The Hands-Off Entrepreneur's Playbook

My guest on this episode is rare by name and rare by nature. He's bucking the trend because he's running multiple businesses, but they're in different industries. And better still, he's actually not working in them. He's got virtual assistants running them for him. So it's going to be a great conversation because we're going to talk about how my guest today, Joe Rare, is building out companies that and how he's generating demand for the different companies in different verticals. I think you're gonna find this really, really interesting. Joe Rare is joining us from Montana. Joe Rare, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Look, it's wonderful to have you because you're Joe Rare, rare talent as well. Let's find out a little bit about this portfolio of businesses that you're running because Everyone these days is talking about niche, niche, niche, niche, and kind of become super expert at one thing and become known for one thing and one thing only. You're going against that trend. How are you doing that and why is it working?

I mean, the easiest explanation is that I build businesses for the intent of not operating them myself. I wanted to build I wanted to build companies that other people ran so you can have your management staff and you can have, you know, your different divisions and teams and leaders who run those teams and all that. And I've always looked at building businesses for the actual intent of creating freedom. And so I know that's like an entrepreneur's dream and that's what everybody thinks they're doing when they build a business. And unfortunately, I mean, the vast majority, probably almost all business owners don't actually get out of their business. They get stuck in it and they end up going down, you know, creating this amazing job, but they get to do things on their own terms. So that's, that's freedom in its own sense. I wanted time freedom. I wanted financial freedom. I wanted the ability to do what I want to do when I want to do it, however I want to do it, no questions asked. But the number one thing that I was after was being able to literally be there for every single thing that my children do. So I have two daughters and I, at this point, have never missed a single thing ever. Not a meeting, not a game, not a pre— like whatever it is. And so for me, that's been the most important thing and that's the reason that I build businesses. And so then how am I able to do multiple is that I have other people run them.

Right. Yeah. Well, let's dive into that just quickly. How old are your daughters, Joe?

9 and 11.

Okay, wonderfully. I have 14 and 16, and actually I'm with you. I've taken to school all— every day, everything from walking them to pushing them in the strollers to on the bicycle, on the stroller, you know, and now driving them. So I'm, I'm also with you. I'm, I'm the dad that people think is unemployed or a househusband.

Uh, that's the best. I'm hoping that they think I'm unemployed.

Yeah, and, um, I'm hoping I can afford to look like I'm unemployed long enough to get all the way through university. And they are— they do eventually, by the way, Joe, ask you to park further up the road from school. I hate to break news to you, but there does come a time when they say, Dad, it's okay, you can drop me a bit further away. Um, but anyway, you've been there for that journey, so I applaud that, and I, and I completely, I completely with you at emotional level for that. Joe, that's the motivation. Now tell us the how. And first of all, tell us which kind of businesses you've got. That, that will help people to understand just the diversity, which I think is also so interesting.

Yeah. So, so I mean, I have a marketing agency. We serve wedding venues, only wedding venues. And so that business I launched after I had a previous business that failed, which was a marketing agency. And I don't know why I did the same thing twice, but I kind of figured it out, I guess. And so what I ended up doing was, was relaunching the business using a completely different strategy on how to deploy human capital and resources. And so I just figured out a model on how I stay in sales until I can be removed from sales. And we start out by basically selling our offer to, you know, to the public without even having the offer ready to fulfill. And so from a tactical standpoint, in the very beginning, we actually go make sure that somebody will give us money for what we're going to sell before we sell it. And so I kind of got the idea from— oh gosh, what's his name? Product Launch Formula, Walker. What's his first name? I cannot remember for some reason right now. Anyhow, you know, he has this thing where it's, it's create your, create your offer and then fulfill it once somebody purchases it. And so I kind of got good at that. And then that became our way of like, okay, let's make sure this is real. And then we put people in place who help us get in front of the right customers. We offer the product, then we teach the team how to fulfill. So now I've got somebody to help with prospecting. I close the sales, pass it off to fulfillment, and rinse and repeat. And we do that until we have enough customers that we actually need somebody to help support in customer support. And then we continue to build from there. So we have a marketing agency within the wedding industry. The team that you— that we build these companies with are all virtual assistants in the Philippines. And so it was kind of natural to build a virtual assistant services company. And then that company became the biggest out of everything that we've had. Most recently, we've launched a company called Visitor Match. Yeah, that's Level Nine Virtual. That's my VA company. And then we've— and then we launched VisitorMatch.com, which is a data services company. It helps with— really, it helps with all businesses that are running advertising to help them identify more of their data, attract leads, get connected with website visitors that bounce from their website, helps them prospect. And it's really, really effective. And so we got into the data services company, went from there. And then just the most recent, very most recent, is a company in the vacation incentive space where we actually help small businesses give away vacation incentives to help with, you know, kind of pushing somebody over the edge and closing a sale. Instead of them discounting or offering like promotions that that affect their bottom line, they can give away a vacation for free to their customer for a super, super low cost. And then what that does is that supports them in keeping their margins high. And so that's another one. So yeah, so very different businesses.

Very different. And so I guess a couple of questions, I'll come back to one, but the first question is this sell before you build, Very popular, for example, in the online course world, for example, and also some luxury car companies and shipbuilders do that where you put down a deposit. What is the crucial component to getting people to put their money down before they've seen the product?

Because— It's the story. It's the story. And you've got to be able to tell the story. You don't go into something and say, hey, I've got this idea. Right? It is, no, we have this service that we're going to deliver and here's, you know, here's all the great things about it. Here's how we're going to do it. This is, you know, what it's going to be. You're going to have to have some sort of collateral of something to be able to deliver. But as an example, I do have another very small business. It doesn't do a ton of money, but it's still in operation called Campground Digital. And this is a digital marketing agency for campgrounds. And all we do is service campgrounds. And the way we figured it out was we were traveling during COVID the very, very beginning of COVID My wife's a hairstylist, so she was, you know, her salon got shut down and she was, you know, unfortunately we couldn't, she couldn't work. So we said, hey, let's just travel for a bit. And we just went camping and we took the kids and we went all over the place. But what we noticed is that all these campgrounds had terrible websites. They didn't tell a good story. So we didn't really understand what we could count on when it came to what our kids could do there. Our dogs, all of that. And it wasn't great. And we noticed that it was really tough to get ahold of somebody. You pick up the phone, you call, nobody's sitting at the front desk because they're fixing the toilet. And I realized there was an opportunity there. And so we got to the campsite that we chose and I pulled out my iPad and I just drew, I sketched a landing page. And then I told my team, virtual assistants, hey, build me this landing page., you know, get a URL. And we ended up choosing Campground Digital and just kind of worked for that time. And then we're just going to— I'm just going to contact people as we're driving. And one of the first ones that we did, we said, hey, we were looking at coming to, you know, come to your place, but we just couldn't really tell if it was good for kids and so forth. I have a service that I might be able to support you. And they were like, yes, we'd love to help. And everybody said the same thing. Yes, we'd love to help. And so from there, that kind of led on. And then next thing you know, we had 30, 40 campgrounds that were working with us and and that became our service.

That's nice. So you're plainly an instinctive entrepreneur, right? And you've seen lots of different opportunities and you're seeing how to cross-sell those as well. And I absolutely agree with you, by the way, with campsites, you can never get them. And, but they don't seem to be fixing the toilets either because often those aren't working. But you're right. There are all these different categories and niches, aren't there, that are underserved, and you seem to be finding different ones. Is there a common element, Joe, to each of them? Because you've got virtual assistants, you've got data matching, which is quite different. You've got your, you know, your wedding business. Where's the common element, or is there no common element in those businesses?

Well, the common element is our— is the process and how we operate the company. So each of the companies are identical. If you were to look like kind of back of the house at our HR team, at our finance team, at our marketing team, if you looked at the back of the house, you'd go, well, first of all, it's pretty boring. I run very boring type of businesses, but the teams are identical. So I can pick somebody up from one business and I can move them into another. And the only thing they need to figure out is offers, like who we serve and kind of the terminology and what to use. But the, but the actual process and the role that they'll exist in is identical. And that's been kind of our key to success is that when we go to launch a new business or some stupid new idea, it's always the exact same process every single time. So we're never doing something where we got to go, okay, well, I got to build this whole thing and it's totally different. No, the process is identical. And then that allows us to go out and test something. I mean, we could test 10 stupid ideas before somebody else figures out their logo. And we just kind of don't care about that kind of stuff. We'll figure that out after somebody says, yes, I want to buy your services.

Right. Makes a lot of sense. And as you say, Joe, it's boring, but actually the detail of running a business, the process of being, a business is essentially dull, right? It is essentially a workflow from invoicing to payment collection to delivery to distribution to after-sales. As you say, that's a kind of a universal truth, isn't it? For businesses. And the front end is the packaging and the branding.

Yep.

But well-run companies are actually efficient, right? Which is why we can do automation.

Well, that's what we want. We want businesses that are more profitable. I don't, I don't want it to be complicated. The more revenue you end up doing, the more complicated the business gets. And so the bigger it gets, the more complicated it's going to get. So as for as long as you can possibly keep it simple, keep it simple, you know, and that's when we start something, we start off with one person who can do prospecting, one person doing sales, hopefully 1, 2, 3 people doing fulfillment. And then that kind of becomes all that you have. And then as it grows and grows, all of a sudden you got more people, now you need HR, right? Now you need somebody really overseeing, you know, finances and all. And so all of a sudden it grows, now you have complexity. And so my goal is to keep it as simple as possible for as long as we can.

Joe, that is really, really superb. And I love how you've managed to find different verticals, but your engine room, if you like, is the same. You remind me of sort of the Honda of entrepreneurs. They said their core competence was engines, but they put them in boats, cars, tractors, anything, right? But the engine, the core competence was in the process of generating energy from combustion, right? It sounds as though you figured out the engineering really well.

Yeah. And like I said, boring, it's boring in operations, but I mean, the way that you create successful businesses is by doing doing the boring stuff. You know, I always like to— I compare it to football. You know, it's blocking and tackling. And, you know, no lineman is ever going to win the MVP, but the quarterback or the running back or the wideout, none of them win the MVP without the lineman. And so when you look at business, it's all blocking and tackling. And so when people go, oh my gosh, this is awesome, like, you had, you know, 4 or 5 companies and all these things, and it's like, they're super boring. Like, you're not going to be impressed.

Yeah, but as Warren Buffett has proven by buying into companies like Gillette, right?

Yeah.

And he said, really, it's just about the repeatability and the margin and the distribution.

There you go.

That's really key. But Joe Rare over there in Montana, let's just talk about marketing those different businesses because this is a show about getting noticed. And I wanted to raise this idea that you've got so many different kind of businesses and running counter to the popular sort of culture. So I think that's great. And in Asia, as we were saying earlier on before we started recording, companies in South Korea, for example, have diversity, or South— and Singapore have diversity because it protects them from, from the sick— the cycles of business, right? What about your marketing strategy? Because Do you have a similar kind of engine room approach, process-based approach, or how do you build the leads and the brands?

Yeah, no, it's the same. It's still going to be the exact same process for each of the businesses. We focus heavily on channel partners and we want to find somebody who has the same audience that we want to, you know, we want to work with, who has a complementary or even a contradicting product. It doesn't have to be anything that aligns with us, but they have our audience. We're not directly competitive competing against one another, but they are working in the same space. And so, you know, in, in our virtual assistant company, we heavily work with marketing agencies. They are very well known to use virtual assistants. So it's a super good complement. Well, our software provider happens to work with agencies. We partner up with them and we do, you know, deals. We bring them clients, they bring us clients. We work with somebody who has a subproduct of that, you know, that platform. And so they have a subproduct and then we, you know, partner up with them. So we really focus on channel partners who have our audience that we're trying to go after. Right now with Visitor Match, we're looking at attorneys. And so we're starting to develop really, really good relationships with attorneys. And some of that is getting to know other vendors and, you know, what do they do? And they offer something completely different. And we complement implement them or we can work, you know, in the same audience. And so channel partners are our biggest focus. It's a lot of people go, well, you can't, you can't scale it. And it's like, well, actually you can, because instead of going one-to-one where I run an ad and I get a lead, we're going to a channel partner who has our audience and we do things like promotions and, you know, incentives and webinars and all these things together. And then they don't send us one person, they send us hundreds. And we have this just amazing relationship and that's how we primarily grow our businesses. Okay.

And Joe, that's really smart because you're doing sort of the multiplier effect, right? And you've got a really sort of an industrial marketing strategy. What's in it for them? What story do you tell the potential partner of why they should work with Joe Rare?

Well, if they're good and their service is good, then we want our customers to use their stuff too. So it's a two-way street. We're doing things together. Some of the times it's just, hey, I'm I'm your customer, I'm buying your service. So for example, we have a, you know, there's a sub-software within our marketing software that we use. I'm a, I'm a user, like we use their tool. And so as we use their tool, I'm a great person to tell the story because we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of clients in multiple, multiple companies. And I can say, we use this and this is what our output is. And then they go, Joe, you're the best story to tell. You know, you're, you're like the best testimonial. I would love to send you business. You just keep singing our praises. And so, you know, that type of relationship is fine too.

And, and Joe, are you also then, um, as much as sort of co-promotional, are you also working on a financial side with those people in terms of commissions, discounts? I mean, obviously don't give anything away confidentially, but just there's the marketing, but what about the commercial side of things? How do you incentivize partners to bring you business or for you to give them business? Yeah.

So, some of them we do like referral part— we do referral partnerships where every person you send in, you get a referral fee for it, a commission. Depending on the type of the service, you know, obviously if it's, you know, human capital and it's hours for hours, that's in the virtual assistant world, that's going to be more of kind of a one-off referral fee. Um, but if it happens to be like a technology-based tool, data, we do a recurring fee. And so it just kind of depends on the service, but we definitely want to incentivize partners if that's something that they're interested in. And again, we want to provide whatever benefit we can to them so that they will give us access to their audience.

And, and I think what we're also I'm finding out from you is your strategic approach. And as you say, rather than trying to get one customer at a time up using Facebook ads or on LinkedIn, for example, you're giving away some of the margin to someone that can bring you groupage, right? It can bring you volume. And so you've got less relationships, you give a little bit of the margin away, but you're taking less time to get access to a larger volume. And also their customers will already trust them, won't they? So you don't have to go through the know, like, and trust. You've already got past that, that gate. Joe Rare in Montana then with his diverse portfolio of businesses. Um, has there been something that you've learned over the last number of years from a marketing point of view where you'd say you wouldn't suggest anyone tries themselves? Maybe a mistake, or I think now we call it a key learning, don't we? Not a mistake.

Yeah. Oh, you know, I've done— we've done conventions where we've spent an ungodly amount of money and not understood the audience that would be there, the volume of the people that would be there. We did a convention where we went to, you know, a show and had an exhibit. It cost a ton of money. I think it was like $20,000. And, you know, and that was a lot for the size. Of, you know, I think there was less than 1,000 people there. Great target audience, but the setup, this was something I didn't know, you know, so we've got that plus you've got all of your exhibit, you know, tools and, you know, the setup and backdrops and, you know, printed material and all those things that are going to come with it. Then I got to bring staff, right? And we all have to fly across the country to wherever that's going to be. And that's going to cost whatever that's going to cost. And you've got hotels. And so we've got all these things that that all add up. And the next thing you know, you know, you're tens and tens of thousands of dollars into the hole. And then when we show up, the environment is not sales friendly. And so, okay, we've got, you know, 800 and something people in this thing, in this, you know, summit, but not 800 people coming to our booth. And so the traffic compared to the, you know, to the investment wasn't great. And it was my fault because I didn't understand the setup. I should have realized how loud is it going to be, how close are we going to be to neighbors, what's the environment going to be like, what's our opportunity to actually get a return by sales. And I did a terrible job. It was kind of early in the, in the days of doing conventions. And so that, that was a huge, huge expensive mistake. And we basically, I don't think we ever really made our money back from it. And I look, oh, and then the last piece of it, Every other place I'd ever been, they give us the list of the people who registered as attendees. This one would not let us have it. And I was like, wait a minute, we got to be able to follow up. We got to be able to market to these people. And nope, we didn't get access to that. And I didn't know that on the front end. And so there's a huge, huge mistake that cost a lot of money for a young company at the time that set us back. And so that was money that I could have spent either at another event you know, sponsoring something where I had better access, um, or I could have put it into ads. And so, you know, looking at that and really budgeting out your year and understanding where are you putting your money and what, what return is that going to give you, really being able to kind of see those things. That was a huge mistake that I made on the marketing side of it.

Well, thanks for that, Joe. And I think, uh, yeah, we've all, we've all made those mistakes. And as you say, sometimes it's the It's the fantasy, isn't it, that you'll be with 800 people and they'll all come to your booth and they'll all want to buy and you think, oh, but then that's the optimism, isn't it? Especially at the early entrepreneur days.

Well, and it's like then we've, you know, I've done other events where there's, you know, 200 people or there's 100 people, but I get to speak on stage. I get an hour. I get to really tell our story and connect with people. And then they come and they, you know, meet us at our booth and they actually spend time with us. And we make a huge return on that investment. And so it's kind of, you know, it was one of those things I just had to learn. Yeah.

Yeah. And as you say, it's not that all events are bad, but you have to pick the right one and structure the deal correctly too. Right. I remember trade shows are always so expensive to run and not always the best ROI, but some people wanted to do them because they felt they should keep doing them. Joe, there's a a tip, something that you would say you've learned, you know, again, over the years now and the many businesses, what would that tip as an entrepreneur be? It doesn't have to be marketing specific.

Um, don't, don't get everything ready before you start selling. Like, you know, we see so many businesses, and this is, uh, in the startup world, in the I'm gonna build a business and I'm an entrepreneur and I'm gonna, I'm gonna You know, I want to build my dream. And they'll spend a year building out their website and getting their branding right and getting their marketing materials done and wrapping their car and all of these things that they do. And maybe it's not a year, maybe it's 6 months, maybe it's 4 months. But the point is, is that they spend time, they spend money, they do all of this stuff on the front end, only later to find out, ah, that wasn't the right business. Then they go back to square one, they start over. You know, your revenue and your, you know, generally your income is going to be directly related to how many offers you can make to your market. So I say go out and have somebody give you money to prove that what you have to offer is right, has market fit. Go out and have— it's a difference between, you know, going to somebody and saying, hey, I've got this idea, here's what we're going to do. And you go ask the people around you, what do you think? And everybody says, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Okay, that sounds good. Oh, I'm not really sure how you're going to do it, but that sounds all right. And then you have all this optimism in you, and then you go spend all this time and all this money building stuff. But the only indicator in business is if somebody will pay for it. And so I would rather have somebody pay me or not pay me, and then they prove that like there's no market fit. Nobody will give me money. And if they won't give me money, I can't move forward. And so the biggest mistake, or the, I guess the biggest tip that I could tell people is like, go out and sell your thing and make sure somebody will pay for it before you build it.

Yeah. Yeah. That's sage advice. And having just built a course and now I'm selling it, I think I should have been.

It was Jeff Walker with Product Launch Formula. Yeah. That's who it was.

That's how I was trying to say. And Jeff Walker, is that going to be your book Joe, that you'd recommend? Or do you have another book or podcast?

That's actually pretty funny. He has a fantastic book called, uh, Launch, and I think that everybody should read that. But the second book, uh, that I would say is Built to Sell. And so, um, I cannot remember the guy's last name. Um, fantastic book though, because it teaches you how to structure your business so that if you were getting ready to sell it which very much means shrink down, you know, your, your product line. Make sure that you're a specialist instead of a generalist. Make sure that you have a repeatable system, because when you go to sell a business, somebody's got to be able to step in and run it without you there, essentially, right? That has to be a repeatable process. It has to be something that people can follow. If you build it that way from the beginning, you never have to even think You don't have to be somebody who wants to sell a business, but the structure of it will keep you sane and it'll make you make running your business very easy. And that's, that's one of the models that we've kind of adopted is building every business as if we're going to sell it tomorrow so that no matter what, somebody could come in and we're like, great, here's all your SOPs, here's this, here's this, here's how everybody functions, you know? And it's just, you know, we have, we have the structure, we have all these processes and somebody could come in and take it over.

Joe Rare, if someone wants to come and take over you and your business, how would they track you down in Montana? In Big Sky, isn't it the Big Sky State?

Big Sky Country.

Yep.

Big Sky Country. Yep.

How would someone find you?

Yeah. Uh, easiest way, you can email me joe@jorare.com. Uh, you can find me on my websites, visitormatch.com, level9virtual.com, or jorare.com. I'm around.

You— he's around. He's, he's Rare by name, but not, you know, not rarefied in terms of he's not difficult to find. Joe Rare, thank you for joining me. And we've, we've covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time, and really focused and clear about your vision. So thank you so much.

You got it. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, it's been great to have Joe Rare on the show. I only wish I'd had him on the show a year ago before I started building out my course to help people become podcast guests. And to generate leads from being on podcasts. I'm sure you just saved me a huge amount of time. But moreover, of course, what Joe is talking about is that, you know, one of my takeaways, of course, is that all businesses at the end come back to having these great— he calls them linebackers, of course, is the American term. We might call them midfielders in England. But, you know, the people that really keep the engine room of the business going, they're often under-celebrated, um, but are relied on to keep the business going. And you can't have a successful business without those people doing kind of the dull parts. And as an entrepreneur, often that's not where we like to live, but it is where we need to pay attention. So thank you to Joe for raising that today on the show. If you've enjoyed it, do please share the show as always with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur and leave a review if you can, because it helps me to know what you think of the show. And until we meet again, my name is Jim James. Keep on communicating.