How A Consultant Grew His Business 200%+ Using FreeUp

Growing a consulting practice isn’t always easy – The large swing in the quantity of work can make it hard to capitalize on all your opportunities.

But one of our clients was able to make it work with the help of FreeUp, AND was able to scale his consulting business 200%+ year over year!

In this case study, we’ll show you how he did it and what you should consider when using freelancers to scale up.

Background

Matt Kubancik is an Amazon and E-Commerce consultant. As his consulting practice began to grow, so did the amount of work.

To capitalize on all the opportunities, he needed help with all sorts of various tasks including:

• Product research
• Product management
• Product uploads
• Feedback tracking
• Amazon case logs
• Advertising
• …and more.

Matt wanted to grow the business but needed to bring on talented freelancers that have specific experience in Amazon.

But where could you find someone with this specific experience? 

Freelancers Vs. Hiring Locally

One of the biggest benefits of hiring online is that you can massively expand your talent pool outside of your local area.

Matt explains, “I think [when] you’re hiring locally, you’re painting yourself in a box and… you’re having to deal with U.S. based salaries. It was just a really tough job market to find good candidates and often and you’re often overpaying for people.”

Finding the right people locally is especially hard when you’re only looking for specific skills.

“A lot of what I do on accounts is specialized. You might have someone that needs to be really good at vlookups and spreadsheets. That same person might not be the best to handle customer service messages on Amazon and report back to you on account health or the best person to run a team of two or three V.A.s”

By using the FreeUp network, Matt was able to connect with the right freelancers that already had experience in what he was looking for.

“You’re able to really put together a team… using the FreeUp network. That’s been huge in scaling up the different e-commerce endeavors that I’m involved in.”

This is one of the biggest benefits of hiring virtual workers – you have so many more options!

By hiring online, you massively expand your talent pool and you’re able to find freelancers with the specific experience you’re looking for!

How Matt Turned A Freelancer Into A Manager

Finding the right freelancers to do your tasks is great, but what happens when you start to scale up and you’re spending more time on management?

You turn your talent into managers!

“I’ve also empowered one of the freelancers [to become a manager]. That’s helped me to be able to scale a lot more people on the team because basically I have a general manager. I escalated her pay and provided her some more incentive to really empower these other people.”

In addition to empowering the freelancer, he was also able to delegate important tasks based on her strengths and business needs.

“Being a busy entrepreneur, sometimes I don’t have time to spend five hours a week on SOPS, so a lot of times it’s just talking on two Zoom calls a week, and then she will take those Zoom recordings, form an SOP, and then train the staff that we bring on the team.”

Finding The Right Price

Pricing is something that always comes up when hiring freelancers, and it can be enticing to try to get the lowest price.

But Matt takes a different approach that works a lot better for him:

“Generally if FreeUp suggests $6-$10 an hour or $6-$12 an hour, I’m usually hiring on the higher end and I’ve been more successful with that.”

He continues, “Just like the US would if you were hiring a warehouse manager at $50k versus $100k, well, you’re going to probably get better candidates at 100k.”

Hiring at a good rate can help prevent some of the common problems of working with freelancers like ghosting, inconsistency or poor work. 

By hiring on the upper end of the recommendations, Matt is able to get quality team members that can grow with the business.

Hiring Progression

Business often comes in ebbs and flows, and it’s not always easy to bring someone on full time when you’re not sure if you have enough work.

Luckily, Matt was able to use freelancers part-time to offload his tasks.

“Some weeks I might have one hundred spreadsheets to go through and some weeks I might have zero. So I was able to find a virtual assistant to the FreeUp network.” 

What’s even better is that by hiring from the Philippines, Matt was able to have work done even while he was sleeping!

“The time change really helps because I would get a lot of these offers in the afternoons (US Time) and I was able to send those over to the V.A. A lot of times they were able to accomplish those in one or two business days and that would be usually the next morning in a lot of cases. That’s how I was able to kind of strategically start sourcing a lot more goods and reviewing a lot more offers.”

The Transformation

What’s life look like now for Matt? Business is up!

“My business is up even during COVID. The different businesses that I manage, I would say [are up] 200-300%. And that’s a huge part because of leveraging the FreeUp network.”

“[Without FreeUp] I just really wouldn’t have that bandwidth. I wouldn’t be able to take on those contracts without the use of the FreeUp network. Like there would just be no way possible.”

What are the future plans for Matt?

“We’re just going to continue to leverage the FreeUp network and look at hiring additional people through there as we grow”

Conclusion

If you are a consultant or have a growing business, FreeUp can help you scale and maximize your opportunities.

By using freelancers you get a lot of flexibility – from part-time work, to having tasks done around the clock, freelancers can help you scale your business.

Want some help scaling your consulting business? 

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