Making Fortune From Strategic Firing - Joe Rare

0:00Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where it does not matter what you think, only what you can prove. Everyone says you can't scale without being everywhere at once. Today's guest, Joe Rare, proves that's backwards thinking. He's built four digital companies entirely run by teams in the Philippines, scaling to over a million dollars monthly while maintaining complete location independence. The show starts now. All right, everybody. Welcome back. I'm really excited to have Joe on here today. Joe, you're doing something that most people who are entrepreneurs don't even believe can be done, and they just don't have this resource.

0:30So before we get into all that, welcome to the show, man. I'm so excited for you to be here. Thank you. I appreciate you having me. So tell everybody a little bit about you because, you know, somebody don't know that how rare you are going in that situation. Tell us a little about you. Tell you about the success you've had. Yeah. I mean, I'm a kind of a lower middle class family guy. My mom was a waitress. My dad was a police officer. And so, I mean, we lived in a super small farm town and it was pretty, pretty, you know, kind of organic upbringing, lots of siblings and, and all that. But we had a, you know, nothing, nothing too crazy.

1:03It's not a rags to riches story, but it's a, it's a working class family, you know, and then I just knew that I wanted something different in life. And I knew that entrepreneurship was a way to go building my own thing so that I was, you know, in control of my own, you know, future and destiny and all of that. And so I've had more than my fair share of business failures. Lots of them, and those have converted into hopefully lessons learned so that I stopped making the same mistakes. and you know now we've built multiple companies i have four digital companies right now that are all run by a team in the philippines so i have an ungodly amount of free time uh i get to spend every minute that i want with my kids we homeschool our kids and do the homeschool hybrid thing and so we get to do kind of anything anytime we want and uh yeah we've created some really cool success most people can't even fathom that and one of the it's funny things you brought up and there There was a little bit of redundancy there.

1:57Like I failed all so many times, all these times. And then I'm an entrepreneur. I'm like, that's kind of the same. That's the same thing. You get that, right? Everyone is an entrepreneur. I'm pretty sure the definition of entrepreneur should have failure in it. It should. I think that's what it means. I think entrepreneur is an old Sanskrit word that means fail all the time. So just how it works. You mentioned the Philippines and everybody knows me knows that Christine is my virtual assistant. I cannot function as a human being anymore without Christine. She's been with me for six, seven years at this point.

2:26Everything gets done. She's my VA. She is my right hand. She's a gift. A lot of people look down on this. And you just mentioned that you've got four different organizations that your entire team is in the Philippines. Walk me through the day to day of what that like, because most people have an experience. They understand the idea of other people's time, but they don't really understand what this is, the workflow of this is like. Yeah. So it's actually quite easy. It's no different than somebody being here, you know, in the U S or whatever country you happen to be in. it's not that complicated.

2:55And I think that's where people over, they overthink this and think that it's just really, really challenging. And it's not, I mean, we do almost every single thing in our daily lives through our phone anyway. What's the difference between doing it through Slack or doing it through another, uh, you know, messaging medium. It's not that big of a deal, but for me, the, one of the core things that I took off my plate that has created kind of my routine is I used to get up in the morning and everybody does their thing. They check their email, right? I don't check my email and I have Martina who's my assistant.

3:26She checks my email. She categorizes everything. She responds as me to everything that she can respond to as me. And then she gives me a summary every morning and every late afternoon, evening, and tells me kind of what happened. Like, Hey, here's what's going on. These, you know, are the three key priorities. I can't answer them. You have to do it. Right. The only time I check my email is when there's something pressing that she can't act as me, or I can't just tell her quickly what to say to send it off. But that was a mind blowing change was putting that in place. Other than that, I mean, it's, uh, you know, kind of once a month, we'll have a meeting on each of the four companies.

4:07Uh, the team gets kind of a, Hey, here's what you need to do. Here's your battle plans. Go to it. Everybody's responsible for their own output. They manage their own teams. I mean, it's no different than any normal business with a ceo who doesn't do the actual work of the company but they kind of run the ship i stepped a little further away from that and became what i call a strategic advisor so i'm more of an advisor to the company and then we choose a long-term plan like here's what we're gonna do over the next 12 months here's what we're doing over the next five years and then we set that in motion and give people resources to go execute it and then we check back in?

4:45How's everybody doing? Do you need more resources? Do you need less? Are we over, under budget? Things like that. So the email one is a huge one for me. That's how it all started for me. You know, what would happen is Christine would go through everything and then she would sum it all up and then she'd give me a one line sentence pretty much on what each one of the emails were. And I would take out some sort of voice recording. I would send her some sort of voice message, which right now I do everything through Skype because it's easy and I'll just record everything. I'm like, okay, email number one to Joe, email number two to Bob.

5:16And that just took time. That took time to get her to train, to learn my voice, to do all that. Now loaded my entire voice and everything into chat GPT. So it'll just respond like me normally, but the team got to the point where they could do that like clockwork. And they, and I just, I don't check emails ever. I don't take social media ever. That's not me. If you're getting, if it has spelling mistakes in it, it's me. If it's actually spelled correctly, that's my team. That's what I always say. So as people do this and they're trying to do this, hiring someone, especially if you've never done it before, it makes it even more complex because they're overseas and you can't sit with them and all that.

5:52Where do you start looking for these people when you're going to do this? And what are some of the questions you want to ask? If I'm an entrepreneur at home going, all right, I clearly am overwhelmed. I need to be a strategic advisor, or not even the CEO, I need to step out because I can scale. What are the things that I'm walking into? Well, the places to look, I mean, you can go everywhere. There's Facebook communities all over the place that have options for you to find people. There's that. Uh, the second piece is, you know, online jobs, you know, a pH is, uh, there's tons of opportunity there.

6:22We, I own my biggest company is it just happens to be a virtual assistant services company. So we got really, really good at doing it for ourselves and then realize like, Hey, we have the opportunity to help our clients help other people. And then we built a business out of it. And then that's scaled and that became the biggest business. The, so, I mean, the easiest thing to do is find a company like mine, level nine virtual, and we support you in the process, find out who you need, what you need, why you need it. If it's the right fit, uh, you know, background checks, like some of the challenge is how do you find out if somebody's actually good or if they're just saying they're good and we've hired thousands and thousands of people to kind of know some of the red flags you know that that you should be looking for um some of the things you got to understand is that they're in the philippines so there was just a typhoon and that becomes a challenge right so backup power internet uh speeds backup locations if they have a problem where they are all of those things are things that we actually factor for.

7:23And we don't hire anybody who doesn't fit minimum criteria that we actually have, which includes if all hell breaks loose and you have to still work, you need to have a location you can go to when your power's down, whatever that might be. So those are some of the challenges there. But as far as you mentioned, you can't sit down with them and work with them. Well, yeah, you can. You just do it like this. And we do it via Zoom. And so we sit down with our team and we literally show them everything we need them to do in real time, record it. And if you're using something like a fathom recorder, it will literally transcribe the whole thing.

7:58It'll create bullet points. You can create an SOP without creating an SOP. And that's been unbelievably helpful over the years is using more technology, more tools, finding ways that we can replicate our processes, but finding people's easy. That's not the easy, the hard part. The hard part is actually getting down to actually testing their skillset, ensuring that, you know, they actually can do what they say. Um, they're a very positive, you know, if you're looking in the Philippines, they're very positive culture, right? They want to do right by people. They want to do well. So they sometimes believe they, you know, with a little bit of, of trial and error, I could figure some things out, but that's not what I'm hiring for.

8:39I'm hiring for expertise, specialization. And so I don't want somebody who kind of wants to learn and figure it out as we go. No. So we do a lot of testing to make sure that everybody that we offer to our clients, we've already run them through and made them work with me. They actually work on my businesses and prove that they can do what they do. And that's been a huge difference for us. So as they're going through this, you mentioned red flags. What are some of the simple red flags that immediately pop you up? like, Oh God, run. What are some of the ones that, that get you that you're like, those are, those are deal breakers over all the years and the thousands of people you've hired.

9:15What are the, some of them you're like, well, what are some of those? First things first, if you say, Hey, we're going to get on a video interview and then they don't get up on it on video, red flag. Um, you know, if they can't figure out zoom, like red flag, if they ask, you know, you ask for them to send over a portfolio of, of work that they've done, um, be diligent and actually understanding what you're looking at, like know what you're looking for. And if it's not right the first time, like people should put their best foot forward than when they're sharing. If it's not like qual, like what you're looking for done red fist, because you're not, it's not going to improve.

9:56There's a great saying. I don't know who said it. I want to give credit to the right person because I keep using it over and over again is that nobody has ever come into a business and, and like months and months and months turned into a rockstar. They show up as a rockstar. Correct. And you're like, Nope, this is it. This person is amazing. Done. They don't become a rockstar over time. Those people it's innate and you know it when you meet them. And that's why I have an operations director who can actually oversee nearly a thousand employees. She is amazing. And there's nobody like her. And so, you know, things like that, that's what you're looking for.

10:34But those real simple ones, oh, length of communication of lag. So if somebody wants a role with your company, they want to work with you, but it takes them a day or two days to get to you. Nope. You're gone. Because guess what that's going to do? It's going to compound over time when there's projects, expressing client stuff, it's only going to get worse. It's very similar. When I've tried to explain to people, it's like dating, trust your gut. My grandmother used to say, when you're dating someone, you know, within three weeks. And if you don't know, you know, I think the hiring process, it's even faster.

11:07I think as you get into the situation, it's like, Hey, we're going to give this a shot. Do you show up on time? Is your zoom? Are you professional looking? Are you responding quickly? You know, the things you want in an employee. And then I always tell them, like, give them a basic task. As you said, know what you want, have clear examples of the before and and then say, hey, give it a shot. I would rather hire six or seven people for one job because of those six or seven people, I maybe will get one. Normally I don't. Normally I've got to hire like six or seven more people because I don't have that.

11:36I don't, I didn't know you existed. So I'll just go to you from now on. It saves me time. So that, those are some of the little simple things. Now, if you are getting a VA there, some people don't understand two things. One, a typhoon for those in the United States, hurricane. Just so you understand, typhoon doesn't, We have no clue. It's a typhoon. I'm like, it's a hurricane. Um, and they have different levels of it and understanding the Filipino culture, which I've hired VAs all over the world. Yeah. Hands down. My favorite are the Philippines. Filipino. I love them. They're instinctively driven to want to please.

12:07And I love that. And that sometimes is the biggest thing. Like the only time I've ever threatened to fire Christine is when she won't stop working. I'm like, I swear to God, if you don't take a day off, I'm going to fire you. That is indicative of my experience of the entire campaign. So you've got to protect that as a boss. But everyone, when they're doing this, always is looking externally. And they completely fail to realize that they as an employer is also on trial. What are the things that if I'm looking to hire someone and I'm coming to you that you're like, listen, it's really cute that you want Susie to be superwoman and you want her to take over the entire world.

12:40That's really cute. You need to turn the mirror on and look at yourself. What are the things that you tell your clients? Hey, we got to get some things involved. How do we get some of those ducks in a row? Cause they need to show up as well to their best version. One of the biggest things to recognize first is like, what do you actually need? And sitting down and getting raw and real, like what, what is it you're trying to accomplish in your business or in your personal life, whatever that is, what are those things? Then you have to put them into buckets and figure out, well, what kind of a skillset is it?

13:10So an easy example is we get people every day, every single day, every single day. It's insane. That continue to ask us, can I have somebody who does, let's say on the marketing front, who's a graphic designer, who can build me a website, who can run my Facebook ads. And then I want them to onboard my clients. I'm like, oh, okay. So you're going to have somebody who's like a developer, who's going to be probably low on the kind of communicative interpersonal right skill set. They're going to be very low on that profile. And then you want somebody to do onboarding who's going to be client facing, who's probably going to be quite a bit more communicative, right?

13:47But then you also want them to be creative, but at the same time technical, but at the same time strategic. And you're asking for all of these spectrums all in one human. And I would like you to go find that person in the US, find out what that might cost you if it exists and then realize that it's impossible and come back. So we always say, look, find your core, find your core skillset. We don't want generalists. We don't want a bunch of mediocre people who can do like five things. Okay. We want somebody who can do one or two things really well. And then from there you can bring on another person because you have cost leverage when it comes to overseas hiring and things like that.

14:31There's cost leverage. And so that would be one of the first things I would say is get raw and real with what you actually need. So turn it back on you. We always want to just like keep like throw stuff off our plate, but what is it? And then what is that going to give you or your business? What's the output you're actually going to get? And if that isn't going to move the needle in a positive direction, meaning it might give me as the entrepreneur more time to focus on dollar productive activities. Okay. That's a really good thing. If somebody gave me that freedom. them. Okay, great. Now, what else am I looking at in front of me that's causing me not to be dollar productive?

15:06Let's get that off my plate. That's another person. So that's where I would start. So when you're going into this, a lot of people have the problem of my budget is only X and I have to hire someone. They have this illusion that I have to hire someone full-time. If I bring someone on, they're my full-time person. I need to commit to X amount of dollars a week, X amount of dollars a month. When you go into this and you're saying, hey, I need one person who can build me a house, make me sushi, build my car and build a space shuttle. And you're like, okay, no, it's very different skill sets. When you walk into that and a client comes to you, do you sit down and say, Hey, that's adorable.

15:42No, here's what this person's going to cost an hourly rate. Here's what this was. And do they have the ability to pick and choose in that? Sure. Yeah. And so we actually make it even easier. So we have a couple options. First of all, you can go part-time, which is 20 hours a week, or you can go full-time 40 hours a week, but we also rolled out a few years back what we call our projects on demand service. So it's very similar to like an Upwork or Fiverr. The difference being is that the tasks that we do, which are endless. I mean, there's, there's, um, we just have, you know, I mean, we have two, 300 employees that can just do projects for you.

16:18And so the varying skill sets, everybody's got a core skill set. So we don't ask the graphic designer to become a carpenter. We're not asking them to do things that are just completely out of their scope where they work within their bubble of their core specialization. We just happen to have hundreds of them so that you can assign a project and you know, it's going to get done by somebody with that specific skillset. So that takes a lot of pressure off of, I need to hire somebody because I have 90 different things that need to get done. No, you probably have one core thing you need internally in your business.

16:52Somebody to be there every single day. They need to be, you know, they're your right hand. They're with you. They need to learn the ins and outs of your company. That person should be a dedicated hire. That should be somebody who works directly within your business, part-time, full-time, right? Then all of the other stuff that's clouding your, you know, your ability to do dollar productive activities, start offloading that with project-based work and say, great, I've got these other things. It's like, we got this graphic design test. I haven't gotten done. I need this video edited for my, you know, website.

17:21I need to do this update over here. Assign that stuff and get it off your plate to a project-based service. And you can actually work both of them in tandem. And that really, really helps. And I think one of the things that really hits on people that they don't understand is if you're going to do this on your own, the hours, the hours, the endless hours that it takes to interview over and over and over and over and over and over and test. And this person and that person, this person, that person is going to chew you up. And what happens for most entrepreneurs is they say, well, then screw it. I'm not going to do it.

17:53I'm just going to do it myself. And I can guarantee you, if you're doing it yourself, you're never going to scale. You're never going to get to that next level. You're never going to run four or five companies at a time. You're never going to hit your financial marks, period. There's this myth of working hard. That was a great idea. And I really believed in the 1920s. When it's not the 1920s anymore. And it's not about leverage. It's about OPM and OPT. And people just aren't doing that. So what are the things that VAs are just amazing for? That's like, Hey, you know what, if you need this awesome.

18:22And then on the other hand, what are the things that don't outsource that? What are the, when did you look at those, the two sides of the spectrum there? What have you found out that worked really well? Yeah, pretty easy to tell. So it's easier to say what not to hire for. I don't love virtual assistance, meaning another, you know, Philippines, India, Pakistan, Latin America, all those things. I don't love that for sales. I don't love that for like phone support. I don't personally. correct um then uh strategy i strategy is not it if they were able to do strategy they would not be a virtual assistant exactly they'd be competing head to head with you yes but what they are great at is all things administrative all things marketing you know social media and all those things but again you take any of that stuff and if you force them to do the strategy you're going a break.

19:19Right. So if you come to the table and say, I've got, here's the strategy, here's what we're doing. Here's what we're trying to get out of this. And then I need all of these things done easy. So though, I mean, those are some of the areas that, and, and development and, you know, um, like real, like, you know, kind of techie stuff, fantastic and all that stuff. Yeah. I've learned that, you know, they're great at making funnels. They're great at being what we call hammers. Just say, Hey, there's a nail, go hit it. Let's go hit it. It'll be a hammer. when you ask them to think outside of a box, if they could think outside of a box, they would not be VA's.

19:52And that's okay. I could not function as a human being if I didn't have a Christine. I love sushi. Doesn't mean I'm going to ever learn how to make sushi and become a great sous chef. That's just not my job. I just go someone else who does it. It's no different when it comes to this. But idea that I'm special, that I'm unique, and that I'm the only person who can do that. And I think that creates some challenges. when they're looking at prices for this, what should they be prepared for? What are the things? And again, I know numbers change radically. We're in the end of 2024 here. I know what it was five years ago.

20:26Good God, what's at a different price? Things change. What are the things that realistically, if someone says, Hey, I need someone for marketing on a part-time thing. This is realistically where I should be. Here's an, you know, if it's a project versus a part-time versus, you know, what are the pricings on that they should be prepared for as they walk into? Yeah. I mean, I would, I would always expect to be paying 10 bucks an hour plus for really good quality, um, on a dedicated role. Um, if it's project-based stuff, you're going to have kind of more mediators in the middle, project managers, uh, people in, you know, in administrative roles.

21:02So the price can be a little bit higher because there's so much more, uh, logistics built into this project-based structure. However, like the way we do projects on demand, we call them pods on our side is that you just buy a block of hours and you get to use it over the course of an entire month. And so you say, okay, great. I want 40 hours to use over a month. You can assign 10 projects at one time and they're going to go to the people that need to get, that need to work them. And then those hours are going to get deducted as everybody's using them every day. And then we give you an update. I think it's like every week and you get a notification that says, hey, here's all the hours used.

21:37How many have left? Here's your next billing date. Those hours also roll over. So if you don't use them, you get to roll them over. That's really, really effective there. But I would say always go somewhere between expect eight to 10 bucks an hour for dedicated people in kind of a marketing front. You might get when you get into like operations or like project management, I'd be looking somewhere beyond kind of the 12 to 15. And this is kind of speaking mainly for the Philippines. and then I think that if you go in with that expectation, it's going to be phenomenal. You could take like a project manager and what would cost you maybe 12 bucks an hour in the Philippines or something like that, or working with a company like ours, that might cost you$80 ,000 a year in the US.

22:17Yes. As an example. So, I mean, that's kind of the comparison. And I always tell people when they hear numbers and they're like, oh my God, I don't have 12 bucks an hour and I have 15 bucks an hour. I always tell them, you're a Ferrari. You're not going to deliver pizzas. Stop delivering pizzas. stop doing the stuff like mowing your lawn just stop it there's no reason to do it figure out what your hourly rate is based on what you make and say okay my hourly rate 75 an hour 150 an hour 250 bucks an hour awesome every time you mow the lawn you're losing money i'm like oh shit so going through there and having that pivot is is so bodily important oh my god have them just have them just calculate time when they check their email how much time do you spend on your email every day even outside of that the stress of knowing that i don't have to check my email the when my thing goes bing, I ignore it.

23:00I literally turn off the notifications on my phone for email and for messages. I just, I don't have any of it. I'm like, I don't have little red circles that say I have a bazillion people to call me. I love it. It's worth every dollar I spend every single month. 100%. I used to say the first dollar I will spend is on marketing. That's not the case anymore. First dollar I spend is on outsourcing. It's getting my time back because I'm a better marketer and I'm better at dollar productive activities. I'm way better when I don't have to focus on things that don't matter. Correct. We're thinking your email, your email almost never matters.

23:32Correct. There's almost nothing in your email that is so important that it's your eyes only. And that was the long, that was probably the hardest part when I first got that. That was like the last thing that I wanted to get off my plate. I was like, yeah, I could still handle it. It's not that big of a deal. And there was one day when I'm like, okay, I'm really being stupid. This is, this is, this is dumb. Let me go through all these emails as far back as I can possibly go through in the next hour and figure out if there's anything that literally nobody else could see except me. Right. Nothing, nothing.