Joe Rare's Entrepreneurial Journey: Build a Seven-Figure Business Portfolio All Run by Virtual Assistants

Speaker 1: 0:11

Welcome to Side Hustle City and thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevy, my co-host. Let's get started, All right. Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast Today's special guest, Joe Rare, the underground entrepreneur. How you doing, Joe? I'm doing well. How are you? Pretty good man. I'm reading your bio before this. I'm like, wow, he's into the same stuff I'm into. I got to pop it up. A wedding venue Sounds like you've got a bunch of them already in five wedding venues. You got real estate portfolio. You got some digital companies out here. I mean, you're an expert in building seven-figure businesses. I'm sure a lot of people would love to run a seven-figure business instead of their nine to five nonsense they're working on right now. So welcome to the show, Joe.

Speaker 2: 1:11

Thanks, man, I appreciate you having me.

Speaker 1: 1:13

Yeah, man, what got you into entrepreneurialism? Man, tell me a little bit about your background.

Speaker 2: 1:18

I mean, what got me into it, I guess, is just the idea of creating your own wealth instead of somebody else's. Yes, pretty straightforward. I've always been more into the entrepreneurial idea. It started back when I was young. My dad was kind of a failed entrepreneur, my stepdad was a police officer, my mom was a waitress and so, seeing one side not that my real dad was a success or anything, but he always had more freedom. And when I was really really young well, I guess I can't say that young, but I'm eight years old or so one of my good friends, his dad, would take us to baseball games during the summer. We would play the middle of the week and we go to like an Oakland A's game or a San Francisco Giants game. And it blew me away. I'm like, why is this guy able to go out and do things when everybody else is trying to work? And it kind of, you know, all of a sudden you know that that started the curiosity and that was, you know, I'm noticing, hold on, he's got the house up on the hill and I'm like, okay, wait a minute. You know he's got, you know he's kind of got things going in a way that other people don't. And then you know, as I got older and found out, you know he was the entrepreneur of the town, like he owned the biggest company. He, you know, he and it kind of you know, I started to learn this and then I realized like, okay, that's the guy I'd rather be. I don't want to work for somebody else, I want to do what he did, right, cause he took his kid to baseball game in the middle of the week. He can take his kids on vacation, he can do all that cool stuff and he's got the big house on the hill.

Speaker 1: 2:46

You know he drives the nice car he's got all the stuff.

Speaker 2: 2:49

And so I was like but he's not creating somebody else's dream, he's doing his own thing and that's what I, you know, that's what I decided I wanted.

Speaker 1: 2:55

I love that man. That's. That's the dream right there. That's. It's not the money necessarily and what it gets you, but it is the freedom that it allows you to have and the thing that people I try to tell people all the time. I'm like look, you got this nine to five job. If you can't, like what do you get away for? Like an hour for lunch, maybe to meet somebody? Or you know, if you can't network during times when there's things happening, there's events going on in your city, you know you're stuck at work and a lot of times there. You know there's conferences, there's things that you could go to or just have coffee or lunch with somebody just to get to know another person. You know I get hit up on LinkedIn all the time. I'm sure you do too, but you know random people in your, in your DMs on LinkedIn, trying to get you to go meet them for coffee, with the automated messages and everything but. But there are valuable people that you want to be able to meet with. You can't do that when you got a nine to five job.

Speaker 2: 3:47

Nope, that's true. Yeah, I mean I. You know what I think, that I forbid in my household. You know, my wife has a hair salon and and my wife has a spa.

Speaker 1: 3:59

What is going on here? Like you know, I know we live in parallel lives here. Joe, that's right, maybe we are so. She owns a hair salon, so how's she doing with that? My wife's had some issues with hers and I think what people don't know about these brick and mortars is that a lot of times you have to rely on other people, and other people aren't as passionate about your business as you are.

Speaker 2: 4:21

Well, so she, the way we opened hers was we just did a one, a one room studio, so that she could just work for herself and it's just her in there. You know, it did the, the bigger one before, and COVID shut it down and so forth, and we ended up moving and deciding not to be. You know, in that she stayed home and you know it didn't work until her creative itch started to bug again and then we opened up a salon. But you know, it's kind of one of those situations. She doesn't use it every day. She was there today, she was with her, she just got home, but she doesn't work every day. She gets kind of going when she wants it's. It's her side hustle, actually, which just is something that she wants to do creatively, and so you know, thankfully we're in a position where we can allow her to do that.

Speaker 1: 5:02

Is she working out of a salon lofts or a salon concepts, or one of those you?

Speaker 2: 5:05

know it's actually in theory it's similar, but it's not because it's just a commercial space and we just built out the unit, just the suite, so that it it became a salon, but that wasn't the intent. Used to actually be in one of those. It was a, so did my wife. Yeah, they called the studios or something, I don't remember, but anyway, yeah, so it used to be in one of those. And then now we just did a commercial lease on a suite, built it out how we needed it, we got the plumbing put in and all this stuff and did that ourselves.

Speaker 1: 5:36

Yeah, and if any ladies are out there listening, or even guys that do hair my wife is nested tissue so she does facials all day, eyebrows, any of that kind of stuff that if you guys are thinking about doing it, there's these places that you can. They'll lease out you know a 10,000 square foot spot in a mini mall somewhere and then they'll break it up into different offices and then they'll rent those to you weekly. You have to sign up on a year lease or whatever, but it's about you pay every week and it's I think she was paying a little over 300 a week to be in a 100 square foot space, which is great for these guys, you know, but it can really eat up your profits, especially if you don't have clients just banging down the door. That's right.

Speaker 2: 6:15

Yeah, If you don't know what you're doing with that, you can eat up profits. But the business model itself for everybody else who wants to get into something you know bigger, opening those businesses, is pretty amazing. I got a buddy who owns a couple of them.

Speaker 1: 6:27

He goes man, they're cash cows, Cash cows, man, I mean yeah, I mean I've got people that rent in my space here that you know. They've been on the lease for three years now and they've been here twice. But these are big businesses. They have to have a door that closes. Some of them have to have a file cabinet like a physical file cabinet in a room by law. So they just rent these rooms and, yeah, they don't come in and drink my coffee. So those are the best places.

Speaker 2: 6:48

Those are the best people to rent to. Exactly that's. That's for your target audience.

Speaker 1: 6:52

Yeah, well, they are in. But the one problem is is when you have a coworking space, like if you label yourself as a coworking space and these people never come in, it kind of feels a little empty, you know. I mean it's good because you know they're not using electric, they're not, you know. But a lot of people complain. So, for instance, like my wife would say, why, man, I'm spending too much money, I just need my own space, why am I spending this 350? You know might have crossed her mind, but for me and you, because we're real estate guys, we're thinking, well, shit, if they're charging that much, they can get that much money. Like, why don't I open that? Like, what are we doing with a salon or a spa? Why aren't we doing the real estate thing?

Speaker 2: 7:30

Yeah, yep, and I mean it. You know what would be the best idea, which? Unfortunately, these places are just packed. But if you could find one that you could buy that was already built out, because the TI's and all that stuff is what is the most expensive part, and you know how long does it take to eat your money back, and but, yeah, if you could find one that was already built that way amazing, yeah, it's such a great deal You'd be doing great.

Speaker 1: 7:52

Yeah, a lot of times you guys open well, you don't want, yeah, the TI is gonna be bad because they're just gonna add that onto your lease. So if you can't get people in right away, you know you're, you don't have, you know, vc money or something that you could play with and it gives you time to be able to build that out. If it's just you investing in it, you know that's gonna be hard because you've got to do a lot advertising and stuff to get people in the door and build awareness and just let them know you're there, especially if you're not in a super high traffic area where people just automatically know that that's happening, which also want to be able to do your research, and I mean this is something that every entrepreneur has to deal with. You know, what business am I gonna go into? What am I gonna do if you don't have a lot of cap X, like? I mean, you're in you own digital companies. I mean you do have those five wedding venues, but it seems like you're big into these digital companies and you don't have necessarily a lot of overhead with those. Explain a little bit the difference between running a digital business and running a physical business, a physical space that requires people. The difference is cash.

Speaker 2: 8:55

You know it's I mean you. It is so easy to pivot in a digital world Rather than something that's brick-and-mortar, something that has a lease, something that you're tied in, you're locked into If something bad happens and you break your leg and you can't go in, it doesn't matter, your landlord is still gonna make you pay Right versus something on the digital front where you have, you know, you might have a team and you might have staff and so forth, but you know, like, I blew out my Achilles in 2020, right before COVID, I did that too and yeah, and so I blew out my Achilles and you know I was able to sit on my butt and still get stuff done, right, and but if I, if I had to physically go to work and you know, and I had anything that required me doing anything, you know movement, physical whatever it would have been detrimental. You know you're less active, even if you know me and my knee scooter, I thought it was awesome my knee scooter, but I, you know you still can't function at the same capacity, no, at the same speed, you know. So you're gonna be in some trouble if you had a traditional size, but you know Tricycle type business and so I think the flexibility by itself is incredible. The cash flow difference, the cash flow opportunity I think is is unreal in the digital space versus you know. So those are some of the things that I would, I would say are huge, huge differences that create a better opportunity. You know, if you can go digital, yeah, well, I would say.

Speaker 1: 10:19

I mean, I blew up my Achilles playing basketball.

Speaker 2: 10:21

I got pushed out of the air. I was doing a layup. See what is going on here.

Speaker 1: 10:25

Yeah, and I didn't have the scooter in my day. This was a high school where I blew it out. Oh, no, no, no, I went to an inner city high school and it was a little little rough on the playground. So, yeah, that was a game-winning shot and they didn't want me to make it, so I got. I got knocked out of the air and landed on my Achilles but, also Aaron Rogers. I mean, look man, we got the. Oh my gosh, this is what happens. Those athletes, man, I mean when you're playing at the top of your game like this, I mean, yeah, you know us and Aaron Rogers, you know same same thing, you know. But but yeah, you can't go in, man, and it's not like if you're, if you're a, an entrepreneur, you don't necessarily have the aphelac and all that other stuff and the business isn't gonna pick you up and take care of you. You got us, you got to sell stuff, you got to do things and I mean it's interesting the way you've done it. I mean you've got you grew your team. You had originally two people. You grew, with the 40 employees In your your big time into sales, which is good. You had that door-to-door product sales business. How do Explain that business for one? But then also explain to us how you grow, because that is one of the hardest things about owning a business is Taking on the responsibility of another human being and being able to pay them. That is scary for a lot of entrepreneurs.

Speaker 2: 11:40

Well, yeah, I was 22. Oh, great so even yeah, so that was even stupider. But that look, at the end of the day, no matter what somebody's doing, if they have that, if they have the skill set of sales, they can succeed. Period, end of story. Doesn't matter what you do, if you can sell, you can succeed. You can create cash flow, and that is the. I think that if anybody's thinking about a side hustle Anybody wants to get out of their day job the only thing that they should do is they should is they should study sales non-stop and be obsessed with it and get good at it, even if it's not your personality. There's introverts out there who are still amazing at sales. You can get behind a screen, you can do it over the phone. You don't have to be an extrovert to be able to do sales. If you can sell, you can succeed, period. And here's a quick little thing. I actually just saw this in a video the other day and I thought it was interesting. If you spend 100 hours doing anything 100 hours doing anything, you will flat out be better than 95 percent of the entire population.

Speaker 1: 12:44

Joe, I spent a thousand hours playing Skyrim, so that's anything. But yeah, 100 hours. Cuz always thought you know with that it was 10,000 hours. Well, that's to become an expert, okay 95%.

Speaker 2: 12:58

The only thing we're talking about is being better than the populace. So if I do something that you don't do and I do it for a hundred hours, guaranteed, no matter what, I will be better than you are. Yeah now imagine in anything that you're gonna get involved in, side hustle in your job, whatever. If you just Do a hundred hours of practice, training, studying, etc. You will be better than almost everybody else and you can go out and you can make money and you can succeed. That was a huge thing. I actually I copied that video and I saved it and I sent it to one of my buddies and I'm just like it put in context how easy business really can be, because it doesn't take much to carve out this teeny, tiny little niche of this one little specialized thing and you just go down this One line and you study that one thing and you get better at it than anybody, or at least 95% of the population and then you go offer that thing to whoever the perfect target market is and you only sell that one thing to that one market and that's it. And if you do that, you will never need a job again and you can. You can serve that community forever. And so I forget the second half of your question. Oh, the growing of people. You know the the only way to scale and to go from small to Less small, a little bit bigger, is to put more people in place to do more. So businesses don't really have an offer, an option if you don't want, unless you, you, you want to remain small. I had a goal to grow the company. I wanted to get to a point that I could possibly sell it. We go to 40 employees and then Randomly, somebody came to my door and actually asked to buy the business, which was kind of that doesn't happen. Oh, wow, that's awesome. But all they really, but all they really wanted was, you know, it was door-to-door sales. So we had an in, we had a warehouse, an inventory full of product, and then I had contracts to receive that product on consignment. All they wanted was the contract for the consignment, which was totally fine. So that's what I ended up selling. Of course I was, you know, I think I was 24 at the time, 23. When I sold, when I ended up selling the company and I could have sold it for a lot more if I'd known anything I didn't know anything. They kind of knew that I was kind of, you know, naive, so they offered me way less than I probably should have gotten, but it was still enough to get me into my next thing. So that was great. What were you selling Widgets. Name it, yeah, kids coloring books, pots and pans, cutting boards, knives, like it was. Literally. If they sold it at Walmart, we probably sold it at OrdoDar.

Speaker 1: 15:33

Wow, okay, so yeah. And then you and the more people you brought on. Were these people working for commission or were they working, yep, 100% commission. See, that's great because that takes the burden of and not everybody's going to be able to do this, Like when you grow a company. I mean, most people are going to want a salary and that's the scary part. It is crap. I, you know, I've got to. I hope this person performs and you've got to be able to have enough coming in that you know that this person's going to make a multiple on top of what you're paying them.

Speaker 2: 16:02

So maybe three three people don't look at it like that.

Speaker 1: 16:04

They don't like a three X Like. If I'm paying this person 100 grand, they need to earn me a 300 grand in revenue this year. So, and then that kind of makes it look like that. Yeah, and that makes up for the non-performed I'm bringing in this much I have.

Speaker 2: 16:16

I have that 100 grand to spend, so I can give them the 100 grand, yep, but you can't. That role needs to produce, you know, three, five, seven, x. That's right, absolutely. And there's tricks like that.

Speaker 1: 16:29

Like, if you study business if you, I mean, you study some of the you know business influencers out there or read some of the business books, you're going to have little tips and tricks and stuff like that in there that that tell you kind of like KPIs you need to go after and things you need to hit and stuff you want to think about when you're growing a business. But at the end of the day, just like you said and you're not the only one person to say this, but you're reiterating it right now you have to learn sales. What are some of the best sales books, sales courses, what are some of the things that you went out and learned?

Speaker 2: 17:03

I mean, pick somebody who's in sales, who is known so you can look at Jordan Belfort, right Wolf of Wall Street. That's going to be, you know, kind of an aggressive type. You know sales strategy is going to throw in some NLP and it's it's pretty good, good, strong closes. Then you need to be somebody who's a little bit softer, like Jeremy Minor. He's got much more of a methodical approach to it, much more calm, much more deliberate, inquisitive and he's phenomenal. And so when you start to combine and you start to stack a lot of these, you know different strategies. They work. Sam Ovens had a really good one. He sells digital products and Sam Ovens had a fantastic sales program that he he had and I use that for a really, really long time. And then you combine in some of these. You know trial, close things that somebody does over here and a little tactic somebody does over here, and we start to just kind of mold them in to fit your personality. You can do really well. But I would say again, going back to the 100 hours thing, how can you can just consume content and then practice for 100 hours. It's 18 minutes a day for a year. That's what it is Working. To find that. What can you find? 36 minutes a day for half the year? Right Like it's nothing.

Speaker 1: 18:19

He was spending more time on Netflix, yeah.

Speaker 2: 18:21

We waste more time on social media. Yeah, and we could become. I mean, honestly, the 10,000 hour thing to become an expert. You could. You could literally become 50% of the way there Pretty darn fast If you'd get off social media and stop messing around, you're making money.

Speaker 1: 18:38

You're making him. The one you sit on social media, the more advertising money he's going to make off of you.

Speaker 2: 18:42

So yeah, he's making money.

Speaker 1: 18:44

You're not making money, so I mean you might you're an employee of his in a way, that's right. You know you're an eyeball that advertisers can sell to. I mean, if you go through your feed nowadays, you know 30% of it is probably advertising anyway. So right and pointless nonsense. So, yeah, I mean, get off of it, Get on this 100 hour thing and learn something.

Speaker 2: 19:05

Go learn something, yeah yeah. Find something you're interested in and figure out a way to convert it into a cash machine. Well, in the interest of the work again, never have to work again.

Speaker 1: 19:14

That's right, especially the way you've got your system set up. And this is what is interesting, guys. Everybody thinks, well, if I work for myself, I got to do this, I got to. You know my boss right now pay, you know, worries about my taxes, they take care of this, they take care of that. And you know I can just go home at five o'clock and I can just chill and then I just wake up the next day and do it all. But well, okay, if that's what you want to do, do that until you're 65 years old and they give you the, you know the the, a little speech and maybe a gold watch, and that's what you end with. And hopefully you saved up enough money with your little 401k, earning maybe six, seven percent a year, and that's what you live off of the rest of your life. And you know you spend 10 years in, you know Fort Lauderdale or something, but what you're doing is all your businesses are literally run by virtual assistants. This is crazy. How did you set this up?

Speaker 2: 20:05

Well, I mean, it started in 2008. I hired my first virtual assistant, and I I'm like this is this is crazy the ability to have somebody on the other side of the world do these tasks that seem. You know, most people want to say, well, I have to do them myself, there's no way somebody else could do them. Well, that's just not true, but setting up processes so that if I, if it was something that I could teach to anybody, if they were sitting next to me, then I could teach it to somebody overseas, it didn't matter. My, my mission was to you know cause I did it the other way. I did the whole. You work your butt off, and you work 15 hours a day and you don't make any money, and life is stressful, and you know it sucks, and I had us employees and the whole thing. What I realized, though, is that it's so much easier to build teams, manage teams and then even replace teams if they're not within the jurisdiction that I'm standing in. So the United States is tough if you're going to have employees. There's a lot of regulation, there's a lot of laws around it.

Speaker 1: 21:03

Now if I have contractors that are outsourced.

Speaker 2: 21:06

All that stuff goes away and you have the ability, like, you can create flex teams and you don't have to offer benefits. You know you can just say, hey, I'm going to pay you cash and you know the. However you're going to pay, but X amount is is for a medical stipend, right, and you can do those things and you can provide amazing salaries for people at a fraction of the cost of the US. And so that that was kind of the first. The first side of it was cost leverage. There's way better cost leverage overseas than there is in the US and you can oftentimes get somebody with better education overseas. Yeah, exactly, because, like, I'm a college dropout but my lead developer has a master's degree and he's a professor.

Speaker 1: 21:44

It's crazy, these, these people are very well educated. I mean they absolutely in order to get an American job, like a lot of people. And I've got a guy I've been working with for over 10 years out of India and with my digital agency and I mean the guy's great, His whole team's great, and these guys, I mean they know they've got to be top of the top in order to attract American business, because everybody's trying to get that American dollar right. That's right, and people here don't want to do anything. They want to sit on their butts all day and figure out a way to never work again, but but without building a business like they're just trying to, not, they're just trying to take. So you know us. We're like look, you don't have to sit around and look for the next dollar to steal from somebody or, you know, fake an injury or whatever the hell these people are doing to make money. I honestly don't know how these people are making money right now. I'm I'm I'm confused by it. But we're sitting here, yeah, you and me both.

Speaker 2: 22:39

Yeah, I'm, how are?

Speaker 1: 22:40

they paying their mortgages. Now I mean, and you've got, I think, 75%, no, 45% of people with a million dollar plus mortgage. They're on an arm. They're on an arm right now, 45%. Imagine when those arms mature. Yeah, If these interest rates don't come down by then it's going to be a bloodbath. So I mean, I just don't, I don't know how they're affording these mortgages. You know, you got these. Keep up with the Jones's attitude. Always tell entrepreneurs look. The keep up with the Jones's attitude is not going to get you ahead. Man Like be as poor as you can like act like you're still in college when you're out of college. And it's tough when you've got a family. And I know you've got a family and a wife and the wife wants nice things and you know the kids need to go to decent schools and things like that. You know how do you do that Because I know you as an entrepreneur and I don't even have to know you, but I know you. You know what I mean. Like we're both entrepreneurs. You would probably, if it wasn't for the kids and the wife, you'd probably be, you know, up there in Montana and living as cheap as you can, putting all that extra money into another business, like. But how do you do it with a family? How do? And a lot of people want to know this.

Speaker 2: 23:53

Well, you don't do it until you can, and that's the reality of it. So you know, you've got to be. You have to be smart with money and in the beginning, in the early days, I wasn't. I made bad investments and made bad decisions. I, you know all that. Nobody's perfect, but what you can do is you can get better. You can get a lot better. You can study money, understand what money is. You can understand how investments work. You can understand, you know, the power of compounding. You can understand how real estate works. What is interesting is, I mean, going back to, like you know, Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Portad. Financial literacy is the challenge. It does it, like everybody who thinks they know something barely knows anything, and that's the reality. And that includes me. I think like I'm doing pretty darn decent and I feel like I got my feet, you know, firmly underneath me. I could not see something coming and could totally wipe you out. That's the reality. So what do you do? Do you have, do you have, a defensive financial strategy in place? What would happen if all hell breaks loose and all of my business got shut down the same day? Well, we have real estate, so it doesn't matter. We have tenants that pay cash flow and we are good to go. There's equity in properties, there's, there's, there's options, right. So most people don't put themselves in that position, but we weren't living high times until all of those things were in place. And so, you know, we've always been, you know, luckily had cash flow and business to be able to execute the things that we wanted while simultaneously doing the things that were necessary, like investments, real estate properties, other businesses, creating additional, you know, streams of cash flow. All of those things we were doing all of them at the same time, but we but we didn't have a crazy, like you know, lifestyle that was just over the top until it was totally fine to do it.

Speaker 1: 25:44

And the wife knew the mission. She knew the mission the whole time. She was totally bought in.

Speaker 2: 25:49

She knew the whole time and she's a worker Like. But when I met her she worked six days a week. She was a hustler. She didn't yeah, she was like I'm just stacking cash, like doing her thing, and she was yeah.

Speaker 1: 25:58

When you're, yeah, when you own a business and you're doing hair and stuff like that, I mean you got to be, I mean you got weddings, you got all this stuff that happens on the weekends, yeah, I mean she's probably like my wife busting her butt too, just like you were busting your butt, but understanding the mission, like my wife's goal, she wants a house in Golden Oak. We should have probably bought one five years ago when it wasn't, of course, you know, four and a half million was the entry, right. But this is what she wants. She wants to live in Orlando and, you know, on Disney's campus, essentially, and just walk over to Disney every day. That's her thing, right? So how do you do that? Like me, I'm like, well, I can't make money off of that place. Like you can't run them out, like that's just a huge expense. I'm just spending 30 grand a month to live somewhere. That's stupid, right. So in my mind it's like that. But you've got to get to the point where you're bringing in money. I mean, and you were doing this, after what was it? A few months you went from nothing to over 100 grand a month in revenue.

Speaker 2: 26:52

Yes, we did it in four months in that business specifically. And then we're on target with the new business that we just launched about a month and a half, almost two months ago. We'll be at 100 grand a month by day 90. Wow.

Speaker 1: 27:06

Wow, and you're doing all this with virtual assistance. So you're paying them. You know, whatever it is, the fair salaries in their country, you know the Philippines or wherever in the world you're doing that at, and we pay well. We pay well for their kind of foreshare, because I want the best talent.

Speaker 2: 27:24

I want good people.

Speaker 1: 27:25

Yeah, that's right. That's right, but then, like you said, you don't have to deal with the US situations and the laws, and people here make a ton of money and I want to make Americans understand that they can own their own business. I don't necessarily want them to have to work for me, I want them to work for themselves. I want them to this country and what we're talking about and what I see is the trend. I see America as the place where the ideas happen, where the entrepreneurs are, and this is, you know, what it's supposed to be, I guess, because this is 100% capitalism here. This is individualistic country, the most probably individualistic country on earth, but this is where the ideas happen. But we also have the most money, right, so we are the consumers. So what do you do? Everyone kind of becomes this entrepreneur. Not everybody can't make everybody do it, but you have people who become the entrepreneurs. Leverage the talents and the skills of these offshore people if you can and this is the benefit of having a digital business over a physical location where you have to have someone work there fast food chain, whatever it is. You want to buy franchises where you're going to have that people there. You're going to deal with staffing issues. You're going to have situations like COVID pop up, where people aren't going to be able to come into work. Somebody tears their Achilles' Plain basketball, they can't come into work. Here you go, you wanted to take a vacation. Well, now you got to come into work, you got to come in there and you got to work one of these jobs. So that's kind of where I see things going. I see more people becoming side hustlers, entrepreneurs, getting an Etsy business going and using offshore talent to put those products or whatever that is on Etsy starting. Going into Alibaba looking for a product that's going to sell in the United States, building up an Amazon store there are people you can find to just do that for you.

Speaker 2: 29:12

Correct. Yeah, there's tons of them. Yeah, you don't have to do it. I mean, there's people who it's crazy, what's that?

Speaker 1: 29:18

And you don't even have to do it. You don't have to spend a lot of time. The time you spend is, hey, I want you to do this, and if you've got a process in place, great, but it doesn't have to be you doing it. And a lot of people, like you said before, they think they have to be the one doing it.

Speaker 2: 29:31

Right, and that's the reality. Everybody. They have this kind of confused overview of what running a business is and it's just not the same that it was 20 years ago. It's completely different. And you don't have to be active in your business. In all businesses I should say you know, there's companies that you can go out and you can just say, hey, listen, I'm going to invest X amount out of my 401k and say screw my 401k because it's going to pay you nothing. You know trash compared to what this can do, and you just give them. You know I forget what it might be like. Let's say it's 50 grand, they're going to build you an e-commerce store and then they're going to split the profit. They'll run it, they will run it for you and then they'll split the profits with you. And you've got a company that you know they could be doing a million dollars. You know in in revenue, maybe it's 30 percent net and you're walking with $150,000 of your cut every single year in that business and you are not running it, you do not operate it and what that turns you into is an investor which, if you go back to Robert Kiyosaki and you go to cash flow, quadrant and all these things. This is who you're supposed to be if you want to create wealth. Yes, if you want to create wealth, you're supposed to be an investor, not a business operator. That's why I, as each of my companies. I may start something and get involved with in it for 120 days, you know, 180 days, but after that I need to be out of the business. People are running it and I'm a strategic advisor. I'm an investor, I'm like a board member, and all I do is I guide the business where it needs to go so that I can deploy my resources financial resources to help the company get there, and then I sit back and I reap the reward of it. So you find, maybe, who I'm supposed to be.

Speaker 1: 31:13

You find maybe an offshore MBA to run the company for you. Once you get it up, get the processes in place, get that stuff going, and you really don't even have to come up with the processes. You can hire people to help you build the processes. Go, hey, I want to start a company like this one. Copy their business model. Let's build something like this. I need a website, I need somebody to manage the social media, I need somebody to do paid ads. I mean, this is all on your website, Like the ideas, the different skills. Guys, if you want to know what these people could do for you. Level9virtualcom that's the website. Right, they go on there. Level nine the number nine and I'm looking at it right now Dedicated VAs, VA Pod, Live Lead Nurturing, which I could use some Live Lead Nurturing for my digital agency, because I don't want to have to do that myself. Copywriting, website building, custom list building which is awesome, Like that's something people need, especially bigger companies. I mean you don't want to have your employees digging in building lists and going through your quick book or going through your LinkedIn or any of that stuff. It's nonsense. Paydads, bookkeeping, Like all this stuff is just busy work. It's busy work, guys. It's skilled, busy work, I would say. But nobody has time for this. Like, you've got to have a team of people and if you're doing a side hustle, you can't afford to hire somebody here to do that stuff. Who's going to want to take a break all the time and complain and be American about it? You know how it goes. You want somebody who's like I want to get out of whatever situation I'm in in my country and I've got a freaking NBA and this stuff and I know what I'm doing. I'm willing to bust my butt for you. I mean, this is something you recognize that people need and you've got this growing interest in entrepreneurship, especially since COVID. There's more and more Americans that are wanting to do entrepreneurship and here we are on a podcast telling them how to do it and how to leverage this talent Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 33:05

And I mean you can make this so easy on yourself that you can say let's find a company who has an affiliate offer. They sell a service and I'm just going to be an affiliate, I don't want to fulfill it, I don't want to be involved in it. And then you get some virtual systems to go out and prospect to sell people somebody else's offer and you're just an affiliate and you just collect a commission on it forever.

Speaker 1: 33:29

Have them build your website, do the on page SEO, and it's so easy.

Speaker 2: 33:33

They do all the prospecting. They go out and they try to you know, set up appointments and close, or they pass them to the company and it's your affiliate link. So you're getting credit for it, but you're not doing it. You have virtual assistants doing it, and this is why the affiliate world is always so cool to me. I'm like you guys. You can just become affiliates of a hundred different companies and hire virtual assistants to just go out and share your link and get you connected with the right people and when they end up buying products from you know the company that you're partnered with, you get a commission and you're sitting back and not doing anything and I mean, for lack of a better word, not doing anything. But that is literally what you could do. You could just be an affiliate of a whole bunch of places and have other people go do it, and so you know. Again, this comes back to the idea of using other people's resources.

Speaker 1: 34:17

Or build a website yourself. Do something like what you're doing and then put it on click bank and have other people that are looking for affiliates pick up your thing and hire affiliates to sell your stuff so you could be selling other people's stuff. You don't have to warehouse anything. You don't need anything. A lot of times it's going to be like a supplement company or that's really big. Right now is well, a lot of it is software, software.

Speaker 2: 34:41

It's crazy software, it's tech, it's all of that stuff, because they have the ability to, instead of somebody continuing to read by product. They're buying subscriptions to software. They're buying software, you know, subscriptions to some sort of tech. And if you're getting a 20% commission or a 30% commission on something for the life of that customer, that's pretty incredible. And the fulfillment, the customer satisfaction, all of those things. It's in the best interest of the company to keep that client using their software and when they do that work themselves, you just get paid for it.

Speaker 1: 35:16

Yeah, all you got to do is build, maybe, a website on a specific subject like CRM's. Hey, I want to create this expert CRM site. I'm going to create the top 100 CRM's, you know, because there's a million CRM's, but I want to create a list of the top 10 CRM's out there. In the top ones, I think, are trash right. So the top 10 CRM's, every single one of those CRM's, guarantee you have an affiliate program, of course. So you know, these aren't ranked in any order specifically, but I'm going to list the pros and cons of each one. Have a virtual assistant, build that website, have them do the research, have them put the website up, and then every single one of those has an affiliate link off to that software company.

Speaker 2: 35:56

That's right. And even the AI side of it. You know you can have AI write all the contents. I mean AI can build the website for you pretty much in minutes. That's right, yeah.

Speaker 1: 36:07

Well, I'm really excited too. So I mean, people you know, get on the affiliate thing, learn about the affiliate stuff. We've had past episodes with affiliate experts on. But when you start a digital company, chances are you're going to play in affiliate marketing on some level. You're going to pay affiliates, you're going to use affiliates somehow, or you may start a website and, you know, hire affiliates to post your links all over the place. So one of these things is going to happen. But let's talk about wedding venues, man. So I've got a spot. I'm thinking about getting pulling some equity out of my building. It's an old Knights of Columbus building and it's got an event center, what used to be a hall upstairs, and it's probably 6500 square feet. I think. We talked to the architects and said we could probably get 150, 200 people up there and we've got a commercial kitchen already in the basement and we rent to a caterer. So all you got to do is bring the food up the elevator. Right, there you go. So I'm like, oh man, let me go pull, you know. Whatever. You know, the architects wanted to do two and a half million dollar upgrade to the building and charge me 250,000 dollars for a bar. But yeah, it's so expensive, but you know I could probably do it for 500 grand right. So as an investment $500,000, I put into this upstairs what kind of money these wedding venues bring. I mean, you've got, you've got a system this weddingbookingsystemcom where you're saying that this is one of the top lead generation tools for wedding venues, like what I want to put in upstairs.

Speaker 2: 37:36

Yeah. So I mean, what's a wedding venue going to make? I mean it depends on what they're going to charge. It depends, you know, if you're doing. If you're, you know I mean quick math you're doing 100 weddings a year at $10,000, you know, you're sitting at that million dollar mark. From that you should probably be running somewhere around a 30, depending on what kind of overhead you have in the place. I mean, if you're running a 30% net, you got a nice income of 300 grand. It's not bad. You get bigger, you get more complex, you add more cost to it. But you, you know again, the bigger you scale, sometimes your margins decline, right. And so it's like if you're running a 20% net but you're doing $4 million a year, you're still sitting in a better spot, right, that's right. You're doing it. So it just depends on what type of a venue you're going to be, what amenities you're going to provide. So we call them inclusions, like what are you going to include in your services, how far you want to take it, and then you know what it's going to cost you to deliver that service. We're kind of lately we've been on this kick where it's like man, I wish we had venues that we just like own the building, give them the key, like they go in, they do their thing, they come back and they leave it the way they found it and that's it and it's handoff. It's just rent the venue, the space, and then they do everything else themselves, because ours are very hands-on. It's a lot of labor. You know 40 employees per building. You know it's $160,000 in payroll, you know monthly and so forth. It's a big operation, but we're also doing $4.5 million a year per venue. So these are big businesses.

Speaker 1: 39:16

So when I got in Northern Kentucky University here is not far we're in I'm in Covington, kentucky, which is like the Brooklyn of Cincinnati, so right across the rivers, you know a city. This metro area has like 3 million people if you include Dayton, so there's a big area. We're actually in the wedding district, believe it or not. There's a couple wedding venues around here, but they're monopolized by the same person. So I'm thinking, hey, I'm in the wedding district. You know, if I start, you know, maybe a little stepping on their toes a little bit start, you know, getting some business myself. Maybe they want to acquire it, you know, maybe they want to come in. So that's another thing you got to think about. We've already got a very successful caterer who's well known in the basement. She's been in business for years. She's doing over a million in revenue just doing catering but they rent from us. So I'm thinking, hey, what you just said, build out the space, rent it to her, let her run the business. I don't know the damn thing about weddings. I don't want to get involved with these brides. You know, I don't want that drama, you know? Yeah, put the space up there, Make money off the space. Let her make the money off the food, Let her get a you know, money off the alcohol, the valet, do all that other stuff. You can just own the venue, right. I mean, you can just, like we talked about earlier with the salon things, you could just own the venue. You don't really have to do a whole lot. Don't stress out over these businesses. Real estate is crazy. Good, I love real estate. And there's another thing that you do, that you dabble in, and I would say almost every entrepreneur that I know who's successful has some stake in real estate, whether it's rental property, like residential or commercial in some way rental property. Talk about the importance of and you alluded to it earlier the importance of having real estate in your overall portfolio.

Speaker 2: 40:58

Well, I mean, you know you take it to. I just always look at what if right, and then my wife does it too right. What if? What if Joe can't work? What if the business crashed? What if something didn't you know, didn't work out? What else do you have? Well, you have a bunch of equity and a bunch of you know properties. So you got a like bunch of equity. How long will that last? You Do you have cash flow on those? If you have positive cash flow, then you have an infinite return on your investment. Infinite because the cash flow comes in literally forever. And so I look at it and I say, okay, well, so the business may last forever, but it may not. Will we get an exit and somebody buy it? Maybe, maybe not. It may just come to a day where it's like you're tired of having people operate or it's just not working out anymore. The market conditions change, the inventory, the, you know it gets saturated and you have to pivot and something doesn't work whatever and the business is just have to close down. What do you have left? And real estate is a great thing to have because it takes little to get into compared to the investment that you're actually buying into, and then you have the cashflow of that property forever and the cashflow is an infinite return. So once you get your money back out of it, your ROI is infinite. There is no number to attach to it. It goes on forever. And then you can get an tax benefits of it. Right, you could pull out some equity. You get that tax free, make another investment, do the same thing, repeat the cycle, do it again, do it again. And next thing you know you have a portfolio that, no matter what, you never have to work again in your life, ever. And then your children if they take it over, they don't ever have to work. And then, if their children take it over, they never have to work. And if they're leveraging it effectively and you put the right things in place, you can create generational wealth that goes on literally until the end of time.

Speaker 1: 42:53

This is it. This is exactly what it is.

Speaker 2: 42:55

There's opportunity that just people you know. When somebody runs a business and then they grab some cash, then they want to go do something with it. It's like, okay, so stop, go make. You know, take percentages, however you're going to break that down, but take percentages, go invest it. And I love the idea of rental properties in real estate and you know it may cost you 80,000 to get into this deal over here for a piece. You know a property that cash flows for 500 bucks, okay, great. But now you've got that 80 grand is still in cash, it's still in equity, it's still sitting there. We all know that over time, real estate continues to rise in value, except when the economy completely corrects, like in 08, right, and then we saw the decline. But then, if you were to look back by 2015, 2014, they were already back beyond where they were before the crash, and before the crash it was at this all time high, but then it wasn't too long 2015, another all time high, 2020, another one 2022, insane. And now we're sitting in this place where everybody's kind of you know, not knowing what's going to happen next. But if you go back in history and you look, when there were 20% interest rates, the value of real estate continued to climb Even as interest rates rose in lockstep the values, the value still still climb because no?

Speaker 1: 44:13

one wants to sell their only time real estate goes down.

Speaker 2: 44:16

The only time real estate goes down is when there's a complete economic correction. That's right, but then if you wait and you just sit seven years, five years, 10 years, whatever it's going to be you will be hot, better than you were before. So far, every single metric that you can imagine, I'll say the exact same thing. So it's a long term game. We look at real estate when we invest in a property. We look at it like it's a 401k. The only thing is it's got better tax benefits.

Speaker 1: 44:42

That's right. It's got great tax benefits.

Speaker 2: 44:45

And we can take the cash from it. And we, you know, and so you know, I look at it like a 401k, though somebody wants to think like, hey, I'm going to go buy that real estate and then I'm not going to work. That's not the way it happens, right, You've got to. You look at it in the long term. So, anyway, there's my spiel.

Speaker 1: 44:59

No, I mean, you're 100% on point with that and you know real estate is interesting and I love all the videos recently like on YouTube from the influencers, right when you know they've got to have that really scary doom and gloom thumbnail and headline on there the crash is coming. The crash is coming. You got all these young investors thinking that there's going to be a crash coming here soon. But it's like, hey guys, like nobody's selling their houses, you know, like it's everybody's got 3% mortgage right now. Nobody's putting their houses on the market. New homes are actually cheaper than existing homes right now because of that, which is interesting. It's. It rarely ever happens. But you know, if people aren't putting their houses on the market because they, you know they don't want to, they don't want to sell their house and then take on a 7% mortgage, then they're just going to trade 3% for 7%? Yeah, nobody wants to do that I mean, that's the new gold man. This is what Pace Morby, who does sub two, sub twos, he's like look, that's you know, finding somebody's willing to just like essentially hand over their mortgage to you at 3%, like finding gold and striking oil, but that's true. Now I got a question I think you know you've. What I see from you is that you open these businesses, you learn about the business, you learn about the pains of the business. Then you turn around and start software companies around the business. So I look at these, I look at the ones you've got here your, your wedding booking system, your engaged app and I'm like did he start a wedding venue and then figure out what all the crap, the hard stuff was, figure out the processes and then essentially sell that to other wedding venues? Is that is that kind of what you did?

Speaker 2: 46:35

Well, it's essentially. I didn't start the wedding venue. I actually got into the venue and got to partner in that because we created results for the venue. And then my friend of mine who owned it and I just, you know, I went to him and said, hey, you know, we made you a couple million bucks, it's. I think you should pay us more money. He said, absolutely. But you know, my wife and I were talking and we we think it's a good idea to give you some equity. So the decisions you make on our venue, you're doing it from a place of an owner and I'm like, cool, I'm in, let's do it. So then it became a place. Well, okay, I've been around this venue for essentially 14, 15 years. I've seen everything. There's not a story in that building that I don't know about, right, and so I came from a different place of authority in that, in that industry. But you know, the tech stack that it used to take to run the system that I had built was just atrocious. And so you know it's like we should do this in our own platform, and so we did, and then we could sell the platform itself. There you go, now we've got this system, or you can just buy the software. The software powers the system.

Speaker 1: 47:36

So either way, somebody's buying one or the other or both, and did you use your virtual assistants to to build all that?

Speaker 2: 47:44

No, we, we partnered with another company that was actually a development company. This is what they do, is that they build these platforms, and so then we partnered with them, had it customized for what we needed it for, and then we buy it from them and we release and and offer the service out.

Speaker 1: 47:58

I love it, man, and then we're out. Yeah, you know, the awesome thing is is now you're getting into the campground stuff which I wanted to start, and I kicked around the idea, decided not to really do it, but essentially build a software that allowed people to get in their van, travel around the country and pick up side gigs at like a Starbucks. So you would partner with Starbucks. You'd say, hey, starbucks, look, I know you're, you know you're short employees all the time. We've got this app that you can join and people are just traveling around the country and you know what? Maybe they want to. You know they're in their Sprinter van or whatever. Maybe they want to hang out in Nashville for two weeks. They need a job. Yeah Right, these people just live in their van, right, maybe they're doing some digital stuff and they're making a little money on the side doing that, but every once while they need to stop somewhere and they need to actually work. So give them a little place to park in your parking lot. They'll work for you. They'll be right outside in that van and they pick up a gig for a couple of weeks till they get bored there and then off they go to to you know, austin, texas or Atlanta or something like that. But it allows you know these people that these companies that have a hard time finding hourly employees, it gives them essentially gig workers who are all over the country just picking up shifts. So I was thinking about doing something like that, but it seems like you are out here, like you're creating a digital marketing company again around this RV park, campground idea, because this trend is is is growing. In my opinion, especially during COVID, it went crazy.

Speaker 2: 49:21

It went crazy. And and the reality is is, you know, when you get something that's privately owned, like most of these mom and pop, you know, owned campgrounds, they don't. They don't know anything about marketing, and for them just to put things together and try to figure out how to connect them to, you know, this service and this other service, and you know they, you know, are they going to do Airbnb's and and they don't have any idea how to connect that. And so we were like, well, we could do that. I can have a VA do that. What about rebuilding their website so that it was functional, so that it actually told about the venue, or I mean the, the campground itself? And so the idea was, you know, we were traveling around and we were having trouble finding and understanding what somebody offered, and kind of the kick in the, the kick in the pants was we stopped at a place, we thought we kind of understood what was going on, and we went and we checked in, and then my kids start riding their bikes and we found out that they didn't allow bikes. And I'm like what? And so it was like we left and we didn't even stay another night. We were just like forget it, and it would have been easier to know if we had seen what their amenities were. And you know who do they cater to and is this a good place for dogs and what do they have for kids and actually give the visual appeal to it. And so that's what we first decided to do let's create, you know, an opportunity to support these small businesses that you know they're running. It's usually just a couple run of the thing you know and they don't know what the heck they're doing. And you know some kind of seasonal person working the front desk. They don't know what they're doing, so let's support them. And then it became instant messaging and, you know, being able to text back and forth, because one of the things that's challenging is when you're calling, they don't answer the phone because they're off doing something else. Well then we can, you know, connect with them and, you know, do two-way text messaging to have conversations, make sure you get people booked and nobody misses, that you don't miss out on opportunities. And so we kind of did that just out of my frustration of the experience I was having. And then we turned that into a small business and then it's just kind of maintained itself for a while it's been pretty fun, yeah, you know what you need.

Speaker 1: 51:21

You need a course, you need, and I know you got a podcast.

Speaker 2: 51:24

Oh, I know You're like the 97th person that said that Every time I get interviewed on a podcast. Everybody says, like Joe, when are you going to create a course and just teach people how to do this?

Speaker 1: 51:33

Yes, teach them how to work with a virtual assistant. Like, teach them you know how to you know use your platform Most effectively. You know whatever they're trying to do, I mean, it's all pretty much the same at the end of the day. I mean, everybody's got different business ideas but, yeah, the process of working with a virtual assistant, what you can hand off, which you can hand off, you know those kind of things and you know the scary part about it is oh my God, they got my information, they've got my email, They've got all that.

Speaker 2: 51:57

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's so interesting when, when somebody can get over the mindset of what it means to work with somebody overseas and they can get over the idea that you know, like, what is somebody honestly going to do with your, with access to your email? Like, really, what are they going to do? They're going to email somebody. Like, I mean, what's the worst thing that's going to happen? I mean, you know now, you know I have a finance team, that that all work together bookkeepers and so forth Like they got financial access, they run payroll, Like it's. You know, there's, there's really, really important stuff that we provide access to people in the Philippines. So, once somebody can get over that hurdle of you know, I'm fearful of this and I'm kind of, you know, I don't really know how this is going to work out as soon as they can get over that, the, the gates open and anything is possible, Anything is possible, and your freedom is sitting on the other side of that, Yep, and so it's. It's pretty impressive. So I implore everybody to kind of take a chance, test it out, get, give yourself some space and I promise you like it works.

Speaker 1: 53:04

I love it. Joe, this has been awesome. Man, I don't want to eat up your all day. I know you got you're up there in big sky country, probably want to get outside, do something, and we have kids volleyball, and that's coming up, oh kids volleyball. Okay, well, you're not going, you're not doing anything outside besides volleyball.

Speaker 2: 53:20

Today's a today's a volleyball game, so we're going to that Well, good for you, man.

Speaker 1: 53:24

Well, yeah, spend time with that family man and I appreciate it. Now tell, tell anybody how to get a hold of you, Like where do you want to send people, how do they, how do they get in touch, or how do they? You got a podcast coming up too.

Speaker 2: 53:35

That that's coming. I've been, I've been saying that for a while. But you know, first things first, if you want to, you want to reach out to us. Check us out, level number nine, virtualcom. Joe, at level nine, virtualcom, reach out anytime.

Speaker 1: 53:48

Yeah, we're here to help. I love it, Joe. I love it. Well, when you get that podcast up, you're going to have to let us know so our podcast people can be your podcast people. And sounds like you got a lot to a lot of good stuff to share, Joe, thanks a lot for being on the show. Man, yeah, Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of side hustle city. Well, you've heard from our guests. Now let's hear from you. Join our community on Facebook, side hustle city. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank you.