Voice Actor: This is the Good for Launch podcast.

Brandon Uttley: Barbara Turley is my special guest today. Barbara’s mission is to eradicate small business overwhelm by simplifying the offshore outsourcing process and facilitating cost-effective business scalability. She’s the founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub, a virtual assistant recruitment and management agency that is disrupting a very stale industry. And rather than doing business the usual way, The Virtual Hub creates their own virtual assistant successes through deep training programs on software programs like HubSpot and Ontraport, as well as ongoing career development and customized coaching to best serve each of their clients. Barbara, welcome to the Go for Launch podcast.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me, Brandon.

Brandon Uttley: All right. It’s a pleasure. I love meeting people with my podcast, as I know you do with yours as well. We’ll talk about that. But where are you in the world today?

Barbara Turley: I am in the beautiful French Alps today, where I currently live in a town called Chamonix. Any of the big skiers or snowboarders out there, or even climbers, will know Chamonix Mont Blanc, beautiful part of the world.

Brandon Uttley: Absolutely. Well, that’s surprising because I thought you were going to say you were somewhere in Australia. Now you’re a native of Australia, correct?

Barbara Turley: No, I’m actually Irish. So I’m from Ireland. I’ve been 17 years living in Sydney, Australia, and I just moved here just recently, just before the whole crisis that we’ve come through. I moved here earlier this year to be closer to my family back in Europe. So I moved to France where the weather’s a little touch nicer than in Ireland.

Brandon Uttley: That’s great. Well, yeah, I just had a recent guest on from Belfast in Northern Ireland. So that’s interesting. I want to talk more about that because you spent a lot of time in Australia, and I know that was contiguous to where you were getting a lot of your virtual assistants. But we’re going to go back in time a bit, Barbara. I want you to tell the story of sort of how you got started in business and what led you to found The Virtual Hub.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s actually such an interesting story even for me to tell every time when people ask me that question, I go, “Oh wow, wait till I tell you how this happened.” So I spent 15 years in corporate. So I was the classic corporate chick. Like I wasn’t interested in running a business. Even I wasn’t the person with the lemonade stand as a kid or any of that stuff. I always had aspirations to work for one of the big investment banks, and I wanted to be in corporate. And I did have a really successful career doing that for a very long time.

But then in my 30s, I was sort of thinking, I don’t know, I don’t want to be a corporate mom, and maybe I should do my own thing. And look in the last crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, the big banking one, to cut a long story short, I got a huge opportunity in 2009 to get involved. I sort of jumped on the coattails of a group of very clever people doing a management buyout of a business from Deutsche Asset Management in Australia.

And I went on to work for that company and be a founding shareholder, and had a great time working there and watching how a startup and a great company gets built. And I guess that kind of whetted my appetite for thinking, I wonder if I would build my own company one day? So I left corporate, and as lots of people do, I ended up becoming a business coach. I had a few small clients. I was doing a couple of other things.

And I discovered that a lot of smaller businesses were suffering from the same problem, regardless of whatever it was they were doing. If they didn’t hire staff, they were never going to be able to grow. And if they didn’t grow, they were never going to be able to afford to hire staff. So it was this kind of vicious cycle that some businesses are in for years. And I had read Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week, like the rest of us. And I had a VA myself in the Philippines at the time.

So I knew this was a cost-effective way to help my clients. I wasn’t even thinking about starting a VA company. I was just trying to get the stuff off their plate so that we could work on strategy together. And honestly, before I knew it, I was getting more calls for, “Can you get me one of those VAs?” than I was for, “Can you be my business coach?” So I thought, I wonder if there is a business in this? And literally overnight, I pivoted from being a business coach to being a kind of a weird recruitment business that six years later, today, we have 140 staff and we have developed into a sort of a, I guess we’re a VA company, but we manufacture our own VAs. We have a huge learning and development department. We train clients on the way through by delegation, and we’re sort of a machine as opposed to just a VA recruitment company now.

Brandon Uttley: Sure. Okay. So when you started the VA business, you were in Australia at the time, right? So yeah. So, you know, I’m looking at the map because I’ve hired a VA myself in the Philippines. I’m in the U.S. and you guys are like 13 hours ahead of us. It’s always a challenge with regard to the time zone. And of course, there’s language barriers and stuff. But when you’re in Australia, you’re sort of on the same time zone. You’re maybe a six-hour flight if you actually want to go visit the Philippines.

Tell us about how that helped shape your business. Did you ever go to the Philippines? I’m sure you did, right? But tell us about that. Did you go there to physically meet people and see how it all worked on the ground?

Barbara Turley: No, the obvious is I didn’t. No, and everyone said, you’re never going to build a VA company unless you live there. And I was kind of like, okay, I get that. But this is kind of growing like a weed without me. I mean, now it was messy in the beginning. It grew by itself very organically, but I wouldn’t say it was massively a success. There was a lot of problems in that first year. And eventually then I did go there and I did go and visit and I understood the culture a bit more. I have been to the Philippines a few times. I’d like to have gone more over the years, but I also have two young children. So I was kind of, I had like a business and babies going on, and it was just all a bit crazy. So, but it’s a nine-hour flight, actually, eight to nine hours. So it’s quite far from Australia, but the time zone is just a two to three-hour time zone change. So you can get people on a day shift in the Philippines. But these days we do 24 hours. So we have U.S. clients, we’ve got clients all over the world. We operate 24 hours now.

Brandon Uttley: I love it. Well, I’m glad to hear that because that’s the other crazy thing that people don’t understand about technology and the whole shift that we’ve gone through in the last 10 to 20 years alone is that you can hire people across the globe literally and never meet these people and start paying them money. I will share that I have hired a VA in the Philippines in the past. I probably did it the wrong way, but I actually discovered this young woman through a series of emails. I was actually booking a guest on my podcast several years ago, and I noticed that this person was sort of the intermediary, if you will, Barbara, right? So I just asked her one day, “By chance, do you happen to be a virtual assistant?” and she said, “Yes.” and I said, “Do you have any extra time that you could devote to another client?” She said, “Of course.” so that’s how it started, but it wasn’t very formal to be honest. And I don’t think the relationship was as probably as good as it could be. So we’re going to talk about that. Again, I didn’t have a formal set of training. So that was my first lesson is that I needed to really train this person. I’ve seen you say on some podcasts and stuff that people in the Philippines have a very Western culture in terms of their work ethic and their belief in providing value to the client.

Brandon Uttley: So that’s a good thing. Yeah. Number one. But with that comes this sort of yes mentality. They want to say yes, they want to please you, and they don’t want to upset that relationship, I think, by saying no and maybe pushing back. But you guys actually teach your VAs and your clients how to develop that relationship to where you’re getting more out of your virtual assistant than just somebody that’s just going to tell you, do exactly what you tell them, correct?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, you know, look, it’s this interesting thing about business, and this is a great business tip for anyone in the startup or trying to grow sort of phase where the first problem I unearthed in this whole accidental business, as I call it, was that people didn’t really feel confident to go online and find their own VA and they were willing to pay me to do it. And then after that, what you find is the next problem sort of raises its ugly head that you have to now go and solve. And for me, in that first year, what I discovered is why it was such a mess.

It’s because clients didn’t really know how to delegate effectively. And you sort of think that everyone is good at this. And I accidentally discovered that I was quite good at it. I’m good at operations. I’m good at systems and processes and leading teams. And again, I didn’t really have any training in that. I just kind of accidentally found out that I was quite good at it, and I liked it. So, but a lot of entrepreneurs, in particular, are not very good at that. They don’t want to do it. They don’t like it. They don’t know how. So it was very important then for me to start to train clients on how to make it simple, how to do it in a way that’s not overwhelming for them.

So we started creating process maps for clients and teaching them how to delegate effectively. And then similarly, what I found from the VAs, the ‘Yes Culture’, you’re right, it was such a massive problem. They were saying yes to everything and then scrambling all night to try and figure out how to do something or ask their mates or try and learn something overnight and then make a total mess in a client’s account. So I realized how important it is to actually find VAs that are talented, that are smart. They don’t even need to be VAs. Like, these days, we don’t even hire people with any experience. We’re looking for smarts, coachability, character, like good, strong moral character, work ethic, behavior, enthusiasm for what it is we do, because you can teach the rest. And we launched a very mini training program in the early days. It was only about five days long.

But these days, we have an entire learning and development department, and we have like training programs that stretch anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of years of ongoing training. We do personalized training maps based on client needs within the digital marketing kind of space because training became so important for both sides to get success together. And that’s kind of how this whole thing was born. And it’s why I see lots of people know that the Holy Grail is getting an offshore VA. You know, it’s very cost-effective and all this sort of stuff, but it’s not that easy to get it right, and a lot of people get it wrong, and then they blame things like it doesn’t work for my business or, you know, they’re no good in the Philippines or whatever, but it can just be these challenges that they haven’t figured out how to solve yet, and we’ve tried to solve that problem for clients.

Brandon Uttley: Yeah, I think that you’re right about so many of the issues that people, if you just do it yourself, you’re going to find this stuff out the hard way, like I did. And, you know, the shiny object, as you mentioned, is let’s go there directly is the cost. That’s typically the number one reason that people in the U.S. and elsewhere decide to hire somebody in the Philippines, especially, is because they realize these people can be had for very cheap rates.

Based on, you know, if I were to hire an assistant here doing social media marketing, for example, you know, a typical rate that might be at least 30 to $50 U.S. an hour. If I’m going to hire anybody decent, right? I’m not going to be able to find somebody that’s going to be willing to do it for even 15 bucks an hour. They could possibly go make that at Starbucks almost, you know, and have benefits, right?

But I can hire somebody in the Philippines for several dollars an hour. I mean, Barbara, I was hired. I hired somebody a couple of years ago and literally asked her, “What do you charge?” you know, thinking it was going to be $15 an hour or something. And she said a dollar 50 U.S. an hour. I was blown away. I was blown away. That was cheap.

Barbara Turley: Was she any good?

Brandon Uttley: She was OK. But that was the other learning lesson is probably you get what you pay for.

Barbara Turley: Yeah!

Brandon Uttley: You know, you know. But probably $15, $20, $30 an hour is not unreasonable, right? To hire somebody.

Barbara Turley: Even with a company like ours, even if you go through a company like ours, just being totally transparent, and we have like entire HR departments, learning and development, we take loads of the weight off you. We’re like an offshore partner for you. Our, like trained on podcast management, YouTube channels, the whole lot with our process maps given to you with a fully trained VA supported, 10 bucks an hour U.S., right? So that’s even going through us and getting all the bells and whistles. So if you want to go direct, it’s just that you take on a lot of the training and a lot of the work yourself with managing and figuring out how to pay for it. I mean, we pay for top level private health cover. We’ve got a local company, so they get all their benefits and all that stuff paid for with us. And you’ve got to figure that out if you’re doing it yourself, basically.

Brandon Uttley: Yeah. And the other thing you touched on is the whole issue of delegation and management, because I was very frustrated, to be honest. A lot of times, this person would make up, I think, excuses about technology. Like she would miss deadlines and say, “You know what, my internet was out last night,” or something. And I’m like, “It can’t be out all the time,” and if it is, I’ve obviously hired the wrong person. Right?

But that was a common excuse, like blame it on the internet or just the time zone difference and things like that. I eventually sort of gave up that relationship and blamed it a lot on myself, to be honest. So if I were to go back into it, I would absolutely go look for a professional like yourself who has more structure and is looking out for both sides of the equation. Because I was looking out for my VA, thinking that I felt sorry almost. Like, I’m paying so little.

I would send her ebooks and try to encourage her to develop her career and that sort of fell on deaf ears as well. So I was a little disappointed. I was trying to think, I’m trying to help you out, but you’re not helping me out to come with new ideas or anything to help the relationship other than simply checking boxes on checklists and doing exactly what I tell you to do.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And there’s so much that I could unpack in what you’ve just said there. And legitimately, you have to remember as well, we’re still operating. The Philippines has come a long way as a culture, as a country, but we are still talking about a third-world country where you have to remember the psyche of the people. There are incredibly smart people in the Philippines, amazing people. I’ve got close friends that are in the Philippines that live there, that work for us, but not the whole population is like that. And you have to remember the boom that happened in the VA industry caused everyone who has a heartbeat to go online and try to pitch themselves as a VA. Right? Some of them will just see you, you know, nice and all, as they might be. They’re thinking, well, I’m just getting this guy who pays me 150 an hour. He doesn’t really know what I’m doing. And honestly, the internet’s not dropping out. It might be, but it could be that they could be running five people like you at the same time.

Honestly, get six bucks an hour trying to do it that way. And that happens, right? And they go AWOL, they disappear. All these sorts of issues actually are the elephant in the room, and they do happen. But it doesn’t make them necessarily bad people. It’s just they have not developed everyone yet in terms of work ethic and how you would deal in a professional environment with an international client. So a lot of our job is to recruit that out and to make sure that we’re not bringing them in. There’s no point in thinking you can bring them in and manage them. We don’t do it at all. We just don’t hire them. We’re like, can’t really coach that out, you know. So just some insider tips there.

Brandon Uttley: Now, so there are a lot of reasons why hiring a VA could totally fail. What are some of the top warning signs to look for in your experience, and how can you avoid those?

Barbara Turley: Okay, so let’s talk about our own side first, because it’s always really important that we look in the mirror first at ourselves rather than blame the person we gave the job to. And I will get to where the line is with that, because some people look at themselves all the time and blame themselves all the time when the person is blatantly doing the wrong thing. So I’ll deal with that separately. But as a client and as the person, the business owner, what I see typically is people say something like, “I just want someone who can hit the ground running”, “I want them to be able to show initiative and come in and just get the job done.” And what that translates into is I don’t want to create processes. I don’t want to have to train somebody or teach them anything. I want them to know translation. I want them to be able to read my mind because even if somebody knows how to do social media or how to do a little bit of this, that and the other, they don’t know how you like your brand or how you like things done in your particular business. So it’s very, very important as a business owner.

And look, this is not just to do with Filipino VAs, right? This is to do with running a business. A business is a machine that is outside of you. And at the end of the day, it needs systems, processes, structure, delegation ability within the business so that you’re not relying on, you know, you hired the great person, the A player, and the minute they leave, all the IP walks out the door. And that brings true whoever you’re hiring. So it’s important to remember that it is a machine.

A business is an entity outside of you, and it needs structure, it needs leadership, and it needs delegation ability for a team to work effectively together, regardless of where they sit. On the VA side, being too accepting of, you know, these constant excuses, people who look like an A player in an interview and then just turn out to be a D player for whatever reason, right? If you’ve got strong systems and processes and you’ve got strong communication channels and communication rhythms. So for example, daily huddles, catch-ups to see where the roadblocks are, all of these little tips. I share them on my podcast, the Virtual Success Show, shameless plug, but this is where I share all these tips.

If you’re already doing all of those things and you’re finding you’re not getting any results or there’s mistakes everywhere or they’re slippery, I call it slippery behavior, they’re there, then they’re not there, all of that. If you’ve got the right machine built, there’s nowhere to hide.

So it’s very easy to have the conversation, the difficult conversation around, “Look, it’s not working out. We either work together to make this work, or I need to move on.” And it’s okay for you to say that because you’re not just waking up in the middle of the night with your gut telling you that this person is not doing the right thing. I hope that’s making sense, like the five-minute version of what I could do in an hour masterclass about that topic. But typically, those are the two big areas that people would fail in. Yeah.

Brandon Uttley: Yeah, I heard what you’re saying. I think that if I were to go into a relationship again, I would absolutely have a trial period, and maybe I could give that person 90 days or something, you know, enough time to get, uh, trained properly and get up and running. But I would make it clear that you are on the clock to get the results that I’m looking for after a certain amount of training and acclimation. But after that point, we’re going to be measuring you, your success. And if it’s not happening, we’re going to end this relationship quickly. So I don’t have to drag this out for months and feel guilty about paying you and whether you’re going to deliver. I mean, I had another VA, I just realized this too, Barbara, you know, made some mistakes over my life.

Barbara Turley: Even I have.

Brandon Uttley: I mean, I wrote a book a couple years ago and I hired this guy in the Philippines to do the cover. He did a great job and it was fairly inexpensive. So several years later, I had another opportunity where I wanted him to do a logo for a client. So I got in touch with him and he said, “Sure, I’m happy to do it. Go ahead and send me the money on PayPal, and I’ll do the logo.” And I sent him like 300 bucks. Not a lot, right? I could have paid $1,800 or $5,000 to somebody in the US to do the same logo process and all this, but this guy didn’t do the work, left me high and dry at the end, missed the deadline, I was totally embarrassed, I never got the money back, and it was a disaster. I ended up actually doing the logo myself, which was ridiculous because I’m not a graphic designer.

Barbara Turley: No, and these stories, the whole internet is littered with these stories. I’m the first to say, I mean, I run an offshoring company. I’m the first to say those things happen all the time. It’s just, again, we’re dealing in a third world country. You have to remember how they see the West. So they’re looking at us like, you know, these Westerners that have these huge businesses, and they don’t realize, sometimes I say to my team, you don’t realize how difficult business is. Like some of our clients are just kind of making it. They’re not even like, they’re not millionaires that are throwing money around. It’s just a cultural, it’s just, you know, I guess, a gap, not all people in the Philippines or India or whatever, but it’s, you know, the cultures are not developed enough yet to understand that that’s not cool. You don’t do that. But then I guess maybe it could happen in the US as well. I just haven’t personally experienced it in the West, but some people might slam me on this podcast and say they have, and I’m sure it happens. People are people.

But the mistakes are, I guess what you were just saying about laying out the expectations, you can do that in a really supportive, really collaborative, beautiful way with anybody that you bring on your team, where you set clear expectations at the beginning, then you set the training plan and how this is gonna work and what the milestones are, what the expectations are at each level in the milestones. Then there’s nowhere to hide, really. mean, the person either can or can’t do the job after all of that. And if they can’t, you could respectfully say, “Look, you know, it’s not really working out, and at this point we’re going to end the relationship.” And it doesn’t have to be a kind of a guilt-ridden, horrible conversation. It can be a very professional, you know, this is where we’re going now.

Brandon Uttley: Sure. Well, let’s talk a couple of minutes, Barbara, about the best types of tasks that people should think about. Because I know on your website, you’re clear that you don’t do some things, full-scale web development, for example, other firms probably handle that. But you guys could do landing pages. Talk about some of the most common tasks that a small business owner, entrepreneur in the US or UK would think about not necessarily hiring a real-time person in their city to work with them for a bunch of money, but they could use a VA for that.

Barbara Turley: Okay, so the best way to map this out first, because people always ask me, “What are the tasks?”, and I always think it’s really good to clearly define the boundaries for you, and then you know what tasks are going to fall in there. So, for example, people always make the mistake that a VA is like, is going to do everything. They’re like, a VA is anything. I mean, unfortunately, the word has become very broad, and it’s anything from someone who can code an app through to somebody with a heartbeat who can type. And it’s like, that’s the problem, it’s too broad.

So a good general VA is not going to be an expert in, for example, graphic design, content writing, Facebook ads. You know, these kinds of things are an expertise level above. Can they be virtual? Of course, but they’re not an assistant. They’re more like someone who’s going to do, who has an expertise. Virtual assistants are great at stuff that is very process-driven. So, for example, social media can be process-driven. So if you’ve got, let’s say, this podcast, this is a great example.

You got this podcast. You can, a VA could take this podcast after it’s done. They can listen to it, rip out some comments, some tips, quotes, turn them into Canva images. While they’re not graphic designers, typically they’re going to be, you know, we can have a design bent, but you wouldn’t want them to like design a logo. They’re not going to design a logo, but can they do a Canva image for social media? 100 % they can. That’s on brand for you. Can they take a blog post that’s been written by a writer, a proper writer, be that whoever and put it formatted correctly on your website to make sure there’s images in there, make sure it’s Google friendly, make sure it’s optimized for a little bit of SEO. Yes, they can do all of that stuff. So it’s about boundaries, about figuring out what is expertise versus what is assistant-type work. And loads of stuff can fall into that category. Landing page again, they can create a landing page, but they’re not going to probably design it. If you need a designer to design something, they’ll know what the anatomy of a good landing page looks like. They can probably build it using Divi or using Entrepages or Leadpages or one of these things. But they’re not going to code a website for you because you need a developer for that. You know.

Brandon Uttley: Sure. And I think I read another thing that you said in a common misperception. People sit down and they go, “You know, I can only come up with a couple hours of tasks for somebody to do.” But you after you coach them, they realize, “Oh my gosh, I could come up with 20 to 40 hours worth of stuff.” What’s the gap that people have to overcome mentally to start offloading more of their tasks to somebody?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so the trick is this. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a billion-dollar company or you’re a mom sitting at your kitchen table making stuff to sell on Etsy. Every single business has departments. You’ve got like marketing, sales, product delivery, know, inventory, whatever it is, you’ve got departments. And if you break any business down into the departments and then within each department, there are always tasks that are process-driven that need to be done daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever, to keep the engine of that business moving forward. Once people start to map those things out and really, truly, deeply dive into all the things that they’re doing all the time, you start to realize there’s a lot to do to keep a business of any level moving, to keep it moving forward. And that’s not even touching on the projects that you want to do to move your business forward.

Like, for example, you’d love to produce an e-book, you’d love to start a podcast, you would love, all the things people would love to do and never get time to do. There’s a ton of tasks related to each one of those projects. Some of those tasks, I would say 80 % of them a VA can do. You might need to bring a writer in, you might need a strategist, but you only need those people for a small number of hours because the doing, the hands are the VA.

So I always say it’s like figuring out you have the head, where are the hands, and who are the hands doing all the stuff. Most business owners are still doing way too much stuff that is highly delegatable, and their own time is worth an awful lot more money. So if you free up, let’s say you’ve got three people on your team, you and two other people, and you free up 30 % of your time, and the other two people on your team, and they’re all onshore staff getting paid anything from 60 grand a year to 200 or whatever, even 100. You free up 30 % of their time. And then you outsource that you get a VA in the Philippines to do that work. You’ve essentially hired another one of you three, a combination of you three, for the price of a Filipino person. Cause you’ve freed your time up to go after more sales. And that’s when you start to become very strategic about it and go, it’s not just getting a VA to help me with a couple of things. It’s building a business and going, “How am I going to do more sales? deliver more product? free up me to do more?” Maybe just be with my kids or whatever it is for you. So I hope that makes sense. It’s kind of that’s the trap. It’s a mindset trap that clients fall into, that they just need a few hours of help.

Brandon Uttley: Sure. Another question I have for you and don’t you have to go into a lot of detail, but what are the tax implications? Is there a barrier or threshold? If I pay somebody in the Philippines, some X amount of money, I’m worried that I have to worry about paying payroll taxes or anything like that.

Barbara Turley: Oh gosh, that’s a big one. In the US, so if you’re, I don’t know what the tax law is in the US around this. If you’re contracting someone in the Philippines and paying them X, if you, all I know is if you use a company like ours, for example, and this is not a pitch for our company because you can go direct and do whatever, but because your contract is with our company, you’re hiring our company to deliver a service. So there’s no employee, there’s no chance of any employee-type, you know, people look and feel like an employee in your business, but they’re actually not. They’re an employee of our company in the Philippines, and your contract is with our head office company, which is not in the Philippines. So that’s, it’s an arm’s length relationship. Okay. So that benefits people who are building big teams, for example, or getting more than a few hours a week of the VA’s.

Brandon Uttley: Sure. I wanted to also ask you, Barbara, you’re a big fan of productivity, obviously, and what are some of the best productivity apps or software that people can use to get more done with their VA?

Barbara Turley: Okay, so the number one, I mean, hands down, number one tip I can give anyone on this, you have to use a project management tool. Email is not a project management tool, but a task management type tool like Asana or Trello, they’re free. You’ve got a phone app with it. It helps you to get organized, to have your task lists in there. VA offshore can just be logging into the same cloud-based thing, and then you can communicate together back and forth on a task and not have threads of emails or WhatsApp messages and a bit of Skype and people communicate all over the place and they don’t have structure around how they communicate. And then what happens is you get mistakes, miscommunications, accidents, and that ties up all your time and frustrates you. So, definitely, a task management tool is the number one thing you should use.

Brandon Uttley: Do you have a personal favorite?

Barbara Turley: Asana. I’m a huge Asana user, built the entire company on Asana, but Trello’s the same. Teamwork PM’s pretty good, and it depends on how big your company gets. So, some of the other ones work better if you’ve got like a lot of clients coming in or you’ve got contractors and stuff. I think Teamwork PM works well for that. But I’m Asana. I’m a massive fan of Asana.

Brandon Uttley: Well, we’ve been speaking with Barbara Turley of the Virtual Hub. Where can people go, Barbara, to learn more about the Virtual Hub and you personally?

Barbara Turley: Sure, you can, for me personally, you can go to LinkedIn. I do share some content over there. I’m not great on social media, I will admit. I’m too busy running 140 staff, but obviously my podcast, you can catch our podcast, The Virtual Success Show, on our website at thevirtualhub.com and also on iTunes. I think we’re on Spotify as well, so you can catch us over there. Our website is loaded full of content, by the way, for anyone that wants to learn more about how to do this more effectively and stuff like that. So let’s head on over.

Brandon Uttley: Outstanding. Well, thanks so much for sharing so much wealth of knowledge about this whole world that people are, you know, confused about hiring a virtual assistant, but it’s really not that bad folks. I mean, like I said, you heard some of my mistakes that I made personally going direct, so probably wouldn’t do that again. And you obviously have learned a whole lot more about how to structure that properly. So congratulations on the growth of your own business. Sounds like you might have a need for a VA to do some social media for you on LinkedIn posting, just saying.

Barbara Turley: They do, they do. What I mean is that I’m not personally on there very much; they do, they put stuff out on social media. I’ll openly admit I don’t talk my own walk.

Brandon Uttley: Yeah, you need to drink the Kool-Aid, of course.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I don’t touch it myself, but the VAs are all in there. Yeah, they’re all in there.

Brandon Uttley: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much, Barbara. It was great to have you on the podcast.

Barbara Turley: Thanks, Brandon. Take care.