. That's all we're talking about today though. Today, Nathan's going to talk to us about his unique hiring process. The organic marketing blueprint that scaled his business from 5k to 12 million. I'm reading that right. 12 million gross revenue. And we're going to chat a little bit about your exit. But first I'm going to sneak attack you. Are you ready to get snuck attacked? Let's do it. All right. So every guest that we invite on before we dive deep into the nitty gritty, we ask for a nugget and the nugget can be something ultra basic and simple in your mind, but Something that might not necessarily have occurred to our listeners. So if you have just that tip, trick, hack, best practice, that quick hitter, that's going to take people and make them more efficient, better, faster marketers or business owners, what would it be? So I'm a big fan of minimum viable product. And I feel like I've talked to so many entrepreneurs over the years that once they get 500, 000, then they'll start building, then they'll start selling. And my partner, Connor and I were the opposite when we started. Dropshipping on Amazon. We tried it out with 20 orders. And if the people complained or less left us a bad review, we would have just refunded them and moved on to something else. Same thing with free up. We offered some free hours of a VA, got feedback, made sure they liked it before we doubled down and built software. Without your school launched a course. If they hated it, we would have just refunded them. With econ balance, we got initial clients and gave them free bookkeeping and saw, Hey, is there a market? Are these people going to actually stick around before we double down and build out this whole business? And there's been ideas that haven't worked throughout the years too, but we get in and get out quickly. For us, we're just big fans of putting a little money to something, seeing if there's actually a market, getting feedback from those initial customers before actually going all in and hire people and putting money in or whatever we're trying to do to build the business. Dude, that's not just a nugget. That's a, it's a master class of thought that needs to be integrated in every CMO, director of marketing, CEO, business owner, entrepreneur, because the class. That people are put through the business school class, right? Is you plan everything out. You build this major infrastructure in your mind. You architect it, you have your business plan and then you go and you execute. And the problem is you build a 30 story building. And then find out that the first floor ceilings are 10 inches too low. And now I got to knock the whole damn thing down so I can raise the first floor. Like just get messy, ready, fire, aim, build as you go. I love that nugget. That's awesome. And I counted four. Successful startups. Did I get that right? Yeah, we had a free up. Yeah, we had an Amazon business that was successful in the way that it, we sold 25 million over six years. It was a major castable machine, but we never really sold it. Amazon became harder and we ended up just dissolving it. But we have free up, we have outsource school and then our two bookkeeping brands, e com balance and accounts balance. Yeah, dude. So you're a killer. Everybody I, broken clock can be right twice a day as they say. And when I see somebody who's done it over and over again, I get one really envious, but two just really like impressed. You obviously see the lanes. How are you choosing these opportunities? What are the things I know you said in your bio? You're like, I like, what did you say? Unsexier, boring parts of entrepreneurship, but that can't be all like, how is it that you're figuring out where you're going to go next? Yeah. Yeah, so we have certain criterias that we like in a business and we, a lot of it's just brainstorming and my partner will come over to my house and we'll sit in the backyard and throw a football around and brainstorm business ideas. But we like big markets. We never try to create the next Uber for every Uber out there. There's 1000 ideas that people actually want that there's no market for. Yeah. Business owners, they need to hire. They need to do bookkeeping. It applies to almost all entrepreneurs. And then we try to just take our small percentage of the market, put our own spin on it. Usually around customer service and good process and really valuing the customer's time. We like reoccurring revenue customers that stick around. We don't want a business selling Shopify stores where you're building at one time and then you're always chasing new clients. And we want something that we think will be around in 30 years. In my mind, bookkeeping will be around in 30 years. I don't know if that's true, but we like businesses like that, where the industry just isn't always changing. And we try to avoid fads and like the, whatever the latest thing is. So those are just a few things we look for. And then it's brainstorming and market research. We like to talk to ideal customers. Like when we launched e comm balance, which is our monthly bookkeeping service for e commerce sellers. We interviewed a hundred e commerce sellers and we said, Hey, can you name us five competitors? What do you like about your past bookkeepers? What do you not like? What softwares are you using? Stuff like that. So that we actually know what we're getting into because. think a lot of times you think you're your own customer when you're not in the customers, you're actually targeting are way different than you. They think different than you, they care about different things. And we want to know all of that before we actually get into it. So I loved everything that you just said. One thing I want to focus on specifically, cause it's something I'm passionate about too, is the recurring revenue component. I have a list of non negotiables for any entity I'm involved in. And unless we're talking major high ticket and even then. I'm just like, because traffic is so expensive, customer acquisition is so expensive. If you're not doing something from a recurring perspective, I think you're, you have a flawed model. And hopefully I'm not being, too aggressive with our listeners, but I would like to encourage everybody who's listening, find a way to build continuity into your business. it doesn't mean that needs to be the core of your business. If you sell a house, maybe you can also get involved in. or you could start with home services or you're selling the great big thing, that's okay, but then turn right back around and, you're selling a SAS product or a software application. you'll start to see the SAS has a 30 X valuation. 30, 3 0, and it's because of the recurring revenue component, whereas, things like professional services, 7, maybe? So I don't know, writing's on the wall there.