1626 – Virtual Staff to Make Your Life Easier with Joe Rare

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0:59with us right now joe rare joe you are the founder and ceo of level nine virtual you're on the web at level9virtual.com uh we also have a really great personal website i want to point out and that is joe rare.com joe thank you so much for joining us yeah you got it thanks for having me From beautiful Bozeman, Montana. And by the way, you've got some great photography on your website. But Bozeman seems like a beautiful, like hidden gem part of the country. You know, if you want - Well, not so hidden anymore. No, no, no. You're getting a lot of immigrants from other parts of the country. For sure.

1:40And I'm one of those immigrants too. We found a beautiful place to live and chose to relocate our family. And so that's how we ended up here and we love it. I've tried working with level eight virtual assistants and they were no good. So I'm ready for level nine. You got to come up one. Tell us more about what level nine virtual is. Yeah. So, you know, in my career, I have pretty much used virtual assistants the majority of the way through. Obviously, you know, if you want to get into the story of the four hour work week, that's where I was introduced to it. And then the world is flat and realizing that labor force can be all over the world.

2:17It doesn't matter. You know, when I started Level 9 Virtual, the idea was was to help the clients that I had in one of my other companies, help them find virtual staff to make their life easier to get tasks done at a lower price point. And, you know, it was essentially lower cost labor that they could create leverage. And it worked really, really well. And then I thought, oh, I should probably build this into like a real business. And so we really kind of took it on and kind of found a niche within our niches that was really, really successful. And the company kind of exploded. You know, then COVID hit, of course, and then all our clients lose all their clients.

2:55And now we're like, OK, well, we got to kind of pivot a little bit. And then we pivot again. And the company, you know, through COVID, I mean, we exploded. And, you know, the premise of the company is just simple. It's create the opportunity for small businesses, for medium-sized businesses to hire specialized staff that can support their business for obviously a fair rate, a much less expensive rate than if they were to hire local in most first world countries. And so our staff is all based in the Philippines for the most part. But when people hear that, they go, oh, no, I can't do that. Well, the majority of my team has more education than I do.

3:35they would have more work experience than I do. You know, I'm a college dropout and my, you know, lead developer is a professor at the university. So it's like, you know, I look and I go, this is amazing that we can get this kind of staff and get this kind of talent. Yeah. And so let's talk about like, again, here we are in 2023 and, you know, AI and, you know, tools like ChatGPT have absolutely changed the game for some of us, I think for most of us in business. And again, you're not, you know, to friends who are like not really paying attention yet. You're not competing against ChatGPT. You're competing against, you know, business leaders who are on it and they're getting their teams.

4:20And can you talk about how AI tools have affected the VA world? Well, you know, a lot of the low level tasks that ChatGPT and other AI tools can step in and do, they still require some, what's interesting is they still require somebody to actually know what to put into the tool. So all of AI is an output machine that seems phenomenal if you have an input engineer. So what we, you know, with our teams, we call them prompt engineers. You have to actually be good at creating prompts and creating rules and creating guidance to tell the AI the thing that you need to do or you need to get out of it.

5:02So while yes, we're seeing like copywriting, a lot of that is getting kind of taken away, some low level type tasks. But what's interesting is, you know, our client base, a huge percent of our client base is in the marketing agency world. even the marketing agency companies out there, they still aren't good at creating personas and AI prompts and all those things. So all it did is it kind of shifted how our team has to be responsible enough to learn the tools, provide value to their clients using those tools. And that's, I mean, that's how it shifted. We haven't lost clients because AI came in and took over.

5:44What we've done is we've taken our team who's working with somebody and then they've had to actually go and go, okay, you have to learn how to use this because your client needs you to. And now all they do is they just morph into more of a prompt engineer, or they could take some of their low-level tasks, have AI do it. And it hasn't lost us any clients. I think that it's going to be something that's absolutely complimentary. And if we continue to be kind of on the forefront and we force our teams to learn these tools, we're just going to become more valuable. Yeah. And where does level nine fit compared to all the other ways that we may be able to connect with VAs, higher VAs?

6:27Like, how would you differentiate yourself from say, like another staffing agency versus Upwork and any other connection platforms and tools and agencies? So we're a little more specialized than most places. So if you're going to go to a staffing agency, they're going to have people who have just said, Hey, I want to work and I want to work with it with somebody else. And so, you know, the way that they'll kind of staff them up, they're not going to do any training. They're not going to work with them on specific tools. We're trying to bring in people who have a specialization that actually us as a company, we specialize in.

7:01So that's, that's why we help. And we have a huge support around the marketing world and marketing for small businesses and medium-sized businesses, social media marketing, video editing, running ads, like all of these tools, graphic design. The reason that we kind of really focus in those areas is because that's what we specialize in internally. And so as we do that, it makes it really, really effective for us to offer the same thing. Well, a lot of the staffing agencies, it's very kind of general. So you're going to get somebody who's much more of a generalist than a specialist. When it comes to things like Upwork, the challenge with those platforms, which we still go try to find talent on those platforms as well, but the challenge comes in, you don't know that person.

7:46So now you're taking a shot and you say, hey, I've got a project. I need somebody to do it. I get on Upwork. I find somebody who looks like they have the qualifications. I'm going to put some money on the line and then I'm going to hope that they know what they're doing. Well, we have the exact same offer, you know, offer is as Upwork. We call it our pod service. It's projects on demand. And the way that we do it is we do projects that we've done thousands and thousands of times. So when you submit something, you're not, there's no way that you're submitting something that's completely brand new.

8:17There's almost nothing that you're going to send to us. We're going to be like, yeah, we've never seen this before. No, it's something we do literally every day. And we have teams of people who are specialists in providing the outcome of those projects that you need. And so the difference really is specialization. It's the, it's, it's the repetition. We've done so many of these projects over and over. We've worked in so many different, you know, industries and, and we actually train our team. We do background checks. We do, um, you know, things like a lot of people don't realize in foreign countries, they don't have a power grid that's amazing like we might have in the US.

8:52So their power goes out. Well, what do you do? Well, we check for backup power. They have to have generators. They have to have backup locations. What about their ISP? How fast is it? Do they have secondary locations to go to if the internet goes down? Things like that all has to be in place. And then we do criminal background checks. We do reference checks. I mean, we actually get on the phone and talk to people and make sure that they say they can do what they do. Then we test them and actually say, hey, can you actually do the thing that you say? You say you're skilled in this. Let's see you do that for us.

9:26And then we will grade you and make sure that you can actually do what you do. So for us, it's specialization. And then it's all of the stuff we do behind the scenes that makes us a lot different than if you're just going out and you're saying, hey, I'm just gonna point and shoot and hope that something comes out of it. Yeah. Are there particular types of companies that you work with frequently? Yeah. I mean, gosh, home services is huge. Home services. Especially, you know, we have a system called Live Lead Nurture Service. And so what we do with that is we're, you know, we're allowing their incoming calls or their incoming texts or their Google My Business messages, Facebook messages, all that come into our system and we answer them in real time.

10:10and it's seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. So, you know, if you're looking at what's going on in the market right now, guess what? Most people aren't answering their phone. They're too busy, right? And then they're not getting back to people fast enough. And I believe that in this market and the way that it is, those companies, even if they don't have capacity to take the business, those companies who are actually responding to customers today are going to end up with the business when the market crashes. and when things aren't all glory. Because, you know, for example, you know, I'm in Montana, right?

10:43They're building like crazy out here. One of the biggest challenges is home services is slammed. You can't get a contractor. They're booked out a year. They're booked out 18 months. You can't get a plumber for weeks and weeks. You can't get roofers. You know, they're booked a year out. So because that, you know, there's so much challenge that everybody's so busy, which is just bizarre because the economy is supposed to be really bad right now i can't figure this one out but you know because of all this they're not answering their phones so somebody calls and they need something there's not even anybody to answer the phone and you see it oh my gosh it's just a montana thing this is everywhere in the country yeah joe no i can tell you listen my experience with that so last year you know we completely redid the entire inside of the house kitchen flooring bunch of other and it was it was shocking shot roofers shocking how many people you would leave voicemails with of course it never goes to a live person just leaves some crappy you know voicemail leave a message never hear back right all the homes are it's like people there to repair my screen and you know in the pool area yeah it's good luck good luck you know I'm getting someone to return a phone call.

11:57I'm like, it is such a low bar in home services today, in my opinion, to make it big. And it's shocking. I think that if somebody really wants to step in and they want to go build a seven-figure business, they could do it in months, not years. They could do it in a couple months. And meanwhile, yeah. And I just want to throw this in here too. You know, at the same time, and this is, home services are notorious, notorious for the business owners working these 70 80 hour work weeks you know constantly checking on jobs having to fill in dealing with adult daycare type stuff you know filling jobs because someone didn't show up to work i mean what a mess what an absolute mess uh and again you know i'd say you know of all of the small business industries i have seen um the biggest violators of kind of every E-Myth principle in the book.

12:52Yes, to a T. I just, I literally last week just met with a consultant who's local and is this older guy and he's just all about like processes. And you've got to get the owner out of the business so that they can focus on the things that matter. And his focus is the home services industry because it's so rampant. These guys do not run businesses effectively. They are making money. Let's not, there's no lie about that. They are busy. The problem is, is that they could grow so much more efficiently if they actually had processes. And one of the challenges, every single one of those, you know, those business owners will say is that we can't get the staff.

13:34So my argument is always, well, you can't get the staff because you don't have the time to actually give them the attention they need. You don't have the processes to make them feel like they're working in a company. It's like, hey, yeah, you can have a job. Come show up to this job site. Come do some work. We'll cut you a check. No wonder they leave, right? They have no processes. There's no onboarding. There's no professional growth for them. There's nothing there. They have nothing as far as a company structure goes. because it probably started with the business owner in one truck, going job to job, bidding.

14:09Then he does some work. Then he goes and bid some more. He's been in the evening and that's kind of been his process. Then he adds a couple of guys. Then hopefully he's got some more guys. But by the time he gets to 10, 20 and he's subbing out and he's got all these people, he never went backwards and said, hey, I should go build processes to actually operate the business. So he's still flying by, he's in his truck. And if you go look in the front seat of his truck, I'll bet you his entire business is sitting in there. And so we step in with, you know, one point that we can provide value, which is, hey, let's not make every customer in the valley hate you because you don't answer your phone.

14:47You never return phone calls. They can't get in touch with you. even if you responded and say, Hey, listen, we are booked so far out. Our recommendation would be to call this other company. If there's anything that opens up, we'll squeeze you in. Um, but right now we're just booked. That's better than never con than never talking to anybody. And so we have a service that literally does that. And we can, if it's an inbound call, we can do text message, you know, uh, miss call text back. Uh, we can answer the phone in real time. So that's some of the things that we offer for, uh, you know, in that home services.

15:20And then we also work with attorneys and medical staff and chiropractors and, you know, and dentists and, and all that marketing agencies. I mean, really there, there isn't too many businesses that we can't step in and find a solution to provide. Yeah. Your website, Joe is level nine virtual.com. What would you recommend folks next step be after listening to our conversation. In the top right corner, there's a button that says book a call that that's the fastest way to just get to a human being. It's a live person. You can ask all of your questions. You'll most likely talk with Dakota. He's in Las Vegas.

16:01And you'll get a chance to chat with him and ask all your questions and figure out how this can work really effectively in your business. It's pretty simple. The virtual assistant world is essentially staffing using people who are just in a different country. We don't recruit and hire people who are complete newbies and have no idea what they're doing. We're actually getting people with education. We're getting people who have worked in a lot of different fields. We bring them in, we train them and send them down a path that is effective based on their personality profile and their core skill sets.

16:36So we're never trying to take somebody that doesn't fit in a role and stuff them in and then give them to a client. We're really taking time to evaluate what does their personality look like? The difference between somebody who's kind of like a nerdy developer versus somebody who's very social and very communicative, those are two different types of people. So why would we try to make one be the other? And that's what we see a lot of times with some of the other companies out there. Somebody might have an interest in becoming a developer, but yet they can't stop talking and they just want to get on and they want to be on social media and they want to, you know, communicate with people, they're not going to be good at that because they don't sit down and focus and it's just not their personality.

17:13So we really focus on the personality profile along with the skillset to create great candidates that can support businesses. Yeah. Joe, you, I just want to also point out your, your personal website, because you share really good content, your personal website, joe rare.com. Anything you'd recommend that you're kind of particularly proud of from a thought leadership standpoint or maybe insights that might be valuable to other business leaders? Yeah, so one that I've kind of been hanging on to lately a lot, I think it's because I've been in experimentation mode with some new businesses that we've been launching is the concept of failing fast.

17:55You know, and it could be starting a business from the beginning. It could be taking a next step in your business to create a new growth path. It could be hiring somebody and filling a new role that you've been hesitant to do. But the concept of failing fast and actually taking a shot and doing something, you know, people always ask me, they say, well, how is it that you can, you know, own and operate? Like, you know, what do we have? I think six companies now. The reason that we can do that and we can do it effectively is because I fail faster than most people take their first step. And so we'll go out and we'll just try things.

18:31We'll throw things against the wall, see what sticks, what works, What doesn't? You know, hey, we'll allocate a set amount of resources, go out and we lose all those resources and realize like this isn't going to work or is it going to work and we have to adjust and maybe add more budget. But the ability to go out and just try things, you know, there's a great saying in business that the amount of revenue your company generates is directly related to the number of offers you make to your market. And that one like hits home because sometimes we get so busy and we're doing things in our business and we're stuck inside the business.

19:08And we can't see from the top that the answer to 90 % of our problems is just to sell more stuff or to increase our margin to create more money. So what do we need to do? We need to ask our market for more sales. A lot of the time that could be existing clients. What else can you offer them? You know, how can you increase your revenue that way? So it's just taking a chance, like going out and actually failing, realizing that the only thing you're going to get out of that quick fail is a quick lesson. You're going to learn something and then you're going to be able to go adjust and then you'll be able to take the next step forward and then fail again.

19:46And then the next step forward in the whole time, you're just creating progress. And so I would say the concept of failing fast has been monumental to everything I've been able to do. I totally agree. Joe, it's been great having you at your website, JoeRare.com and of course, Level9Virtual.com. Joe, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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