52: When is it Time to Pivot in your Business?
Behind Their Success: Ep 52
Joe Rando: [00:00:00] Just because you can build it Doesn't mean you should
Paden Squires: Hello everybody. Welcome back to Behind Their Success Podcast. I am Paden Squires, the host, and today we have on Joe Rando. Joe is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 30 years experience in business and technology with a background in physics and an MBA. Joe has developed nearly 1 million square feet of retail real estate and has founded three tech companies.
He's now dedicated to helping solopreneurs build businesses that serve their lives through Lifestar, co hosting the aspiring solopreneur podcast and co authoring the upcoming book, solopreneur business for dummies. Joe, good morning. Welcome on the show. Good morning, Peyton. How are you? Yeah, doing good.
Welcome on the show. I appreciate you coming on. kind of give us kind of what you do and, um, uh, currently. Currently.
Joe Rando: So, I started a business basically around an app idea and the app idea was for an [00:01:00] app that would, Let people work with other people that weren't necessarily on their team I was frustrated with the task management apps that I was buying because they were really team focused and I worked With a lot of people outside of my team and I had a vision for it and I started to build it because, you know, that's kind of what I like to do is, is build stuff.
And, uh, I had a marketing person, Carly Reese was co authoring the book with me say, gee, who are we going to target with this? You know, people that want to work beyond their team isn't really a thing. And I'm like, yeah, good question. And she says, how about solopreneurs? Solopreneurs. are people that don't have a team.
So it's a natural. I said, that's brilliant. Where do we go find those people? And we looked around and looked around and there was no place. And I'm like, Oh, that's kind of a bummer. And then I looked more carefully and I learned that if you count side businesses, there's like 60 to 75 million of them in the United States.
If you count all one person businesses, you know, freelancers, coaches, consultants, contractors. And I said, There should be a [00:02:00] place so I kind of pivoted and having been a solopreneur and currently a solopreneur Said let's figure out how to bring these people together and help them. So I did a bunch of research I put a survey out did over 300 one person businesses and found out that regardless of what they did Regardless of what they called themselves.
They all shared the same challenges, which is lead generation Sales and managing their time and processes so they have a life So we said, let's focus there, put all the pieces together to help solopreneurs with those kinds of things. And we've got a multi pronged approach with community, with courses, with office hours, accountability groups, all coming out in January of 25.
So that's how I got here. like I said, I've been a solopreneur a couple of times. I was a solopreneur real estate developer and a solopreneur now. So that's kind of the thumbnail
Paden Squires: on that. Yeah. so you're helping solo entrepreneurs. and like I work with a lot of those [00:03:00] people, or at least did definitely in my past with a lot of startups and solar entrepreneurs and, you know, kind of my business and the tax and wealth.
And, um, yeah, they need a lot of help. Right. Like, you know, they may be a great practitioner, you know, they may be a great accountant or a great lawyer or great whatever, but you're right. Like they don't know anything about running a business. And same here. It's like, I have a business background and got those degrees, but still the same time, like I didn't know what I was doing 10 years ago when I, I started this up.
Some of the
Joe Rando: stuff you learn right at, you know, on the ground, not in the classroom. Yeah.
Paden Squires: Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. And, I think the real stuff is really what you, you know, you learn in the arena when you're getting punched in the mouth. So, but yeah, so kind of tell us, how you come in and help people.
Joe Rando: Well, again, it's one of these things where we kind of narrowed down the challenges. we do a lot, some ancillary stuff, but it's really comes down to helping people figure out how to do lead gen, how to close sales and how to run the business in a way that, you know, [00:04:00] lets them have a life.
Cause you know, and let me back up because my entire premise here, Is that if you're smart you're not starting a one person business to get as wealthy as you can You're not starting it to try to make forbes, you know wealthiest list You're starting a one person business to serve some goals in your your life beyond Income because if you want income, why would you give up the most powerful scaling tool, which is employees?
It makes no sense, right? So so this is about life right? it starts with Helping people figure out what their goals are. Why are you doing this? Right. So when you start there and then you start thinking through what you're going to do You can design a business that's actually going to serve those goals if you just go.
Hey, i'm going to do this You can wake up one day and go You know, I really didn't want to have to travel and here I am traveling every other week for three days or whatever. And it's like, you know, you really need to think those things through and build it out. So we built something called the solopreneur [00:05:00] success cycle, which starts with goals and then moves to.
Kind of, you know, envisioning your business and then, you know, kind of making the decisions and, and, and designing your business and then actually building it and then operating and learning and then circling back to reimagining your business and then making decisions and then making changes and back into operation.
So this kind of continuous cycle of improvement or change, and it might not be that you're improving revenue. It might be you're improving your lifestyle. It might be that you're reacting to changes. In the environment. I mean, AI has certainly, you know, caused a lot of people to have to do some thinking about how they're doing stuff.
So, so this is the process we've designed. It's the process we're building solopreneur business for dummies on. and it's really effective. it really, really is. So, and I learned it because I didn't do it. And that's, that's always the case. If somebody is great at something, they never have an ability to teach it.
Cause it's just like, Hey, that's what you do. Right. But when you screw it up, when you do it wrong and you wind up in a business, you don't want to run, [00:06:00] you start thinking real hard about, you know, what it means to, to, to have that happen. So, you know, that's, that's kind of the big picture is specifically how do we do it?
We do it with online events, bringing people together, networking community, like, you know, 24 seven community, for people to just not be alone. we're doing it with, accountability groups. So, you know, get four people together once a week to kind of say, Hey, you know, did you do what you said you were going to do?
Very powerful. Um, we're doing it. We've, we've got an AI trained to answer business questions from a solopreneur business perspective, right? If you look at AI in general. The advice you get, because it's the average of the internet, the device you get is a lot of times appropriate for either an employee based business or a subject matter expert.
And neither of those apply to solopreneurs. Solopreneurs need that percent of the effort that's going to yield the 80 percent of the results. And so that's how we're focusing on thinking this. So I almost consider myself to be kind of a translator. In [00:07:00] a sense to say, you know, this is search engine optimization, right?
Okay. You go to chat GPT or go to the internet. It's like, Oh, I do this, do this, you know, keywords, blah, blah, blah. And it's like for a solopreneur, well, how many customers do you need? If you only need six or eight customers, what the heck do you care about? Optimizing your website and, you know, just go out and network, you know?
So these are the kinds of changes that you have to think through when you're talking about a one person business.
Paden Squires: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I, you know, thinking about my own journey and starting my own business. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't think of, I didn't really have a lie for starting my business or a vision for the business other than like, Hey, I don't want to work at my job anymore.
So I'm going to quit and start my own thing. And I was like, and the goal was make money. Right. Um, which you, you know, like you said, it's, it's very easy to, you know, If that's your only path or goal, like it's very easy to build something that doesn't, doesn't serve your personal life. Right. and so entrepreneurs, and especially people that are good and driven and, and, [00:08:00] and different things that they'll, they'll build, you know, they may have left a corporate prison and have immediately built a new one for them.
pretty quick. Right.
Joe Rando: Yeah. My friend calls it building a crappy job. And that's really what you want to avoid. But, um, but no, I mean, when you say, you know, you didn't have a goal, well, you did have a goal. You wanted to work for yourself. You didn't want to have a boss. And that probably, if you dig into that or why this is one of the things we do, like, why, why did you want that?
Well, you know, well, why actually, why did you not want to work for your job anymore?
Paden Squires: think it's because I, I see inefficiencies and think I can do it better, probably. Okay. So you wanted
Joe Rando: the ability to run the business in a better fashion. Why?
Paden Squires: That's a great question.
Joe Rando: It's a two year old.
It's a two year old approach. I know you're, you
Paden Squires: know, it's, it's, it's. You know, a process like that. You keep asking why and get four or five levels down. I mean, it gets, you get to the root and it gets real, real, real,
Joe Rando: you know, I won't psychoanalyze you here, but no, no, I'm
Paden Squires: just
Joe Rando: trying
Paden Squires: to think of the answer,
Joe Rando: [00:09:00] but
Paden Squires: you know, I, why, why do inefficiencies bother me?
I think it's just waste. I think it's, I kind of came from a single mom background, not that we were just like crazy poor or anything, but you know, I'd say we had less than others, but it was, I think waste bothers me. I think that's like the scarcity kind of mindset, right? Uh, growing up. Just kind of why I went into money and finance and that kind of kind of stuff, right?
Joe Rando: Yeah, my wife is exactly like you. Like any, any waste, you really have a light on it. Why'd you leave the light on? Yeah, I go around and shut lights the whole time, right? Yeah, so that, makes sense. I mean, they're probably, we could probably dig deeper, but we don't want to do that here, but, but, you know, but that's the point is like, why do you want to do this?
Cause it's not easy, you know, like my favorite meme in the world. Okay. And I put this on every once in a while, I post it on LinkedIn just for fun, but it says, we do this, it's a big banner. It says, we do this not because it is easy. And then it's small print says, but because we thought it would be easy.
And this is the story of every entrepreneur or solopreneur. it's my story. Every time I got it figured [00:10:00] out three years, we're going to be this, that, but you know, and it's three years turns into 10. Yeah. And, uh, and it's still worth it. But it's like, if you didn't, if you weren't the optimist, if you weren't like, okay, this is going to be easy, you wouldn't do it.
If you knew how hard it was going to be, you wouldn't do it, but then you do it and you're glad you did.
Paden Squires: Yeah. you're totally right. Alex Ramosi, who I listened to a lot of podcast guy, um, talks about the, Kind of the like the woman in the red dress like that and he's talking in fashion of like distractions for entrepreneurs and whatnot But like the the point is like you see that attractive other opportunity, right?
But you don't know the problems you're like this irrational optimist because You have no idea. Like you see this opportunity, like, Oh man, that'll be easy. If I just jump over there, I can make all this money. It's going to be so easy, whatever. And then you get over there and you're like, Oh crap.
There's all kinds of problems here that I didn't know anything about.
Joe Rando: Exactly. Exactly. It's just, you know, it looks simple on the surface, but when you dig in, you start seeing all the, all the pitfalls. [00:11:00] And then, you know, even if you had it all figured out. Even if you had it all figured out, then there's tech changes.
You know, I remember just I have this, book. I'm going to write before I die called the power of procrastination, because there are times when you see this thing, we got to do that. And then you don't get to it. And you're like, so glad. And I just a quick example. We went out with the trade area systems.
we had built a web app and the web app. Was good, but my partner who was the CTO and really smart in terms of tech said, you know We really need to build this on Microsoft Silverlight because it'll be a lot more performative and all this stuff And he but he never we never had the bandwidth to make the transition and then Microsoft turns around and says we're going to sunset server lights.
And a lot of our competitors were like, Oh crap. And we're like, yeah,
Paden Squires: yeah, yeah. You invest a bunch of resources. Yeah. So you can be
Joe Rando: chasing these shiny objects that, you know, and sometimes, it's a mistake, but there are times when, you chase these things and it actually leads you down a bad path.
So there's a, real power in kind of [00:12:00] being careful and selective of what you really need. To sustain or grow your business as opposed to what's the shiny objects like you're talking about It takes a lot of analytics and you're not going to do that If you're doing three other things at the same time, you need to have your head right in there I mean that was a lucky that was a lucky one for us because nobody thought microsoft would do that But there are a lot of times when you get, you know Distracted by something and wake up and go.
I wish I had done something else. Yeah.
Paden Squires: it's an interesting path. trying to decide kind of where, where you're going and what you're focusing on, but it's, the people that are, that are successful. The ones that stick to one thing, right. because like you said, you're moving from different things, different opportunities, you know, solo entrepreneurs very well.
I see that a lot in that world where people kind of jump from thing to thing because they see this. You know, bright, shiny object. And it's like, well, this sucks what I'm doing now, because it's hard. I figured it out. It's hard. And it's that constant jumping around.
The thing is you've got to [00:13:00] figure out, okay, I got to go with one. I got to dig deep and start fixing all the problems. That's the only way to like the sustained success.
Joe Rando: And that's why not everybody's built to be in business. Some people don't, I mean, I'm like one of those people, like I will pound my head against the wall until the wall breaks.
I just, I'm just how I'm built. I just, if it gets hard, I just go, and I'm lucky. That I'm like that, although it has let me down some very expensive mistakes. Right. I mean, like I should have shut that company down back there in the internet days, and I, I guess it worked out in the long run because everybody came back and I had a great team out of the gate when the opportunity was there, but you know, that was really lucky.
Um, but you know, but really there are times when you need to give up. It's hard to tell. And I've actually developed a set of rules to decide. whether you should change directions or not, you know, and the, and the rules are first, does anybody love what you're doing? You know, if nobody loves what you're doing, you're not, you're not on a path.
You're, you're basically asking to [00:14:00] fail. But if, some people love what you're doing, you just got to go find more of those people. then the second one is, can you make money with your product? will people pay enough to let you make a fair profit so that you can run a business in a way that, that, that keeps you, fed your family fed.
So, those two questions are really, really important. Critical, I think, to, to deciding whether to continue a business or to transition.
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Paden Squires: so Joe, what skill or superpower do you have that's kind of led you to, build all these different businesses? Ah,
Joe Rando: um, I'm a little bit of a contrarian. for example, when I started into the shopping center development business on my own, it was 1990 and most of your listeners probably weren't born yet, but, what had happened was a terrible real estate crash that occurred in 88, 89.
And it, and to the point where the wall street journal. Had a a headline on the home on the front page that said is real estate dead as an investment
Paden Squires: Literally
Joe Rando: said that and
Paden Squires: hope you didn't set on the sidelines the next 30 years
Joe Rando: Yeah, so what I did is I said, let me [00:16:00] go see if I can tie up some land And now you know, I didn't have a lot of money, but I found this piece of land Up the street from a mall that was not built yet, but permitted.
It was a 1. 1 million square foot enclosed mall and I found this piece of land up the street But everybody's saying they're not gonna build the mall. so it was kind of doom and gloom And I ran my my software that I was telling you about and it told me that the mall was gonna kill it It was gonna just destroy these other two markets north and south And I said they're gonna build that mall They're gonna figure out a way to do it Even though the financing had up terribly so I went to this guy that owned a big piece of property up the street and I, you know, I told him what I wanted to do.
He had permitted it for industrial. he's a wonderful guy and came over from Italy when he was in his thirties, didn't speak a heck of a lot of English, but his daughter translated for him. They were great people. We ended up becoming friends. he told me how much money you wanted. You want a lot of money.
And I said, look, Give me the chance to make it worth that much and I'll pay you that so he basically let me in Tied up the property with a right to purchase at this [00:17:00] high price But gave me years to go get the permits go get the tenants go put the pieces together and he got his money He got his money and it was a good deal by the time I finished getting all the permits It was a good deal and we ended up putting in that center home depot target coles Circuit City, thank God I sold them the parcel instead of building the building and collecting rent because I didn't really care when they went, when they went belly up, but it's, uh, you know, and a bunch of smaller stores and things, you know, Petco and Starbucks.
So it, it worked out great, but it took a lot of time, but that, contrarian view of going in, if things have been good, he wouldn't have talked to me. He wouldn't have given me a chance to tie up property for peanuts. It was barely covering his real estate taxes, you know, so it was probably wasn't but you know So this is the kind of thing that that contrarian view of going in when things are bad Because when things are bad, you can make good deals and by the time you finish everything Now the world has changed back and that's what we forget.
And that's one of the things, if you talk about lessons, you know, people like rulers, [00:18:00] right? So they see a point and a point and they put the ruler on it and draw the line and up they go into, uh, you know, this great situation. And I'm like, get yourself a French curve, right? it's going to go up, it's going to go down and it's always going to come back.
So, you know, like in 2008, I was invested heavily in the stock market. And rode that baby down. And I swore never again, I'm going to be ready when things, when it hits the fan, that's what I'm buying.
Paden Squires: yeah, I'm a contrarian guy as well, right?
that's where all the opportunity is always at. And, you know, being a contrarian, right? anytime when there's blood on the streets like that, you know, you talk about real estates crash in or the stock markets crash or whatever, that is, that is That's screaming opportunity, right? if you're positioned, and that's why, you know, you know, a guy like Warren Buffett talks about, you know, he's always got dry powder. He's always got cash. And the reason he always has cash, and holding a bunch of cash in his position actually hurts his [00:19:00] investment returns, right? Sure. Because he just has cash sitting there.
And, and you'll see in big bull markets, everybody's laughing at him saying, Hey, look, he's lost his touch. He's not getting these big returns and whatnot because he's waiting on the sideline and waiting for that crash. And as soon as that crash comes in, he's got hundreds of billions of dollars and can buy up anything and everything.
And it's going to. Easily get massive return.
Joe Rando: I love the way that guy's brain works. And I, I would love to, you know, be able to emulate them completely, but I don't think I have what it takes, but I can, I do the same concept, right? I just, uh, half a billion dollars in cash? And then, yeah.
Paden Squires: I think it's recognizing the world moves in cycles, right? and understanding those patterns and, and being able to see those. Like, I think it was very formative for me when I was in college studying finance and accounting that, that was in like, the middle of like, 08.
And watching that, I love watching that on TV every day of like what was going on and the whole world was coming to an end, you know, financially. Right. And, really wish I wasn't a broke college [00:20:00] student when that was happening because you could have thrown money at literally anything and made.
30 percent on your money in a, in a year or so.
Joe Rando: Yeah, it was, it was, that was everything. That was the stock market. That was real estate, real estate. I mean, it was just, it was hard to lose. And, um, but you know, it just, you have to be positioned and like you say, you have to have dry powder if you're going to do that, you know, with respect to, businesses and starting businesses, if there's a good business that's bad right now, it's not a terrible time to maybe start as a side hustle.
And, um, put the pieces in place. Cause you know, by the time you get it all figured out, things will probably have changed back. You know, we, I mean, oh, wait, it was the worst since the great depression and it took till when. when were
Paden Squires: we out of that? I guessed it was going to be, the market was back.
So the market like, um, bottomed out in like March of 09. I don't know when it hit back, like to its highs.
Joe Rando: I think I had guessed it was going to, you know, I kind of ran some simple numbers and guessed it was going to be 2012. And I think I was, [00:21:00] I was optimistic. I think it was a little later than that, but
Paden Squires: yeah,
Joe Rando: so that was terrible.
But you know, more often than not, like you look at what happened in, in, you That was back by 93. I mean, we were, you know, we were coming back.
Paden Squires: You got ripping in the nineties with the internet boom and everything, right? Like you think about the people sitting there in 1989, right? They're in the middle of this real estate crisis and everything looks terrible.
A few years later you hit some of the biggest bull run internet age, like massive. com bubble, like was only a couple of years away. And if you got scared and it's like, I'm not going to be involved in anything anymore. Right. Yeah. You missed the entire nineties . Yeah.
Joe Rando: Yep. It was, uh, I mean, and the nineties were scary because it was a lot of fluff, you know, a lot of overpriced fluff.
I mean, I remember one that blew my mind and none of neither of them exist anymore really. But when toys.com had a higher market cap than Toys R Us , which was a big deal back in also rest in peace, right? ? [00:22:00] Yes, I know. Now they're both gone, they got Amazoned. But, um, it was, you know, it was just amazing to me.
That kind of lunacy happened. And that's one of the things that I do in terms of anything is always looking and saying, what are we looking at? You know, people don't understand. I don't know why we're getting into the stock market, but what the heck? they look at a stock and look at the price of a stock and they don't think of it as a slice of pizza.
Right. And it's like, it's a slice of pizza. And it's like, and say, well, that's a really expensive stock, but the pizza is nine feet in diameter and you're getting one eighth of it. that's a lot of pizza. Whereas, if you look at a situation where a stock is, five bucks, but you're getting a very, very small piece.
I like to look at it just in terms of, price equity, right. Looking at, you know, what is the PE, what is that, that ratio of what you're paying and the value of the company. And, you have to think that way, or you're overpaying.
And as you know, Buffett says, you know, you make the money when you buy, right? if you can buy a dollar for 75 cents, it usually works out.
Paden Squires: Yeah.
Joe Rando: So
Paden Squires: it's [00:23:00] hard for those,
Joe Rando: those deals to go bad, right?
Paden Squires: Yeah. And that's, that's his number one rule is don't lose money. Number two is. But anyway, so, so Joe, just kind of, just kind of going back, you know, what, would you credit as the best decision you've made?
Joe Rando: marrying my wife, but that's probably off. No, that's
Paden Squires: good. I've
Joe Rando: gotten that answer several times. I mean, yeah. In terms of business, I mean, I think the best decision I made was to start my own business.
Paden Squires: Yeah.
Joe Rando: That was the best decision. it was a lot harder than I expected. As we talked about, every decision to start a business since then has been a lot harder than I expected.
The net has always been positive in the end and you got to stick it out. But yeah, so I would say starting, is the best business decision I've ever made.
Paden Squires: Yeah. Same here. that's the same way to answer that question. just saying yes in the beginning, right. It was the best decision.
So one more thing here, going back to the beginning, you, now you help a lot of entrepreneurs in this space, right. That are probably near the [00:24:00] beginning. if you could go back and tell yourself one piece of advice. Other than buy bitcoin or amazon or something like that. I'm a bitcoin skeptic. Sorry fair enough What piece
Joe Rando: of advice would
Paden Squires: you
Joe Rando: give yourself going back to the beginning?
it's this Just because you can build it Doesn't mean you should, what I mean by that is that you should think through the business. I'm a product guy. I like products I see a problem and I envision some kind of a tool system to solve the problem, you know, that doesn't mean you should build it.
It doesn't mean it's a good business. So you got to think through beyond just solving a problem to whether you can solve a problem that is going to make sense as a business. So I think I have a little bit of that in me. Of trying to solve problems that probably aren't worth Solving from a business perspective.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Paden Squires: No, it's true. Like you can solve the most complex problem, but if the market doesn't care, no one cares. Well, I'll
Joe Rando: give you an, I think a real world example. So when when I started that company back in the nineties, doing the technology [00:25:00] to figure out where to put retail, I built it on some tech that I had kind of evolved from, there was some technology out there that was okay.
And I basically took what I knew and. And put it together with some other smart people that I hired and we built out a better way to kind of predict sales For a new store in a hypothetical location So you go in and you put the store in the hypothetical location It tells you how many dollars are going to go to that store which stores are going to lose those dollars And where they're going to come from so you can even see like which neighborhoods are changing where they shop.
It was very powerful and it was really useful And it was very accurate, surprisingly accurate, but it was really hard to run. And so we started this business again, having this as our kind of flagship product, along with an analytical tool that it was built into. And then we realized one day that we couldn't hire anybody to do support.
So my, my co founder and myself were tech support for this particular product, and that was not scalable and we couldn't find a way to scale it. And we had to make the decision to [00:26:00] basically. Sunset the product or at least, you know, stop selling it to new clients and change our focus over to kind of uh web apps mobile apps and more basic and analytical things for people and It was, you know, it was one of those things where, you know, we built a tool that we loved and it was great.
It worked, but it wasn't a sustainable, scalable business.
Paden Squires: Yeah. and that's, you know, advice around that. I think for people would just be like, find ways you can test things as much as possible. Before you, you invest too many resources, right? Like find ways to split test or market test to like, Hey, is this product fit a market?
Right. quick as possible without, dumping your whole life savings or whatever.
Joe Rando: I mean, it doesn't always work, but it's not a bad idea to just. Come up with a little elevator pitch for your, your idea. If it's an app or service or whatever, and just talk to the kind of people that you would want to sell it to.
And if they go, well, I would love that. That's at least an indicator that you can take it to the next step. If they, people like, Oh, I don't [00:27:00] get it. Or I don't think I would use that. Now you really want to rethink, you know, so, but just ask, but people get afraid, especially when they're first starting a business, they, they don't want to tell anybody what they're going to do, because everybody's going to steal their idea because it's that great.
And they. I was right there. I mean, I get it. I live it. No, I get it too. I've
Paden Squires: thought that too.
Joe Rando: And no, yeah, nobody cares. Yeah. And nobody's going to steal your idea because if they do, it's too much work and, I want to come back to that though.
There is a caveat to that. That's a very important, but you know, the idea of just talking to people And getting out there is something that is not natural for especially first time entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, but very, very powerful. the caveat to that is if you have intellectual property, you come up with some secret algorithm, some thing that you've figured out and, you know, patented or not.
and you go into some big company and start pitching what you, what you have. you have to be very careful many large companies will happily steal your ideas and say, sue me. [00:28:00] And they will just wear you out. So very, very risky to share real intellectual property, real unique ideas with big companies.
we sold that company. Uh, I think I told you about in 2020 and the buyer wanted our source code. Before they bought to review the source code and we're like, no, we're not giving you our source code because you lose control of your source code. Now this company starts and it turns out they were extremely ethical people.
They were great soup to nuts, but at the time we didn't know who they were.
Paden Squires: Yeah, sure.
Joe Rando: We were like, No, we're not doing it. We'll blow the deal. We're not giving you our source code because it's just too risky to give away that kind of level of intellectual property. So just a caveat, go out there, talk your idea up, get feedback, but don't share your IP,
Paden Squires: there was kind of a, uh, I don't know, a movie from maybe 20 years ago or something. It was called like a flash of genius. It was the guy that, um, invented, their intermittent, uh, windshield wipers. For like cars and Ford just straight up stole it from him. He had a patent, right? Yeah.
Yeah. He had a [00:29:00] patent and he fought Ford for like 30 years before he was finally vindicated and won in court that they stole, his intermittent lynching. Yeah.
Joe Rando: Yeah. I remember the story. Yeah. I think that happened with the laser too. I think there was a guy. His name gould or something and he had a patent on a laser and everybody starts making lasers and he's like, hey But it took him forever.
I don't know. I don't even know what happened with that one whether he ever ever Um was able to get yeah to get paid. But yeah, that's interesting
Paden Squires: Yeah, it's good stuff. So Joe, great conversation today. You know, what's uh, what's a way, uh, people can connect with you or get to know more about Lifestar or you're, you know,
Joe Rando: So, the website is, www.lifestarr.com the Lifestar with one R is the, you know, medevac helicopters. Don't go there, but it's Lifestar with two Rs. my email address is joe@lifestarr.com and you can connect with me on Facebook. just search Joe Rando and you'll see me.
I'll pop up in the short list. [00:30:00] So very cool. Very
Paden Squires: cool.
Joe Rando: Joe, I
Paden Squires: appreciate you coming on. Anything else you want to leave for the listeners? I mean,
Joe Rando: you like this kind of stuff, you're a solopreneur, interested in becoming one, we have a podcast called the aspiring solopreneur. It's available on all podcast platforms.
you can also get a link to them from our website, but, um, we love podcasts. We love doing podcasts. We love being on podcasts and, uh, Carly Reese and I, um, are, you know, just real fans of the whole podcast concept. So, and then beyond that, if you, if you go to our website, we have a free tier called Lifestar intro.
It comes with some really cool stuff and the two live events a month. And, uh, you know, virtual, but, um, yeah, you're welcome to come to and, and, uh, lots going on. They have free community, lots of free stuff. So please feel free to, do that. If you're either a solopreneur or thinking about
Paden Squires: becoming one.
Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. That's awesome, Joe. You got a lot of, great free advice and, resources for entrepreneurs out there to, make that jump and get rocking on their own. Well, Joe, I appreciate you. Thank you for coming [00:31:00] on and listeners. We will catch you next time.
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you found it valuable, please rate review and share it. That is the best way to help us build this and reach more people as we're trying to accomplish our goal of help creating more healthy, wealthy, and wise entrepreneur. You can follow us on social media by searching for me @padensquires or going to www.padensquires.com on the website and social media. We're always sharing tips of personal growth and there we can actually interact. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks guys.
