Big Talk About Small Business
Hosted by Mark Zweig and Eric Howerton. Our Mission is to inspire, empower, and equip entrepreneurs with the knowledge and insights they need to succeed in their ventures. Through engaging conversations with industry experts, seasoned entrepreneurs, and thought leaders, we aim to provide valuable strategies, actionable advice, and real-world experiences that will enable our listeners to navigate the challenges, seize the opportunities, and build thriving businesses.
Big Talk About Small Business
Ep. 106 - From Door-to-Door to Eight Figures
Growth isn’t magic, it’s math. We sit down with entrepreneur Joe Rare to unpack how he turned a failing, everything-for-everyone agency into a focused, scalable machine by choosing one niche, productizing delivery, and unleashing a disciplined engine of VAs, automation, and AI. The conversation moves fast, from door-to-door “test marketing” days to rebuilding on a lean tech stack, and lands on a clear thesis: make more offers, with more precision, to the right market, and let systems carry the weight.
Joe breaks down why the wedding venue niche was ripe for transformation and how simple automation doubled annual bookings in just over a year. We dig into the operational backbone: why the Philippines excels for creative marketing output to where AI fits best today, as an authentic, disclosed “setter” that handles instant callbacks on warm inquiries. We also explore the pendulum swing toward community and human connection as AI saturates channels, and how brands can stay trusted by being transparent and experience-led.
Then we get tactical with RevLift.ai, Joe’s new revenue intelligence play that squeezes more value from every marketing dollar. Think identity resolution for anonymous traffic, data enrichment, deliverability fixes, iMessage response lifts, and partner handoffs that monetize “dead” leads. It’s a stack of micro-optimizations that compounds into meaningful revenue without blowing up ad spend. The takeaway is unapologetically direct: stop treating marketing as an expense and start treating offers as your primary growth lever. Build the team, document the process, and 100x your output so the numbers can finally tell you the truth.
If this conversation sparked an idea, share it with a founder who needs it, subscribe for more no-fluff growth playbooks, and drop a review with the single tactic you’ll implement this week.
Now, a lot of small businesses they're afraid to market that hard. They feel self-conscious about it.
SPEAKER_01:They feel like I don't think it's self-conscious. It's seriously that they don't understand the math. And they're they they almost refuse to accept math. And this is that this is the thing that I love the most in business is that the math doesn't lie to you.
SPEAKER_03:So, Joe, um, welcome to uh uh our show. This is another episode of Big TikTok about small business. Where are you located, Joe? I know you're somewhere out in the northwestern part of the country.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm in I'm in Montana. So I'm in southwest Montana.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, that's great. Big sky country. That's right. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:We got big sky today, too. Oh, yeah. Today it's so nice today. Yeah, we we've definitely got it going today.
SPEAKER_03:Well, we've got storms here today, so but that's typical of this time of year here. Um, so Joe, tell tell everybody um a little bit about yourself. Joe is an entrepreneur, he's had multiple ventures. Um, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get started and tell us about some of your businesses?
SPEAKER_01:So, how did I get started? Well, that's a good question. Um, I dropped out of college to start a business because somebody made an amazing promise that it was going to be awesome. And it was the opposite of that. It uh it it was uh selling products door to door out of the trunk of my car. And the promise was hey, if you come work with us, not only will you make money every day, and coming from a family that didn't have money, not that we were the the bottom of the barrel broke, but like my my we didn't have money for new stuff all the time, right? We didn't get the greatest clothes and all that, but we always had food and it was never anything like that. So um it's not a rags to riches type scenario, but I didn't have money, and so the opportunity to make money and the fact that I I went to college be uh really with the only intent that I thought I could walk on to the basketball team and play. And I walked on, made the team, and never played. And so after a couple years, it was like, well, guess what? My uh 5'11, not that great of a jump shot. Uh basketball career is kind of coming to a rapid end. So uh I decided not, I decided to not finish college and go and build a business. And so the first thing I learned to do was door-to-door sales. It was exactly what it sounds like, terrible. And um, but the promise actually rang true. If you come, you build your your team of people and you sell and you do well and all this, you you can open an office and they would consign products to us. And so I had a warehouse with a million dollars worth of inventory that was on consignment to me. And then I had a whole name it, kitchen utensils and knives and children's toys and books and uh equip like name it. And the way that it was basically the way that it worked, I mean, this is kind of like the internet existed, but you know, eBay was was not even a thing yet. It was just kind of starting to become something. And so what they would do is to figure out whether they would put products in stores rather than go and fight for shelf space for products, whether it be a wrinkle of a of a different type of a culinary set or it was a set of children's books and uh Tupperware and who knows. Instead of trying to fight for shelf space on on a um, you know, on a in a store, they would actually run this around the entire country, find out if the product would sell, then go fight for shelf space. And so we were what we would call test marketers back then. Now you put it on the internet, see if anybody will buy it, and then you know. But we we did test marketing essentially is what it was. But the test marketing was legitimate sales because there's nothing better than saying, hey, would you buy something by giving me your money right this minute, rather than just the concept of like, hey, is this a good idea? And so that's what we did. And so we sold that, and I uh I had that business running for a couple years, and uh at 22, I sold the company, um, didn't make that much money, but then that got me into real estate. And then after the 2008 crash, I lost everything. Uh, started an e-commerce business. I read the book, The Four Hour Work Week, realized I needed to do the four-hour workweek thing. So I moved to San Diego, lived on the beach, built an e-commerce business, and uh that was great until the FDA shut down the product that I was selling. So that got closed, and then I just started getting asked, like, well, how did you build the business? Like, how did you get customers? And I kind of had a knack for marketing, so I opened a marketing agency, uh, did that uh until my business partner, who was our biz dev person, stopped biz deving and we didn't have any new clients coming in, and the business failed, and so we closed that down. I got some good advice from a friend of mine who ran through a similar scenario and he said, look, just restart it, but don't do an agency that does everything for everybody. Do one thing for one niche and do it better than everybody else. Yes. And so I chose to go and uh our best client was a wedding uh venue. So I decided to go into the wedding industry and be a marketing agency for wedding venues only. And then that company, we went from zero to yeah, we went from zero to a hundred grand a month in four months, then we doubled it four months later, and then that kind of became the model on how we started building businesses. So that was the start. Wow to the yeah, and I still own that agency. It's yeah.
SPEAKER_04:How did you I mean, when you got into that niche, like I mean, what were you what were you originally doing and then what did it expand to?
SPEAKER_01:We were a full service agency. I had it was really stupid. I think I was listening too much Gary V back then. And uh it was like, you know, you had to have this office with glass walls and glass doors and conference rooms and all these things, and we had you know 20 employees sitting in desks, but the chairs had to be ergonomic because you could get sued and oh my gosh, computer equipment. And then, you know, we hired a guy who was really good at what we thought was going to be like internal video production to create content, and it turned out we decided, hey, let's just shoot commercials too. So we shot commercials for clients, and the next thing you know, we do everything for everyone, and it was so incredibly difficult, first of all, to get the talent, but second of all, you know, half the team were Philippine VAs, but we still had 20 people in the US sitting in chairs, and so the overhead was insane. And uh so a buddy of mine asked me a question when all this was failing and crumbling down around me, and he said, if you were to pick up the phone for one client on a Sunday, who would that client be? And I was like, Well, it's my friend who's a client too, who happens to own a wedding venue. And he says, Well, why would you answer the phone? Right, yeah, yeah, why would you answer the phone for him? And I said, Because he's not calling to complain. He's because like it's not a fire, we're killing it for him. So I know it's good, it's gonna be something to talk about. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:But I I hate to interrupt you, but I just had to jump in. Eric had a marketing agency as well. Yeah, so you're you're he's he's been through this exact same thing, and he gets it's like a common thing, yeah. Yeah, so so uh I'm sure this sounds familiar to him, this this story.
SPEAKER_04:But um well, I mean, one thing I'm sitting here thinking about kind of your point, Joe, like you have to there's a lot of yeses in the beginning because you're just trying to so many you're actually in discovery mode, you're trying to find some sort of you know good highway to go down, and you don't know what that is, but to your point, like you start feeling that pain, and then you but now you have a client list that you can actually ask that question towards. Yeah, you've done some work.
SPEAKER_01:But I didn't we didn't ask the question well. We didn't ask the question well because we had so many clients, and and in theory, you know, it's like we're doing millions of dollars a year, and it seems like we're successful, right? Everything's moving. The problem was uh we ended up losing two clients who happen to be a combined 40% of the entire revenue. The moment that happened, we go immediately into the red, and now I'm using debt to pay payroll. And so I rack up quarter million dollars in debt personally to cover and keep the business afloat. At the same time, business partners not developing any new business, so we're kind of just flat. And so the crazy part was the friend of mine who kind of became a mentor and asked me that kind of very pointed question. I had talked to him a little bit before when things were starting to kind of fall apart, and I chatted with him and I just said, Hey, like, you know, what's your advice? And he said, Close it down. And I'm like, dude, we're we're like doing we're we've got revenue. And uh he said, you know, he he goes, close it down. And I'm like, well, what are you doing right now? And he he was, oh, we're doing like sixty thousand dollars a month. And I'm like, well, how many people are on our team? And he goes, three. I'm like, well, that's kind of cool. Like, we've got 20 plus 18 VAs, but we're doing four times as much money as revenue as he is. So I'm like, I can't close that down. About six, eight months later, I see him interviewed on somebody's podcast or whatever, and uh he's doing 400,000 a month with five people. Wow. And so I text him and I just said, What are you doing? And he goes, You didn't listen to me, did you? And I'm like, Shit, no. So literally, like within two days, I actually closed down the business. Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_04:And and that's when you started focused on and you started focusing on the wedding venue. And so how are you what what was it that was making you kill it for the wedding venue industry and marketing? I mean, was it just like do you think it was your team that was more excited about that, or was it a little bit no, it was it was strategy.
SPEAKER_01:It was literally just yeah, it was it was there was a gap in their market that was way behind everybody else. So the wedding industry kind of does everything last. So they, I mean, think back, you know, marketing, marketing automation, super simple. We've been doing it forever. They adopted it way last. Like, you cannot send an automated message to a bride, it has to be personal. And I'm like, no, it doesn't. And so when I started with my buddy's venue, which I later became an owner in, he gave me equity. We put in marketing and automation and it skyrocketed. He went from they were doing about 57 weddings a year, and in 14 months, they were doing 120. We killed it, and so because of that, they said, Hey, you know, we'd like to give you a piece of of the business. And then later on, we went and invested in a bunch of other venues. But so that's what it was was we just saw a gap that existed that they weren't taking advantage of. Just like now, we I still own the agency in that in that space. They're now starting to talk about AI. And I'm like, you guys, like, dude, we've been doing this for a while. Where have you guys been? But that's how the industry works.
SPEAKER_04:So you went while I narrowed down, and I'm sure that once you found success there, you started scaling that out to other venues, right? And then rubber stamping that that methodology. And I mean, just now you got a streamline practice process. Yep. Yeah, it's good.
SPEAKER_03:That that's interesting, you know. You don't know this about me, Joe, but anyway, I started a consulting, publishing media training business for architects and engineers 37 years ago. It just for the fourth time was on the Inc. 500 5000 list in 2024. And it was so the same thing for us. We're serving this one industry that's very fragmented and has a million small players in it, and they don't know anything about the stuff that we do. It's kind of like that. That's what you found there was that sweet spot. And they all want to know what did you do for other people like me? Yep. Yeah, so now you've got that that history and track record. And um, you know, I my theory is like when you don't have big players like Eric's agency, he worked for a lot of consumer product companies, and I think they're a lot farther ahead in terms of their marketing sophistication because there's big players out there, you know, and they got money to spend. These small companies, they tend to be 10 or 15 years behind everybody else. Yeah, there's no like dominant players out there with the funds to like push things forward.
SPEAKER_04:They're not major corporations with a lot of resources, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there's now what's happening, especially. I mean, you see it in real estate with big companies coming in and buying neighborhoods, right? Same thing's happening. We and you see it in like HVAC where be these big you know PE comp you know, groups are coming in, they're buying a hundred, three hundred, they're doing roll-ups. It's happening in the wedding industry right now, where there's there's four or five serious players with with VC money behind them that are coming in and buying venues. And um the industry's gonna change because of that, but it's it's uh, but it's interesting because all the you know, we type we tend to work with independent business owners, people who own a wedding venue, but it's independent, they own it, they don't have partners. It's kind of like, well, I own a 50-acre ranch and we have this amazing barn and we decided to turn it into a venue. Now we do 100 weddings a year and it's amazing, but they still don't understand what they should be doing, building their brand, building their their marketing, all of the technology, all of that stuff. They have no idea. And so um, yeah, it's it's tough.
SPEAKER_04:Well, it's overwhelming to them, right? And they and they have the property and the location, they've done a lot of work. Yeah, you know, that it's a lot of work to maintain that, and then to have somebody like you come in and now you can drive business for them. I mean, that's a huge I mean the good thing is is like true on the agency side, the success metric is bringing new sales in. I mean, that's just the name of the game, right? And you you grow in those those number of uh venue bookings a year. I mean, that's your top line number metric, and if you figure out how to do it, then I mean you're doing a service.
SPEAKER_01:But you know, yeah, the great thing what what oh go ahead, go ahead.
SPEAKER_03:No, I'm just gonna say the great thing about your business though is you can completely define who your target market is. Yep, nothing's better than a business like that. You know, a B2B business where you know every potential buyer of what you do, okay? It's fantastic. I uh, you know, as opposed to anybody can buy what we do, that's hard to market.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yeah, it is. And it's uh, you know, the niche is tight when competition rises, but realize that the uh the end consumer, that market size isn't growing, it's shrinking. So that's where we get run into some challenges, right? So there's more venues opening up every year in every market around the country, but the number of engaged people who are gonna get married, that number's shrinking. So there's this weird inverse where the market, you have to start to get good at marketing if you want to succeed. Sure. Because the the shiny new venue that opens up against somebody who's established and well, they just get attention because they're shiny and new.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, right?
SPEAKER_01:Their windows are still clean. And so it's it's it's an interesting strategy uh where we have to take these established businesses and make sure that they're uh you know that they they can still stay on top.
SPEAKER_04:So Joe, according to your uh your your resume here, you got 2000 2016 is when you started the wedding booking system, but then in 2017, not even a year later, you're starting a virtual assistant agency basically called level nine. Tell us about what I mean. Okay, so you you got the wedding thing going, then I guess you had yet another great idea. And you're like, hey, I should do VA stuff because you've been using that in your business, and you've kind of probably figured out a lot there, I'm assuming. I'm I'm yeah, I'm uh I'm catching this on you like a bell. And then you but then you can't crank it out. What what was your prompting for that?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I realized what when I relaunched, like I'm relaunching my agency, but I'm only doing the wedding industry. Right. We used like our my method for doing it was super simple. It was I'm gonna create a fulfillment process so that I can record it, I can teach it, and I can put a couple people in place to do all of fulfillment. So I never have to touch fulfillment. My job is to sell and so to bring in new business. But how am I gonna get in front of people? Because if I'm prospecting, I'm not selling. So I need to be selling. So I put one VA in place, and all he did eight hours a day, five days a week was prospect. Social media outreach, email outreach, he'd pick up the phone to call, and he's based in the Philippines. Um, and we would he would just tee me up. All I wanted was the conversation started. If you could start the conversation, I'll close the sale. And so we did that, and I went from zero, having well, technically it was two thousand three hundred dollars a month from my friend uh to a hundred grand a month in four months. And it was 109,000. And we did that, and I went, okay, hold on. Okay, let's let's double down and do it again. So now we got a second person to help. And then we did the exact same thing, did it again. So next thing you know, we've got this business, and I'm like, okay, this is like a real deal. Like, there's money now. I paid off all my debt from the business that failed. We're like, we're moving. This is real. At the same time, I everybody kept asking, like, well, we kind of need some help, but you're using virtual assistants. So how do we do that? And I said, Well, I mean, I could kind of offer this to my clients, and then I just real, you know, the VAs basically came to me and said, Hey, you do know that you just tell everybody how to hire VAs, you could have a VA company. I was like, I don't want to do that. And they said, Well, we'll manage it, we'll run it, you just help us build it. And so, sure enough, we did that. They uh they run the business, and so even today, the company is far larger than any other company I've built so far. The VAs run the company. So I do strategic. Yeah, so I I look at myself as like a strategic advisor and an investor.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So I come in at 30,000 feet and say, hey, here's where we're going. What resources do you need to execute? And then they come up with their plans, we put an execution model for it, and then they run. And then we adjust, you keep going.
SPEAKER_04:So that's that's called level non. So level non virtual.
unknown:Yes.
SPEAKER_04:So do y'all have a niche that you focus in? I mean, is it an industry or is there a is there a service that you're focused on for that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So so the interesting part is that through the wedding side of things, the wedding industry, the software that we were using was kind of the the crux that made everything function well. We started out using Infusion Soft, Scipio for text messaging, click funnels to build funnels and landing pages and all these tech stack. And so the tech stack was really expensive. So the friend of mine who gave me the advice, obviously, we get going and he's like, hey, I need a CRM, a market automation tool. Why don't we find a developer and do it together? And I'm like, that'd be awesome because I got this tech stack that's crazy expensive. And a little, I don't know, we invested about a hundred grand each into it, and then the developers failed. And we went, oh, okay, now we're stuck. What do we do now? So as we're in that process, he goes, Hey, I actually ran into an old friend of mine. This guy's got, he's already further down the line, they're already almost ready to launch. Let's see what they come up with. And so that was, I don't know if you've ever heard of high level.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:The uh yeah, so go high level. So I was their very first customer ever. Oh, wow. And so I built, I rebuilt wedding booking system on top of high level. And so we rebuilt the whole thing, moved everything into that one platform, it dropped my cost by like 90%, and we built it there. So what ended up happening being the first, we were the first VA service to exist inside that community. So immediately we we explode staying inside the niche of hey, we can work inside the platform because we are the first people to ever use it. So that became our first niche. Then it then it expanded into agencies, Hubspot, Keep, all the other platforms. Right. So we stayed with agencies. Now we've expanded and been able to support more people, different businesses, but our core focus is really um, well, now we've kind of shifted much more to AI, but it's marketing type services. That's mostly what we do for small businesses.
SPEAKER_04:Is it like pro when you say marketing, like prospecting, like legions?
SPEAKER_01:No, I'm talking about building automations, building, you know, inside a CRM marketing automation tool, building email campaigns, um, you know, setting up cold outreach, doing running paid ads on, you know, doing paid media, uh, graphic design, video editing. Like we have a team who could do they do everything. Yeah. And then we recruit for all of those different skill sets.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and so I guess in your position, you're meeting with companies talking about their needs. Yeah, and you basically have like a virtual my team does. Your team but you have a virtual marketing team basically that's offshore virtual marketing and automated. 100%. And they just get in and whatever their gaps are, whatever their focus wants to be. Like so, if I if I wanted to hire you guys specifically for like LinkedIn outreach prospecting, you guys could tap into our CRM Zoho and do that outreach and marry those things together, giving our sales team kind of warm leads to follow up on. And and like you can start and stop anywhere in that box, right? And then expand if needed.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Yep. It's cool. I mean, so if you were to go look online, any single thing that exists on the internet of me, level nine virtual, wedding booking system, my new company that we just were launching, RevLift, anything that exists, I didn't touch it. It's a hundred percent created the mind, everything from virtual assistants, not me.
SPEAKER_04:Is your team is all in the Philippines then?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Yeah, we've got a couple people who support from the US. Like my CMO, because she works in all of my companies, she's here in the US. My sales director, he's actually in the US, but he has a team of people in the Philippines.
SPEAKER_04:So tell us a little bit about why the Philippines.
SPEAKER_01:So I've tried everywhere. So again, I read the book before our work week. That's when I hired my first VA, it was November of 2008. And I've had at least one, if not a full team, working with me every single day since that day. I tried India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, name it, Australia, Canada, Mexico, everywhere. The biggest factor that I ran into is because I was typically using them for marketing. And it was like lots of design stuff, lots of editing, lots of help us create a website, help us create graphics, help us do all these things. The only country that understood US style was the Philippines. And the reason was English is their second language, universities teach in English, street signs are in English, they wear our clothes, they watch our movies, and they listen to our music. They absolutely understand the culture more than any other country. So that was the reason there was cost leverage, obviously, which is you know the main reason uh to use outsourcing. And so that was kind of the reason we chose the Philippines.
SPEAKER_03:One thing though, um, Joe, is yeah, when Eric and I came back to a company that I sold in 04 that was taken over by its lenders in 2010 or nine, and then we came back in 2010 and were trying to resuscitate it. Um we were saddled, I want to say saddled with Philippines and India service providers. And one of the things that they were using the Filipinos for at that time was outbound um lead generation. And so I got, I'll never forget, I get this voicemail sent to me by one of my old clients who I used to be on the guy's board of his company, and he sends me this. He's like, Holy cow, Mark, what are you guys doing now? And it was this Filipino trying to sell him our services, and had a very sing-song-y voice, and he sounded almost like a recording, and it was very strange, and he couldn't even pronounce the name right. It was, I am calling from somebody white, it's white, you know. And anyway, um, he's like, What are you guys doing? And and um I remember we killed it right then and there. Do you remember that?
SPEAKER_04:Oh, yeah, I remember you coming in.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and um how do you deal with that, I guess? Is is because the language, even though they could speak English well, it was not English that sounded normal to people here in this.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think I think it's it's also what are you selling? So if I'm selling virtual assistant services and there's a virtual assistant on the call, that makes absolute sense to people. And it's like, okay, you do your best to find the person who has the best English. You I never want anybody, I don't want to try to find somebody who doesn't have an accent because that's not authentic. That's like a unicorn, you're not gonna find it. So we don't look for that by any means and stress on that side of it. What we're looking for is can somebody communicate well? Because at the end of the day, people are buying productivity, they're buying output. They don't care necessarily if the person doesn't sound perfect, they want the output. If it's a situation where you're trying to get somebody to do outbound calling or things like that, inbound calling is funny because nobody cares. They're just used to India answers the phone, the Philippines answer the phone. Every bank in America uses the Philippines and right. So we're all used to that on an inbound call when we actually call that company. The outbound side of it is the part that's hard. So we don't use the Philippines for outbound.
SPEAKER_05:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:We use Latin America now. But even now getting even further away from that, we're not even doing that. We're just using AI. And so we're moving away from humans on the outbound piece, going to AI first, having them be a setter, and then bring it back in-house. That's how we're doing it now.
SPEAKER_04:Because AI can go to dialect, southern, northern, right, western dialect.
SPEAKER_01:It's still a little, it's still quite iffy. Uh, number one, in in a lot of markets, it's actually against the law to outbound using a robot. That's illegal. So we're very hesitant in how we do it, but like our methodology is create inbound marketing, inbound leads, instantly call them back using AI.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So now we're not cold outreach. That's that's they that's inbound marketing. We're just reaching back out because they asked for information. And so that's still illegal to use with AI.
SPEAKER_04:I will agree with Joe. I mean, like when I did go when I was working with you, you know, we had India and Philippines. When it came to like Joe's right, they understand the culture because when we did any creative design, any type of written content messaging, I mean, it was really there was very little back and forth on that. And and whereas India was just they weren't efficient with that at all. But but when you get into like more of the analytical part of stuff, India would always do a fantastic job. I met one of the best workers in my life when I was at Zwag White, uh Parole.
SPEAKER_03:Parole, I knew you were talking parole.
SPEAKER_04:She was in India, but man, the only person in my entire life, still to this day, that reported to me, she would call me every week. Eric, I've ran out, and this would be like a Wednesday. Eric, I've ran out of work to do. What else can I do? Yeah, I'm like, Parole. Nobody asked. Just go to bed. I'm just I love you for asking. You know, but I mean, it was the no one has ever asked me that before or since. I have I have ran out of work.
SPEAKER_03:Give me more. I just remember we had to have a bus, and Peru was one of the reasons because they didn't want to be taking public transit.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So we had our own bus to pick up all our temporary workers and take them to work and take and take them home. She was great, man.
SPEAKER_04:She was a leader, man. Yeah, she she was awesome, one of the best workers ever.
SPEAKER_03:So I love this idea, though, of the AI responding. I mean, the great thing about the AI is it can work 24 hours a day and it never gets tired and it never gets, you know, doesn't hang, put the phone in the cradle, right? I mean, it just goes.
SPEAKER_01:I think the biggest thing to recognize. Recognize is that you have to be truthful. I really don't like if they're not up front that you're talking to AI and they're trying to hide it. I'd rather come straight up and just say, No, no, no, like, yeah, I am the AI agent for this. I can do these things to get you as far as you need to go. When you're ready to talk to a human, you just tell me.
SPEAKER_04:That's right. No, I agree.
SPEAKER_03:You're right on with that. I had a call recently and it was AI, and I asked, are you AI? And it would not answer. It wouldn't say no and it wouldn't say yes. It really was a basic.
SPEAKER_01:The thing is, is okay, two minutes into the call, 30 seconds into the call, you know. Yeah, there's just there's a pause, there's a gap, there's just a little bit that it's not there yet. It's not there yet. And it'll get there and it's gonna be scary as hell, but it's not there yet.
SPEAKER_04:Well, and when it gets there too, I mean, I'd argue that humans still, I mean, like, look, we're still humans, right? We want authenticity, we want we want to be treated with genuineness, we want, you know, we want that that personal that personal attention. We all want attention. It's a human nature. And I think that to your point, if as long as companies continue to be transparent about it, you know, it it'll can work really well and everybody will be good with it. Just don't try to fool me. No one likes being sold to. So yeah, no.
SPEAKER_01:And and I I think one uh it's an interesting situation because we're in the middle of AI really becoming the the way things are gonna be. But I I believe that we're watching the pendulum swing and the conversation right now is go as far AI as possible and get as much stuff and then what's gonna happen is we're gonna get to a point when it's like I don't know which video is real because it's that good. I don't know which one's real, I don't know what conversation is real, and the pendulum's gonna swing back to wanting AI's fine, but I still want that real human connection. And I think that was a good thing.
SPEAKER_04:You know, I had I was talking to somebody, I mean, I know we could go in the weeds on this, but I was talking to somebody a few weeks ago and they brought up a really great analogy. You know, we all know IKEA, and we all would buy IKEA, right? It's less expensive, it's dependable, you know, you can expect that same thing. Yeah, and you'll pay a certain amount for that. But everybody would still buy a handmade piece of furniture and spend more for that handmade piece of furniture. Not necessarily because it's that technically better, yeah. It doesn't function better. It doesn't function better, but there's a nostalgia to that. There's a there's a elevated thing. So I think to your point, we're gonna swing really far this way, and then we're gonna then the humans who are the ones that are buying decisions. I know that there'll be buying agents and stuff, but that's different. But the human connection, we'll still pay more higher premium, you know, to get somebody on the line and give us that attention we want and be able to complain and voice and have somebody be empathetic. Mark, I'm sorry about that. You know, I mean, yeah, like humanly connecting. We will that desire. Yeah, uh yeah, the emotional connection.
SPEAKER_03:It's funny. I was just talking with my brother this morning. He was in the ad agency business. Um, he was the chairman of a group of companies under the WPP umbrella. I don't know if you know who WPP is, but they're huge owners of ad agencies. They had Jay Walter Thompson and Ogilvy and Mather and all this. And we were talking about AI. And he was telling me about somebody he was at the dinner with recently who teaches creative writing, or no, he gave a talk at uh CUNY, City University of New York. Teach a person teaches creative writing, and they were like, Well, AI is is taking over so much of the writing. And he said, Yeah, but on the other hand, you know, it can only go so far. So, in reality, you know, people who are really good creative writers are gonna be needed more than ever, yeah, because uh of so much of this AI-generated writing. And it's kind of interesting when you think about it like that. It's just what you guys are saying. You can only take it so far, and then it's gonna come back to the human element.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. I mean, at Walmart, you can buy stuff and get it delivered to your house by a drone, right? But you still want to go to downtown. You want to go look at the mom-pa small businesses. Well, my wife does.
SPEAKER_03:I don't want to. I just want to push a button and get the shit delivered by a drone. Yeah, that's because you have no interest.
SPEAKER_04:Well, it's because you're mostly a robot. You're not even a human anymore, you're just a robot and you have no heart or soul. But I'm talking to people that are I'm just kidding. But I mean, there's still something about going down and window shopping and having that community and helping and serving other people, sure. You know, investing in your community. I mean, we all still know we're gonna have that.
SPEAKER_01:But I mean community is gonna be community is what the future is gonna hold. That's exactly what you're right. There's actually there's an interview, Gary Vanderchuck gives interview. It's pretty funny, it's recently, and he says, there's gonna come a day. Dude, now it's interesting because times have changed, right? So what I what I love about it, too. Yeah, I I think I think it's interesting. He says that in our lifetimes we will see where people will pay money for you to take a walk with them. Yeah, that'll be a business. Come take a walk with me and I'll pay you. And the reason is is because we're gonna eliminate, we're trying, I mean, AI is trying to eliminate community. But yet, if you look, what's funny online companies like school.com are gigantic community-based. Right? I mean, so it's it's very interesting how we're gonna come back to the thing that is the most human of all, which is tribal community. We're gonna come back to that. Yep. Especially when you can't tell the difference between reality and AI, you know, what is real and what's AI, videos on the internet, people saying anything, somebody's selling you something, you're not gonna know. So community is gonna be even more important.
SPEAKER_03:No, you're right. It's funny, I just came back from the Janus Motorcycles owners rally, and I'm one of the owners and of Janus Motorcycles, as well as an owner of a Janus motorcycle. But that's what we have is this community, and getting all those people together is unbelievable.
SPEAKER_01:Look at like music festivals, look at music festivals sold out. I mean, you know, anybody ever try to get uh what's the thing in the in the desert they do? Uh Burning Man. Oh, yeah. Try to get a ticket, it's like impossible. Yeah, like those are community things, they're experiences. And I think what I hope, and this is something we really work to instill in our kids, is that experiences are better than product. So let's go have experiences rather than just buy stuff all the time.
SPEAKER_00:Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Well, that's the 100% behind a brand development and marketing, right? You want to create a brand that's not a product, but a an experience. You want to you want to identify and attach with that brand. And I mean, that's just gonna live forever. Hey, so we only got like 10 minutes left, Joe. I wonder if you you in passing throughout as like an a true entrepreneur would. Oh, and I'm starting another business called Rev Something. Like, tell us what's that? Yeah, what are you doing there, man?
SPEAKER_01:So uh here's what's funny we have all of these tools that are awesome. We got um data intelligence that we use, and you know, identity resolution on websites and buyer intent data that we can use in advertising, and all these tools that are amazing. And at the end of the day, what does everybody want? They want more sales, they want more revenue so that they can make more money. And so, as we were evaluating a lot of our client base and just what people were needing, we realized how much revenue they have just sitting in their existing database, their existing customers. And so we using AI so much, we just created our own AI model that it'll take their customer database, it'll analyze everything there, it'll give them a distinct playbook for every single one customer that they have. Every one. So if we have a customer who's in our database, they've been buying services from us, how do we get more revenue from that that one person based on the data we have on them? Or can we go identify more data by doing things like data enrichment? And so when we take that, we decided to create a data intelligence business called Revlift. And the goal is that you're spending X amount of money on your marketing every month. Again, small businesses. If I look at the wedding industry as a whole, they spend on average two to three thousand bucks a month on advertising on marketing, marketing in whole not much advertising, including ads. It's low, right? So we're a high volume, low cost. How can we get more money for everything, every dollar they spend if we run a revenue intelligence model? And so using AI to do it has been incredible. So we started it with our wedding clients, it went gangbusters, moved it to the the virtual assistant clients, it went crazy. So now I said, all right, I guess we should build a real business out of this. And so we just started establishing our brand. I uh just actually two days ago, I built a website uh with my graph designer using nothing but AI. So we prompted 100% of what exists on the website today just with prompting. And it took 38 prompts and an hour and 29 minutes, and we had a live, fully functional website.
SPEAKER_05:Yep.
SPEAKER_01:And so we did that just to kind of prove that the model, you know, for 119 virtual clients and so forth. So we did that. So Revlift.ai is our new business. We don't are we aren't taking any money yet. Uh we are rolling out a launch, I think, in two weeks. And so we will go live with that.
SPEAKER_04:So to your wedding example, your wedding venue as a client example, then so I'm these venues have had, say, I've had 50 weddings at my location, right? And I'm doing outbound marketing to bring in the top funnel advertising. What RevLift does is it says, hey, you've had 50 people at your location, they got married there, they had good experiences. How do we engage them to bring in new business? That could be like referral programs, that could be, I mean, all kinds of different stuff, right?
SPEAKER_01:So so with the wedding industry, one of the core values that RevLift offers is how do you get more for every marketing dollar you spend instead of because most of the client or all of the clients in the wedding industry are one-off. Yeah, they once they get married once, you're gone, right? Right? There's no recruiting revenue.
SPEAKER_04:Well, except for Eric and me.
SPEAKER_01:Not except for us. You guys did it twice, huh?
SPEAKER_03:It's not a one-off for three times for me.
SPEAKER_01:Well, right, but here's the thing you didn't get married at the same place three times.
SPEAKER_03:I did not.
SPEAKER_01:That's fair. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So we'll actually have a part of audience. We know it's like swimming pool companies, though. People typically build one pool. I get it. That's a challenge. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But what about when you're spending money? What if you spend a thousand dollars a month on advertising and that brings you 500 leads, you know, or 500, you know, it won't even get you that, but 200 leads. What about the other 800 people that hit your website?
SPEAKER_05:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Well, if we identify using identity resolution who those people are, and we give you instead of 800, we give you 400 of those back, and you can use that to increase your return on ad spend, that's huge. That's more leads. Yeah, sure. Well, you think about like a wedding venue, they get all of these leads and they do a fraction of their leads as uh you know as clients.
SPEAKER_04:Well, they should they should sell photography, they should sell flowers, they should sell easier than that.
SPEAKER_01:What if we what if we just take their dead leads and sell them? There you go. Because everybody who's everybody who inquires is getting married. It doesn't matter what whether they get married here, there, or anywhere, they are getting married. So what happens after a wedding? There's a multitude of things that change car insurance, home insurance, life insurance, health care, on and on and on and on. Yeah, you make these partnerships, maybe buying houses. So now you have all those things. But even before that, though, all these companies, you know, wedding, wedding venues, and everything else, they're all sending text messaging in their marketing and doing all those things. Well, what converts better than a text message? An iMessage. Oh no, an iMessage, a blue text message from an Apple device. So what if we could get you a 60% higher response rate simply by implementing iMessage? That's a rev lift. So all of these little nuances. Do you know that most small businesses have bad email delivery deliverability? What if we just gave you what you need so that you could increase your email deliverability? You're gonna increase your revenue. All of those little teeny tiny things. And in just the wedding industry, we have 291 identified rev lift element. They can just go execute this today. Like little micro things they can do that would just change everything. So how do you charge one of the things that we're doing?
SPEAKER_03:What's that? How do you charge for this? What is it gonna be like on a monthly basis? Flat monthly subscription.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. And so one of the one of the core functions is that every single week, month, they're gonna get a playbook. Here's the things that you need to go do this week, this month to go execute. Here's the estimation of what it will increase your revenue, what you'll get out of it. Here's the confidence score based on our recommendation and you getting the execution. All of those details. So that's how we run it.
SPEAKER_03:So do we then use level nine to implement this plan? Is that I mean, it's like I got the flywheel. Welcome to the flywheel. Yeah, I get level nine to do it all.
SPEAKER_04:So, Joel, we gotta we gotta we gotta uh end the show soon, but uh a couple things.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Um, I do want to talk to you about level nine. So I need to, you know, you should have my email. Pop me an email or I'll I'll reach out to you and chat with you about that for some stuff. Um the the the other thing I'd say is like, so we talked a lot about your businesses, but what advice do you have for a small business entrepreneur? I mean, with all your experiences learning the marketing, lead gen, all these things you've done. What would you tell the startup, hey, do this, this is what you need to do, just in general, from a marketing sales standpoint?
SPEAKER_01:Do so I I hate giving so many other people like all the credit for some things, but this has been ringing true at a level that is like it's almost crippling to me. We think we're doing pretty good in our businesses, and I'm like, great, we're doing eight figures, we've got phenomenal companies, we've got all this stuff going on. It's awesome. I don't have to work. What I do for work is I get on podcasts, I do strategy, I don't actually physically work. Like I have an awesome life. I snowmobile in the winter, we do all kinds of outdoor stuff in the summer in the in the summer. The thing that I did figure out just recently, and I can give credit to Alex Hermozzi for this, is that when you think you're doing good, and then you look and there's somebody who's doing like way better than you, the difference between you and them isn't that they're doing like they're just doing more than you, or they're doing, you know, maybe they're doing 10 times more than you. No, no, they're doing a thousand times more than you. And what I what I came to realize is that if we make more offers to the market, that can be simply we just try to sell more people, or we just keep coming up with a new offer, putting it out, putting it in front of the market. The more offers you make, the more money you you earn. Period. It is a direct correlation. If I triple my offers, the number of offers that I make, whether that be in volume of humans that we talk to, or it's in the number of actual different offers that we make, we triple our income. It is lockstep it go, and so I realize I'm like, oh my god, the difference between the next level, it it's not just like we just need to double what we're doing. We need to 100x what we're doing. Yeah, so I think every entrepreneur and small business out there, get somebody on your team, a team, get a team of people, level 9 virtual offers it, get a team of people who will help you execute at a hundred times what you're actually doing. Because your income will skyrocket, the opportunities open up, and typically in business, cash solves almost all problems. So if you could make more money, you could solve a lot more problems. And so I would say look at 100x, 1000 X what you're doing. And the way to do that is to outsource it, get it off your plate, build a team, and yeah. So we can 100x, and I don't have to actually physically do the work, which is awesome.
SPEAKER_04:That's great, man.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, on a on a on a very simple way to look at it, I mean, we discovered that years ago with direct mail. We sent out more direct mail, we made more money. Now, a lot of small businesses they're afraid to market that hard. They feel self-conscious about it.
SPEAKER_01:They feel like I don't think it's self-conscious. It's seriously that they don't understand the math. And they're they they almost refuse to accept so true math. And this is that this is the thing that I love the most in business is that the math doesn't lie to you.
SPEAKER_03:But they, as you said, they they refuse to to acknowledge that and they they don't want to do it. And and then if somebody says, oh, we got a call from a customer that says he gets too much mail from us, so we need to stop. Like, no, we put we sold 50 customers because of that. Why do you let the one who objects kill everything? That's right, you know, yeah, yeah. But so many small business owners think like that. But marketing.
SPEAKER_01:We all did at one point, though. We all did at one point.
SPEAKER_04:Marketing sales is not an expense, it's not an expense line, it's an investment. It's an investment.
SPEAKER_01:It's hard though, because it's your money out of your pocket, and you feel like when you're a small business and you, you know, basically the the revenue of the business is your income. You really look at when I put up an ad, that money comes off of my it comes out of my family's mistake. And so it's really hard that disconnect. And that's why get as fast as you can, thousand extra output, and you can thousand extra income. I truly believe that.
SPEAKER_03:I believe you, Joe.
SPEAKER_04:Fantastic, man. Thanks for joining us today. And what a great set of companies you have. We need to have you back on, keep talking shit.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, let's do it anytime. Yeah, all right.
SPEAKER_03:Maybe maybe the three of us could interrogate somebody jointly. That would always be fun. Just beat them up. Get somebody else in here.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, cut them off and say you're wrong.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, find somebody who doesn't believe in marketing at all, and they're gonna tell us how great they are. We can put them in their place. That's right.
SPEAKER_04:How do people get a hold of you? How do how do they find your your company?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Joe at JoeRare.com. Easiest. Joe at joRare.
SPEAKER_04:Joe at JoeRare, just like it's spelled. Yep.
SPEAKER_03:All right. Well, as you said, it has been another episode of Big Talk about small businesses.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Joe. All right, you got it, guys. See you later, man.
SPEAKER_04:Appreciate you, man. Yeah, you're great.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Big Talk About Small Business. If you have any questions or ideas for upcoming shows, be sure to head over to our website, www.bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com, and click on the Ask the Host button for the chance to have your questions answered on the show. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn at Big Talk About Small Business. And be sure to head over to our website to read articles, throughout episodes, and ask questions about upcoming shows.