Carey Rome: Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Caged Vision podcast with special guest, Barbara Turley, who has got just an amazing story of how she got to where she is now. And I cannot wait for you to hear Barbara’s story. Barbara, thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Why don’t you take two minutes and catch everybody up to where you are now? And I really can’t wait to talk about the journey of how you got to where you are now.

Barbara Turley: Sure. Thanks so much for having me, Kerry. So yeah, where am I now? Well, it’s interesting. I have three babies, two of them are human and the other one is my business. So it’s a company called the Virtual Hub. And the Virtual Hub is a company, it’s mainly in the Philippines. We have virtual assistants. We train our own virtual assistants, and we help businesses all over the world to free up time, mainly through digital marketing type tasks. We have 150 staff and yeah, rapidly growing at the moment. Interestingly, its digital transformation has kind of taken over at the moment. So I’m quite busy with trying to navigate all that right now.

Carey Rome: Yeah, that’s so exciting. And it’s just a fascinating story. And I would imagine it’s no surprise that at this moment in time, with a global pandemic, that people are trying to figure out, how do I do some of these things remote and things maybe that they didn’t think could be done remote, all of a sudden are saying, wow, I got to find a smarter way to do this. But before we dive into that, because I cannot wait to get into that specific aspect of your business as it is right now—but it wasn’t always that way. So take me through how you started, how you came into this business specifically.

Barbara Turley: Oh wow, that was a total accident, which is the story in itself. Yeah, look, I had no background in—you would imagine being in a business where we’re leading lots of staff, recruiting, training—I had no background in HR management, recruitment. You know what? I had never even been to the Philippines when I started this business. It was purely just, you know, I had come out of corporate—and we can dive there later—but I’d come out of a very long corporate career, about 15 years actually in the financial industry.

And I had done many things through that whole experience, and I’d been involved in some startups and stuff like that there, but I always wanted to launch my own company. So I left corporate, and like many people in corporate, when we first leave, the obvious thing to do is consulting. So I ended up doing a bit of consulting, and they were mainly just smaller businesses. And I just saw them all having the same problem. They weren’t really making enough in order to hire staff, but if they didn’t hire staff, they were never going to make enough. They were in that sort of crevice between startup and growth that can go on for like 10 years, and if you get stuck there. So naturally, I mean, I knew about virtual assistants in the Philippines, so I was like, we’ll just have to get some of these VAs to free up your time so that we can work on strategy. And look, before I knew it, I was getting more demand for that than I was for any sort of consulting. And literally overnight, with no business plan and no website, nothing, I sort of found myself in this business. And I was like, my God, we’re in business with this. And I had to kind of rapidly regroup and reshape and try to figure out what on earth this business actually was. And that’s six years ago now. So it’s been a wild, wild ride.

Carey Rome: So great, because you started finding a solution so that you could free up time so that your consulting customer would have capacity to work with you. All right, so a couple of questions. Why the Philippines? I’ve heard several people reference the Philippines specifically as it relates to virtual assistance. Why the Philippines?

Barbara Turley: Yes.

Barbara Turley: Look, you know, in the beginning—OK, so I know the answer to this question now, six years later—in the beginning, it was because I had a Filipino VA who I just found online. So I got a few of her buddies, and before we knew it, we were like a motley crew of this sort of thing. But, you know, I mean, looking back over the years and dabbling in other cultures as well, there’s three main reasons. Number one, the Philippines culture is probably, I think, the closest to the Western culture that there is in Asia, in the Asia Pacific region. For me anyway, that you can be mates with them. Even saying “them” sounds weird because I’ve got Philippines friends. So that’s number one—they’re very Americanized culture. They were brought up in that American sort of American TV, American everything. And even the Aussies have had a big influence on the Philippines.

So number two, their education system is actually quite good. There’s a massive number—I should have the number, but I don’t have the stats—on the numbers of people who graduate university every year in the Philippines, right? So that’s great. So you’ve got a highly educated workforce, and their English is exceptionally good. Not everyone, but you do get people who speak fluently to the point that I’ve even got people on my leadership team where sometimes they use words, I think, that’s a big word, wow. So it’s not just “speak English,” there’s a command and a mastery of the English language that is very impressive. Yeah. But it’s actually a second language they read.

Barbara Turley: They’re not all like that. People listening to this going, my Filipino wasn’t like that. So obviously, the country—100 million people—we have all sorts, but there it is possible to find those three things.

Carey Rome: Okay, so yeah, thank you for diving into that and explaining that. And I think that’s a very well-sale culture and education system. Yeah, these are the two main things. You also said that you wanted to start your own business. You wanted to do something. And take me there, because I think there’s a lot of people that potentially will listen or stumble into the Caged Vision podcast because they have Caged Vision. And you and I talked about that when we first met. And that was, it’s this concept that I’ve got something that I want to do, something bigger, something more grand, but there’s something holding me back. And maybe I’m a little nervous. What was it that made you say, I’m gonna go and I’m gonna start, and I’m just gonna jump out there and do some consulting? And then what was it that gave you the guts or the gumption to know when to pivot?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Oh wow, let’s try to unpack all of that. So first of all, I’m going to go right back to the beginning and say that I was not the child with the lemonade stand. So I didn’t like the story, I have an entrepreneurial bone in my body. I had no interest. I actually wanted to be a doctor when I was at school. There’s a whole other story why I didn’t become a doctor. But anyway, I studied really hard and I just didn’t make it into med school.

And being the slightly impatient person that I am to get after life, I decided that I would go to university anyway and that I would just do an arts degree. Now, not an arts degree—as somebody asked me recently—an arts degree where I studied English and economics. And my goal was only to do a year and see where it took me. Now that’s a little—and we’ll come back to that—that’s the seed of something in my personality that I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten older that has stood to me.

I tend to be able to go, let’s see where—let’s open this door and see where it takes me. I like that journey. And I ended up absolutely falling in love with the world of economics, particularly macroeconomics and financial markets. And I just found myself taking that route, very interesting. I’m fascinated by the world of money. I’m fascinated by not politics, but macroeconomics and geopolitics.

Carey Rome: Okay, okay. So I did not know we’d stumble into this part of the conversation, but I’m also a geek in macroeconomics. And I’m going to share a podcast with you that’s one of my favorites. And it is—if it will pull up here—we’ll keep talking and I’ll pull it up once it comes. Yes, it is.

What, Macro Voices, is it? We’re going to say it. It’s like people who geek out on macroeconomics. Eric Townsend on the Macro Voices podcast is like the only podcast I listen to in that.

Carey Rome: It is so good. This week’s podcast I was not really interested when I saw who the guests were, but he has the ability to draw out—even the way they think—why did you do that, even if it’s not—that is exactly the podcast.

Barbara Turley: That’s the podcast for us. I listen to it religiously. I mean, I have two small kids, and I find space with kids around me to listen to that podcast. So we’ve geeked out listeners that are into that. Yeah, I still love that world, by the way. So it took me on a journey into trading floors. I spent about 10 years on the equity trading floors and loved it. Like my twenties was just, you know—

That’s so good.

Barbara Turley: Work hard, play hard, and all that goes with that entire industry. Very male dominated, but honestly, I loved it. I mean, it was tricky at times, but I had no interest in being a small business owner or an entrepreneur. But then again, you have to remember as well, this was in the 90’s when, to be in big corporate at that time was kind of—it was the thing. Today, to be an entrepreneur is the thing, right? So I guess for me anyway—

No, but it is. It is. I’m glad you said that because—

Carey Rome: Glamourized today to be an entrepreneur. I don’t think it was in the 90s.

Carey Rome: You know, I really am, which is why I love this show and this topic particularly, because it is so glamorized. What you’re serving makes it so much more important because you reference people that they’re generating revenue, but they’ve just created a job for themselves. Yeah, they can’t grow the business. OK, sorry to interrupt.

I see it all the time.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So that was that. I spent a long time in equity trading. And then the last financial crisis—I would love to say that I called it a top to the market and decided to take off on a year traveling—I did take off on a year traveling. I took a year out because I was at a crossroads in my life again. I was kind of heading up to that age of 30. Yeah. Had I hit 30? I had turned 30. So my first midlife crisis, sort of, or early life crisis.

And my husband today, my then boyfriend, and I decided, you know what, let’s take a year out. And we went off and did a ski season in New Zealand, and we traveled all over Australia because we were living there. And then we came back to an absolute mess of the financial industry. I had aspirations at the time to maybe do my own thing. Now, I’m not even going to say launch a company because all I had in my head was I’d like to do my own thing. Had no thought around what that might be. And just as usual was flying by the seat of my pants going, let’s open this, do my own thing, and see what’s behind it. And actually, there was nothing behind it, only a massive precipice.

By the time I came back from that year away, it was 2008, and the financial industry was falling in a heap. I sort of panicked and ran back to the industry, and then I couldn’t get a job for about a year. So by the end of this two-year experience, I was sort of a little bit broken financially, emotionally, mentally. And I got an opportunity to go and work at Deutsche Bank in Sydney, but in a completely different end of the industry. The job basically was to go around the country in Australia and talk to financial advisors about investment funds. Now, honestly, I ended up loving it, but it was like going from driving a Ferrari to driving a scooter. That’s another way I could put it in terms of my career and what it meant at the time.

But that was one of the very lucky breaks that I decided to say yes to that opportunity because what ended up happening was the financial crisis rumbled on. Deutsche decided to get rid of the whole team. I miraculously and weirdly was paid a redundancy, even though I was only there for about five minutes. I still got a redundancy package. But the bigger opportunity came when the CEO at the time approached me and said—and a few of us—and said that there was a group of them that were thinking of doing a management buyout of a portion of the business. I mean, I didn’t even know—honestly, I think I didn’t even know what he was talking about. I just remember myself going, I mean—

Yeah, that sounds good. Let’s do that. Yeah.

I was like, let’s do it, you know? I thought to myself, I had zero cash. I was like, how am I going to pay for this? And I decided not to tell—not to mention that. I thought that’s just—you know—I mean, this was the trader in me, right? I was like, this was ’09, you know, there was blood on the streets at that point. The whole world had collapsed. Lehman was gone. Everything had happened. I remember thinking, in for a penny, in for a pound. I mean, either the financial markets are going to completely disappear and we’re all dead anyway, or this thing is going to go flying. And I did sweat equity. I just jumped in boots and didn’t think about it. And had a few years of hell, I will say, trying to do that. But we’re 10 years later now, and that company’s managing $20 billion, basically.

It’s an amazing company. I’m still involved in it. And it was a chance for me to whet the appetite and to see how great companies are built. And I was involved in a part of that.

I was definitely not the brains of it. I was sort of hopping on the coattails of some clever people, but I learned some really amazing skills over that five-year period. And then it gave me both the confidence, but also the backing.

Barbara Turley: Because the company was doing well at that point, and I actually was earning some passive income from it as well as a shareholder. So it did give me—I had a moment in time where I said, right, if ever I was going to do my own thing, now is the time. And I still don’t think I had a good enough idea of what that was going to look like. But I was able to have the freedom at that point to say, let’s open this door.

Carey Rome: You know, it’s when I decided—well, I knew for a long time that I wanted to own my own business. And my father, who was a dentist, said, okay, well, what business? And for him, knowing what business you were going to go into, it was logical. Why would you not know? But for me, I just knew it was going to be a business. I didn’t know which one. And he was always perplexed by that. But I think there’s a certain aspect of people that just know it’s going to be something, and they’ll know it when they see it.

Barbara Turley: Well, I have that in my DNA, and it’s something I’ve learned to honor as a more mature adult now. And it’s something I just was almost afraid of when I was younger. I kind of knew it in my knowledge, but I would never say it openly, that I knew what was sort of like, know where it’s going and what’s going to happen. I don’t even like to say it now because it seems quite egotistical to say that. But it’s like a caged vision. You have your own vision, you know it’s there and it’s deep within, and it’s the trusting and the knowing and taking that step off the cliff and trusting in yourself that you’re going to fly. And I think I’ve honed that over the years.

Carey Rome: I’m so glad you said that because when you unlock—unlocking your caged vision is not a one-time event.

No, it’s a lifelong mastery pursuit.

It’s a daily process because the wheels are turning and you’re trying to figure out—every day you pivot and you adjust and you adapt, and you’ve got to unlock a little bit more each day.

Barbara Turley: You know, I think, you know, one of the things that has been a thread, though—and I’m just thinking, what was it that helped me to unlock? There were a lot of things in my career that actually helped me to be more risk-taking, but calculated. Obviously, being a trader for so many years taught me that sense of buy, sell, quick decision-making and being able to pivot and move fast, right? So I know that’s something I learned over the years, but I think, you know, wanting to be a doctor way back when I was at school.

I didn’t want to just be any doctor. I wanted to work in the ER, right? I was just really attracted to the high-energy, dynamic, fast-moving nature. Now I ended up on the trading floor. Now I know it’s not life or death in there, but it kind of has that same energy about it, you know, that fast-moving environment. And that’s what attracted me to macroeconomics. That’s what attracted me. So it’s obviously something in me as opposed to the careers I chose or whatever. It’s that—

Barbara Turley: part of me that’s always hunting for that feeling. And interestingly, the business I’m in today, I was thinking, how does this all equate? Like, how was I successful at what I’m doing? If you think about it, I’m actually just trading supply and demand all day, really. It’s global supply for offshore people, digital marketing—what types of people are they looking for—and then supply of talent that needs to be trained and honed. And sometimes it’s a disaster, I’ll be honest. Sometimes we pick the wrong people and it doesn’t work out or whatever. But you’re always just in this matching process of supply and demand. And I think that’s been a thread through my entire career.

Carey Rome: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I want you to take a moment and describe your target customer. And it may not be—there may not be just, you know, everybody fits in this one little box—but when do they come to you?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so look, people need help with loads of stages. People need VAs yesterday when they’re in startup mode. There’s really loads of points in the entrepreneurial journey when you can use staff, be it onshore, offshore, consultants, whatever. But typically for us, we’ve kind of honed who it is we’re looking for. Typically, we’re looking for a business that is already kind of out of the startup phase. They’re now in that systems, processes, team-scaling growth phase. So they know what it is they’re doing. They know what product they’re selling. They have a bit of structure, and now they need to ramp it up. And usually we’re trying to ramp up by getting people to run the systems that we’ve built and delegation of tasks. Yeah, so that’s the stage.

But the type of business then, if we go a layer down, it can be businesses—it can be any industry, which is going to sound like everyone, but not really. The main thread that ties the businesses together that we work with is that they are doing things in a digital-footprint way. So, for example, they might have quite an extensive social media footprint. They are probably using systems like Infusionsoft or ClickFunnels or HubSpot, Shopify. They’re using these online platforms, and those sorts of businesses need a lot of hands to actually do the doing around this sort of thing—blog content management on websites, video content management on your YouTube channel, repurposing, that sort of thing.

They’re any business—it could be a dentist or it could be a yoga teacher or it could be, like, we have a venture capital firm that does that sort of thing. But the thread is that they’re all pretty good at this area of what they’re good at. They’re doing it all right. They’re good at it.

Yeah. And are you bringing strategy, digital strategy, to the table? No.

They know what they’re doing.

Barbara Turley: No, so they have to either have a strategist or they have to know what they’re doing or they have to work with a strategist, because those that don’t know what they’re doing start to think VAs are going to solve the problem for them. They’re not at it.

Carey Rome: Okay, so they have to be doing it. They have to know who they’re targeting. Yeah, the marketing funnel needs to be defined so that it just needs to be executed? You save them time and money. Tinkering skills. Yeah, very good. Fascinating.

Yes.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, essentially.

Carey Rome: And this has been six years. Okay. And always in the digital marketing space. Six years.

Barbara Turley: Yes, pretty much. Didn’t just—again, sort of by accident rather than design. I did eventually design it that way, but only because I started getting demand for bookkeepers and recruitment people and all these different types of roles, and they weren’t working out. It was just messy. And then we couldn’t control the training, you know, the outcomes for the clients. So we try to—we control our own training programs, and we kind of manufacture our own VAs essentially in this space.

So if we deeply know what types of things the clients are going to be doing, what platforms they’re using, we can sort of get ahead of that game and recruit and train and manage and hire ahead of demand. That’s the goal, but, God, it doesn’t always work out that way. It’s hard.

Carey Rome: So talk to me about what sort of results your customers are looking for?

Barbara Turley: Mainly freeing up time. The classic is, I spent all Sunday last weekend tinkering in ActiveCampaign. I’m like, yeah, don’t do that. I mean, I can build funnels.

I’m actually a certified Ontraport consultant. I just don’t consult. I know how to do it all. I wouldn’t be fit to think of building my own stuff. I enjoy it. I just don’t have time for it. I don’t have time for it.

Carey Rome: Yeah. Well, as someone who has tinkered with a lot of funnels and probably most of the systems that you’ve referenced, it’s extremely time-consuming.

Barbara Turley: Even to do a newsletter, it’s so time-consuming to do that. So that’s the hands, but you need someone to be the head. I think where people sometimes make the mistake is they blur that line, and the expectation of what you’re about to get is too much from a VA. So we try to really draw that line quite strictly.

Yeah.

Carey Rome: So once you get a piece of content, do you do the repurposing thing with the content? Yeah.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, we can repurpose it, but we won’t produce the content. Got it. So social media is an interesting space where we do loads of social media management, but where people just make that little mistake—and we’re trying to actually work on this right now—if they’ll say something like, I need somebody who can create engaging posts for me that will draw engagement. And I’m like, well, I mean, that’s even hard for social media experts to do. We could create social media posts, but you need to have some sort of a social media strategy behind it that then the hands can help you with.

Carey Rome: That’s fascinating. Okay, so now catch me up to this year. What’s COVID done to your business, for your business? It sounds like things are going exceptionally well, so I imagine that a lot more people are coming to you. Tell me about it.

Barbara Turley: It’s funny, actually, because on the positive side, my God, we’re in the right industry. Digital has just exploded. I mean, we’ve done like 10 years of digital transformation in about six months. So every company is scrambling looking for it. And also, we’ve gone remote. So the whole world is now remote. So people are now—we’re all on Zoom anyway—this offshoring thing makes way more sense, and it’s not as difficult to get my head around. So that’s been enormous for our business, and we’ve gotten a lot of demand from that.

Barbara Turley: On the negative side, managing people through this sort of an experience is extremely challenging. It has challenged me to my core. This is something that you would think people would feel so grateful just to have a job, but people are depressed. They are working at home. They’re angst-ridden. There’s a lot of that sort of stuff happening in your culture. Our culture took an absolute beating, and we had spent so long trying to build a culture at The Virtual Hub, and boom—overnight, it was like trust, in an instant, it’s gone. So that’s been very emotionally challenging for not just me, but for our entire team and all of our staff.

And the other thing that’s been very challenging was the equipment needed. We were an office-based operation, and we had something like 48 hours to maybe a week to get a hundred-and-something people set up working from home. That sounds simple in the West. You’re like, hey everyone, just go home and open your laptop. They’re like, I don’t have a laptop, and I have no internet connection at home either. We were like, my God. Like 35% of our staff had no computers at home, and the city had run out of computers. So that was a nightmare. We’re just starting to recover now from that experience of about four months of hell—like five months in the beginning. So despite the business not going bad, there was the expense of doing that and then trying to figure out where we go next and are we staying at home or—you know—and anyone who was at the office, we had to organize a private driver, private buses, catered food for anyone that needed to be at the office. So the expense line actually went through the roof. So just being very open with people—they think every digital marketing business is going gangbusters. Kind of is. The operations are challenging.

Yeah.

Carey Rome: Yeah, you’ve got challenges just like any. Well, I guess it has changed how you go back to work?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, a few. Look, again, the trader in me many months ago looked at this and went, okay, this is really destabilizing, right? How are we—everyone’s asking, are you going back to the office or are we going to be made to go back to the office? All these questions. And I thought, what are we selling now? Are we selling offices? It was very hard on the phone because we don’t know what we’re selling anymore. And I thought to myself, there’s so much uncertainty right now, if we want to just get on with doing business, the best thing I can do is remove the one uncertainty that I can remove. I can’t remove COVID, but I can remove the office, and I can just say, right, we’re working from home, and that’s it.

Now, what happened, which was very interesting, is that not everybody wants to work from home, and people started getting depressed going, I like the office, I actually miss it. So I think the model of the future—and I’ve thought this for many months now—is a hybrid model where you have a cool co-working space where you put on lunch and it’s cool and there’s, like, pizza Fridays and stuff like that, where people come to get the culture and the social aspect of being an employee of a great company, but they can work from home a few days a week and they can have a mix of both. That’s the model of the future.

Carey Rome: I couldn’t agree more. You know, it seems as though just as everybody did finish designing these open-space offices, the people that create and design office spaces are probably really excited. Everybody else is not so much, but I do think you’re accurate. I mean, that’s an accurate prediction for sure.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, not everyone wants to work from home all the time. It’s kind of lonely. It’s very heavy working at home. It’s very serious. I mean, I work from home, and I know that when I get to go to a conference—which I don’t anymore—but in the days when we could do that pre-COVID, I’d show up at a conference and I’d feel heavy. And by the end of the day, I’d feel alive again because all the troubles of the ops that you’re dealing with all day in business, it just gets lifted by other people just for a day or two, and then you can go back and have your energy again.

Carey Rome: So true. Well, Barbara, thank you so much for coming on the show. Each week, it’s very simple. We’re just trying to help those listeners who have a caged vision learn from someone who’s unlocked it and is in the process of continuously unlocking their caged visions. And thanks for your story and sharing that. I really appreciate it.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me.

Carey Rome: We’ll chat soon. Take care.