Barbara Turley: Our mission really is to help to eradicate overwhelm. Part of that is putting people in, but part of that is showing, if I can use the term of your podcast, showing the entrepreneur the way of doing that and getting success with it. We’re very keen on success for the entrepreneur, not necessarily just putting a bomb on a seat.

VoiceActor: This is The Entrepreneur Way with Neil Ball, unlocking the secrets of successful entrepreneurs seven days a week. Subscribe to our podcast and follow us on Twitter at @neilbball. Only here, the power of the mastermind is the driving force to discover how you can unlock the potential in your business using the power of a mastermind. Go to mastermindunlimited.com. And now, here is your host, Neil Ball.

Neil Ball: Hello, it’s Neil Ball here. Thank you so much for joining me today on The Entrepreneur Way. The Entrepreneur Way is about the entrepreneur’s journey, the vision, the mindset, the commitment, the sacrifice, failures, and successes. I am so excited to bring you our special guest today, Barbara Turley.

But before I introduce you to Barbara, I have a quote for you by Richard Bach, who is an American writer. “The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.”

The Entrepreneur Way asks the questions so we all get the insight, inspiration, and ideas to apply in our businesses. Barbara, welcome to the show. Are you ready to share your version of The Entrepreneur Way with us?

Barbara Turley: I sure am, Neil. Delighted to be here.

Neil Ball: I am delighted that you are here, Barbara, and thank you very much for coming on the show today.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me.

Neil Ball: You are so welcome. Barbara Turley is founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, a business that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants for businesses who need to free up time and energy so they can go to the next level. With a strong focus on training, delegating the doing so you can focus more on growing, and ongoing development, The Virtual Hub ensures their team is trained in cutting-edge programs like HubSpot, Ontraport, and more to best meet their clients’ needs. Barbara is also a mom to her gorgeous daughter Ruby, wife to her best friend, Etty, and an adventure lover with a passion for horses, skiing, tennis, and spending time in nature.

Barbara, can you provide us with some more insight into your business and personal life to allow us to get to know more about who you are and what you do?

Barbara Turley: Sure, sure. So for those who haven’t picked up my accent, or as we were talking off air might be a bit confused by my accent, I’m actually originally from Ireland. So it’s a bit of a personal backstory. Moved to Sydney, Australia, to be in the sunshine by the beach about 17, almost 18 years ago now. So I live in sunny Sydney, Australia, and love it down here. Amazing lifestyle. I have a two and a half years old daughter, a four and a half year old business, and another baby on the way. So that’s a little bit of the personal, just to frame up where I’m at.

But in terms of the business side, currently I am the founder and CEO of a company called The Virtual Hub, which, as I said, is four and a half years old and honestly growing like any toddler does, growing out of control right now. We have 150 staff in the Philippines, and what we do is we recruit, train, and manage virtual assistants in the Philippines for businesses all over the world, mainly in the digital marketing implementation type space.

So you would think from that story that I would have a long history or background in areas like HR, recruitment, even outsourcing, or even the Philippines. But the truth is I actually don’t. I had zero experience in any of that before I started this business. And in fact, I hadn’t even been to the Philippines when I started this business. Those who were in this business probably would fall over with shock that I even attempted this.

I actually had a background in investment banking for many years. I’m an ex-corporate, so I’ve been a corporate convert into an entrepreneur over the last seven or eight years. I spent, as I said, many, many years in the investment banking arena. I was an equity trader for about 10 years before moving into a sales role in asset management, which was a little less crazy, fun in other ways, but less dynamic and mad than a trading floor.

Barbara Turley: And then, to cut a long story short, I always had a wish to build my own company. And I think after about 15 years of being in corporate, I just made the decision that it was time, for me to try my own path. And I left corporate and started doing some consulting, as many corporates do. Sort of the fastest path to cash when you come out of corporate is to do some consulting. And I found that, first of all, I didn’t particularly like it. So I wasn’t, people said I was a good coach, business coach, but I didn’t really like doing it personally.

But what I did find, the people I was working with, the businesses, they all had this one major problem. They were sort of stuck between that, I call it the deep crevice between startup and growth, where some businesses can actually get stuck there for 10, 15, forever, years, where you can’t afford to hire staff because your revenue and your model is not there yet and you’re still struggling to get there. But if you don’t hire staff, you’re never going to get there. You know that kind of problem, that Catch-22?

So look, I had a virtual assistant in the Philippines purely because I had read Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek like so many other people had, and I had recruited one myself online. So I just started getting VA’s in the Philippines purely to help the clients out that I was working with so that I could free up their time, I could help them to get out of that crevice, and we could actually start working on strategy.

And honestly, before I knew it, I just was getting more demand for VA’s than people were calling me saying, “Hey, can you get me one of those VA’s?” And I thought, that’s interesting. I mean, you can just go online and find one yourself. And then I started to realize where all the problems with that actually lie and how many people have been burned and how difficult it is.

And I discovered by accident, honestly, that I had a bit of a natural talent for not just delegation, but systemization, leading people, leading teams, which I hadn’t done a lot of before. And I literally pivoted out of one business into another in the space of about a month. And The Virtual Hub was born, and I haven’t looked back for four and a half years. Have a lot more gray hair, I will admit, because it’s not that easy to build something like that. But that was the genesis of it, really. Hope that gives you some insight.

Neil Ball: Yeah, it definitely does. How much was your ignorance of what you were doing an advantage for you?

Barbara Turley: Look, I think it was a huge advantage because I probably wouldn’t do it again, shall we say. I think sometimes you are better off. Look, it’s taken me longer to build it. If I was to build it again, it would be a lot faster. I do know that. I do know some other people that have been in business the same length of time as me, and they have probably four times the staff.

And I look at them and go, wow. But I did have the first two years, I would say, for me, were successful in that the business was always profitable and I always was successful, but it was extraordinarily chaotic. You know, just navigating a culture like the Philippines, the virtual world, clients who didn’t understand how to do it. I wasn’t quite certain in the first few years of what the real problem was. I couldn’t understand why people couldn’t get success with it. I couldn’t understand why VA’s were lying, like we’ve all had those stories where VA’s say they’re working and then they’re not, and it’s slippery behavior and all these problems.

I wasn’t quite aware fully of the extent of the problems out there when I first started. And it probably took me two years to build a company that could solve those problems as much as possible for our clients.

Neil Ball: How do you make sure that you find the right VA’s so you don’t end up with the problems that you’ve just talked about now?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so a lot of that, again, the inexperience in the beginning. I actually have some staff still that have been with us since the beginning, so I hit a couple of really big home runs in that first year. We had some real disasters in that first year as well, both on the client side, though, as well. I mean, some of the clients we had were horrific. I mean, that’s the only way I can describe them. I mean, people that really are never going to get success with delegating to anyone, let alone just the Philippines. They’re just not capable of delegation, I guess.

But on the VA side, yeah, people that really were just not suitable for the business and the culture and the company that I was trying to build. Look, years of experience, and probably the reason I think I’m so successful at it now is probably because I sort of got burnt a lot in the beginning and I learned the hard way.

So it forced me to build a recruitment system and a recruitment funnel that is bulletproof. So these days, over 600 people at the moment per month apply for a job with us. And after an excruciating experience with us, we will probably hire between 2 and 5%. So it’s actually hard to grow at a fast pace if you’re only hiring 10 people or 20 people per month.

Barbara Turley: So that’ll give you some insight into kind of those listening, if you have had trouble with offshore recruiting, it’s actually quite hard. And then there’s the HR management on the other side. So don’t beat yourself up. It is a tough game, and you have to get really, really, you’ve got to fine-tune your process very deeply, which is what we have now.

Neil Ball: How do you manage to manage all these people? What have you done to make sure you can make that as easy as possible?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so there’s two other things I think I had from my previous career that made me successful in this, and it’s something I’ve only realized recently. I guess one of those was in a big corporate. I mean, I’ve been involved in very large companies. Also, I didn’t mention this at the beginning of the podcast, but I also had about a five-year stint where I was involved in a management buyout of a large asset management business, essentially from a large investment bank in Sydney. So I was, I’m still a shareholder there.

And I think from that experience, I spent five years watching. Look, I wasn’t in any way the instigator or anything of that. I just kind of hopped on the coattails of it. But I learned a huge amount through that experience of building great companies. I learned a lot about teams, about taking risks, all these sorts of things.

So in terms of team structure, I fully understood the benefits of organizational charts. Lots of people don’t do this, but very early on in the piece, I actually was kind of figuring out how to manage all this. And actually, a friend of mine who’s also a business coach said to me, why don’t you do the organizational chart for the company when it has 100 people, rather than figuring out who you should hire next? Do the org chart first with many people, and then figure out who you need to hire next.

And that was really pivotal for me because I realized I was like, wow, I’m going to need like 16 leaders, head of operations, then I’m going to need a head of HR, I’m going to need, and I knew I needed all these people. And then I’ve strategically put all of those people in place over the past four years. And today, I think I’ve only got one more very large role to fill, and that’s customer success. And then I have a complete team, and the org chart is completely filled out. So it’s having great people, but also recognizing the big roles that you need to hire with the right experience. That’s been key for me.

Neil Ball: How would anybody know who’s listening right now if you could help them in their business?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a great question, actually. So there’s a couple of key things. First of all, well, we as a company at The Virtual Hub do a minimum of 20 hours per week, so we have dedicated staff. Now, the reason for that, a lot of people come on calls with us and they’re like, “I just need three hours a week,” or “I just need five.” And when you’re starting out in business, that can be the case.

But if you’re in that situation, you really are swimming in the pool of Upwork and places like that. And you can hit a home run there and find someone that’s willing to do a few hours for you a week. We don’t because fundamentally we want our people to be embedded into businesses and to be, to look and feel like an employee of the clients that we work with. Because then you have longevity, the client will actually grow. There is a commitment from both sides.

Barbara Turley: And our VA’s are happier because they’re not trying to deal with 10 different clients, which is just notoriously difficult to do. And often the reason people are clients, for example, is because they are committing to 5 hours a week with a VA, but expecting that VA to marry them and treat them like they own the business, you know, when that VA probably has 20 other clients like that.

It’s that mismatch of kind of commitment and expectation and all that sort of thing. So number one, we tend to deal in that space. But also, if somebody’s interested in that, the key thing for us is that the client has to have, and we do teach a bit of this on the way in, on the onboarding experience, but what we find is that one of the biggest problems is clients come in and the boundaries between strategy and VA are too blurry, or the boundary between project manager and VA are just completely blurred.

And clients are coming in, hiring a VA, and then saying something like, “Can you take a look at my social media pages and just think about what we can do differently?” Now, that’s where you need a strategist. A VA is someone who you say, “Here’s our social media strategy, we have a process that we’d like you to implement.”

Here’s all the steps, and it’s like a step-by-step process, and you’re going to train them on that process. And VA’s are there to build the system, and then you plug people in to run the system for you. So we’re very much looking for businesses that are likely to fully get that and that they’re like, “Yep, we’ve got our systems, our processes, and we now want to plug in VA’s to parts of these task lists and processes that we feel can be delegated to offshore VA’s in particular.”

Now you can, you know, we help people to get there, but often we find that the clients that hit the ground running the fastest are the ones that really get that. So I’m hoping that makes sense. That’s a key thing for us.

Neil Ball: I think you’ve been very clear with that.

Barbara Turley: I have to be really clear because honestly, literally yesterday we still had this problem happening. We’ve had a client that came in with that social media exact thing. And we’re sort of going, you know, look, of course the natural tendency is to blame the VA. A complaint comes in, “Oh, they’re not showing enough initiative.” And you kind of go, well, you’re sort of blurring the line between what a VA is for and what you actually need, and maybe a VA is not what you need. That’s the truth.

So we’re very clear with clients, and we can help clients navigate that. Even on our calls, our consultants do free strategy calls, and we don’t call them sales calls because honestly, they’re not there to sell. They’re there to make sure that we’re the right fit for our clients before they come in because otherwise they’re going to waste money and time.

Neil Ball: What do you enjoy most about what you do?

Barbara Turley: Look, I’ve found that, like I said in the beginning, I started out in business coaching, and I thought I was going to love that. And I did initially for a while, but I rapidly realized that I’m not really a one-on-one person. What I love doing is I’ve loved building the company side. And look, that’s probably no surprise, given I’ve come out of an investment banking background where I was spending all day, every day, reading about company reports and looking at how companies are performing and growing and strategy and all that sort of thing.

So I’ve realized that that’s really what I love doing. I love building the culture and the employee brand, the client-side brand, but I don’t enjoy being client-facing at all. And I’m really clear these days about that. No clients get to speak to me at all.

And the reason for that is because some people have said to me, “But you’re so good at it.” And I go, yeah, but just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean that you should do it. Because the more I get caught up in the client conversation, the less time I get to spend making sure that the employees, that people we’re bringing on in the Philippines, are what the client actually needs. And I’m not looking at what the market is now demanding. I’m not looking forward to two years to see things like how is AI, for example, going to impact the VA, the offshoring experience, and all that sort of stuff is more where my interest lies. And when I get to just do that and mentor my leadership team, I absolutely love doing that. That’s my favorite stuff every day.

Neil Ball: What drives you to do what you do?

Barbara Turley: Look, I’m probably, I’m a classic high achiever. I mean, even at school, I was the classic academic. I went into a very dynamic, competitive industry that I absolutely loved. I loved the whole financial markets. So I think a part of my personality likes two things. I like dynamic, fast-moving type environments where you have to make quick decisions. And I think just a part of my personality really appeals to that. And in this game that I’m in now, it’s actually moving quite fast. So yeah, that’s the bit I really love, I guess.

Neil Ball: How do you relax when you’re not working in your business?

Barbara Turley: I saw this question actually, and I was thinking, let me think about that for a second. Pre-children, pre-having a toddler—yeah, look at them all—pre-having a toddler, I’m the classic sort of, I’m like the introverted extrovert. Everyone thinks that I’m an extrovert because when I’m social, I’m very social. But I need a huge amount of time by myself to regenerate my energy. I don’t actually get my energy from being around other people. I give it out when I’m there, which is probably why people thought I should be client-facing in the business, because I’m really good at it, but it just depletes me.

I love being in nature. I don’t get to go skiing every day or anything like that, but I love things like horses. I love reading. I love being by myself, which is quite, you know, even if it’s just going for a walk or listening to music. But unfortunately, at the moment, it’s an interesting question for me right now, and any of the women listening or even fathers that are doing this—mothers and fathers—when you still have a fairly fast-growing or young business and you have young children, your time is so crunched that even if you can spend time with both of those things, which I have done really well, there’s nothing left for you.

So at the moment, I’m on a bit of a mission to figure out how to create space for myself outside of work and family to make sure that I can kind of replenish my energy. So yeah, that’s something I’m navigating right now to make sure I can do that in the future. Not easy, though. There’s only 24 hours in a day.

Neil Ball: It’s a challenge I think a lot of entrepreneurs have. I think the thing is, if you love what you do, I don’t think it probably matters as much as if you’ve got a job that you don’t like.

Barbara Turley: Yes, I was thinking too, actually, because sometimes when I get time to myself, what I love doing is I listen to a podcast or, you know, everyone sort of expects you to say, “I’ll get up and meditate and do yoga.” I don’t do any of that. I used to try, but it didn’t really light me up that much. I mean, I love a great conference or, you know, I’m just like I said, classic sort of high achiever type person. I get my energy from that. So it’s good that I can mix my work actually with my love of reading and podcasts and knowledge and all that sort of thing.

Neil Ball: Do you have any entrepreneurial role models?

Barbara Turley: Well, I suppose, like I said, most of my career was in corporate, and I always wanted to be in corporate. I wasn’t the person that had the lemonade stand as a kid and had these dreams of launching my own, you know, I wasn’t the classic entrepreneur. I only really started thinking about it when I hit 30, and only because I sort of got bored and thought maybe I’ll do something new.

But my dad ran his own business and still does, actually. And one of the things that really appealed to me—he worked very hard—but I guess I liked the fact that when I came to have children, for example, I remembered the fact that the way I was brought up, I was very lucky. I can remember my dad dropping us to school, picking us up at lunchtime because we lived in a small town and he ran his own business. So he was able to do that, and I grew up that way, which was really lovely.

And a lot of that kind of appealed to me about running my own business, was having that sort of level of freedom or flexibility, I guess. So, but other than that, not really, I have to be honest, not really, because I’ve just gone my own path with entrepreneurship, and I follow a few, but at the moment I’m just so focused on my own game that I can’t really give you a solid answer to that question.

Neil Ball: Barbara, you’ve told us a little bit about your business and your personal life. Now what we’re going to do is go back in time and talk about the time before you were an entrepreneur. What difficulties did you have to overcome when you started your business?

Barbara Turley: Oh yes, look, this is such a good question because I think, and particularly for anyone like me who spends a long time in corporate, has a very successful career, and then you go out to try to do your own thing, here’s the biggest challenge. And I know other entrepreneurs who haven’t had that face the same challenge, but in particular, when you leave corporate, if you’ve had a very successful corporate career, you are going to get tripped up by the emotional roller coaster that is entrepreneurship.

It is the most challenging part because the failures are more than when you’re in corporate. When you’re in corporate, you have a different mindset because you can try things and you’re still within the cushion of a large corporate. When you’re on your own and things fail and money starts to run out and you get cash flow crunches and sort of big mistakes that happen, and all of a sudden there’s a couple of months where there’s no income and things like that in the beginning, that for me was very hard to navigate.

I just felt, I started to feel like—I didn’t feel like a failure—but I started to want to hide because I was afraid of what people I used to work with would think. I was afraid that they’d be like, “What is she doing? Look, she’s falling on her face.” There was a lot of that mental anguish that went on, and I didn’t want to appear weak. So I struggled a lot with that, and I think it’s taken me a good few years to kind of get over the hump of that and not to care anymore and just to go, that’s just part of the journey.

And but it wasn’t something I was prepared for, put it that way. I was really caught off guard by it.

Neil Ball: I think a peer a week would have been not to do it at all, really?

Barbara Turley: Well, now I look back and go, well, all the people who are still—I mean, there’s a lot of people in corporate who don’t want to be there, but they don’t have the guts to go out and do what I did. You know, and it takes a lot, like it does take a lot of guts, right? I mean, I think, had I known about the emotional journey, I probably wouldn’t have done it either, you know? I’m glad I did now, but it definitely, I’ve had some pretty low lows that I didn’t experience before.

But then I’ve had highs that I didn’t experience before either, and that’s the roller coaster of running your own thing.

Neil Ball: Did you have any doubts that delayed you starting your business?

Barbara Turley: Look, I would have said no, but now that I have a bit more experience in my own business—I’ve been out on my own probably for about six years now—I think I didn’t think I had in the beginning, but now I look back and go, oh my God, it took me like five months to even get a website up. Like I just agonized over the color of my logo and all these things that honestly, in the beginning, they just don’t matter.

Like in the beginning, if I was to go again or advise anyone, I would say, don’t even worry about any of that. Like when I started The Virtual Hub, people were calling me and just asking me to solve this problem for them because they had heard that I had solved it for someone else. I didn’t have one—there was no website, there was no name. It took a few months before we even bothered with the website because I couldn’t keep up with the demand of solving the problem for people.

Nobody ever said to me, “What’s your web address?” or “What color is your logo?” or any of those things. So I think in hindsight, I did get blocked. It took me a year to kind of get anything done and to make any sales or anything. I should have just gotten after it a lot faster.

Neil Ball: What mistakes did you make that slowed your journey?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, one of the big mistakes I made—and this is good for anyone listening who’s sort of at the start of the journey and feeling some of the things that I’m talking about—I did, in that first year, I just put so much energy into the branding, and it was all great. You do need that stuff, but I put a lot of energy into it. And then I did a product launch online, and I put a lot of money into it and a lot of energy, including emotional energy.

And I launched a member sort of a course, and I did the whole Facebook ad, I did the Jeff Walker product launch formula. I did it all perfectly because being like the perfectionist A-type personality, I did everything. And while it was okay—like, was it a success? Sort of was, because people bought and I sort of broke even in the end. So actually, in hindsight, that was a roaring success for your first one.

But because I had an expectation that it was going to be better, and when it wasn’t, I sort of went into a depressive hole for about two or three months about it. And I just found myself not able to do anything. Lost motivation. I think I was just exhausted from the experience, and I wouldn’t do that again. Like, that was really silly.

I kind of think I should have just, if that was to happen now, I’d be like, come on, let’s launch again. Let’s get feedback, go again. You know, it’s just to be less emotional about whether the market buys or not because often the market won’t buy from you. And when they don’t, you have to go, okay, well, that didn’t work. Let’s try something else and just get on with it, you know. So I think that was a mistake that I made.

Neil Ball: What are some of the things that you did before you started your business that will be helpful tips to some of the listeners who haven’t yet taken the first step on the entrepreneur way?

Barbara Turley: Yes, one of the key things that I did—this might not be what people would expect me to say—but a lot of people say when you want to start your own business, you’ve just got to take the risk and go jump. And there is a lot of value in that, but depending on how old you are and what stage of life you’re in, personally, I think if you’re working for someone else right now and you’re thinking about this, the first thing is that you have got to sort out your personal finances because there is going to be a period of time where you won’t have money coming in.

So you better make sure that you have sorted out where your income supply is going to come from in those first—I would even say try and shore yourself up for 12 months. Now lots of people will say, well, I can never do it then because I have this and that and whatever. My view is honestly, I had no car for about two years. I just sold everything. I pared my lifestyle right back. Now you have to be willing to make those sacrifices.

And I made sure that my monthly outgoings were really low, as low as I could get them so that I wasn’t going to be in the desperation sales mode. So when you start your own business, you don’t want to be—people like the market can smell desperation—where you’ve got no money, no income. And then you’ll make bad decisions because your decisions will be driven by fear and kind of that sense of lack.

Barbara Turley: So it’s important to, it’s nearly better to spend more time before you start making sure that part of your life is kind of squared away as much as you can. At some point you have to take a risk, of course, but just think about that for a little bit longer. Now for people who are not in corporate and doing nothing and just thinking of starting their own business, you’re probably a lot younger. You can go and take some big risks, and maybe you’ve got to work in a bar at night or something to get your income.

But for people who are a little bit older, like what I was, I think it’s important to think that out, think it through strategically before you do it.

Neil Ball: Barbara, we’re now going to jump forward in time and talk about the time from when you became an entrepreneur. Do you think culture is important from the beginning in a business?

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, because I mean I’m in the game of delegation, so offshoring teams, virtual assistants, etc. I hired a full-time virtual assistant from day one in my business. So when I was talking about the personal finances thing just before, not only did I sort out my personal finances, but I also factored in—I knew immediately that I couldn’t—and this is probably my corporate background—but I was like, well, I can’t do it all. If I get bogged down doing social media and doing all the doing all day, well, I’ll never be able to make any sales because I just won’t be able to get after it.

So I had already squared away money for that. And I think it’s important to just really be realistic about what your needs are going to be for the business. So like I said, I hired a full-time VA from day one.

Barbara Turley: And in order to do that, you have to attract—like that VA stayed with me, she only left recently to go off and do her own thing, which was great. But you’ve got to attract talent to you, right? And then you’ve got to get them onto your vision, right? Because there’s no point in just hiring someone, throwing tasks at them. Culture starts with you, and it starts when it’s just you.

And that cultural vision and that sort of feeling will attract the right people to work with you, and you’ll get the results because eventually you will grow your team even more. So you don’t want to be hiring and firing. So if you do find good people, you want them to be so attracted to what it is that you do and the culture of you and your brand and the business you run and everything. So when you are really, really big, that culture just expands, and you focus part of your energy on making sure that the culture that you have is always on your mind, even when it’s just you and maybe one VA or your sister working for you or something. So yeah, I think culture is key.

Neil Ball: How do you make sure that you hire the right people so that they fit with the culture in your business?

Barbara Turley: Yes, that’s a really great question and one of the hardest questions out there. So the first thing when you’re hiring people, my view these days is different from what I would have said four years ago. I think when you’re hiring people, you’ve got to be very clear on a couple of things.

So, for example, you can hire someone who you get on great with, right? So you think, wow, we’re a great cultural fit together because we get on great. We speak the same language. We’re on the same page. But do they work the same way that you do? Because if you have a misalignment of how you do work, it won’t work regardless of how much you like each other, right?

So I’ll give you an example. In my business, because I’m very systems-focused, I have found—and I’ve made this mistake—I have a virtual team. We’re big users of Asana. I’m big into very clear communication lines, meeting rhythms, and how people update. I don’t want phone calls at midnight to get an update from one of my team when I have 17 other people reporting to me. So I’d prefer to just get us all in a daily huddle and everyone has their thing. And you come in and report on X, Y, and Z, regardless of your position in the company. That’s kind of how I work.

I’ve hired people that said they liked that idea but then didn’t know how to do it. It wasn’t their style, and it drove me insane. So I think it’s understanding that you obviously have to have a connection with the person, but they also have to work in the same way that you do. And then that can be a good cultural fit.

And that just doesn’t even get into skills. I mean, how do you make sure that the person actually has the skills? Because the problem with interviews and resumes is people can say anything. So I would probably suggest testing people as much as you can, even before you interview them, so that you don’t have a bias, and be metrics-driven before the interview.

And then if somebody looks like they’ve got the goods in terms of the skills, then you go meet them, interview, that sort of thing. And then you’ve got to figure out, okay, so that’s all great. Now, are we a cultural fit in terms of how we do work and our work ethic and our approach to how we approach our day, how we update each other, that sort of thing. So I’m hoping that makes sense. It’s quite deep. But if you recruit that way, you won’t get caught out.

Neil Ball: That made total sense. In fact, it was so clear I feel I could do it myself now.

Barbara Turley: Good, because I’m hoping I’m rambling here because I feel so passionate about this because I’ve made this mistake myself. And yeah, that final piece is important for how you do work.

Neil Ball: It’s little things like testing them before you interview them so you don’t have any bias. I think that’s brilliant advice because it’s so easy to have that bias, isn’t it?

Barbara Turley: The minute you meet someone in an interview and you go, “I love them. I just so want to work with them. We just had this connection.” Forget that, because that connection can just go completely pear-shaped. And then you’re afraid to fire them because you have such a good connection and you’ve made a friendship. So yeah, speaking from experience.

Neil Ball: Knowing what you know now, is there anything that if you’d known it when you started out that would have helped you to shortcut the learning curve?

Barbara Turley: Yes, if I was to follow on from the previous point about recruiting, I didn’t recruit that way in the beginning. I was way too emotionally attached to sort of hiring people I liked or I felt a connection with. I don’t do that these days. I’m much more protective of what I actually need in the business. The whole hire slow, fire fast.

I was never a believer in that because I think it’s a bit too cutthroat sounding. But when I dig deeper into that from my experience now and what I would do differently is that the hire slow—some people think hire slow is slower to spend a long time thinking about it. I don’t agree with that. I’m like, no, no, no, do what I just said about the recruitment thing. So have a process that is kind of unemotional, and that process can take a while. So that’s the hire slow bit.

Fire fast, a lot of people are like, after a week, this just isn’t working. They’re like, hire slow, fire fast, you’re gone, right? I don’t think that’s fundamentally what you should do either. You’ve got to have a sort of a process for working with someone to see, because hiring and firing is very expensive and it’s very time-consuming and emotionally draining. So it’s probably better to have strategies on both sides.

The fire fast bit is don’t wait four years. I’ve done that. Maybe just make sure that you have a process on the way out, but you can enact that process within the first three to four months, rather than the first week. Just ask somebody in the first week.

Neil Ball: How much does gut feeling influence your decisions in your business?

Barbara Turley: Look, it actually does a lot sometimes, and I think of something I mentioned earlier in the podcast. I said I had two things I brought from my previous career, and I actually only mentioned one of them. The next one, this is the one I forgot to mention.

Because I was a trader for 10 years on an equity trading floor in an investment bank, there’s a lot of—obviously the information flow is very fast, the decision-making is very fast. But people have asked me, how do you know? I mean, you don’t always know, but traders will tell you that it’s like you feel it in your fingertips. You can feel the market moving and shifting when you can’t see it yet. And it’s things that—it’s like that gut kind of instinctual thing that comes from experience and from being open to your gut and knowing that there’s a difference between that fear and a genuine gut feeling that is probably correct.

So I have taken that into this business. I don’t use it for recruiting anymore, really. In fact, I’m not even involved in recruiting anymore because it’s not my strategy. I’m good at building a process, but I still get too emotional about it. But in terms of watching what’s coming, the risks that might be coming for the business or the direction I think we should go, I’m very good at pivoting very fast, and I’m very good at just all of a sudden waking up one morning and going, we’re going to do this now. And that has served me very well. And I think it comes from honing that skill in my trading days that I really deeply trust that part of that, that my ability to do that. And it has paid off massively in this business.

Neil Ball: What makes you uncomfortable as an entrepreneur?

Barbara Turley: That’s a great question. So many things make me uncomfortable as an entrepreneur. But I think one of the things that would be my biggest uncomfortableness would be when I don’t feel like I know what’s happening within my team, which makes me sound like a micromanager or some sort of control freak. But I like processes and systems that are transparent, and I know what everyone’s doing and the reporting lines are really clear. Otherwise it all seems a bit vague, and I hate that.

Neil Ball: So how do I make sure—yeah, it does. I’m just wondering, how do you make sure that you know what’s happening in your team when you’ve got people working remotely?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so I get asked this a lot actually, and it’s something I’m very good at and probably because I feel so uncomfortable. I mean, in the early days of The Virtual Hub, I think I got burnt quite badly a lot with some work-from-home VAs. I use the word slippery—you know they’re there, but they’re not there, and they’re sort of working. I mean, everyone’s experienced this, I think, so it probably heightened my issues around this.

But when it comes to processes, first of all, if you have somebody for X number of hours per week, it’s very important to know when they are doing that work, within reason, for me anyway. And then number two is to have enough of a task list that you know is within the time that you’ve got that that should be done. And then the next step is to have a process that you’ve laid out so you know how things, within reason, are being done. But the biggest one is reporting back.

And this was something in the early days I wasn’t doing very well, and I learned the hard way. So you’ve got to have a communication rhythm and a clear way that you expect them to report results to you. And that gets rid of that for me. I do it online. I mean, using Asana and Slack and tools like that. A combination of those things plus the reporting lines and the tools that you use online in order to facilitate that. So if you’re in different time zones, for example, it doesn’t matter. Still, they can’t be like, I couldn’t get you on the phone. It’s like, well, you didn’t update Asana. You know, it gives you that sense of—it means that you maintain control without having to do everything or be there all the time.

Neil Ball: What do you think are some of the secrets to success?

Barbara Turley: In my business or just in general in life?

Neil Ball: General.

Barbara Turley: In general, yeah. If I could isolate one thing or a couple of things, I think it’s the ability to make a decision. So, for example, I think for a lot of people, the worst thing is to get stuck in indecision. And that doesn’t matter whether you’re deciding about a relationship or a business or anything really. When you’re stuck in indecision, that’s a very uncomfortable place to be.

And it can be that you don’t know which way to go yet, so you might have to stay in that place for a while. But people get stuck in indecision for years, and then avoidance, and then pretending it’s not there. So I do feel the secret to success really is to have a sense of just making a decision, and you have to know that sometimes you make a decision. You don’t know if it’s the right or the wrong one, but it’s better to make one than not, because then you find out and you can make another decision.

Neil Ball: Life is made of constant change, whether we like it or not. And many people say that the only constant in life is change. Barbara, how do you try to keep up with change?

Barbara Turley: Well, I’m a bit lucky with this one because my personality, I tend to thrive on change. I actually quite like it. A lot of people don’t. I get bored if things are the same all the time. So I enjoy that sense of uncertainty to a certain extent. I mean, we all like certainty, but I thrive on a bit of uncertainty. I thrive probably because I’m a good decision maker and I’m good at moving forward and looking at all the angles and kind of making a decision about what I’m going to do. I tend to like the thrill of change personally. I think it works for my personality.

Neil Ball: What is your favourite book on entrepreneurialism, business, personal development, leadership, or motivation? And can you tell us why you have chosen it?

Barbara Turley: Sure, so one of my favorite books is Traction by Gino Wickman, which is a book a lot of people in the systems kind of world will get. I love it because I’m a big fan of books like The E-Myth, Michael Gerber’s E-Myth, which is all about systemizing businesses and taking the entrepreneur out of the business. Scaling Up is also the Rockefeller Habits one, which is the same sorts of concepts of how you build out departments.

But Traction was actually a book that kind of took that to a new level for me. It’s a book where you can build all the other stuff, but Traction is something that I was like, okay, now I’ve got all the moving parts, here’s how I’m going to push that forward. So definitely a book that’s going to help if you’re interested in building something that’s scalable, and not everyone is, by the way.

Barbara Turley: But yeah, definitely a fascinating book to read.

Neil Ball: It’s a book for systemizing your business, isn’t it? I mean, you mentioned communication rhythm, and I can’t remember which one of the books it was from, because it’s either from Traction or Scaling Up, I think.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and I can’t remember either, but I find myself talking about that a lot. So I’m thinking I picked that up somewhere. But I found that when I brought communication rhythm in as a concept to my own business, I realized it actually changed everything. Even though it was a small thing, establishing a communication rhythm was huge for moving my business forward and getting that sense of comfort with what everyone’s doing.

Neil Ball: Yeah, so with communication rhythm, I seem to remember talking about it extended into the rhythm of meetings as well, didn’t it? I seem to remember as well.

Barbara Turley: So I think the difference between a meeting rhythm is you have to have both. And look, entrepreneurs hate this because it has that sense of structure, and entrepreneurs are great at saying, “I’m too busy today, I can’t do that meeting.” But meeting rhythm is about having your daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly huddles, or if you want to call them scrums or whatever you want to call them.

The thing about meeting rhythm is the non-negotiable meetings that have to happen and that you actually have to show up for, or your team has to show up for, with a leader of that meeting. It keeps things in flow and keeps everyone kind of organized. But the communication rhythm is more of an ongoing thing.

So, for example, I always say to virtual assistants that go and work with clients, you have to establish your communication rhythm. Because what happens if you think that it’s okay to ping your client all day long with questions as they arise, especially when you’re in a virtual world, because we were doing it that way when you were in training or if you worked for me, because I like it that way, but they happen to be a consultant who’s in meetings all day and they hate that. They would prefer you to centralize your questions in one 10-minute slot in the morning or something. So that’s more of a communication rhythm than a meeting rhythm.

Neil Ball: Folks, when you have a busy life, listening to audiobooks is a great way to expand your knowledge in the time when you may be doing other things such as driving or when you are at the gym. We have a special offer for you of a free audiobook of your choosing. To choose your free audiobook, go to www.freeaudiobookoffer.com. As long as you have not already signed up, then you will qualify.

Barbara, are you ready to speculate about the future?

Barbara Turley: Sure, I love speculating about the future.

Neil Ball: All good. What one thing would you do with your business if you knew that you could not fail?

Barbara Turley: Yes, if I couldn’t fail, yes, I am actually funny, I had this thought in the last week or two. I would love to just take an entire floor, like a football pitch-size floor in Cebu in the Philippines, and deck it out with an amazing branded-up floor that would seat 500 people, have like a beautiful cafe and sort of co-working spaces there, like all this kind of cool stuff, like a library nook and everything for all the employees.

But at the point we’re at now, 150 employees, and that’s across 24 hours, so that’s only—that would work out at about 80 seats or 90 seats. It would be a huge move expense-wise to do something like that. And I mean, if you failed, you’d be left holding the baby, literally. So I can’t do that yet. But if I knew I couldn’t fail, I’d probably just go and build what the end result looks like in my head now.

I guess I could with investors. Yeah, I don’t want to take on investors. I could do that if you got investors involved, but I don’t want to do that. I’m happy to just keep doing what we’re doing. And in two years’ time, we’re probably going to do that anyway.

Neil Ball: What skill, if you were excellent at it, would help you the most to double your business?

Barbara Turley: That is a good question. I think I could double this business pretty easily. Gee, that one stumped me because of the business. I’m not going to say it’s relatively easy to double it, but it kind of doubles pretty quickly. Maybe if I was—do you know what, actually, if I was better at marketing, I could probably double it very quickly if I actually upped the marketing game.

But then there’s issues in my business. There’s issues around that because you have issues. We’ve got three dynamics. If you go and market to clients, you get lots of clients, but then you’ve got a supply issue. It’s not just a widget. I have to find the people, train them. And then there’s a space issue. So there’s the logistics of getting another office space, making sure we have seats and computers for everyone. So it’s actually quite—I think I could double it easily, but I would have to get all of those factors to play well together at the same time.

Neil Ball: In five years from now, if a well-known business publication was publishing an article on your business after talking to your customers and suppliers, what would you like it to say?

Barbara Turley: I would like it to say to our customers, definitely, that we changed their lives because we do hear that. Because it’s not just about business. We’ve heard people that finally took a holiday after five years of never being able to leave their business because they finally delegated effectively. And not just getting a VA—they may have hired—like some of our clients started with one part-time VA, then they moved up to two or three, then they hired a salesperson in their own country.

Then they hired an operations person, and all of a sudden, before they know it, they’re spending three weeks on an island somewhere just going, wow, I never thought this could happen to me. So I think, yeah, they changed my life would be what I’d love them to say.

Neil Ball: It’s now time for three golden nuggets. Barbara, what is your favourite quote, and how have you applied it?

Barbara Turley: So it used to be, “Feel the fear and do it anyway,” which is probably still one of my big ones. I have no idea who said it. In my head, my mom said it. She’s the instigator of it because she used to always say it to me. I’m sure if I Googled it, I’d find out whoever said that originally. But it’s that. I remember my mother saying that to me as a child all the time, and it has really stuck with me. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve been successful because it’s that sense of, you know, feel the fear, but just put your head down, get your grit up, and just go for it anyway.

But another one I heard recently, which has helped me more recently, is a very good friend of mine who’s also been a big mentor in terms of navigating the Philippines legal system and the employment system over there. She said to me one day, I was having a particularly bad day, and she said, there was a, I think it’s an Arabic proverb or something that she had heard from someone else, and it is, the dogs may be barking but the caravan still passes.

And what a lot of people don’t know what that means, but really what she was saying is that, you know, the caravans that go through the deserts years ago, and they would come through various watering holes and there would be dogs barking at all the passing, I guess the circus passing. But it still keeps going. So it’s that sense of there will always be dogs barking at you and nipping at your feet, right? But you’ve just got to keep your eye on the prize, keep your eye on the vision, and keep moving forward. And that has helped me a lot through some very tricky situations in the last couple of years.

Neil Ball: Do you have any favourite online resources you can share with us that will be useful for other entrepreneurs?

Barbara Turley: Definitely. So lots of people will have heard of this, and lots of people will already be using this. But Asana literally changed my life. Now that’s what I’d love people to say about our company eventually. They changed my life, because Asana is an online project management tool that is free. We only signed up to the paid version about a year ago, and only because we just have a huge team now and it made sense.

I ran a company on the free version of that for three, three and a half years very successfully. It has an iPhone app or an Android app that just means you as an entrepreneur, you have that sense of knowing your finger is on the pulse with your team without your email getting clogged up. It’s just amazing. Try it out and use it for your task management and on the go. You could just be in a cab when you’re busy and then your VAs could ask a question inside a task in Asana, and you can just quickly flick through and go, yeah, I can answer that now while I’m on the go. So it just made my life, changed my life really, from a business perspective.

Neil Ball: What is your best advice to other entrepreneurs?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a good one too. I think my best advice to other entrepreneurs is that in the early days, well let’s focus on the early days for a second when you’re starting out, just focus on sales. Sales solve everything. Now you can’t sell a crap product. Lots of people can sell a crap product, but at the end of the day, you have to listen very deeply and get lots and lots and lots of feedback from your market. Try and get a group of people together, get really deep feedback on what it is that you’re selling, what their pain points are, and then go and solve for those pain points.

Now, everyone gives that advice, but I definitely think in the beginning, people still get caught up, and I did this too, in like your brand, the websites, the logo, all that stuff. In the very early days, you’ve got to find something to sell that people are willing to buy. And that is just, you can just do a beta group of people online for a basic program without spending a fortune building a membership site or all this stuff to purely test the market. You’ve got to test what it is you’re doing.

And don’t worry too much in the early stages about how it looks because it’s really my experience with the Virtual Hub was I didn’t have websites or anything. Nobody ever said to me, what’s your web address? In the early days, they were like, oh my God, can you get me one of those VAs? Because I just hit on a major pain point. It is hard to do, but that’s key. So in the early days, it’s like that. But when you start to make sales and things are flowing, the next stage is that crevice between startup and growth. And if you do not, as an entrepreneur, recognize that once sales are flying and you realize that you’ve got something the market wants, you’ve got to very quickly get onto the systems process team because otherwise you’ll never scale it. Or you will, but you’ll blow yourself up along the way. The internet is literate with stories of people who made millions, but it was just an absolute burnout fest because they couldn’t manage the growth. So those are the two big stages I think that people need to focus on.

Neil Ball: Folks, if you didn’t manage to get a note of Barbara’s favorite resource or her favorite book, you can find the links on Barbara’s show notes page. Just go to theentrepreneurway.com and search for Barbara or Barbara Turley in the search box.

Barbara, is there anything else you would like to add about your business?

Barbara Turley: I think we’ve covered a lot. I mean, as people can probably see from listening to this, we are in the business, obviously, of getting virtual assistants for businesses and putting them in, but we’re actually in the business of way more than that. Our mission really is to help to eradicate overwhelm. Part of that is putting people in, but part of that is showing, if I can use the term of your podcast, showing the entrepreneur the way of doing that and getting success with it.

We’re very keen on success for the entrepreneur, not necessarily just putting a bum on a seat. So that’s what I would say about our business.

Neil Ball: Where can people go to find out more about it?

Barbara Turley: Sure, so we’ve got a special link actually for you guys, which is thevirtualhub.com forward slash entrepreneur way. And there we’ve got a special page for your listeners where there are a couple of freebies up there you can pick up. We’ve got a free little mini guide, which is the five reasons people fail with VAs. A very good way to start because you can make sure that you don’t do those things before you go and hire a VA, even if it’s just online at work or whatever.

We also have a scalable business success formula, a little e-course, which is a lot about what I’ve just been talking about today in depth. And you can also book a free consultation with one of our strategy consultants. So if you feel like from this discussion today that you are ready for a business like ours or to get a dedicated staff member and you feel your processes and stuff are kind of getting there, you can book a chat with one of our consultants for free there and they will help you to figure out if you are ready.

And if you are, take you on the next steps to join us at the Virtual Hub.

Neil Ball: Thank you for that Barbara. Barbara, it really has been an honor and a privilege having you on the show today. Thank you for coming along and talking to us about your business, the Virtual Hub, and sharing your story of how you’ve got to where you’ve got to, and telling us about how you help people in your business with getting things done with virtual assistants and hopefully getting some of their life back as well. And it sounds like you’ve helped people to actually find that there is a life outside of business, which is a good thing. Beyond that, you’ve shared some of your experience and your thoughts, and you’ve given us some great tips on what it takes for us to take away and go and apply in business as well. So thank you very much for coming on the show today.

Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me.

Neil Ball: You are welcome Barbara, and thank you.

Folks, you have been listening to Neil Ball chatting with Barbara Turley on The Entrepreneur Way. If you have enjoyed the show, please share it on social media and subscribe to our email on The Entrepreneur Way website. Also, please add your comments on Barbara’s show notes page on The Entrepreneur Way website at www.theentrepreneurway.com and search for Barbara Turley in the search box.

Thank you for listening, and until the next episode tomorrow, goodbye.

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