Episode 266 – Joe Rare

Richard Matthews: what do you think your superpower in business is?
Joe Rare: Delegating my ability to actually pass on, like very critical activities that is absolutely required for the business to succeed. I am very effective at delegating to whether it be somebody who knows very little about our business whether it’s somebody you know internal that knows a lot I think that’s something it was really hard in the beginning but I was always okay, Like just got to just like I got to try and then it’d be okay with the failure and I think another you know kind of a level to the superpower is the ability to allow people the latitude to fail and allow people to go learn a lesson and so you know I have a motto we have a motto within the business it’s like fail fast go make a mistake now there’s no excuse for making that same mistake a bunch of times in a row it’s just stupid but go make a mistake go try something if you’re not making mistakes you’re not trying hard enough.
[00:00:00]
Richard Matthews: Hello and welcome back to the hero show. My name is Richard Matthews. Today I have the pleasure of having on the line, Joe rare, Joey there.
Joe Rare: Yeah, I’m here.
Richard Matthews: Awesome. I didn’t accidentally rhymed there Rare. And are you there?
Joe Rare: I thought you did it on purpose.
Richard Matthews: No, it did not, but you do have a Rare name. So that one I did on purpose, but,
Joe Rare: There we go.
Richard Matthews: So what I want to do before before we get too far into this, I always like to do a brief introduction for our audience. They know who you are and then we’ll just dive into your story. So Joe Rare is an underground serial entrepreneur, investor, outsourcing expert, father, and husband currently owns four digital companies, five wedding venues, and real estate investment properties.
Joe’s journey began with door to door product sales business, which grew from a team of 2 to 40 employees in under two years. He later sold that company after 27 months, but his passion for sales never dimmed. He discovered that his life works what it would be, which is building digital businesses.
The road was definitely made of dirt with a lot of potholes. There were failed businesses in the early days, but he took the failures and learned to create wins. He has since built multiple seven figure companies and built a strong and growing real estate portfolio. And, [00:01:00] you focus on helping small to medium sized businesses around the world while working from the comfort of his home in Montana, enjoying big sky country with his family.
He’s an investor and looks to find projects that he can use his marketing leverage to impact growth profitability. All of his companies are being fully run by his virtual assistants.
So what I want to start off with then Joe is who you are now. What are you famous for? Like, what do you do? You know, who do you serve?
Like what’s the main sort of like crux of what you offer in the marketplace?
Joe Rare: Yeah. So, I’m the outsource guy and so, kind of my, I guess claim to what I call underground fame has been that I build businesses that run without me. And so I have virtual assistants, my core business level nine virtual is a virtual assistant services business. It’s the biggest business that we have, and that is 95 to 97% run completely by virtual assistants overseas in the Philippines.
And so we recruit from the Philippines and South America and you know, a few other places, [00:02:00] but for the most part, the team that actually operates the company is in the Philippines. And so what I’ve become known for is the ability to build a business, create a process that we can replicate over and over.
So I did it once with one business and I thought, Oh my God, I wonder if I could do that with this other thing. And then I did it again and then I went, Oh, I wonder if I could do it with this other thing. And then I did it again and then the history is a little off. We do have six companies now and and they’re completely run by virtual assistants.
And so that’s really what my core kind of what I’m known for and who we serve is pretty much all small businesses. We have a huge footprint in the agency space simply because agencies are very well known and using virtual assistants. And so, it was kind of an easy lean to for us to get in.
And so that’s really who we serve the most. And any small business that has tasks that they keep thinking in their head, I need to get these done. And then they never get them done, which is most small business owners. That is our target market. We take things off your plate. We give you your time back.
And so our focus is like you [00:03:00] can see in the background, get more done, increased profit and for your time. And that’s it.
Richard Matthews: I have to say, I love that we run an agency, so we run an agency called Push Button Podcasts and are the overwhelming majority of our team is in the Philippines. And so we’ve got that and we have a few U S employees as well. But the overwhelming majority of our staff is in the Philippines and I don’t know, but we don’t generally call them virtual assistants because we hire them all full time on staff. But it’s the same thing, right? They’re virtually working, our whole office and team is virtual. And
Joe Rare: You know, we stuck. It’s interesting that you brought that up because I have wrestled with the term virtual assistants for years and years, and in our case, we actually provide the service to the market. And the hard part is we’ve tried everything from virtual staff, but now because of COVID, everybody thinks that’s just somebody here who’s just not going to come into the office. They’re just going to be at home and but they still work within the company.
And so virtual staff had became it to, Oh, meaning, you know, there’s a lot of people who have tried like online Filipino specialists and they’ve tried all of these different names, but the [00:04:00] problem is that the market as a whole knows the term virtual assistant. And there is a correlation to what that means.
So us as a service provider saying, Hey, we can help you hire somebody who is a virtual assistant to work in your business under X, Y, Z role. That’s the only reason we still use the term. Is because the market knows it and instead of trying to reframe the markets, you know, understanding and reeducate them and create a different, you know, work phrase.
We just decided to stick with what people know and it’s worked. So that’s
Richard Matthews: Yeah. And I get that. And we, we actually, I use the term virtual assistant when we’re looking for people. I said, Hey, we’re looking to hire a virtual assistant, but then we bring them on. We just call them staff, right? You’re on our
Joe Rare: A 100%. Yep. That’s how our team is as well. Yeah.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. Cause you know it’s what the market calls your staff in other countries. Right? And you know, as we’re getting more into it in our company, you’re starting to learn about things like employer of record and other things we can have have, what do you call it? Like partial ownership of the [00:05:00] company and those kinds of things.
There’s all sorts of other stuff, like, as you start getting more into it, you realize it’s a lot more than an assistant, there’s a lot more things that, that happened there. But to your point, the market calls them virtual assistants. So that’s what you call them in the marketplace. If you’re
Joe Rare: Well, it’s funny if we’re trying to recruit. Yeah. If we’re trying to recruit somebody to we would have to call it, you know, Hey, virtual assistant, we’d have to go find a virtual assistant to bring them in and let them work in our business because that’s what they call themselves. Until they get a role and then they go, well, okay, now I’m an operations director, I’m a project manager, I’m a media buyer, whatever. But yeah that’s exactly it.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So you said you have six companies, so I see level nine there. What are the other ones?
Joe Rare: Yeah. So we have a wedding booking system, which is my marketing agency that serves wedding venues. And we have a SAS product on the backend. But we do full, you know, for the most part, full service, marketing, advertising, and kind of sales opportunities for wedding venues specifically. And so I had that business before level nine virtual and [00:06:00] level nine virtual actually started because we used to serve.
We used to provide virtual assistants to our marketing agency clients. And then we said, well, you know, we keep giving these, you know, the secrets away, why don’t we just build a business around it? And so we did.
So obviously that then level nine virtual came around as we were traveling through, you know, kind of the COVID era and we were looking for a new place to live, we were doing some traveling and we noticed that campgrounds.
Are notorious for having horrible marketing and unless they’re owned by when you’re a full time traveler. So, you know, this, right? And unless it’s a big ownership, it’s a KOA or it’s a thousand trails, they’re terrible marketing. And so as we were traveling around a lot, we were trying to decide where we were going to move. We kept running into the same thing.
We don’t know anything about this campground, this RV park, and we were trying to find places to stay. And it was driving me so crazy. I’m like, you know, I think there’s an opportunity here. And so we created a little landing page. I had my team do it.
And then as we were going, we just started calling RV parks and campgrounds and saying, Hey, you know, we were going to book with you, but we can’t understand [00:07:00] this, and this about your business. Would you like some help? We actually do that.
And then after we got, a bunch of clients on board and we had a bunch of campgrounds. We were doing marketing for campgrounds. We then built campground digital, which we still haven’t even like fully built a brand around it. We still use the same landing page that we always have, and we still serve about 30 clients currently and they’re on autopilot. And so the team runs that so that’s three.
Then we have a visitor match, which is an identity resolution, it’s a data provider, data service. And so everybody’s trying to get eyeballs to their website and they get traffic to the website. 75, 80% of every single visitor is going to bounce off the site.
We have the ability to match through pixel matching, IP matching and a bunch of other data points we can match. The person who visited and left your site to an actual user profile that exists in data somewhere, right? Maybe they opted in to have their data sold from Netflix or Hulu or Bank of America [00:08:00] or the mortgage company or credit card, whoever, and that data sold it’s aggregated and all that stuff.
And then we match against that to create profiles. And so we can increase your lead flow simply by matching against people who visit your website, who left. So we call them anonymous website visitors. And then we identity match them, give you the profile of the person and you can run your marketing back to them, upload them into the ad platforms.
So that’s visitor match. So what’s that for? And then we have yeah, and then we have flat rate well, flat rate dispatchers, which is a, freight dispatching company. I know nothing about freight dispatching, but my business partner in the thing came to me and he said, you know, Hey, I got this great idea.
You know, let’s get into dispatching. And I’m like, I don’t think you can just become a nine one one dispatcher. And he goes no. Like freight. And I’m like, I still don’t know what you mean. And he’s like, all these trucks that are driving around, there was somebody who coordinated them picking up the load and then dropping it off, that’s a dispatcher.
And I’m like, Oh, [00:09:00] interesting, what am I going to do with that? And he says, we’ll have the team in the Philippines do it. And I’m like, is that even possible? And so next thing you know, we’ve got a business where we do freight dispatching. And then the last one is that we have a SAS product that works within our marketing agency.
And so technically, I guess it’s five now, cause we kind of, rather than having them decoupled, we actually merge them. And so wedding booking system has its own SAS product market automation. It’s a white label. And then we sell that independently is why it kind of seems like six businesses.
So there you go. So those are
Richard Matthews: And then you also have your real estate investing portfolio, which is sort of like a business as well.
Joe Rare: Oh, that’s its own. Yeah. That’s its own business.
Richard Matthews: So,
Joe Rare: And kind of
Richard Matthews: Say
Joe Rare: Of those, yeah, as I say, each of those independent, you know, pieces of real estate sometimes act as their own, you know, business, each one of them. So it becomes a lot. Yeah.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, so when people say serial entrepreneur, what they mean is you.
Joe Rare: Yeah, pretty much, or I think they also use the term like nutcase, like crazy.
Richard Matthews: That works too. I still just have the one business. And [00:10:00] you know, once we get around to making it profitable every month, we might start talking about more, but right now that’s where we’re.
Joe Rare: Go. Yeah.
Richard Matthews: So what I want to talk about then is your origin story, right? Every good comic book hero has an origin story, whether that’s the thing that made them into here they are today. And we want to hear that story. Were you born a hero or were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you think, you know what?
I can start a business in six or seven different categories. No problem. Oh, where did you start a job and eventually become an entrepreneur? Basically, where’d you come from?
Joe Rare: So, you know, I’m like, where did it start? And that’s a tough question. It came from a realization that I don’t think I fully realized until I was older, but it still struck me when I was a kid. And so I had to be, I don’t know, nine or 10 years old and a friend of mine, his dad used to take us out.
I grew up in Northern California and he used to take us to Oakland A’s baseball games in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the week though, like on a weekday. And it always blew my mind. I’m like, because everybody, I know their parents are working. My parents are working. And I’m like, so how is this guy able to just pack it?
Like he would just take us to games all the time. And I’m like, first of all, you have the money [00:11:00] to do it because we didn’t second, you can take the time off in the middle of the week while everybody else is working. And it just like blew my mind. And I didn’t realize how much of an impact that had on me until later, you know, I was finishing high school.
And we were taking a road trip to go visit my grandparents in Canada in Winnipeg, which is, you know, of North Dakota and Minnesota. And We drove from Northern California all the way across, you know, Nebraska, then up through South Dakota and onward. And during that time, I read the book, rich dad, poor dad.
And I think during that trip, I read it about four times and I was a teenager, but it immediately stuck with me and something to do with understanding, like my childhood, you know, that friend’s dad and that, and the concept of not building wealth for other people, but doing it for yourself really hit home.
And so that’s where I said, I remember distinctly, we were in Minnesota doing something like going to Walmart or something. And I remember saying to myself [00:12:00] flat out. I will not build somebody else’s wealth and I will create my own. And it was from then on, I knew that I was going to be an entrepreneur and I literally dropped out of college to go build businesses.
And that’s how I started my first business and sold it two and a half years later or I think we were at 27, 28 months. But that’s how it started.
Richard Matthews: That’s really cool, I had a similar experience. My dad brought home a copy of rich dad, poor dad for me. And I was like nine or 10 years old. One of his friends at work was like, I think your son would enjoy this. And so they brought it home, had a little sticky note on it. It was like, here, I think you’d enjoy this kind of thing.
And I did the same thing. I read the book four times in one evening at that age. And like the next morning I was like, dad, I read the book like four times cover to cover. He was like, what?
Joe Rare: That’s crazy, that’s great.
Richard Matthews: And so, yeah. And it started me on that whole journey. And, you know, they did everything from starting my first, like, candy wholesaling business on campus at like 13 to I paid my way through college as a wedding photographer and started a marketing agency after college.
I dropped out of college as well. About six weeks before college was done too. I could probably, I could go back and get a degree like six weeks later, but I was [00:13:00] like, I just didn’t care, and you know, the rest is history.
Joe Rare: You know. Yeah. It’s funny, actually. I mean, kind of a fun little fact is Rich Dad Porta was the first book that I actually ever fully read in my entire life. So even through school, I would never read a whole book. I would only skim it and I would like figure out what I needed to do to pass the test.
But I hated reading as a kid. That book got me hooked into like education. But even then, when I went off to college, I still wouldn’t read the books that I was supposed to be reading. I would read books about business. And then that didn’t help me do well in college. And so I’m like, well, I went to school to play basketball, but I’m five 11 and I’m not really going to play.
And so I, you know, after I sat the bench for a year, I was like, all right, I think I’m over it. But so anyway, that
Richard Matthews: See I discovered early with my son, he’s not a reader either, but he likes the audible. And so we started getting him an audible subscription about like nine or 10 years old, and he’s had it for several years now and he gets credits every month. And I just tell him every other credit needs to be spent on a, you know, business leadership book.
And he’s read everything, like almost everything in the rich dad series. [00:14:00] He’s read all of Trump’s books, like art of the deal and and Midas touch and, you know, the richest man in Babylon and several other things. And I’m like that’s how we got him young is get him into audio
Joe Rare: That’s right. You have to, I mean, it’s like you can either send them to public school and they get indoctrinated with one thing or you homeschool like you are. And we do a homeschool hybrid and or we indoctrinate them ourselves into our way of thinking and a school isn’t going to teach our kids entrepreneurship, but I will teach my kids to be entrepreneurs.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. Get a lot more freedom that way. At least a portion of it anyways. So I want to talk then about your superpowers, right? Every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s, you know, the fancy flying suit made by your genius intellect or the ability to call out thunder from the sky, or if you’re Superman, super strength.
In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with. Where you developed over the course of your career that really energize all of your other skills. And the way I like to frame it for my guests, if you look at all the skills that you’ve developed over your career, there’s probably a common thread that sort of ties all those together.
So with that sort of framing, [00:15:00] what do you think your superpower in business is?
Joe Rare: Delegating. My ability to actually pass on, like very critical activities that is absolutely required for the business to succeed. I am very effective at delegating to whether it be somebody who knows very little about our business, whether it’s somebody, you know, internal that knows a lot.
I think that’s something it was really hard in the beginning. But I was always okay, I got to just like, I got to try and then it’d be okay with the failure. And I think another, you know, kind of a a level to the superpower is the ability to allow people the latitude to fail and allow people to go learn a lesson.
And so, you know, I have a motto, we have a motto within the business. It’s like, fail fast, go make a mistake. Now, there’s no excuse for making that same mistake a bunch of times in a row. It’s just stupid, but go make a mistake, go try something. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.
You’re not doing enough and innovating and doing all those things. So I have no issue [00:16:00] with giving massive leeway and putting somebody in a position where they may fall on their face, but when they come out of it, they’re going to be unstoppable. And so I would say that, that kind of package is my superpower.
Richard Matthews: I love that, I know, one of our core values that I’ve got listed in our our handbook is failure are the stepping stones to success. And we talk about that on all of our company meetings is like, Hey, you know, the purpose of failure is to basically pave the road for success.
And you know, the only reason it doesn’t work is if you repeat the same mistake. Right? So if you adjust your processes, you fix things, you learn from them, then that’s how you achieve things is with failure. So I love that.
And I’m curious, my next sort of like question, just to dive a little bit deeper into that is I know delegating is a hard thing, and it’s something that, like, I kept my business really small for a really long time because I didn’t know how to let go of things, and so the biggest question I learned to ask myself that changed everything for me was, it was [00:17:00] a a mentor of mine and he was like, you just, like, when you’re leave here, go and hire someone.
And I was like, I can’t hire someone, I don’t have the money for it. And he was like, no, you don’t understand. Do you absolutely have to hire someone to do this thing? And he’s like, just go home and do it. I vacillated on that for like three months before I actually did it. And the shift for me, the perspective on the other side was realizing that the question I was always asking myself is, should I do this myself, or should I hire someone else to do it?
And that is a poor person’s question. Because the answer is always, I should do it myself. Because I can do it better, I can do it cheaper, and I can do it faster. And what I realized when I hired someone, what my mentor was trying to get me to do, is when I hired someone and they were on my staff full time, the question I shifted to asking, instead of, should I do this myself or should I hire them, is what do I have on my plate that I can take off and give to them? Right?
Give to someone else. And then you know, there was that big realization on the other side of like, Oh, I’ve got twice as much resources available to me, which significantly outweighs whatever benefits of better, cheaper, faster comes from me doing it myself, because now I’ve got 18 people doing [00:18:00] that kind of stuff.
It doesn’t matter how good or fast I am, I cannot outperform 18 people.
Joe Rare: Yeah I love that you know, that concept because delegating and people releasing responsibility onto other people is really challenging. It’s hard for people, even the simplest of things. And so we all have a laundry list of things that are in our mind that we go, we need to get all these things done. But, who’s going to do it better than me?
Well, that’s a really poor person’s, I guess question to ask is who can do it better than me? Because the reality is that who’s going to get it done is the question. And if you were to be dead honest with yourself, the majority of that list that’s going on, you are not going to complete.
And so I always like, you know, one of the things where we really scaled the business that I love to tell this to people who are trying to understand delegating and releasing responsibility is I said, look, zero people on this planet can sell my services better than me. Nobody can, like I am charismatic in the process of sales.
Like I really understand what we do. I can find the pain points that somebody’s struggling with. I’m going to find my way in [00:19:00] and I’m going to close more sales than literally anybody, no matter how good of a salesperson they are, like my thing, like I’m the best at it and because I’m the best at it, that was really hard to let go.
And that was one of the last things that I was able to let go of was sales, until I come back to the same methodology I have with everything else, which is, yeah, except if somebody’s half as good as me. But I had three of them, the three of them combined are way better than me at my best in volume.
And so they may close 50% and I would close a hundred because I’m awesome. The three of them now close 150% and they’re better than me. And no matter what I could do, I can’t do the volume that they can do. And so then I go, well, what if we had 10? I’m like, what if we had 10 only closing 20%?
They’re still closing two times more than me and they suck. Now imagine if they were decent, you know? And so coming through that realization and going like, Oh my God, like I held myself back from [00:20:00] massive growth. All because I just sat around going, but I need to be the one doing the sales. And so that was like the last leg that I passed off.
And then all of a sudden it was like, okay, all the businesses are hands off. Now I don’t operate them. And then as soon as I got that going, then it was like, Hey, here’s the full process. This is how we build, this is how we replicate, this is how we can do this with anything.
Richard Matthews: I could not agree more, it was the biggest realization for me and it was really striking for me because like the first month that I had someone full time on my staff, I was like, I don’t know how I’m going to pay for them. And after like four weeks, I was like, Oh, that’s how you pay for them.
And now we’ve got 18 people on staff and I was just doing math earlier with my wife, cause we run a podcast post production company. And so we help produce the podcast videos and the blog posts and social media content that gets published out, and I was just doing it for the number of episodes that we’ve produced a little over 32,000 pieces of content that’s gone onto social media for ourselves and for our clients over the last couple of years.
Which is insane, but also, I couldn’t do that at my, [00:21:00] like, the amount of time that it would take me to do all of that work would be insane. I couldn’t do it. And yet our team is producing that. So there’s something to that volume play. And I’m at the same point right now where I was like, it was about two months ago, I was the only one doing sales.
And I was like, I’m going to strangle the business by being the only one who does sales. So we hired our first salesperson. And I’m really looking forward to like, we’re trying to get his calendar full this month and next month and whatnot. And then, you know, I get to a point where we can hire 10, 15 salespeople and I’m like, it doesn’t matter how good they are, like how good I versus how good I am if they will take the calls and do the things and, you know, not lie to our people and, you know, over promise what we can do.
Like, that’s pretty much our biggest danger is to getting people to say things we can’t do. But like, other than that we can grow.
Joe Rare: I know there’s only upside. Yeah. There’s only upside for you. And you know, if you get really focused on just having really good sales conversations with your team and actually like, okay, so how are your calls, you know, go back and listen to their calls, you know, hear what they [00:22:00] said, how they said it, whether their timing was off, how they overcame an objection, like all of those things.
And if you actually do that religiously, and you make that part of like, I’m still part of sales for now. And you do those things and you do those things and they’re going to get so much better, so much faster. And then all of a sudden they don’t need you. And now it’s like, okay, now you’ve got the humming machine there.
And so that was really helpful in the beginning for me. Now I have a sales manager. Who’s like, he can train a team in a minute.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. I am looking forward to that point because, man my goal forever has been, I call it the bus rule, which is kind of morbid, but like, I want the business to survive me getting hit by a bus.
Joe Rare: A 100%. Absolutely. We have that conversation all the time. What happens if Joe gets hit by a car? Yeah that’s the question we ask ourselves at all.
My wife asked that question. What do we do if Joe gets hit by a car and it’s like, all right, we have everything covered, don’t you worry.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. And I said we’re not there yet, but we’re getting there. Right? And I have a whole list of like, one of our things in our project management system is like all of our standard operating [00:23:00] procedures. And one of the little fields on it is who owns these processes.
And the goal is to get it so that Richard doesn’t own any of the processes anymore. And that’s the ultimate sort of thing. So I’m like, I own nothing. I want someone else on the team to own all of them.
Joe Rare: Look at it in the same way you look at like, assets and stuff, right? You own nothing but control everything and you should have the exact same strategy in the business where you don’t own it. I mean, the greatest is when you get told, there’s a new process that was built.
You don’t even know what it is or what it’s for. And then you find out and you’re like, that was pretty cool. Like they thought that up, they engineered it, they put it into practice and then they executed on it. And look at that, and we had one that just happened literally this morning. And I watched it happen via Slack, like in real time, all these people talking to each other.
Then, you know, all these things happen, these moving parts hit, you see the conversation happening over here in our marketing tool. And then all of a sudden we see the end result exactly how the SOP says it’s supposed to [00:24:00] be. And I was like, I had nothing to do with that. That was pretty awesome. And I get excited about that.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. That’s where my goal is, I want to be able to take a week, two weeks, a month off and come back to a business that’s bigger than what I left it.
Joe Rare: Yeah. When we moved to Montana, it was a huge transition, like my wife has never lived anywhere except where she’s lived. And like I was a nomad before I met her. So I’ve lived everywhere, I don’t care, I’ll live in my car if it didn’t matter to me. And then we picked up our kids and we moved our kids and you know, decided that, okay, it was time for a huge change.
And I thought, okay, well, one of the things that I need to do is I need to be very present, I need to be around because it’s a big transition. And so I took 10 months off and I didn’t work for 10 months. And I checked in about once a month and the business doubled that year.
And so I went, Oh, wow, they really don’t need me. And it was like a really big eye opener. And so then I was able to kind of rise above that and go, okay, where do I fit in this now? Now that I’m not in the business, like, [00:25:00] where do I really fit? And it was as a strategic advisor and an investor. And so, you know, I look at myself more as like a board.
I sit on the board, right? And I oversee the business and the direction we want the company to go. And then we say, okay, great. What resources do we have to deploy? And it was really cool to be
Richard Matthews: That makes a lot of sense.
Joe Rare: Yeah. They don’t need me.
Richard Matthews: So,
Joe Rare: And I probably get in the way a
Richard Matthews: Here’s my question and I’m sure the burning question a lot of our audience minds is, how do you go from solo to, you know, a board advisor in your company? What does that path look like? What’s like, I know it’s a long sort of meandering path, but what are sort of your, if you could break them down your, I guess, major milestones to accomplish that goal?
Joe Rare: Well, the cool part of it is we replicated it in a bunch of times with different businesses, and so it kind became just a very simple process. And so if I were to say I was going to start something from scratch right now, what we would do is first create proof that somebody is going to buy the thing that we’re [00:26:00] going to sell.
And so, I would literally just me, I would go to the market and say, Hey, I have this service, I have this product, whatever it is. You know, give me money for it and then we’ll give it to you. Right? And so we don’t have a fulfillment process yet. What I’m doing is I’m selling something that doesn’t exist and I would sell the concept and go, you know, for example, visitor match.
We knew the concept existed and I had access to the data. But we didn’t have any way to fulfill it. And so we went out and we sold and boom, we got a bunch of clients. And then I went, okay, now what? And now we turned around and we go, okay, great. Let’s go ahead and figure out our fulfillment mechanism and how we’re going to do it.
Then we teach that to a team, we teach that either if one person can handle it, fantastic. If multiple people need to be there, let’s put those people in place. And literally we hire those people. And those are the first people that we hire somebody to do fulfillment, because the most important part for anybody who’s probably solo is that you can’t turn and do fulfillment and stop selling.
And [00:27:00] that’s the cycle and the trap that most people get into. They sell, they turn around and fulfill, then they go back to sell. They forgot about their clients, a client drops off. They close a new one, they’re fulfilling go. They drop another one off, they close to like, and it becomes this wheel where they just like, ah, I can’t get past, you know, 10 clients. And that’s super common.
Well, so what we do is we just put a fulfillment team in place and we say, okay, great. Somebody else is going to do this process and they’re going to fulfill it. And the cool part is when we bring them in the beginning, we actually build the fulfillment process with them. So who do you think knows it from the very base? They do. So who creates the SOPs? They do.
And then they can teach the next person and so forth. And typically somebody within that group, that original group, will end up becoming something like an operations director down the road. So then I get to focus on revenue generating activities. We keep bringing in more clients, they fulfill the service and we go, okay, great.
We have service fulfillment, we’ve [00:28:00] got sales, let’s get somebody to kind of manage, you know, client relations, customer, you know, satisfaction like that. And then we can kind of move on and pass off probably sales, right? And so that’s the smallest mechanism that we use to launch something from zero.
And as soon as sales, I get to step out. Now I’m kind of looking around going, all right, we’ve got a fulfillment team. We’ve got customer relations, we’ve got sales. All right. Now who can be the person that orchestrates all of that? And that’s operations. And then as you get more people, then you can get HR.
And as you actually have some money, you get finance and then you can literally step out of the business. And that’s how we do it over and over again.
Richard Matthews: I love that. So we are we’re at that second stage, right? Where our team is building all the operations. I mean, we have the operations pretty much in place, but like the next part is getting the sales figured out and operations figured. But yeah, that’s pretty much the same thing that we started with.
And I’ve had people tell me I was crazy for building operations first. I was like, we had a couple of test clients that were like willing to pay us. And I was like, listen, I was like, we’re just going to stick [00:29:00] with these two clients until we have operate like the actual fulfillment side, like just nailed and yeah, that’s
Joe Rare: I’m more of a fire ready. Yeah, I’m a very much like a fire ready aim kind of guy. And so I’m like, Hey, let’s go ahead and shoot and find out, Oh crap, we hit something. Now what do we do? Like, does anybody know how to like gut this elk? Like we should figure this out. Right? We have no idea. And then like you figure things out on the run and that’s how we test everything and I think that what it’s given us the opportunity to do is go to fail a whole bunch of times fast.
I’m figuring out what the market will and won’t accept, do it unbelievably quick. And while we’re doing that and we’re trying and we’re actually making sales and fulfilling on service and we’re learning and doing all those things.
Most people are still trying to figure out what they’re logo is going to look like, and we just get way more done a lot faster because we’ll just go ask people to buy our stuff and most people sit back and they want to make everything perfect before they ask anybody anything. And I’m like, I don’t even care if we have a brand name, you know, visitor match when I launched that, the identity resolution [00:30:00] business, we launched that.
We had 30 clients before we had a business name. Like we just called it a anonymous website, visitor profiles or something. We were like, yeah, we’re just going to give you these things. It’s going to be great. And then we were like, well, shit, I guess we should probably build a brand around it. So then we built a business.
Richard Matthews: Push button podcasts brand we got from day one, but that was accidental because of a mastermind thing, but we didn’t get business cards for our events that we go to and speak at until five years in. Oh,
And we finally got business cards. And like some of these events that we’ve been to regularly, like the people knew us all.
And I was like, I finally showed up one of the events. I was like, look, I got business cards this time. And they’re like, Oh, you’re finally a real business. And I was like, yeah, it only took five years to become a real business.
And we’ll get, you know, cause that’s what everyone starts with it. They start with their logo and their business card without having a that’s proven in the marketplace or a product that’s proven in the marketplace. Right?
Joe Rare: Yeah. And I think, because of that a lot of people, they move a lot slower than they could, and then they think that, well, business takes a long time to make money and make profit. And it’s like, eh, or you’re just not asking enough people to buy your stuff. And that’s [00:31:00] probably the real issue.
Richard Matthews: More offers is always the solution.
Joe Rare: That’s right. Yep.
Richard Matthews: I had one of our mastermind buddies, he says more buy buttons. And he always spells it M O A R. So it’s like a roar more by buttons.
Joe Rare: Yeah. funny. That’s true. Well, yeah. And I mean, there was a lot of data for quite a while on landing pages and on sales pages and stuff like that. Like you increase the number of you know, buy now buttons and you just straight up increase sales.
You do nothing else. Don’t change the copy, don’t change the structure of the pages and you just end up with more sales. And I always think that’s so fascinating. I’m like, just so simple, but yet you know, Hey, make sure my copy’s right, sure I have the right image the right spot and all that.
Richard Matthews: Yeah. And for like a service business, like ours, the analogous to more buy buttons is literally just making more offers in the marketplace, talking to more people, getting more nose, you know, you have to get more of that exposure of here’s what our offer is and seeing what people respond to.
Joe Rare: Yep. Absolutely. Like you can’t learn unless you’re asking, right? You don’t know what the market wants unless the market [00:32:00] tells you. And so let the market tell you if they think your price is wrong, you’re going to find out real fast that your price is wrong. And so there’s nobody better to tell you anything than the people who are supposed to be your customers.
So I agree with you.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s take the the flip side then, right? So if your superpower is that delegation that you were talking about, the fatal flaw is, you know, the flip side of that coin, just like every Superman has his kryptonite or Wonder Woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad.
You probably have a flaw that’s held you back in your business. Something you struggled with. For me, I struggled with that perfectionism thing for a long time, right? It’s what kept me from hiring people forever and kept me from shipping. But I think more important than what the problem is, what the flaw is how have you worked to overcome it? So you continue to grow your businesses the way that you have.
Joe Rare: So my flaw is that I don’t like operating my companies. So it ends up perfectly aligning with the fact that I’m really good at delegating, but huge flaw to me is that I can get bored really fast. So the business grows, the business becomes profitable. We were making money, all [00:33:00] things are firing on all cylinders and I have no interest whatsoever.
So the challenge with that is when I’m in the middle of the business and I’m actually functioning within the business and I have a role within the business, I become a bottleneck and I actually cause issues in the business and I don’t let us grow.
And so my method is to use my superpower and delegate and put people in place so that I don’t have to be that part of it. And instead I could stay where my interest lies, which is like in the creation piece of it. I love the beginning. I love the projection of what could be coming. And I like to kind of, I’m a.
My wife would say like, you’re a Pisces. You’re a dreamer. And I don’t know anything about astrology, but I always kind of bring that up because it’s kind of funny. Yeah, I like the dream side of it. I like to talk about, okay, well, if the company’s here and we want it to go to here, how do we do that?
Like, what part of it needs to be there? And that’s the part that gets fun. It’s like, okay, cool. So how much money does that require? So what’s the capital allocation I need? [00:34:00] What’s the human capital allocation? You know, what might be the technology that’s going to be involved in that? And then I get to say, Hey, delegate, go, you guys go do it.
And then we get to check back and say, okay, cool. How did, how’s it going? And then we can redirect and do all that stuff. But yeah, my biggest flaw is probably that I get bored too easy.
Richard Matthews: Yeah I feel that really hard because I don’t know exactly what the the term is for it, but I really like having a problem to solve, and as soon as I’ve solved the problem, I no longer care about the solution.
Joe Rare: I think that probably aligns really well with what I mean. Yeah
Richard Matthews: Yeah. Because like, I will develop really cool software or serve, you know, like whatever the thing that is, that’s going to solve the problem.
And then our team is like, wow, that’s really amazing. I can’t believe you did that. But then like, it needs to, then it needs to get used. Right? And you know, someone needs to actually like operate the process regularly and I’m like, I don’t care. I should care, right? That’s the process that our staff is using, that our clients are getting their results from and all that stuff.
But I just don’t, because it’s not interesting anymore because I already solved it. And I want a new [00:35:00] problem to solve. And I struggle with that regularly, and so for me, I spent a long time struggling with that because I had that, and I didn’t pair it with delegation, so I just had delivery problems
And it wasn’t until I sort of learned how to do the delegation thing, and that’s not my superpower, I’m not great at it, I’m still learning how to do it well, but for me it’s been the big unlock is learning how to get the solutions that we develop into someone else’s, and to actually do the work regularly.
Joe Rare: Yeah. That is an absolute unlock. The moment you do that, like it really opens up opportunity.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, and I wish I was better at it, working on getting better at it all the time, but man, that’s it’s like a superpower all into itself that I’m a little jealous that you have, but you know, Some powers you’re born with and some of them you have to develop, right? So that’s what I’m working on.
Joe Rare: Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with developing skills, right? Like we can’t, you know, we gotta work on our tool chest, you know, keep filling that tool chest.
Richard Matthews: So I want to talk then a little bit about your common enemy, right? Every hero has an arch nemesis, right? It’s the thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world and the world of business we [00:36:00] like to put it in the context of your clients, right?
And so, you know, since you have so many businesses, let’s put it just directly in the level nine business and the clients that you serve there, and it’s a mindset or a flaw that you’re constantly have to fight to overcome so that you can actually get people the result that they came to you for in the first place.
So that, what do you think the common enemy is in providing virtual assistants to a marketplace who needs them?
Joe Rare: The common enemy is just as simple as this sounds, it’s somebody’s mindset. You know, there’s still a stigma around the concept of having somebody in a foreign country do certain things in their business. You know, in my company, my finance division, they handle payroll and we move a ton of money from my business account into all of our staff members.
You know, bank accounts in a foreign country, and I’m not the one pushing the buttons. It’s somebody in a foreign country who’s actually pushing the buttons. They have [00:37:00] access to run payroll and spend my money.
And, but that was a mind shift that I had to get myself to the point where it’s like, okay, well, how do we know they’re trustworthy? How can I give up things? Like one of the simplest things is giving up your email inbox. And most people can’t do it, they won’t do it.
And they think for some reason that this is so private and it’s theirs. And if you really step back and think about it, there is almost nothing that comes through your email inbox that is so dire important that somebody else can’t check it for you first.
Like there’s almost nothing. And it took me a long time to kind of get to terms with it. But I tell you what, one of the most liberating things that you could do is never check your email, like at all.
So everybody knows Martina, my executive assistant, she checks my email. I get told what I’m supposed to pay attention to.
So if somebody sends something and it doesn’t seem important to her because she knows who I am and it doesn’t seem important enough, [00:38:00] like she’ll either reply as me, she’ll delete it, or she’ll let me know the needs to get, you know, that I need to pay attention to it. But it’s everybody’s mindset that there’s just this, like, you, you can’t delegate certain things to, whether it be overseas or even just somebody not sitting next to you.
And so I think it’s improved a lot because of the virtual staff world where everybody went and worked from home. I think it improved a ton. I would bet almost every single day of the week, my staff gets hit with, can I really have somebody else check that for me? Can I really have somebody do this in my business? Can I, can somebody really do that? Can I trust them to do that? That mindset is the one major hurdle we still overcome. Every single day of the week and it’s crazy.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, and I feel that I just, like, two months ago, and I’ve been running business stuff for more than a decade, two months ago, finally let go of my email inbox. And we got an email course on, like, how to outsource your inbox to [00:39:00] someone else, and I had my executive assistant take it over, and it’s the greatest thing ever.
I get hundreds of emails a day. And He just, once a day, goes through and processes all of it, and I get one little section that says needs action. It’s the stuff that I need to do something with, and he does everything else. And I’m like, it is the greatest thing that has ever happened. And like, from that, like, one of the things is we have a, you know, you’ve mentioned being a nomad. We’re nomadic.
We have a virtual real mailbox too. So like physical mail that comes through. And, you know, just like anything else, we get an email that notifies us when a piece of mail comes in. And he’s managing our physical mail. So, you know, scans the stuff when it comes through, forwards it to our address wherever we’re at locally. Like, I don’t even manage my physical mail anymore. And, man it’s good.
Joe Rare: It’s so awesome. Yeah I know that the getting rid of your inbox, even at your physical mailbox, cause I’ve done the virtual thing before as well. It’s like the coolest thing. It’s like, are you kidding me? Like, I don’t have to check my email. How much time do people get lost [00:40:00] in their email inbox, right?
It pings, they stop doing the work that they’re doing. They go in, they jump in their email, they send a response, check another couple messages, send another response. 30 minutes went by, they’re totally derailed from the task that they were on. Now they’re going to kind of come back, but they’re also going to pick up their phone.
They’re going to surf social for a minute. Then they’re going to kind of get back on track and, you know, 45, 50 minutes go by that they just burned versus again, you and I, we look once I look at a Slack message, which literally is, Hey, here’s what’s going on in your inbox that needs your attention.
It’s all sitting in the inbox. If I want to go check it out, but I get it in Slack and then I review the Slack and I just tell her, I just tell my assistant what to say to who, to when done, and that’s it. And then she sends it on my behalf.
Richard Matthews: Yeah I need to do that. So.
Joe Rare: Yeah. It’s sweet.
Richard Matthews: We don’t use Slack. We use Google chat workspace. And so like, I have my own little, like Richard’s personal space and I’m like, my goal now that I’ve sort of [00:41:00] seen the light, so to speak, is I’m trying to get it. anything that anyone needs to communicate with me doesn’t hit me first.
It hits, Someone else first, and then it ends up in the one thing that I want to check, which is the one little Google Workspace chat. And I want nothing, like I want that one little thing. So if something pings in my Google Workspace chat, then I know I should pay attention to that. And I don’t want to check.
I don’t want to check like our, you know, twist messages or Slack messages or Facebook messenger or LinkedIn messages or the CRM message things that comes in. Like there’s so many people that want to talk to you and the more and more you know, I said, we’ve only gotten a couple of things off of the plate now.
So far it’s been email and then the physical mail, but I’m like, okay, now that I’ve got a taste of what it’s like, I’m like, okay, how do I manage it? So that everything is not touched by me and it’s touched by someone And yeah that’s the ultimate goal.
Joe Rare: Yeah. Well, it’s been really empowering. And I think it’s had a huge impact into the businesses as well, is that as I’ve removed myself from all of those kinds of things, I just have more time than anybody, right? I have tons of time [00:42:00] and so I can turn to my team and we’re running a decent sized business.
And so it’s important that nobody feels like they don’t have the resources that they need. Now they have their layers of management and leadership and so forth within the company.
However, what’s been amazing is the ability to tell anybody in the company, Hey, I’m available for you. Like if you need me, I’m available for you.
And every single person, no matter what level of the company they exist and they operate, they know for a fact that they can reach out to me direct if they ever needed anything. And I think that has created so much more just such a strong culture within our companies. It never gets abused because I don’t check it first.
And if it is something that’s just not necessary, my assistant will respond on my behalf. And, but what it’s done is it’s created this opportunity where I have so much available time that I can actually give people my attention if it’s necessary. And that’s been pretty powerful for our culture.
Richard Matthews: That’s really cool. [00:43:00] Yeah we’re small enough that I don’t have to worry about that too much. I’m still available to everyone, but yeah, I like keeping that going. And yeah the goal for me is to get out of everything. And like my other big win on the operation side was getting out of all the operation side, the actual service delivery.
And I know there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that see this happen is like the customers will ask you, they’ll ask you things like, how’s this going? How’s the other thing going? What’s going on with this? What’s going on with the other thing? And starting to retrain all of my clients to the point now is like, I literally don’t know, like, if you want a good answer, ask your operations manager, right? Ask your show manager, like, ask person because I’m going to have to go ask them.
So if you want the you have their information, you have their phone number, you have their email, you have their Slack channel, like, if you ask me, it’s going to take you longer to get an answer than if you just ask them.
Joe Rare: Absolutely. Yeah. You want to be efficient? Yeah. Go to the source. That’s right. I’m not the source anymore. I know
Richard Matthews: Go to source, because that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go to the source. So that’s my goal. I want to know nothing except the things that I like doing. I like speaking on stage, I like getting up in front of a group of people and talking about what [00:44:00] we do. That’s fun for me.
Other than that, I don’t do anything else in the business.
Joe Rare: Yeah. I hear you.
Richard Matthews: So
Joe Rare: That’s awesome.
Richard Matthews: Cool. So I got just a couple more questions for you. I want to talk about, you know, if your common enemy is what you fight against, then you’re driving force is what you fight for, right? So just like Spider Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham, or, you know, Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information.
What is it that you are fighting for in your business, your mission, so to speak?
Joe Rare: So my mission is to provide opportunity for everyone around me within my company, clients, my family and to give them opportunity to actually experience freedom to experience whether, and freedom comes in so many different forms, but I’m very heavy into the concept of freedom. And to me, the highest value that I could possibly get is time.
So I weigh heavily into the time freedom side of things. Of course, financial resources provide more of that. But I also [00:45:00] like I heavily weigh into that for my clients. So when they come to us and that’s, you know, they’re looking for their business to grow. They’re looking to get things off their plate.
We’re going to support them in a multitude of different ways. One of the biggest things that I want to push and put on them is to give them the freedom that they thought of when they started their business. Cause nobody started their business was like, I cannot wait to work 15 hour days. Like, I can’t wait for that. Nobody’s doing that.
What they wanted was I’m going to be able to do my thing my way whenever I want. Right? And the truth is, no, you don’t. Now you’re married to your clients and your clients dictate your life. And so if we can help them get out of that and create freedom then, you know, my mission really is, you know, partially complete on the flip side of that, we have such a gigantic impact into the lives of our virtual staff, like their families.
You know, using like, for example, overseas work, right? Our dollar travels so much [00:46:00] further in their culture than it does in ours. So while we complain, our dollar is being devalued, right? It is still ungodly more valuable in their culture than it is and in their economy than it is here. And so the impact that our salaries create inside a household, is it’s still to this day blows my mind.
And then when we look and I find out like a few weeks ago, I found out one of our team members is mentioning somebody mentions them by name and I’m like, who’s that? You know? And they go, Oh, well, you know, that’s my wife. And, but they had a different last name. And I’m like, wait, what?
And I’m like, how many of your family members work with us? And he’s like, like nine. And I’m like, what? And it blew my mind to think that hiring one person led to the impact of nine households, you know, or eight households being employed for them, having the wherewithal to send their kids to school, cause they have to pay for school [00:47:00] to be able, you know, they live multigenerally generationally.
So they’ve got other family members live in. So one income could be impacting two and three different households at one time. And so I’ve got this mission on one side that I want to create massive freedom for my clients.
And I want my clients to feel the freedom that I have. And on the other side, the impact that we can create by employing people in the Philippines, as an example, it’s just mind blowing what we can accomplish. And I feel like we’re really doing well with that mission. And now it’s just, how do we keep it going?
How do we make it bigger? How do we create more impact? How do we provide more for more people?
Richard Matthews: Yeah, I love that. I know I’m sort of in the same boat. Just like on the family thing, we’ve got like my writer, for instance, she brought her dad. Her dad’s one of our writers now, and her husband is one of our virtual one of our post production people. And like my executive assistant, his girlfriend was like my best friend’s executive assistant. She trained him how to be a virtual assistant, I hired him.
And so, like, [00:48:00] they’re that’s another family. And like one of my post production specialists his wife’s working with us now, and so we’ve got like families over there and like one of the things that I keep track of is I keep track of the number of people for whom our revenue puts dinner in front of them on the dinner table, right?
Which is not our number of employees. It’s a significantly larger number.
Joe Rare: Yes. It’s remarkable. It, well, it still blows my mind. Yeah, it blows my mind when I find out, you know, one person’s working and they happen to be, you know, the only person who’s working in the entire household and they happen to work for us. And then I go, well, how many people like live in their home?
You know, and it’s like, there’s eight other people that live in the house. And it’s like, what? And our salary covers all of their life, for eight other people. And I’m like, I can’t fathom how it is now. Of course, that’s super normal and probably two thirds of the world, right? The multi generational living, like we’re the weird ones in the U.S where we separate from our parents and do all that.
But I still think it’s fascinating how much impact we can create by just [00:49:00] simply given somebody an opportunity. So I just want to do more of it.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, I love that. And yeah, we’re in the same boat. I’m really excited about growing our company from that side of it. And the mission to have, like, just what you do provides freedom. Like one of the things are the backside of our company. You always have like your business name, like our actual business names on our, you know, our DBA is push button podcast, but our business name is called five freedoms.
And the five freedoms are political freedom, time freedom, financial freedom, spiritual freedom, and location freedom. And the idea is essentially that you don’t have those areas of your life dictating what you can do, right? So political freedom is your government doesn’t tell you what you can or can’t do.
So, you know, the time freedom is you get to decide what to do with your time. Location freedom is you can decide where you do those things. Things financial freedom is your bank account doesn’t decide what you can do. And you know, so on and so forth through each of those. And that’s like one of the things that we talk about all the time.
And I even talked to my staff about it. I was like our staff all has, they all set their own hours. They all work for wherever they want to work. Right? And I was like, the only thing that I require is that you get the work done by the due dates that they’re due for. I don’t care when you do them or [00:50:00] how you do them or what goes on with it as long as the work gets done.
And so I was like you know, I have that freedom. Right? That’s why I built a business, but like we’re trying to build a business such that everyone who works for us has the same opportunities for those freedoms.
Joe Rare: Right. Makes sense. Yeah.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Joe Rare: That’s impressive. I love it. Yeah. I like the five freedoms. That’s cool.
Richard Matthews: Thank you. Got one more, maybe two more questions for you. This one is your practical portion of the show. I call it the hero’s tool belt. And just like every superhero has their tool belt with awesome gadgets, like their batarangs, their web slingers, or the laser eyes.
I’m going to talk about the top one, maybe two tools you couldn’t live without to run six different businesses. Could be anything from your notepad, your calendar, to your marketing tools, your product delivery, communication systems, something you think is essential to getting your job done that you play with every day.
Joe Rare: Number one is high level. So we use the marketing automation system high level. I was actually their very first paying customer. And so, I really dove in heavy, built everything on top of that platform. And [00:51:00] my team became the first team to even use it to service other people using it.
And it became a major milestone in how we ended up growing our businesses and what we ended up offering to the market. And so, high level will be the first thing that is absolutely necessary. And probably the last thing is just my iPad. And I know it’s like, I use it to like, I draw, you know, I draw sketch something when I have an idea and then I just literally share that to a designer and say, Hey, create this, here’s my concept.
I’ll do a recording, a voice recording over the top of it. Hey, here’s a landing page idea. I have, I want to test an idea and I want to go ask, you know, some people to buy this, you know, the thing that I’m going to probably do, here’s a sketch of what I’m trying to think I am not an artist, so I can’t draw at all.
So it’s stick figures and boxes. But then I pass that off to designers and they do that. I read most books, digital form or audio. So again, iPad is still there. Yeah, I mean, you know, calendars on it, like it’s a really effective tool for me. And so, yeah, I would say my iPad is my other [00:52:00] tool.
Richard Matthews: What’s funny about that is you know, I have a laptop and obviously I’m recording this on a laptop because, you know, the there’s some things that your iPad can’t do, but I ran an experiment a while back when I first getting into the whole delegation thing where I was like, you know, what I want to do is I’m going to, I close up my laptop and I stuck it in my closet.
I’m like, I’m not going to open it up for six months. And I’m only going to run off of my iPad because one of the things that’s really cool about an iPad is not really great at doing work product, but it is really good at doing delegation work.
And like keeping track of your team communications and delegating things to them, it is so much easier to force yourself into the delegation mode rather than actually doing things. Because anytime you try to do actual work on an iPad, you’re like, you get stopped by the limitations of that kind of a platform, right?
Rather than you know, a real computer, so to speak. And so I ran that experiment for six months and I was like, I just want to see how it affects my business and realized, you know, it was a really impactful sort of experiment to leverage using an iPad as a CEO manager role rather than a doer of work product role.
[00:53:00] And cause it just removes the temptation of like, I could just do this because you’ve got your computer open. And so, for me, that was really helpful. I realized that’s your superpower.
So you probably didn’t have that but for those of us who are listening, we’re like, want to try that. It’s a useful experiment and it’s a useful tool.
Joe Rare: So one other thing that actually I’ve noticed that, and I didn’t recognize it till you just started saying that’s actually pretty cool is when you’re doing things like on an iPad you maintain better focus, right? So like when I’m at home and I’m in my home office. I’ve got dual monitors, right?
You’re on a decently powerful computer. I’ve can open up multi screens. I can use Slack over here and email under Chrome and so forth. And I’ve 30 tabs open and all this stuff going on. In an iPad, you can run one app at one time for the most part, right? Like, for example, if I open Slack and I’m going to go through that, like Slack is open, if I’m going to open email’s open, that’s all. Right?
If I’m going to be drawing, I’m going to be doing my notes. That’s the only thing that’s open. There’s nothing to distract me and get me checking this other tab. And Oh my God, a ping just hit and all these things. Cause you turn [00:54:00] notifications off, like you’re good. And so, that is an interesting thing.
I actually hadn’t really thought about it, but it does help keep me focused. And so maybe that’s another reason that I like it because I can get easily distracted.
Richard Matthews: Yeah.
Joe Rare: I think that’s why I have six.
Richard Matthews: I feel that, right? I’ve got three displays in front of me. I’ve got this one in front of me. I got a display here. I’ve got the laptop there. I’ve got three displays in front of me, but man, having the the tablet is one of those things. It’s really useful. And I’ve also decided that the smaller tablet is the better one for the same reason, right?
The iPad
Joe Rare: I bet.
Richard Matthews: It forces you to like, it’s even harder to do actual work on it. So you do the little
Joe Rare: Right. Yeah.
Richard Matthews: Just management and delegation.
Joe Rare: Yeah. No, I hear you. That works.
Richard Matthews: So I got one last question for you and it’s about your guiding principles, right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code.
For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. And I learned recently that Spider Man always pulls his punches because he’s worried he’s going to kill someone.
So as we wrap up the interview, I want to talk about the top one or two principles that you use regularly in your life.
Maybe something that you wish you had known when you first [00:55:00] started out on your own entrepreneurial journey.
Joe Rare: Actually. One of the things that’s you know, I was kind of reviewing this question. I thought about How to kind of answer it. And the first thing that came to mind is like what I decided to go with. And really I have non negotiables and I think that like my strength and what kind of keeps me going is that when for example, I make a commitment to my kids.
Like, it’s happening, it doesn’t matter. Make a commitment to my wife, it’s happening. There is no going back once I give somebody my word, I will follow through and I will execute and I will do what I have to do. And I’ll go to the end of the earth to make sure that I fulfill my obligation that I committed to.
The same thing goes in my companies and so as an example you know, on the staff side, right? Because we kind of have two separate sides of level nine virtual. We have the virtual assistant side, where we actually have to recruit and retain virtual assistants, and then they work with our clients.
So then we have the client side, we have to go acquire clients and get them to pay a service so we can have both of these. So we have two sides to the business that we have to go get the thing to sell. [00:56:00] And So I have this same principle for both sides of it. And it’s completely around just integrity and somebody’s commitment.
And what the same guiding principle that I live by, which is a non negotiable. I do what I say. If I tell you I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it. You have to do the same thing. And that is a non negotiable in our culture. It’s something that I just straight up live by, the company has to live by it. Every virtual assistant has to live by it. And our clients have to stand up to it. They have to do it.
And so if a client tells somebody, you know, tells one of our staff members that something’s going to happen, they need to execute and they need to do it. And if they don’t, we’re going to call them on it.
And we’re going to make sure that we set our boundaries. And if that means we lose the relationship with the client, so be it. But our clients are going to respect the boundaries, the expectations and everything with our virtual assistants. And likewise, in the reverse, our virtual assistants will always do everything in their power to [00:57:00] execute what they say they’ll execute, put the business first, do the right thing in the best interest of the client, the company and so forth.
And at the same time with all of that, they will never fall short on their own values. And so, that’s what I would say is probably my guiding principles is like, we negotiables and it’s primarily around, you do what you say, you follow through, you go to the end of the earth to make sure that your word is the truth and I kind of make everybody around me do the same thing and I’m kind of like a one strike you’re out kind of guy.
So it’s like, you know, the rule? If you break the rule and we see that you broke it, not made a mistake, mistakes are fine, failures are fine.
Broke it. You broke your word. Like zero tolerance. So that’s one of my guiding principles. There we go.
Richard Matthews: Yeah, I like that. I like that zero tolerance for integrity. One of the things I find fascinating is, you know, we’re 260 some episodes into this podcast now, and I’ve asked that question to almost everyone. 98%of the [00:58:00] people have answered that some variation of integrity is the guiding principle for their business.
Which I’ve always found very interesting because the cultural narrative around entrepreneurship is that entrepreneurships are villains, right? That, you know, if you watch TV shows or movies or read books or watch any of the kids shows, the bad guy is always an entrepreneur. And, but like in the real world, actually talk to entrepreneurs, it’s exactly the opposite.
Joe Rare: That is so interesting. So I would take that integrity piece and I would layer on top of it, accountability, right? And being responsible for our own actions. And that is very entrepreneurial, right? Like us entrepreneurs, we know it’s all us.
Everything that happens in the company is my fault. Everything, good, bad, ugly, doesn’t matter. It’s my fault. And so, I think accountability, responsibility and making everybody stand true to what they say is so valuable. And so, yeah, those would be my guiding principles for sure.
Richard Matthews: If it’s not your fault, you can’t fix it.
Joe Rare: That’s true. Absolutely.
Richard Matthews: Awesome. So that I think is a [00:59:00] great place to wrap our interview. So I do finish every interview with a simple challenge. I call the heroes challenge, and I do this to help get access to stories that we might not find on our own.
So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network who you think has a cool entrepreneurial story?
Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story with us here on the hero show? First person that comes to mind for you.
Joe Rare: Rob Bailey. My buddy, Rob. Yeah. He was a mentor to me and he has a great story. He’s done fantastic in business. He’s a really good guy.
Richard Matthews: Awesome. Well, I’ll see if we can reach out, maybe get an introduction, get them on the show. They don’t always see us, but when they do, we get some cool interviews out of them. But here at the end of the interview, I always do our send off in comic books. There’s always the crowd of people who are there cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism.
So our analogous to that, as we close, is we want to know where can people find you if they want your help in the future, where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak. And more importantly than where, or who are the right types of people or businesses to reach out and ask for your help.
Joe Rare: Yeah. So if you’re an entrepreneur and you need help, just getting things off your plate, if you own a business and you need support and you’re open to the idea of outsourcing and leveraging virtual assistants and virtual staff please feel free to reach [01:00:00] out. Level9Virtual.com, on the top right corner. You can book a call with my team.
We’re also doing a promo when I get on a podcast, we want to let people dip their toe in the water, get a feel for really what we do, how we can support them. You can get a trial of 10 hours of our service for 92 bucks, so super cheap.
And you just go to Level9Virtual.com>/trial, and you can sign up. If you want to chat with our team first, you can do that too. But we can take projects off your plate, get them done for you very quickly. And you’ll learn all about it once you hit that page. So there you go.
Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on today, Joe, and sharing your story with us. We’ll make sure that the links are in the show description below this, wherever you’re watching the episode on.
Again, thank you so much for just coming on and sharing your story and just getting to hear a little bit about what you’ve done with your businesses.
Do you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before I hit this stop record button?
Joe Rare: Yeah. I think just go out and make some mistakes, learn some lessons and get some stuff off your plate.
Richard Matthews: Thank you very much. We appreciate having you here today.
Joe Rare: You got it.