Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Joe Rando, Founder and CEO of LifeStarr

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Joe Rando is the Founder and CEO of LifeStarr, a platform dedicated to empowering solopreneurs. With a background in B.S. in physics and an MBA, Joe has a rich history of launching successful ventures in technology and real estate. He lives in Florence, Massachusetts, with his wife, Licia, a child therapist, and they have three grown children. Beyond his professional endeavors, Joe is passionate about cycling, especially in the Netherlands, cross-country skiing, and savoring good coffee. At LifeStarr, he’s committed to helping solopreneurs build businesses that align with their desired lifestyles, focusing on lead generation, sales skills, efficient operations, and supporting beginners. Through initiatives like LifeStarr Central, The Aspiring Solopreneur Podcast, Solopreneur Secrets Blog, and virtual events, Joe fosters a community where solopreneurs can thrive.Learn more: http://www.lifestarr.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-joe-rando-founder-and-ceo-of-lifestarr

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Influential Entrepreneurs is sponsored by Marketing Huddle, where we build an authority positioning portfolio for entrepreneurs that sells for you so that you don't have to.

This unique approach gives credibility and trust to attract prospects using podcast and TV interviews and guaranteed press coverage. For more information, go to Mike Saunders360.com. Today we have with us Joe Rando, who's the founder and CEO of Lifestar. Joe, welcome to the program. Thank you. Glad to be here. Hey, so I know you work with solopreneurs and businesses looking to launch, but before we

dive into what you do and how you do it. Give us a little bit of your story and background and how did you get into the industry? Well, yeah, that's a good story. So I started out, let me go back away. I started out with a degree in physics and I was in fiber optics going way back and decided I wanted to start my own business. I always had that bug all through college. I wanted to start to brainstorm with my roommate businesses we could start.

And I decided I wanted to do that. My father, who was just a really good natural businessman who, you know, didn't really finish college, but just had what it took, said, you know what, you're not going to fail because you're not good at fiber optics. You're going to fail because you don't know anything about business. And he twisted my arm and said, go get an MBA. And I said, all right. So I quit my job with a baby on the way and went full time for an NBA while I was. doing some consulting in fiber optics to pay the bills. And it was pretty crazy time.

Got the MBA. And in the meantime, the consulting worked right up. I started helping him and his partner. They had a project that they had some land in a hotel that was going to kind of lose its holiday and franchise. And that consultant said to build a power center, which is a shopping center that had these big box stores that were just coming in like Home Depot and those things. And I said, can I help you guys? I'm a good project manager. and none of us know anything about this business.

So I started helping them to pay the bills while I was in school, and sure enough, love the business, jumped into it, built some technology to figure out where to put shopping centers, ended up developing, you know, overall, almost a million square feet of retail space. But the software, then people started wanting to buy the software. So I said, hey, let's, you know, the world just beat a path to my door. Let's start a company.

So I started a company, started, you know, went out trying to sell the software. I had a couple of customers, hired a sales guy. He landed at, I'm talking 1995 now, a six-figure-a-year SaaS deal with a company. And we're like, we are on the way. And then the Internet hit. And nobody knew what was going to happen next to if there was going to even be stores in 10 years. And basically, I pivoted to a service business, didn't work, kind of shut it down. And then we resurrected it as I was still developing, you know, shopping centers in the early aughts with a partner.

And sure enough, the world was ready for it. We kind of figured some stuff out and ended up with an enterprise software company that we sold in 2020. And, you know, I was looking for my next act. I wasn't ready to retire. I don't think I'll ever be ready to retire. So I started looking at different things and came up with the fact that there are, if you count side hustles, somewhere like 65, 70. million solopreneurs in the United States or one person businesses. You know, some of them are just gig workers and that kind of thing. But, you know, a whole bunch of people doing really cool

stuff as one person businesses. And I didn't see any place for them to come together. That was really vibrant. And I'm building that. And so you are focusing on someone who's already launched. They're in business by themselves. So they're not looking to launch. They've already launched. and you then help them to scale? Well, that's one of the things we're doing. We are also helping people launch. That's coming. But right now we have a whole bunch of people that are, you know, some of them haven't launched

yet, but anybody that's interested is welcome to join the community. We've got different channels in the community for different topics. We've got free events, you know, free virtual events. We have one called the Solopener Problem Solvers. That's only for people that have been in business a year where they come together going of breakout rooms, the kind of brainstormed solutions to each of their challenges. And then we have one called the Solopreneur success sessions. And that's open to everybody.

And we just bring in an expert to do a workshop or something that helps people around getting their, you know, either starting their business or more likely just skills that you need to get your business working well. You know, we've covered AI. We've covered, you know, making workshop on, we did a kind of a throwdown on people's websites and they came in and volunteered and we'd look at their websites and kind of pick, pick them apart and what they're doing right, what they're doing wrong, and all kinds of stuff like that, just helping people get better.

And it's a lot of fun, but, you know, all that stuff is free. And then we just, we have community. We've got some other things in our online, we call it Lifestar Central. It's just a place on the internet for solopreneurs to come together. You know, I think that there's a, over the last probably decade or more, like you've noticed, there's so many people doing side hustle, gig, economy, that kind of thing. And I know that you've seen this in your career, but I've noticed back in the day, the early 90s, if you wanted to start your own business, wow, you're quitting your job, you're putting up a lot of money, you're taking on a lot of risk. These days, with technology and the internet, you can discover what you want to do that would make you super happy and monetize your passion and start it part time, nights, weekends, online.

So talk a little bit about what the internet has opened. up for people that have started their own business or looking to start their own business. Good Lord. I mean, it's such a long list. But, you know, well, think about, I mean, you know, like you said, if you go before the internet, I don't know if we want to go back that far, but brother, getting noticed was really, really hard if you were doing, you know, I mean, if you could put an ad in the yellow pages kind of thing and get some local response.

But, you know, once the internet came along at first, it was like, okay, you want a website. Well, you got to pay a web developer. It's going to cost you thousands of dollars. I mean, you know, a lot of people. you know, we're spending literally tens of thousands of dollars on the internet, developing a website. But the reality is that nowadays, I mean, you can go to, you know, people like HubSpot and for 15 bucks a month get access to everything you need. I mean, you know, email marketing, website hosting, you know, sales CRM, service hub. I mean, it's incredible. So you can get these

these pieces in place for very short dollars. And you can build your own website now because the templates are so good. And some of them are cost money, but some of them are free. So there's just, you know, there's so many ways to just get up and running. You know, if you get these tools that you can use to, you know, put your product out there, low code and no code software development tools. I mean, it's just, you know, bubble and these kinds of things. So it's an endless list of things that you can do.

Now AI, I mean, it's just, you can just be so effective. I mean, people are using AI and doing great things and people are abusing AI and becoming a, you know, I think a waterfall of gray, as Jay Akonzo put it, you know, with the, you're using it to generate content generically. But, you know, there's really cool things people are doing and really becoming very efficient with AI that you'd never be able to do with a one person in business before. So you meant, I agree with everything you said. and you mentioned something that jumped out of me, there's so many ways. I agree. Well, how do you teach your people that come to your website and your community? How do you teach them not to get shiny object syndrome and zero in on the most effective ways to launch and position their solo business?

So I've created something called the Solopreneur success cycle. And the Solopreneur success cycle is basically a flywheel. model and it has eight steps to it. The first step I call the zero step because people neglect it more often than not. And that is starting out by defining your goals for starting a business, right? I mean, why do you want to start a business is a question that people probably should ask more than they do, but why do you want to start a one person business? Why are you giving up the most powerful scaling tool available to an entrepreneur, which is employees? And, you know, there's an answer to that question usually, but it has to.

has something to do with life, right? It has, I want to be at my kids' games. I want to be able to golf when the weather's nice. I want to only work with the people I want to work with. There's some other reason or reasons that you're choosing this path, and it has to do typically with some aspect of kind of having the business serve your life and your goals. So we start there, right? And then as you start to envision your business, you're making sure that as you imagine what you're going to do, that it's not going to conflict with your goals. Because your goals are, have to be kind of tantamount in this process. So you're saying, you know, I want to be, I want to be my kids games. Well, therefore, I can't start a business going to involve a lot of travel. And then from there,

you envision the business. Then you have to plan what the business is actually going to look like. Then you have to actually build the business. Then you operate. And as you're operating, you're learning what's working and what's not and noting that stuff. Then you go into refining the business or possibly reimagining it if it's not working at all. Take that to the point of deciding what to change, then implementing the change, and then back to operating. So it starts out in the middle, and then it turns into basically a cycle of execute and learn, execute while learning, deciding, you know, figuring out what can be changed, deciding what to actually change, implementing the change, and just continually doing that.

And, you know, depending on the business and the person, you may do that quarterly, you may do it annually, but this idea of not sitting still because the fact is, The world's changing. And if your business isn't adapting, you're probably going backwards. And you're changing. So as we get older, our life stage changes, we might have different goals, might have different needs, and need to adapt the business from that perspective. So there's, you know, the worst thing to do is just to sit still and keep doing the same thing over and over again without thinking about it. You know, and as fast as things do change online or technology or industry or chat GPT or anything, you want to put your finger on to some.

say, look at this advance. If you think you found the business, launched it, and you have polished it up because you put a business plan in action and you're good to go, boy, in about 10 minutes, you're going to get lapped by people 10 times over, you know, and I think that you would agree with what Tony Robbins teaches, can I, C-A-N-I, constant and never-ending improvement. It just never ends. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think, you know, with a solopreneur, you can't necessarily be thinking that way every

minute of every day. People are so busy. I mean, one of the things we've seen with solopreneurs is a really common problem is Feast and Famine, right? Because because of solopreneurs, they're out there hustling for work. They're doing lead gen. They're doing sales and they're closing deals. And all of a sudden, they get some deals closed. So now they go into work mode. They're producing whatever it is they have to do, not prospecting, not generating leads. And then they wake up one day and go, oh, no, I don't have any business. And now they're scrambling again.

And so this Feaster Famine Syndrome is very common. And because of that, we need to think in terms of keeping them on this prospecting mode all the time and not just thinking about improvement all the time, but doing it in a cyclical fashion, while noting all the challenges and issues that aren't going well so that you're not trying to remember those things at the end of the quarter or the end of the year or whatever. And you might need to get as structured as going, okay, the first Monday of the month, I'm going to sit down and do marketing updates. The second Monday of the month, I'm going to sit down and look at my whatever the case is,

but you should have a structure that you follow, that you hold yourself to. Because if you stop doing one of those things, something could get out of whack. So what do you find some of the biggest mistakes are that people make when starting a business or running their soloprador business? Oh, easy because I can make most of them. So, I mean, I think one of the biggest mistakes, people make is not answering the question, why am I doing this, right? Why am I taking this on? Because, you know, as you well know, starting a business is harder than anybody expects. And the people

that start businesses are typically optimists, right? And we tend to, if we, if we really knew how hard it was going to be, we probably wouldn't do it. That's been my experience. And I'm glad that I'm, too dumb to know how hard it's going to be every time I do it, because I'm always glad I did it. But the fact is that it's really hard. So it's really good to have a deep why, you know, deep why and a deep set of goals to work towards. So I think some of these people go, oh, it would be cool to be in business. I got this great idea for a business. And it might be a great idea.

But if the great idea involves you now having a life that you don't really want to live, and as I alluded to earlier, I've done that. When I switched my SaaS business to a service bureau, I didn't want to do it. But I had employees in that business, and I felt, you know, that I was responsible to them. So I made the switch. And it was terrible. It was just, you know, very, very painful to run a kind of business that I wasn't interested in running and wasn't excited about. And so I never want to see anybody else in that situation of not liking the business you just busted your hump to build.

So that's why I start with goals. I'm sorry, what was the question again? What are some of the mistakes that you've seen people make? Right. So that's a big one. The other one that I see a lot in solopreneurs is not being willing to niche down enough to get noticed, right? It's really getting harder and harder and harder and harder to get noticed because the world is so crowded and noisy. You know, search is, you know, just becoming much more about to the point where, you know, even being on the front page of Google probably isn't enough anymore because if there's zero.

click search now with the AI. So, you know, you really need to niche down in a way that when somebody, when that person sees you, they go, that's who I want, right? It's not a matter of being, you know, a freelance graphic designer, right? I mean, you can do that and you'll probably get some work, but you're not going to get paid very well. And it's just going to be luck of the draw, whether you get picked or not. But if you can really position yourself as some kind of an expert on something, whether

that be for a certain kind of business or a certain kind of person or my favorite ones, a certain kind of pain point. If you can position yourself as the perfect solution for that, you're in, you know, you're going to be in much further ahead. And then when you go out and you prospect, you can find those people and present yourself, hopefully through some kind of a lead magnet and get noticed and get attention and get hired. You know, I think you said quite a few things there that I'll kind of tag along on because, you know, get noticed, huge lead magnet. You know, most of the time, if you remember the book, I'm sure you've read it, the ultimate sales machine by Chet Holmes.

You know, he's one of the ones that brought up, you know, content marketing, teaching, educating, and 90% plus of your market out there is not looking for what you want right. now, I think it's like 3% is. Well, you're hustling and grinding for that 3%, but in reality, if you were to educate and teach the 90%, they might be ready next month, next quarter, next year, but you're the one they think of. So what are some of the ways that you find that you're helping solopreneurs really dial in what the problem is that they solve for their clients so that they can create that lead magnet and keep in touch? Well, that's key. So really defining, you know, What pain points are you solving and who are you solving them for? And that's a very, very important step in the process.

I don't know if I mention that. I and my fractional CMO, Carly Reese, are in the process of writing solopreneur business for dummies, which is coming out in September of 25. And that's a big part of the book is kind of figuring out, making people think through what is the pain point that you're solving and who are you solving it for? because once you can define that and then you can start to think through how you can explain what the world would look like when that pain point is solved for them,

then you can very clearly articulate what it is that you can do for them in a way that they're going to respond to. We also strongly encourage people to determine some kind of a lead magnet, some way of helping people, helping them somehow, whether it's, you know, a free webinar or, you know, We do the free events, something, and preferably something that involves an investment of time on their part. So it's not just, hey, download our white paper or download this really great ebook. That's fine, but to really engage people, they need to have some investment because they can download that white paper and never look at it. So the idea of getting them engaged in a way that involves an investment of their time to get some really good benefit builds trust. but it also builds an investment. And then from there, you can try to take them to the next level.

I mean, we have developed a kind of a philosophy, which starts whenever you're trying to engage people to do anything that's going to involve eventually selling them, you want to start by building trust. That is the first step. You want to build trust. And if you haven't done that, and we've all gotten the LinkedIn in-mail or the email from somebody we've never heard of, hey, you know, we do. We do, you know, SEO optimization for companies just like you as you want to hire us.

And it's like, no, I don't. I don't know who you are. And it's like somebody walking up to somebody that you're attracted to and say, hey, you want to get married. It's like, no, not yet. So we're encouraging people to kind of have this process of starting with building trust with their potential customers. And it makes a big difference. Yeah, 100%. I think, you know, a lot of times people just think, let's throw it against the wall and see what sticks.

And that certainly is not a strategy. So, Joe, you brought up some really, really great points. And I love your approach to serving solopreneurs. If someone is interested in learning a little bit more about what you do and how they can get tapped into LifeStar, what's the best way that they can do that? Yeah. So, I mean, the easy thing is just to go to Lifestar.com. And Star has two hours. So we're not getting confused with the MetaVac helicopter people.

But Lifestar with 2Rs.com slash intro will bring you to a place where you can join our free online community in place for solopreneurs. If you're interested in connecting with me directly, I'm on LinkedIn. It's Joe Rando. I am the Lifestar guy, not the professor at Vanderbilt, nor the guy that makes the cool flying saucers and things for Hollywood movies, though I'm jealous of him. also we have the aspiring soloprinoa podcast, which is available wherever you get your podcasts. So yeah, I'd love to connect with people

and I really enjoyed this conversation. Excellent. Joe, thank you so much for coming on. It was a real pleasure chatting with you. You too. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources

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