Voice Actor: This podcast is part of the C-suite Radio Network, turning the volume up on business.
Welcome to the Business Power Hour, hosted by Deb Krier. Join us as Deb talks with her guests, experts in their fields, as they share real life stories and techniques to power up your business.

Deb Krier: Good morning, good morning. I am Deb Krier and I am passionate about giving professionals the tools that they need to make themselves and their businesses as successful as possible. And I have to laugh because I say good morning, but my guest is in Australia and so it is late evening for her and so we are very honored that she is able to do this so late in the evening for us. I love having our international guests on, but holy schmolly does it ever cause time zone problems.

So please join me in welcoming Barbara Turley to our program today. Welcome, Barbara!

Barbara Turley: Good morning Deb and so nice to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

Deb Krier: Well, this is going to be a great time because we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects and that’s virtual assistants. And, I love virtual assistants as we’ll talk about in the program. It might not be for everybody, but they are something – someone – I should say that so many people never even think about or think not for me. And it really is, you know, something that I think everyone should consider.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, I’m in full agreement with you, but I know that there are so many reasons why people don’t want to take the jump or have taken the jump and maybe failed or had bad experiences. And we can talk through all of those things.

Deb Krier: Well, let me tell people just a little bit about you. So Barbara Turley is an investor, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, 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 to the next level.

With a strong focus on customized training and ongoing career development, Barbara ensures that her team is trained in cutting-edge programs like HubSpot, Ontraport, and so on to best meet their clients’ unique needs in digital marketing, social media, personal assistance services, and administrative support. So again, Barbara, welcome!

Barbara Turley: Thank you so much Deb.

Deb Krier: Well, you know, as I mentioned, I love virtual assistants and I’m not just saying that because my producer is a virtual assistant and she’d take us off the air. I really do think that for small business owners and entrepreneurs, especially those of us who are completely on our own, a VA is absolutely critical. But I loved it in your bio where you were talking about the fact that you started your company by accident. So tell us a little bit more about that.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I love sharing this story because, you know, obviously all your listeners are, know, business owners, we’re all out there trying to do our thing. And I totally didn’t intend to launch this business at all. I have a very strong financial kind of investment banking background. You would think that I would come up with a big business plan and, you know, test ideas and everything. And I sort of had all those ideas. I had spent 15 years in corporate. I left corporate and I was doing some consulting business coaching.

I had a whole other plan for an online platform and everything to do with the wealth space. And what I found was all the businesses that I was coaching were all small businesses, but very diverse industries. You know, there was a swim school, an atropath, a lawyer, and so many different sorts of businesses, but they all had the same problem. I could see that they were all stuck in that kind of crevice where they weren’t making enough yet to hire someone. But if they didn’t hire someone, they were never really going to get out of the trenches. They were going to be stuck there for years. And some of them were stuck there for 10 years. I had a VA in the Philippines myself. I just started recruiting some of her friends initially, not as a business, but just to help out the clients I was working with. And before I knew it, I was getting more calls for that than I was for business coaching. And I was like, I wonder if there is business in this.

I just was like, I’ll have a go and see what happens. And before we knew it, we were in business and we’re five years in now with 150 DA and full offices in the Philippines and a big global client base. So yeah, it happened very, it wasn’t quite as easy as that, you know, that was how it started.

Deb Krier: You know, as I mentioned, I have a VA and I’ve had several VA’s before. Some have worked out and some haven’t. But it really was one of those decisions that was very difficult for me to make because I kept saying I can do this myself. I should be able to do this myself. And more importantly, oh my gosh, money is tight. So why would I want, you know, why or how could I pay someone else to do this? So talk to us about, you know, kind of how you get over that hump.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so that’s the first biggest hurdle. People naturally think, I can do this myself. I’m probably better at it than anybody else. I know how it needs to be done. How would I even explain it? All of these. So to tackle that issue first, I would say, I say to people, if you were, we all go, nobody goes into business to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week. But unfortunately, that’s what a lot of us end up doing.

And we keep telling ourselves that if we just do a little bit more and work harder and harder, that we will stop doing that. And the reality is that unless you actually learn to let go and delegate, you probably will never get out of that cycle. And the first step is your mindset around, even if you’re great at it, even if you feel you should be doing it, you probably shouldn’t be doing it because your job as a business owner is to build the business. It’s not actually to create Canva images for social media or pick up your own phone and all these things that take up your day. Now in terms of being able to afford it, of course that is a really challenging area to think about and it’s quite scary. So the best way to think about this is that if you do free up your time, you’ve got to be very strategic about how you do this, right? So you’ve got to decide what you are going to get off your list first before you even hire anyone. You’ve got to figure it out.

What am I going to stop doing? Like what is my stop doing list? And then once I stop doing all these things, what am I going to start doing that will bring in more revenue? Now that will bring in more revenue is key because a lot of people start doing stuff that is useless. Right. You know, so you’ve got to be strategic that way and go once I bring this person on.

I know that I need to bring in more revenue and I need to use my time to do that. And sometimes people are scared of sales. They’re scared of growth and they don’t go there because that is a big mindset shift.

Deb Krier: Yeah. Well, and it’s funny that you mentioned because, you know, this, this isn’t to give you more free time. You know, as you said, it’s not.

Barbara Turley: Yes, yes. Yeah, so I think, look, if you’re making good money and if your business is humming, then definitely if you want to take your kids to school and you want to have more free time, 100% you can do this. But initially in the early stages, usually it’s a case of, I need to free up my time so that I can actually bring in more revenue and then build towards getting the entrepreneurial freedom or the things that I really want to do from this business that I create.

Deb Krier: Right. Well, you know, my VA, my producer, works three-ish hours a week for me. She obviously is doing what I could already do because I already did it before I started working with her. But it’s the administrative tasks of the program. So she contacts the guests. She does all the follow up with them. You know, she coordinates my schedule, all of those various things. And so again, I could do that. But when it freed up. And it’s funny because there are still times where I have to interact with a client and obviously I’m interacting with her or a potential guest, but it’s freeing up my time. And she does it very quickly and gets it taken care of. And I suppose that part of it was for me just to stop whatever I was doing, send an email to a potential guest, all those various things.

It really did free up my time, as you said, because I’m not stopping, I’m not doing that. And she does it wonderfully. We’ve been working together for several years now. And it was difficult initially because, letting go. And you’re not wanting to say, I need to see every email you send. And so a big part of this for me, was developing that trust factor and knowing that Kim is going to do exactly what is needed and in a way that gets it done. I know, sometimes it’s a little bit different than I would do it. Sometimes it’s a much better way than I would do it. She gets it done. You know, and that I think is the big thing is having that trust factor with somebody that they will do what it is that you think you need to be doing.

Barbara Turley: Do you want to know how to build the trust factor up much faster? I’m sure everybody wants to know how to do this. It is very hard to hire somebody online, particularly if they’re in another country, even if they’re in your own country. It is very difficult to take the jump and say to yourself, just trust, let go. Because as entrepreneurs, we’re naturally, it’s our baby. It’s like asking a mother to let go of her child. Definitely.

I’m not really a big subscriber to that so much. I’m more of a fan of building a system, building processes and systems and building a machine that you have orchestrated and built that other people can run for you. And then you teach those people to run what it is you’ve created and to then evolve it. Once they have experience doing what you’ve asked them to do, then of course you want to hear their voice and you empower them to say, I would love to know your opinion. And if you have a better way of doing this, I’m all ears. But for now, when you’re first in, here’s your process. Here’s how we do it. And you’ve got to document that. So for me, that’s more control. It’s a controlled way.

Deb Krier: Yeah, and I had, you know, I sent her a template, you know, when you’re communicating, here’s the email that you send. And so she did. That was, you know, exactly what she started with. But then she discovered, okay, these are the questions I’m getting back. These are various things. And I knew, you know, that she needed to take care of it. And I didn’t need to micromanage. And it’s funny, because we think about this, and if we were in a corporation, and we had an assistant, we wouldn’t think twice about having them do some of these things, but you’re right, when it’s our business, it’s our baby, you know, and yes. And a big part of why many of us go into business is the control factor. You know, we want to be in charge.

Barbara Turley: Of course, yeah. So delegating challenges, that core sort of in charge thing that we went into business to do. And the reason we tend to hang on so long is because we are kind of control freaks in our own thing, right? And it’s okay. I will openly admit I’m one of them, you know, but at the same time, I don’t do anything. I mean, I don’t do nothing in my business, but I mean, the things that I do, I don’t do any of the day-to-day operational running.

But I am very much the conductor of the orchestra. And the people, like I’m the leader of the entire thing. And even if it’s just you and one VA that only works a few hours a week, you still need to be a leader in your own business. And a lot of people miss that bit and they feel like they’re giving away control when actually you’re actually maintaining control and bringing someone else in. And that’s a different mindset shift.

Deb Krier: Yeah.

Barbara Turley: So I think, look, a lot of people in small businesses in particular, a lot of people haven’t been in big corporations. And I think one of the things that I learned when I came out of big corporate myself was I made an assumption that everybody thought the way I did or the way I was trained to think in large corporations and a lot of business owners I met along the way had hustled hard. They had built their thing. They had, you know, they’d probably been arguably more successful than me because it’s actually harder. But they hadn’t built those skills of delegation and of team structure, org charts and reporting lines.

The things that are kind of just like part of second nature for those of us that have done that. Even how to run an effective meeting you know, things like what’s the difference between a chat and a meeting? How to deliver effective feedback and how to not feel like you’re slamming someone because they made a mistake, but you have to bring it up. So all of these things are very challenging for people who’ve never been in those big corporate structures before. And I found when I started this business, a lot of what I ended up doing was the reason we recruit, train and manage, and that’s the whole concept around what we do, as originally I was just recruiting. And honestly, in the first six months, it was an absolute failure.

We did loads of sales, but we were getting flooded with problems because people didn’t know how to delegate. They were finding it very frustrating and they were blaming the VA’s when in reality they weren’t set up properly to deal with a VA. And so these days we run huge client onboarding programs where we actually teach people how to use tools like Asana, how to make a recurring task list, how to actually develop a process and how to communicate that effectively and then how to have oversight and reporting all these kinds of things and similarly on the VA side we found that they might have some skills, but they weren’t deeply trained on the tech platforms are moving so fast and they’re often not trained either on how to manage the client expectations how to communicate effectively back all these kinds of things. So today The Virtual Hub is kind of built around those concepts of solving those larger problems and not just putting a body in, throwing a body at a problem. It’s like saying, here’s the person, but we also give you a sort of an ecosystem around that. And that was really the, I think that was really the success point for me of understanding the problem runs much deeper than finding a VA.

Deb Krier: You know, I love that concept because, you know, as I mentioned, I’d had several VA’s and some worked out and some didn’t. And the reason they didn’t work out was entirely me, you know, and for the most part, was things like I didn’t know what the expectations were or I knew and I didn’t properly communicate them, you know, so I didn’t give them the right tools. It’s like I needed to be trained, you know, and so then what it did was I got more and more frustrated. Well, you know, why aren’t they doing this? You know, I told them to go do, you know, whatever, find me 20 leads a month or whatever, but then I didn’t give them enough structure, enough definition. And I certainly didn’t do enough follow-up to say, okay, what have you been doing? Because then they would come back and say, we just really struggled. And so it was, it was two ways because

Deb Krier: They didn’t come back to me and say, we’re not understanding. We just kind of went like this several times and then went, OK, this isn’t really working.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and look, know that there’s a number of problems that occur. So let’s say the first problem is it’s the business owner, right? And sadly, a lot of people never get to that point and they just continue to blame the VA and they turn through people never really realizing that maybe they should look within. So not being set up properly before you hire a major problem like we even turn people away on our sales calls and say, look, you’re going to waste your money, right? So just go away and do this, this and this first, and then come back when you’re ready.

The other problem is though that sometimes we get business owners that are actually very well set up and they’re very nice and they’re just getting railroaded by people online who are just, you know, and they’re blaming themselves. So we see that a lot as well. You can recruit badly. You can recruit someone who’s a great talker. You can recruit someone who says all the right things in the interview.

There’s all the right things every time you have a meeting, but the work never gets done. And there’s always a reason why and the slippery, I call it slippery behavior, particularly online. You know, you don’t really know what people are doing. And then the third problem is, sort of, a misalignment of what you actually need. So some people hire a VA. This is a classic example. Some people will hire a VA to run their Facebook ad campaigns. And I’m like, look, you need a strategist to actually come up with the strategy. Now, VA’s can implement 80% of what a strategist will come up with, but they won’t come up with the strategy for you because that’s a different thing and they won’t be a project manager for you. Some of them will, but you’re sort of stretching the scope by saying that you want them to do all these other things. And when they don’t achieve it, you blame the VA and you go, well, that’s actually just a misalignment of expectation completely or a scope creep.

And these are the three main things that I see as problems that show up at our doorstep as this problem.

Deb Krier: And you know, I love that you mentioned social media because I do other organizations’ social media for them. And, and it is it’s something that you don’t just do, you know, yeah, like, you know, process it up either there has to be strategy you know so you’re the strategist.

You know, you mentioned Facebook ad campaigns. Well, you might have this great strategy that you’re going to reach X people with your ad, you’re going to do this, this and this. But if the ad is not a good ad, then it doesn’t matter. Hopefully the VA might go, excuse me, I’m just not quite sure.

Barbara Turley: I don’t think they would though because how would they know the copy wasn’t great because they’re not copywriters.

Deb Krier: And they aren’t intricately involved in your business. And now if they’ve been with you for a while, that’s a little bit different. Somebody who is really just starting out, they’re not going to know the ins and outs of your business. They certainly don’t know your clients, your potential clients, all of these various things.

So it is a teamwork type of thing. And I do keep coming back to thinking about when I hired VAs and it didn’t work. Great people, very organized, all these things. But I didn’t give them the right information to start with.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and you probably may not have. The other thing about process development is that sometimes we do have a little process or it’s in our head. And we document it and we do a little video and we send it to the VA and it’s a sort of a mini disaster. And we say, but I gave them a process.

The interesting problem with processes is that when you give it to someone else, there’s the test of your process. Because if it fails, there’s a problem. Even if every step was there, things were still up in here.

How do you think while you’re doing the process, and now someone else who doesn’t have your mind and your eyes and all those sorts of things, you have to kind of dig deeper before you shoot the person. But people just shoot the person straight away and blame them.

There are a lot of those challenges. I think people sadly underestimate or don’t realize these problems. And therefore they get very frustrated because the word on the street is get a virtual assistant and your life will be amazing.

I’m here to tell you it won’t be. If you get a virtual assistant and you’re not ready or you’re not really clear on what needs to be done, you’re actually going to create one more problem for yourself and not solve any. And that’s where I think people are not being honest online about that.

Deb Krier: And you could even be taking your business backwards.

Barbara Turley: You might for two months when you get to onboard someone, you might have to go backwards for two months.

Deb Krier: And if things don’t go well, you could really have problems. I think maybe it was funny because you mentioned that it’s the in thing and a lot of people do it. So I think a lot of people think, oh yeah, this is easy to do because it’s the in thing. Maybe that was my problem when I initially started.

When I decided to hire a producer, I actually created a job description because to me, the person is an employee. Now yes, I know they’re a consultant for all of those tax reasons and all of those things. Clearly, it’s not somebody who’s working for me 40 hours a week.

But I did, I created a job description. And I worked with a different service when I was getting my VA. I narrowed it down to five, I think maybe five. And I did interviews like this so that I could see them.

We went through the job descriptions and these were pretty detailed interviews. Everybody was qualified. I really liked them.

But the funny thing was, the person that I work with, she was the only one who, when she followed up, and they all followed up, they’d all been very well trained to follow up and thank me and all of those things, she was the only one who said, I have some suggestions for things and I went ding ding ding ding.

Barbara Turley: Yes, initiative. And she knew what you needed. She understood your mindset and your needs more deeply than the others. That is actually the hardest thing to teach. But some people just have a natural ability with that.

Deb Krier: And that takes courage, you know, to say, you know, hey, I’d like to make some suggestions because, you know, my first response was, well, boy, that’s pretty ballsy.

Barbara Turley: Now, I deal in the Philippines, right? So I’ve got our VA’s are all in the Philippines and that is extraordinarily difficult to teach them. That’s culturally it’s… but when we find the great ones, I’m like, wow, they’ve got a voice. That’s great. You know, but they always assume, I always say to them, don’t assume the client knows more than you do on this topic. Cause actually you’ve been trained very deeply.

And they probably know about 10% of what you currently know on the, like, let’s say it’s something like, you know, link building in SEO or like, you know, something kind of quite, you’ve got to pitch to them why they should be doing this process or what you think they should be doing. That’s hard though. That’s hard because they’re really putting themselves out there, you know?

They feel rude just saying that to a client. Yeah.

Deb Krier: You know, and, or yeah, they do, or they feel like, you know, it’s too much, you know, and obviously there are ways to do it so that it’s polite but yeah, it’s tricky. Well, you know, you have a business that does this and I love that you keep mentioning that you have trained your VA’s because so many people that I talk to, and you know, I’ve talked to several people recently who’ve said, I’m going to go do this. I’m going to be a VA and that’s great.

But there’s so many other things that go through it. And it could work out perfectly. We don’t ever want to dissuade somebody from doing that. Tell us a little bit more about why it’s so important to go through a service like yours because of everything that goes along with that.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, let’s be honest, anyone can go online, go to Upwork, Freelancer or any of these things and you can get a VA. The way I explain it is that if you’re already overwhelmed in your business, right, we get on average five or six hundred applications per month for a job with us. After a lengthy, several week long process, let’s call it four weeks where it starts pretty basic where they come into the office, sit a five hour exam of which they can fail in any hour of that exam and it’s all automated. So there’s no real human interaction. It’s just like, you know, hey, sorry, that’s it right down to a four week intensive training program that you can be knocked out in any of those weeks. We will hire on average between 2% and 4% of those people.

And I always say to people, look, it is excruciating even for us and we are in the business of this. So if you want to do it yourself, you just can, and you can hit a home run like on your first go, but just recognize that there’s a fair bit of work to do. And if you’re willing to devote the time to that and the ongoing HR, KPI management, training, all those things, if you’re willing to take on the work of that and to be realistic about it then by all means you can do it yourself. Most of the clients that are coming to us recognize the fact that they’re like, I want an offshore team. I get it. I just don’t have the time to do all the stuff that you guys do. And therefore I’m willing to pay a premium to pay off the studio. And they want them in offices. They don’t want them working from home and all these sorts of things. That’s essentially why you’re actually taking on a whole other job. And usually people are overwhelmed anyway. So why would you?

Do that to yourself.

Deb Krier: Well, and as you mentioned, the training is what’s important. As we were talking, I was thinking, say I need to outsource my invoicing and so I might find a great person to do that who knows QuickBooks or whatever program it is that I’m using, knows how to do all of that, but has horrible communication skills communicating, say I told this person, okay, I need you to create this invoice and then I need you to send it to the client. Well, if there’s that gap in there where they’re not doing that part well, you know, and let’s start, hey, invoicing, that really is important. That’s where it’s going to fail. And so I love the fact that you take the training and the time to make sure that that person is there. Now it could be, you know, all I need them to do is the invoicing, they’re going to send it back to me and I send it off. That’s a little bit different.

But I also am looking for someone, as you said, we mentioned the word a couple of times, initiative. Maybe that person is going to say, hey, what about, could we, what if? And that comes with that training, to be able to know, okay, there are other steps, there’s other programs. There might be somebody that says, let’s not, you’re not best served by QuickBooks or whatever it is.

Barbara Turley: Well, you know, as you were talking, I was thinking, how am I going to tackle this one? Interestingly, initiative is kind of where in the world of virtual assistants now, let’s have a US virtual look to all the US virtual assistants that are listening. Most of you guys who’ve been doing this forever in a day and are highly skilled at it, in my view, are not charging enough and you’re actually not a VA anymore. You’re what’s called an online business manager.

You are like a whole other level, you probably at the project management level and you’re still calling yourself a VA, right? So let’s just put that one out of the… so the ones that are feeling like I’m saying, they’re like, show initiative, you’re probably in a different camp and maybe you should think about renaming yourself.

Don’t do that to my producer. No, no, she can’t.

But when it comes to the word, the problem with the word virtual assistant is it has become very broad. And it’s anyone from a heartbeat who can type to a coder who can create an app for you and that therein lies the problem is that people, the creep there. Really, for me anyway, a virtual assistant is someone who is there to execute processes built by you or, you know, and probably has a project manager leading or there’s someone leading. They can definitely suggest ideas and bring their feedback on doing that process to you if you create the environment whereby they will. You’ve empowered them to do that. You have to actually tell people to do that. But when it comes to saying, you know, I don’t think you should use QuickBooks. I think you should use Xero. That’s a pretty risky thing to say if you’re not an accountant, for example, or a bookkeeper. Now, well, you know, it may be true, but I don’t know. I think a lot of virtual assistants probably wouldn’t go to that level because of the risk involved, because you’re actually giving business advice there. As opposed to a process tweak, you know what, I’m finding that every time I send this email, I get this question back. Can I create an FAQ page on your website? And why don’t we put it in the autoresponder that this question is the most common question, right? That’s kind of what I would call.

Barbara Turley: Okay. Yeah. Just to kind of, I just want to often on these podcasts, I try and bring things back into reality and go like, that’s where I see virtual assistants. Now I’m sure there’ll be people online saying, no, she’s wrong. I do it this way. And I think those people are probably in a different category, right? Different categories. Right.

Deb Krier: Yeah. Well, and that comes back to what we were saying before. That’s kind of managing those expectations. Because if that was what I was wanting, then I should say, hey, if you see something or have suggestions, again, let’s talk about maybe social media where somebody, they say, there’s a different scheduling program that I’m familiar with. Would you consider testing that or something like that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, they will do that. With those sorts of tools that are a little bit less, they will do that. And I think as well, it means if someone’s working with you a little bit longer, don’t expect that in the first week or two. People kind of expect that straight away. I’ve worked with people from the US, I’ve worked with freelancers, everything, not just Filipinos. It still takes months to onboard somebody into your business.

They don’t know your voice. They don’t know your business, your processes. You know, I’ve hired salespeople, writers, the whole lot. It takes months to onboard them properly.

Deb Krier: Yeah. Yeah, it’s funny because I was talking with someone, and this was a while ago, has a VA who responds when people ask questions about something they’re selling on Amazon. And they’ve created a script. If they ask this, then you respond. They ask this, know, but the tricky thing that they have found, of course, is timeliness. Because, holy cow, people expect a response right away.

Well, yeah, we mentioned at the start of the program, it’s almost the middle of the night for you because you’re in Australia. Now, clearly if we’re working with someone in the Philippines, it’s a very different time zone. So again, those are those expectations that we have to manage. If it is something that absolutely has to be responded to in an extremely timely manner in your time zone, then that needs to be communicated. And maybe it is that somebody is working in the middle of the night. I mean, you never know.

Barbara Turley: We run 24 hours. Our business runs 24 hours, but here’s the thing. In the Philippines, you will find people that will work the night shift. It’s a huge, booming kind of night shift over there. In my view, the last thing you want is someone working a night shift in their bedroom in the province outside of Manila with everyone asleep and all this sort of thing. It’s very hard to stay focused. Whereas in an office environment, so getting back to your question, why would somebody use maybe a service like ours? Well, if it is a US and business hours thing, we’ve got a great vibrant office environment going on all night. We’ve got cafes open downstairs. We’ve got team leaders there and help desks. You know what it means? We’ve got quite a vibrant thing going on. If someone is going to be working in the US time zone, it’s definitely better to have them in that engaging place, I think, for them as well, for well-being.

But like you say, you do have to be realistic about what it is you’re trying to achieve. What does the role require? You know, and then how are you going to get reporting on that?

Deb Krier: And if say a 24 hour response window works, then that’s very different.

Barbara Turley: Yes, yeah, if that’s fine. If you run 24 hours, what I was thinking there is if you need people 24 hours to be responding all the time, then you definitely need an agency and or you need to bring in automation. Right. You need to bring in chat bots and things like that.

Deb Krier: Yeah, because they could. They could get the chat bot that says, thank you so much for your inquiry. Maybe it refers you to an FAQ page, you know, all of those various things. And then it says, we will follow up with you during regular business hours, you know, and then, then again,

Yeah, you can and you know VA’s can build those for you the simple chatbots a good VA’s can build you one of them, you know

And that just really brought up something that is why we should hire VA’s. We’re the small business owner, we’re the entrepreneur, we’re in our home office. As smart as we all like to think we are, we don’t know everything. And so to me, that is one of the most important reasons to hire a VA because we don’t know everything.

We know, my gosh, I should be using a chat bot. And for those of you who are wondering what a chat bot is, we’ve had other programs on those. But it’s that little thing that pops up on, could be your website, could be Facebook, all these various things, that is an automated response. But I don’t know how to do it.

Barbara Turley: Even researching it, even researching all the differences, like what a classic VA job. Can you research for me the top three chat bot? What are they? Can you tell me what they are? And then tell me like what they do, what we could do with it. And then if you can build one. And like that’s a massive research project that you could just give to a VA. And they would come back and say, wow, these things are amazing. This is what they do. Here’s the top three in the market. I was thinking we could do this, this and this. And actually then I was thinking, I always get this question, maybe we can put that in there. That’s what the VA is for. And then these days my team, I’m just like, can you just go and do that? Like, can you just not bother me with that anymore? So, you know, you should, there’s a lot of things that you want to do that you’re not doing as a business owner because you don’t have the people or the even the brain capacity or the space to actually think about it, you know?

Deb Krier: And we can’t keep up with the technology. And you mentioned that before that things are changing so quickly that we have the best of intentions, but we’re supposed to be doing whatever it is that our business is doing. And so to have to stop and think chat bot, what’s a chat bot? Or, you know, wait a minute, maybe we should be invoicing differently or something like that. We just don’t have the time to be doing that.

Barbara Turley: We don’t have the time to be doing anything, only running the business. I think too many people, you know, I think as you were talking, too many people in business, and this is worldwide, the majority of people, I have no numbers or stats or anything on this. I’m sort of thinking, I want to say like 95 percent of businesses, but they are still stuck in the technician land, which is, you know, I’m a naturopath, I’m a dentist, I’m an accountant, whatever it is that you do.

People are stuck in the mindset that running a business requires them to do the thing, the technician piece. But unfortunately, there’s all these other roles that you have to play when you start to run your own business. You are the technician, you are the salesperson, you are the business operator, and you are the business. So you have to start thinking about, if I’m really going to run a business and not a glorified job, because let’s be honest, most people are only really making

What they could probably make by working for someone else with a lot less stress. You have to start thinking about which hats are you going to strategically wear and which ones are you going to let go of. And that involves delegation, regardless of whether we’re talking about VAs or anything. I mean, this is like, you just got to learn this skill. But the best place to start is to get rid of admin and get a cheap VA, like let’s be honest, they’re cheaper and start to learn the delegation game in the lower end before you go and take on the big end of town and hire the big shot. I know, so I just think it’s good and look at going offshore. Obviously for me, it’s a complete no-brainer because it’s so much cheaper than what you can get at home. But it comes with complexity because then you’re in a virtual world then, you know, so you’ve got to figure out Zoom calls, like what we’re on and you’ve got to make an effort and all of these things. And just for those listening, what I mean by offshore, let’s be honest, is places like Asia, the Philippines, we’re in the Philippines, but there’s many other countries. Can go to Eastern Europe, you know, there’s lots of places you can go to get that option.

Deb Krier: And obviously it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re needing someone who is actually going to communicate via phone with your customers, then that’s a little bit different. But it still might work. I mean, you get someone who’s training in proper scripts, sure. Hello, there’s a reason why the big companies do it.

You know, right? I’ll tell you a story about a small business here in Sydney that my husband runs. My husband runs a tennis coaching business in a suburb in Sydney. Now tennis coaching is fairly local, right? You know, it’s physical. Right. Right. Common. We do tennis, right? He does tennis coaching. Everything else, including speaking to the clients, answering the phone, running the invoicing, and social media is all done by Mervyn.

Who lives in the Philippines and even the clients know. He calls them, he answers the phone and it all happens in the Philippines. So, you know, I would challenge anyone to think, I mean, the people we hire, their English is perfect, right? So there’s no issue around that. They are pretty new, some of them even have US accents, to be honest, but yeah. So it’s really expanding your mind to go, that’s possible, you know.

Deb Krier: Then we could hire somebody in the US that we couldn’t understand. I was talking with somebody who is from Boston and I’m like, what the heck are they saying? Well in Ireland, where I’m from, you can go 20 minutes down the road and you don’t know what somebody’s saying. Totally different accent.

You know, yeah, I mean, we get people who have very heavy accents and, you know, and we’re just not quite sure what’s going on. So, you know, and it comes back to that proper training and making sure that it’s a good fit.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. Training and onboarding is everything. Right. How you onboard them. You made a comment earlier that you treat your producer like she looks and feels like an employee, even though she’s not and she’s working only three hours a week. Most people when they hire VAs or freelancers or, you know, virtual anything, they very much accidentally treat them like that and they don’t bring them into the business. They don’t bring them into the vision and make them feel like they’re part of it. And then you get a different result. That’s the truth, right? Because the person doesn’t feel, I mean, it’s like dating, right? You’re sort of going for coffee and stuff, but you’re not really talking about your long-term goals.

Yeah, there’s no like, you know, sort of movement forward or anything. And it’s the same thing. People need to feel like they belong. And those are the people they work the best for.

Deb Krier: Yeah. Well, and just like with a regular employee, you want this to be long-term. If you’re having to turn through VAs because things just aren’t working out, that’s a heck of a lot of work. And so you do want to get somebody that ends up being a long-term person that you’re working with.

Barbara Turley: Well you know the funny thing about that. Well, I think the problem actually is a lot of business owners don’t want to, they are too afraid to commit to an employee type of situation. Right. Therefore they want the ability to cut and run when things might go south. And then that energy is felt by the person. So of course they’re going to hedge their bets and they’re going to have 10 of you. And then the one that gives them more attention is going to get the better work. It’s kind of a tricky one. You’ve got to kind of, it’s all human relationships at the end of the day. Yeah. Right.

Deb Krier: You know, and I want to come back to the fact that you mentioned that you train the onboarding, the client too, as to what to expect and what to ask. And so let’s talk a little bit more about that because I think that’s, to me, that’s just fascinating. And I love that because it is, it’s a two-way street. And for someone who is saying, my gosh, I want to hire a VA, now what?

I think that the training that you provide is very interesting.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and look, we don’t make it complicated. We do go deeper later. Yeah, so we give you, it’s pretty simple, it’s quick to do. The people who do it get the most, the fastest results. It’s very simple. It’s teaching people where to start. Like, so how do I create my task list? How do I just start at the beginning and create like a recurring, or how do I, because the biggest problem people do, right, I’m sure you’ve fallen into this, we all have. You get a VA and then every day you wake up and go, what am I going to give the VA to do today? Oh my gosh. I know. And you’re like, just, okay, do this, do this for me. And it’s all like fluff. Then you get rid of them. This is where you use so much anxiety every day that you can’t cope. So we teach people how to not do that. We’re like, don’t do that because you want to get the recurring tasks in your business, the operational day-to-day things and you want to map those out into daily, weekly tasks so that you have a recurring system that initially a VA can take over so that if you are tied up for a few days, they’re like, well, I just have to get on with my time. I know what I’m doing. And you’ve given them a structure, right? And then projects are different. You can come in on projects and stuff later, but it’s that sort of shift of like people literally say to us,

You’ve just taken such a weight off my shoulders because I was waking up every day going, I have to create another loom video. I don’t know what to give them to do. The last thing you want to do is that, right? You want to give them the job.

Deb Krier: You don’t want busy work either.

Barbara Turley: No, and you don’t want another task on your list every day called, what will I give my VA to do today? What a nightmare!

Deb Krier: Yeah, like, no, you don’t want to do that. That’s kind of more of what we do is like for me, it sounded so basic. I was almost embarrassed to launch it as a training program until clients were like, wow, you know what? That was a game changer for me, even with getting that’s what the feedback has been. It’s very simple. How do you use LastPass? How to secure your business to work online and how to use project management tools, things like that and what not to do.

You know.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Well, and that’s where I went wrong when I hired VAs before. You know, it really was the, my gosh, what am I going to give them to do? Or did I give them enough to do?

Barbara Turley: What are they doing all day? Because the other one is you’re busy all day. On the day you’re really busy, you get three days where you’re busy in a row and you go, I don’t even know, did they work? Like, what are they doing? Yeah, that’s a disaster. So we try to look, I have an entire podcast about this because in the early days, I just saw so many questions. I thought, how can I deliver this? So I launched a podcast that literally is very tactical.

Things like how often should I speak to my VA? We did a whole show on it. to clarify.

Deb Krier: Am I supposed to talk to him every day? Is once a week enough?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, how do you know what to do with that? Like, how do I get my VAs to meet my expectations or even communicate them effectively? It’s a very tactical show.

And it’s because these are all the easy, they’re all the kind of simple questions that people feel stupid asking. They’re almost too afraid, they don’t even know to ask. But we see people getting tripped up with that.

And especially because you hear people, well, I have a VA, and so you’re thinking, well, if everybody has a VA, maybe I need one too, but now what? So it’s, yeah, I mean, I could go much further if I had educated myself to start with.

Deb Krier: Yes. And I think as well, then what happens when people fail with it is again, they look around and everyone else is apparently getting success. So the biggest thing that happens then is they run back to the theory of, it just doesn’t work for my kind of business. Because they’re too embarrassed to admit that they don’t know why it failed. And it fails a lot, right? So don’t be embarrassed at all. I know, it’s very common.

And if it doesn’t work out, we need to figure out why. Did I not give enough direction? Did I micromanage? I mean, all of those various things.

Barbara Turley: Well look, at the end of the show I’m going to give you guys a link for your listeners and one of the goodies on that link, you don’t even need to sign up for it, it’s just a download. It’s basically the five reasons people fail with VAs and how to fix it. So it’s a little ebook and it just lays it all out for you there. So those are the five things not to do.

Deb Krier: I love it. Well, you know, one of the things that I’m and we probably should have talked about at the start of the program. One of the things that I’m guessing a lot of people think is what could a VA do? What could I be having someone do?

Barbara Turley: Yes. There’s different, obviously different types of VAs, different levels of VAs that there’s a wealth of things that VAs can do for you. We tend to specialize at the Virtual Hub in more digital marketing implementation. Now I stress the word implementation because people hear the word digital marketing and immediately think someone’s going to come in and drive leads and come up with their funnel strategy and all this sort of thing. So no, we’re not going to do that. We’re just going to do all the doing that the strategist or you or your plans come up with. But we break it down into three main sections. So our level one VAs are more general admin. And what I mean by that is email management, calendar management, organizing your Dropbox, you know, even running your podcasts, not the technical end of it, but like, you know, managing the guests and that sort of admin sort of stuff. They can do a little bit of invoicing, a bit of Xero, but they’re not bookkeepers. People get very confused with this. Like there is a line between a VA and a bookkeeper. Level two VAs, this is the most common one that we see, is social media content calendars. Let’s say your podcast, let’s take this podcast for a second. Classic VA work is you record the podcast, put it in Dropbox, and then there’s like 80 percent of the job happens after you’ve recorded the podcast. It has to be edited.

You’ve to top and tail it, put it up on your website, get it up on iTunes. Then you’ve got to get it transcribed. And then if you really want to go hell for leather, you could create it into a slide share and stick it up on YouTube and you could do different stuff for LinkedIn. And then you can turn it into an infographic with the top five points that were made. You can turn it into 10 social media images and spread it all across social media. And before you know it, 20 hours worth of time. Exactly. Right.

So a lot of our VAs, this is what they’re doing. And we train them on the process behind that. So the podcast is a big one that we do and YouTube channels and stuff like that. Because everyone knows there’s so much doing involved in that. It’s just endless. Blogs, you write the blog, which you’ve got to get the images and get it SEO properly on your website and get it up on WordPress and same sort of thing. Then our level 3 VAs, they’re more technical, so they’re going to do stuff like take platforms like HubSpot and Fusionsoft, Ontraport, big CRM platforms. You might have a funnel that you want to build. Let’s say it’s a lead magnet ebook or something, and then if someone signs up for the ebook, you want to get this series of emails over the next whatever. If you know what you want and you can draw a map, even on the back of an envelope, you go,

They come in here, they do this, you know, three days later, I want this email. And you can write the copy, it will build it for you on the platforms and make it work. So make it all tie it together, make it work, build your campaigns. So that’s just a bit of an idea around what our VAs do. You know, online there are VAs that do, look, there’s a lot of them that will do sort of bookkeeping. I just would be, I’m nervous about people.

Deb Krier: The financial aspects are tricky because

Yeah, be careful with those things and be careful as well on websites. People are like, my VA is amazing. She’s going to build my website and then do all this stuff. They can do that as long as it’s simple. But if it’s any coding or anything like that or messing with the code, I wouldn’t do that. I’d get a developer to do that.

And as you said, yeah, that’s a different person that you work.

Yeah, so let’s say you’re talking generalist VAs and then expert VAs that might be more expert level in something like writing. Don’t expect your VA to write blog posts because they’re not writers. That’s technical, that’s an expertise thing that you have to be clear about.

Deb Krier: You know, and I love this because I think so many people do get caught up in the what could I have them do stage. And as you were talking, I was thinking, well, yeah, I do all of those things here. But of course, they need to be done up here. But I don’t have the knowledge. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the skill. All of those various things then it becomes my decision. Am I going to take things to the next level or am I just going to stay here?

And I think that’s what so many business people do. They know that they need to get to the next level, but they just don’t know how to make that step.

Barbara Turley: Here’s a very simple framework, right? Every business, regardless of its size, even if it’s just one person running a nice lifestyle business, there are departments in every business. You’ve got marketing, sales, product delivery, finance, whatever. You’ve got all your little bits. The easiest thing to do is to map out all the little departments, all the bits that you do, and then list down the sort of top five kinds of tiny, tedious, everyday just has to be done to keep the thing moving, delegate those first. And that’s kind of how you stop doing. And even if you never take the business to another level, you get to spend a bit more time with your kids or with your family. So that could be, you know, just bringing it right back to simple terms. You don’t have to grow a big scalable empire to do this. You just have to just think, start small, create a process for it, get someone else to do it.

Deb Krier: And that’s basically how you do it. Yeah.

You know, and I love that you say you could stay at the same level because for some people that’s exactly where they want to be. They don’t want to be selling more, doing more for whatever reason.

Barbara Turley: That’s totally fine. But I bet you want to work less though. Right. It’s quite nice to stay at this level and not work all the time. Like that’d be quite nice. Yeah. Take a holiday. Take a little holiday. Yeah. Go to Australia. So these are the things, you know, like everyone thinks I talk a lot about scaling because I’m interested in that topic, but you’re right. Some people, you know, they’re very happy with the business they have. They’ve built it. Right. Just take some time back for you. That’s how you do it.

Deb Krier: We are almost out of time. So tell people how they find you and connect with you online.

Barbara Turley: Sure. So if you go to Thevirtualhub.com forward slash business power hour, we have a special page for the listeners here. The ebook I mentioned about the five biggest mistakes is there. Definitely worth a read. I wrote it, by the way. I did write this one myself from my own experience because I’m the one who sees all the problems. Also, there’s a seven part e-course. Don’t freak out. It’s just seven emails. It’s not really a massive thing.

Again, it was developed by me. I didn’t write it, but it was developed by me. It’s more, that’s more if you want to use VA’s to go a bit bigger. So if you want to scale something, definitely tips there, even if you don’t, perfect. Then the final thing on that page, you can book a free strategy call with one of our outsourcing strategy consultants. We have one who covers the US, so we’ve got one who covers Australia, Asia. So we do 24 hours perfectly. And they will ascertain whether we’re the right fit for you or if you’re ready. Typically, we’d like you to have a look at the e-book first before you book that call just to make sure you’ll know if you’re ready. And if we sound like something that you’re ready for and you really want, then the guys can talk you through how we operate, if you’re ready for us and if we’re a fit for you.

Deb Krier: Yeah, and I’m guessing that many of our listeners and our viewers really could benefit from having a VA. Even if it is just taking some of those tedious little tasks off their plate, whether it’s to give them more time for networking, more time for sales, more time for having fun with their family, there are so many things that a VA can be doing to make our lives run better, both personally and professionally.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. I mean, you’re talking my language, but as you can tell from speaking to me, not into the big, you know, I think it’s a no brainer for any business, but you have to be ready for it. And I think, yeah, once you listen, maybe listen back to this podcast a few times and you’ll know how to be ready. And it’s so worthwhile. The dividends it pays you in the end are very worthwhile if you do it right. You do it right.

Deb Krier: Of course, we’re talking about VAs that are doing a couple hours a week to a whole bunch of hours a week. It obviously just depends on what you’re having them do.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, now just to clarify, and now we’re finished, we at The Virtual Hub, we specialize in dedicated staff. So we have a minimum of 20 hours a week, which is more like a part-time employee type thing. But there are lots of them online. You can do less. If someone is ready for that level, then we’re definitely a good fit.

Deb Krier: And as you said, you’ve got great information for people to even figure out, are they ready to take that step or, I did it wrong to start with, you know, and all of these various things. Because, as I said, we have had experiences where we hired a VA and it didn’t work out. It doesn’t mean that it was not what you should be doing. It just means it didn’t work out then.

Barbara Turley: Exactly. And you can listen, you can get my podcast actually, if you want to hear more from me. The podcast is the Virtual Success Show. It’s on iTunes and it’s also on our website under our content. So you’ll find it at the same time, when you head over to that link, you’ll see it there as well.

Deb Krier: I love it. I love it. Well, Barbara, this has really been great. Is there anything, any final thoughts that you want to leave everyone with?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, I would just encourage everyone. The first step is a mindset shift usually. And it’s about expanding your mind that everything you feel is fine. The lack of trust, the issues about security, they’re all real. And there are ways of dealing with all of those things. And when you do and you expand your mind, listen to some of our podcasts, read some of our content, and then take the jump. Because honestly, if you do it right, it will pay you the best dividends in the end from every angle, like just even freedom. It’s like time freedom.

Deb Krier: I love it. I have been talking with Barbara Turley from The Virtual Hub. So it’s www.thevirtualhub.com. I am Deb Krier and until next time, have a great day.

VoiceActor: Thanks for listening to The Business Power Hour, hosted by Deb Krier. Join us next time for more real-life stories and techniques to power up your business. You’ve been listening to C-Suite Radio. For more top business podcasts, visit c-suiteradio.com.