Voice Actor: Welcome to the Unshackled Owner Podcast, the show where you’ll learn the tips, tricks, revelations, and realities that it takes to build a real business. A business that works harder for you than you have to work for it. Not just a job, but an asset. No matter where you are in your business, you’re in the right place right now. Here is Aaron Young.

Aaron Scott Young: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Unshackled Owner podcast. I’m Aaron Young. I’m your host, and I guess I’m always your host. It seems silly that I always say it, but that’s what they do on late night TV, so I’m going to do the same thing. And this is the program that helps give you the ideas and the tips and the skills and the processes so you can really build a business that works harder for you than you have to work for it.

Because so many entrepreneurs that I’ve met all through my life, they think that they work for themselves or they think that they’ve got this business, but they don’t really have a business. They have a glorified job, and it’s because they’ve never learned how to become unshackled. And so that’s our goal here with the podcast, is to bring you case studies and specific information to help you really kind of rethink and transform a business so that you can really scale and grow and do the things that you’d love to do.

And our guest today is going to be perfect for that conversation, and we’re going to get right back to visiting with her right after this message.

Voice Over: That’s a glass taper.

We do all of the things that Erin teaches, and it’s really paying big dividends. He gives you a foundation and a track to run your business on that I think is so needed for every single owner.

It’s called Unshackled Owner with our good friend Aaron Young. Your business needs a boost in counseling—this is the man that will see it. If you’re at a point in your business that you would rather be working on your business than in your business, this is exactly what you need. Please, with all the information that I got from him, become the Unshackled Business Owner you set out to be. Go to aaronscottyoung.com slash programs to join the eight week live stream class. You can be unshackled.

Aaron Scott Young: Okay, we’re back with today’s guest, Barbara Turley of the Virtual Hub. Now, her background has been in financial services and in trading stocks and building a successful financial career. And then we’re going to learn more about this, but there was a moment, there was a transformational moment where she went, as far as I can tell, to go out and get some additional help in taking care of tasks in her life. She reached out.

She found a virtual assistant that she liked and had such a good experience managing a virtual assistant that I’m assuming her friends and colleagues started asking her. And before she knew it, she was the expert and was growing a business helping others. The cool thing about this is I’ve met a bunch of people who run virtual assistant kind of connection businesses. All of them are wonderful people. I’ve never had one on the show. I’ll tell you why—because I didn’t love the story and I didn’t love the approach.

When I was introduced to Barbara as a potential guest for the show, I went and did some studying about her, and there’s a secondary mission. There’s a first mission, which is helping you grow your business. There’s a secondary mission, which I’ll let her talk about, that I thought, you know, that’s a cool thing. And part of the value of being unshackled, folks, is being able to invest your time and your energy and your passion and your wealth into things that transcend just making money and to doing something that makes a difference in the world. And that’s why Barbara got invited onto this show. And so I’m super excited.

And let me just say, ladies and gentlemen, Barbara Turley. Hi, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited. There’s like so much I can unpack in what you just said.

Aaron Scott Young: There’s so much about what I learned about you. And folks, we’ve never met. Sometimes I always give you full disclosure if this is somebody that I work with or I’m on a board with or that I’m somehow otherwise engaged with. Barbara and I are new friends. We’re just getting to know each other right now. But I saw in her bio that she loves horses, and so if I needed any more encouragement, that was it. We’ve not talked about horses.

So Barbara, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard our show, but let me tell you how we do this. Normally, instead of doing the commercial that so many business owners come on to podcasts to do, what I like to do is get to know who you are, how you came up, and how you got into the position that you currently are.

So if it’s okay with you, can I ask you some questions, and then we’ll eventually get caught up to where we are right today?

Barbara Turley: That would be fabulous. I love these conversations because this is where the gold comes out. These are the podcasts people really want to listen to, right? Where we just pow wow about the journey together.

Aaron Scott Young: I know you have an accent, and I believe you’re Irish. Born and raised in Ireland.

Barbara Turley: Yes, born and raised in Ireland.

Aaron Scott Young: Now, where in Ireland? I don’t know Ireland that well, but I find myself not saying Ireland. It’s like Ireland.

Barbara Turley: Ireland, yeah. I’m about an hour from Dublin. For those who know Ireland, I’m about an hour from Dublin on the way to Cork. Just hang a ride off that road, and that’s where I was brought up—in horse country, yes, surrounded by horses.

Aaron Scott Young: So in the countryside.

Barbara Turley: Yes, yeah.

Aaron Scott Young: So we often think of Ireland as—now, I’ve never been to Ireland, but I’ve been to the Isle of Man.

Barbara Turley: Totally different. My best friend who grew up in Ireland—digressed for a second—she and I live here in Chamonix right now together. We’ve been friends since we were like one year old. When she was 12, her family moved to the Isle of Man. So I’ve been to the Isle of Man a few times, and she grew up there.

Aaron Scott Young: So in my mind, based on images I’ve seen of Ireland and having visited the Isle of Man, I just always assume they’re similar—a lot of stone fences and grassy…

Barbara Turley: That’s exactly right, yeah. The Irish would kill me for saying it’s kind of similar, but yeah, same thing, but totally different.

Aaron Scott Young: Just the topography. I’ve also kept Irish Dexter cows at our farm. If you guys have never seen an Irish Dexter, look them up. They’re super cool—really great for small acreage. Okay.

Barbara Turley: I probably milked one when I was a kid on my cousin’s farm. I did milk a few cows in my time.

Aaron Scott Young: So you grew up around horses. Did you actually have a little bit of an agrarian childhood, or did you live in town, but in a small town?

Barbara Turley: No, I lived in a small town, but in the country, so outside the town by a forest. There were no horses in my family.

So my mother was in that sort of position of saying, okay, you want to do horse riding, right? Am I going to go buy all the gear? And then you’re going to give it up after a year. But anyway, she brought me. None of the rest of my family were into it. I just loved it. So I spent a lot of time in stables and the horse country when I was a kid—absolutely loved it.

Aaron Scott Young: We always talk about being horse crazy, and a lot of times they always say girls are horse crazy, but I think I was kind of horse crazy too.

Barbara Turley: It’s the smell. Even when I smell horses today, it’s like my soul is singing all of a sudden. It’s like I’ve hit my purpose, and yeah, I love it.

Aaron Scott Young: Walking into a barn, walking into a horse barn—there’s a smell. The hay and even the manure and the leather.

Barbara Turley: Everything brings back all the memories, and it’s a visceral kind of a feeling. Only horse riding people understand what you’re saying, what you mean.

Aaron Scott Young: So just right now, standing invitation—if you get to the United States, the Western United States, you’re totally invited to come up, hang out, come to the barn. We’ll go horseback riding up in the mountains. We’ll have a fabulous time.

Barbara Turley: That’d be amazing. I’m currently getting my four-year-old into horse riding, and she’s loving it. Absolutely loving it.

Aaron Scott Young: Okay, guys, sorry, everybody. We just had a little private time here with our horse conversation. So you grew up like that. What was your—did you follow kind of a traditional route of education, or did you start off young as an entrepreneur, or both? What was your situation?

Barbara Turley: You know, I always say I was just not an entrepreneur as a kid. I’ll put my hand up and say I didn’t have the lemonade stand. I had no interest in selling anything. I was very academic. I was all into it. I was quite academic at school. I just went to our local school, did very well, wanted to be a doctor, had not even one entrepreneurial bone in my body.

Cutting a long story short, I just slightly missed medicine in the points. It was very difficult to get into that in Ireland at the time. I just felt I had done as well as I was going to do, and I was kind of bored being at school. So I decided to go and do an arts degree and see what would happen. And I ended up taking economics, absolutely loved it, and just found the whole world of macroeconomics and how money works fascinating, and found myself gravitating towards the money industry and eventually finding my way onto trading floors and into the equity market.

The story goes on from there—the best part of about nearly 15 years in corporate in the investment banking world, a lot of it in the trading floors, and then moved into asset management sales after the last financial crisis. But that was where the seed was sown of my entrepreneur.

Aaron Scott Young: Woah, woah, woah—time out, time out, time out.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, too much?

Aaron Scott Young: Before we go too far. So, folks, I hope you’re picking up what she’s laying down here, which is she went to school, she got the education, she wanted to be a doctor. Now, who knows if you would have loved being a doctor—maybe not, who knows? It’s also like money—it’s a practice.

Barbara Turley: Fascinating, yeah.

Aaron Scott Young: As much as we want to believe money is straight math, money markets are art. Very artistic, yeah.

Barbara Turley: Hard science.

Aaron Scott Young: Didn’t quite make it, so she didn’t stop and go, well, I guess I’ll just go get some other job or go stay home and raise kids all the time—which nothing’s wrong with either of those choices. She kept exploring. And this is part of the deal.

Sometimes, as you get close—in my experience—to the thing you think you really want and you’ve been striving for for a long time, either you miss it by a couple of points, as Barbara did, or you get it and go, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be, right? The difference, though, between people who succeed and people who don’t is the people who tend to succeed keep exploring, keep an open mind.

Don’t try to live their life in a linear way. They keep looking around and seeing what else is going on, because medicine and being a stock trader seem pretty far apart. And yet, your experience is legit.

So when you say you’re on trading floors, do you mean were you that person calling us, going, hey, I know you don’t know me, but I’ve got this great stock deal for you? Or were you actually on the floor going, doing the bid and the ask?

Barbara Turley: I was doing the bid and the ask, so I enjoyed it, yeah. Now, it’s interesting what you just said about the medicine and the financial situation, because what ended up happening—now, I didn’t know this when I was like, let’s open this door and see what’s in here—but I found myself on a trading floor, and I loved the energy of that whole thing.

And I realized that I always kind of saw myself working in—not the emergency department—but like in a hospital that’s fast-moving, dynamic, decisions every minute. I realized that they’re actually sort of the same feeling, in that everything’s changing, you have to make decisions all the time, that nothing is set and forget. And I liked that energy.

And it would have been the same had I gone into some sort of medical field in a hospital. I saw myself in a busy hospital. It’s sort of like totally different, but the same feeling.

Aaron Scott Young: I like that comparison because I totally see it. There’s a lot at stake, and it’s right now. You can’t wait around for it. Yeah, that’s so interesting.

Barbara Turley: You’ve got 10 seconds to make a decision sometimes, and not all day. And I found myself—and it’s something I’ve learned over the years actually about myself—the smaller the window of time that I give myself to make a decision, I will typically make the right decision because I don’t have time to get in my own way. I just go, boom, right decision, and then we move on. And that’s really important.

Anyway, it has served me in my entrepreneurial career later. We’ll circle back to that point.

Aaron Scott Young: I think the audience has heard me say this before—maybe not, I don’t know. My life here doing these interviews and doing these monologues that I do and my normal life are pretty much just the same. I like to think I’m kind of the same in any setting.

And I’ve been happily married for almost 34 years, and people ask me all the time, well, how did you know? And I said I knew almost immediately that she was the right girl. We went on our first date in September and got married in February, so it’s very quick.

And people come to me and they’re struggling in relationships, and they say we’ve been engaged for four or five years. And I’m like, well, what are you waiting for? Is there some other reason, or insecure? Because usually the longer we dwell on and micro-edit every little thing, the harder it is to make a decision.

And one of my favorite quotes of myself that I like to say is, it’s more important to be certain than it is to be right.

And what I mean by that is, if we sit around waiting to make the one right decision, we’ll often not make any progress at all, rather than saying, here’s what I’m going to do. You said I’m going to go be a doctor and you went after it and you focused on it and then it didn’t happen and you’re like, okay, new path, I’m going to go do something else. But if we just sit and wonder constantly, instead of just saying, off we go, go ahead.

Barbara Turley: If I could share, I mean, there’s so many things I could share on that, but you know, I remember when I first started on a trading floor, I got my big break and I was like, okay.

Now I wasn’t in London, I was in Dublin. So they were significantly smaller trading floors, but they were still loud and all that stuff. And I remember being frozen. I just was like, trading was on and they had given me some smaller stocks to kind of take care of. And I just froze.

And I remember the head of trading coming over to me and he said to me, he goes, what are you doing? And I was like, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. And he said, it doesn’t matter. You just make a decision. And then once you make a decision, you make the next one and then you’re in the game.

The problem is that when you’re sitting on the sidelines, you’re not playing, right? So if you’re trying to decide, everyone else is in the game and you’re missing out on all the opportunities that are happening. And that was a really pivotal moment for me that I realized that I kind of had that in my nature anyway, but that was the first step into it and realizing once you’re in the game, you sink or swim. I mean, to be honest, the winners will swim. You just gotta swim and that’s it.

Aaron Scott Young: Yeah, and people think that if they make—and this doesn’t just apply to school or marriage or trading floors, it applies to everything—once you’re in, once you get off the bench, get off the sidelines and jump in, you learn a lot more about yourself. You learn a lot about the thing you’re doing. You also find out that even if it’s immediate and even if a decision has to be made, it’s not life and death. It’s just a moment. It’s just a thing.

Barbara Turley: And it could be wrong, you know, many times you’re going to be wrong. And you just have to accept it and go, tomorrow I’m going to get up and fight again.

Aaron Scott Young: We’re often going to be wrong a lot, folks. We’re going to be wrong a lot. Henry Ford had seven failed companies before the Ford Motor Company. And yet he became the ninth wealthiest person to ever walk the planet. So Richard Branson has had over 200 businesses fail because he tried something with somebody and it didn’t work. It’s okay. It doesn’t mean they’re not trying to go to space. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have airlines. It doesn’t mean they don’t have Necker Island and all that. You just have to be in the game.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and you have to be really sure about what you want as well. You’ve got to know. I think making decisions, I mean, it’s something I have been good at and thankfully it has served me well, but I feel like you have to deeply know. A lot of people are very disconnected from their own intuition about what they want, where you want to go with your life. It might be subconscious beliefs about what’s possible, what’s possible for you, what’s allowed, what’s not allowed, like all of these things. But if you can actually connect to what you want, regardless of what’s possible, well then you can go and make decisions about that, you know?

Aaron Scott Young: This is called the Unshackled Owner Podcast. And the only course I’ve ever created that was me using my stuff is this thing called the Unshackled Owner Intensive, which is a course that teaches people just my process that I’ve used a couple of dozen times to build very successful multi-million dollar companies, right?

And first thing—and I got a lot of pushback on this because almost everybody that takes the class is successful already—they’ve kind of run into a ceiling, like they don’t know anymore what to do. Like I’ve run out of my own creative ideas here. What do I do with this thing?

And so whether it’s a three-quarter million dollar company or a $200 million company, it doesn’t really matter. Five employees or 2,000 employees doesn’t matter. They’ve bumped into their own ceiling.

And so the first class in Unshackled is all about, I’m going to use the trite word, is vision, your vision. But the way I say it is getting explicitly clear on what does the finish line look like? Why are you doing this? Where are you going? Let’s get clear on the outcome. I mean, it’s stupidly clear. Like what color are the walls inside the house you live in now? Once you’ve achieved everything you’re dreaming, what does it look like, smell like? Who’s with you? How much money do you make? Where do you go? Really, really clear, almost like a great novel.

Because the clearer you get on the outcome, regardless of the path it will take to get there, which is what you just said, which is why I wanted to double down on what you said, if we focus on the path, we’ll always limit ourselves. But if we focus first on the outcome that we want, we can almost always reverse engineer the path to get to the big goal.

Barbara Turley: You’ll find yourself there by accident. You’ll find yourself—like you can reverse engineer it—but I mean, the story I’d like to share is when I first got corporate, I left and I did start a business that I, like, it was kind of a failure to be honest. It was sort of a mini failure in that I didn’t do it for very long, but I launched a program online. I launched a wealth program for women and honestly, it was an almighty flop. I blew up a whole pile of money on it and I was so depressed after it. I remember feeling so down on myself and embarrassed and ashamed and loads of things like, because I was like, I’m this corporate chick that should have done well.

So I really suffered for a few months and I kind of downed tools and did nothing. And then I kind of had a few private clients. I mean, this is how the Virtual Hub started. It was born out of the seeds of disaster, really. I had a few private clients. I was just helping them with small business, like a naturopath and nothing major.

And I was just like, look, if you don’t hire staff, you’re never really going to get out of it, like unshackle yourself. But they had no money to hire staff. So I was like, well, we’ll just have to go to the Philippines. So I was sort of recruiting VA’s.

Anyway, long story short, I found myself getting phone calls from friends of theirs saying, can you get me one of those VA’s? And I was like, you just go and work and get one yourself. So I couldn’t figure out why people would pay me to do it, but I started doing it. And literally within a month, I had a business that I had no business plan for. I had never been to the Philippines, and I had like 15 staff. And I was like all of these sort of subcontractor deals that were shady and, you know, a mess.

And really that was the start of the business. And it was the first problem I solved was that people were too scared to do it themselves. And you know, after that, lots of other problems raised its ugly head. But yeah, I ended up kind of coming this path and who would have thought I was going to end up in a HR and recruiting and training business in Asia, in the Philippines? I’ve never even been there, you know?

Aaron Scott Young: At that point, you had never been there.

Barbara Turley: At that point I’d never been there. I still haven’t been there very often. I have two children. I’ve been either pregnant or with newborns and, you know, it wasn’t possible for me to be there all the time. So I have done something that people told me I would never be able to do. Anyone who’s built a business like this said unless you’re in the Philippines you won’t be able to build it. I was like, watch me.

Aaron Scott Young: Yeah. When you said that, all of a sudden people were asking me and you’re saying, well, you could just go on and do it yourself. The reason we use general contractors to build a house—you could hire all the subcontractors yourself. You could download a checklist from Google, you know, you could figure it out and you could do it yourself, but you don’t know enough about how it actually works. You hire a general contractor, pay them 11 to 15% more than if you did it yourself, because you want the comfort of feeling like somebody’s been down the road before you, and they actually know the path.

Folks, as you’re listening, you can’t see Barbara, but she’s very relaxed, very at ease in her own skin demeanor. I mean, she doesn’t look all hyped up. Now granted, it’s going on at 10 o’clock at night where she is right now, so maybe she’s just a little sleepy, I don’t know. There’s this relaxed feeling that instills confidence. I’m listening to her and I’m going, oh, I like her. I don’t even know her, but I like her.

And if people were having that experience and you were getting endorsements, I mean it makes perfect sense. They’re going, well, it worked for so-and-so, why wouldn’t it work for me? And those things just snowball, right? They just sort of pick up their own steam. So all of a sudden you ended up in this business.

First of all, what was the moment where you thought, I need to professionalize this thing I’m doing as kind of a sideline? You know, I’m trying to be a consultant or whatever, coaching some people, but now all of a sudden I’m recruiting the VA’s for them and I’m getting more attention from that than from this. I better legitimize this a little bit or, you know, make it real. What was that moment and what did you do to start building something that was really quite unfamiliar?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a really great… look, I think the first thing to note there was that I could feel it in my own energy, that I realized there was a pivotal moment that happened pretty quickly, where I realized I don’t love doing the consulting, but God, I love doing this.

Aaron Scott Young: I’m going to stop you again. It just exploded in my brain something that I really believe, and you’re saying it right now. And I want to set up what you’re going to say with this. Because thinking back to your financial thing for women, whatever the course was—folks, I can’t stress this enough—the reason most small business startups fail is because the owner does something that they want to do and they spend money on it and they tell all their friends and they might buy ads for it and they get deeply invested in something without ever determining if anybody else gives a darn about what they’re doing.

Probably just nobody wants to buy your thing, but you stick to it doggedly because you’re so far down that road. And you said, Barbara, you were embarrassed. And I’m saying most people hang on to foolish, stupid, wasteful, ridiculous things and they’ll just go into the poorhouse trying to force feed the market something that nobody wants to eat. But when you find something that people actually want, boom, it will take right off.

Barbara Turley: So you know, people told me, friends of mine, others, you know, people in the industry, whatever, were saying, you need to launch again, just launch again. And I was like, no, there’s something in my gut telling me nobody wants to buy this.

And then friends of mine were talking, but everyone said it was a great idea. And I realized it years later. And this is a great tip for anyone listening. Years later, I realized, yes, everybody thought it was great, like all the women I spoke to, I did surveys and all that. They all loved it. Except the problem was they saw it in their future. They didn’t want to buy it now.

And actually what they told me, a lot of them were business owners. They were like, yes, I want to work on my wealth, but right now I just need to build this business because I just can’t get out of the weeds, right?

And then what ended up coming to me was me saying, okay, so they want to buy that, but it’s not an immediate pain they have today. It’s something that is in the future, it’s like retirement. It’s very difficult. But the pain that I ended up solving today was acute and it was something people didn’t—nobody ever said to me, what’s your website?

They were like, where do I sign? How do I get one of those VA’s? They didn’t care that we had no website, we had no brand name, we were nothing. And they didn’t care that there was no contract, there was nothing.

And then after about the first couple of months, I was like, gee, this is really sort of taking off. We need to get a website. I mean, just got a landing page.

And then it kind of rumbled on. Now, interestingly though, there was a moment about seven months after I started the business where I almost decided to close it.

And we joked about my email address prior to recording this. I was getting flooded because what happens when you solve for one problem—and you will know this—you solve for one problem so well, and then you forget that when you solve that problem you’re going to unearth the ugly face of the next problem.

And for me that was the clients we were taking on. Yes, they needed help. Yes, they wanted a cheap VA in the Philippines, but God, they didn’t know how to delegate. And I was like, now we have to train them. Now we have to get rid of them or train them.

And similarly the VA’s in the Philippines—yes, they know stuff, but they know a mishmash of stuff. We need to train them. So I actually nearly imploded because people were just contacting me on every channel complaining about VA’s, VA’s complaining about clients. And I was like, that’s it, I’m done.

And then I thought, no, I need to fire 70% of the staff. They were contractors. Fire half the clients. Start again.

And it was at that moment that I thought, right, I know I’m onto something. I need to just gather my strength and I need to solve for the next problem that has come up.

And that was the start of the genesis of what we have today, which is that we’ve our own training platforms and we do massive amounts of training and we’re becoming kind of a training company really.

Aaron Scott Young: I want to get in now and talk about the company a little bit. I can’t overstate the fact that when we—two things—one is the market has to really want your thing. If you try to get people to meet you where you are, it’s a hard, hard lift, heavy lift, versus if you go meet them where they are and solve a problem that they’re feeling, it’s the old thing about, let’s say you’ve got a headache, right?

And people can tell you, well, boy, you know, if you were taking more B12 and ginseng and this combination of herbs every day and a tea, it would do all these things to your body, right? And that can all be true. And maybe that would keep you from ever having a headache again in the rest of your life. But right now I just need an aspirin. That’s great. Just give me the damn aspirin. So that’s what happened.

Barbara Turley: That’s what happened to me. I call it my accidental business. I didn’t mean to start it. I had no business plan, nothing. It’s just people were just flooding in to buy.

Aaron Scott Young: Well, then you did the second thing, which is you started without an end goal. People want—we’re coming at you—there was a way to make money, but there was no real clear path.

And so you had to stop. Now folks, this happens all the time. So remember this for you too. You have to stop. And then as Stephen Covey says, begin with the end in mind and start to do things where you say, this is what I’m gonna do and this is what I’m not gonna do. I’m gonna provide these things and not everything to everybody.

I’m dying to hear the next part, but as Barbara just intimated, even now as they grow and become more successful, the nature of the business is somewhat changing from being basically a broker or a talent agent or a dating service between the VA’s and the business owners.

Now you said it’s becoming more of a training platform. Can you tell us a little bit about your business and a little bit about what you mean by all that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so the second stage—so the first stage of legitimizing it and making it a real business was at that moment. And then I rumbled on for another— that went quite well for the following 12 months. But I realized that, you know, like they were subcontractors of a contractor in the Philippines. It all started. We had about 65 staff of people and I was like, they’re all working from home and it was starting to implode again, right? I was starting to go, right, can I imagine having a thousand people working from home?

You know, on this kind of thing. I was very fortuitous. I met a woman who’s been a bit of a mentor of mine. She’s in the Philippines. She’d been in this game a long time. And she said to me one day, she goes, you’re going to have to legitimize it. You need to come here. You need to get a Philippine company and you need to make them all employees. Now bear in mind, this was exactly at the time that Zirtual in the US failed because they made everyone an employee. So they had 500 contractors in the US, and you can Google this company, they decided to make everyone an employee and the benefits collapsed the entire company pretty much, right? So I was like, am I going—

Aaron Scott Young: Under capitalization is a death knell to a company. You have to have money to go through growth. You think you’re excited about growth, but growth is incredibly expensive. And so you have to have enough capital resources so you can survive the growth when you think you’re killing it, but you’re going upside down month after month after month while you catch up to the growth. She’s covering another incredibly important point. I hope you guys are taking notes because under capitalization, besides a stupid idea and poor processes, the lack of capital is the other thing that kills companies. So she’s covered all of these. Barbara, this is a wealth of…

Barbara Turley: And I learned this by accident. You’ve got expertise. I suppose I came out of the investment world. I just accidentally discovered that I had some talents that were really useful. And I’m going to tell you something in a bit that’s going to circle back to a point we started with that you’re going to love.

So essentially, I decided, right, we need to do the numbers on all of this. And essentially, we were going to blow up pretty much everything we had made, you know, in terms of our run rates and all that. All the profit that we were currently making was going to be burnt by legitimizing it.

So we did a few more sales. I was like, right, we need some more sales. We’re going to do it. So we went and did it. And I did escape too close to the wind. I knew I was going to, but we had the numbers done. And we went wild after sales to get a few more in to try and fund it.

And weirdly, when we made everyone an employee and gave them all these benefits and top level private health cover and everything, like 20 people resigned. And we were like, what?!

Because now they had to pay tax. Now they were going to be watched. They were going to be part of a system they didn’t want to be in. So that was kind of like a major rumble for me. And the business went backward. And it was a very scary time because I didn’t anticipate that. I thought I was told if you give them private health cover and you give Filipinos this, that and the other, that they would love me forever. No, they didn’t. They wanted to be freelancers. Like this is another tip I guess I’ve learned along the way.

As your company grows, there are going to be people who are not gonna like the bigger version of you. They want the small one where everyone was cool with each other and high-fiving at the water cooler and you know, now your company’s becoming more legit, right? And there’s—

Aaron Scott Young: More corporate.

Barbara Turley: More corporate, more systems. We brought in the head of ops, we brought in the head of HR, you know, and we also moved to the city.

So I decided to move out of Manila and move down south to a city called Cebu. I didn’t even go. I sent a few scouts from my team, flew them down there. They scouted out again. I just flew by the seat of my pants a bit. We scouted out an office, we put out flyers and hired a few people there. And you know, that office has gone boom down there, but where was I going? Digress.

So I set up the company, did skate too close to the wind and had to hustle very hard over the next year. Essentially it was like starting a new company all over again. It was very painful. It was a painful transition.

And sadly, we were just coming out of that and about to, like, we were ready for scale this year and COVID hit and we were like, no, like here we go again. But again, we’ve come through COVID. I mean, it’s been chaos, but you know, we had to like—having gone to an office-based operation, we got offices and everything—then we had to send everything home again. So now we’re all at home again. So we had to buy computers and blow up a load of money again, trying to fund the whole thing, so…

But you know what I’ve learned over the years is just to trust that it’s that vision thing that you spoke about. Like the whole way through COVID, I’ve had some really dark days, but I’ve said to myself, I know where this is going. I know the model works. We have loads of demand even through this time, but recruiting is hard, retaining staff is hard. There’s lots of problems, but it’s just that belief that we’re doing the right thing. The feedback we’re getting from our employees is strong.

Our clients love what we’re doing. More clients are coming through the door. We’ve got to do it, right? We just got to forge ahead and get bigger. It’s either get bigger or go home. It’s, you know, get bigger or close up, really.

Aaron Scott Young: Well, and the truth is there are tasks that need to be done, you know, right there where you’re sitting. And there are tasks that can be outsourced from around the world to across the other side of the planet. The one thing that COVID has clearly shown us is that we can stay open even if we can’t be at the office.

Barbara Turley: Totally. Right?

Aaron Scott Young: We can work from home. Now, a lot of people have said—I’ve had people come on the program already during COVID and say things like, well, you can go work at home, you know, can do all this, and we’re going to go to this whole work at home thing. And then I say, you know, a lot of people, especially people that aren’t getting paid a whole lot of money, right, they’re not high end, and a virtual assistant typically is not one of your top paid employees, at least if you’re a bigger company, right? If it’s your only employee, I guess they’re highly paid.

But the point is that especially in expensive countries like the United States—it’s an expensive place to live. Go to London, go to Paris, any of these big capitals of the world, of the Western world, they’re expensive. San Francisco is insanely, New York, incredibly expensive places to live.

When you say, well, we can outsource or we can have all of our people domestically working from home, I think that’s a little bit of ivory tower thinking because a lot of them have children at home that make noise. They don’t have a spare bedroom. They don’t have a real dining room where they could sit somewhere outside of their kitchen, TV space.

This idea that we can just outsource everything domestically and send our employees home is, I think, a fallacy.

Barbara Turley: Lots of people don’t want to work from home. We’ve had a lot of depression. We’ve had people with depression. They don’t want to be at home. They’re like, I miss the office. I miss my friends. A lot of our people are in their 20s. They’re not loving it at all.

Aaron Scott Young: Yeah, there’s no social interaction. If you’re locked in your little box of your apartment or your house, you work there and you sleep there and you romance there and you exercise there and you eat there. At some point you go, I’m sick of this place. And it does not become a productive place to be.

You know, now flip that around. There are people who live in countries that don’t have the economic strength of some of the countries that I’ve named. The Philippines is one of them. And because English is so prevalent in the Philippines, right? So it’s easy—even if pronunciation and so on may be hard for some people—it doesn’t sound like English. That doesn’t mean they’re not speaking English. It doesn’t mean that they’re not understanding your English.

And just because you may not want to put that person on an important customer service or sales call doesn’t mean they can’t be an easy person to deal with. And you’re not dealing with a big language barrier. You’re just having to listen a little bit more intently.

There are people who are wildly very well-educated people that are available for a comparatively low price compared to that same education in Silicon Valley. You can get somebody with a bachelor or master’s or doctoral degree in the Philippines to do stuff for you still.

Barbara Turley: If I can just say, our guys speak fully fluent English and they sound pretty dumb.

Aaron Scott Young: Sounds great. Some of the ones I’ve talked to of the VA’s that were, you know, more like helping me with my calendar stuff—it was tough sometimes to understand it, but they knocked out the work.

Barbara Turley: We don’t have those. Actually, do you know, I wanted to touch on something I think is going to be really—I wanted to circle back to what I was talking about being a doctor in a hospital and the energy of that, and then the energy of a trading floor.

I was asked on a podcast once what I think made me successful in doing this. And a couple of things I just want to explain beforehand. I realized very early on in doing this business that it was a broken model, right? I was looking at the industry going, everyone just churning VA’s and clients, and it’s just a recruiting thing. They’re saying we do HR management and payroll and whatever, but all they’re really doing is glorified recruiting, bit of office space. That’s it, right?

And the churn rate was really high. So lots of resignations, attrition of employees, clients just churning and burning, clients poaching staff direct, staff poaching clients, cutting you out, all that sort of stuff was going on.

And I thought to myself, right, this industry is ripe for disruption. Somebody’s got to come in and do this right.

So I thought to myself, the model of charging people a subscription model, which is what we have—we charge a subscription fee every month, it is recurring based, we charge one fee, there’s no breakdowns. But in order to do that, you need to actually be more of a partner to the client, right?

So I thought to myself, if you’re trying to go across loads of industries, it’s very hard to do that, right? How about we just niche down, like the whole inch wide, mile deep niche, right?

And I love digital marketing and I had learned digital marketing in the wealth thing that I had started, even though I had no marketing background in my career. I had learned a massive amount through that experience of the failed business.

So I decided, right, I knew how much help I needed with platforms like Infusionsoft and HubSpot and all these WordPress platforms. And I thought, right, well, if we just say that we are digital marketing VA’s, we’ll handle all the training, we’ll develop all the SOP’s, all the task lists, everything. So a client can come to us and go—we’re like a one-stop shop where the client will say, well, I just don’t want to train them. That’s usually what they say. So I was like, don’t worry about it, we’ll train them. So we have them already trained before we even show them to you.

So the point I want to make here is my background helped me to kind of analyze the market and go, what’s the market telling me? There was a lot of anger online around VA’s and offshoring and doesn’t work for my business and all that stuff. And I knew that somebody had to solve this problem and I was just going to do it in one industry.

The second thing that made it successful really was deeply listening to the client and also to the VA’s and going, right, how do we listen to both sides very deeply and just iterate and iterate and iterate and slowly tweak and change constantly so that we actually give the market what they want.

And people often say to me, have you heard about this group or that group? They’re all competitors, technically. I don’t even know who they are. Because one of the things I learned in my previous career when I was in asset management sales, I remember the CEO saying to me—I was with Deutsche Bank—I remember him saying to me, don’t worry about the competitors, just listen to the client and get the solution the client needs.

And if you listen to them right, you’ll just outsell the competition anyway. So that serves me very, very well. And we have a very high customer satisfaction rate and our success rate is through the roof compared to the industry.

And the third thing I want to touch on that I said on this podcast—and I realized after this guy asked me this question—was that every day the main role operationally that I do, I mean I build the company. I’m not involved with clients, I don’t talk to clients, I’m not involved in any of it. I do lead all the teams. I’m like a COO type, but I do the matching.

So every day we have a daily huddle where the head of recruiting, head of training, head of sales, like they’re all on the call with me and they’re reporting all their numbers to me. And I’m saying, okay, now remember we operate 24 hours. We’ve got three levels of VA, so we’re night shift, day shift, three levels of VA, part-time, full-time. I’m just trading people. It’s matching supply and demand.

And it’s like being on a trading floor. I’m saying, okay, put her there, introduce him to him. Maybe she’d fit there. And usually we get a home run on the first meetup because the fit is correct.

And I’m able to take all of the reporting and all the data and remember who’s done what training, who excelled in what area. And I can match people very quickly in 20 minutes every day. That’s the role I play.

And that is the hardest role to delegate. Some of my team are really stepping up into it now, but it was from my trading floor days that I was like, I’m actually doing the same thing now. All I’m doing is listening to the market, not telling the market what I want it to do. I’m letting the market tell me what’s happening and then I’m moving and iterating and then matching supply and demand so that we get the highest matching rate. And that’s what you do on a trading floor.

Aaron Scott Young: And it’s working. And folks, I hope you heard something else she just said. So one thing was, there are some things that are difficult to delegate. It doesn’t mean they’re impossible to delegate. My guess is that if Barbara made a choice where she had to be gone for an extended period of time, or you just sold the company or you dropped dead, it’s possible that it could keep going. Yes. Because there’s a good team and there’s a good process.

I have all these highly educated business school people, including Harvard Business School, you know, and the people come back and say they never taught us any of this at Harvard because they were busy learning other things that are also important and also useful. So look, we’re getting down to the wire here. So let me ask you a couple of things.

First of all, you sort of just said it, but I’d like to give you a chance to say it straight out. What is an ideal match for your company? In other words, if I think I might want to hire a virtual team, what specifically would I come to Virtual Hub for? You talked about marketing.

Barbara Turley: Because we’re not for everyone, right? We’re very specific about who we can help. I’d love to help everyone, but at the moment we’re quite specific. We typically deal with small, sometimes medium-sized businesses all over the world. Doesn’t matter what industry they’re in, right? We’ve got everything from—we’ve got a fisherman in Australia to like a Facebook ad agency in Boston and everything in between.

But the thing that ties them all together is that they either have a digital strategist, or they have a pretty good digital strategy and they’re running things, they’re doing podcasts, they’ve got a YouTube channel, they’re doing funnels, they’re putting on webinars, they’re in this digital space. And typically there’s so much to do and tasks that need to be done in order to keep a podcast moving, to keep a YouTube channel alive, all of the above, even blog content on your website, all of that stuff—that’s where we play.

We play in that space. We do general admin typically, you know, but we don’t do a lot of it. The reason being is because I can’t control the training, right? The general admin relies on the business owner and how good they are at building their own systems.

In the digital space, we’ve got systems for link building, for SEO, we’ve got all the SOP’s there already and people can either use them or not use them. We’ve got success coaches that help the VA’s and help the client to get success with this. So we’ve built a whole model around the back of this.

So any business that is doing digital—these days everyone is—but that’s the thing that ties them together. And that’s where we help the most. So we’re not going to do prospecting calls, for example, for a real estate agent. We don’t do that sort of…

Aaron Scott Young: You’re not doing a lot of AR, AP, accounting things.

Barbara Turley: We’re not doing any accounting. The other thing is virtual assistant—you’ve got to remember the word unfortunately has been kind of destroyed because the word virtual assistant today means anyone with a heartbeat who could type right through to anybody who can code an app, right? Which is incorrect.

If you think about it, the word assistant—what does it actually mean? They’re assisting you. They’re not strategists. Some people come to us and they go, well, I wanted them to hit the ground running and come up with ideas for me and sort of run the business. I’m like, well, you need a strategist, right?

So if you’ve got a deep process and you want someone to do it, we call it like separating the heads from the hands. You need some hands and you need to separate yourself from all the admin and the grunt work, I call it. I mean, not to belittle it, but so that you can free up your time and your team’s time onshore to be business people.

Or like we just spoke to someone today that needs people to do client onboarding because the onboarding process of getting all the documents—and it’s a financial-backed company—getting all these documents in place is tying up their sales team and stopping them from doing more sales. Right? So that’s an obvious thing that should be given to an offshore team member that you can integrate.

Aaron Scott Young: I love that. Okay. I want to end two things. So I’m going to ask you to put this in the back of your mind. You can just pull it out real quick. I’m going to ask you one thing and then I want you to end with a quote, a book or something that you want to pass along to people. But first, I want to give you a little heads up so you can think of that.

But first, one of the things I loved and the thing that besides the horse connection, the thing that really got me was that you didn’t just talk about how much cheaper and how much easier we could do it using foreign people. You also talked about what this means to the people that you’re hiring. You want to just give us a couple minutes about your philosophy around how hiring a virtual assistant is not just a blessing to the business owner.

Barbara Turley: Yes, okay. So there’s a few things I want to say on this. A lot of people, especially at the moment in the environment we’re in where there’s unemployment, people losing jobs, they’re worried about, am I taking jobs from my own country? Okay. First of all, in the global economy right now, we all need to grow. It’s just how it is. So if a business is thinking this way, I’m like, look, this is a strategy you need to put in. Every single business needs this now because profit matters. And it doesn’t just matter for you. It matters for your country. It matters for the GDP. It matters that you go in and pay tax revenue in your country, right? So that you can then go on and hire salespeople and lawyers and accountants and all these things in your own country.

Maybe the way to do that is to embrace the offshore strategy piece. In doing it as well, you’re offering, well, we have like dynamic careers. We’re building careers for people in countries like the Philippines. Traditionally, they’ve all ended up in call centers or they’re working in like Jollibee, which is the equivalent of McDonald’s over there or here, you know, lower end, lower pay work. Here’s an opportunity for them to build a really, like the smartest ones, to build a dynamic career that they really, really want and enjoy. Right. So this is great work for them. You’re actually helping that whole economy as well. So that’s my philosophy on this whole thing.

On the employment thing, and this works in the Philippines, this works in America, whatever you’re doing, it’s important to remember as a company that you need an employee brand as well as an external brand. So we have an entire separate brand in the Philippines that is basically inbound lead generation for employees. We’re putting out content all the time about how to build a great career, about where the marketing industry is going, like stuff that we’re not doing for clients, but it’s a completely separate thing over there to attract, you know, we have our core values, we’ve got our purpose, we’ve got all of that, and we talk all about that on our social media channels.

And it’s very important to remember that you have two clients in whatever business you’re in. You’ve got your employees and the people you want to recruit to work for you. And you also have the clients that you’re servicing.

And so many businesses treat the employee side like, you know, they’re just doing the work. Well, actually, no, they deserve as much respect and love and acknowledgement, and that’s something that I’ve spent a long time building in the Philippines. And that’s what lights me up. Yeah, one day I want to sell the company and make a load of money, whatever, but that’s the bit that keeps me going every day. Wow, watching people transform on both sides, client and employee side.

Aaron Scott Young: Yeah, it’s such a great thing and it’s such a great thing that you acknowledge it because I talk a lot about what do you stand for? What do you stand against? One of the things I stand against is treating employees. What I observe the vast majority of employers do, and most of these are small companies, right? Almost all companies are small. Owners tend to treat their employees either like family or like slaves, right? So here, we’re in it together and let’s have dinner and let’s be friends and let’s… There’s this like just their fear and it’s always leading with the stick.

And I stand against both of those. I stand for treating your people like the very best human resources that you could afford to bring into your operation. The best, most qualified people that need to be acknowledged and respected, as you said, for what they know how to do that you don’t really have time or competency to do. Right. And we want to respect them because they come to work to make money so they can fund everything that they want to do in their life. Right, and work is something that they do because they have to do it to fund their own interests.

And so if we can make work both financially rewarding, but more importantly, as you discovered when you went on salaries, people will work harder for something they believe in or something they love than they will ever work for money. So the money piece has to be reasonable, but the culture, the respect, the acknowledgement, and listening to their ideas, acting on, if not theirs, at least their co-workers’ ideas. And so they see, oh, the owners are listening to us, the ones in the trenches. When we do that, then we get more than just their hands, as you said, but you also get their heart.

And when you see other people progress, one of the things we do at my company is we pay for college classes for people, as long as they’re working, if it’s anything related to what we do, we’ll pay for college. Right? And I know that I’m educating that employee right into leaving me and going off on their own adventure. But guess what? During that time, they are the most dedicated people to what we’re doing. They go, my employer appreciates me as a human being and wants me to be successful, even if it may end up not benefiting them forever.

Folks, when you treat your employees with respect, it will change the nature of your business, but also of your life, because you will become much more successful. Because people won’t just do the work, they’ll give you their ideas. They’ll feel confident to take a risk and say, I think we should change this, or I think we should start doing this. Don’t you think?

Barbara Turley: A hundred percent and you know, some people think as well that you’ve got to not make the mistake of thinking that doesn’t mean you can’t have boundaries. Just like with clients, you can have boundaries around what, you know, acceptable behavior or not, or who’s a fit and who’s not. And then you start to recruit for this and you go like, is this person going to fit in here? And are we going to be a fit for them? Right. Because sometimes someone with the best experience in the world and you just think it is not a cultural fit, we can’t help them.

I’ll just tell you this story because I know you’ll enjoy it. We were doing a lot of work over the last few months trying to redevelop our purpose because our purpose used to be, I used to always say it had to work for both the employee side and the client side. Our purpose is one with a dual kind of approach. And it was always eradicating overwhelm, which is on our website at the moment. But we came up with a new one when we started peeling the layers of that back.

We were like, well, what happens when we eradicate overwhelm for our clients, for our employees, for our staff, for our team? Well, actually when you eradicate overwhelm, you actually unlock the business owner to go and build the business that they dreamt of building, that they ended up going down a path of not building. You unlock that for an employee, you unlock their energy to then go and pursue the passions that they have to enjoy the work that they’re doing.

So we’ve redeveloped our purpose and we’re just about to come out our website with this for our purposes now that we are passionate about unlocking dreams. So we do this for our clients. We do this for our team. We do this for our employees. And every decision we now make in our company, I’ve asked our leadership team, they have to ask themselves, if we’re recruiting someone, do we have the ability to unlock a dream for this person? And are they going to help us to unlock our dream of the company that we want to build and unlock the client’s dream of the business they want to build? And if we can’t say yes to those questions, we’re not going to hire them because they’re not a fit for us. It doesn’t matter about their skills.

Aaron Scott Young: That is freaking good. Thank you for that. It’s actually, that’s a perfect place to end. Let me ask you, was there anything, any guiding principle, any quote, anything? I like poetry. I use poetry. What’s yours?

Barbara Turley: A very good friend of mine when I was having a dark day said this to me, it’s an Arabic proverb. The dogs may be barking, but the caravan still passes. And it was the idea that, you know, clients might be at you complaining, the market might be bad, the employees are pissed off and everyone’s like, you know, and you’re having a really bad time. But the caravan still passes. The caravan is the company, the business. You’ve got to keep a sort of a, yes, you got to listen, but you’ve got to try to keep focused on the vision and the where you’re going. All of that. And that really, I always bring it up because I just, on bad days, I go, the caravan is still passing. We are moving ahead.

Aaron Scott Young: I love that. Guys are writing down the dogs may be barking, but the caravan still passes. You’re going to have terrible crummy days. Part of becoming unshackled is doing the work that’s going to change the nature, not only of the business, but also of you. You’re going to have to become a slightly different person than you are now in order to grow and grow your business and delegate the work and know when I just could pontificate on this.

Here’s the deal. What you’ve heard, and we went a little longer today than we normally do, but I think that what we learned today has been so freaking fantastic. I really want to thank Barbara for coming on and sharing her journey with us, sharing so much gold. And folks, if you want to grow your business in the marketing and social media and digital world, I mean, go check out The Virtual Hub, see if it’s a good fit. We already know, we heard it maybe here first, that before it makes the website, that the goal is to unlock the dream. So if they can’t do it, they’re not going to say yes to you anyway. Go to The Virtual Hub, check them out, see if they can help you.

But no matter what you do, learn that beautiful art, challenging thing, especially for an entrepreneur who gets a lot of strokes by people standing outside their door with saying, hey boss, can I just get five minutes? A lot of people love being the most intelligent, needed person in the company. As long as you’re that, you will always be shackled. Always be shackled. So go out there, contact Barbara Turley’s company, The Virtual Hub. It’s easy to find online. Go out there, change the nature of your social media game. Learn the skills. Tell your friends about this. Subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t. Tell people because this kind of freaking gold is what we bring you. And we’ll be back with you again next week with another great guest. Until then, Barbara, thanks for being here, kiddo. Thanks for staying up late in France to talk to us.

Barbara Turley: My pleasure.

Aaron Scott Young: All right, guys, go out and make it a great day. We’ll see you next week on the Unshackled Owner podcast.

Voice Actor: Thank you for listening to the Unshackled Owner podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you get new episodes right when they come out and help spread the word by liking and sharing the podcast across social media. You can get more information and ideas from Aaron at www.AaronScottYoung.com. And while you’re there, download Aaron’s ebook, The Critical 20, and grab your copy of The Freedom Formula, the seven step process to build an asset, not just a glorified job.