In this episode, Charles delves into the transformative world of virtual business scaling with Joe Rare, an entrepreneurial innovator who revolutionized the traditional business model by building multiple seven-figure companies run entirely by overseas teams. Joe reveals his breakthrough approach to leveraging global talent, showing how he scaled from zero to over a million dollars monthly revenue without a single local employee, offering a masterclass in the art of virtual team building and remote business optimization. From his humble beginnings as the son of a waitress and police officer to becoming a pioneer in virtual business operations, Joe's story demonstrates the power of breaking free from conventional business constraints. He shares how his virtual assistant service company evolved from a personal solution to a thriving enterprise, bypassing traditional overhead costs and office politics through an innovative direct-to-talent approach that spans multiple time zones. Charles and Joe engage in an illuminating discussion, exploring the delicate balance between maintaining quality and scaling rapidly in a virtual environment. They unpack the crucial distinctions between hiring specialists versus generalists, the importance of clear communication protocols, and why understanding your core business needs trumps the traditional office-bound model. Joe's practical insights shine as he breaks down his journey from a failed traditional agency with 27 local employees to building multiple successful companies with virtual teams. Joe's wisdom resonates with hard-earned experience as he details his company's evolution from startup to scaled success. He challenges conventional business wisdom, advocating for a radical shift from the "local talent only" mentality to building global, flexible teams that can operate efficiently across time zones and cultural boundaries. KEY TAKEAWAYS: • Optimize Business Operations: Discover the systems and processes that enable seamless virtual team management • Scale Without Boundaries: Understand how to leverage time zone differences for 24/7 productivity • Transform Email Management: Learn how to completely remove yourself from daily email operations while maintaining control • Build Freedom Through Systems: Master the art of creating a business that runs without your constant involvement Head over to podcast.iamcharlesschwartz.com to download your exclusive companion guide, designed to guide you step-by-step in implementing the strategies revealed in this episode. KEY POINTS: 4:03 Daily Workflow Revolution: Reveals how Joe transformed his daily operations by completely removing himself from email management, implementing a two-part daily briefing system that saves hours while maintaining full control of communications. 8:30 Talent Testing Blueprint: Details the unique testing methodology that ensures every hire is a specialist, not a generalist, involving a multi-step verification process where candidates prove their expertise by working directly on Joe's businesses before being offered to clients. 15:01 Business Reality Check: Exposes the critical importance of getting brutally honest about your business needs, breaking down tasks into specialized roles rather than seeking impossible "unicorn" employees who claim to do everything. 19:20 Virtual Assistant Evolution: Demonstrates how virtual assistants have evolved from basic task managers to specialized professionals, showcasing roles from operations directors managing thousands of employees to professors leading development teams. 22:34 Pricing Revolution Formula: Breaks down the exact pricing structure for building a world-class virtual team, revealing how to secure top-tier talent for $10-15 per hour while achieving the same quality as $80,000/year local hires. 32:36 Freedom Through Outsourcing: Maps out how Joe transitioned from a failed traditional agency to generating over a million dollars monthly using virtual teams, all while having the freedom to homeschool his children and control his schedule. 36:40 Zero to Millions Blueprint: Chronicles the rapid scaling strategy that took his business from zero to $109,000 monthly in four months, then doubled it, and eventually hit seven figures - all through strategic virtual team building.
Chapter 1: What strategies did Joe use to scale his businesses?
Chapter 2: How did Joe transform email management in his workflow?
Willkommen bei der I Am Charles Schwartz Show, wo wir nicht nur über Erfolg diskutieren, sondern auch zeigen, wie man es kreiert. In jedem Episode entdecken wir die Strategien und Taktiken, die tägliche Unternehmer in unabhängige Powerhäuser in ihren Unternehmen und in ihren Leben verändern.
Ob Dein Ziel ist, Dein Leben zu transformieren oder das elusive 7, 8 oder 9-Figuren-Markt zu treffen, wir haben das Blueprint, um Dich dort zu finden. 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.
So 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 somebody don't know how rare you are. Go in that situation. Tell us a little about you. Tell me about the success you've had.
Yeah, I mean, I'm 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
Chapter 3: What is the Talent Testing Blueprint?
und all that but we had a you know nothing nothing too crazy it'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 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 it's one of the things you brought up and there was a little bit of redundancy there. Like I felt 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 I mean. I think entrepreneur is an old Sanskrit word that means fail all the time. So just how it works. Du hast die Philippinen erwähnt, und jeder, der mich kennt, weiß, dass Christine mein Virtual Assistant ist. Ich kann ohne Christine nicht mehr als Mensch funktionieren. Sie ist seit sechs, sieben Jahren bei mir. Alles wird gemacht. Sie ist mein VAT.
Sie ist meine rechte Hand. Sie ist ein Geschenk. 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's like. Because most people have an experience.
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Chapter 4: What lessons did Joe learn from his business failures?
They understand the idea of other people's time, but they don't really understand what the workflow of this is like.
Ja, also es ist eigentlich ziemlich einfach. Es ist nichts anderes als jemand hier zu sein, weißt du, in den USA oder in welchem Land du bist. Es ist nicht so kompliziert. Und ich denke, das ist, wo die Leute das überdenken und denken, dass es wirklich, wirklich herausfordernd ist. Und es ist nicht. Ich meine, wir machen fast jedes einzelne Ding in unseren täglichen Leben durch unseren Telefon.
Was ist die Unterschiede zwischen es durch Slack zu tun oder es durch ein anderes, weißt du, Messungsmedium zu tun? Es ist nicht so groß ein Deal. Aber für mich ist eine der körperlichen Dinge, die ich aus meinem Blatt genommen habe, die meine Routine entwickelt hat, ist, dass ich morgens aufstehe und jeder macht seine Sache. Sie checken ihr E-Mail, richtig? Ich check meine E-Mail nicht.
Und ich habe Martina, die mein Assistent ist. Sie checkt mein E-Mail. Sie kategorisiert alles. Sie antwortet als ich alles, was sie antworten kann, als ich. Und dann gibt sie mir eine Summary jeden Morgen und jeden späten Abend und Abend.
Chapter 5: How can businesses leverage virtual assistants effectively?
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 emails 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. The team gets kind of, 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 going to 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.
How's everybody doing? Do you need more resources? Do you need less? Are we over, under budget? Things like that.
The email one is a huge one for me. That's how it all started for me. 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.
und ich würde eine Art Voice-Recording auswählen, ich würde ihr eine Art Voice-Message senden, was ich jetzt alles durch Skype tue, weil es einfach ist, und ich werde alles aufschreiben. Ich bin so, okay, E-Mail Nummer eins zu Joe, bla bla bla bla. E-Mail Nummer zwei zu Bob, bla bla bla bla. Und das hat einfach Zeit genommen.
Das hat Zeit genommen, um sie zu trainieren, um meine Stimme zu lernen, um all das zu tun. Ich habe jetzt meine ganze Stimme und alles in Chat-GPT eingeladen, sodass sie normalerweise wie ich antworten würde. Aber das Team kam zu dem Punkt, wo sie das wie Clockwork machen können. Und ich schaue nie E-Mails. Ich schaue nie Social Media. Das bin ich nicht.
Wenn es Falschgespräche gibt, dann bin ich es. Wenn es richtig aufgespalten wird, dann ist das mein Team. Das habe ich immer gesagt. Ja, ja. Also, wenn Leute das tun und es versuchen, jemanden zu hirten, besonders wenn man es noch nie gemacht hat, dann macht es es noch komplexer, weil sie im Ausland sind und man kann nicht mit ihnen sitzen und all das.
Where 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, not even the CEO. I need to step out so I can scale. What are the things that I'm walking into?
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Chapter 6: What are the challenges of hiring global talent?
Find out who you need, what you need, why you need it, if it's the right fit, you know, background checks, like some of the challenges... How do you find out if somebody is 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 that you should be looking for.
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 speeds, backup locations if they have a problem where they are. All of those things are things that we actually factor for and 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 is 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. It'll create bullet points. You can create an SOP without creating an SOP.
And that's been unbelievably helpful over, 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 skill set, ensuring that, you know, they actually can do what they say.
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 trial and error, I could figure some things out, but that's not what I'm hiring for. I'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. Und das hat für uns eine große Unterschiede gemacht.
Also, während Sie das durchgehen, haben Sie die roten Flaggen erwähnt. Was sind die einfachen roten Flaggen, die sofort auf dich kommen und du denkst, oh Gott, ruf! Was sind die, die dich bewegen, die du denkst, das sind die Verbrecher über all die Jahre und die Tausende von Leuten, die du gehirrt hast. Was sind die, die du denkst, oh, oh, was sind die?
Zuerst, wenn du sagst, hey, wir werden auf einem Videointerview kommen und dann kommen sie nicht auf dem Video. Roter Flagg. Absolutely. 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 work that they've done, be diligent in actually understanding what you're looking at, like know what you're looking for.
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Chapter 7: What are the red flags to watch out for when hiring?
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 like an Upwork or Fiverr. The difference being is that the tasks that we do, which are endless.
I mean, there's there's we just have, you know, I mean, we have two, three hundred employees that can just do projects for you. And so the varying skill sets, everybody's got a core skill set. So we don't ask the graphic designer to become a carpenter. Right. We're not asking them to do things that are just completely out of their scope. 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 skill set. 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. Somebody 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 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've got this graphic design test I haven't gotten done. I need this video edited for my website. I 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.
Und ich denke, eine der Dinge, die wirklich auf Menschen hängt, die sie nicht verstehen, ist, wenn du das selbst tun wirst, die Stunden, die Stunden, die unendlichen Stunden, die es braucht, um über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und über und
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 it in the 1920s. 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. And then on the other hand, what are the things that don't outsource that? What are the, as you look at those, the two sides of the spectrum there, what have you found out that worked really well?
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Chapter 8: How can entrepreneurs identify their core business needs?
I used to say the first dollar I will spend is on marketing. That's not the case anymore. The 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. Your email almost never matters. There's almost nothing in your email that is so important that it's your eyes only. And 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.
I have, we all have lots of email addresses. It is what it is. My family knows to email me in a very specific location. Wenn das jemand anderes e-mailt, wird Christine involviert.
Das ist das, was es ist. Ich habe meine Familie nicht e-mailt. Wenn du etwas brauchst, schreibe ich. Das ist es. Meine Familie, das ist es. Nichts e-mailt mich, weil ich nicht weiß, was es durchgegangen ist.
Es ist wie Social Media, wenn wir Messungen in Social Media haben, sei es Gramm oder Facebook oder all das. 99,9 Prozent davon ist etwas, das jemand anderes sieht und ich muss es nicht beantworten. Und was ich tue, ist, dass ich einen Brief von dem alles bekomme und wir einfach Video-Messages oder Voice-Messages aufschreiben und wir senden Voice-Messages zurück.
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