Scaling your business: agile sprints, metrics, onboarding and sales for scaling businesses
The Bean Ninjas Podcast
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Episode breakdown
Wondering how Agile sprints might be useful for scaling your business? Learn from someone who’s doing it.
In this Podcast, Bean Ninjas CEO Meryl Johnston talks to Barbara Turley about scaling your business.
Barbara Turley is the CEO of Virtual Hub. The Virtual Hub has been running for 5 years now 24/7, and currently has 150 employees. It’s a company that recruits, trains and manages support assistants. Support Assistants are mainly from the Philippines but are hired for businesses all over the world.
- The meaning of an Agile sprint
- Focusing on one project (The Big Rock)
- Getting everyone together for your sprint
- The benefits of the sprint
- Celebrating achievements
Get in the game and start playing; you don’t have time to read 400 analyst reports. There’s no failure in this, there’s just discovery.
In this episode
00:00 Introductions and Business Overviews
Barbara Turley and Meryl Johnston introduce themselves and their respective businesses, The Virtual Hub and Bean Ninjas. They discuss their business models, goals for creating virtual, scalable companies, and how their similar values have fostered ongoing collaboration.
06:18 Agile Sprints Concept and Setup
Barbara shares how she initiated a company-wide sprint without formal Agile expertise. She explains the motivation—reducing overwhelm before her maternity leave—and how she improvised her own version of a sprint process, setting rules like no overtime and daily 3-minute huddles.
12:07 Leadership Delegation and Big Rock Projects
Discussion of how leadership team members chose key projects (“big rocks”) to focus on during the sprint. Barbara highlights the unexpected relief and enthusiasm the team felt when given permission to focus on one priority, improving clarity and productivity.
15:43 The Power of Daily Huddles
Barbara describes how implementing daily huddles solved communication gaps in her virtual business. She explains how huddles enhanced pipeline visibility across recruitment, training, HR, operations, and client onboarding, fostering accountability and cohesion.
18:41 Sprint Execution and Team Dynamics
They reflect on how the sprint energized the team, reduced overwhelm, and revealed valuable cross-departmental insights. Barbara shares how the structured daily calls encouraged healthy competition and team members discovered overlaps in their projects.
23:40 Examples of Big Rock Projects
Examples include developing a client transition process to ensure consistent service and revamping the company’s digital marketing support assistant training program. The team’s openness uncovered overlaps between customer support, HR, and training needs.
25:10 Plans for Future Sprints
Barbara confirms plans to repeat sprints quarterly. She outlines a framework of observing challenges for six weeks, then planning and executing a focused sprint while pausing non-critical business functions to manage capacity effectively.
28:20 Lessons and Final Reflections
Key takeaways include embracing action over perfection, learning by doing, and the importance of speed in business execution. Both hosts discuss overcoming perfectionist tendencies and how the sprint experience delivered unexpected wins in team dynamics and project outcomes.
