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Barbara Turley: You can be the best virtual assistant in the world and still fail at this, and not because you’re not great at what you do, but because you don’t know how to manage the client. And there’ll be VAs out there nodding their head as I say this. Being clear on your boundaries, on your communication style versus the client’s style, and managing their expectations is key. And using something like Asana is like the number one tip. It’s non-negotiable—Trello, Asana, whatever they are—but to keep everybody organized.

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The 10 Best Productivity Apps You and Your Support Assistant Can Use to Get More Done

I’m John Mahfoud, CEO of Jamaican Teas, and we’re listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange. Give us a call today at 876-967-3271 to begin your transformation through conversation. We want your company to be listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Now, here’s today’s episode. If you’re serious about changing your life, you’ll find a way. If you’re not, you’ll find an excuse. Jennifer Sincero, my peak performer. I trust that you are staying safe—this is my wish for you—and you’re avoiding COVID-19 like the plague that it is.

Welcome to Episode 189 of The Entrepreneurial You podcast. I’m your host, of course, Henneka Watkis-Porter. Today’s episode is with Barbara Turley. Now, Barbara is an investor, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, a business she started by accident that exploded in the space of 12 months to become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants for businesses who need to free up time and energy so that they can go on to the next level.

With a strong focus on customized training and ongoing career development, Barbara has built a company that ensures their team is trained in cutting-edge programs like HubSpot, Ontraport, et cetera, to best meet their clients’ unique needs in digital marketing, social media, personal assistant services, and administrative support. So you know that we’re going to have a great conversation, as today we’re going to be looking at the 10 best productivity apps you and your virtual assistant can use to get more done. Welcome, welcome, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me, Heneka. It’s lovely to be here.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: It is my pleasure. Do you know any genre of Jamaican music?

Barbara Turley: Do I know any genre of Jamaican music apart from—my God, it’s gone out of my head. I was going to say, apart from just Jamaican music.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: So, reggae…

Barbara Turley: Oh my God, the word’s gone out of my head. I have two children—I can claim baby brain over—reggae music…

Heneka Watkis-Porter: I figured that’s what you were trying to remember. So yeah, there we go—reggae. All right, all right. It’s okay, that’s fine. We won’t hold it against you. We love you still. All right, so the best—the 10 best productivity apps you and your VAs can use to get more done. First, let’s start at the beginning, where you started your business by accident, and in the space of 12 months that exploded. Tell us about that.

Barbara Turley: Yes, it’s such an interesting story because, you know, when you start a business, everyone tells you that you have to come up with some sort of a business plan and find a product-to-market fit, and then go out and create a lovely website and do all these things. And I did it completely the wrong way around, in that I wasn’t intending to start this business at all. I was actually a business coach, and I was helping, I guess, all the clients I was coaching at the time. This was about seven years ago.

I noticed that they all had the same problem, regardless of the industry they were in or the delivery—the model, product, service, whatever it was, online, offline. They all pretty much had the same problem. They were small businesses that, if they didn’t hire staff, they were never going to really be able to grow and get out of the gates. But if they didn’t grow, they were never going to have the money to hire staff. So it was like this kind of vicious cycle that they were all in.

And the only solution I could come up with was to get offshore virtual assistance in the Philippines. I had one myself at the time, and I started out by just literally getting some of my VAs’ friends to help out some clients, just so that we could free up their time so that they could then go on to work on the strategy with me. And before I knew it, I was getting random calls from friends of clients—not asking me for business coaching, but asking me, could I get them one of those VAs? To which I sort of thought, you can get them yourself—I mean, they’re online—but I rapidly realized that people didn’t have time, energy, interest, or confidence to do it themselves. And, you know, literally overnight, I woke up one morning and I was in business, and I was like, this is actually a business all by itself. And that’s why I call it my accidental business. I literally didn’t mean to.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: It’s a good accident to have. Yeah, it’s a good accident to run into. So where’s your business now, Barbara? Where’s your business now?

Barbara Turley: Sure, so today we’re six years old. We have 140 staff. I have a company in the Philippines, and all the staff—they’re all employees of our Philippine company there. And we have clients all over the world: US, Australia, Canada, all over Europe, even in parts of Asia—we have clients today.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Interesting. I mean, I’m still at the point where it’s an accidental business, you know? Yeah, I mean, all’s well that ends well, right?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, yeah. And look, you know, for anyone listening, it definitely has been a labor of love. It started quite easily, but, you know, nothing is ever linear and nothing is ever that simple. So yes, we’re still open anyway, so that’s the main thing.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Absolutely, absolutely. So now we’re going to focus the rest of our attention on the 10 best productivity apps that you and your VAs can use to get more done, because who doesn’t want more hours in the day, right?

Barbara Turley: I’ve learned a few things over the years from managing large teams and offshore staff and trying to help clients to get more done, so I know a thing or two about this area.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Absolutely. So you are the best person to talk to right now. So let’s move into those—at least let’s start with the one you want to start with.

Barbara Turley: Sure. So my number one tool—and I started out using this tool, the free version, and I’m still on it today, I’m a premium customer—Asana. So, asana.com. It is a free project management app and tool. Now, the thing with Asana, though, is that it doesn’t have to be Asana. There’s also Trello, and there’s Teamwork PM, and there’s a few other types of these sorts of tools that are floating around the internet.

The main point is that, if you’re working with VAs or any remote team for that matter, it doesn’t matter whether the VAs are just remote in your own country. It’s very, very important to have a project management tool so that everybody is collaborating on tasks and projects together in the one place, and that all of the comment flow and the instructions are all attached to specific tasks, as opposed to people trying to find—you know, when you’re trying to find the email thread, and you’re like, where did you write that, and all that stuff, right? So you’re cutting down—this is going to cut the fat out of all of those mistakes, miscommunications, and missed ideas that happen when you’re trying to find threads of emails.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: And I actually interviewed the co-founder of Trello on this program here as well. I had a conversation with him, and that was an interesting story. So yes, we’ve looked at Asana. What’s next on your list?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so I think number two on my list is probably going to be—I’m going to say LastPass, right? Now again, it’s a password security cloud app, essentially. It’s a vault, a password vault. There are other ones like 1Password and a few other ones out there. We are an enterprise customer of LastPass, so we love LastPass.

Again, it stops, where was that password? You know, all this back and forth—what’s the password for this? No, I can’t log into that. Did you change the password? All of that stuff, right, that goes on when you’ve got lots of team members or even just one VA. You can cut all of that out by using LastPass. And all you have to do is invite your VA or any of your team into your LastPass vault, and then they can literally log into your systems without ever seeing the password. So you can change passwords—you don’t ever have to give actual password access. And if you need to cut someone off, you can do it in a minute. It’s very quick to cut someone out of your business. You don’t have to go in and change all of your passwords just because you had to get rid of someone, for example, if something goes wrong. So LastPass for password security, especially these days online—definitely number two.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: That sounds really good. I just saw myself using that immediately after we had this conversation.

Barbara Turley: Big, big one. So Asana, LastPass together—amazing. Number three would be G Suite. Now, I am a Google—there’ll be people listening to this that are Microsoft—there’s like Microsoft or Google sort of thing. You can use either. I’m a G Suite user. I love G Suite because it’s so cloud-based. And when you’re working with remote teams, it has some clever stuff like G Drive, which means that you can have Google Docs, Google Sheets—these are the things that replace Word docs and Excel files—but you can actually work on these things collaboratively in real time together and see each other on the other side of the world updating cells.

So you don’t have to be sharing screens or anything. You can say, see me there in that cell. And if somebody changes a cell in a Google Sheet, it will change in real time on your side as well. So there’s no—which was that version of the Excel sheet that you had? Look, I’m sure Microsoft have fixed this problem maybe these days, but I find G Suite amazing for that—for the real-time collaboration that can happen inside of G Suite. Even Google Calendar—great for checking when team members are available. And then, of course, there’s the chat function, and now they have Google Meet. So plenty of stuff in there to really utilize that will speed up time.

My number four is a good CRM software tool. Okay, so there are obviously the simple ones like Mailchimp, but Mailchimp is still a great—you know, email marketing—and, you know, it’s an okay CRM. I don’t know if you’d describe it as a CRM tool, but there are also ones—I’m a big fan of Ontraport. Anyone who hasn’t heard of Ontraport—they’re a reasonably small company, but they’re very interesting. A beautiful, very well-run and amazing software tool is Ontraport. It’s like things like Infusionsoft, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign—even parts of ClickFunnels would be similar, or parts of that sort of software.

Barbara Turley: Now, the reason you want to be using these tools, okay, you could cut out so much manual labor by using these tools. It’s not funny. Like people say to me, but they’re a bit expensive. So, Ontraport is about 300 US a month, and for some businesses that’s just too much. But in there, you can build—I mean, the funnels that you can build to personalize, both personalize and completely automate your client experience, your leads experience, even your employee experience—we use it for employees as well—is phenomenal.

If I wasn’t using Ontraport, I’d probably have another 10 people on my internal team trying to manage everything that we try to manage. So client onboarding experiences—we even have a membership site that works off the back of it, protects content that we only give to clients that join—all of the above. I could go on about this for two hours, but that’s definitely right up there. And the four tools I’ve just mentioned are basically, you know, I’m running 140 staff, clients all over the world—it is a seven-figure business, and those are the four key software tools and apps that we use to run the entire company. Few other ones around the edges, like Asana is the motherboard and Ontraport’s the backend in the backend, and then G Suite and LastPass to back them up.

So number five, number five, I’m going to go for Zapier. So Zapier, such a clever tool. I mean, really, basically, for anyone who doesn’t know Zapier, go to zapier.com and have a look, but essentially what it does, in layman’s terms, it makes your systems talk to each other. For example, let’s say that somebody signs up for something on your website. On our website, we’ve got people that sign up for calls to book a call with us. And Zapier is so clever that we don’t need to look at that calendar or look at anything. We can make it talk to Asana, and it’ll tell Asana that there’s a call, and it’ll give us the full details so that our entire team just has to spend their day inside of Asana, as opposed to opening lots of other tools. So a very, very clever little tool, and it can make Ontraport talk to Asana and WooCommerce and all these different things talk to each other—even Xero, so accounting software. There are hundreds and hundreds of apps on there, and you can make them talk to each other. Even something simple, like you can make one app update a Google Sheet to give you data so that you have live data all the time on various different things. And the very cool thing about Zapier is they actually give you ideas of what types of things you can do. So you’re not trying to come up with the ideas yourself—they sort of go like, did you know that Xero can talk to Ontraport, or, you know, they give you ideas of what’s possible.

Number six, I’m going to lump two together because I think they’re kind of, you know, they’re sort of the same—same, but different. So we’ve got Loom and Zoom. So Zoom is obviously great for loads of things. I mean, it’s not just having meetings or catching up with people. You can record—you know, if you’re in a meeting with somebody and you want to quickly record, you can do that. If you’re on the phone with someone and you want to record a call or something like that, and you don’t have that functionality on your phone, you can put it on speaker and record it using Zoom or even Loom. So Zoom is great for connecting people and having that visual relationship that you don’t quite get on the phone. So Zoom is great, and you can run webinars off it as well, which is very cool, and Zapier makes it talk to lots of different systems. So Zoom—everyone’s using it these days—but there’s a lot more that you can do with it. For example, you can even use Zoom to manage some of your Facebook Lives if you want to go live across different platforms. So that’s just a little pro tip that you can use on the key platform. You can use it and integrate it with tools like StreamYard and all these different tools so that you can make your live streaming multi-stream across multiple channels. Again, using your time more effectively makes it more efficient, and a lot of them integrate with each other.

Loom, on the other hand—brilliant for VAs—because if you want to record yourself doing a process because you can’t be bothered to write a process document, or you want to tell a VA how to do something, or you want to give some real-time feedback, you can record a Loom video and then send them just a URL link, which makes it really easy. You can even embed it into Gmail, so it works really, really well for that, or embed it into your CRM platform. So very, very great tools to use, especially with this remote work that we’re doing now.

So number seven—again, lots of different tools do this, but my one of choice is Hootsuite. So Hootsuite—of course, social media management. I mean, please just get VAs to do it. That’s what they know—managing it is a whole job all by itself, right? But Hootsuite has some very cool dashboards and ways that you can manage multiple channels quickly, efficiently, and you can see data from them, et cetera.

So, you know, if you’re trying to post stuff individually across different types of social media, you know, there are some that are useful today, but Hootsuite is great for just making sure that your social media channels are staying fully alive without you having to post everything individually. You may want to do some stuff individually.

Of course, number eight has got to be Canva. I mean, how could you—how did we live without Canva?

Heneka Watkis-Porter: I don’t know, right? Graphic design for dummies.

Barbara Turley: Yes, I don’t know… Yes, I mean, I don’t even know—should I say anything about Canva? Only congratulations to, you know, a graphic designer who was a female in Australia who just thought, surely we can make this simpler. And there you go—billion-dollar company. Anyone who’s not using Canva—I mean, is anyone not using Canva?

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Well, we’re yet to identify that person, right?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I mean, everyone’s using Canva. So, okay, am I on number nine? I think I’m on number nine. So number nine—I’m a fan, I am a fan, I am a user—but you have to be careful with it. Okay, so time-tracking apps—something like Time Doctor. So with Time Doctor, it depends how you use it, right? So if you’re pitching something like Time Doctor as a spying tool to make sure people are working, then you’re going to polarize your entire team, and you’re going to make them feel like, you know, you don’t trust them and all that sort of thing. But on the positive side, something like Time Doctor—it has a time tracker, it has a screen tracker, and it has productivity reporting and stuff like that. So you can see when people are online, what work they’re doing, how they’re doing it, how they’re getting on with it. But it’s very, very effective to figure out if there’s a mistake happening—how is it happening? So you’re going back and watching somebody trying to do a task. You can also make sure that, when you are using contractors or people on your team, that their time is being used efficiently and effectively. And sometimes what you find is people don’t intend—they’re not doing the wrong thing—but you might need to coach them or mentor them a bit more around how to use their time more effectively and efficiently and how your company tends to do it or your business. So I find it very useful for that.

There are a couple of newer ones these days. There’s one called TerraMind, which has a kind of a live feed where you can go in and literally clock into someone’s computer live. So, you know, some people feel funny about that. But for those people who are trying to track time, though, for client billing and stuff like that, I mean, very difficult to do, so it’s better that you use something like Time Doctor, or there’s Clockify, there’s Toggle—I think there’s also Harvest Time. There’s one called Harvest App, I think, as well, which integrates nicely with Asana.

My final one is, again, one that you need to be careful with—Xero accounting software. Now, the trick with Xero—they have marketed themselves as very easy-to-use accounting software in the cloud. And yes, it is that. However, you can also accidentally create Frankenstein using Xero if you really don’t know what you’re doing. Okay, so the trick with Xero is that, when you use it properly, it will definitely, definitely cut down your time—like invoicing people. The app is amazing for expense tracking and all that sort of stuff. And by the time you come to do your bookkeeping, your accounting, it makes everything easier. The mistake people tend to make—and I’ve made this mistake myself—is not engaging a proper bookkeeper to help you to make sure that it’s all in order there. So that’s my little pro tip there. It does cut down time, but don’t try and become your own bookkeeper and your own accountant, right? Because those skills—that’s where it can go awry on you. And then you don’t save time, you tie yourself in knots. And I say this from my heart because I’ve done it.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: And I have been there as well. You’re trying to say be penny-wise and pound-foolish, as they say—trying to save a buck or two when eventually you’re going to have to spend more to get an accountant to clean up your mess.

Barbara Turley: It’ll be thousands of dollars, and we’ve all done it. So Xero—yes, my number 10 tip—but just be careful with it. It does save you time, but not if you’re trying to do your own accounting and your own bookkeeping. Use it for the admin stuff of invoicing and following up and all these cool automations in there and stuff for that. So those are my 10—that’s the big 10.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: You see, we got through the 10. We were concerned whether or not we would get through the 10 on time, but we did get through, and we did quite well. So, I mean, I want to just close off right here, Barbara, by just asking you to share just encouraging words for anyone who’s considering going into the business of providing that service as a virtual assistant.

Barbara Turley: Yes. Okay, so that’s actually a great question. So my number one tip there would be—you can be the best virtual assistant in the world and still fail at this, right? And not because you’re not great at what you do—because you don’t know how to manage the client. Okay, so—and there’ll be VAs out there nodding their heads as I say this—being clear on your boundaries, on your communication style versus the client’s style, and managing their expectations is key. And using something like Asana is like number one tip. Make it non-negotiable—Trello, Asana, whatever they are—but to keep everybody organized. So I hope that helps, but that would be definitely my number one tip for anyone trying to do it.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Absolutely great. What a great time I’ve had with you, Barbara Turley, but you need to also now share with us your contact information and the downloadables and the goodies that you have for our community. So go right ahead—be my guest.

Barbara Turley: The 10 productivity apps that I just mentioned—if you’ve been frantically trying to write them down, don’t worry about it because we’ll put this in the show notes. I’m sure Henneka will help with this. We have a blog post which is called this, and I know this inspired the show. If you go to thevirtualhub.com forward slash blog and then forward slash 10 dash best dash productivity dash apps, you will find that blog post. I think we’re also on page one of Google for “10 best productivity apps” if you Google it there.

And also, especially for you guys, we have a special page—I’m just getting it up here now—which has some other goodies on it. I’ve got a downloadable, “The Five Reasons People Fail with VAs and How to Fix It,” which means that if you read that and you do what we say in there, it’ll help you to get success with VAs. Also on there, we have a scalable business success formula e-course, which you can sign up for. It’s just an email course—it’ll help you with some of the tips around this. And then finally, if you do want to talk to us about getting a VA in your business, you can book a call on this page with one of our strategy consultants, and they can have a chat with you. And that page is a special one for you guys—it’s thevirtualhub.com/EY. Very simple.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Thank you so much, Barbara. It’s such a pleasure. And again, some of these apps I’m going to be checking out myself because I have not used them before. So thank you for spending time with me and my community. You know, you’re sounding more French than Australian. At what point did you leave Australia?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so I’m actually not Australian. Okay, no—so I’m Irish originally. I’m originally from Ireland, and I spent 17 years in beautiful Sydney, Australia. But my two children—my husband is from Budapest in Hungary—and we just decided with two children it was time to come closer to the grandparents and the cousins. And France happens to be halfway to Ireland and halfway to Hungary. And my best friend happens to live in this town where we are living now. So not French and not Australian.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Neither, right? Who knew? Okay, all right. So thank you so much again, and I look forward to, you know, watching more of your work, and I wish you all the best in your work.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Thank you, my people, for tuning in to this episode with Barbara Turley. I look forward to connecting with you next week. In the meantime, though, you can connect with me for all things podcasting—whether it’s my book, my coaching program, or online course—by visiting henekawatkins-porter.com. Send me a WhatsApp message there—that comes directly to my phone—and I will respond as soon as I can.

Today’s point of hope is this: “For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.” 
– 1 John 5:4