Transcript of A Fortune from Strategic Firing

Welcome to the I am Charles Schwartz show. Today, we're unlocking the secrets of virtual empire building with Joe Rehrer, a master of remote business scaling who transformed a failed traditional agency into a $1,000,000 per month powerhouse, all without a single office. In this episode, Joe rips open the playbook that helped him build 4 thriving digital companies run entirely by overseas teams. He reveals how he achieved the entrepreneur's dream, scaling multiple businesses while having the freedom to homeschool his kids and control his time. Get ready to discover how Joe went from 0 to $109,000 monthly revenue in just 4 months, then doubled it and eventually hit 7 figures, all with a team he's never met in person.

If you're tired of being chained to your business and ready to leverage global talent to scale your success, this episode is your blueprint. The show starts now. Welcome to the I am Charles Schwartz show, where we don't just discuss success. We show you how to create it. On every episode, we uncover the strategies and tactics that turn everyday entrepreneurs into unstoppable powerhouses in their businesses and their lives.

Whether your goal is to transform your life or hit that elusive 7, 8, or 9 figure mark, we've got the blueprint to get you there. The show starts now.

Alright, 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, you know, somebody don't know that how rare you are. Good in that situation. Tell us a little about you. Tell you about the success you've had.

Yeah. I mean, I'm a 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 and 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, you know, future and destiny and and all 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 stop making the same mistakes. And, you know, now we built multiple companies. I have 4 digital companies right now that are all run by a a team in the Philippines. So I have an ungodly amount of free time. 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, yeah, we've created some really cool success.

Most people can't even fathom that. And then 1 of it's funny 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.

Sure the definition of entrepreneur should have failure in it.

It should. That's I think that's what we mean. I think I think entrepreneur is an old Sanskrit word that means fail all the time. So just know how it works. You mentioned the Philippines, and everybody knows me knows that Christine is my virtual assistant.

I cannot function as a human being anymore without Christine. She's been with me for 6, 7 years at this point. Everything gets done. She's my VA. She is my right hand.

She's a gift. A lot of people look down on this. And you just mentioned that you've got 4 different organizations that your entire team is in the Philippines. Walk me through the day to day of what that like because most people have an experience. They understand the idea of other people's time, but they don't really understand what this is this the workflow of this is like.

Yeah. So it's actually quite easy. It's no different than somebody being here, you know, in the US or whatever country you happen to be in. It's it's not that complicated, and I think that's where people over they overthink this and think that it's just really, really challenging, and it's not. I mean, we do almost every single thing in our daily lives through our phone anyway.

What's the difference between doing it through Slack or doing it through another, you know, messaging medium? It's not that big of a deal. But for me, the 1 of the core things that I took off my plate that has created kind of my routine is I used to get up in the morning. Everybody does their thing. They check their email.

Right?

Right.

I don't check my email. And I have Martina, who's my assistant. She checks my email. She categorizes everything. She responds as me to everything that she can respond to as me.

And then she gives me a summary every morning and every late afternoon, evening, and tells me kinda what happened. Like, hey. Here's what's going on. These, you know, are the 3 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, you know, kinda once a month, we'll have a meeting on each of the 4 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 kinda run the ship. I stepped a little further away from that and became what I call a strategic adviser. So I'm more of an adviser to the company, and then we choose a long term plan. Like, here's what we're gonna do over the next 12 months.

Here's what we're doing over the next 5 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. So that's The

the email 1 is a huge 1 for me. That's how it all started for me. You know, what would happen is Christine would go through everything, and then she would sum it all up, and then she and she'd give me a 1 line sentence pretty much on what each each 1 of the emails were. And I would take out some sort of voice recording. I would send her some sort of voice message, which right now I do everything through Skype because it's easy, and I'll just record everything.

I'm like, okay. Yeah. Email number 1 to Joe. Email number 2 to Bob. And that just took time.

That took time to get her to train, to learn my voice, to do all that. Now loaded my entire voice and everything into chat GPT, so it'll just respond like me normally. But the team got to the point where they could do that like clockwork, and they and I just I don't check emails ever. I don't take social media ever. Yep.

That's not me. If you if you're getting if it has spelling mistakes in it, it's me. If it's actually I mean, it's spelled correctly. That's my team. That's what I always say.

Yeah. So as people do this and they're trying to do this, hiring someone, especially if you've never done it before, it makes it even more complex because they're overseas and you can't sit with them and and all that. Where do you start looking for these people when you're going to do this, and what are some of the questions you wanna ask? If I'm an entrepreneur at home going, alright. I clearly overwhelmed.

I need to be a strategic adviser, not even the CEO. I need to step out because I can scale. What are the things that I'm walking into?

Well, the the places to look I mean, you can go everywhere. There's Facebook communities all over the place that have options for you to find people. There's that. The second piece is, you know, online jobs, you know, PH is, there's tons of opportunity there. We I I own my biggest company is it just happens to be a virtual assistant services company.

So we got really, really good at doing it for ourselves and then realized, like, hey. We have the opportunity to help our clients, help other people, and then we built a business out of it. And then that scaled, and that became the biggest business. The so, I mean, the easiest thing to do is find a company like mine, level 9 virtual, and we support you in the process. 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's actually good or if they're just saying they're good? And we've hired 1,000 and thousands of people to kinda know some of the red flags, you know, that that you should be looking for. Some of the things you gotta 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 could go to when your power's down or whatever that might be. So those are some of the challenges there. But as far as, you know, 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.

Mhmm.

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. Right. 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 is 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 a very positive culture.

Yeah.

Right? They wanna do right by people. They wanna do well. So they sometimes believe they, you know, with a little bit of of trial and error, I could figure some things out. But that's not what I'm hiring for.

I'm high hiring for expertise, specialization. And so I don't want somebody who kinda 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, and that's been a huge difference for us.

So as they're going through this, you mentioned red flags. What are some of the simple red flags that immediately pop you up, like, oh, god. Run. What are some of the ones that that get you that you're like, those are those are deal breakers over all the years and the thousands of people you've hired? What are the some of them you're like, woah.

Woah. What what are some of those?

First things first, if you say, hey. We're gonna get on a video interview. Mhmm. And then they don't get up on the on video. Red flag.

Absolutely.

You know, if they can't figure out Zoom Yeah. Like, red flag. If they ask you know, you ask for them to send over a portfolio of of work that they've done, Be diligent in actually understanding what you're looking at. Like, know what you're looking for. Mhmm.

And if it's not right the first time, like, people should put their best foot forward than when they're sharing something. If it's not, like, like, what you're looking for, done. Red fist. Because you're not it's not going to improve. There's a great saying.

I don't know who said it. I wanna give credit to the right person because I keep using it over and over again is that nobody has ever come into a business and and, like, months months months turned into a rock star. They show up as a rock star.

Correct.

And you're like, nope. This is it. This person is amazing. Done. They don't become a rock star over time.

Those people, it's innate. And you know it when you meet them, and that's why I have an operations director who can actually oversee nearly a 1000 employees. She is amazing, and there's nobody like her. And so, you know, things like that, that's what you're looking for. But those real simple ones, oh, length of communication of of of lag.

So if somebody wants a role with your company, they wanna work with you, but it takes them a day or 2 days

to get to you.

Nope. You're gone. Because guess what that's gonna do? It's going to compound over time when there's projects pressing client stuff. It's only gonna get worse.

It's it's very similar when I've tried to explain to people. It's like dating. Trust your gut. My grandmother used to say, when you're dating someone, you know within 3 weeks, and if you don't know, you know. I think the hiring process, it's even faster.

I think as you get into the situation, it's like, hey. We're gonna give this a shot. Do you show up on time? Is your Zoom are you professional looking? Are are you responding quickly?

You Know the things you want in an employee. And then I always tell them, like, give them a basic task. As you said, know what you want. Have clear examples of the before and after, and then say, hey. Give it a shot.

I would rather hire 6 or 7 people for 1 job. Because out of those 6 or 7 people, I maybe will get 1. Normally, I don't. Normally, I've gotta hire, like, 6 or 7 more people because I don't have a I don't I didn't know you existed. So I'll just go to you for now and get saves me time.

So that those are some of the little simple things. Now if you are getting a VA, there some people don't understand 2 things. 1, a typhoon for those in the United States, hurricane. Just so you understand, typhoon doesn't some people have no clue what's a typhoon. I'm like, it's a hurricane.

And they have different levels of it and understanding the Filipino culture, which I've hired VAs all over the world. Yeah. Hands down, my favorite of the Philippines. Filipino people. I love them.

They're instinctively driven to want to please, and I love that. And that sometimes is is the biggest thing. Like, the only time I've ever threatened to fire Christine is when she won't stop working. I'm like, I swear to god. If you don't take a day off, I'm going to fire you.

That is indicative of my experience of the entire So you've gotta protect that as a boss. But everyone, when they're doing this, always just looking externally, and they completely fail to realize that they, as an as a employer, is also on trial. What are the things that if I'm looking to hire someone and I'm coming to you, that you're like, listen. It's really cute that you want Susie to be Superwoman, and you want her to take over the entire world. That's really cute.

You

need to turn the mirror on and look at yourself. What are the things that you tell your clients? Hey. We gotta get some things involved. How do we get some of those ducks in a row?

Because they need to show up as well to their best version.

1 of the biggest things to recognize first is, like, what do you actually need? And sitting down and getting raw and real, like, what what is it you're trying to accomplish in your business or in your personal life, whatever that is? What are those things? Then you have to put them into buckets and figure out, well, what kind of a skill set is it? So an easy example is we get people every day, every single day of every single day.

It's insane. That continue to ask us, can I have somebody who does, let's say, on the marketing front, who's a graphic designer, who can build me a website, who can run my Facebook ads, and then I want them to onboard my clients? Yeah. I'm like, oh, okay. So you're gonna have somebody who's, like, a developer who's gonna be probably low on the kind of communicative, interpersonal right skill set.

They're gonna be very low on that profile. And then you're you want somebody to do onboarding who's gonna be client facing, who's probably gonna be quite a bit more communicative. Right? But then you also want them to be creative, but at the same time, technical, but at the same time, strategic. And you're asking for all of these spectrums all in 1 human.

Right.

And I would like you to go find that person in the US, find out what that might cost you if it exists Yeah. It just does. And then realize that it's impossible Right. And come back. So we always say, look.

Find your core find your core skill set. We don't want generalists. We don't want a bunch of mediocre people who can do, like, 5 things okay. We want somebody who can do 1 or 2 things really well. Right.

And then from there, you can bring on another person because you have cost leverage when it comes to overseas hiring and things like that. There's cost leverage.

Mhmm.

And so that would be 1 of the first things I would say is get raw and real with what you actually need.

Mhmm.

So turn it back on you. We always wanna just, like, keep like, throw stuff off our plate, but what is it? And then what is that going to give you or your business? What's the output you're actually gonna get? And if that isn't gonna move the needle in a positive direction, meaning, it might give me as the entrepreneur more time to focus on dollar productive activities.

Okay. That's a really good thing if somebody gave me that freedom. Okay. Great. Now what else am I looking at in front of me that's causing me not to be dollar productive?

Let's get that off my plate. That's another person. So that's that's where I would start.

So when you're going into this, a lot of people have the problem of my budget is only x, and I have to hire someone. They have this illusion that I have to hire someone full time. If I bring someone on, they're my full time person. I need to commit to x amount of dollars a week, x amount of dollars a month. Yep.

When you go into this and you're saying, hey. I need 1 person who can build me a house, make me sushi, build my car, and build a space shuttle, and you're like, okay. No. It's very different skill sets. When you walk into that and a client comes to you, do you sit down and say, hey.

That's adorable. No. Here's what this person's gonna cost an hourly rate. 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. You first of all, you can go part time, which is 20 hours a week. Mhmm.

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 to, 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 2, 300 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, where they work within their bubble of their core specialization. We just happen to have 100 of them so that you can assign a project, and you know it's gonna 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 1 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 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, you know, your ability to do dollar productive activities, start offloading that with project based work.

Right. And say, great. I've got these other things. It's like, we got this graphic design test I haven't gotten done. I need this video edited for my, you know, 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.

And I think 1 of the things that really hits on people that they don't understand is if you're gonna do this on your own, the hours, the hours, the endless hours that it takes to interview over and over and over and over and over and over and test. And this person and that person and this person and that person is gonna chew you up. And what happens for most entrepreneurs is they say, well, then screw it. I'm not gonna do it. I'm just gonna do it myself.

And I can guarantee you if you're doing it yourself, you're never gonna scale. You're never gonna get to that next level. You're never gonna run 4 or 5 companies at a time. You're never gonna hit your financial marks, period. There's this myth of working hard.

That that was a great idea, and I really believed in it in 19 twenties. When it's not the 19 twenties 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 2 sides of the spectrum there, what have you found out that worked really well?

Yeah. Pretty easy to tell. So, it's easier just to say what not to hire for. I don't love virtual assistants, meaning another, you know, Philippines, India, Pakistan, Latin America, all those things. I don't love that for sales.

I don't love that for, like, phone support. I don't personally. Correct. Then strategy strategy is not it. If they were able to do strategy,

they would be. Would not

be a virtual assistant.

Exactly.

They They'd be competing head to head with

you. Yes.

But what they are great at is all things administrative, all things marketing, you know, social media and all those things. But, again, you take any of that stuff, and if you force them to do the strategy, you're gonna break. Right. So if you come to the table and say, I've got here's the strategy. Here's what we're doing.

Here's what we're trying to get out of this. And then I need all of these things done. Easy. So though I mean, those are some of the areas that and and development and, you know, like, real, like, you know, kinda techy stuff, fantastic, and all that stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. I've learned that, you know, they're great at making funnels. They're great at being what I what we call hammers. Just say, hey. There's a nail.

Go hit it. Let's go hit it. It'll be a hammer. When you ask them to think outside of a box, if they could think outside of a box, they would not be VAs. That's okay.

I I could not function as a human being if I didn't have a Christine. I love sushi. Doesn't mean I'm gonna ever learn how to make sushi and become a great sous chef. That's just not my job. I just go someone else who does it.

It's no different when it comes to this. But idea that I'm special, that I'm unique, and that I'm the only person who can do that. And I think that creates some some challenges. When they're looking at prices for this Yeah. What should they be prepared for?

What are the things and again, I know numbers change radically. We're, you know, we're we're in the end of 2024 here. I know what it was 5 years ago. Good God.

We're

at a different price. Things change. What are things that realistically if someone says, hey. I need someone for marketing on a part time thing. This is realistically where I should be.

Here's and, you know, if it's a project versus a part time versus you know, what are the pricings on that they should be prepared for as they walk into?

Yeah. I mean, I would I would always expect to be paying $10 an hour plus for really good quality, on a dedicated role. Right. If it's project based stuff, you're gonna have kinda more mediators in the middle, project managers, people in, you know, in administrative roles. So the price can be a little bit higher because there's so much more, logistics built into this project based structure.

Right.

However, like, the way we do projects on demand, we call them pods, on our side is that you just buy a block of hours, and you get to use it over the course of an entire month. And so you say, okay. Great. I want 40 hours to use over a month. You can assign 10 projects at 1 time, and they're gonna go to the people that need to get that need to work them.

And then those hours are gonna get deducted as everybody's using them every day, and then we give you an update. I I think it's, like, every week and you get a notification that says, hey. Here's all the hours used. Tell us how many have left. Here's your next billing date.

Those hours also roll over. So if you don't use them, you get to roll them over. That's really, really effective there. But I would say always go somewhere between expect 8 to $10 an hour for dedicated people in kind of a marketing front you might get when you get into, like, operations or like project management. I'd be looking somewhere beyond kind of the 12 to 15.

And and this is kinda speaking mainly for the Philippines. Yep. And then I think that if you go in with that expectation, it's gonna be phenomenal. You could take, like, a project manager. And what would cost you maybe 12 bucks an hour in the Philippines or something like that or working with a company like ours, that might cost you $80,000 a year in the US Yes.

As an example. So, I mean, that's kind of the comparison. Right.

And I always tell people when they hear numbers and they're, oh my god. I don't I don't have $12 an hour, not $15 an hour. I always tell them, you're you're a Ferrari. You're not gonna deliver pizzas. Stop delivering pizzas.

Stop doing the stuff like mowing your lawn. Just stop it. There's no reason to do it. Figure out what your hourly rate is based on what you make and say, okay. My hourly rate, 75 an hour, a 150 an hour, $250 an hour.

Awesome. Every time you mow the lawn, you're losing money. I'm like, oh, shit. So going through there and having that pivot is is so vitally important.

Oh my god. Have them just have them just calculate time when they check their email. How much time do you spend on your email every day?

Even outside of that, the stress of knowing that I don't have to check my email, the when my when my thing goes bing, I ignore it. I literally turn off the notifications on my phone for email and for messages. I just I don't have any of it. I'm like, I I don't have little red circles that say I have a bazillion people to call me. I love it.

That's right.

It's worth every dollar I spend every single month.

100%.

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.

And It's getting my time back because I'm a better marketer and I'm better at at dollar productive activities. I'm way better when I don't have to focus on things that don't matter. Correct. Or think your email spell

out. Yeah.

Your email almost never matters. Correct. There's almost nothing in your email that is so important that it's your eyes only.

Yes.

And that was the long 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 I could still handle it. It's not that big of a deal.

And there was 1 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.

None. Nothing. Yeah. 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. If they emailed everywhere else, Christine's gonna be involved. It is what it is.

I just don't the other

my family email me. Yeah. Like, if you need some, text me. Like, that's it. Percent.

So my family, that's it. Don't email me anything because I will not even know it came through.

Yeah. It's kinda like social media when we get messages inside social media, be it Gram or Facebook or all of that. 99.9% of that is something that someone else can see, and I don't have to address it. And what I'll do is I'll just, you know, I'll get a debrief of it all, and we'll just record video message or voice messages, and we'll just send voice back. I'm like, okay.

Because I'll just sit there, and I'll do a call very similar to this, which is why I wanna ask you about tools next, where she'll just rapid fire it out, take the recording, crop it out, and then just send it off. And then some people are getting this, wow, this personalized voice message for me. I'm like, I just sat there for 32 hours and just went blah If it's that high of a level. The lower end stuff, yeah, have have fun. So it just you know, for example, the podcast has taken off.

We probably get 20, 30 people a day requesting to be on the podcast. Right. You think? Go ahead of that, please. So there's a very normal thing that we're talking about.

Like, Christine is all we do. So, yeah, we're just name dropping her all over the place. Please be nice to Christine. Those who are listening, be nice. What are some of the tools that you have found to be unbelievably effective?

Because I use 1 that no 1 else use because it's me, and I'm old school. But what are some of the tools that you love?

We communicate as an internal company through, actually, all of our companies, all of our client Mhmm. You know, kind of, the way that we just categorize everything down, we use, Slack for that. So, internally, we communicate from Slack because we have so many people that we couldn't use, like, Skype or something of that nature because there's just too many people, and we have to be able to create channels for very specific things. So, I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds of people communicating in in, Slack. So that's where we do that project management tools.

We use Asana. I know ClickUp is like, you know, a better version or whatever. But when I actually went to ClickUp, it said, hey. Here's what we do. This is what our company does.

Here's how we use it. Gave him kind of an overview on showed him, like, how we use it. I said, sell me. Like, bring me to ClickUp. Show me why I need to switch platforms.

And he he literally was like, yeah. It's just gonna be a waste of time because all you're gonna do is do the exact same thing in our platform. So we stayed with Asana. So we've been with Asana for a really long time. Obviously, bigger meetings.

We do all those through Zoom. We use the high level platform when within our company for CRM, marketing, automation, all that stuff. So we use high level. Big shout out. I was actually their very first customer.

So that's pretty sweet. You done? Yeah. So that's sweet. Let's see.

I do pretty much everything else, from my cell phone. And so I'm I'm an Apple guy, so all things Mac. And, yeah, I'm trying to think what other I'm, like, looking on the side of my bar. I'm, like, what what else do we use? Like, that's that's kind of we we operate the entire company through that.

And and it's funny how simple these things are. Now the reason we went with Asana on our side because I don't care. I was like, what do you use that you can function in and you can flow in really, really quickly Yeah. And gets executed? Like, we like Asana.

I'm like, okay. It's Asana. The only pushback that I have on them is I do not let them use Google Docs because I hate Google Docs. That's a personal thing. I'm a my I was a Microsoft certified trainer.

I was an MCSC. I ran IT divisions. I'm just more comfortable there. So I let them work in it. But they know if it involves me, yeah, you're gonna be you're gonna not be in in Google.

And then I use Skype because it's just it's easier. We're a small team. It it's super easy. So people always wanna know what I'm using and and all

that. For sure.

What are the questions that if someone's writing down that before they come to you, that you want them without our side? We already talked about, you know, know where you're going, but let's get a little bit more detailed. What are the things that, like listen. I I I do this a lot. We brought a lot of people in.

We got 1,000 and 1,000 of people. Have these 3 or 4 questions. Answer these before I get on the phone with you, before you bother me, before you jump on a call with me, please, for the love of god, let's say we'll spend some time. What are the questions that you you wanna have answered immediately before they

tell you? Well, I mean, back to know where you're going, know what you're actually after. So sit down and genuinely think through your day and identify all of the areas. They could be mundane. They could be kind of you're like, man, I don't know if that's really anything that we should we should hire for.

Write it down. Come to the table with, look, these are all the things that waste my time or that aren't as productive and somebody else could do them. Write them all down no matter how inconsequential you think they are. Bring that to the table. The next thing is, what do you expect when you're gonna hire somebody who's virtual?

Right? An outsource staff member. What do you actually expect? Are you expecting a certain education level? Are you expecting a certain level of experience?

You know, are you expecting a certain certain ability with certain platforms? Like, what are those things that you're expecting? So that's today. I want them to come in with this kind of core resume or, you know, experience level. Here's the big 1.

Where do you need them to be in 2 years? Right. Because the problem that we see a lot, and this is something we've been addressing, I've been doing it through content and through communities. 1 of the core things that we run into is that outsourcing feels transactional to people, and it doesn't feel like I'm hiring somebody for my company forever. If you go and you're gonna hire a marketing executive or a, you know, a CFO, you're not assuming I'm gonna do this for, like, 60 days.

Right. No.

No. This is like a 5 year, 10 year investment in your business.

Mhmm.

You have to come to the table. If you're hiring dedicated staff, that's exactly the same thought process you should have. What you're gonna end up with is a completely different candidate. Because on our side, when we go to work with the virtual assistant, we're gonna say, hey. Okay.

Great. Let's see your your resume and what you're what you're all about. Tell us your experience and show us. Okay. Now prove it.

We're gonna test project. We do all those things. K. Great. Here's where you are today.

Where do you see yourself in 2 years? Where do you wanna be in 5 years? And we start asking these questions, and now all of a sudden they go, okay. Wait a minute. Oh, this isn't I'm just getting a gig for a minute.

This is no longer the gig economy. This is a career. And the people that we bring on that have that are far better for everybody, for us, for you as a client, and all that. So those are kind of the core 3 that I would say come to the table with.

Yeah. I think it's 1 of the things that COVID taught all of us was that the minute everyone and companies realized, wait. We don't have to have people in offices, we can be almost as productive and sometimes more productive, the game changed. The prices for VA shot up because, obviously, supply and demand. If you're sitting at home right now, if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, yeah.

You know, this can't happen. I'm not gonna have the same productivity if I have you know, if it's a VA or if it's outsourced. You're so unbelievably wrong. I I would love to

say, I I told you so. I wanna shout I told you so all day. Yeah. You know? It's like, well, we can't be as productive.

We can't build as good of a business, and I'm like, I'll put my business up against yours all day. I was

like, absolutely.

Yeah. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like like so so just as an example, because a lot of people don't don't really understand this piece of it. So I'm a college dropout.

Mhmm.

I didn't have the ability to finish school. It didn't interest me. However, my lead developer on my team is a professor. So when you wanna talk about what you can get as quality, people go, oh, well, they're just not you know, who are they? They're not that no.

No. No. There are some pretty dang amazing people out there. Right.

We

have team members who have 20 years experience in a core skill set.

Yep.

I don't have that.

Right.

So why in the yeah. So I think it's a you know, I I think that people need to step back. They need to humble themselves and realize that, you know, for for the title of the book, The World is Flat, you know, we are in a world where it doesn't matter where somebody is. Right. There are no borders anymore when it comes to employee.

And, you know, and if and, you know, just as a side note, if somebody has that, well, you guys are shipping jobs overseas. Yeah. Everybody's been doing it forever. And here's the interesting part of it. Most companies fail.

Most businesses will fail. Absolutely. Part of their challenge is it. Well, most of the reason is capital resources. They just don't have access to capital.

They don't have the ability to hire the right skill set to drive the business. Well, now they have the leverage to hire the right people. When the company can now afford to hire somebody local, they have the money to do it. And they did it because they used dollar leverage overseas outsourcing, then they brought their business in house. Now the company survives, and outsourcing was the key to that.

And so that is my argument against it all day. Yeah. We're employing all over the world. However, there's an opportunity somebody could just become successful enough to afford to hire local. So if that's your goal, fantastic.

But it's an opportunity.

I also think there's huge hypocrisy. Right? Like, oh Yeah. Why would you send your money overseas? Or why you're I'm like, cool.

Tell me where your food came from.

Tell me Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yeah. No.

It's true.

In your car. Tell me who made your shirt. Tell me where the stuff that's in your shirt was grown. Walk me through this process. Walk me through any part of your house where everything was created here in 1 location.

I wish we could do that. I wish everything would be here, but I don't wanna spend $700 for a t shirt. Sorry. It just is what it is. I gotta make sure I can feed my family.

Sorry. We just until we automate this, it this is the world we live in. I live in reality. Sorry. We like to eat.

Food is good. In order for me to eat, I need to have money. Sorry. This is the the game we play.

Sure.

So alright. So if people are going through this, and they wanna, like, listen. I get it. I'm completely a noob to this. I don't know what to do.

I'm terrified. I heard that you guys are doing it. I wanna have that level of success. How can they get on the phone with you? How do they find you?

How do they get get in touch with you to say, listen. Hey. I don't know if I'm ready to hire. I don't know what this is like. I'm really scared.

You've had all this success. Obviously, Charles does this as well. How do they get ahold of you to track that down? And are you open to having a call with them?

Yeah. So, personally, I'm not gonna lie. It won't be me on the call. But I did.

Like, you have fantastic team. Weird.

Oh, no. I mean, we have a fantastic team of people who jump on calls and they support, and it's it's very consultative. So level number 9 virtual dot com. Mhmm. Level9virtual.com.

Top right corner is a big old yellow button that says book a call.

Yeah.

Book a call, jump on, ask questions. Bring those 3, you know, items that we we had talked about. Right? Your clarity, knowing what is is sucking your time, kind of where you need somebody to be when they come into your business, and then where you see them in, you know, 2 years or whatever. But if you only need project based work, then bring the list of stuff you wanna get off your plate, and we can help you with it.

But our team is very consultative. It's 1 of the things that I will brag to the end of the earth about is that we are not hard sales Right. Ever. I don't care. We have plenty of clients.

I don't need to hard sell you. If you don't think it's a good fit, like, I always tell people, it should be a no brainer.

Yes.

You come in, you're like, I I can't imagine not doing this because it's the right thing to do. And if you don't feel that, don't do business with us. Go somewhere else. But I will tell you, we are so consultative. And for example, Dakota leads up, you know, our entire sales division.

He jumps on the call and he'll spend serious time with you. He will text with you if you have questions that pop up later. He's gonna make sure that you feel very confident in the decision that you're making moving forward. So level9virtual.com, big yellow button in the top right corner.

If there's if you sat there and said, listen, you know what? I I get to homeschool my kids. I get to spend all the time with them as much as possible. I'm having the success I have. Could you honestly and authentically have done what you've done without your VA and without level 9?

I don't I I I don't know how to. So I can I can tell you this quick story, you know, before we wrap it up? I had a marketing agency that was filled an office filled with 27 US employees.

Mhmm.

And there's some really kind of gangster stuff that you've gotta realize goes on when you have a business that's local. Right? For example, ergonomic chairs. I didn't know that there was a such thing that had to be if somebody complains and they go, and now all of a sudden you got a workers' comp issue. Yep.

And I'm like, what? Wait a minute. This doesn't make any sense. Like, I'm gonna get in trouble because I didn't buy an $800 chair. Yes.

That's insane.

Yeah.

Oh, the desk isn't the right height so that their monitor is sitting in the right and I'm like, this is real. Like, this is stuff, like, stuff that companies deal with. Right. And that company failed.

Mhmm.

And it failed because we couldn't get we couldn't build the business how we needed to build it to be able to afford the staff, to be able to afford everything we were doing. And there were other factors as well. So it's not all a staff issue. But when I relaunched and said, okay, I'm gonna relaunch an agency. I'm gonna do it from from 0, but it's 100% run with virtual assistants.

Mhmm. We went from 0 to a $109,000 a month in 4 months. We doubled in another 4 months, and then we hit over a1000000 a month shortly after that.

There it is.

Virtual and and there is 0

people right now with that. You just can't. You know, people ask

Yes.

People ask, you know, why did you sell your first company? It was thriving. We were getting 30% every quarter, growth every single quarter, employees. 100 thou I sold my IT company because the employees. I would rather have a wall of Christine's than the employees that work for me that used to work for me at the IT company.

It worked. They're fantastic. Like, this is not a knock on people local or whatever. This the the reality is is the game is set up against entrepreneurs. It's set up against us.

And I'm talking from a tax standpoint, a legal standpoint.

Yes.

This workers' comp stuff is Holy Christ. Insanity. Insurance

on all of them. Eats of it. Lot.

Eats of it. It it is. And it's just cost that doesn't have to exist if we all had common sense and we took care of ourselves.

Correct. But we don't have that.

Just the reality of it. And so I'd rather outsource and take stuff, you know, to people who actually respect the role, want the role. Mhmm. They are loyal to the company. They're not gonna try to go stab me in the back and sue us for a a workers' comp thing because they have the wrong, you know, desk height and so forth.

It's like, no. Like, you set up your own thing and get your shit done. Like Absolutely. Pretty easy.

Like, when you were talking about earlier that if a typhoon hits you, you need to have somewhere to go. I'm not paying for that. Get your butt over there. Get it done. Do your job.

That's right.

And I think that the entitlement across the board that exists right now is is eating us alive. On no matter which side of the spectrum you're on, it's it's too much. It's gotten out of control, and this is what forced us to do these things. So, no, I am I'm all in on outsourcing. I've done it for a really long time.

I could not run my businesses. So if people wanna get into this again, how do they track you down? What's the best way to get all of you?

Level number9virtual.com and, book a call. It's the easiest thing.

Man, I I really appreciate it, Joe. Thank you so very much. It. Yeah.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

And that's a wrap on our masterclass in virtual business scaling with Joe Rayer. We hope you're as excited about the possibilities of remote teams as we are. A massive thank you to Joe for pulling back the curtain on his journey from a traditional office bound agency to building multiple successful companies with virtual teams. His transformation from struggling with 27 local employees to running a $1,000,000 operation with overseas talent is a testament to the power of embracing the virtual revolution. To all you entrepreneurs out there feeling overwhelmed and trapped in your business, remember Joe's words.

You don't need to be everywhere. You need to be strategic about where you put your time and energy. Want to implement Joe's virtual team strategies in your business? Grab your free guide at podcast.imcharlesswartz.com. As he emphasized throughout our conversation, success in today's world isn't about working harder.

It's about leveraging global talent and systems to work smarter. Now go out there and build your virtual empire. Your business revolution starts today.