VoiceActor: Welcome to the Leadership Coaching Group Podcast, where we help aspiring and established influencers build a solid leadership philosophy.

Liz Howard: Hey guys, welcome back to the Leadership Coaching Group’s podcast. I’m Liz Howard, and today I am so excited to introduce you to Barbara Turley, who’s an investor, an entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub. This is a business that she started by accident that exploded in the space of just 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. Barbara is also a mom, wife to her best friend, and an adventure lover with a passion for horses, skiing, tennis, and spending time in nature. My goodness, Barbara, welcome to the podcast.

Barbara Turley: Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be on your show.

Liz Howard: Likewise and with this bio I’m just like wow you’re someone that I think everyone’s gonna want to be friends with on top of everything.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that does sound pretty cool there. I’m thinking I don’t play so much tennis anymore. Probably should get back into horse riding, you know, when you have kids, as you’re about to find out all about it. It’s an interesting journey. It’s your hobby. Yeah.

Liz Howard: Well, you know, I am excited to chat with you because you are going to be able to speak to our listeners about so many things. I don’t know anyone who’s in business that can’t use a little bit more time and energy, as we said in the bio. But certainly the way that you built your career is of a lot of interest. Do mind just talking a little bit about yourself beyond the bio and what you were juggling when you were in the process of building up your business?

Barbara Turley: Sure, yes. I think one of the key things to point out, and I won’t delve too much into this, but my background was actually in the investment banking world. I was in the corporate world for quite a long time in my career. I always had a burning desire, as lot of corporates do, to run their own business, but I didn’t really know what it was that I wanted to do. I struggled with that for a number of years. Then I

In the sort of start of my entrepreneurial journey, I guess, I got involved in a startup of sorts in the financial industry, but not by myself. I was sort of just part of a group that did some cool things with an asset management business. In that journey, that was about five years. And I learned a lot about in that five years about kind of how great companies get built. And it just whetted my appetite even more to build my own company. But of course,

You know, the challenges that you face building your own business are just enormous. I mean, they’re different from corporate. And as women, of course, we face the added challenge of having children. So this happened at a time when I was also starting a family. I was sort of in my mid thirties. I wanted to have a baby and I did do baby and business all at the same time, which I’m glad I didn’t know beforehand how crazy that was going to be because I don’t think I would have just stayed in my safe, cozy corporate job. But of course, now I’m really glad that I did do that. A number of challenges really there, not just business related, but I think some of the personal challenges can actually be the hardest to face when you launch your own business.

Liz Howard: Absolutely. And I think whether as a parent or not, right, there’s so much more emotion. You can read the textbooks and you can have the education and learn that there’s waves of early adopters in business. But when emotionally you feel the difference and you feel like things are hard, it’s more complicated than any book can capture, isn’t it?

Barbara Turley: Well, the anxiety is immense. I, you know, I had felt anxiety in my corporate career, but just nothing at the level that I felt running my own, like building my own business, running it myself, trying to navigate the future, trying to figure out. And I had this burning desire to create a company. I didn’t just want to be a consultant or, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I sort of didn’t want the lifestyle business where it was just me consulting. I very much wanted to build a scalable business that had impact globally. What a massive thing to try and take on when you want to have children as well. But I felt the pressure of that as well from myself and the anxiety was incredible at certain points.

Liz Howard: My gosh, and if you don’t mind, I’d love to just hear a little bit about how you did that because we’re not at a point in the world as much as I wish that maybe we were where it’s become clean and easy and society makes it super simple for women to do all of these things while having children. Can you talk a little bit about how you built a business and had a baby at the same time and managed to keep your sanity intact?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, sure. And look, this wasn’t something I planned. So number one, I didn’t sit down and go, hmm, I want to have a baby and have a business. So I need to do X, Y and Z and create this massive business plan. It really didn’t happen like that. It sort of happened very, very organically and just by mistake in lots of ways. But I think that’s kind of how it goes. But the key thing that happened for me was that I discovered a talent I didn’t know that I had.

And I assumed everybody else had, because we often do this with our own talents, we sort of underestimate how powerful they are. And we overestimate the amount of people who actually have the same talent. But my little hidden talent appears to be delegation. It was actually a skill in its own right. I realized from working with some business coaching clients that I was working with in the early days that actually majority of people really struggle with things like systemization, process development, task creation, and actual effective delegation to another person and allowing someone else to take on something and then mentoring them in a certain way. Like even if they’re an A player that has all this experience, there’s still a level of kind of involvement that you need in order to grow somebody up into your company. And I discovered that I was naturally good at that.

And I assumed everybody else was as well, but I discovered very quickly that they weren’t.

Liz Howard: No, entrepreneurs are historically terrible at that.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely terrible. I realized that people have asked me, what was your entrepreneurial journey and were you doing the lemonade stand at six? I was like, no, actually, I wasn’t. I wasn’t the kid that had the lemonade stand. I always wanted to be in corporate. And I excelled in corporate. And I realized in building my own business, I’m probably not the crazy entrepreneur. I’m more like the CEO role. So I’m like the operations person. I’m really good at building.

I can take a vision and I can turn it into an entire machine. And that’s something that worked really well for me in both building a business and in also having a baby at the same time, because I was able to kind of process it all up and go, okay, well, if I need X number of hours here, then that has to be delegated and that has to work and I’m just going to make that work. So I had this thinking. And I do think as entrepreneurs, that’s something we lack.

And we don’t have time for it. So the other problem is that I hear a lot of people saying, tried, I tried the ways I tried this, I tried that and nothing worked. It doesn’t work for my business. And we get ourselves caught up in a lot of mindset issues around that. You know, so I mean, even Michael Gerber’s book, anyone hasn’t read the E-Myth Revisited, please read that book because it’s not just me saying this, this is actually a phenomenon that is out there.

that actually stores the growth of many businesses and means that they remain small and struggling and not even, you don’t have to be big and explosive, but you can be small and sustainably successful with lots of free time that way.

Liz Howard: Yeah, I mean, taking advantage of the fact that you have that COO mindset and you were good at systemizing, where did you start with your own business and how can the rest of us kind of learn from you? What was step one to get that delegation and systemization going?

Barbara Turley: Sure. Again, it was sort of like I said, because I didn’t know that this was a talent that I had and I sort of was assuming everybody did stuff this way. I guess how I started was, look, I was a trader for 10 years in the equity markets. And somebody asked me recently, I was speaking at an event and somebody asked me, what was it from my previous corporate career that helped me to be successful in this venture? And it was something I had never really thought about actually. I’d always just discounted everything I did in corporate and this was all new. And I realized when I was discussing that question that the 10 years I spent on the trading floor were pivotal in me being successful doing this because in that environment, things are changing like by the second. It’s very fast. It’s very dynamic and you often see changes in the wind that are coming. So like the farmers can smell the rain coming, you know, this kind of thing. It’s something that I honed that skill very early on and you see things, problems, changes, shifts, pivots happening before other people will see it. And I know that in the early stages of business, I was extremely agile. So I would see something and go, that’s not working. How do I fix that? I’m going to fix that.

Or a client complaint would come in. And of course I would feel the emotional rollercoaster of clients not happy. But then after I got over myself and the shock of somebody being upset, I would look at it and go, okay, well, let’s take that. Let’s use that feedback and let’s fix that problem so it never happens again. And it was this sense of just a continuous commitment to process evolution and to seeing kind of the market feedback from employees, from customers, from online, from digital, and putting that all together into slowly inching forward. I’m hoping that sort of makes sense. It’s just a commitment to tweaking all the time.

Liz Howard: Okay. So yeah, you’re listening to the voices of your customers and then you were trying to do something with that instantly and change your processes as appropriate.

Barbara Turley: Yes, and just, you know, like people often get caught up in what their competitors are doing and getting upset when you look at other people’s websites and you’re like, oh my God, they’ve got it all sorted, mine’s a mess, right? We do this all the time. But it’s actually better to listen to your clients and even the bad ones, like even if you lose a client, there’s gold in the experience that will make your business stronger.

Liz Howard: Yeah. Can you touch a little bit on what it just felt like from an identity perspective to go from, I mean, you had a successful corporate career, you built your own business, and then you became a mom, which I’m sure was one of the most thrilling, but also, you know, it changes you. How did you, and I think it’s important for both men and women to be a part of this conversation because there’s a lot of pressure on women, whether they’re in the workplace, whether they’re entrepreneurs, whether they’re at home, to meet all these expectations and to do all these things. So what did you go through just personally as you evolved into this new role of mom and businesswoman?

Barbara Turley: Yes, that’s a great question. I was just, you know, sort of overflowing with feeling and emotion when you were talking about it going, I’m still going through it. Like, and I think actually, I’ve reached a kind of a bit of an inflection point just at this moment. So it’s a good time to talk about this. My daughter is two and a half. And in the early days when she was a baby, when she was first born, I mean, I didn’t take maternity leave, but I was able to reduce my day down to about an hour a day, which was quite good for a few months.

But what I found was when they’re babies, they sleep. Well, let’s say you have a baby that does sleep. I mean she is quite good. So I was actually, I felt I was kind of able to work. I was like, oh, well, she’s sleeping for two hours. I can get like, you can change the world in two hours when you’re a mother. But what I found was I wanted to do 50 50. And I was very clear that I wanted to be entrepreneur and mommy. I don’t want…

And I was determined to prove that you can do this. And to a certain extent, I have proven it. So for example, I do have my daughter in daycare. I did have a nanny and when she got to about six months old, I eventually hired a nanny because I thought I was going to die from overwhelm.

Liz Howard: Yeah.

Barbara Turley: But it was never full time. It was always part time. And I made a commitment that when I’m working, I got laser focused and so said, well, when she’s in daycare three days a week, the days I have her, I do still work a bit in the evenings, early mornings and stuff. But during that day, it’s very much focused on her. Now, that has worked great, except two and a half years later, what I have found, and women out there who’ve gone through this will know what I mean. Even men is that 50 50 is awesome. I proved I can make a work, except there was nothing left for me. And you become, I’ve reached a point where I feel like I’m on a relentless treadmill that is working as long as I don’t fall over. And that’s been a kind of a, that’s sort of been a destabilizing feeling for me in the last few months of going, damn, I don’t know if a business of the size that I have right now is starting to consume me and my daughter is starting to consume me as well. And I’m going, no, I need to rethink this. Yeah, I think you’ve got to be very strict with your time.

You’ve got to be very strict with your boundaries around, you know, especially in your business, like how much client contact people can have, how much employee contact, all that sort of thing. So being structured is very important, but also realizing that you do need time for you. Like even if it’s just thinking time, like stare at the wall, you know? And that’s something I haven’t, I didn’t factor in. So it’s been a learning from this experience of the last, last few years.

Liz Howard: Yeah, thank you for talking about that because I think especially when you’re, you know, as a career woman and I can speak to this and you’re trying to plan, okay, how am I going to take time off, let my boss know, get my mind ready for being pregnant and maybe having labor and delivery, we kind of forget to think about and then what? You know, how do we balance who we are, what we are, how we manage our time, if the home stuff, the work stuff and the pressure feels enormous and it seems like everywhere you turn there’s expectations that we kind of adopt and hold and so to find the space to just be a thinking human and a feeling human in and of ourselves again it just I don’t think we’re talking about that enough.

Barbara Turley: I was just thinking, that’s not the conversation that’s going on and that’s the conversation that needs to happen because, for example, what took me by surprise was not the business. I had set that up perfectly. That runs the way I set it up. What I didn’t factor in is that a child is totally different from a business and you can’t structure up a child. You can’t decide, you might have a child who is a terrible sleeper, who has colic, who is ill, who is just needy, who, you know, toddlers are very, they go through stages where they just want you and everyone thinks, oh, I can just hire a nanny. Like, yeah, you can, but the child wants you all the time. So it’s sort of, you know, I’ve gone through stages where I’ve been on podcasts, for example, and I can hear the nanny outside, you know, the child, my daughter Ruby is screaming mommy. And you think, you know, you didn’t factor any of that stuff in.

So these are all the challenges that kind of caught me by surprise, I guess. And I’m not sure what the answer is, but the childbirth bit, I think, is actually the easy part. It goes on and on thereafter. As parents and as entrepreneurs, we have to think about that and think about the impact on our emotional and mental state. And your decision-making ability, if you’ve been up all night, can be heavily impacted. So you’ve got to… look, I don’t know if there’s anything you can do about it, but talking about it and realizing that other people, you know, people look at me on my bios and things and think I’m superwoman. And go, no, I’m not. I do have moments of deep despair about, you know, being up all night and being stressed and these sorts of things, despite having built a scalable business that does essentially run sort of without me. But there’s the other element, which is your kids, you know.

Yeah, so…

Liz Howard: Yeah. So since your business is in virtual assistance, what can they do and what are the limits? I mean, how do we know how to maximize the usage of a VA? What’s an appropriate expectation for help from a VA?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So online, know, everybody read Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week. I think that’s how this whole thing exploded. I mean, that was my first sort of introduction to offshore and how you could use offshore people, you know, cost effectively. Me too. Yeah, like everyone did that. And then the problem, so Tim did a great thing there by sort of exposing the opportunity, but then everyone thought, well, I can get someone for two bucks an hour. That’s going to like change my life.

And that’s mistake number one, like I said, just the expectation creep is enormous. The second one is, well, the internet is sort of littered with people who failed at this. Like, so a lot of people are angry out there because they’ve wasted time, energy and money. And they’ve said like, I tried VAs, I hired three of them, they all failed. Now, you may have just hired the wrong people. So like recruitment and HR, trust me, is a minefield all by itself. But let’s talk about the things you can actually control. So,

If you get a great person, you can still fail because you may not have a developed task list. So if you bring someone into your business, you need to map out like what is there, what are they actually going to be doing? What do you need them to do for you? Are they qualified for that? And have you got processes built? Even if there’s small little things like how to answer the phone, there’s a process for that in your business that only you know.

And you can’t expect somebody to come in and just read your mind or do things the way you’d like them done if you haven’t developed your process and shown people the path. So systems and processes and things like that and good structure within your business, if you don’t have that, it is chaotic for not just you, but the person coming in. And sometimes you find they’ll leave because they’ll go to a less chaotic business. So that’s definitely a big one.

There’s a number of other things like lack of leadership. We’re talking about leadership here. A lot of people want to hire a VA and they’re just like, they say things like, I just want to hire someone who knows what they’re doing. And then I just move them to get on with the job. And what that actually looks like is I want to hire someone and then I’m going to go on holiday for a month and I don’t want to speak to them. Or I’m just going to, I’m too busy to have calls with them every week. Or you find weeks and weeks and weeks go by and you haven’t caught up with your person.

Now that’s a blatant lack of leadership. I mean, in that sort of a vacuum, anybody can get lost, even the most talented skilled person, because they’ve no idea what we want. There’s no direction. So you need to have a sense of kind of the pied piper syndrome, I call it. So basically you need to lead, you need to lead your team, your vision, your business. And yes, you can delegate to people, but you are still the conductor of the orchestra. If that makes sense.

Liz Howard: Yeah.

Barbara Turley: So those are a couple of the big ones. We actually have for the guys listening, all the people listening to this podcast, we do have a download that you can get. You don’t even need to sign up for it. And we have a link for you guys where you can actually download the five big ones that people tend to make mistakes with. And then make sure that you don’t fall into those traps.

Liz Howard: Right, right. So say that you don’t fall into the traps and you’ve done an okay job, but maybe the person isn’t quite right. How do you know that it is time to say goodbye to that individual and maybe try again?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so the first thing is when, so let’s talk about the kind of elephant in the room. What if, I hear this quite a bit, what if you have a person and when they’re on they’re great, because I often hear this about particularly offshore VAs, well you know what the problem is, I don’t want to let them go because when he’s there he’s amazing and I’m like, so the problem is that you never know when he’s there.

or when she’s there and they go, yeah, yeah, they’re getting miserable when they show up. That’s a HR issue. And that’s like, yes, they’ve got the skills, but they’re not actually supporting you. They’re causing you stress and anxiety. And you either have to have the serious conversation. And I see people online, I think one of the issues is being too flexible. And as leaders, often want everyone to like us. So we’re like, hey, look, I don’t mind when you do the work as long as you deliver.

But what you’ll find if you do that is that a lot of people, we’re all human, you might find a VA in the Philippines doing a job for you at three o’clock in the morning while there’s a baby on the hip and they’re working all day for someone else, maybe another job during the day and they’re tired and mistakes start happening because you’ve allowed, you’ve told them that you don’t mind when they do the job. And they will do that, right? So that’s a common sort of issue. Having some structure, flexibility within a structure, I always advise and I say, look, you know, I think as a business, it’s okay to say to someone, I work these hours, I would like if you were online between these hours so that we can have a meeting, we can discuss issues and I expect my expectations of you in this role are X, Y and Z and be very clear.

And that’s not me taking the leadership position about how you’re running your business. And it’s okay to do that. Yeah. So that’s a big one. The other one I see people doing is you can get a VA to help you. So people often go, I just want someone for two or three hours a week. That’s fine. You can do that. But the level of expectation of their commitment to your business and their care factor for your business.

If someone else works in an office in a full-time job, you’re gone. They don’t care about your business. And why should they? Because it’s like, you’re sort of expecting someone to marry you, but all you’re doing is taking them for dinner every now and then. It’s kind of like a half. So examine how much commitment you’re expecting from someone versus how much commitment you’ve made to them. That’s a big problem.

Liz Howard: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I guess the other thing that would be on my mind right now as a listener is, you know, we did read the book, we read the Tim Ferriss and we tried to go online and hire someone and, you know, they’re nice enough, but there were problems. How can you vet out a reputable source for VAs versus maybe less consistent one?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So let’s talk about going direct first. So of course you can go on Upwork, you can go into the freelance market and you can hire great people, right? The issue with it is that it is a little bit of a needle in a haystack and you… Recruiting is hard, trust me. I mean, look, we have something at the moment, like we have something like between 300 and 500 people per month apply for a job with us. Wow. And after all of the testing we do, we might per month hire 15 of those, maybe 20.

So we find it excruciating. And I think, no wonder people in the direct market are getting run over because people can say anything on a resume and they can say anything in an interview. Sometimes people wow in interviews, but they’re just terrible on the job. I think you’ve got to be realistic that if you are going to recruit by yourself, you can do it, but you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs. You might get flooded with applications and you sort of have to develop a bit of process of how you’re going to sift through them. Then you’ve got to kind of try people out. But also people can shine massively in trials. And then what you find is a month on the job or six weeks in, the mistakes start, the confusion starts and they start to falter. And we even see this in our business, right? So what happens there is it’s like people are on high alert for six weeks and the minute the client is happy, they’re like, can relax now. And then they start making loads of mistakes.

If you’re in the freelance market and you’re finding that happening, it could be because all of a sudden they’ve gone out and gotten 10 more of you and they are working. So like you have seen VAs doing this, right? They’re working for you and someone else on two different computers at the same time.

Liz Howard: Wow.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, like nobody realizes this goes on, but it does, right? So it’s one of the reasons I don’t do work from home people anymore. We’re completely office based and all of that. And you sort of have to watch for those problems. So things like that can really catch you out. So I think to solve that problem, what I would do is you’ve got to recruit well, you’ve got to do some trial tasks to make sure they have the skills that you need. Then you have to onboard them properly and you have to have a very developed and very clear task list with an expectation delivery.

So now, again, this is leadership, right? And then a meeting rhythm together with this person around how you’re going to discuss results, be it daily, weekly, whatever it’s going to be. And you commit to that. And if you do a lot of that, there’s very few places to hide for someone who’s working with you. They’re either going to be an A player and be amazing, or you’re going to find out pretty quickly that if something’s going on, that it just doesn’t feel right. And if you get that gut feeling,

Don’t immediately fire them. I would suggest being very direct and saying, here’s what’s happening. I don’t think it’s really working. How can we work together to make it work better? And you might find that they’re overwhelmed or your communication style doesn’t match theirs or there’s confusion. Or you find out that they’re just not doing the right thing.

Liz Howard: Right. So on that note, I’d like to give everyone an opportunity to hear a little bit about your business because when you’re busy, whether you’re a solopreneur, an entrepreneur, you’re, you know, a wantrepreneur, you’re thinking of starting out, it is not likely that you’re going to just have the time to go through all the necessary steps, right, to find your own person. I know I certainly struggled with that when I was trying to go online and find a VA. So what is it that your business does exactly and how can people get in touch if they want your help?