Still Doing Everything Yourself? This May Be Why You’re Stuck

If you’re a self-employed professional still doing everything yourself, this episode is for you.

For years, business owners have said, “You just can’t find good help anymore.” But in this episode of How to Win Big at Business, Joe DiChiara challenges that belief and sits down with Nick Petras of HireFreely to talk about what’s really changing in the world of hiring, freelancing, remote work, and AI.

Together, they unpack one of the biggest growth obstacles for self-employed professionals: getting past the solopreneur stage and making that first real hire. They discuss why traditional hiring is often slow, frustrating, and broken… and why the future may belong to business owners who think differently about skills, delegation, flexibility, and remote talent.

This conversation is especially relevant for consultants, accountants, coaches, agency owners, and other self-employed professionals who know they need help but are overwhelmed by the process of finding the right person.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

•  Why most small businesses never make it past the solopreneur stage 
•  Why the first hire is such a major business milestone 
•  Why “you can’t find good help anymore” is no longer true 
•  What COVID and remote work changed forever 
•  Why resume-based hiring is becoming less effective 
•  Why skills-based hiring may be a better model 
•  How freelancers and fractional talent are changing the workforce 
•  Why AI could create more opportunity instead of less 
•  What faster, leaner business growth may look like in the near future 

If you’ve been buried in admin, wearing every hat, and wondering how to grow without burning out, this episode will help you rethink what hiring can look like now.

If you’re a self-employed professional trying to build a real business, this podcast was created for you.
 New episodes break down the systems, strategies, and structures needed to move from solopreneur to sustainable business owner.
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Thanks for listening!
If you want fewer headaches, fewer IRS surprises, and more smart systems running your business (so YOU don’t have to), let’s talk.

Book a strategy call: www.timewithjoe.com

Because running a business shouldn’t feel like wrestling an octopus… alone.
Also check out:
www.Bedrock360BusinessSolutions.com
(Complete Coverage)
www.Bedrock360TaxSolutions.com
(Tax Guard 365)
www.Bedrock360BusinessTraining.com
(Courses)

Thanks for listening!

If you want fewer headaches, fewer IRS surprises, and more smart systems running your business (so YOU don’t have to), let’s talk.

Book a strategy call: www.timewithjoe.com

Because running a business shouldn’t feel like wrestling an octopus… alone. 

Also check out:
www.Bedrock360BusinessSolutions.com (Complete Coverage)

www.Bedrock360TaxSolutions.com (Tax Gaurd 365) 

www.Bedrock360BusinessTraining.com (Courses)

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

So you just can't find good help anymore. The truth is that used to be true. It used to be true. I've been hearing it since uh when I first could talk. Okay. I heard everybody saying you just can't find good help anymore. And it was it was really true. If you're like me, I was a solopreneur struggling for decades to try to scale my business. You know, one of the benchmarks of starting a business, we all start from zero. Not many people start a business with 10 employees. So if you're like me, and I was a solopreneur, self-employed solopreneur, meaning I did everything, including my own social media, my own graphics, my own website. And if you're one of those people that were like me and you could relate to this, one of the benchmarks of every business is actually getting to that first hire. Believe it or not, at a 33 plus million US businesses, almost 90% of them are still solopreneurs. Think about that. So if you're starting a business, chances are you're never even going to get to that first hire. But here's the thing: what I learned is you can't find good help anymore isn't true. It's not true for a number of reasons. Number one, the internet connected the whole world. COVID gave it a real kick in the butt where a lot of businesses that just weren't willing, especially in the accounting field, to start doing business remotely, let alone let their employees work from home. And here we are at the forefront of some really, really amazing stuff that's going on. I just met with my team and I said, you know, this is like a watershed moment in time for a lot of reasons. So this podcast is called How to Imbigot Business. And what we do, what I do is I focus on self-employed professionals like myself that are trying to navigate all of the obstacles. Forget about the IRS. We all know about that. But technology, the workflows, just getting over that first obstacle, getting your first assistant, whether it's full-time, part-time, but somebody that you can delegate some of that workload to. And today I'm proud and happy to introduce a new friend of mine that's really cutting edge. I see what he's doing. He's got a whole unique type of business model, and I'm gonna let him talk about it. Introducing the one and only Nick Petros from hirefreely.com. Is that right, Nick?

SPEAKER_00 3:09

That's it. You nailed it.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Okay, so first of all, where where are you from?

SPEAKER_00 3:14

So I'm from uh the Northeast, I'm from Rhode Island originally, uh, but I'm calling in from Florida. Uh and down here, people don't judge you if you don't cut your hair because you're working too hard. And I think, like you said, we're in the middle of a watershed. I'm like barely sleeping, so excited about what's coming and trying to get us all ready for it.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

Yeah, it it's truly amazing. You know, I mean, the stuff that I'm doing 15 years ago was like, oh yeah, right, that that'll never happen. That's like science fiction, right? Well, here we are able to connect. I'm literally I'm in I'm in Manila now. I'm on literally the other side of the world, and I meet with US clients all the time. And the way we met was through a mutual friend. She's an influencer on LinkedIn, and she's like, I I made a connection, you got to meet this guy. Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Well, I mean, we had you um come speak on our on our town hall, which was amazing.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

So interesting, you know, the the just the food for for thought, you know, the intellectual conversation that you know, I love that talking about not only you know what's happening now, but what what's gonna happen. Okay, and you and I I believe are at the at the forefront of this. Okay, way, way in front.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Because people, so we both work in the people business, and I think our our town hall was a lot about technology, and everyone's talking about technology because it's so visible and it's central and it's exciting. But I think we both believe that behind all of this are people, and behind all of this, there will always be people. Um so I imagine that's what we'll wind up talking about on this this podcast. Like, does does the tech that's coming in replace people, or does it just create more opportunity for people to earn in different ways? And and I think we both kind of fall into that second category.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah, well, and thank you for having me on the town on the town hall. And I think the the consensus was, you know, it's fine, you know, all the AI. This isn't the first technological watershed, right? I mean, I've lived personally through several of them. Uh and the bottom line is yeah, AI is great, robotics is great, but in the end, there's got to be some uh a human behind it, and human beings want to talk to other human beings. Always, always that's that's how we're uh we're built. We're we're built, we we want community, we don't want communities of AIs. That that would be like not too fun, okay. Uh so you and I think what we focus on is okay, how can we use this amazing technology to solve problems? Does that sound right?

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Yeah, what's it's uh and we're both building ecosystems, right? Like you're building one on the accounting side, uh, which is critical because it's one of the hardest places to find help you can trust. Um, you what I'm trying to do, what we're trying to do with with Hire Freely, I think uh it's very difficult for people in the freelance and fractional space to find work and connect with clients. Um, and there's a lot of like predatory business around that. There's a lot of companies that like try to sell you lead gen that doesn't really work, but you kind of have to keep paying to prove that it works or doesn't, or there are there are marketplaces that I may or may not name that are literally squeezing their top producers out of business. So like you do work and the provider charges you money to like interview with somebody and then charges you a percentage to do the work and then charges you a percentage to withdraw your money, and it's like like there's no value trade there. It's literally like creating the scarcity of profits off of. And and I think what COVID proved was we can survive working remotely. Um I think what AI is enabling is people to remove themselves from the labor side of work, so all of our work can be creative, and and for that to happen, we need to be remote and global. So that's what we're trying to build with freely, like a proper ecosystem where you can meet anybody you possibly need to help you either build your company or hire you to help build their company. Um, and uh and only profit off of net value we create for you. So freely makes money when we connect you with someone who actually could be an opportunity. So, like you don't pay to bid on jobs, you don't pay to promote yourself, they don't pay to hire you. There's no percentage exchange, all the money is directly between the two. Um, so it's it's a vision kind of like yours for this future where people can work from wherever they want as long as they do a good job and they operate on good principles and they execute their skill well, like there should be no limits to how or where they can earn, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Yes, and just one thing, like they said, I'm having one of those. Okay, so I thought my my mic went out. But what I like, so here's the thing, and you're approaching the solution to this problem in in a pretty unique way. First off, you know, I'm on your website and I'm like, it can't be this simple, it's it's very like transparent, right to the point. I'm like, where's all the bells and whistles? Where's all the you know, all the oh, this is why you should do you know, the testimonials? I'm like, no, this is simple because you've made it simple. Is that is that accurate?

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Well, we're trying to. I think uh we might have talked about this on the town hall too, but I think uh I think the resume was made for like an economy that we're a hundred years but beyond, right? Like you needed a resume when uh you're applying for a job and someone's never seen your face before, they don't know who you are, they don't know the company you've worked for. So, like this is all the information they have on you. But today it's the opposite. Like they they know who you are, what you care about, um, if you're creative or not, where you went to school, other people who went there, what the company culture you came from is like, all that's available. Um, so putting a resume in front of you is very redundant and often misleading now that most resumes are written by Chat GPT. So we're in this world where like uh and now on top of all that, uh everyone's getting 4,000 job applications for every job they put live. So like hiring is totally stalled. And the problem with hiring today is that there's no line of sight to the talent, like it's literally a resume and then internet stuff, and then AI screening, and like the company that's hiring the human don't connect until all that stuff filters, and we have no idea if it's accurate or not. We're just guessing and trying to make it more efficient. So, what we did with Freely was make it super simple. We were like, we don't want to hire people, we want to hire pizza. When you order a pizza, you don't get a resume on the chef. You're like, is it good pizza or not? And you click a button and you pay money, and then you get the pizza. So in Freely, the companies don't look at your face or your resume, they look at your skills. Uh so they're like, I need an accountant uh who can do XYZ. And no one would ever hire an accountant through us because it's too high trust. But I need someone who can cut up my podcast really, really well for me, or build a system that can cut up my podcast really, really well. That's kind of a unique skill set. And you scroll through and you find someone who has that skill set and you you hit a button. And on the back end, freely is constantly paying attention to what all of our talent talks about because it's social, that's how it validates your skills. Um you can't come into Freely and then use like Chat GPT to say you do all these things. Like you can say you're a developer, but if all you talk about is accounting, we know you're an accountant, and that's what we match you to. So it's it's an algorithmic filtering system that just makes it button push for the client to hire you and really easy for you to get in front of people that want your skill set. Like, you don't have to figure out how to market yourself, you don't have to post, you don't have to pay to be elevated. All you have to do is kind of engage with stuff that you like, and the system will put you in front of the people that you want. So that's uh that's our attempt, anyway. It is really simple, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:26

So, like every other time I do this podcast, I have like a hundred thousand different questions, and uh but let's go back to the problem because I I like I said, we're we're solution providers at the end of the day. You know, we find a problem and we find a simple way to solve it. So I pretty much uh been on on the other end, you know. You mentioned my business. What I'm passionate about now is the online training that I've started. I've I started and and it started with my business here in the Philippines. I have an online accounting a hundred percent remote, and that's how I got into the remote uh field because I I found remote workers that were amazing. Okay, and and then I started teaching them, and what I found was a lot of them want to work from home, they're tired of the commute, it's a waste of time, and like I said, COVID really put that into high gear, right? So I've never all only my own experience trying to hire people, which was frustrating literally literally for decades, for decades. Most of it was me because I wasn't I wasn't uh going about it correctly. I was looking for somebody that was like me. That was the first mistake. But anyway, it overcame all those obstacles. So now I'm like, so I'm like, okay, I know how hard it was to hire one person, and now I know how how talented these people are, and all I gotta do is uh if I give them the right training and like coach Yanion, she's great at coaching them on how to like apply for a job, like how to get the interview, right? But in your in your uh town hall, you had a human resources person, and I heard it from a whole different standpoint because I think she said she posted a job and she got like 2,000 resumes, and I'm like, oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

How do you process those? You can't, you know.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

So there's the the people that have the talent on one end, okay, and then you got the the human resource people that need the talent, but now they're overwhelmed. Like, so I don't know what they do. Like, she explained, like, okay, this is what I do. They probably use AI, they use this, what do they call it, ATS system that weed out all the resume. But that's that can only be so uh effective because at the end of the day, right, you're taking a chance, you're taking a chance based on okay, this guy's resume, his presentation, his LinkedIn profile. But until they start working with you, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:19

You have no idea.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

You have not so it's always a chance, and then there's the time factor, right? So explain to me exact. So this is a unique way, uh a unique approach, and I've never seen anyone even come close to this. Okay, so there's like, okay, I can hire a freelancer, I can I can I can hire a freelancer to just work with me, right? Like a like a remote worker, an employee, or it could go out and get, you know, put a project out there and hire somebody, but it's still the same thing. I've done that by the time you you know, imagine hiring somebody to do a database and you get something that's completely different than what you asked for, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

So your explain how your marketplace works. Like, let's say, and and I was on your site, and I'm like, okay, so if you need a website, if you need uh a workflow built, and and you got all these different things that everybody needs. So, how does that work?

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Yeah, so um freely is all about skills. Uh, we don't really care about your resume because I think that introduces a lot of complexity that, as you point out, doesn't create any value. Like hiring like the best person you meet after your first three interviews is statistically as successful as like interviewing a thousand people and like reviewing them for three or four months. Like, there's no productivity value difference. Um, the only slight difference um in hiring long term is if you can take three months to hire somebody, you can probably also take three months to train them. So, in reality, your training is what's creating the value, it's not the process working. Um, but in today's world, if you spend six months to get someone into your company or new capability, you're toast. Like you're competing with people who can train AI to get 80% of that capability in two hours. So six months is not effective, it's not gonna work.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

It cost a lot of money, it cost a lot of money. And and I've been there, I've had people, I've trained, they were they're with me a year, and then I'm like, listen, this isn't working out. And I'm like, all that time and effort is down the drain.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Gone. Yeah, or I mean, or worse, like they cost you money. Like you hire somebody, you spend time investing in them, they do something wrong, it upsets a client, it actually costs you money, it's a double negative. But what I so I I learned all this. We were talking about Pinchforth, our consulting business. Um, my first year, one, I I said yes to three full-time contracts at the same time because I'm an idiot, and I had to hire people to help me, but they all they all went well, fortunately. Um, but finding folks, it was the same experience as you. I hired someone and they were unbelievable right away. And I was like, Well, this is crazy. It took me like two days to find this human being, and they're changing my life. Let me find another one. And we kind of kept going, and I had 50 full-time folks at the end of like year two. Um yeah, there's like big agency operating. And my passion, as much as I liked helping companies grow, my passion was more about like finding these unbelievable people and bringing them into a culture and like giving them an opportunity to work this way, and that's why we found people so well was we kind of created a culture people wanted to be a part of, and that allowed us to create this massive staff. Um, so that that's what kind of sparked freely ultimately. I wanted to find a way to say, okay, all these super talented people want to work, they just don't know how to find opportunities like we do. So, how do I build a bridge for that? So the the ultimate bridge isn't even the technology, it's the fact that you need to hire skills, you don't need to hire the entire human being. And I'm sure in your business you have folks that like they're not amazing website designers, but they're unbelievable with your books. But the clients only care about the books, they don't care if they're an amazing website designer. So it's the same thing when you're looking at the human being that you hire, uh especially as a solopreneur, uh, for your contracting. You don't care if they went to Harvard, you care if they can do the thing that you need done for your business. Because if they don't, you don't have it and you're spending your time on it. Those are two compounding negatives. So, what freely does back to skills, um, is the main element, like the main component of the platform is your skills. Uh and it's all about judging and ranking skills. So on the on the marketplace side where all the talent is, uh, it's like a social feed where they like grade each other. Like, is this good? Is this the right approach? Oh, really? And by you can challenge people so you can look at their skill description and say mine's better, and people will vote on it. Um, so as they engage, we build a like a uh neural net of what they're actually interested in and what they actually are good at. So when companies start selecting skills, we take the best three and we put them in front of them right away. Uh now that's the other thing. It's not really policing, it's it's all math. So, like as you communicate, as you engage in other people's skills or challenge them or vote on them or comment on them, uh, we build kind of a uh neural net, like I said, of what you're good at and what you're interested in and what your strengths are. Um we do the same thing with companies. So as companies engage and hire people, we figure out the type of folks that they like and they want to work with so we can recommend better connections. Um, but we we limit connections to three and we add friction to the connection. So if a company wants a website designer, for example, um we go to the top three that are available because we track how many people they're talking to. So only the top three that are available. Um and we we limit the connection to three, and we limit the connection to three people who want to talk to that company so bad they'll pay for the conversation. Uh and we guarantee it. So if if a freelancer spends money with us and they don't get an interview, we refund them. Like they don't pay unless they're actually in a business conversation. But that creates quality. So the company's connecting on the skill, the freelancer knows what the company wants because they have that skill, and they're paying for the conversation. So there's no fake interviews. I'm not going to spend money to lie to somebody about what I can do. Right. So it's way faster for the company. There's no filtering, it's just directly to the thing you want. And if there's an opportunity, you win. If there's not, freelancer gets refunded and everybody's happy. So it's uh it's pure value.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

So does the uh the freelance do they get to check out the company like on LinkedIn or just go to their website?

SPEAKER_00 20:49

We don't know because it then there's a lot of end running that happens.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Uh oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

But we give them a profile. So what we what we show is this company wants to hire you. Um, they're looking for this specific skill that you have, and here's the budget range. Um, so the freelancer can decide like, do I want to fake, you know, I'm not gonna spend 50 bucks to talk to this guy if it's a $200 project and he's never hired for it before. But if it's ten thousand dollars, sure, like I'll pay $50 and see if the guy's worth it.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

So do they get to see, like, you know, when I order an Uber, I get to see the driver's, you know, rating, which I never believe anyway, because I've got some really bad five-star. I'm like, this guy can't, I can drive better than this guy, and that's that's bad. Yeah, so do you do you have the rating system?

SPEAKER_00 21:37

We have internal ratings, but um it's more of like a quality, it's more of a quality match system because ratings like there's no public profile on Freely, like no one can go look at you and see what someone else is doing because we're honestly trying to kill the resume. Um because I think the more you do that, the more there's an incentive to lie, and um the vision behind Freely. Is like the people who want to hire through us, they want value so fast they don't have time to look at your resume. And we want workers who are kind of of the same mindset. Like, I'm not here to self-promote, I'm here to like engage and become discoverable by proving what I'm actually good at. So both sides get what they want really fast.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

You know, it's funny you said that about lying on the resume because there's politicians, I mean, throughout time, they say there in fact there was one in Queens recently. He got, I think he's in jail right now because he lied on his resume. I'm like, who who runs for public office and says that they did stuff that they never did? Like somebody at that college is gonna say, wait a second, I went to this college, and you know, so yeah, if they're lying on their resumes, think about what everybody else is doing.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

Yeah, yeah. And it's it's a target for that, though. I think when you have demand for work, like people are trying to work now. That's why so many folks are applying to every job, and there's there's nothing that can scale with that demand, it automatically kind of balloons into fraud. Like people are trying to engineer a way to game themselves into work. So for freely, it's all like it's it's also agent first, too. So you can apply to jobs directly from Chat GPT through our platform. Um, and you can hire people directly through whatever LLM you're using. That's uh it's kind of unique because I think the future is gonna be like that. Like you'll have your main assistant and you'll say, I need a designer, and it can just ping our platform and we'll automatically surface the folks that they need. And same thing for workers, they can just ping their chat of choice and it will you know automatically kind of register them, get them set up, and help them start to build their credibility within the platform. Right, because it's gonna go fast. If I I think you agree that the future is fast, folks are not gonna spend six months hiring, it's gonna be a day, and it needs to be effective. So we need a new platform to do that.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

Yeah, if I told you what my method of uh of hiring used to be, you you're you're gonna laugh. I'll tell you, I would literally hire the first or second person that I interview.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

Statistics, I mean statistics, like you're hitting the the 95% success that you hit with uh with uh the long way. Like literally, there's no benefit to taking six months, there's no financial benefit. There's uh there's a political benefit. Like if you take six months and they go bad, you can say, Well, we we interviewed and we checked all this, and yeah, I covered my butt. That's the real value, you know.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

All right, so I don't feel so bad then. So on your platform, so is this project-based, or do you actually do like full-time positions or part-time positions?

SPEAKER_00 24:43

It's really up to the business, it's whatever they want. I think uh the discovery part that we focus on for freely is that you don't have to go on like Upwork or Fiverr and like look through resumes or profiles and figure out who to hire. You can just be like, I need this, and boom, here's three good people that really want to talk to you. That's the vision, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

You know, just for myself, because I know I've been when I needed people, it's gotten a lot easier uh to find people, but and basically a lot of it is through referrals because now I've built up a network, I don't have a problem hiring accountants because I've taught thousands of them, and I can just go to the cream of the crop, so that that works out well. Uh but where was I going with this? I lost my train of thought.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

Well, it's the same concept. I mean, what you pointed out like you have thousands of folks from your courses, you know who's really good, you have a pool and an audience, which honestly is an incredibly valuable asset. That I mean, that's effectively what freely gives everyone. Like you're tapping into our audience of thousands of people, I see just like yours. So, and you just click what you want, and boom, it's there for you. That's the key.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

I get it now. Because if I it so like every six months we hire about 10 interns, and we just put it out there to our students on Facebook, and we're already known, and they come to us, and then we already know that. I mean, we have all the the course history. So I get that that that is powerful, that's very powerful. Um, yeah, and what I what I started to say was, you know, just like the human resources person, when I had to like put a put a job posting out there, it was horrible because and this might sound crazy, but it was horrible because within an hour I'd have a hundred resumes.

SPEAKER_00 26:37

I know, yeah. And then where do you start?

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Well, you know what my my co and this is what what turned it all around for me was about six years ago. My coach, you know, had a actually started a business called Hire My VA. And and it was a it was a course, and he asked me to be one of his beta testers. And one of the things, and Marianne will tell you this because it's it's it's still it's like a joke. He said, What you do is in the job posting you put a secret word and you say, if you don't put baseball in the subject line, I'm not even gonna look at your resume. And I'll tell you like 80% of them don't look at the at the job post. I'm like, oh my god, I just eliminated 80%. And think about this, Nick. They're they're applying for an accounting job, detail oriented, and they're skipping it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Well, so so the town hall that you spoke on uh is is through our training program called Rocket. So there's Higher Freely is the main platform, but we realize kind of the same thing as you're just pointing out. People have the skill set, but they don't know how to manage clients, they don't know how to build, how to structure their work week, like all those things you have to learn through pain and gain or work for somebody else. Um we created Rocket to kind of give them a tool set, and the people who come out of Rocket will be like our elite providers, so we'll badge them so companies know like this person's been trained, they know how to manage you, you can trust them a little more. Um, and and one of the the big things we teach in Rocket is how to approach companies. Um, because the same approach that people use with resumes, they use with finding clients, they spam thousands of people and hope someone will reply or apply to thousands of jobs. Um, but to your point, like it's always human, it always comes back to human, and you meet your clients from other people you know, like a business your size or a small solopreneur, it's always social, and that's what Rocket teaches like how you can track that and turn it into a measurable thing so you don't have to go spam people with your resume 5,000 times. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

So let's turn this to a topic that that we we both uh know and love. And you mentioned the the demand, and one of the things I mentioned in your town hall was you know, you have all these naysayers saying, Oh, 50% of the you know, entry-level jobs are gonna be gone in three years. So imagine if you're a college student now, right? I'd be ready to drop out. I know it's horrifying listening to these guys. You mentioned about the demand for for people, so let because you're on that side. I mean, I'm only on I'm really on the side where people want they want the work, okay? You're on both sides. So tell me about the the demand, and let's keep it to the US, okay? Because you're in the US. I I don't know if you just focus on the US, but okay. Let's focus on the demand in the US.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

Well, so so there's two pieces there's public demand and then there's real demand. Um, and on the public level, like all the headlines are doom and gloom. It's like, oh my god, these are gonna take all the jobs, and if I think we're rates, yeah, exactly. That's literally what it is. Um, but then the the real economy is changing so fast. And uh, I wrote an article about this yesterday. So if you do the math, and you could validate this from the accounting perspective, for a company, especially with a new product, but for a company to get from like founding to like establishing some sort of market traction, especially in technology, it's cost about a million bucks until six months ago. It cost about a million dollars. So you have to hire somebody, you have to build your platform, you have to put in a lot of sweat equity yourself, you have to get a team going, you have to go to market. Like generally, the the median number is about a million. Um today, that number is about 30,000, and only 4,000 of that is is CapEx. So like the 30k is really your effort to get something going because it's so cheap for you to make and validate and market versus what it was even six months ago. Um, so to back up the demand, so I'm seeing 50 million uh open uh fractional and freelance positions today, which is massive because our entire job market's 160 million. So like 50 million is staggeringly high. And what's fueling that, so you you take the million dollar cost to get product market fit and you cut it down to 30,000, that's 333x reduction, right? Uh and then you apply it to VC math. So VCs assume that one out of every 10 bets is going to be a winner for them. So if your cost is reduced by 333, um the math comes out to we have 66x more successful founders today than we did six months ago. Like companies that are going to our product market. So the labor pressures like there's no way you can scale people that big. Like you have 160 million today, you'll have like 162 million in two years with a 66x increase in companies. So the only option is fractional, like the only way to scale that because you can't climb people, you need people working for multiple companies, so there's incredible wage pressure, incredible demand for pieces of folks. Uh I mean, honestly, it's gonna be the best time ever to work because you're gonna have five companies paying you like unbelievable amounts of money because they have it, because they're producing so fast, they're in market, uh, and and just nobody's prepared for this. There's no infrastructure for it, there's no way to find the people. It's it's wild.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

You want to know something as an accountant, and and when you were saying it went down from and I'm thinking, oh my god, that means everybody that has a business idea, they don't need a million bucks, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:37

Exactly. For the first time in human history, you you know, we're all gonna be like um Tony Stark and Jarvis, like, hey, make this thing, and then it's out there.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

Oh my god, you know, you know, I've never heard it, I've never heard it put that way, but you are so right. When I started bedrock, uh I'll tell take it back like eight years ago. I'm I'm with this marketing guy, right? And he has me doing all this like deep research, and he's like, listen, the you find the biggest problem out there, you come up with a simple solution, and and you got a winner. So I do some research, and I'm like, I find there's 27 million businesses out there, right? Okay, there's 27 million. Well, who who are these businesses? How big are they? So I come across a term on the SBA website called non-employer firm. And I always assume, well, those are corporations that just don't have any employees. That's normal. No, there's sole proprietor, which is the worst way in the world to do business. And so at a 27 million, like 24 million were sole proprietors, just themselves. Oh my god, that's the problem. I have a simple solution. Turn them into an escorp. Done. I've been doing that ever since. Since then, it went from 27 million to 33 million, and COVID had a lot to do with it. A lot, you know, in the US, a lot of people decided not to go back to work. Well, what are they doing? They're not like not working, they're just not working in a regular job anymore. A lot of them started businesses. So now I'm thinking, oh my god, if it only costs 30 grand to start a business, well, it's 30 grand in equity, it's not in the kilogram, which makes it even some it's like some if and you know, entrepreneurs, if they have an idea, and if you're an entrepreneur and you're listening to this, you can relate. I wake up every day with the world's next greatest idea. Luckily, 30 seconds later, I'm like, no, wait a second. I've already it's not the greatest idea. I just thought it was for a second. But we're gonna have I believe this. I believe this. And you want to know something? I'm happy now because that's a lot of people that are gonna need accountants.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

Honestly, honestly, we should do a follow-up in a year. If your business doesn't 3x over the next 12 months, I will be shocked. That's how big this is. Yeah, it's nuts. There's a if you want to get proof on this too, because basically I wake up every day and I'm super excited, and then I read the headlines and I want to cry. I'm like, you people are missing it. So there was uh an article today. So we're what is it, um, April 23rd that we're recording this? Uh so people can look back. I'm sure we're gonna have 10 new advances.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

April 23rd of 2026. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

So this article today was talking about how uh AI is a trap, and all of these companies uh are getting you like addicted to their inference, and then they're gonna jack up the cost just as high as employees, and you're gonna be screwed, and there's gonna be no jobs and all this stuff. At the same time, there's this company in Caltech called Prism AI that built a 8 billion parameter model that's quantized down to one gigabyte, it can run on your cell phone. So you can run a model that's pound for pound as smart as the best model in the world two years ago on your cell phone for free today. What do you think that does in two years? When everyone has Chat GPT Frontier on their cell phone in two years, I mean it's gonna cost like 20 bucks to start a business, you know.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

My I don't know how old you are. I know I'm a lot older than you, but my first computer had 40 megabytes of space, not RAM, that that's how many, how much storage space I think. So it's not yeah, that doesn't surprise me. That doesn't surprise me.

SPEAKER_00 36:46

It's going so fast, and I mean it it's impossible, like it's literally impossible to create companies this fast and not run into needs, which creates job pressure, which creates demand, and yeah, the way it's supposed to be, you know.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

Yeah, all right. Listen, so like I said in the beginning, I try to keep this to a half an hour that never happens because we start getting deep diving. Listen, we've only scratched the the surface, and we will do a follow-up. Um, how do people get in touch with you? And more importantly, who do you want to get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_00 37:20

Yeah, well, so on both sides, if you're getting into the fractional space, uh our training program is called rocket.hirefreely.co. Uh we we have our own AI in there that basically it teaches you the schedule that you're supposed to run, it tracks who you're supposed to meet for you. Like basically all the things that people are afraid to do that keep you out of business, it guides you through automatically. Uh so basically you don't have to learn and figure that out on your own. You can just plug in, chat with it once a day, it'll do everything else for you. Uh and then if you're looking for work or you're looking for talent, hire freely.co. It's free. Um you can request as many jobs or hires as you want. Uh you can apply to as many as you want. Um and we're we're trying to make it a bridge so that's your backup. Because your network is going to be most of your revenue. And that's what we teach you at Rocket. You don't even need freely if you use Rocket. Uh, we're trying to be like your insurance policy. So as you're building your business, um, if you need a couple clients to make ends meet, uh that's kind of what we want to be for you in the future. You just you're there, it automatically feeds you leads, you choose which ones you want to pursue.

SPEAKER_01 38:21

Interesting. So, yeah, it sounds like you got a big educational uh part of this, right?

SPEAKER_00 38:30

A guide. I think so. We created Rocket, both because people don't know how to be consultants, but they don't want to do it alone. Like more than anything, they don't want so when you did our town hall, there's 1,500 people streaming that. We have a huge community of people who are learning this because there's nowhere else for them to go. So that's what Rocket was trying to be for them.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Nick. And I'm I'm so glad we we connected, and it's it's really gonna be exciting, exciting journey, and I'm looking forward to it. So that's our story. Yeah, thank you. That's our story, folks. We're sticking with it. Follow us, download all of my episodes, it helps the analytics, and and and that's it. God bless overnight. I'll see you in the next exciting episode of How to Win Big at Business. Thank you.