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Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Leah talk about disability, preparedness, and covid. Guest Info Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (They/She) is a writer and structural engineer of disability and transformative justice work. Leah can be found at brownstargirl.org, on Instagram @leahlakshmiwrites, or on Bluesky @thellpsx.bsky.social Their book The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs can be found: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-future-is-disabled-prophecies-love-notes-and-mourning-songs-leah-lakshmi-piepzna-samarasinha/18247280 Their book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice can be found: https://bookshop.org/p/books/care-work-dreaming-disability-justice-leah-lakshmi-piepzna-samarasinha/16603798 Host Info Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Leah on Disability and Preparedness Resources Mentioned: StaceyTaughtUs Syllabus, by Alice Wong and Leah: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/05/23/staceytaughtus-syllabus-work-by-stacey-milbern-park/ NoBody Is Disposable Coalition: https://nobodyisdisposable.org/ Power To Live Coalition: https://www.powertolivecoalition.org/ Disability Visibility Project article about Power to Live : https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2019/10/26/call-for-stories-powertolive/ Power to Live survival skillshare doc: http://tinyurl.com/dissurvival Long winter crip survival guide for pandemic year 4/forever by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Tina “constant tt” Zavitsanos https://www.tinyurl.com/longwintersurvival Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid by Rebel Sydney Rose Fayola Black: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-QfMn1DE6ymhKZMpXN1LQvD6Sy_HSnnCK6gTO7ZLFrE/mobilebasic?fbclid=IwAR0ehOJdo-vYmJUrXsKCpQlCODEdQelzL9AE5UDXQ1bMgnHh2oAnqFs2B3k Half Assed Disabled Prepper Tips for Preparing for a Coronavirus Quarantine. (By Leah) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rIdpKgXeBHbmM3KpB5NfjEBue8YN1MbXhQ7zTOLmSyo/edit Sins Invalid Disability Justice is Climate Justice: https://www.sinsinvalid.org/news-1/2022/7/7/disability-justice-is-climate-justice Skin Tooth and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People (A disability justice primer): https://www.sinsinvalid.org/disability-justice-primer DJ Curriculum by Sins: https://www.sinsinvalid.org/curriculum Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies: https://disasterstrategies.org/ Live Like the World is Dying: Leah on Disability & Preparedness **Margaret ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret killjoy. And I always tell you that I'm excited about episodes, but I'm really excited about this episode. It put me in a better mood than when I started the day that I get to record this episode. Because today, we're going to be talking about disability and preparedness. We're gonna be talking about Covid abandonment. And we're gonna be talking about a lot of the questions that... a lot of the questions that people write us to talk about that they have about preparedness and I think that we can cover a lot of those. Not me, but our guest. But first before the guest, a jingle from another show on the network. Oh, the network is called Channel Zero Network. It is a network of anarchists podcasts and here's a jingle. [sings a simple melody] **Margaret ** 01:08 Okay, and we're back. So, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then I guess just a little bit about how you got involved in thinking about and dealing with disability and preparedness. **Leah ** 02:00 Sure. Hi, my name is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. She and They pronouns. Right now I live in Pocomtuc and Nipmuc territories in Western Massachusetts. And that is a great question. I will also just plug myself briefly and be like I'm a disability justice and transformative justice old sea-hag, aging punk of color who has written or co-edited ten books and done a lot of shit. Okay, so when I was sitting on the toilet thinking about "What do I want to tell Margaret when we get on the show?", I was actually thinking that my disability and my preparedness routes are kind of one in the same because... So I'm 48 [years old] now and I got sick when I was 21-22. So like back in 96-97. And, it was the initial episode that I got sick with chronic fatigue, ME, and fibromyalgia. And I was just super fucking ill and on the floor and was living in Toronto as somebody who was not from Canada. And, you know, I was just sick as hell, like crawling to the bathroom, like sleeping 18 hours a day. The whole nine. And I'd been really really deeply involved in anarchist of color and prison abolitionist and antifascist organizing and lots of stuff. I had a community, but it was 1997, so most of my community was just like, "What you're sick? Why didn't you make it to the meeting? We have to write all the prisoners with the [untranslatable]." And I was just like, "I just.... Okay, great." Like it was a really different time. There was no GoFundMe, mutual aid, Meal Train, someone brought me some soup. Like, know you, we weren't really doing that. And people really did not have a consciousness around, "You can be a 22 year old brown, nonbinary femme and be really, really sick and be disabled." So something I think a lot, and I've said before, is that disabled people are really used to the concept that no one is going to save us and we are really not surprised when state systems abandoned us because we live in that all the time. And so I was just like this little 22 year old sicko weirdo who'd read my Octavia Butler--and, in fact, that was part of the reason why I was like, "Toronto, great, there's gonna be more water and less heat." Okay, wasn't totally right about that. But, you know, I mean, I really had to save myself and I kind of was like, "Alright, I don't have..." Like, I'm working off the...I'm working under the table. I have hardly any money. I'm gonna make my own herbal medicine. I'm gonna grow a lot of what I eat from my backyard. I'm going to store water. I'm going to run a credit card scam and get a lot of dried goods and live off of those for like a year. [Margaret Hell Yeahs] Yeah, stuff like that. I feel like from there, over the last, you know, 26 years like it's....like, that's the route. The route was, you know, similar to a lot of people, I think of my generation, we were like on the cusp of looking at the current crises of like hot fascist war, hot eugenics war, hot climate crisis, and being like, "It's coming," and I started being like, "Yeah, like don't...don't think that it's all going to work out okay and that somebody else is going to fix it for you." So, I would say that's where my initial route--and then do you want to jump in? Or can I jump ahead like 20 years or something? **Margaret ** 05:10 Honestly, you could jump ahead 20 years later. I'm gonna come back and make you talk more about Octavia Butler. But we'll do that later. **Leah ** 05:16 Let's talk more about Octavia Butler because I have a lot of stuff about Octavia Butler and how she thought of--and I think sometimes misused--like nowadays [this is probably not the word but it's untranslatable] and also about disability. [Margaret "Oooohs" curiously] I know. We can get to that. Okay, so that's one route. And then, you know, I mean, I was always kind of like a little weirdo, where it's like, yeah, I grow most of my own food--or as much as I can--and it's not a fun green hobby. It's like, I'm broke as fuck and I need to grow a lot vegetables that fucking, you know, I can mulch and that can stay growing into December, you know? I stashed stuff. Something I also think a lot, is that as disabled people--and we talked about this a little bit when we're emailing--I think we're always prepping whether we call it that or not. Like most disabled folks I know just do shit. Like if you get a prescription and you have extra, you store it, you know? Like, if you can get a double dose, you put that aside. And then maybe you have it for yourself. Or, there's so many disabled mutual aid networks I've been a part of where someone's--I mean, before Facebook clamped down, this is really common on a lot of Facebook disabled groups--someone would be like, "Yo, does anyone have an extra five pills of such and such?" and I've seen total strangers for 15 years of disability justice be like, "Yep, what's your address? I do. I'm gonna mail it to you. I have my old pain meds. I've got this. I've got that." But, um, yeah, like doing the jumping forward that I promised you, so for people who don't know, disability justice as a movement was founded around 2005 by a group, a small group of disabled Black, Asian, and poor and working class, white disabled folks, who were all pretty, you know, gay, trans, and radical. And they were like, "We want to bring a revolutionary intersectional out of our own lives and experiences and issues. We want to create a disability movement that's for us and by us that's not just white, single issue, often cis, often male, often straight." Like, we want to talk about the fact that 50% of bipoc folks who were killed by the cops are also disabled, deaf, neurodivergent, etc... just to give one example. So, you know, that was '05 in Oakland, you know, Patti Burn, LeRoy Moore, Stacy Milbern, Ely Claire, Sebastian Margaret, Stacey Milbern Park, you know, the six. And I was living in Toronto and I moved to Oakland in '07 and I was kind of around for some of the beginnings of it. There's two stories I want to bring in. One actually predates my move. It was right when I was getting ready to leave Toronto, I got invited to go to this reading by a bunch of queer--I think all white--disabled radical folks. And I was just like, "Oh?" And I did the whole, like, "Am I really disabled enough?" and then it was like, "Oh, it's gonna be really depressing." And then it was really awesome. And I was like, "Whoa, disability community. Life saving." But it was kind of one of my moments of being brought into the disability community because there was this writer who was there who, their reading series was actually a choose your own adventure where there's four disabled, queer, and trans folks who are having a sex party and the zombie apocalypse happens. And then they have to figure out how to survive it without abandoning each other. And it was all like, "Okay, you all get to the van, but then there's no ramp. What do you do? Oh! You get this accessible ramp, but it smells like perfume and somebody has NCS. What do you do? And I was just sitting there with my mouth open--and it was also interwoven with like, 'Yeah, and then somebody's fucking somebody else with like, you know, a dildo strapped to their prosthetic,'" and I was like, wow, I fucking love disability. Like, sign me up. But I gotta say briefly, that was one of my first examples of like, you know, there's a really important phrase in Disability Justice, which is, "No one left behind, " right? Like, that's one of the core organizing principles. And that was kind of.... Before I even heard that phrase, I was like, "Fuck like this is..."--because I'd been around antiauthoritarian, quasi prepper, like "shit's gonna happen, we have to get ready." But I was always kind of quiet in the corner closeting my disability being like, "Well, shit, like, what if I don't have my meds? Or what if I'm too.... What if I can't run away from, you know, the Nazis or the zombies because I have a limp and I walk with a cane? Like, what if?" And that was my first example of this cross disability fantasy space of like, "We're going to escape together and we're not going to let anyone get eaten and it's going to mean really being creative about access stuff." Okay so jump ahead to, right, then I moved to Oakland and then I ran into actual Disability Justice community through Sins Invalid, which is an incredibly important foundational Disability Justice group, and through a lot of friendships I started making with other QTBIPOC disabled folks and my really, really good friend Stacy Park Milbern, who, people should totally know her work. She's incredible. She was one of the best movement organizers that the movement has ever seen. And we met online. And she was living in Fort Bragg, North Carolina with her family on the base because her family's military. And she was a queer southern, working-class, Korean and white, you know, physically disabled organizer from when she was really young. And then she was like, "Okay, I love my family, but I'm literally hiding my gay books in the wall because my mom's Pentecostal." So, yeah, and she's like--I literally realized she tells the story a lot--she's like, "Yeah, like, I realized I hadn't really left the house for a couple months and like, this is gonna be it," and she's like, "I was literally watching Oprah. And Oprah said, 'No one's coming to save you.'" And she was like, okay. She's 21 years old. And then through online, disabled, queer of color community there was this--or she organized--this initiative called To the Other Side of Dreaming where she moved crosscountry with Mia Mingus, who's another queer Korean organizer who was a friend of hers, ad moved to the Bay Area. And so that was around 2010-2011. And then in 2011, what happens but the Fukushima nuclear accident, right, disaster? And we're all on the West Coast--and it's completely ridiculous bullshit, looking back on it now--but all of these Bay Area folks were like, "Oh my God! Radiation!" And some people pointed out, "Look, you know, we're not.... There's...it's a big ocean. The people who really have to worry are in Japan and areas around it, so whatever?" But it was one of those times where we were like, fuck, this is a really big nuclear accident and we are sort of close and it's making us think about disaster. And I remember just going to fucking Berkeley Bowl, which is this big, fancy, organic supermarket and people had bought out all of the burdock all the fucking seaweed. And I was like, "Oh, my God, these people." But out of that, Stacy started having conver--and I and other people who were in our organizing network of disabled, majority BIPOC--were like, "What are we going to as disabled BIPOC if there is an earthquake, fascism, like another big disaster? And Stacy said, really bluntly, she's like, "You know," and she was a power wheelchair user. She used a ventilator. You know, she's like, "Yeah, I am supported by electricity and battery dependent access equipment." And she's like, "Well, I'm going to be really honest, my plan has always been, if something happens, I'm just going to lay down in my bed and die, because I don't think that any emergency services are going to come save me and the power is going to run out in 48 hours. And then we were like, "Okay, that's super real. What if, through our amazing collective access stuff we're doing, we could figure out something else?" And we had this meeting at Arismendy bakery, which for folks who know, is like a worker owned co-op chain, Our friend Remedios worked there. It's wheelchair accessible. We met there after hours. And it was just like, 12-15 of us who started just sitting there and being like, "What are the resources we have? What are the needs we have? And we made this map, which I still have, which I think I shared with you, which is just like, "Apocalypse, South Berkeley/Oakland Map 2011," where we were like, "Okay, you know, when the power goes down, the communication goes down. We're gonna meet at this one traffic circle because people who are wheelchair users can roll up. And we're gonna bury note paper in a mason jar with pens and we're gonna leave notes for each other. But we're also going to agree to meet there the day after at noon." And I was like, okay, my collective house, the first floor is wheelchair accessible. We have solar, we have a landline. And we have a lot of space. So like, let's meet there. And then someone was like, "We've got the one accessible van. And we know, it's only supposed to fit 4 people, but we can fit like 12 in there." And we started.... Like, I just think about that a lot because it's, I think it was a really important moment where it was important...the stuff that we did like that--you know, the actual strategies and the resources we started talking about--but it was also that it was the first time in my life that I was like, "Okay, we're not--not only are we not going to just die alone in our beds, I'm also not going to be the one person who survives. Like, I can actually survive with, and because of, other people. And we're all disabled BIPOC with a couple of disabled white folks. And we can actually collectively strategize around that. And this will be my last leap forward, because I see that you're like, "I want to ask you stuff." So, you know, eight years go by, and in that time we all do an incredible amount of Disability Justice organizing and strategizing. And, you know, in 2019.... And a lot of it started to be around climate disaster on the West Coast. Like, I moved to Seattle in 2015. The wildfires started being really bad a year or two later. A lot of us were involved in mask distributions, just spreading information about smoke safety and survival. And then 2019 was the infamous year where the wildfires came back and Pacific Gas and Electric, in all of its fucking glory, which is the main--for people who don't know--it's the main utility electrical company in Northern California. They announced two days before wildfires were going to really impact the Bay, they were like, "Oh, so we've decided that our strategy is going to be that we're just going to shut down all the power in Northern California. **Margaret ** 14:52 No one uses that. [Sardonically] **Leah ** 14:53 No one uses that. And they're like, "Oh, if you have a medical need, call this number, and we'll make sure to leave it on at your house." and Stacey was, "Okay." She had just bought her house, the Disability Justice Culture Club in East Oakland, you know, which was her house but also a community center, de facto community center, that housed a lot of disabled folks of color. And she was like, "I was on the fucking phone for eight hours. Like, I never got through." And she and some comrades started this campaign called Power to Live where they were like.... It started out as, "Okay, we can't save everybody, but we're not going to just lay down and die. What do we do?" So it started out as like, okay, let's identify who has housing that still has power. There's some people in Richmond, there's some people in this neighborhood, but then it also developed into this thing where it was just this amazing crowdsource survivalist resource where it was everything from, she's like, "Here's a number. Here's an email. If you need something, text us, call us, email us. We have a team of eight people. We'll figure it out. If you have something to offer, do it too." And then some of it was that people were sharing everything from generator information, to generator shares, to people in different areas-- like I was in Seattle and we were like, "Okay, we will mail you generators and air purifiers, because it's obviously all sold out in the Bay, but we can get it here and get it to you." The thing that always stands out to me is people being like, "Oh, yeah, here's how you can use dry ice and clay pots to keep your insulin cold if refrigeration goes down." And there's a lot more I could say about that action and how amazing it was. But for me, when I think about the through line, I'm like, that moment in 2011, when we all got together, and were like, "What do we do?" we were prepping for what we couldn't fully predict, you know, the exact manifestation of eight years later. We're there and we're like, "Okay, there's wildfires, there's smoke, there's no fucking power, and we've not only built our organizing base, we built our relationships with each other so that we can actually trust each other and more or less know how to work together when this shit actually is hitting the fan to create something that's really life giving. Okay, I'll shut up. That was a lot. **Margaret ** 16:52 Now I have so many questions about all of it. **Leah ** 16:53 Yeah, ask me all the questions. **Margaret ** 16:55 Because there's a couple...there's a couple of questions and/or feedback that we get with Live Like, the World is Dying a lot. And some of them are very specifically disability related, and you covered most of them, but I want to highlight some of them. Like a lot of people write and are like, "Well, I rely on the following thing that is provided by civilization. So my plan is to lay down and die." Right? This is a--and I know you've kind of answered it--but I.... I want to ask more. Okay, I'll go through all the things. Okay. So to talk more about what "No One Left Behind," means? And then the other thing that really stands out to me is that, you know, when we were talking, when we were talking about what we were going to talk about on this on this episode, I was saying, okay, we can talk about, you know, making sure that preparedness is inclusive and open and includes disabled folks, or whatever, and you pointed out, really usefully, the, the necessity to reframe it. And I think that the story you just gave is a really beautiful example of this, where it's less about, like, "Hey, make sure to pay attention to the people who need canes," you know, or whatever, right? Like, you know, "make sure you keep track of folks based on disability." And more than like the thing you just described, is the thing that we're always trying to push, which is that you need to make a list of all the resources and needs within your community and then figure out how to meet those needs and instead of assuming that we can't meet those needs, figuring out how to actually do it. And so I love that it's actually like.... It's actually disability justice movements that we should be learning from, I mean, or participating in, depending on our level of ability, or whatever, but I just find that I find both of those things really interesting. And so I wonder if you have more that you want to say about alternatives to laying down and dying, and specifically, to tie into the other thing that I get asked the most or that I get the common feedback is--because we talk a lot about the importance of community for preparedness on this show--a lot of people don't feel like they have community and a lot of people write to be like, "I don't have any friends," or "I don't know any other people like me," or, you know. And so, I guess that's my main question is how do.... [Trails off] Yeah, how do? **Leah ** 19:22 So how do you make community when you don't have community? Alternatives to lying down and dying? And was there a third one in there? **Margaret ** 19:28 I was just highlighting how cool it is that y'all sat there and made a list of resources and needs, which is exactly what.... Instead of deciding things are impossible, just being like, "Well, let's just start doing them." You know? **Leah ** 19:40 And I think.... Okay, so I'll start there. Like I think that like.... You know, Corbit O'Toole, who's like a, you know, Disability Rights Movement veteran and like older Irish, disabled dyke, you know, in Crip Camp, the movie, she's like, "Disabled people live all the time with the knowledge that the society wants thinks we're better off dead," right? Like one...back in the day, you know, there's a--I think they're still active--one of the big Disability Rights direct action organizations was called Not Dead Yet, right? [Margaret Hell Yeahs] I think this is the thing is like I think that sometimes abled people or neurotypical people are not used to sitting down and making the list. And I think that even if disabled people aren't preppers, we're used to being like, "Okay, what do I need? Fuck, I need somebody to help me do my dishes. Oh, I can't bend over. I need to figure out what is the access tool that will allow me to pick up something from the floor when my that goes out? Like, if my attendant doesn't show up, can I have a..." You know, like, my friends always like, "Yeah, I've got a yogurt container by the bed in case my attendant doesn't show up so I can not piss the bed. I can lean over and piss in the yogurt container." Like there's a--and I think that.... God, I mean, there's been so many times over the years where I've done or been a part of doing like Disability Justice 101 and me and Stacy would always talk about crip wisdom and crip innovation and people will just look blank like "What are you talking about? You guys are just a bunch of sad orphans at the telethon." It's not just about making the list, it's also about how disabled disability forces you to be innovative. Like, Stacy would always share this story where she's like, "Yeah," like, she's like "Crip innovation is everything from," she's like, "I save a lot of time sometimes by pretending I can't talk when people come over and want to pray over me. You know, I just act like a mute and they fucking leave and they go on with their life," and she's like, "You know, I realized one day, if I took my sneakers off, I could ramp a step if it's just two steps. I could just put them there and I could roll up." Or I mean, there's a million examples.... Or like, because I think it's about prepping and about making the lists and it's also about whatever you prep for, there's always going to be the X Factor of "Oh, we didn't fucking expect that." And I think that's where a lot of prep falls apart is people have their "Dream Bunker." They're like, "Oh, okay, I know exactly what the threats are going to be." And then of course, it doesn't fucking happen that way. I really hope I can swear on your show. **Margaret ** 21:46 You can. Don't worry. **Leah ** 21:47 Great. So, I mean, one example I could give is I'm remembering at, you know, a Sins show when we were in rehearsal, where everyone drove over from Oakland in Patty's wheelchair accessible van, and then the ramp broken wouldn't unfold. So we just were like, alright, who do we know who has welding equipment? Who do we know has lumber? Like, I think we ended up going to a bike repair shop and then they had tools. And then we're like, okay, we'll just bring the rehearsal into the van and do it that way. Like, you have to be innovative. And that's a muscle that I think society doesn't teach you to flex and that often, I think that even people who.... I think there can be a lot of eugenics in prep, you know, whether people are overtly fascist or not, there's a real belief of like, "Oh, only the strong and smart," --which looks a certain way-- "survive," and that "We should use rational thinking to make it all work out." And I think a lot of crip intelligence or wisdom is actually knowing that shit can go sideways 48 different ways and you have to adapt. And you have to just kind of be like, "Well, let's try this." So I think that's one thing. And I think, you know, one thing I'll say is, yeah, just speaking to kind of the reframing we were talking about, I think it's less like, "Oh, remember the people with canes," but, I mean, that's good, but also knowing that we're already doing it and that abled people actually have a shit ton to learn from us. But also, I mean, something.... I mean, the title of my last book is "The Future is Disabled," and it comes from something--it's not unique thinking to me--it's something that a lot of disabled people have been thinking and saying throughout the pandemic is that we were already at like a 30% disabled world minimum and we're pretty close--we're probably at majority disabled right now. Because what, 2% of the world didn't get Covid? Like, how many people have Long Covid? How many people have complex PTSD? We're all sick, crazy, and, you know, needing access equipment. Disability is not out there. It's in here. Like there's no such thing as doing prep that's like, "Oh, only the three Uber Mensch are gonna survive." Like fuck that. And that actually--I mean, sorry, this might be a side note, but a lot of people have probably seen The Last of Us. And I'm just gonna SPOILER ALERT it. You know that famous episode three of those two gay bear preppers in love? Yeah, I loved a lot about it. I was so pissed at the ending, which I'm just going to spoil. So you know, the more artsy, non-prep guy....[interrupted] **Margaret ** 21:47 Yeah, they don't survive. **Leah ** 22:47 Well, no, but like, not only did they not survive but one of them gets chronically ill. And I was just like, grinding my teeth because it's like, "Oh, he's in a wheelchair. Oh, his hand tremors." And then they end up deciding to both kill themselves rather than do anything else. And I was so furious at it because I was like, these are two people who are so innovative. They have figured out all kinds of problem solving. They have an entire small city for themselves. And it's all like, "Oh, no, he can't get up the stairs." And I'm like, really? There was no accessible ranch house you couldn't of fucking moved to? **Margaret ** 24:38 Or like build a bedroom on the fucking ground floor. **Leah ** 24:40 Or youcouldn't get meds? You couldn't? I mean, when his hand was shaking, it was like, "Oh, it's so sad. He's being fed." I'm like, there's tons.... First of all, it doesn't suck to be fed. A lot of things that seem like a fate worse than death are not when you're in them. And also, there's like all kinds of adaptive utensils that they could have fucking raided from medical supply if he wants to feed himself. Or I'm sorry, there's no cans of Ensure? They absolutely have power. They couldn't have made smoothies? Like, what the fuck is this? But beyond that--and I think that a lot of people who have talked about that episode did, I think, have some good analysis of it where, you know, the whole way they set up their prep was they were like, "Oh, it's just the two of us," and the one super prepper guy was like, "I don't even want friends to come over." And the other guy was like, "Hey, actually, we need to make alliances because there's things they have that we don't. And we also need more than just the two of us because I love you, but I'm gonna kill you." And I think that's something to think about is really moving away from the idea that just your little you know, the utopic queer rural community that so many fucking city queers fantasize about or, you know, lover are going to be enough, because it's not. So that actually leads me to, "I don't have community. Where the fuck do I get it?" And I'm like, yeah, that's super real. Right? And I think it's something I actually wrote about in "The Future is Disabled" is that I have people be like--when I write about different crip communities, just even when I talk about stuff on Facebook.... Like my friend, Graham Bach, it's going to be his second year death anniversary in like two weeks, and he was like, you know, white, psychiatric survivor, super poor, amazing sweetheart of a human being, he died.... I mean, he died in his, you know, rent to your income apartment because he was really afraid to go to the hospital and he had cardiac stuff going on. And he was an anarchist, he was amazing, kind, complicated human being. And, I was writing about, like.... I'm going to tell the story and there's a couple things I want to pull out of it. So I was writing about meeting Graham when I was in my early 20s through radical Mad people community, and somebody was reading it and was like "That sounds so great." And I was like, "Yeah, it wasn't utopic. Like, I had to yell back at Graham because he would scream at me and I'd be like, "Shut the fuck up!" Like, there was so many fights. There was so much racism. There were so many older white cis dudes who had electroshock who were jerky or gross, you know? And I guess that was the thing is, I was like, they're like, "Well, how did you find each other?" And I was like, it wasn't perfect. Also, it was very analog working class. Like my friend Lilith Finkler, who is an amazing Moroccan, Jewish, working-class queer femme psych survivor, she would just go to the donut shop where everybody poor hung out and would talk to everybody who wass there who wass crazy who no one wanted to talk to and be like, "Hey, do you want to come hang out at this meeting at the fucking legal clinic? We have a room. We have a snack plate. I'll give you tokens. Let's organize." So I think that's the first thing is that it's not--and I don't mean this in a finger-wagging way--it's not automatic. And also, one of the really big ways that community is often ableist, and that a lot of us get cut out from it, is that a lot of us who need it the most are not particularly easy to love in ableist neurotypical worldview. It's like we're cranky, we're wounded, we're in a bad mood, we're weird. So a lot of the time, I think it's thinking about, first of all, what's one step, one move you can take towards it. Like, can you make one fucking acquaintance and build it. And really think about what it would mean to build some kind of relationship. I think the other thing that I really want to highlight is that a lot of the communities that I see that keep each other alive, that I'm lucky to have been a part of making and being supported by in disabled community, they're not static and they're not perfect. Like, I have networks with people who piss me the fuck off and who, you know, I've sent 20 bucks to people who I'm just like, "I really don't like you, but I can see that you really don't have food," you know, and we're not going to be friends and we're not going to like each other, but I don't want you to die. And that's not...I mean, it's bigger.... There's also people who I'm like, "Okay, you're my ex-abuser. I'm not gonna give you $5. Someone else can give you $5. **Margaret ** 28:42 There's this person who puts a lot of their effort into talking shit on me on the internet and I...they're also broke and have a lot of chronic health issues and I send them money every month. And every now and then I'm like, could this like...could you stop talking shit now? **Leah ** 29:03 I think this is the thing sometimes is like, hey, how about this is the deal, like maybe just say "Thank you," or maybe just talk shit even like 20% less? Because you know, I'm really doing we keep us safe here. I just really want a "thank you." **Margaret ** 29:16 I don't want you to die. Like, I don't want you to starve to death, but I really wish you would be a little bit more open minded to people having different opinions on yours. **Leah ** 29:26 Oh yeah, nuance, right? Yeah, it'd be fucking nice. **Margaret ** 29:29 God forbid. Anyway. **Leah ** 29:31 No, it's good. I guess my TLDR would be to start where you are and start with "what's one thing you can do? What's one person you can reach out to?" And I think, you know, I don't know if this is true for everyone who reaches out to you and it's like, "Well, I don't have anybody," but I think that social media and online connectivity is a real double-edged sword because for some of us who are isolated, it can create both online communities that can sometimes become in-real-life community and, either way, can be sources of some community or support. But I think.... I mean, you know, I'm a Generation X'er and I've just seen social media get more and more chokehold and just turn into fucking the panopticon meets a mall, you know? [Margaret laughs] And I think it's hard because 12 years ago I was part of really early online disabled spaces, which were great because so many people were like, "Well, I'm so isolated in my small town or in my city," or "I can't leave bed, but this is great. I'm meeting with other people and we're building these connections and it's actually more accessible for me to be real about my stuff from like my bed with a heating pad." And now I just think it's so chokeholded that it's hard for us to find each other. So it's much more common for people to be like, "Wow, I'm seeing all these people who have millions of followers and a shiny brand and I just feel like even more of an isolated loser." And then at the same time, I think people are like, "Well, how did people meet each other before this?" And I was like, "Yeah, like, you go to the coffee shop or the donut shop. You put up a flier. You go to the library. You like, I don't know. I mean, I just remember people I met on the food stamps line, you know, when we got there at six in the morning. And not everything's gonna stick, but maybe something sticks. And I also think about like, I'm going back to 13 years ago in early Disability Justice community spaces where--I mean, I think back to [untranslatable] when I went back to Toronto--which, yeah, big city--but I remember I had so many people come to me and be like, "You're..."--because I was starting to be more out about disability, cuz I was like, "I'm in the Bay and there's these wild people who talk about it and they're not all white people." and so I have so many, especially Black and brown disabled femmes be like, "Hi, you don't really know me, but I have fibromyalgia too," or "I have Lupus too. And like, no one I know talks about that. How do you do it?" And I'm specifically thinking about this time that this person I'm no longer in touch with--but we used to be friends--who's like, you know, queer, brown nonbinary person was like, "Let's just have a meet up of other chronically ill femmes of color," which is how we were identifying a time, and it was four of us, four heating pads, a bottle of Advil, and just very tentatively starting to share things about our lives. And I was like, "Yeah, that was four people." But a lot of that hang out then rippled outward. And it was like, I think it's also important to be like, it's scary to build community. Some tools I want to shut out like, so Mia Mingus, who I mentioned before, she has a lot of really great writing on her blog Leaving Evidence and she created this tool a long time ago now--that some people might be familiar with but for folks who aren't--it's, you know, it's her tool that she calls Pod Mapping. And she actually created it as part of a collective she founded called the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective that was working on doing transformative justice interventions into intimate violence, specifically childhood sexual abuse a lot of the time, and she had this framework that I find really helpful. She's like, "A lot of..." she was talking about in community accountability, transformative justice spaces and she made a really good point where she's like, "Sometimes we talk about like, 'Yeah, bring in the community. Like, everyone has a community.'" And she's like, "Most people don't have a fucking community, let alone one that can interview in childhood sexual abuse." So she created this tool where she's like, "Let's broaden the idea of what community is." Like, maybe it's that one cousin, that you only talk to once a year, but you could call them in a jam, or it's this hotline, or it is like, yeah, they're a weird church, but you really like their food banks. She's like, "You have to really bring in.... Like, start where you are and do the resource mapping we were talking about" I really liked that tool a lot as a place for people who are like, "What's my community?" because I think it's a big word and really being like, "What does that even mean to me?" and like, "What's one place that can start building it?" And I also want to shout out, Rebel Sydney Black, who's a friend of mine who passed this June, at the beginning of the pandemic, he created this tool called Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid that was specifically aimed at disabled folks who were trying to pod map during Covid--and we can provide the link and stuff like that--but I would say that those are two places to start and then I want to get to alternatives to lying down and dying. And then I'll stop. **Margaret ** 34:04 Okay, wait, wait, before we get to that I want to talk more about the building community thing. **Leah ** 34:08 Yeah, please. **Margaret ** 34:09 I think you brought up a lot of really interesting points. And one of the things that I really like about it, you know, talking about having like...you're broadening the idea of what counts as community, which I think is really useful. And one of the things I realized is that a lot of times when I was younger, I was like, "Y'all say 'community' and you just mean the people that you like," right? And that didn't make any sense to me. Community seems like the people where you have a shared interest, whether the shared interest is you live on the same block, or whether the shared interest is an identity, or whether the shared interest is an interest that you're trying to see change, or whatever. It doesn't mean people you like. It's a different thing. Friends are the people I like, right? Well, mostly. I'm just kidding. I love all of you. I mean, there's a lot of people I love that I don't always like. Anyway, so I don't know, and so I think that one of the things that stuck out with me about what you're gonna say and I want to highlight is the idea that--or maybe I'm misreading it--but like "pick issue to work" around seems like a good useful way. Especially if you struggle to just have friends, right? That's not like the thing that you're good at. But maybe there's a thing that you want to work on? Or having that meetup where it's like, oh, all the following people who have the following things in common, let's meet up and talk about it. Or honestly, activism is a really good way to meet people and work closely with people about things. And it doesn't necessarily have to mean these are now your friends. But they can be people where you rely on each other. And that doesn't have to be the same. I think about it a lot because I live in a fairly isolated and rural environment where there's not a lot of people around me who are culturally.... Whatever, there's not a lot of out, queer people where I live. There's not a lot of punks. And I'm like, that's okay. I talk to my actual neighbors instead. I mean, some of them, not all of them, but most of them, you know, they're who I would rely on in a crisis, because they're right there. It doesn't mean that we have the same ideas about a lot of stuff, you know? But we have similar ideas, like, "Let's not die," right? And so that's enough sometimes. Anyway, I just wanted to.... **Leah ** 36:12 No, I really appreciate it. And I mean that makes me kind of think about, when you were talking, I was like, yeah, you know, there's friends, there's communities, and then there's survival networks, which can include contacts, right? Because I just think about what would I do right now, if some should happened? And I was like, I've got long distance kin and long term friendships and relationships ofvarious kinds and I also have--because I moved to where I live, which is like semi-rural, but definitely more rural than where I've lived before--and I'm just like, yeah, I have a small number of friends. But there's like people who I know who I can...who are neighbors who like, maybe we don't know a shit ton about each other but I could be like, "Hey, this thing?" or "Hey, do you have water?" or, "Hey, let's do this." I think it's a lot about thinking about what are your goals? Is your goal intimacy? Is your goal survival? Is your goal friendship? Because you need different levels of trust and commonality depending on those things, right? I also think, and this is the thing too, I think something.... I think a lot of times because I've had people be like, "Well, I don't have community," also, I've heard that. And I think that a lot of times the context, I hear it in is people being like, "Well, I have care needs, but I don't have any community." So then there's also the really big thorny question of "need" and like being cared for is actually very complicated. It's very risky. It's very vulnerable. It's not safe a lot of the time. It may feel a lot easier to just be like, "I don't have any fucking needs." And so there's a lot, I will just say that there's a lot of unpacking that needs to do around like, "What would I need to be cared for? What are my lower risk needs that I need help with? What are my higher risk needs?" right? Like, there's people who I can.... There's some needs I have where I'm like, I don't need to trust you super, super deep politically or on an intimate level to let you do that. There are certain needs where I'm like, that's only going to be people where we've really built a lot of fucking trust because if this goes sideways you could really stuck with me. Right? And I think that when you're starting from nowhere, I think often where people get stuck is like, "Where I am feels like I have nobody and nothing. And I want to get to like the thing I've read about in your topic science fiction, where you know, it's Star Hawk and everybody loves each other. And how the fuck do I get from A to B." And I think the solution is like, yeah, you're not gonna get to fucking "Fifth Sacred Thing" right away--and that book is complicated. **Margaret ** 38:29 Yeah, It was very influential on my early.... **Leah ** 38:31 Oh yeah, when I was 18, I just wanted to fucking move there. And now I'm like, "Oh God, this is embarrassing. There's some shit in here." I'm like, "Wow, everybody's mixed race, but everyone's Black parents are dead." Wow. Cool. Nobody really thinks about race. I'm like, I'm gonna throw up. And like, you know, BDSM is just violent....Okay, sorry. We're not going to get into that. **Margaret ** 38:47 Oh my God, I don't remember that part. **Leah ** 38:49 Oh, yeah. No, where it's so violent. Like, "We're just loving." And I wrote a really no passion paper for school, because we actually had to read it in a college class I was in, and I was like, "Why are they not into leather sexuality?" And my professor was like, "Okay, 18 year old..." but yeah. **Margaret ** 39:04 I mean, legit. You 18 year old self had a legitimate critique. **Margaret ** 39:08 Yeah. **Leah ** 39:08 Yeah, no, there's a lot there. But, um, but jumping back, I guess it's just like, you know.... And I think this feels like disabled wisdom too, it's like, what can you do with the spoons or the capacity you have? Like, what's one move you can make that small? And then can you build on that? Yeah, but can I talk about alternatives to lying down and dying? **Leah ** 39:28 Yeah. Well, I think...I mean, this is the thing, is like, I'm a survivalist, but I'm not like anti-civilization in the ways that some people are. Like, I want meds, you know? And I think that's something that other crips I know talk about a lot, which is like, you know, we're really against this way that some people, including some people who would like align themselves with like Healing Justice who are like "We're like, oh, yeah, we just have to go back before colonialism and capitalism, and just everyone lived on herbs and it was great." and I was like, "Nah, bitch, I need surgery and meds." Like I want it all. Like, I love non-Western pre-colonial traditional healing. Absolutely. And I've had friends who died because they didn't get their surgeries on time. Like my friend LL died because nobody would give him a fucking kidney because they said he was too fat. And I'm just like, my good future involves.... I mean, and he's one of millions right? So like, my good future involves that we have surgical suites. And I'm just like, you know, honestly, also, a lot of times that worldview just seems so white to me, because I'm just like, listen, a lot of like, global south places figure out how to have field hospitals, right, in really dire and low-resource situations. So I'm sorry.... **Margaret ** 40:40 I mean, only Europoe's ever figured out surgery. No one else has done surgery until Europe showed up. [Said sarcastically implying the opposite] **Leah ** 40:45 Yeah, not fucking ever. [Also said sarcastically] **Margaret ** 40:46 Said the people who are like, "bite down stick and I'll saw your arm off." **Leah ** 40:49 Yeah, so I mean, I guess one thing I would just say is like, I would say that and I would say like, you know, really...I want to like lift up and encourage people to look at--and they can be hard to find--but look at cultures, look at organizing initiatives where people were like, "We can have our own ambulance, we can have our own like..." And when that's not there, to think about what it would mean to have medical care after the apocalypse, right? What would it mean to make hormones, make drugs, synthesize chemicals, and it's not impossible. I think that we're still in the in between of like, okay, we gotta figure out how to do that. But, um, you know, I'm thinking about, Ejeris Dixon, who's my friend and comrade, and, you know, we co-edited "Beyond Survival" together, which is a book we wrote that came out right at the beginning of the pandemic about stories and strategies from how people are actually trying to create safety without the cops. Ejeris always talks about how they were like, "Yeah, like, in Louisiana, you know, in the South, you know, like in the 50s, and 60s, and before I believe, there were all kinds of Black run ambulance and 911 services," because regular 911 wouldn't come to Black communities. Right? And they, I mean, something that I've heard them say a lot over the years is like, "We don't have the people's ambulance yet. But we could." And then it makes me also jump to some friends of mine who were in Seattle who were really active as street medic crew during the rebellions after George George Floyd was murdered by the police in, you know, 2020 in the summer, and specifically in, as some people remember, Seattle managed to have 16 square blocks break off from the city for a while, CHOP, Capitol Hill Organized Front. And so what people don't know is that the cops were like, "Okay, fuck you. We're not going to...If there's any 911 ambulance calls, we're not going to fucking let anyone go in there." So the street medic crew had to deal with a lot of really intense situations. And then after that, like a lot of us folks, like some folks were already nurses or EMTs and a lot of folks who were involved went to nursing school or EMT school and we're like--and I don't know where it's at now--but they were like, "We want to create,"--because right now in Seattle, there's, if somebody is having a crisis on the street, like a medical or a mental health crisis or an altered state crisis, there's no non-911 crisis response that you can call. There's either you go down the stairs to talk to somebody or there's the cops, right. And they were like, "We can get a van. We can get medical equipment from eBay." And you know, I don't know where they're at with that, but they were really organizing around like, "Yeah, we could get a defibrillator. We could get oxygen. We could get blood pressure cuffs. We could get fucking..." you know? And I think that that shit gets complicated in terms of insurance and regulation and the State and the medical industrial complex, but I want us to keep thinking about that. I also, and then I'll wrap up because we have other questions to get to, but it also makes me think about, I mean, I don't know if folks are familiar with Gretchen Felker Martin's amazing science fiction book "Manhunt," right, which is about.... **Margaret ** 43:50 I haven't read it yet. **Leah ** 43:52 It's so fucking good. Okay, so I won't give it away. But just for people who don't know, I'd say it's the one kind of gender sci-fi book where "Oh, a virus, you know, affects people with certain chromosomes or certain that dih-dah-dug that's not TERFy because it's a book that, you know, she's trans, and it's a book that centers trans women and nonbinary communities and there's like one or two trans masculine characters. But the two main trans femme, like trans women characters in the book, they're like, they have to, they're like, "Yeah, like, we're going on raids to get, you know, hormones, and, you know, different, like chemical drugs we need. And we're also figuring out how to synthesize them from herbs and different substances." And it's not easy. It's a struggle. But there are organized communities of trans women and allies that are fighting to do it. And I'm just like, yeah, and I mean, it's an amazingly well written book, and she's incredible, and I fucking loved it. And it's just beautifully written and really just--sorry, I won't gush too much but go read it, it's incredible--I just really also appreciated it because she was like, "Yeah, of course we're gonna get our hormones after the end of the world. Like of course it's possible." And I will also.... I have some criticisms of the ableism in it, but M.E. O'Brien and--fuck I'm forgetting the second author's name, but every you know, "Everything For Everyone," that book. I appreciated how in the good future society, they're like, "Our priority is making sure that insulin and chemical drugs and hormones are accessible and free to everybody." And I was like, I guess I would just push people towards there are ways of imagining the future where we can defeat capitalism but still have medical care of all kinds. We can have Reiki and acupuncture and we can also hormone surgery and transplants. And we might be doing it better because it's not controlled by fucking corporations and assholes. Sorry, that's my soapbox. Um, okay. I will say in terms of people being like, "That's really nice. But what about me?" I would be like, you know, I mean, right now in the war on trans America, there are so many people already who are like, "Yeah, I'm stockpiling meds. I like doing meds trading." I would say it goes back to what we started about, which is like, "Okay, what are your needs? What are the things that you're worried will not be there if the world ends?" Right? And we also need to recognize that the world's already ending and it's ended for some of us a bunch of times already. But I would be like, make that list and then really be like, "Alright, how do I get it?" You know, and if I can't specifically get it, are there like backups that I can get? And it may be stuff that you can research on your own. It also might be stuff where it's like, "Okay, are there trans [untranslatable], disability justice organizations, nationally, globally, locally, that you can hit up and be like, "What are folks thoughts about this? Are there ways that we can resource share?" Because I think it's about pills. I think it's also about durable medical equipment. So in terms of stuff that requires power to live, I think about generators and I think about generator shares. And I think about things like...there's a story when Hurricane Sandy hit New York 10 years ago, there were a whole bunch of us where...there's a guy Nick who's in community who, physically disabled guy, 13th floor, accessible apartment, you know, the lights went out, you know, really dependent on electricity to change out the batteries on his ventilator. There's a whole crew of disabled folks, like people walked up and down those fucking stairs every eight hours to take the spent batteries, figured out, "Hey, you know, what still has power, the fucking fire department." People were walking down recharging the batteries every eight hours. And it was allies, it was ambulatory, it was disabled people who could walk. It was fucking hard. But people were like, we're not.... Nick and his friends were like, "We're not just going to die. We're needed." So I wanna shoutout that and just for possibility modeling, I really want to, one other place I want to shout out, is an org that used to be known as Portlight but was now known as the Center for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, which is a disabled-led organization that is about like, yeah, when there's a climate or other disaster, they figure out ways of getting like accessible fucking evacuation methods to places because they know...we know, there's millions of examples of people who are just left to die in nursing homes or like, "Oops, the bus doesn't have a ramp," or, you know, I really want to name that during Katrina, some people might know about, you know, the situation with the nursing home that was there were a lot of folks who were wheelchair users or had high care needs were fucking killed by medical staff because the medical staff were like, "We're gonna actually euthanize these folks without their knowledge or consent." [Margaret exclaims] Yeah, no, there was actually a movie on HBO about it I think semi recently. Because "that's easier than figuring out how to fucking get people in the medivac ," right? Yeah, and so the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, I'm still getting to know them, but I have friends who are involved and they're like, "Yeah, we're aware this is an issue." So yeah, let's work with the fucking Cajun fucking Navy to like make sure that you can get folks with different bodies onto evac boats. Like let's figure out what disabled survival looks like. And I will just say, and this is the last thing I swear, for me, I mean, we all know water is important. Like, I can't lift 54 pounds. Guess what? So can't--which is, you know, a seven gallon right, like a five or seven gallon whatever--I'm just like, yeah, so I can actually have smaller jugs of water that I can lift. So yeah, I have a bug out plan, but I also have a real Shelter in Place plan because I'm just like, yeah, my apartment's accessible for me. So yeah, I got a shit ton of water right here and I'll be good for a while. And I also have a plan B for.... Okay, there's...I've got my filtration equipment, so when that runs out, I'm close to some water sources where I can go and I can filter that shit. And that's me thinking about what works for my body. Think about what works for yours and then plan out from that. Okay, I'll really stop talking now. **Margaret ** 49:44 No, no, but there's so much there. Even just like to go to the weight of water, right? The thing that I ran across that I'm like--I'm reasonably able-bodied and such like that, right--but I live alone and so obviously there's this specific thing where like.... Well, one, I mean, abledness is always a temporary position.... **Leah ** 50:04 Yeah, you're going to get disabled, you're gonna get sick and disabled. **Margaret ** 50:07 Like it literally happens to--unless you, I don't know, die very quickly, very suddenly, probably violently, you're gonna go through a period of disability in your life, you know? And so my argument is that machismo is anti-prepping. And one of the ways that I would say is that like, there's now, I think.... Okay, so cement bags, they come in 50 pound bags traditionally, right? But now there's more and more, I think, there seems to be more and more 30 pound bags, right? And I used to be like, "Oh, whatever, I can lift a 50 pound bag. So I should carry the 50 pound bag." And then I'm like, well, it was not a helpful way to look at it. It is far better for me to just have 30 pound bags of cement because they're easier to carry and I'll get tired less. And I, you know, at the time that I was pouring these bags, I lived up a hill about probably the equivalent of a seven storey walk up to this cabin that I was building, right. And so I had to carry each and every one. It was way nicer that I carry 30 pound bags. And if your preparedness doesn't include the fact that your level of ability will change in different situations, then it's not very good preparedness. And and so like, I don't know, I mean, like most of my water jugs are four or five gallon jugs. I use jerry cans. I think most of them are five gallon. And I hate the six gallon ones and the seven gallon ones. They're just heavy and annoying. And it's like I can give lift them but there's no reason why I should. Unless I'm specifically working on lifting weights. And then the other thing that you talked about that I really think about a lot, you know, is this idea, of does your version of disaster mean that every doctor dies? Or like, does your version of disaster mean everyone who's ever made insulin dies? Like, it's possible. Sure, you could have 90...if almost everyone on Earth dies, then everything is a little different. But most disasters don't actually..... Most disasters destroy ways of living and large numbers of people, but not the majority of people write. Most people survive most disasters. And, people are like, "Well, our organizational systems are what produce insulin," and like, no, people produce insulin and they use organizational systems with which to do it. But different organizational systems can also produce insulin. Like different organizational systems can use the same infrastructure sometimes and make the things that we rely on. And it came up with this like whole thing where people on the internet were like, "Ah, if you're an anarchist, you hate disabled people because in anarchy, you can't have insulin," **Leah ** 50:28 That's gross. **Margaret ** 52:40 It is a complete misunderstanding of anarchism. It is not a lack of organization, it is a different type of organization. **Leah ** 52:46 Anarchy is responsibility. **Margaret ** 52:48 Yes, totally. **Leah ** 52:50 Sorry, sorry. **Margaret ** 52:52 That's why people don't like it. People are afraid of it because they actually have to.... It's the accepting no one is coming to save us except us. You know? No, I love that way of framing and it also annoys anarchists when you tell them this too. **Leah ** 53:07 Okay, well, I mean, you know, so I worked at Modern Times books, which was, you know, is no longer around, but was a long time anarchists and anti authoritarian radical bookstore in the Bay. And we had the only public toilet in all of the Mission because everybody else was like, "No, you gotta buy something." and in my interview, they're like, "How will you make the store better?" And I was like, "I will make the bathroom not smell horrible." Because, you know, it was just like a bust, everyone was pissing in there. And so I taped up a sign that said "Anarchy is responsibility. If you spray the fucking toilet with urine, please wipe it up. Together we can have a toilet." And somebody called me out and was like, "That's capitalist." And I was like, "No, just wipe your piss up or we're not gonna make the revolution. Like, come on." But yeah, they got pissed at me about that. [Both laugh] But yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point. And it's like, you know, I mean, I think that it does point to, you know, I think a structural problem in a lot of our movements, which is like, yeah, we don't we need more people who know some basics of chemistry and can synthesize stuff. Like, that's, you know, we need more people who've gone to some kind of science or engineering school who can figure out how sewage works and how you synthesize insulin and how you synthesize hormones and like, basic surgery. And I think there's a lot of hopefulness because I--maybe it's just the folks I hang out with--but I have a fair number of friends who are like, "Yeah, I'm gonna be a nurse practitioner. I can give you an abortion. I can sew up your wound. I can help you figure out this thing." And I'd love for there to be more of us who can go to PA school or

Nathan started his first company, Portlight in 2009. Out of frustration of hiring remotely for Portlight, he founded FreeeUp in 2015 with his business partner because they wanted a better way and scrap poor support and unreliability of some existing platforms. Within 4 years, Freeup revenue scaled up from 5k to $12 million in yearly revenue and was recently acquired by the HOTH.   Today, our newly launched company Outsource School teaches entrepreneurs how to hire and scale their business with virtual assistants and will share all the secrets to scale and sell FreeeUp with a completely remote team of VAs.   During the show we discuss:   ● What to focus on as a business owner ● Why businesses are hiring Virtual Assistants ● Advantages of hiring virtual assistants ● Delegating tasks off your plate ● VA skills and habits to look for ● VA must have qualities ● Example tasks for VAs ● Where to find the best freelancers ● What to prepare before hiring a VA ● Steps in hiring freelancers ● Setting your VA budget ● Setting up strong communication with freelancers ● Building culture remotely   Show resources: https://www.outsourceschool.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanhirsch/ https://www.facebook.com/outsourceschool1

At today's episode of You Can Overcome Anything! Podcast Show, Cesar R. Espino brings to you a successful young entrepreneur that has make his millions in multiple businesses.Nathan Hirsch is a 30 year old entrepreneur that's been scaling businesses since 2009. Nathan's first business, Portlight, sold over $30 million in sales through Amazon. Nathan then co-founded FreeeUp.com with an initial $5,000 investment in 2015, scaled it to $12M per year in revenue, and it was acquired in 2019. Today, Nathan is a co-founder of OutsourceSchool, a company working to educate entrepreneurs on how to effectively hire and scale with virtual assistants through in-depth courses. With all of his businesses, Nathan has hired and scaled with hundreds of virtual assistants and freelancers from all over the world. He shares his roadmap for scaling businesses with virtual assistants through OutsourceSchool. Nathan has built himself into a social media personality online, he has appeared on over 300+ podcasts, and has spoken to thousands about remote hiring at industry events. To Connect with Nathan Hirsch go to:https://twitter.com/SchoolOutsource - Twitterhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/outsourceschool - Linkedinhttps://www.facebook.com/outsourceschool1 - Facebook pagewww.facebook.com/nathan.hirsch - personal facebookwww.facebook.com/FreeeUpNathanHirsch - Nathan Hirsch pagehttps://twitter.com/realnatehirsch - personal twitterhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanhirsch/ - personalhttps://www.instagram.com/realnatehirsch/ - personalTo Connect with CesarRespino go to: www.CesarRespino.com Thanks for visiting my Youtube Channel Subscribe to my personal Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEeiT_IUI-GCqzvIq4ENbyQ If you have any Life Insurance and Fixed Annuities questions, or looking for retirement plans/Will, click on the link below. https://calendly.com/cesar-espino-c2/life-insurance-retirement-plans-willsAre you looking to sell your house, and Need CASH Fast, I am here for your Real Estate Needs please contact me here:www.CesarBuysHousesLA.comFree property evaluator and for an ALL CASH Estimated on your house:www.KovaxBuysHousesLA.comFollow Me: My website: www.CesarRespino.com Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/c2reiFacebook: www.facebook.com/cesar.espino.1297LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cesar-espino Business Email: cesar.espino.c2@gmail.com Looking for ways to reward your clients, or give referral gifts, Use the same Company I use to gift my clients/partners: www.NeedOfAvacation.com To have a 15 min FREE mind set and self-development call with Cesar R. Espino, go to https://calendly.com/cesar-espino-c2/15min?month=2020-02To listen to other great interviews, subscribe to You Can Overcome! Podcast Show:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/you-can-overcome-anything-podcast-show/id1497917624?uo=4

In this episode, Roland talks with Nathan Hirsch, the founder of (recently sold) FreeUp, and (the newly launched) Outsource School. They discuss his story, why he wouldn’t do a Drop-Shipping business now, his new Venture with Outsource School, and how he scaled FreeUp from a $5,000 investment to 12 million last year. “The entire time we acted like the sale wasn’t going to go through. That they were going to pull out at any given time because we didn’t want to get to the end, have them pull out, and have neglected the business for three months. So, it’s tough to do, but we ended up having our best month the month that we were acquired”. Nathan Hirsch  11 years ago, Nathan Hirsch started his first company, Portlight, in his college dorm room, selling textbooks on Amazon. Since then, Nathan has bootstrapped two multimillion-dollar businesses.  If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to subscribe on ApplePodcasts, write a review, and share this episode with your business-minded friends. You can also learn more from Nathan at OutsourceSchool.com Listen For Nathan’s TOP 3 Ways To Scale A Business Up 1.  A Partnership program with ‘Content Swaps’. “…Find all the big players in your space that don’t have a competing service and find ways to mutually work together, consistently over time. So you’re constantly getting in front of their community.” Nathan Hirsch 2. Affiliate Marketing “Everyone’s looking for a good source to point people to that makes them look good. And that’s really what it’s all about”. Nathan Hirsch 3. Podcasting “So podcasts are great for networking. They’re good for backlinks. They’re good for a snowballing effect. You get to use them to get on bigger opportunities, speaking, engagements, whatever. And it’s good to get in front of thousands of your ideal audience”. Nathan Hirsch Plus, The most surprising thing about his FreeUP Exit. How he ran his company with 30 Full-time VA’s in the Philippines. What he would do differently if he were starting again today. How to find ‘good people’. How his drop-shipping business went from being a roaring success to something being something he left behind. His major mentors. His favorite read! And So Much More! Click to find us on Apple Podcasts and other podcast players.  Find Nathan Hirsch On LinkedIn  Contact & Follow Roland On Facebook  On Instagram  Through his Website   Follow Business Lunch Podcast On Twitter Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Business Lunch with Roland Frasier? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on ApplePodcasts and leave us an honest review! Your feedback will help us improve the show, and connect us with more high flyers like you. Click to find us on Apple Podcasts and other podcast players. 

Nathan Hirsch is a 30 year old entrepreneur that's been scaling businesses since 2009. Nathan's first business, Portlight, sold over $30 million in sales through Amazon. Nathan then co-founded FreeeUp.com with an initial $5,000 investment in 2015, scaled it to $12M per year in revenue, and it was acquired in 2019. Today, Nathan is a co-founder of OutsourceSchool, a company working to educate entrepreneurs on how to effectively hire and scale with virtual assistants through in-depth courses. With all of his businesses, Nathan has hired and scaled with hundreds of virtual assistants and freelancers from all over the world. He shares his roadmap for scaling businesses with virtual assistants through OutsourceSchool. Nathan has built himself into a social media personality online, he has appeared on over 300+ podcasts, and has spoken to thousands about remote hiring at industry events. Resource www.outsourceschool.com Previous appearances: www.marketeroftheday.com/183 and www.marketeroftheday.com/696  

Nathan's first business, Portlight, sold over $30 million in sales through Amazon. Nathan then co-founded FreeeUp.com with an initial $5,000 investment in 2015, scaled it to $12M per year in revenue, and it was acquired in 2019. Today, Nathan is a co-founder of OutsourceSchool, a company working to educate entrepreneurs on how to effectively hire and scale with virtual assistants through in-depth courses. With all of his businesses, Nathan has hired and scaled with hundreds of virtual assistants and freelancers from all over the world. Today, he shares his roadmap for scaling businesses with virtual assistants. 

  Nathan Hirsch is a serial entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring and e-commerce. He is the founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com and the co-founder and COO of Portlight. Nathan is an expert at building efficient systems and processes, sales strategies, and business management.    In today’s broadcast, Nathan Hirsch takes us behind-the-scenes of his acquisition and investment journey and he shares his bootstrap strategies to grow his business into a multimillion-dollar business in a little less than 4 years.    In this broadcast, Nathan and I talk about:   How Nathan began his entrepreneurial journey using the Amazon Marketplace Behind the scenes of Nathan’s acquisition journey How Nathan figured out what to prioritize in his business Where did Nathan know to put his effort when it came to software Nathan’s strategies to get his business “sales” ready The best rules of thumb when it comes to hiring developers How you can make your business a business that someone wants to buy The top 2 things Nathan had to invest in prior to the sale of his business How Nathan made the decision to sell his business to the person who bought it   How to Connect with Nathan:   freeeup.com outsourceschool.com facebook.com/freeeupmarketplace linkedin.com/in/nathanhirsch   Get the Latest Broadcasts of In The Trenches on Your Favorite Podcast Platform:   Subscribe to In The Trenches on iTunes   Listen to In The Trenches on Spotify   Get your weekly dose of In The Trenches on Google Play     How You Can Support In The Trenches   Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.      Podcast and show note production by Nives Kurjak. Click here to get 10% off your podcast production for life.  

An interview with Nathan Hirsch from Outsource School talking about how to hire an Amazon virtual assistant. Nathan Hirsch also covers VA courses like cracking the VA code, hiring a virtual assistant workshop and the VA playbook. What were the process and reasons Nathan Hirsch sold FreeeUp. How did you come up with the idea for Outsource School? High Level Over View of the service that Outsource School offers. Tell us a little more detail about the courses that Outsource School will offer? What questions did Nathan get asked the most when people were looking for a VA? How much should I be paying for a virtual assistant? How important are SOP's for an Amazon Business? Nathan Hirsch explains the playbooks listed on Outsource School. What is a VA calculator and what it is used for? Nathan talks about what he did prior to FreeeUp and what he would have done if he did not start FreeeUp. How you can contact Nathan Hirsch. About: Nathan Hirsch https://www.outsourceschool.com/ Co-Founder of Outsource School Nathan Hirsch is a 30-year-old entrepreneur that's been scaling businesses since 2009. Nathan's first business, Portlight, sold over $30 million in sales through Amazon. Nathan then co-founded FreeeUp.com with an initial $5,000 investment in 2015, scaled it to $12M per year in revenue, and it was acquired in 2019. Today, Nathan is a co-founder of OutsourceSchool, a company working to educate entrepreneurs on how to effectively hire and scale with virtual assistants through in-depth courses. With all of his businesses, Nathan has hired and scaled with hundreds of virtual assistants and freelancers from all over the world. He shares his roadmap for scaling businesses with virtual assistants through OutsourceSchool. Nathan has built himself into a social media personality online, he has appeared on over 300+ podcasts, and has spoken to thousands about remote hiring at industry events. About FeedbackWhiz: http://www.feedbackwhiz.com FeedbackWhiz helps Amazon sellers monitor, manage, and automate emails, product reviews, orders, and feedback. Build professional email templates with gifs, emojis, buttons, and attachments. A/B test subject lines and view open rate analytics. Send or exclude emails based on triggers such as refunds, shipment, delivery, feedback, and repeat buyers. Track and manage all product reviews. Instant notifications whenever a review is posted. Monitor all product listings and get alerts when critical events such as hijackers, buy-box loss, and listing changes occur.

What's up and welcome to the Fitness Business Foundations Podcast! Join me as I bring on actual facility owners and specialty experts to share their story and insights to help you move your own journey forward!Today I am honored to have on Nathan Hirsch, a top level entrepreneur to talk all about scaling your team using virtual assistants. Nathan really dives into the power of using a virtual assistant, how to hire one and keep them engaged with your mission. This is a powerful way to expand your team, and leverage your time all while keeping your overhead low. Being a facility owner, overhead is always a huge concern. So, if you want to learn how to do this with the best in virtual assistants then you must check this episode out!More about today's guest Nathan Hirsch:Nathan Hirsch is a 30 year old entrepreneur that's been scaling businesses since 2009.Nathan's first business, Portlight, sold over $30 million in sales through Amazon. Nathan then co-founded FreeeUp.com with an initial $5,000 investment in 2015, scaled it to $12M per year in revenue, and it was acquired in 2019. Today, Nathan is a co-founder of OutsourceSchool, a company working to educate entrepreneurs on how to effectively hire and scale with virtual assistants through in-depth courses. With all of his businesses, Nathan has hired and scaled with hundreds of virtual assistants and freelancers from all over the world. He shares his road map for scaling businesses with virtual assistants through OutsourceSchool. Nathan has built himself into a social media personality online, he has appeared on over 300+ podcasts, and has spoken to thousands about remote hiring at industry events.Want To Lean How Many Virtual Assistants You Can Afford Right Now? Check Out The Link Below To Access The Virtual Assistant Calculator.Free Virtual Assistant Calculator Where Can You Connect With Nathan:Personalwww.facebook.com/nathan.hirsch - Personal Facebookwww.facebook.com/FreeeUpNathanHirsch - Nathan Hirsch Pagehttps://twitter.com/realnatehirsch - Personal Twitterhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanhirsch/ - Personalhttps://www.instagram.com/realnatehirsch/ - PersonalOutScourceSchool Social Mediahttps://twitter.com/SchoolOutsource - Twitterhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/outsourceschool - Linkedinhttps://www.facebook.com/outsourceschool1 - Facebook Page Are you interested in learning more about my mentorship program? Do you want to learn how to put your business in a category of one? Then let's hop on a connection call to see if my service makes sense for you. Go a head and book your call below, and I look forward to talking with you soon!Book Your Connection Call With Justin

In this episode we talk about finding, training and benefiting from VA's as well as find out what B.A.R.F. stands for!  Our guest is Nathan Hirsch who is a 30 year old entrepreneur that's been scaling businesses since 2009. Nathan's first business, Portlight, sold over $30 million in sales through Amazon. Nathan then co-founded FreeeUp.com with an initial $5,000 investment in 2015, scaled it to $12M per year in revenue, and it was acquired in 2019. Today, Nathan is a co-founder of OutsourceSchool, a company working to educate entrepreneurs on how to effectively hire and scale with virtual assistants through in-depth courses.

Nate Hirsch has an awesome story. He's only 30, but he's already started multiple 8-figure companies. He started his first company buying and selling textbooks out of his college dorm room. Over 5 years, he and his business partner scaled Portlight to over $25 million in total sales. After endless frustration with remote hiring, they founded FreeeUp. For 4 years, they scaled it from $5k to $12 million in yearly revenue. They were subsequently acquired by The HOTH. Today, he's launching a new company called OutsourceSchool. It's an online education platform that teaches entrepreneurs how to hire and scale their business with virtual assistants. If you listen to the news, they'll try to convince you that the apocalypse is nigh. So it's easy to forget all the good stuff that's happening. Nate's story is a great reminder. We live in the greatest time in the history of the world. Opportunity surrounds us. The media will tell you all about the many ways this economy benefits the rich people. But they won't tell you about the many ways you can become one of those rich people. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Go to OutsourceSchool.com for a free case study, to sign up for Nate's newsletter, or to pick up his Cracking the VA Code tutorial! This episode is brought to you by our sponsor: Stamps (Code: JASON)

Nathan Hirsch is a 30 year old entrepreneur that's been scaling businesses since 2009. Nathan's first business, Portlight, sold over $30 million in sales through Amazon. Nathan then co-founded FreeeUp.com with an initial $5,000 investment in 2015, scaled it to $12M per year in revenue, and it was acquired in 2019. Today, Nathan is a co-founder of OutsourceSchool, a company working to educate entrepreneurs on how to effectively hire and scale with virtual assistants through in-depth courses. With all of his businesses, Nathan has hired and scaled with hundreds of virtual assistants and freelancers from all over the world. He shares his roadmap for scaling businesses with virtual assistants through OutsourceSchool. Nathan has built himself into a social media personality online, he has appeared on over 300+ podcasts, and has spoken to thousands about remote hiring at industry events. He has also been featured on CBS, ABC, NBC, and Entrepreneur. Find out how many VAs you can afford: https://paykstrt.com/15457/48607 Learn how to scale up your business through VAs at OutsourceSchool: https://paykstrt.com/14889/48607 Support The Podcast! Buy Me A Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/tapeyourtime Key Takeaways: Nathan’s entrepreneurial story: Amazon Marketplace, eCommerce operations, drop-shipping, FreeeUp and exit, OutsourceSchool Recruiting, interviewing, and building a team of outsourced freelancers Trial and Error and Importance of Speaking to Your Customers Nathan’s approach of not following the conventional wisdom, trying things out and adapting it to make it your Own Delegating tasks off your plate that aren't your expertise or aren't worth your time. Figuring out what doesn’t work and 3 common tenets of all 3 businesses Speed in the Marketplace Understanding when, how and who to delegate to Gathering Feedback Not being emotional about your product/service Figuring out who you like to work with and surround yourself

On today's episode, Seth speaks to Nathan Hirsch , Founder and CEO of FreeeUp, a marketplace connecting business owners with the top 1% of online contractors about how to hire more talented people and apply success secrets to your business. Nate started as a serial entrepreneur and hiring expert. His first business, Portlight, is an Amazon Marketplace seller representing top toy, baby, and home brands. In 2015 he founded FreeeUp with the purpose of providing business owners with an easier solution to accelerating their growth through remote workers. Nathan started his e-commerce career on the Amazon Marketplace and successfully built a $7 million business within 4 years. After seeing the potential of using remote workers within his first business, he founded FreeeUp to make the remote hiring experience simpler for all e-commerce business owners. FreeeUp now provides reliable e-commerce workers to hundreds of clients around the world. Nathan is an expert at building efficient systems and processes, sales strategies, and business management. He currently lives in Orlando, Florida. Learn more about Nathan and FreeeUp here, https://freeeup.com/about-us/ https://www.facebook.com/FreeeUpMarketplace/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Connor Gillivan is the co-founder of FreeeUp.com. He has built two companies to over $10 million in yearly sales within the eCommerce industry, is a leading voice for entrepreneurship and digital marketing, and is the author of Free Up Your Business: 50 Secrets to Bootstrap Million Dollar Companies. Connor started his first eCommerce business, Portlight, drop shipping on the Amazon Marketplace when he was 20 years old and still in college. Together with his co-founders he built a 60 person team located all over the world, partnered with over 1,000 US suppliers, and had total sales of more than $25 million of total. He started his second business, FreeeUp, in 2015 when he and his business partner became frustrated with their online hiring experiences.  They built a 60 person team with freelancers from all over the world, but it took years and endless amounts of turnover to arrive at that team. Just over 3 years into the business FreeeUp has grown their user base to over 15,000 clients around the world. In this episode Connor we dig deep into his journey. Connor Credits his fast start in entrepreneurship to some of the people that surrounded him when he was growing up Shares his thoughts on the importance of exposing children to the idea that entrepreneurship can be a viable career option Talks about the things he learned working in South Africa during his time in College Tells us how 2 College Sophomores built a business that sold more than $25 million on Amazon Explains how frustrations in scaling his first company led to the creation of FreeUp Offers tips for anyone that wants to be a freelancer And so much more. You can contact Connor at: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/connorgillivan/ Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/connorgillivan/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connorgillivan/ Personal blog: http://connorgillivan.com/ FreeeUp: https://freeeup.com/ My calendar: calendly.com/connor-gillivan My email: connor@freeeup.com Please do not hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments, and stories, or just make a connection. Email tim@screwthenaysayers.com Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/stnwithtimalison/ Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/screwthenaysayers/ LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-alison/ Screw The Naysayers- www.screwthenaysayers.com

Connor Gillivan is the author of Free Up Your Business: 50 Secrets to Bootstrap Million Dollar Companies. He started his first business, Portlight, when he was 20 out of his college dorm room drop shipping products on Amazon and scaled it to sell over $20 million of product in its first 4 years. Connor started FreeeUp.com in late 2015 to connect the top 1% of freelancers online with business owners. It now serves over 2,500 businesses worldwide. Today, he is the CMO of FreeeUp driving growth for the company through digital marketing strategies and continues to run Portlight as its CEO. In this episode of Futureproof, Connor and Kelly discuss the importance of getting the right people in your business. Hear how you identify and secure the top 1% and why recruitment processes matter if you want the best people. Find out more and connect with Connor on: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/connorgillivan/ Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/connorgillivan/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connorgillivan/ Personal blog: http://connorgillivan.com/ FreeeUp: https://freeeup.com/ My calendar: calendly.com/connor-gillivan My email: connor@freeeup.com

My guest in this episode is Nathan Hirsch. Nathan has bootstrapped two companies to become multi-million dollar businesses and he continues to run them today. He started the first, Portlight, in his college dorm room selling textbooks on Amazon.com in 2009. Along with his partners, he expanded to other product categories and has sold over $20 mil on the marketplace. At its peak, they were managing over 500,000 products on their Amazon store from over 1,000 drop ship suppliers. After much frustration hiring through Upwork and other platforms, Nathan along with his business partner started their own online hiring marketplace specialized for eCommerce biz owners in Fall 2015. FreeeUp.com now services over 2,000 online businesses and they are on pace to hit $3 to $4 million this year. Nathan serves as the CEO handling client acquisition, software management, and internal team growth.

“It always seems impossible until it’s done” -Connor Gillivan   Connor GIllivan is a 27 year old serial entrepreneur and published author who started his first eCommerce business,Portlight,  out of his college dorm room when he was 20 years old. He has been featured in a slew of media outlets and podcasts including: Entrepreneur, Thrive, Web Retailers, and Conscious Millionaire. To date he has sold over $25 million of product drop shipping on Amazon.com. He also runs his own blog at  www.ConnorGillivan.com.   He started his second business, Freee Up (yes with 3 e’s), which is an online hiring marketplace with a team of over 25 people that serve thousands of business around the world and creates jobs for hundreds of top talent freelancers. Today we talk about a wide range of topics with the similar concept of starting to outsource your life! Topics covered include but aren’t limited to:   Teleportation Freelancing Virtual Assistants How to choose one Interview Questions to Ask Common mistakes when hiring a VA Connor’s stories of bad VA’s The new time freedom   Enjoy!   View full post at: www.iamdrcole.com/ConnorG

Nathan Hirsch - Freeup Nathan Hirsch, is co-founder and CEO of FreeeUp, a marketplace connecting business owners with the top 1% of freelancers to create an effective way of outsourcing, in a range of areas - including eCommerce, digital marketing, web development and much more. Outsourcing To Help Grow & Energise Your Business In this episode, we explore 5 key reasons why outsourcing fails and how to avoid the pitfalls associated with this process.   Nathan has created a really effective way to avoid the pitfalls of outsourcing.  Much of the success of Freeeup, has been down to the the unique vetting and recruiting process set up by Nathan and his colleagues to ensure they recruit the top 1% to ensure success for their small business owner clients, with their business growth plan. This has resulted in $1million in payments to freelancers in just the last year, which is no mean feat.  We also explore how outsourcing can be a very effective and one of the proven strategies for energising your business.  Nathan's entrepreneurial journey started at a very young age.  His first real success came in 2009, whilst he was still at University, when he founded his first company, Portlight, which has generated over $5 million in sales and is still operating. It was during his early years at Portlight that he really started to understand why outsourcing fails and how to avoid the pitfalls. He soon realised the negative impact of failing to outsource on his own business growth plan and therefore decided to establish Freeeup. In this episode of 5 key reasons outsourcing fails : 07.00  The entrepreneurial journey 20.50  Setting expectations 21.15  Focusing on what you can control 27.10  The 3-month rule 33.18  Valuable lessons from adversity 36.34  Dealing with rejection In addition to the valuable tips from Nathan about how to avoid the pitfalls of outsourcing, you can also get a gift that he has kindly made available to show listeners - so go check out the interview and claim your gift! The power of outsourcing is also explored in the proven strategies for energising your business. More information on Nathan can be found here. Similar posts await you at our Forum.

Nathan Hirsch has bootstrapped two multi-million dollar businesses which he runs to this day. Nathan’s first business, Portlight, an Amazon store with over $20 million worth of product sales, emerged from his college dorm room. At Portlight’s peak, Nathan and his team were managing over 500,000 products on the Portlight Amazon store from over 1,000 drop ship suppliers. Nathan’s second business, FreeUp.com, is a hiring marketplace specialized for eCommerce business owners. FreeUp.com now services over 2,000 online businesses and is on pace to hit $3 to $4 million in 2017.   Quotes To Remember: “After a hire, that’s where the real tests begin” “As a business owner, hiring is an investment. It’s an investment of your money, your time, your energy, so when you make an investment into someone, you need to look for those red flags early” “We’ve all worked with someone before who has a bad outlook on life….. that’s a cancer in your business, you don’t want that within 100 yards of your company” “Almost all bad business relationships, come down to a break in communication. At a basic level, your workers need to speak the same language.” “Providing things you can go back and reference, is incredibly important” “You don’t own three companies by working inside 3 companies, it doesn’t work like that, you have to delegate.” “If you waste your time, you’re not getting that back”   What You’ll Learn: Learn when and how to delegate various processes of your business How to pick the right VA, looking past just the skills. Why communication is key in all aspects How to find the right employee by developing your interview process How to turn delegation into revenue   Key Links From The Show: FreeeUp.com --Nathan’s site Skill Sets Rates for FreeeUp Video testimonial on FreeeUp from Ben Cummings How FreeeUp Works Infographic Free Up Your Business: 50 Secrets to Bootstrap Million Dollar Companies   Recommended Books: Start with Why by Simon Sinek Deliver Happiness by Tony Hsieh Think Like Jeff Bezos by Jamie Morris Free Up Your Business - Nathan’s book

Visit EOFire.com for complete show notes of every Podcast episode. Nate is an serial entrepreneur and hiring expert. His first business, Portlight, is an Amazon Marketplace seller representing top toy, baby, and home brands. In 2015 he founded FreeeUp with the purpose of providing business owners with an easier solution to accelerating their growth through remote workers.

This week, Tara’s guest is the founder of Freeup, Nathan Hirsch. Nathan is a serial entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring who got his start as a college student with a drop shipping business. Over the last seven years, his company Portlight has sold over $25 million worth of product and hired plenty of remote […] The post Episode 103 – What the Heck Is dropshipping? with Portlight & Freeeup founder Nathan Hirsch appeared first on What Works.

What do you do when a dick is a hurricane? We speak with representatives from Portlight and Global Giving to learn how to help Houstonians affected by the devastating hurricane. Also: Ivanka reminds us she's no friend to women.

Connor Gillivan. He’s a 27-year old serial entrepreneur and published author. He started his first company out of his college dorm room and built it to sell over $20M in products on Amazon.com. After he became an expert on hiring online, he co-founded FreeeUp, an online hiring marketplace focused on connecting the top 1% freelancers with business owners. He’s the author of Free Up Your Business: 50 Secrets to Bootstrap Million Dollar Companies. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Shoe Dog What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk Favorite online tool? — Jira How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5-6 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I wished I knew to stay focused on what I do best”   Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:47 – Nathan introduces Connor to the show 01:32 – Connor makes 20% to 30% of the gross margin of a product on Amazon 01:38 – Net profits end up being from 5%-15% 02:04 – It was 6 years ago when Connor started his business 02:15 – Connor earned on the first year of the business 02:51 – Connor has scaled up his first company 03:00 – The company still operates with $1-2M in revenue per year 03:08 – The team is composed of freelancers who are based around the world 03:27 – The 3 founders, including Connor, are getting their pay quarterly 03:40 – Connor now spends his time on his second business FreeeUp 03:52 – Connor’s first company is Portlight 04:05 – Average price point was  $75-100 04:25 – FreeeUp was launched in 2015 04:29 – Connor and his co-founder learned about hiring freelancers through Odesk and Elance, which merged and is now called Upwork 04:36 – They didn’t like the process of posting job ads and going through every applicant 04:46 – FreeeUp has a better solution where the business owner doesn’t have to do the upfront work 04:58 – FreeeUp finds the top 1%  candidates for the business owners 05:18 – Toptal is more focused on top developers and designers 05:23 – FreeeUp’s freelancers are specialized on e-commerce business operations 05:35 – There’s no upfront free 05:43 – FreeeUp has a standard markup that they charge on their clients for hourly rates 06:06 – The minimum charge is $2 and 20% for the higher price 06:55 – There are over 500 freelancers on FreeeUp 07:28 – FreeeUp’s system can measure the amount they’re paying their freelancers 07:37 – The biggest metric is the hours billed to the client 08:01 – Average billing per hour is $10 08:18 – FreeeUp is keeping $60K-80K in revenue per month 09:11 – FreeeUp has around 1500 signups on the platform 09:16 – FreeeUp bills between 300-500 people who are utilizing their workers 09:45 – 2000-2500 people have been billed since FreeeUp started 09:58 – FreeeUp has a referral program where clients can refer other people who would want to use FreeeUp and they receive $0.50 for every hour that has been billed 10:28 – FreeeUp is more hands on with their client 10:56 – Most clients start slow and when they see FreeeUp’s benefits, they’ll use it more 11:10 – Team size is 20-25 part-time people 11:51 – Connor is currently in Orlando, FL 12:11 – Both of Connor’s businesses are bootstrapped 12:21 – Total transaction volume for 2016 is a bit over a million 12:33 – 2016 average revenue 12:44 – 2017 projected transaction volume is $3-4M 13:20 – Connor puts his money back into his businesses to scale them 13:47 – Connor splits the 20% from FreeeUp 14:32 – Since April, FreeeUp has grown 1000% 15:20 – FreeeUp started winning in the ecommerce industry 15:58 – FreeeUp now offers digital marketing as well and try to find different areas that will interest more clients 17:10 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: There are more business owners relying on outsourcing for their needs and share with others just how beneficial outsourcing is. Ensure you have backup funds for your company. Focus on what you do best.   Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox  – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Nathan Hirsch is the CEO of FreeeUp.com and the COO of Portlight. Nate has been an entrepreneur in the eCommerce industry since 2009 and has grown into a leading expert in the field with experience managing multi-million dollar businesses. He has extensive knowledge in creating business systems and processes, personnel management, hiring remote workers, the Amazon Marketplace, and advanced sales tactics. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge with others and has been featured on leading industry podcasts, webinars, and blogs. Nate is determined to build FreeeUp into the top hands-on platform for hiring remote workers where thousands of businesses and remote workers are connected. If you're interested in connecting with Nate, shoot him an email at Nathan@FreeeUp.com. The Transcript NPC Interview with Nathan Hirsch – 6/13/17 Hugh Ballou: Greetings, everyone. This is the Nonprofit Chat. Tonight's guest is Nathan Hirsch. I just met Nathan a month ago. I was smart enough to recognize this guy had talent, so I am giving myself credit for that. I posted a little information about you, and I'd prefer for guests to give us a synopsis of what brings you to this discipline that you do so well. I'd like to say your company is called Freeeup.com, and it's an outsourcing company. The reason I wanted you on this series is because I see so many people who are working at the leadership level that are overfunctioning and doing way too much. We are going to talk about how to leverage time by putting in part-time employees. Nathan, speak a little bit about your journey and why you are so good at what you offer. Nathan Hirsch: It's funny. When I first talked to you, I was like, “My mom owns a nonprofit.” I'd seen her journey from being a one-woman show to finally retiring and upgrading the location she was at, having a huge staff, taking more and more off her plate. I got that business, entrepreneurial, delegating mentality from a very young age. When I was in college, I started a textbook business trying to cut off the school bookstore because I was mad at them for ripping me off and giving me pennies on the dollar when I thought I could get more. Before I knew it, I had lined my college dorm room buying people's books. That led me to Amazon.com because you don't sell books for very long without learning about Amazon. Before I knew it, I was running this multi-million-dollar drop-shipping business on Amazon, working with all these different vendors and suppliers, selling stuff out of my college dorm room. It was just me doing everything, from filling orders to answering customer emails. I was driving myself crazy. I was going to college at the same time, trying to have good grades, trying to balance a girlfriend and a million other things that happen while you are at school. I remember going to my accountant one day, and he was like, “So, when are you hiring your first employee?” I was like, “Why would I do that? I don't want to give my money to someone else. I really enjoy what I'm doing. This is fun. I am going to work seven days a week.” He just laughed in my face. After that meeting, I quickly got to hiring. I opened up an office and moved stuff around. I ended up getting rid of that and making my company remote. I always ran into hiring dilemmas because I would make really good hires, things like Connor, who was my business partner for a long time. But then I would make bad hires, who cost me time and money and set me back. Although I got better at hiring, the amount of applicants got greater and greater because I was hiring for all these different things. Yes, I perfected this hiring process, but then I found myself in the interview room six hours a day interviewing people, going through multiple rounds and resumes, only to find that some of them, even though I'd vetted them properly, still didn't work out and cost me money. So I got really frustrated at that and thought there had to be a better way. There had to be a company where I could tell them what I wanted—if I needed a graphic designer, I don't want to wait three weeks to get one by vetting through fifty applicants. This is what I need, and I could get them by the end of the day. This is how I came up with the idea of Freeeup, where instead of the marketplace being a free-for-all, it is very organized. People apply to get into the marketplace, they are heavily vetted, we make sure they have a good attitude and communication, and we make them available to clients so they can get access to talent quickly, no matter what it is. Hugh: I love it. Our co-host, Russell Dennis, has joined us. Russell, say hello to Nathan. Russell Dennis: Good afternoon. Good to meet you, Nathan. I love the concept of Freeeup and pre-vetting virtual assistants because they are practically everywhere. I have just had that one follow me on my Twitter feed who looks like they are doing the same thing or something similar. These agencies are starting to turn up, but I haven't seen anything quite like what you are doing before. Nathan: Thank you. Great to meet you as well. You're right. There are so many different agencies and marketplaces. I have hired from all of them. I kind of took what I liked and what I hated and put together a concept that really works for business owners. The downside of agencies is you never know who is doing the work. You don't get that one-on-one touch. A lot of times they switch people behind the scenes and you don't know about it, so the quality goes up and down. The problem with the marketplace is the time and effort it takes to get a good freelancer, and if you invest the training and they decide to quit, there is no one held responsible for that, and you have to start right over. With Freeeup, we have our no-turnover guarantee, where we cover replacement training costs if anyone ever quits. That was the concept behind it. It has been a lot of fun so far. Hugh: Having run multiple businesses and church programs and non-profit programs, hiring people is not a skillset that I had. I have it now. Previously, I had a lot of bad hires. You have come at this very early in your life. You have developed this level of expertise. Russell has worked inside a non-profit for 11 years. He also worked for the IRS, so he had to visit a lot of nonprofits, I guess. This whole thing of accomplishing our mission is very elusive, and we are so passionate about it that we just jump in and forget that in this realm of the charity, there are people who will step up as community leaders and work with us. They will say, “I want to help.” There are some tasks that we need to have somebody who is paid, that regular work ethic that someone will do what we have assigned them. There is an exchange of value for pay. We can do that in a charity, actually delegating some things. Part of what we teach at SynerVision about leadership is learning to take things off of your plate. I guess the piece that you just talked about is having the confidence that the person is going to be capable of accomplishing it. We invite people who have businesses and expertise. We are talking about Freeeup, which is Nathan's business. The people that referred Nathan to me were our friends in Phoenix who do the background checks, former military intelligence people. If they said he is clean, it's good. Nathan, we have to get over this fear of having somebody else do the work. From a leader's perspective, I have noticed you have a team around you that performs at a pretty high standard. Speak from your own personal perspective. How were you able to make the transition to getting things off of your plate, delegating them? Nathan: Sure. Whenever you talk about delegating, you have to be in the mindset that the business has to work for you. You can't work for the business. If you find yourself trying to catch up and clearing out customer emails and calling everyone back and doing this Excel project and building the website, the business isn't working for you; you are working for the business. You have to get out of that mentality. You have to get into the mentality that you are a delegator as the owner of the company. There should be a specific thing, or a few things if you are very talented, that you are really good at, that your core competency can really help you excel at. You need to identify those things. If you are good at sales, 80% of your time should be sales. If you are customer service, you should be building customer service programs. If you are a website developer, you should be constantly upgrading your website, and other people should be doing those other things. It's really important that you get into the mentality that the beginning of every day is getting your team organized before you get yourself going. The first thing I do every day is I have a list of people and prioritize them. I go to them one by one, following up with what they are doing, making sure they are on the right track, making sure I answer any of their questions to get them to the next level because if they are sitting there waiting, that is incredibly unproductive. I am not going to start on my project because I get them going. On top of that, I make sure things are constantly running at full speed, whether it's someone working at night or someone working on the weekends. Even when I am on vacation, the business is not going to stop. My whole thing as a business owner is to get into the mentality that I have to get this train running. It takes a lot of organization upfront to build that team, which we will talk about, but the end goal is to have a team that never stops, that keeps moving forward whether you are there or not, and that you are contributing value when you are there to keep them moving further and further along. Hugh: We think, and I'm saying we because I am not innocent of any of this, we are essential to the work of the organization when in fact, we don't need to be essential. We are the cheerleaders; we are the visionaries. It's the people we bring on board that actually perform the duties that are important to the success of the organization. That thing you just talked about is a paradigm shift. Did you have to make a paradigm shift to make a mental flip that you were going to learn to delegate? Or did that come easily to you? Nathan: I came easier to me than it did to my business partner Connor. I remember when I first started delegating after that meeting with the accountant, it becomes addicting. I am a business owner. I am passionate about what I do. I like getting things done. All of a sudden, when I added a few people, I realized I was getting four times the amount of work done, and not only that, but they were doing the work better than I could even do it. They were talents that I didn't have. When I realized that, then it became easy. You almost become lazy as a business owner because it's like, “Yeah, I could spend the next three hours doing Quickbooks, or I could pay someone $40 to do it for me.” You just start passing stuff off your plate. You get a lot more done, which leads to more revenue and expanding your company, which leads to hiring more people. It is a really great circle once you get those wheels churning. But I remember my business partner Connor managing the company one day when I was on vacation, and he was literally doing everything. Every single tracking email at my Amazon business, he was responding to. When I came back from vacation, I sat him down and said, “You're stuck. If this is how you want to do business, you are never moving forward. You can't be my business partner. You are just going to be in this spot forever. There is no way to be on top of your business if you are doing every little thing. You have to take stuff off of your plate. You have to get over that fear of letting go. It's not until you actually do that that you can accomplish something as an entrepreneur. No matter how big or small your business is, you are going to hit a ceiling, a road block. Right now, if you get sick for two weeks—I had shoulder surgery a month ago. Nothing stopped, things accelerated. I got my team motivated to work because I wasn't there, and a lot of stuff got done while I was out. You have to look yourself in the eye and figure out if that is going to happen in your business while you are out. Hugh: David James Dunworth says, “The real measure of a successful leader is that the operation operates as or more effectively and smoothly when the boss is not there. I call the job of establishing systems and processes to get that point is owner-proofing.” That is getting out of the way, isn't it. Owner-proofing. We have launched some questions during the interview. You sent me some good questions, and we are sharing them out there on social media. The first one: What would you do if you had two extra hours each day? Russell, what would you do if you had extra time every day? Russell: Two extra hours. I would probably be outside walking. Definitely would be outside. It's not a cloud in sight. It's about 82 degrees here. That is what I would be doing. I took a break today to walk outside and get around. I love the fresh air. I made a decision to get in a really good condition this spring. I made major changes to my diet. From my last doctor's appointment about five weeks ago, I am down 27.5 pounds. And I am sleeping better. Hugh: Wow. I was with a client today, and they had a management team of about 14 people. They were talking about one of the aspects of one of the department's work, and they were streamlining and automating. They estimated it would save 3.5 hours a day of the employees, which totally revamped how they were going to assign duties in that department, which is huge. They are installing some automation, which frees up people with a higher level of skill from doing something routine to utilize that skill. Nathan, what would you do with two extra hours if you had them? Nathan: I think that's the difference between running a lifestyle business and trying to get back toward that lifestyle versus a workaholic. For me, when I am freeing up time, which I am constantly doing because I get more and more on my plate, I am just freeing up my time to focus on some other part of my business. I like working ten hours a day, and I am doing that no matter what. If I free up three hours, I may take an extra day off here and there, but I am reinvesting it back in the company. That content video that I didn't have time to make, now I have time for it. That PR company that I never called back, let's give them a phone call. For me, I am freeing up time to get more time in my business that focuses on sales, marketing, and expansion. If I am not doing something that focuses on sales, marketing, and expansion, my business is stalling. I am not moving forward as fast as I can. I owe it to the other people on my team to do that. We have all been around that boss where all they do all day is walk around and look over your shoulder. My mentality is if you are doing that, you are not doing what you are supposed to do as a leader. You are not progressing anything forward. You are not making a process better. You are not fixing anything for the future. And you are definitely not growing and expanding your company. Yes, there is a time and place to double-check work and make sure everything is going well, but the goal should be to free up your time for anything that involves expansion. Hugh: Why do you think that it's so hard for people to do that? Nathan: Expanding is hard. Get to a point in your company that you are comfortable. You are making money for the first time. You have a stable client base. Anything past that is unknown territory. What happens if you invest in advertising here? What happens if you do 20 phone calls for lead generation and you get rejected 20 times? People don't want to do what it takes to get to that next level of your business. You eventually stall out. There are people who are very comfortable running a $1 million company or a $4 million company instead of being like, “Hey, every year, I want to grow non-stop. Yes, I am setting goals and guidelines, but if I didn't get bigger from year to year, I did something wrong that year. I am too involved, or I made a bad decision, or I wasn't focused on expansion.” A lot of it is fear. Fear is incredibly motivating or unmotivating when it comes to people. Along with delegation, it is something you need to let go of. As a business owner, you need to figure out how to take your business to the next level, whether it is taking that online mastermind class or reading a new book or trial and error, which I am a huge fan of. Figure out a way to free up your time to take the business to the next level. Hugh: I'd like to point out that expansion becomes easier after you get older and your metabolism slows down. Not what you were talking about, I don't think. Russ, do you want to piggyback on what he just said? That is so aligned with our philosophy at SynerVision. Russell: It very much is. With that extra time for me, I was thinking I needed to take better care of myself so I can do things. Over the course of the day, if I am not learning something or out here reaching out to people or trying to grow that business, then I am in a place where I need to look at getting some of the smaller things off my plate. I have been leveraging technology. I have some people I work with here in my office who are here to help me do some things. I have been able to get more traction by connecting with other people who can help me along in my process, and that is true for anybody. The people who are clients of mine, I actually help them do that. What you are talking about is filling gaps. Those don't necessarily have to be weaknesses. It could just be things we simply don't want to do or are not the best use of our time for what we need to do. Nathan hit that on the head: What am I best at, and what are the things only I can do? Those are the things I try to attend to, and I try to hand other things off and find other ways to get them done. Hugh: So true. Once we can hand off things, we can focus on what we are supposed to be doing and what we do best. Really, Nathan you talked about what kind of business, a lifestyle business. When we are in business, we need to stop and look at our life plan and make sure the business is fulfilling our life. You are getting ready to go to Mexico in a couple of days. Sounds like you got your act together, boy. Nathan: Yeah, I mean I have assistants who monitor my Skype and my email almost 24 hours a day. It took a lot of time and training and investing. There will always be some frustration. You hire four people, and maybe one of them doesn't work out. They can't be a reason to give up. You have to learn from those experiences, come up with better systems, come up with better processes, and figure out a way to do it because your competitors are going to do it. At some point, they are going to figure out how to automate it, how to hire the right people, how to make it so their business is getting bigger while you sleep. You have to figure out a way to do that. Hugh: Absolutely. I didn't mean to call you “boy.” I am three times your age, so the perspective… Nathan: You can call me “boy” then. Hugh: That's right. And you're not catching up either. The next question that we posted out there, and I did talk about the real time research that people tell me they are struggling with leadership and burnout, the Meyer Foundation did a research project a few years ago and found that the burnout rate for nonprofit executives is 45%. 75% of executives are looking at the door as a way out. We feel like we are trapped and have to do too much. Let's flip that coin. We are focusing on burnout, we don't have enough money or time, nobody volunteers. Let's flip it over. If we weren't burned out, what would that mean? What could we accomplish? Nathan: If you're not resting, if you are burned out on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis, you are not going to have the productivity that you can. You won't hit your potential. You're not going to motivate the people around you. You're going to be short. You're going to talk down to people. You're not going to figure out a way to take your business to the next level. The easiest way to get burned out is by doing a lot of things you shouldn't be doing. I spent years of my life entering data into Quickbooks. I would get hundreds of orders every week, and at the end of every month, I would go in and reconcile them. It would literally take me hours and hours and hours. If I could go back, I would honestly yell at myself. It was a terrible decision. I could hire someone from the Philippines to do it for $8 an hour. They would probably have been more prepared than I was and done a better job. There were times I would wake up at 5 am to do these Quickbooks. It was a complete waste. I could have woken up rested, ready to go, on to expand my company. Hugh: We don't call those mistakes. We call those learning opportunities. Nathan: Exactly. One more thing. When I started Freeeup and had all these clients, I started bookkeeping. The first thing I did was hire someone else to do it right from the very beginning. Hugh: Damn. That's good. All right. Russell, what would you do? You're not burned out. You probably experienced in your career lots of burned out leaders, didn't you? Russell: I have run into a lot of burned out leaders. I became one because I found myself at the back end of my career working as a tribal administrator. And I had 70 employees. But I didn't relinquish my development responsibilities. That was burning the candle at both ends there because I didn't understand delegation. Even though I had other people there, I didn't understand at that point in time how to hand things off. I found myself in time constraints. Everything was a crisis. I found myself overfunctioning and doing things that would have been better to hand off to other people. Nathan: Like what? Could you give us an example? Russell: Some examples there would be working on grants and trying to get those ahead in time. Working on budgets and approving other projects. I should have been able to rely on my program directors to get that done, but at that time, I was a bit of a micromanager because I wanted to do what I wanted to see the organization do well. That was a part of a hard education coming through. That was really a baptism by fire. I had to learn to do a lot of things and learn to do a lot of things other people didn't know how to do. At that point in time, I learned how to teach other people. But the largest number of people I had working for me prior to that was five when I was in the Air Force. A bit of a shift to go from five employees to 70. Nathan: Absolutely. That is where a lot of people get frustrated, too, is that teaching side. There are two ways to go about hiring. You hire someone who is really talented and is bringing their own experience to the table to do something that you can't, or you are hiring someone to come in that may have some kind of background but you are teaching them your system, your way of doing it. A lot of people, especially the first few hires, don't know how to teach. They don't know how to give that information to someone else and do it properly and have someone get the same results or even similar because a lot of times it's worth it if someone can do it 85% of what you can. You want to take it off your plate. A lot of people can't accomplish that. They get frustrated and think they can't hire, when a lot of times it comes down to their teaching, how they trained them, how they integrated them, and how they motivated after they taught them. Once you give someone the keys on how to do something, how did you make sure you were getting the most out of them every day because if you did it yourself, you would get the most out of it every day. Hugh: There are also things I do okay, but I have people who can do them better than me. Once I can back off of that and accept they are going to do it differently, the responsibility rests on the leader to identify the ending point. What is the outcome? What does it look like specifically? We are there to mentor people. There is a huge difference from micromanaging to mentoring, to empowering people. Let's talk a bit about equipping ourselves as leaders. Suppose we want to free up and got a really good person to do some administrative assistance. The responsibility is on the leader to have a really good plan so that when someone comes in, we can define the quantifiable outcomes. As you are working with leaders who haven't been successful or are new at having someone else to delegate things to, what kind of advice do you give them as far as being able to quantify the end result and empower anybody, your people or others, to accomplish those goals? Nathan: Sure. The first thing you have to understand is that no matter who the person is, you need them more than they need you. They can go out and get another job. You are the one who is investing training, resources, and your own time, which is invaluable. You are the one who is putting it all in. You have to be the one to get out of it. You go into it talking down to someone or being mean or not with a positive attitude, and you will get burned in the end, not them. They will walk away being like, “This boss was terrible. I hate him. I'm going to get a new job.” That's step one. Step two is identifying what you want. What are your goals? What are your expectations? I see so many clients who will give someone an assignment and just walk away and go back to exactly what they were doing without outlining any goals or expectations. The worker, if they are good, in their mind they will look back and go, “I have client A, B, and C, and they liked it this way. I am going to do that.” If that client comes back a week later and gets the assignment and says, “This isn't at all what I wanted,” then the worker is baffled because they have been doing this the same way the entire time, but no one set their goals and expectations. That is why I encourage our workers to not start anything until that discovery or scope is lined up. Even if the client is too busy or says, “You should know what to do,” that is not acceptable because that just leads to issues at the end. The worker has to step up and make sure that discovery happens so the work gets done. Hugh: I want to capture the sound bite. When you don't have a clear definition of what you want, it leads to issues. We are setting up conflict if we do that, don't we? Nathan: Absolutely. A mess is bound to happen. Yes, there are all-star workers out there who can read the client's mind and do the job without any instructions, but the majority of the time, there is going to be some kind of issue. It will also save you time and energy. There will be revisions. Even if you are someone who likes revisions, if you just set a discovery and scope up front, it will save you a lot of time. It's worth it. Hugh: Wow. Russell, you want to weigh in on this issue? It's a big one. Russell: Yeah. It creates that accountability, and when the worker becomes involved, they have that accountability. Once it's clear they understand what it is you want and you send them away, it's like the Colombo technique when I was auditing businesses in the IRS. This is how you outsmart a lot of $500 an hour attorneys. You walk in and ask questions like a second grader until you are absolutely clear on what it is they are saying. I found that they volunteered more information. They probably thought I was the village idiot asking questions until they got the tax bill from their clients, and it looks like this guy is smarter than he looks. You want to be flexible, but you want the result. You don't want a lot of wiggle room on that result. But flexibility as far as how to get it. You leverage that talent, and they will approach stuff in ways I would never think of. It works better for them. It doesn't matter how they get it done as long as they got that standard that is set and they know what's expected and they deliver, and that is what I am all about: delivering that ned result. Hugh: Just for Nathan's benefit, he is stealing my lines. I am smarter than he looks. That is the one I use often. Last time I used it, somebody said, “That's a good thing.” Russ, you're so right. What is really annoying to the team members is when the boss does things they are not the expert at. If we started inventorying the things we're good at but not excellent at, and maybe someone else should be doing it. I am sure you interview people who do it all, and it is hard to convince them that someone could do it better, save them time and money, free up their time. How do you approach that conversation? Nathan: I get to that point now where I rarely do anything that isn't directly involved with something I am really good at. I realized it's a total waste of time, and it usually ends up backfiring. I usually have to redo it down the line anyway. Even if I put something together makeshift that lasts me a few months. So I usually want to get it right the first time. What I tell clients is a story I have with my business partner Connor. We rarely fight; we have an awesome relationship. The biggest fight that we had, the time that things escalated the most, led to the best conversation. We were sitting out on our patio. We had been stepping on each other's toes, and there was a lot of uncertainty on who was doing what. We found an activity online where we would tell each other what we were good at and what we were bad at. Connor was like, “Nate, you're a bad writer.” I was like, “Connor, you don't delegate properly.” We went back and forth on this for a solid hour until we had a list of everything we were good at and everything we were bad at. Can we work together? We noticed fortunately that we had a lot of complementary skills, as we were polar opposites in terms of skillsets, which was why we had such success earlier on. From there, it was fairly easy to divide everything. I am not going to do anything with writing, so Connor, you have the blog, the website. I'm better at talking on the phone, so I handle all phone calls. We were clearly able to divide the line, and as we hired people, we would have them work under us to where it related, where it was relevant. What I advise people to do is have an honest conversation with you, your employees, and your business partner to figure out who is good at what, and, I think Russell said this earlier, to identify where the holes are at because usually you don't get that perfect synergy where everything is covered. You realize you don't have a bookkeeper on your team or a developer. Those are the next steps. Hugh: I can see where people starting out in the first stages of a charity or a business need to do a lot of things. From the very beginning, especially in charities, we have all these people who want to give their time. There is an emotional release of I have to do it to feel worthy when that's not true. You have a vision. You do what you're really good at. And you allow other people to perform up to their highest standard and fulfill their passion. If it is worthy work, there are other people who want to join us in that work. We just have to be better at recruiting them and telling people why it's important and what impact they are going to have in the lives of others. Russ, you might know better than I, but there are something like four million 501(c) somethings with 10s and 6s and those that are government. There is an abundance of charitable organizations in this country. Many of them have a really good mission, and many of them are compromised in that mission because of the kinds of things we are talking about here. The culture is a reflection of the leader, and as John Maxwell says in his Law of the Lid, the organization cannot grow any further than the leader's ability to let it grow, to lead it. Finding really talented people to work around you is one of those strong secrets. If we were all to ask ourselves, “What could we take off our plate if we had someone who worked a certain number of hours?” There are two sides to this. What could we take off our plate, and what additional important thing could we do if we had that kind of assistance? There are two sides to that question. Nathan. Nathan: I always recommend starting small. Very few companies, especially nonprofits, will just start off hiring six full-time people and take everything off their plate. It has taken me two years of running Freeeup to get to that point and a few years into my first company as well. But what I did do was hire someone to run my social media page one hour a day. It cost me $7 a day. It took it off my plate. They did a great job in building that. Then I mentioned Quickbooks. Let's get someone in place once a month to do that. So I get an entire day back at the end of every month. In the beginning of every day, I spend the first hour answering customer and client emails, so let's hire someone to answer these emails an hour before I wake up so I can get a head start on every day. I started small with those three hires over the course of four to five months, and it freed up my time to invest back into expansion. From there, the business grew. So we just had a good month, and let's hire a fourth person for four hours a day to do some small tasks. The beginning of the day is a little hectic for me, so it'd be nice if I had someone on there who I could just assign different papers to write or projects to do or contacting clients. I put that person in place, and I got an extra few hours every day, so I invested that into expanding my company. You get the point. That is the correct and proper way to go about it if you are a nonprofit, if you have a limited budget. If you are ahead of that curve and making money, then you can go ahead of that and start hiring people for 20 or 15 hours a week and start taking this off your plate. Have a meeting. Once you get your time back, have a brainstorming session on what you should be doing so you can maximize that extra time. Or if you are a lifestyle business, figure out where you are going to go on your next vacation. Hugh: An hour a day is five hours a week. That is 25 hours a month. That is 300 hours a year. If we just outsource something for an hour a day, that is quality of life. Wow. Russ, what are you hearing here? Russell: I am hearing that I should get somebody to do my email because the pile is growing. I could do that. I could have somebody do some of the email and some of the posting. I have some things automated. That has been my big push of late is to get some things automated. I have been doing some rework on my website and some other things are in the works. As I get more resources, I am going to get more people involved. It's a lot of hours, and I don't mind a lot of hours, but those hours could be spent a little better because I am still doing a lot of small things. Hugh: Aren't we all. Nathan: A quick note on email. I have a lot of clients who notice those emails are piling up. It costs you business not to respond to emails. It costs you opportunities. You have to find a way to get on top of your email. That should be step one. Hugh, if you emailed me and I didn't respond back for a week and a half, I would not be here right now potentially. There are people out there who respond fast. You have to figure out a way to do it. That is just one example. There are other parts of your business like falling behind on taxes and stuff like that that you have to figure out a way to keep up. Sometimes the only way to do that is to hire an assistant for an hour a day. Russell: Several times a day, I clean out my email inbox, and I don't leave it over the weekend. I do get response to it, but the point is that I am cleaning it out, and it's time that I am spending cleaning it out to make sure I don't miss anything that I need to gain. It's that time cleaning it out. Hugh: We offer these sessions to nonprofit leaders to offer some best practices and good business tips for charities. Like Russ said, you can't help but think about yourself. I teach people that we are always working on our skills. Even old guys like me can learn new things. Nate, you brought up some really good stuff. Nate Hirsch is principal at Freeeup.com. As you see, he has a lot of energy and a lot of wisdom for such a young guy. You have done a lot in such a short period of time. Thank you for being here tonight. As we wrap up, I am going to ask you to do a parting thought for people. What is some wisdom you'd like to leave us with, a tip or a closing thought? Nathan: When you are hiring, you want to hire people that are passionate and have a great attitude about your company. If you are hiring someone—I don't care if it's the smallest project—if it's one graphic design project, get someone who is emotionally involved. Get someone you can tell actually cares about you and your company. You will get a better result. You will never know when you will use someone again. You also don't know how it will affect the people around you. If you bring someone in who has a bad attitude, even for a day, even for a very small project, that can have lasting effects on your business that can last months. Make sure you are bringing in high-quality, high-caliber people for every little thing. Just because you have something due, don't take a shortcut and give it to someone who could ruin your business down the line. That is my word of advice. It's something I wish I knew upfront. I became addicted—for example, I needed Excel work done, and I would hire someone who had a bad attitude but were very good at building this formula. When they were building these formulas on my computer at my desk, I realized they were interacting with all the other people on my team. And the next week was a terribly unproductive week because everyone had the mentality that Nate would go around and hire any Joe-schmo that he could find that wasn't passionate about the company. It took me a while to get that back on track. That is a good piece of advice that I wish I had when I was hiring the first time. Hugh: That is excellent advice. Everything you said in this interview has been spot-on with what Russell and I teach. We have reframed the word “consultant” to “Wayfinder,” and we help people find the way to better leadership. Nathan Hirsch of Freeeup, thank you for spending your hour with us tonight. Nathan: Yeah, thanks for having me. Don't forget to check out Freeeup.com. Right at the top, you can book an appointment with me and I can talk to you about your business. If you mention Hugh's name, you get a dollar off your first worker forever. It's free to sign up with no monthly fees. Hugh: My name is worth a dollar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nathan Hirsch from Free Up shares his outsourcing secrets. Nate is the CEO of FreeeUp.com and the COO of Portlight. Nate has been an entrepreneur in the eCommerce industry since 2009 and has grown into a leading expert in the field with experience managing multi-million dollar businesses. He has extensive knowledge in creating business systems and processes, personnel management, hiring remote workers, the Amazon Marketplace, and advanced sales tactics. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge with others and has been featured on leading industry podcasts, webinars, and blogs. Nate is determined to build FreeeUp into the top hands-on platform for hiring remote workers where thousands of businesses and remote workers are connected. If you're interested in connecting with Nate, shoot him an email at Nathan@FreeeUp.com. For more information go to https://freeeup.com

Nathan provides great insight on how to build your business using the remote talent around the globe. Nate is the CEO of FreeeUp.com and the COO of Portlight. Nate has been an entrepreneur in the eCommerce industry since 2009 and has grown into a leading expert in the field with experience managing multi-million dollar businesses. He has extensive knowledge in creating business systems and processes, personnel management, hiring remote workers, the Amazon Marketplace, and advanced sales tactics. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge with others and has been featured on leading industry podcasts, webinars, and blogs. Nate is determined to build FreeeUp into the top hands-on platform for hiring remote workers where thousands of businesses and remote workers are connected. If you're interested in connecting with Nate, shoot him an email at Nathan@FreeeUp.com check out Natan on Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nathan.hirsch Twitter: https://twitter.com/realNateHirsch LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanhirsch/ Check out the LIVE SHOW on Facebook click here: https://www.facebook.com/ThinkBoldBeBold/ Until next time BE BOLD! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nathan Hirsch is a serial entrepreneur. He's an expert in remote hiring and ecommerce. He's the founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com and the co-founder and COO of Portlight. Nathan started his ecommerce career on the Amazon marketplace and successfully built a $7 million business within 4 years. After seeing the potential of using remote workers within his first business, he founded FreeeUp to make the remote hiring experience simpler for all ecommerce business owners. Topics discussed during this podcast episode include; Nathan's tips for hiring great virtual assistants Do you have what it takes to run a successful business? How FreeeUp works And much more! You can play this podcast episode here: Your browser does not support the audio element. Websites referenced during the podcast: FreeeUp.com Here's a timeline of the topics discussed during the podcast: 0:00 - Short bio and intro 2:15 - Nathan Hirsch's upbringing, influences growing up, and his first online business 7:45 - What Nathan recommends to his family and friends when it comes to making money online 10:45 - Starting up FreeeUp.com 14:30 - Nathan's tips for hiring virtual assistants 19:00 - How has FreeeUp developed over the years 21:30 - How does hiring staff through FreeeUp.com work? 24:30 - How does payment of workers being hired through the FreeeUp marketplace work? What are FreeeUp's fees? 25:45 - How does someone go about being a worker on the FreeeUp Marketplace? 27:00 - Nathan's final thoughts Like this podcast? If you're enjoying the podcast, it's safe to assume there are others out there like you who would also enjoy the podcast. Help them find it! I've created a short video below that will show you how to quickly and easily rate and review the podcast in iTunes and/or Stitcher. Those people will appreciate it, and you'll feel great about yourself...

Nathan Hirsch and his business partner, Connor, took a long overdue vacation, leaving their business in good hands. On Day 1, they learned they had lost a major vendor. The same day, his CPA called to tell him his identity had been stolen and a false tax return had been filed in his name. But putting his life and business back together was not going to stand in his way. He is a serial entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring and e-commerce. Now the founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com and co-founder and COO of Portlight, he started his online career on Amazon’s Marketplace.

My guest today is a writer, traveler, e-commerce expert, and an entrepreneur. He got started with building a landscaping business while still in high school and ran it until going to college. While in college, he met his business partner and launched as eCommerce business called Portlight, which has sold over $20 million in products and has a team of ten people running it. He is currently the co-founder and CMO of FreeeUp, where my guest and his team enable companies to hire the top 1% of freelancers in eCommerce, virtual assistance, marketing, and web development. He also just released a new book called Free Up Your Business. Now, let’s hack… Connor Gillivan.

Connor Gillivan is a 27 year old serial entrepreneur that has built and runs two million dollar companies. He started his entrepreneurial career in his dorm room buying and selling text books on the Amazon Marketplace. After becoming an expert at Amazon, he helped to expand the company, Portlight, to other product categories eventually selling over $20 million on Amazon, building a team of over 60 people, and working with over 1,000 drop ship suppliers. Connor co-founded his second venture, FreeeUp, in late 2015 after becoming an expert at hiring remote freelancers with Portlight. He and his business partner were frustrated with the current platforms and wanted to create a simpler solution to hiring remote workers online. FreeeUp is now an online hiring marketplace offering pre-vetted workers from $5 to $50 per hour to over 1,000 businesses. The platform is experiencing rapid growth and has been featured in leading publications like The Huffington Post. Connor's first book, Free Up Your Business: 50 Secrets to Bootstrap Million Dollar Companies, publishes on April 26th on Amazon and FreeeUp.com. The book reveals 50 core lessons that he and his business partner have learned from the many ups and downs they've experienced as entrepreneurs. In his free time, Connor writes about eCommerce, leadership, and startups at http://www.ConnorGillivan.com.

Nate is the CEO of FreeeUp.com and the COO of Portlight. Nate has been an entrepreneur in the eCommerce industry since 2009 and has grown into a leading expert in the field with experience managing multi-million dollar businesses. He has extensive knowledge in creating business systems and processes, personnel management, hiring remote workers, the Amazon Marketplace, and advanced sales tactics. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge with others and has been featured on leading industry podcasts, webinars, and blogs.Learn more: www.freeeup.comInfluential Influencers with Mike Saundershttp://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/

Nate is the CEO of FreeeUp.com and the COO of Portlight. Nate has been an entrepreneur in the eCommerce industry since 2009 and has grown into a leading expert in the field with experience managing multi-million dollar businesses. He has extensive knowledge in creating business systems and processes, personnel management, hiring remote workers, the Amazon Marketplace, and advanced sales tactics. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge with others and has been featured on leading industry podcasts, webinars, and blogs.Learn more: www.freeeup.comInfluential Influencers with Mike Saundershttp://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/

In this episode, Nathan Hirsch, CEO and Founder of FreeeUp.com, discusses how his firm makes the remote hiring experience for all business owners in the USA or overseas simpler, faster and better. He explains how using remote workers lowers a company's cost while giving them access to a higher-level talent pool.In this interview, Nathan lays to rest some common misconceptions about outsourcing versus hiring highly-skilled remote workers. He recommends that you use remote workers on your smaller, time-consuming tasks, as those workers typically cost less than the business owner's current hourly rate. This gives the business owner more time to spend on sales and marketing.Nathan Hirsch is a serial entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring and eCommerce. He is the founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com and the co-founder and COO of Portlight. Nathan started his eCommerce career on the Amazon Marketplace and successfully built a $7 million business within four years. After seeing the potential of using remote workers within his first business, he founded FreeeUp to make the remote hiring experience simpler for all eCommerce business owners. FreeeUp now provides reliable eCommerce workers to hundreds of clients around the world. Nathan is an expert at building efficient systems and processes, sales strategies, and business management.To learn more about Nathan, visit http://www.FreeeUp.comMain Street Mavericks Radio with Joel Helferhttp://businessinnovatorsradio.com/main-street-mavericks-radio-with-joel-helfer/

In this episode, Nathan Hirsch, CEO and Founder of FreeeUp.com, discusses how his firm makes the remote hiring experience for all business owners in the USA or overseas simpler, faster and better. He explains how using remote workers lowers a company's cost while giving them access to a higher-level talent pool.In this interview, Nathan lays to rest some common misconceptions about outsourcing versus hiring highly-skilled remote workers. He recommends that you use remote workers on your smaller, time-consuming tasks, as those workers typically cost less than the business owner's current hourly rate. This gives the business owner more time to spend on sales and marketing.Nathan Hirsch is a serial entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring and eCommerce. He is the founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com and the co-founder and COO of Portlight. Nathan started his eCommerce career on the Amazon Marketplace and successfully built a $7 million business within four years. After seeing the potential of using remote workers within his first business, he founded FreeeUp to make the remote hiring experience simpler for all eCommerce business owners. FreeeUp now provides reliable eCommerce workers to hundreds of clients around the world. Nathan is an expert at building efficient systems and processes, sales strategies, and business management.To learn more about Nathan, visit http://www.FreeeUp.comMain Street Mavericks Radio with Joel Helferhttp://businessinnovatorsradio.com/main-street-mavericks-radio-with-joel-helfer/

Nate is an serial entrepreneur and hiring expert. His first business, Portlight, is an Amazon Marketplace seller representing top toy, baby, and home brands. In 2015 he founded FreeeUp with the purpose of providing business owners with an easier solution to accelerating their growth through remote workers.

Nathan Hirsch is the CEO and founder or FreeeUp. For the past 7 years, Nate has been the co-owner and Chief Operating Officer of Portlight, an Amazon Marketplace seller ranking within the top 20,000 sellers representing top toy, baby, and home brands from around the United States. In 2015 He founded FreeeUp with the purpose of providing business owners with an easier solution to accelerating the growth of their company through hiring remote workers.