Joe Rare is the Owner and CEO of Level 9 Virtual, a company providing businesses with certified, industry-experienced, and college-educated virtual assistants to assist with tasks so business owners can prioritize what matters most. Joe is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and outsourcing expert. Owning four digital companies, five wedding venues, and multiple real estate properties, he leverages resourcefulness and initiative to impact the growth and profitability of projects.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Why Joe Rare refers to himself as an underground serial entrepreneur
- Joe’s experience in sales and why he values sales skills
- How does Level 9 Virtual serve its clients?
- The businesses Joe owns in different industries and how his mentality assisted in scaling each
- Why failing is important and how to learn from costly mistakes
- Joe shares how he manages his work and personal life
- How Joe’s business model services multiple businesses utilizing one team
In this episode…
Many entrepreneurs discover their ability to innovate early in life. The desire to build and lead a company that produces a paycheck is desirable — compared to working for corporate entities where groveling for the next promotion is commonplace. Launching a business, however, requires heavy lifting in the beginning. How do you streamline business operations, especially when you run multiple companies?
Joe Rare, an underground serial entrepreneur, has found ample success in his career by constructing a streamlined business model. Although he owns multiple businesses in various industries, each company operates identically on the back end, eliminating the need for multiple teams. The functionality of Joe’s strategy minimizes expenses while simultaneously increasing productivity — and can be replicated to help you launch your next project.
On this episode of the Top Business Leaders Show, Chad Franzen welcomes Joe Rare, Owner and CEO of Level 9 Virtual, to discuss how Joe’s business model has contributed to his ability to scale multiple companies across varying industries. Joe shares why salesmanship is an asset in entrepreneurship, the role of mentality on business growth, and the benefits of failing from a business perspective.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Email the team at Rise25: support@rise25.com
- Joe Rare on LinkedIn
- Email Joe Rare: joe@joerare.com
- Level 9 Virtual
- Joe Rare
- Visitor Match
- Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T. Kiyosaki
Sponsor for this episode…
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We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.
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Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show. Powered by Rise25 media, we featured top founders, executives, and business leaders from all over the world.
Chad Franzen 0:20
Chad Franzen here co-host of the Top Business Leaders Show where we feature CEOs, entrepreneurs, and top leaders in the business world. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. We help b2b businesses reach their dream relationships and connect with more clients referrals and strategic partnerships and get ROI through done-for-you podcast. If you have a b2b business and want to build great relationships, there’s no better way to do it than to profile the people and companies you admire most on your podcast. To learn more, go to Rise25.com, or email us at support@rise25.com. Joe Rare is an underground serial entrepreneur, investor, outsourcing expert, father, and husband. He currently owns four digital companies, five wedding venues, and real estate investment properties. Joe focuses on helping small to medium-sized businesses around the world. While working from the comfort of his home in Montana and 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 and profitability. All of his companies are being fully run by his virtual assistants. Joe, thanks so much for joining me today. How are you?
Joe Rare 1:28
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Chad Franzen 1:31
Hey, so what do you mean by underground serial entrepreneur?
Joe Rare 1:37
So, yeah, I know somebody, somebody called me that a while back. And I was like, yeah, that’s pretty fitting. You know, a lot of people are building things. And they’re in, you know, involved in, in businesses, you know, they’re a little more outspoken, and so forth. And I don’t like social media; I only have my team run it, and they use it. And they put up content, mainly, it’s coming from podcasts and so forth. But social media and just kind of all that stuff isn’t like really where I want to spend my time, I could not remember to take a photo of something or make a video of something and post it if you paid me to do it. And so what I prefer to do is just build businesses in silence. And you know, I just want to focus on things that are interesting to me, that provide value for my clients, and my team and my family. And I don’t get involved in so much of the, you know, personal brand building, which could be to a detriment. I don’t know; it’s working fine for me now. But yeah, so I kind of do things under the radar. I’m not, you know, I’m not some loud voice that everybody knows. Which, you know, again, could be to my detriment, but we’ll keep playing it until the wheels fall off. But yeah, so I mean, that’s kind of the underground side is that I just do things under the radar, we’re always investing in things, we’re always starting something new. We’ve got kind of what I call secret projects that we’re working on, we just launched one of them now that has become super successful. So that for digital companies is now actually six, which is kind of crazy. And so some of that stuff. Nobody has a clue what’s even happening that we’re working on it, and then boom, we launch it, and we’re, you know, we’re off to the races.
Chad Franzen 3:23
So obviously, entrepreneurship is in your blood. Can you remember the first time in your life when you launch something?
Joe Rare 3:31
Oh, I mean, we, we try to sell stuff all the time, whether it be, you know, I want to know somebody’s lawn, and, you know, we would find, you know, random things in junky properties and try to sell them to antique people, you know, collectors and so forth. We did that when we were kids. I know my sisters had me setting up a lot of lemonade stands a little bit as well. So all the way back then for sure. But I really, really recognized it in high school when I couldn’t quite figure out why anybody would go to work for somebody else. And you know, like, kind of a quick story I always tell is like, there was a father of a friend of mine, who he was kind of known in town, he was like you know, and I grew up in a small farm town. And so he was known as one of the wealthiest guys in town. And it’s, but you don’t really recognize, like, why. But what was interesting was that he was always able to take us to like a baseball game in the middle of the week, you know, when parents are working? And I’m like, How is this guy able to do that? And then, you know, as I got older, and I get into high school, and I’m really starting to recognize more of these traits, I realized, like, well, cuz he owns the biggest business in town. And he’s the owner, and he doesn’t have to abide by the rules of workers. And I realized I’m like, I want that, you know, and that was kind of like, where I think it really for me started and then you know, at the end of high school, I kind of I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and I said, okay, no matter what happens in my life, entrepreneurship is how I’m going to
Chad Franzen 4:59
Go. So have you ever had a job?
Joe Rare 5:04
Yes. So I’ve dabbled in some jobs. During college, I serve tables; I think, you know, working in customer service and the service industry is, is really, really valuable. I also took a sales job to learn sales, you know, and so that kind of sucked. It didn’t last very long before I jumped ship. But other than that, I’ve always been building my own thing. And even when I had a sales job, I was still running my own stuff.
Chad Franzen 5:32
But you see, so you said you didn’t like the sales route that you took, but I know you enjoy sales. In fact, I’ve read that it’s
Joe Rare 5:37
your passion. Yeah. So you know, the sales job. Again, you’re locked by, by parameters. And the hard part is, is when you’re an entrepreneur, you always look at it, and you go, you didn’t know I could do this for myself and make way more money, right. And so I wanted the skills, and I wanted to learn, but it was like, it was really, really difficult to continue. And so, to be honest, I don’t even think I lasted three months. And it was always like, why am I selling for somebody else? You know, yes, I want this experience, I need to understand how this company works and all this, but it was like, this is just devastating to me. And so that was it.
Chad Franzen 6:12
What do you enjoy most about sales?
Joe Rare 6:16
Oh, man, I think it’s uncovering the truth. Within, you know, we’re in the sales process, there’s so much hidden truth in the dialogue, in the ability to uncover what it is that is the challenge with getting them to move forward. I also like the idea of kind of the creation of it. So in a conversation, you can be free flowing, and so forth. You’ve got tactics and strategies, but they’re always going to throw something at you that you don’t know is coming, and you have to be able to react to it. And so, how can you create an outcome when it’s very improv? And for some reason, I really, really liked that. I don’t know if it’s the challenge side of it. I don’t know. But I really liked the idea of creating something out of the improv of okay, well, what’s coming, and I catch myself, you know, and I mean, I don’t do much sales anymore. My team does. But I would rehearse every potential scenario of an objection of a comment out, or her sit in it as I’m driving. It’s like, okay, if I say this, they say that if they say this, I say that. And I would do that 1000 times over. So I felt like, even before I knew everything, everybody would say I probably touched on it somewhere and had it in my bag. And so I don’t know, I just really liked that kind of stuff.
Chad Franzen 7:38
Wow. That’s amazing. So do you. Like as your closing, given the fact that you’re so well versed on overcoming objections and rejections and things like that? Is your closing rate? Pretty high? Or do you still? Is it still like, you know, you’re here? Like, if you can sell one out of every 20? You’re good?
Joe Rare 7:57
Oh, no, if we’re not closing over 50%, or me personally, if I’m not closing 50 60% of everybody I’m on I’m on a call with, I’ve done something wrong in the due diligence side of things, qualifying and making sure that they’re the right fit, you know, the question at that point should come down to, can I make this a no brainer for them? Right? It’s my can I create enough intrinsic value for them that this feels like a no-brainer. And I love the no-brainer comment and use it all the time. And it’s like, if this doesn’t feel like a no-brainer to you, we should not move forward. And I’m okay, pulling it, pulling it off the table. And the funny thing is, when you reverse that, and you’re willing to take it away, people want it a little bit more. But no, I mean, I’m not a one-in-20 type of guy, I don’t want to have 20 conversations to close one deal. When we get to that point if I’m going to be on a sales call, it needs to be okay; I’ll have to when we got a new client; it has to be somewhere around that ratio. Otherwise, we’re doing something wrong in the vetting process.
Chad Franzen 8:59
Let’s get into some of the things you have going on. I know you are the owner and CEO of Level 9 Virtual. Tell me about what you guys do there.
Joe Rare 9:07
So that’s a virtual assistant services company. And so, you know, essentially, I got into it originally because I started hiring virtual assistants as cost leverage. I didn’t have any money, and we were building. I was trying to build a business. And so having somebody overseas do the work for less was a great option. And at one point down the line, one of my base came and said, hey, you know, you keep telling people how to get a VA, but you should just provide the service because you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. And I was like, Huh, okay, so we kind of discussed it. And I said, Look, I don’t want to run the company, though. So my VA ran the company, and it kind of made sense because they had the relationships in the Philippines they could work with, you know, that team over there, and they could. So we started offering the service to existing clients, you know, in one of my businesses, and that kind of just grew a little bit. It wasn’t until I had had a business fail and agent, I had a marketing agency. And when we closed down that business, I relaunched kind of using a more niche-focused strategy. And we grew that business really, really fast. And then I realized, like, hold on a second here, I can do the same thing that we just did there. I could do it in the virtual assistant company. And then that company exploded. And then I said, Hold on, we could do this with any business, if I just put this in place. And so now we have six.
Chad Franzen 10:26
So you kind of launched that as part of providing services to the client that already existed through another business that you had,
Joe Rare 10:33
Yeah, yeah. And I said, Oh, look like here. This is how we can support you better, you know, we’re running this for you. But you need help over here, just hire a virtual assistant here, we’ll help you. And that’s how it kind of started. So what did growth look like, then? Oh, back then it was stagnant. It was like if I didn’t have the client first, there was no new client. We didn’t know marketing, we didn’t know advertising. We didn’t tell people we did it. Other than our existing clients. And here and there, you’d get a referral. But other than that, I mean, we never even talked about it, it was kind of like on the back end over here. And we had somebody kind of managing it. And then I realized that that will you can’t grow that if you don’t actually put effort towards it. And so when I relaunched my agency, I decided to go one niche, one service, you know, for that niche, and we went from zero to $109,000 a month in four months, and then we doubled it in the next four months. I said, Hold on a second here, why are we not doing that with a virtual assistant company like? This makes perfect sense. And so we were able to scale that one unbelievably fast.
Chad Franzen 11:34
And then another business you have is called a wedding booking system. Tell me about that.
Joe Rare 11:39
That’s the marketing agency in the wedding space. And so we do marketing services and sales services for wedding venues, specifically. And that was what we relaunched. So I had an agency that was local, we had employees all over a building, a big office, glass walls and doors, and all that stuff. It came crashing down, when we had about 40% of all of the revenue, the company tied up in two clients, both of those clients canceled, like in the same 10-day, 14-day window, the whole company was like, wait a second here, and now we’re losing money, and we’re in the red. And that continued and you know, of course, is the optimistic, you know, business owner, I’m like, all we got to do is just replace that revenue, right? We’ll get it, we’ll get it. But you get into those ebbs and flows, where it’s you gain a client, you lose a client, you gain two clients, you lose one, and you could never get over that hump. So I took on a ton of debt, to just maintain the business and keep salaries paid, and so forth. And then finally, it’s just like, Okay, we got to this doesn’t work, we have to close it down. So a mentor gave me a great piece of advice and said, hey, you know, if you were to think about your clients, out of all of them, if they were to call you on a Sunday afternoon when you’re hanging with your kids, who would you pick up the phone for? And I was like. There’s like one. And it happened to be a wedding venue owner, who was a friend of mine. So that kind of helped. But it was like, because I know that he wouldn’t be calling with a fire, he would be calling for something positive. And so he said, that’s who you should serve us. And I was like, the wedding industry. Like that sucks. Like, it’s not my big, but we I said, Alright, let’s go all in on the wedding industry. So that was our one niche, you know, one service, we created one, one service package. And that was that and, you know, we launched that we’re able to scale really, really quick. And that’s what created my business model that we’ve used over and over.
Chad Franzen 13:36
What about the engaged app?
Joe Rare 13:39
So that’s a SaaS. Yeah, so that’s a SaaS product that we actually use for the wedding industry. So it took, hey, this is the product we’re using on the back end to run the system. And they said, why don’t we just sell this to the industry? And so then we put that forward and sold it to the industry. So venues, photographers, DJs, everybody uses it.
Chad Franzen 13:57
And there’s one more campground digital. Tell me about that one.
Joe Rare 14:02
Yeah. So that’s, that’s the smallest of them all, and that has been still run off of like, some ghetto landing page. But we, you know, during COVID, we were traveling a lot and, you know, in our campaign, you know, a toner trailer and, and cruising around, and that was when we were actually looking at where we wanted to live next before we moved to Montana. We were driving around and you know, we’d be looking for places to camp, and where are we going to go unless you went to like a big KLA or, you know, 1000 trails or one of the big companies. If you looked at all the independent campgrounds and RV parks, their marketing was awful. The ability unless you call them and you were able to get them on the phone, but if they were out like fixing something, they didn’t answer the call. And so I’m like, there’s an opportunity here. This is kind of interesting. And so it was just as simple as, hey, how about we help you with your website right or integrating, you know, these third party tools or offering text messaging to your or, you know, to from your website, so that somebody could send a text, you guys could text them back in real-time using a marketing tool. And so that’s how it kind of started. And so I’m like, let’s just call a bunch of these, hey, I was trying to stay the night, you know, you guys, but like your website, I couldn’t figure out if it was okay for my dogs, or my kids or anything else. Like, you know, Hey, would you mind having a conversation about, you know, us helping you with your marketing? And we I literally had somebody build a landing page, create a logo, and let’s just test it out. And we got to over, I think it was four or five months, we just got to $70,000 a month in revenue, just by doing that, and just make. It was more like, Hey, okay, let’s just pick this region, everybody’s got a crappy website, everything else is going to be probably pretty bad, too. And so we would just bang, bang, bang, and call all of them and build that business.
Chad Franzen 15:50
What kind of a mentality do you have to have? You know, I’m sure a lot of people have ideas, but they just get out. I don’t know, I can’t figure out how to do this. So I just forget about it. You seem to have a you know, like an idea about, you can’t find a campsite. So you start your own thing, what kind of mentality? Do you have to be willing and able to start these kinds of different things?
Joe Rare 16:09
Well, the mentality is just curiosity to start, and then it’s okay, I actually think that I have a solution that could work. And then and then from that, if I feel like I have a solution that could be valuable to somebody, then I go ask them if they’ll give me money for that. Right? If I could do this for you, would you pay me for it? Yes. Okay, great. Give me money. And I will do it now. And if we can do that enough times, that’s how you end up creating you know, that’s how you create the business. So I believe in putting out and trying, I mean, in the worst case scenario, you go, okay, look, like, I talked to 30 people, zero of them want this, we’ve maybe I’m either not communicating effectively, it’s not the right offer, or nobody frickin wants it. Right. And maybe there’s just not the need that I believe that there is, or they don’t care enough, and they’ve got enough business, and they’re good, then that’s fine. I mean, it’s, you know, unless somebody is experiencing some pain, it’s pretty tough to convince them that this non-pain issue needs to be solved. And so so you know, I’m looking for pain points. And I don’t know, I just believe, if it fits in my wheelhouse, and I have a team that can execute it, we might as well ask them, and then try it.
Chad Franzen 17:23
Have you ever, I guess, like this, like the campground digital business that kind of started. As you already had other businesses going and engagement app that started as a result of your wedding booking system? Have you ever like been in a position where you’re planning a business, and you’re, and you’re putting pressure on that business? Like this is now my job? Like, I need this to support me? Or have they all just kind of developed one thing out of another thing?
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Joe Rare 17:53
You know what I think I think if you go into an opportunity, and you think this needs to support me, you’re screwed. I truly believe that if you’re putting, Well, I say that. But you know, in the beginning, you know, when I relaunched my agency, that was our, that was our income, we had nothing else. And so that was important actually to execute on that. But I also understood what it was going to take to get us to the point, okay, so how long can we struggle and then be able to go, okay, all we need to do is execute this, and then we’ll succeed. Something that has been very interesting lately is I keep seeing a saw a video of it first, and I saw somebody post about it. And it’s talking about, you know, goal-setting goals, right. leading indicators versus lagging indicators. And I, it’s something I think that I’ve naturally done, and I didn’t realize it was like, actually a thing. But leading indicators are things like, okay, all we have to do is literally make 100 calls a day, we need to, you know, 100 outreach, or whatever that is, we need to spend 100 bucks on ads or whatever, you know, those kinds of things, whatever the activity is, if we just do those things, end of story, the lagging indicator, which is the goal, which is like 100 grand a month, you will hit that period, it doesn’t matter. So I keep going to my team, and I’m like you guys, stop talking about the end goal. The only thing we need to worry about is if you do these things every single day, you execute these, you will absolutely succeed, period, end of story. There is no way around it, you cannot do the activity without producing the outcome. It’s just gonna happen. So that’s been very, very helpful. But I think, you know, when it comes to like, can you afford to do something, I have to make this work? That’s coming from a completely different mindset. And I think you’re in big trouble. If you’re doing that. And you’re thinking I have to, no, no, this is going to I think there’s a huge difference in that in that belief system. We, you know, we just launched this new business visitor match.com, which is a company that essentially all of the Anonymous visitors that hit your website. Right, it’s data, right, they hit your website will get you the contact information of 40 to 70% of those visitors. And we’ll send that to you. And you can do whatever you want with it cold call email, build custom audiences for ads, all of those things. This, I came to this and I go, if it fails, who cares? Right? But before we put up a website and had a name before anything else, we had customers paying us money. So I didn’t go into this thing, this thing has to make money, it already made money, then we said, Okay, now it’s a thing. Let’s build it.
Chad Franzen 20:30
So you can start a business that’s kind of already a business, and then it just turns into an official business. That’s, that’s the best way to write.
Joe Rare 20:37
Yeah, you got to go out and gotta test it; you got to fail. You know, campground digital didn’t have a name until I was like, we need a landing page. Okay, we kind of need something; well, what URL you’re going to put it on? Like, I don’t know, let’s keep looking at it. It was just kind of like, okay, the name is gonna be campground digital, you know, and that, and that was it. And that was as difficult as it was to create a brand around that. And the same thing with Visitor Match. It’s like, well, what are we doing? We’re matching the visitors to profiles. So it’s matching visitors? And I’m like, so how do you say that in a domain? And then there’s the name. That’s how we did it.
Chad Franzen 21:12
So given that our failure, I know, you talked about one failure that you had, and it sounded like it was kind of a big deal? Or have you had other failures? And are those a big deal? Or is it just, you know, we tried it and
Joe Rare 21:23
I’ve had more failures than then most people I am sure, I have no doubt I have lost everything multiple times I have. Yeah, I have failed big, big, big-time real estate investments that cost hundreds of 1000s of dollars, businesses that have lost me millions. I have had major failures. Are they a big deal, of course, but it’s a failure. And so there has to be something in there that you draw from it; otherwise, you wasted that opportunity, you wasted that every failure has something that you’re supposed to learn. It’s a learning point. And so with my team, I tried to say the same thing, look, go do everything that you’re doing go make mistakes. Now, don’t go make the same mistake bunch of times in a row, because that’s stupid, right? Learn the lesson, take the lesson and get better and improve. And I think that we do that over and over and even a loss of a million dollars on a business deal. Something came out of that, that later down the road, we you know, that could be one of the reasons like we hit a home run with this already. Right, because I’ve already failed in this build. And in this strategy, I’ve already failed. But now we figured out how to, you know, we don’t even get to the point of building anything until we know it’s something real. And so, you know, that could be lessons learned from failing?
Chad Franzen 22:42
Sure, I was gonna ask you can you give me a specific example of, like, maybe a painful lesson, but it turned out to be valuable.
Joe Rare 22:50
So here’s a great one in team leadership. And I, by nature, I’m not a very great leader of people. So I have to employ people around me who are really, really good at leading teams. I am very much a visionary when it comes to business. I’m very, very interested in that side of it. But the moment it gets going against traction it starts to operate, I don’t really want to run it. I don’t feel like I’m great at managing people in certain roles and so forth. So that becomes very challenging, I think, for teams, because they’re just like, dude, like this guy like he, you know. And so one of the things that happened last year was I had a very, very integral member of our team who had a very, very high position in the company. And I believed the next best thing for her, and the company selfishly was to move her into an official executive role. Now, this is somebody who’s over in the Philippines. And I want to make her a legitimate executive who has equity in the company who like all of these things. And I’m pushing that, and I’m forcing that, and there’s resistance, and I, and I’m like, why are you not just wanting this? And so I pushed so hard and didn’t manage that relationship well enough to understand that that was not a good fit. That was not where she wanted to go. Nor did her skill set truly allow her even to go there. So I ended up actually ruining that. She left the company in a glorified fire. We were devastated as a business because she kind of was a gel. And there were so many things that kind of just fell apart when she left, and I realized, like, that was my fault. I didn’t manage that relationship well and understand her needs and her desires and her goals. And if I were to think back truly it’s like I never even asked. I never truly asked with an open heart and like letting her be who she needed to be. That was probably what am I biggest business failure of the past four or five years that I think probably, that will make me an enormous amount of money in the future, understanding how to more effectively lead people in their team, you know, teams and so forth. So that was a huge lesson. Yeah.
Chad Franzen 25:19
Yeah, that’s a good one. Thanks so much for sharing that. So as you mentioned, you’re kind of like the visionary when it comes to companies. But then, you know, once the ball gets rolling, you kind of like to distance yourself, what does a typical day look for you with everything look like for you with everything you have going on?
Joe Rare 25:37
Ah, let’s see right now. Okay. So today, like today’s probably a typical day, right to podcast interviews today. Because we’re kind of on this roll, we’re starting to use this. I’m never gonna create content; my team’s kind of figured that out. So they’re like, hey, we need to get you on a bunch of podcasts, we have content to us so that we can use that to then grow businesses and so forth. So I’m like, Alright, I can do podcast interviews. That’s fun. I like that. I like meeting people and figuring out, like, what is rise? 25? Do I want to now? I want to go dig in and find out. So my day today, you know, we wake up, my wife and I sit out on our back patio and stare at the mountains, have good conversations, our dogs are run around, our chickens are out like, then the kids kind of slowly wake up and we’re just kind of hanging out as a family. You know, then it’s like, Okay, let me go figure out what’s going on in my world in business. And so I come into my office and go, Okay, look at Slack and figure out what my team’s got going on. What are you guys working on today? Then I kind of figure out where people are. If there’s any, you know, drastic need or somebody needs me, I address that. And then, if I have a podcast interview or something, that’s what I do. I’ve got some rental real estate on which we’re doing some construction. So I might swing over and check in on that today. Just kind of see what’s going on. We’re going to the park later with my kids. And then I’ll probably ride my side-by-side up into the mountains today and just hang out. I mean, that’s kind of my day.
Chad Franzen 27:04
Nice, very nice. How can people find out more about everything you have going on? Oh, man.
Joe Rare 27:10
I mean, if they want to send me an email and ask Joe@JoeRare.com, you can go to JoeRare.com. Or, you know, a couple of companies, obviously, visitormatch.com is brand new. We’re just making that an official business and launching it. But we, you know, we’ve already got, I don’t know, what are we in 40-50 clients already. So it’s a real business that’s running, making great money, Level9Virtual.com, Level9Virtual.com. And that’s where you can see most of what we’re up to. For most small businesses, Level 9 Virtual is a huge value add. There’s just, you know, virtual assistant services are remarkable. The entire operation of everything I do is run by my team in the Philippines. And so then we serve as hundreds and hundreds of clients around the world, and virtual assistant services are going to continue to grow. It’s going to be something that every business is using on some scale, some capacity. And so it’s exciting. It’s a fun time right now.
Chad Franzen 28:10
So when do you last question for you? When you have, you know, you had you have four kinds of official businesses that we talked about? You’ve got another one? Yeah, got another one that you just talked about? And you keep referencing your team? Do you have one team for everything? Or does each separate one have a team?
Joe Rare 28:27
So we can; here’s the cool part. And this is the business model that I kind of referred to in the beginning when I relaunched my agency, and we kind of figured out what is like what is the business takes to operate and actually grow the way we want it to. Then we did it again with the virtual assistant business and it, and it worked. I was like, hold on, we can do this with multiple companies. Then we did it with another one. And I said, Okay, what’s really, really interesting is you can have these businesses. So, for example, we have a virtual assistant services company, we have a marketing agency, we have a SaaS company, we have another digital kind of marketing company, we have a data supplier company. And then the other one that I didn’t talk about is we have a truck dispatching company. I know, weird. But what’s interesting is that those are all somewhat similar but different. And but the back end of the business, the actual functionality on how everybody operates, the systems they use, the communication strategies they use, how they handle fulfillment, how teams are led, managed, and how everything is financed, in HR. They’re all identical. So I can pick somebody who, let’s say somebody’s working in Visitor Match right now. I can pick them up in their role; whatever their role is, I can move them into another business, and drop them into that same role. They do the exact same thing. In the back end of that business, identical. Some of the verbiage might be different. Some of the actual outputs that we’re trying to create might be different, but their responsibilities are almost identical across each business. So we have a core team him up. I think there are 24 of us now. And everybody’s in their roles within each of the companies they operate summer in one, some work in multiple. And so that’s kind of how we do it. But we know that if somebody’s sick over here, we could pick somebody else up and put them in that spot.
Chad Franzen 30:15
So it’s pretty cool. Yeah, sounds good. Sounds great. Do you host your own podcast? Are you just a guest? Enough? Do you have some very good-looking equipment there?
Joe Rare 30:24
So I was gonna launch a podcast, I keep saying, I’m gonna launch a podcast, and I just literally haven’t done it. And I think part of it comes down to the fact that I just won’t make the time to do it. If I’m obligated to somebody else, like you. I don’t have a problem sitting down. Let’s do this over, you know, whatever period of time and I’m, I’m all for it. I haven’t put myself in the position yet. To say, Okay, well, now, we’re going to build our own thing. I have podcasts and concepts. I’ve interviewed a few people in some other ones. And then we never even whenever you launch them, but it’s coming. I promise.
Chad Franzen 31:03
When we get off this recording, I’ll fill you in on a couple of benefits of Rise25.
Joe Rare 31:08
Right on. Yeah, I know that in the beginning, I was like, hold on. We got to talk.
Chad Franzen 31:12
That’d be great. Hey, Joe, it’s been great to talk to you. Your story is very interesting. Amazing. And congratulations on all your success. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Joe Rare 31:21
Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Hello, everybody.
Outro 31:24
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