Voice Actor: Hi everyone, it’s Bill Black, the Exit Coach from the Exit Coach Radio Show.
You know, one of the biggest questions I get on the show is, what exactly goes into a business exit plan and when should I start creating mine? Well, I always tell people that the best time to start was five years ago, but the next best time is now because you never know when you might need it. So we put together a free report that describes what an exit plan is and what you should know. You can get it free by texting EXITPLAN with no spaces to 44222. That’s EXITPLAN to 44222. Again, text EXITPLAN to 44222.

Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio Show. The Show for baby boomer Business owners looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week, we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies and precautions so you can be well planned and now here’s your host, the exit coach Bill Black.

Bill Black: Thank you very much. We’re gonna roll right into our next guest today. She is Barbara Turley and she is the founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub. Barbara is an investor, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub which is a business she started by accident that exploded in the space of 12 months to become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants for businesses who need to free up time and energy so they can go on to the next level. That’s everybody I know. With a strong focus on customizing training and ongoing career development, Barbara ensures that her team’s trained in cutting edge programs like HubSpot, Ontraport, et cetera, to best meet their clients’ unique needs in digital marketing. This is a tremendous growth business. Barbara’s right on the forefront. I can’t wait to interview her, so let’s get with it.

Barbara, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Barbara Turley: Hi Dale, thank you so much for having me.

Bill Black: It’s my pleasure. It’s interesting to talk with business owners who have been building factories for 20 years, but it’s far more interesting to me to talk with people like

Should Your Next Hire Be Virtual?

yourself who have found new technologies, new ways of doing things, new industries and taking a hold of those. I’m sure it was an overnight success, Barbara. Tell us all about it.

Barbara Turley: Yes, no overnight successes here, but it was very much an accidental business as you said and interestingly, I was a business coach prior to this and I spent 15 years in corporate. So, you know, in the investment banking world and spending a long time with strategy and planning and all these things. And it’s quite ironic that I ended up with a business that started kind of organically by accident. And it was purely just clients I was coaching through my business coaching practice after I left corporate, they were struggling to grow. And unless they hired staff, I could see that they weren’t really going to be able to grow. But the problem was they weren’t making enough money in order to hire staff. So vicious cycle that was going on. And I had a virtual assistant in the Philippines myself. So I just started to get some of her friends to try and help out clients that I was coaching, not actually as a business, but just as a kind of a side thing.

And before I knew it, I was getting more demand for that than I was for business coaching. So overnight, I went, thinking there’s a business in this. And here we are five years later with 150 staff in the Philippines.

Bill Black: Wow, that’s fantastic. Congratulations. You know, our listeners, people that are listening to this show are typically aged, 50 plus, but we have younger listeners too. They’re entrepreneurs, business owners. They want to grow their business. They’re realizing that it’s expensive to hire and train staff, especially since there are many, many things that they could probably have done by someone somewhere else.

So let’s talk about what are some of the first questions you get from new clients who are concerned about whether or not a virtual assistant will work for them?

Barbara Turley: Yes, it’s a very common question and particularly with more developed businesses or you know that 50 plus market that feel maybe like this is very online, it’s kind of new. The reality is that it’s not really that new. So outsourcing to the Philippines is something that the big end of town has been doing for decades. It’s just with the introduction of the internet and you know in the last 10 to 15 years in particular with the explosion in digital marketing in the South products in cloud-based technology, it has enabled the regular businessman on the street or woman to access this type of strategy. And the reality is that if you go offshore, and we’ll get on to whether it’s ethical and all these questions that a lot of people have in a second, but going offshore to somewhere like the Philippines, you can pay somebody there a great salary for them, but it’s extremely cost effective for you. And you can pair an offshore strategy with your onshore business strategy and your onshore team and the two together, if you get it right, pay very large dividends because it’s straight to your bottom line in terms of your cost base. And it allows your team and you to be freed up more to get cracking on the strategy, the sales, the more front end revenue generating parts of the business.

That’s in a nutshell, I think that’s really what I want people to hear from this conversation.

Bill Black: Yeah, yeah, and that’s really good input. What I think about it as well is that you may have someone in your business that is doing low-level work, but they’re capable of doing higher-level work, but they’re so inundated with all the work that they have to do that they don’t have time. And this is a way to free up time. So let’s start from some of the tasks that you see people starting off and moving over to virtual assistants. What are some of the early things they do and then what we’ll get into some of the other ideas?

Barbara Turley: Sure, so a great area, and obviously there’s digital marketing and social media and all these sorts of things. But taking a further step back from that, what about the admin tasks in any business? There’s so many tasks that need to be done from anything from research during a project that is just grunt work really. Let’s call it that where somebody has to put in hours of research building databases, data mining, scraping data from various areas online. I think about client onboarding.

In how many businesses do we have a situation where you have to onboard clients after a sale is made? There are documents to get finalized. There are contracts to go out. There are all these sorts of things that have to happen. And a client onboarding process is something that you can actually delegate to a VA to help you to manage. Now wouldn’t abdicate it. You definitely want to be delegating which is a different thing than just handing it over and forgetting about it. It’s very much having a person who is offshore but they look and feel like an employee in your business despite the fact that they actually are not and they are offshore.

Research tasks, admin tasks like creating PDFs, maybe creating some Word documents, formatting things, formatting blog posts on websites is a huge job. Email management and even answering the phone and customer support, those are all the things that people typically are starting with. And then as you get more developed, you can go into things like CRM management, building marketing campaigns, or managing some of your platforms. You can even get help with your bookkeeping. Even though a VA is not a bookkeeper, they can do a lot of the invoicing and the chasing and stuff like that that’s very admin based still. So hope that gives you a quick sort of picture of where people start and what’s possible with this.

Bill Black: Yeah, that’s terrific. And the way I think about it is, as you mentioned, you should delegate, don’t advocate, but you can get things 90 % done so that you only have to do the final 10 % in a lot of the ways that could be reviewed or could be finalised. What are some of the issues that you hear about with regards to people’s questions about, like, well, what about privacy? What if they’re dealing with customer names or email addresses, can I trust my virtual assistant? What are some of those, the answers to some of those questions that you have?

Voice Actor: Hi everyone, it’s Bill Black, the Exit Coach from the Exit Coach Radio Show.
You know, one of the biggest questions I get on the show is, what exactly goes into a business exit plan and when should I start creating mine? Well, I always tell people that the best time to start was five years ago, but the next best time is now because you never know when you might need it. So we put together a free report that describes what an exit plan is and what you should know. You can get it free by texting EXITPLAN with no spaces to 44222. That’s EXITPLAN to 44222. Again, text EXITPLAN to 44222.

Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio Show. The Show for baby boomer Business owners looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week, we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies and precautions so you can be well planned and now here’s your host, the exit coach Bill Black.

Bill Black: Thank you very much. We’re gonna roll right into our next guest today. She is Barbara Turley and she is the founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub. Barbara is an investor, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub which is a business she started by accident that exploded in the space of 12 months to become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants for businesses who need to free up time and energy so they can go on to the next level. That’s everybody I know. With a strong focus on customizing training and ongoing career development, Barbara ensures that her team’s trained in cutting edge programs like HubSpot, Ontraport, et cetera, to best meet their clients’ unique needs in digital marketing. This is a tremendous growth business. Barbara’s right on the forefront. I can’t wait to interview her, so let’s get with it.

Barbara, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Barbara Turley: Hi Dale, thank you so much for having me.

Bill Black: It’s my pleasure. It’s interesting to talk with business owners who have been building factories for 20 years, but it’s far more interesting to me to talk with people like

Should Your Next Hire Be Virtual?

yourself who have found new technologies, new ways of doing things, new industries and taking a hold of those. I’m sure it was an overnight success, Barbara. Tell us all about it.

Barbara Turley: Yes, no overnight successes here, but it was very much an accidental business as you said and interestingly, I was a business coach prior to this and I spent 15 years in corporate. So, you know, in the investment banking world and spending a long time with strategy and planning and all these things. And it’s quite ironic that I ended up with a business that started kind of organically by accident. And it was purely just clients I was coaching through my business coaching practice after I left corporate, they were struggling to grow. And unless they hired staff, I could see that they weren’t really going to be able to grow. But the problem was they weren’t making enough money in order to hire staff. So vicious cycle that was going on. And I had a virtual assistant in the Philippines myself. So I just started to get some of her friends to try and help out clients that I was coaching, not actually as a business, but just as a kind of a side thing.

And before I knew it, I was getting more demand for that than I was for business coaching. So overnight, I went, thinking there’s a business in this. And here we are five years later with 150 staff in the Philippines.

Bill Black: Wow, that’s fantastic. Congratulations. You know, our listeners, people that are listening to this show are typically aged, 50 plus, but we have younger listeners too. They’re entrepreneurs, business owners. They want to grow their business. They’re realizing that it’s expensive to hire and train staff, especially since there are many, many things that they could probably have done by someone somewhere else.

So let’s talk about what are some of the first questions you get from new clients who are concerned about whether or not a virtual assistant will work for them?

Barbara Turley: Yes, it’s a very common question and particularly with more developed businesses or you know that 50 plus market that feel maybe like this is very online, it’s kind of new. The reality is that it’s not really that new. So outsourcing to the Philippines is something that the big end of town has been doing for decades. It’s just with the introduction of the internet and you know in the last 10 to 15 years in particular with the explosion in digital marketing in the South products in cloud-based technology, it has enabled the regular businessman on the street or woman to access this type of strategy. And the reality is that if you go offshore, and we’ll get on to whether it’s ethical and all these questions that a lot of people have in a second, but going offshore to somewhere like the Philippines, you can pay somebody there a great salary for them, but it’s extremely cost effective for you. And you can pair an offshore strategy with your onshore business strategy and your onshore team and the two together, if you get it right, pay very large dividends because it’s straight to your bottom line in terms of your cost base. And it allows your team and you to be freed up more to get cracking on the strategy, the sales, the more front end revenue generating parts of the business.

That’s in a nutshell, I think that’s really what I want people to hear from this conversation.

Bill Black: Yeah, yeah, and that’s really good input. What I think about it as well is that you may have someone in your business that is doing low-level work, but they’re capable of doing higher-level work, but they’re so inundated with all the work that they have to do that they don’t have time. And this is a way to free up time. So let’s start from some of the tasks that you see people starting off and moving over to virtual assistants. What are some of the early things they do and then what we’ll get into some of the other ideas?

Barbara Turley: Sure, so a great area, and obviously there’s digital marketing and social media and all these sorts of things. But taking a further step back from that, what about the admin tasks in any business? There’s so many tasks that need to be done from anything from research during a project that is just grunt work really. Let’s call it that where somebody has to put in hours of research building databases, data mining, scraping data from various areas online. I think about client onboarding.

In how many businesses do we have a situation where you have to onboard clients after a sale is made? There are documents to get finalized. There are contracts to go out. There are all these sorts of things that have to happen. And a client onboarding process is something that you can actually delegate to a VA to help you to manage. Now wouldn’t abdicate it. You definitely want to be delegating which is a different thing than just handing it over and forgetting about it. It’s very much having a person who is offshore but they look and feel like an employee in your business despite the fact that they actually are not and they are offshore.

Research tasks, admin tasks like creating PDFs, maybe creating some Word documents, formatting things, formatting blog posts on websites is a huge job. Email management and even answering the phone and customer support, those are all the things that people typically are starting with. And then as you get more developed, you can go into things like CRM management, building marketing campaigns, or managing some of your platforms. You can even get help with your bookkeeping. Even though a VA is not a bookkeeper, they can do a lot of the invoicing and the chasing and stuff like that that’s very admin based still. So hope that gives you a quick sort of picture of where people start and what’s possible with this.

Bill Black: Yeah, that’s terrific. And the way I think about it is, as you mentioned, you should delegate, don’t advocate, but you can get things 90 % done so that you only have to do the final 10 % in a lot of the ways that could be reviewed or could be finalised. What are some of the issues that you hear about with regards to people’s questions about, like, well, what about privacy? What if they’re dealing with customer names or email addresses, can I trust my virtual assistant? What are some of those, the answers to some of those questions that you have?

Barbara Turley: Trust is a major factor. And of course, this industry has exploded online and there’s a huge freelancer direct market, which is fine. You can get VA’s online that work from home and they’re not working for anyone. They just work for themselves and that’s okay. But if you have a business that requires or that you feel like you would prefer to have some data security, companies like the Virtual Hub, like my company for example, are becoming the big GDPR compliance program that came into Europe in May of 2019 of last year, sorry, the year before it was. It’s probably the gold standard in terms of data protection and privacy. And it’s really important that like European clients for us now require VA’s and processors to actually be compliant. So we are now compliant as a company. So you’re probably better off going to an office-based managed operation like the Virtual Hub, there’s lots of other ones out there, in order to get that level of comfort and to see their processes and their data processing agreements and what they have in place around data privacy.

Now there’s another layer of this. If you need something like PCI compliance, which is when you’re dealing with things like credit card numbers, social security data, and stuff like that, that’s a whole other level again, and many operators have facilities that provide that as well. So you can get it, but it’s all about knowing what questions to ask and what you really need and not going in the direct market if what you actually need is data privacy and some security around that.

Bill Black: Well, that’s great. That’s really good to know. And it makes a lot of sense that if – because there are, like you said, a lot of virtual markets out there that people can go to, but they won’t have the supervision. And let’s talk about that, the supervision and training. Do you have – like I can think of a lot of different verticals that might be interested in this, financial services for instance, that requires a lot of input and research and that type of thing, healthcare, manufacturing. Do you provide specific training to specific virtual people on your staff? Well, they’re not virtual. They’re people on your staff, but they’re virtual assistants. How do you manage that if someone says, hey, I’m in a certain industry? Do you have people that speak my language, let’s say?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so that’s a tricky one. I’d love to say yes, and in the future I think that would be a direction we might consider going. The only vertical that we do that currently is in the digital marketing implementation space. Now the reason we do it there is because we started out in that niche where we found ourselves being very successful in that niche probably because I had a deep interest in it, I had a background in it. And so we run our own training program. We train our VA’s and we train them on digital marketing.

When clients come in that are from different verticals like financial services or what else do we get, manufacturing or law firms and things like that, we encourage them that in your own business, you also have a set of processes that we actually can’t know. So you’ve got to be able to train your people. So we sort of aim to get the staff about 70 % of the way there, but mainly in digital marketing. There are other companies that do other verticals but they don’t train necessarily. That’s hard to find because managing training, different businesses do things in different ways, they have different processes and it’s very hard to streamline one process. Other companies, what they typically do is they will go out and try and find somebody with deep experience already that’s gonna come in and do this role, but that’s notoriously difficult to achieve as well. So that’s a roundabout way of saying that one of our value propositions is that we manage training for our VA’s. We bring them in and we train them up and we do ongoing training. But it is mainly in the digital marketing vertical for us at this stage.

Bill Black: It is one of the concerns that people have when they’re first kicking the tires about whether they should use a virtual assistant that I just don’t know if I’d have enough work and are there ways to fractionalize the use of a virtual assistant to suit the needs of an individual or company?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so the most common thing after the trust and security thing, the most common question we get is, I only need a VA for five hours a week, right? Because we have a minimum of 20 hours a week. We do dedicated staff, it’s either part-time or full-time staff, you know. And typically what invariably happens is we help them to see we have a thing called the super task list that we’ve developed where we can show clients all the different types of daily, weekly, monthly recurring type tasks that a VA can help with.

And what ends up happening is people come in and they fill the 20 hours really fast. And then all of a sudden we’ve had clients come back and say, oh, I should have gone full time because now I can see how much stuff I can actually delegate to this person. And typically another client has then taken the rest of that person’s time with us, is how it works with us. So what I recommend clients do is really before you get a VA and when you’re thinking about this, to write down every business, no matter how large or how small has a set of departments. And in each, you know, there’s marketing, there’s sales, product delivery, there’s accounting, there’s all the different departments that are involved in any business. And under those departments, there are always small, recurring tasks that need to be done daily, weekly, monthly, that are quite process driven, and they have to be done to keep the engine of the business moving. And if you write all this down and map that out, you will find that you’ll be okay filling 20 hours a week, no problem.

And if you only fill 15, the cost going offshore is such that it’s actually still worth it to do it and allow them to do training in the other five hours on other types of work that you might want them to do in the future or projects you haven’t gotten down to yet. Does that make sense?

Bill Black: That’s great. That’s really good advice. I think a lot of our listeners are in that first example that you just gave where people say, I only need you for 5 hours a week until they really understand. And one of the ways that you help people understand, which is terrific, is that you have a podcast called the Virtual Success Show Podcast. Tell our listeners a little bit about who you interview and what kind of topics do you talk about there?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, sure. And if the podcast was started, I didn’t, again, an accidental podcast. I didn’t really mean to start a podcast. I did it for clients because I was getting the same questions all the time and I thought I should record this as a video and then it became a podcast. And I found that the more I was doing it, the more it was really effective. And it’s a very tactical podcast in that we talk about specific questions. For example, I think you need five hours a week of a VA? think again. And in that show, we go through what we just talked about and more in depth around how to see that you need more time and that it’s still worthwhile. We talk about things like how often should I speak to my VA? We talk about the meeting rhythms and huddle concepts and how to manage people offshore. So it’s quite tactical. And I have a co-host on the show, Matt Maloof, who is a business coach. And we also then interview, occasionally we interview entrepreneurs that have large offshore teams or virtual teams and they talk about their process and how they’ve achieved success with this because a lot of people fail at it because they think it’s easy and it’s not as simple as you think immediately. If you study it and follow what people tell you to do and the experienced people at it, you’ll get it right but some people go off on their own tangent and it just fails and they find it really frustrating.

So yeah, the podcast is all about that. It’s on our website, thevirtualhub.com. You can find it under the content section. Every question you could think of is on there.

Bill Black: Yeah, I’m looking at it right now and there really are a lot of questions that I think are in a lot of people’s minds like my virtual assistant who was amazing just resigned. Now what do I do? How often should I talk to my VA? Do I need a VA project manager, operations manager, all three? A lot of great questions on there Barbara. Good job on that. And that’s really a terrific way for people to then start learning about. Maybe they don’t want to jump right into it. Maybe they want to learn about it. If they do want to get started, they should probably go to your website, right? And what website should they go to and what will they find at that website?

Barbara Turley: So the one thing I would say just on the podcast and all the content that we have on our site, it’s a very content heavy site, but it’s nice snackable pieces. And the idea is that we want to educate everybody globally, whether they come to us or not. We want to educate people, business owners, on how to use this strategy to eradicate overwhelm and to grow your business. Because I do feel for small business, it is an ace strategy for any small business who can achieve this.

And with the content, we would prefer that people do educate a bit and follow some of our content. So then by the time you actually come to us or whatever you decide to do, you are really ready and you know how to actually get the real value out of it. So if you go to thevirtualhub.com, you can find us there. You can also book a call with some of our strategy consultants there. On that call, they will actually help you to decide whether you are truly ready for this and whether we are right for you. And if you’re not, it will help you to find out where you can get the right support. Like if our VA is not what you absolutely need, it’s not really a failed call, it’s more of a discovery call.

Bill Black: That’s great. Could you just share maybe three tips or ideas or precautions for people who might be considering hiring a virtual consultant or virtual assistant?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so my tip number one is exactly what you just said. If you are thinking about hiring a virtual consultant or assistant, the first thing that you have to remember is that, I mean I know you just made that mistake, but people make this mistake all the time. They sort of think they’re hiring a strategist sometimes, and you have to remember that these people, they’re an assistant. And with the explosion in the industry, the word virtual assistant kind of means anyone with a heartbeat who can type right through to someone who can code an app for an iPhone. And unfortunately, that means people’s expectations can be way out of line with what actually an assistant is there to do. So it’s first managing your expectations.

Second of all is making sure that if you’re going offshore or having a virtual team, you need the right systems in place for task management and project management tools, something free like Asana or Trello, they’re brilliant. Email is not a task management or a task communication tool and I really urge people to check that out. It’s on our website. There’s information and we’ve even done shows on this as well.

And my third tip is remember that even though people are offshore, they’re not in your state in America. They might be in the Philippines, they might be in Australia, they could be in Ireland where I’m originally from or they could be in a different state. Communication is key.

I mean, communication has been the downfall of marriage and business partnerships. So it applies in this situation as well. Bring people into your vision. Bring them into your business and make them feel part of what you’re trying to achieve with your business. And then you’ll get loyalty, you’ll get great work, and you’ll achieve what you want to achieve. So those would be my three big tips on how to really think about this.

Bill Black: That really is great information. I think I took a whole page full of notes, Barbara. So I think our listeners who might not be as familiar with this topic now have a lot more to think about. And again, they have a podcast they can listen to. They have a website they can go to. I really appreciate you taking the time to bring our listeners up to speed today. And I wish you the best of success. I hope you’ll come back and talk to us again in the future about this topic because I think it’s only going to continue growing especially with things that we’re seeing in the world today. So people want productive, trained people that they can work with and help grow their business and you’re filling that gap for a lot of our listeners. So I really appreciate you taking the time.

Barbara Turley: If I could just add to that as well to finish, you’re also creating amazing careers for people in these countries like the Philippines. So don’t feel like you’re taking away from anything and you’re allowing your people in America to be up-leveled into the next level of where they want to go in their careers. And that’s the best way to think about this, what you’re trying to achieve.

Bill Black: Terrific. Barbara Turley, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Hope to talk to you again in the near future.