How Virtual Assistants Are Reshaping The Business Landscape written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Marketing Podcast with Joe Rare In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Joe Rare. He is an “underground” serial entrepreneur, investor, and outsourcing expert. Joe focuses on helping small- to medium-sized businesses and currently owns and manages a number of digital companies that are fully run by virtual assistants, including: Level […] How Virtual Assistants Are Reshaping The Business Landscape written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Marketing Podcast with Joe Rare In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Joe Rare. He is an “underground” serial entrepreneur, investor, and outsourcing expert. Joe focuses on helping small- to medium-sized businesses and currently owns and manages a number of digital companies that are fully run by virtual assistants, including: Level 9 Virtual, Wedding Booking System, Engaged.app and Campground Digital. Key Takeaway: Joe shares his story as an underground entrepreneur with his unique perspective on building businesses in silence, without seeking the spotlight or constantly promoting themselves. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on business growth, making an impact, and connecting with customers rather than getting caught up in content creation and personal branding. Joe is involved in the virtual assistants and shares the benefits of outsourcing tasks to VAs and how it can help businesses grow and be more profitable. It’s important to have a mindset shift to fully embrace this approach. Questions I ask Joe Rare: [01:51] What’s an underground entrepreneur? [04:34] How did you get started building businesses? [06:12] What attracted you to the virtual assistant world? [08:37] Now you’re building some apps and some marketplaces. What what got you there? And what have you learned that it’s going to allow you to repeat that process? [15:43] Should every business be looking at virtual assistans as a way to supplement, grow, be more profitable? [18:50] What’s the best way to go about finding virtual assistants? [20:35] Do you find that people graduate towards higher levels of responsibility for those virtual person where maybe they’re even client facing in some cases? [21:58] Talk to me a little bit about the mistakes or the best practices when you’ve seen the relationship with virtual assistans really work. What’s been the keys to success? More About Joe Rare: More about Level 9 Virtual. Joe’s website. Reach out to Joe. More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training: Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here Take The Marketing Assessment: Marketingassessment.co Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please! Duct Tape Transcript Email Download New Tab John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by HubSpot. Look, AI is literally eating the web ChatGPT is more searched than I don’t know, Taylor Swift. Check out HubSpot’s AI powered tools, content assistant and chat spott. They both run on open AI’s GPT model and both are designed to help you get more done and to grow your business faster. HubSpot’s AI powered content assistant helps you brainstorm, create, and share content in a flash. And it’s all inside a super easy to use CRM now. Chat Spott automates all the manual tasks inside HubSpot to help you arrange more customers close more deals and scale your business faster. Find out more about how to use AI to grow your business at hubspot.com/artificial-intelligence. That’s hubspot.com/artificial-intelligence. (01:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Joe Rare. He is a, I’m gonna say self-proclaimed underground serial entrepreneur, investor and outsourcing expert. He focuses on helping small to mid-sized businesses and currently owned and manages a number of digital companies that are fully run by virtual assistants, including Level 9 virtual, wedding booking system, engaged.app campground, digital. We’ll talk about a few of those. So Joe, welcome to the show. Joe Rare (01:45): Thank you so much. I, I appreciate you having me. John Jantsch (01:47): So I have to get into that like underground thing. , what’s an underground, what’s an underground entrepreneur? Cuz you’re clearly like not in a cave or anything. Joe Rare (01:55): No, no, no. Well, I mean, I’m actually in the lower level of my house, so that counts for some. No, I, you know, somebody actually kind of said that to me when I was speaking at an event and we were discussing social media and whether you have to be a personality in order to succeed Right. In business today. And you know, everybody’s kind of telling their story over and telling everybody else what to do and is that necessary? Is that how it has to be? And I said, well, you know, at that time, I mean I’m like, I don’t produce content. Like I don’t do anything on social other than in some, you know, Facebook communities where I engage with people in my market, but I really don’t spend much time there. I don’t post a lot. It’s just not something I love and I don’t enjoy it. (02:34): And so I don’t think I do. And they were like, geez, that’s so underground. Like it’s so, you know, you’re not in the spotlight. You’re not trying to tell everybody how to do everything like everybody else is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, that’s kind of interesting. And so that carried over and somebody else introduced me at another thing I spoke at and they called me an underground entrepreneur and I’m like, you know, that kind of sticks and I kind of like it. So, I mean, the way that I say it is I build businesses in. Yeah. I, I don’t, you know, nobody knows. We just lost a company and kind of see here in the background, we just launched a company called visitor match.com and it’s, you know, we did it and nobody knew we were even doing it. Half the com, half of my team didn’t even know we were working on the project. Cause I’m like, look like let’s not do anything until we know it works, . Then we’ll actually say, okay, let’s build it. And so yeah. So that’s kind of how that came up about. John Jantsch (03:23): Well, and and I actually love that cuz there definitely are a lot of people, like you say on social media that, you know, they’re making a lot of noise, but they’re not really making a lot of impact. And I think that, you know, being busy, building a business, making money, having an impact, you know, you don’t really need to necessarily have a megaphone to do that. Joe Rare (03:38): Right. I mean, you look at the, the biggest businesses in the world didn’t have, um, a single person out there telling everybody what they should be doing. Yeah. And I think I actually just had this thought today and I was like, oh, should I make a piece of content around it? Because it’s completely inverse of what the thought is. But I said, you know, everybody out here thinking I gotta make this content to make my business more successful. It’s like, no, you don’t. You need to pick up the phone. You need to contact your customers, you need to sell stuff. That’s how you make your business more successful. So stop producing content at the, you know, where you think you have to. Right, right. The moment you think you have to produce content to make money, you’re dead. Yeah. Because everybody else that’s competing with you, they’re calling your customers and winning the business. John Jantsch (04:25): . All right. So you’ve got, you’ve had a really sort of interesting journey. I wouldn’t say you’re a youthful guy, so I’m not gonna say long journey necessarily, but how, how’d you get started building businesses? Joe Rare (04:37): When I was in high school, towards the end of high school, I think we took a road trip to visit my grandfather in Canada. And so we were driving from California to Canada in an rv and I read the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I think, you know, over a two 10, day two, no, I used this two week trip. I think I read the book six times. John Jantsch (04:57): . That’s awesome. Joe Rare (04:57): And the first time I read it, uh, it literally just, it just nailed me. And I went, yep, that’s exactly what my life’s supposed to be. And so then I went to college and I, you know, started school and thought, okay, I’m gonna go play sports. And of course I’m a five 11 guy who isn’t gonna play basketball at any level, you know, beyond, you know, maybe I sit in the bench in college I decided, you know, maybe I should start a business. And so I dropped outta college, started a business and my thought was, I can always go back to school. Right. If I ever want to, I can go back to school. But the business that I started went from zero to 40 employees. And then I sold the company two and a half years later, . And so I didn’t make a ton of money cause I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in my early twenties and I was kind of an idiot. And so I didn’t make, John Jantsch (05:39): Yeah, you probably made early twenties money. Joe Rare (05:41): I made early twenties money, you know, and, uh, I was able to get into real estate investing and bought some properties and got to play that game. Uh, but that, you know, I, right out of that, I was like, okay, hold on. I, I, this is like, it’s my itch, it’s my thing. And I have to be, I have to be able to flex that muscle. And really that’s, it’s where my interest lies. It’s where my heart lies. I don’t think I could work in a job. I think I would suffocate and it would just be devastating to me. So that’s how I got started . So, John Jantsch (06:12): So what attracted you to the virtual assistant world? Um, you run one of your organizations is fairly large, uh, VA Level 9 virtual is a fairly large VA placement agency. Uh, was it one of those things where you needed one and you were like, Hey, this is cool, this works. And so business? Joe Rare (06:28): Right. So yeah, so I mean, to kind of make this story more colorful, I actually was
