Trey Downes: This is your Superior Self, episode 49. It’s okay to ask for help.

Barbara Turley: And you have to become a master delegator. You have to get the three things you have to get right: systems, processes, and team delegation. And if you nail those three things and you’re strict with your time—and it’s not easy to nail those things, by the way, you’ve got a lot of things that you’ve got to get right there—but you become the conductor of the orchestra. You’re not the person playing all the instruments. So if you’re still playing any of the instruments, you need to stop doing that because you need to… teach someone else how to play it. And then you’ve got to be the conductor, the leader, and learn to lead. And that is something I didn’t know that I was good at until I stepped out of corporate. And I realized that so many things I learned in my corporate career that seemed like second nature to me, other people didn’t really know how to do this, particularly in the entrepreneurial world. All those meeting rhythms and agendas and milestones and deadlines and how to run projects and things like that. I was able to actually do that and to lead that sort of thing. And you have to become 100% committed to that.

Trey Downes: What is up, superior nation? Welcome back to your favorite podcast, Your Superior Self. I am Trey Downs, blue-collar worker turned into blue-collar entrepreneur. And I get to discuss my favorite subject today, which is entrepreneurship, which has the power to change the world and positively impact billions of people, even though it seems overwhelming and sometimes chaotic. I love it.

And today, to talk about entrepreneurship, I have Barbara Turley, CEO of The Virtual Hub. Her story is incredible, and I’m excited to have her on the show. But before I dive into the interview with her, I wanted to read from the book Resisting Happiness by Matthew Kelly. It’s the book that inspired me to be a better version of myself. It’s the one that helped me realize that there is daily resistance out there that is trying to knock you down on your path to self-growth, and one form of daily resistance is loneliness, which all of us can relate to as an entrepreneur. And in his book, Matthew Kelly says, “The loneliness, of course, served a purpose. It is a great teacher. It’s a form of pain, and pain can be a ruthless teacher. You put your hand on a hot stove and you learn not to do that again. But that can be a brutal lesson.”

Barbara Turley – It’s Okay to Ask For Help

Loneliness is not brutal like that, but it can be a painful way to learn. Interestingly, solitude is the cure for loneliness. When we are afraid of being alone, we should go into it, dive deep into it. Solitude teaches profound lessons, especially about ourselves. Feeling lonely has value. Sometimes we need to turn inward to discover what we need to hold on to and what we need to let go of. The loneliest journey is that of an entrepreneur because not everyone understands our mission in life.

Not everyone understands what inspires us. And when we start following our dreams and when we start taking the path that is less traveled by others, we get rejected. We get rejected because it makes others uncomfortable. And that’s okay. You’re going to be by yourself because it’s your dream. It’s no one else’s but yours. And you’re going to encounter trials and tribulations to reach that dream. You’re going to encounter problems that you’re going to have to solve.

And all that does is make you better. It is the next step in your game of life that is going to get you closer to your dreams. And I’m kind of guilty of self-inflicted loneliness because I merge myself into my work, merge myself into my passions so much that I tend to isolate myself from others because I’m just so passionate about the work. And then when I come out of it or I lift my head for air, there’s no one around, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. I think loneliness can be a tool because you get more things done, but others struggle with it because they feel like there’s no one there to support them. And my idea behind that is that they don’t understand you. Your ideas, your dreams are going to make them uncomfortable because it’s not theirs. They’re not used to those types of ideas, and what you need to do is submerge yourself in the loneliness. That is where you’re gonna get the work done. That’s where you’re gonna find out what really and truly motivates you. Don’t be afraid of the loneliness. Merge yourself into it and find out who you truly are. Stop listening to the crowds. Stop listening to the masses and listen to your heart and what it’s telling you.

And what my heart is telling me to do right now is show some gratitude. So I want to say thank you to you, the listener. Thank you for hanging out with me today, taking time out of your busy schedule to listen to what I have to say. If this is the first time you’ve listened to the podcast, please hit subscribe and leave a rating and a review wherever you get your podcast from. And I want to recognize all the volunteers out there. Whether you’re volunteering at the local shelter or you’re volunteering in your kids’ local youth programs, you guys are giving something that you can never get back, and that’s your time. And I want to say thank you for that.

And to get back to our amazing guest today on the show, I have for you Barbara Turley. She’s an investor and entrepreneur with a keen interest in scalable business models. During her 15-year financial markets career, she was a trader for some of the world’s largest investment banks. She successfully traded her own money and managed relationships with some of Australia’s largest wealth management businesses and became an early-stage investor in a number of very successful disruptive financial services companies. Today, Barbara is an investor, entrepreneur, and founder of The Virtual Hub, a business that she started by accident that exploded in a span of 12 months. It became one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants. She’s also the founder of Energize Wealth, an online platform for ambitious women who want to create wealth and impact from whatever stage they are in their wealth journey.

This is such a powerful interview, and I can’t wait for you guys to listen. So without further ado, here is Barbara Turley.

Trey Downes: Hey, what’s going on, guys? Welcome back to another episode of Your Superior Self. Tonight, I am joined by Barbara Turley. She’s an investor, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub. Barbara, welcome to the show.

Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me, Trey. Delighted to be here.

Trey Downes: So why don’t you go ahead and give us a quick rundown about what you’re doing today?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So today I run, as I was saying to you off-air, like a crazy ship called The Virtual Hub, which is a company in the Philippines. And we recruit, train, and manage virtual assistants, mainly in the digital marketing and social media kind of management space, for businesses all over the world that are looking to kind of scale their endless to-do lists that come with anything to do with digital marketing and implementation. So we have 100 staff on the ground, 100 employees now on the ground in the Philippines, which is a bit of a milestone. I would like to say “crazy ship” when you run that many people.

Trey Downes: Yeah, absolutely. So talk about your investing years. So like I asked you before, was that in securities or VCs? And you had mentioned to me that it was angel investing. Like, explain that experience.

Barbara Turley: Sure. So, just to—look, my background—I did spend 15 years in the financial industry, but the first 10 years of that were actually on the trading floors. So actually, it was in equity trading, in that fast, furious, dynamic, changing world of trading floors, which I absolutely loved. And I learned a lot about how companies develop, how companies fail, I guess, in that arena as well. And then after that, to cut a long story short, the financial crisis changed a lot of things many years ago—the big global financial rumble that happened in 2008. And I moved after that into asset management sales, which was a different kind of role for me, and it was a different end of the industry. And from that, I got an opportunity actually to get involved in a management buyout of a business from Deutsche Bank here in Australia, with a group of other people. And it was my first kind of chance to try something new and to actually take some risk and invest in something, which I did. And I’m still an investor in that business. It’s 10 years later now. It’s been very successful. But from that, it kind of started a journey of meeting very interesting people doing interesting other startups. And I got involved in a couple of those along the way. So it was very much sort of accidental and just taking my opportunities when they came my way, really.

Trey Downes: So when people find out you’re an investor, do they start pitching you right away? How does that work? Like, what’s that intro like?

Barbara Turley: It’s funny, actually. I think the word “investor” is like the word “money.” It just carries so much weight for so many people that they almost don’t know what to say. And they think it’s like this kind of voodoo world that other people inhabit, and it’s really not like that at all. A couple of people have tried to pitch me, but I’m very clear that, look, I’m an angel investor, but I’m very specific about the types of things that I would invest in. Predominantly, it’s in the financial services space because I completely understand that space, and it’s usually technology-driven because I have a real interest in the tech space myself. But I think people get a bit taken aback because there’s not many people, particularly women, who do it. I don’t know about in America, but in the rest of the world it’s kind of a weird thing for females to do. It’s growing, but yeah, I’ve been doing it for a long time.

Trey Downes: What’s the difference between angel investor and VC?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So angel investing is very much in the very early stages. So it’s like a seed kind of thing. Often, the angel investors will be your family, your friends—you, the first couple of hundred grand that you raise from, you know, beg, borrow, and steal to try and get the business off the ground. Venture capital funding then comes a little bit later when it’s more—you know, there is probably at least an established idea. You’re going to be approaching investors. They’re going to be doing massive due diligence on you, and it’s a much more formalized kind of approach. You know, there can be a sort of a line between where they blur, but generally, angel is much earlier in the very, very risky stages.

Trey Downes: What’s the best pitch that you’ve ever heard?

Barbara Turley: I haven’t heard that many pitches, would you believe?

Trey Downes: Really?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. I don’t go to pitches, and I don’t go out looking for pitches. Usually, the things I’ve invested in—a handful of startups—so when I say a handful, I literally mean four to five. And typically, they’re people I met along the way by accident who weren’t pitching at me or didn’t think that I was going to be an investor. And I was like, so, you know, what are you guys doing? And then I was like, okay, that sounds really interesting to me. Are you raising capital? And that question has brought out the, “Yes, actually, we are.” But I haven’t—the first investment I got involved in, the management buyout thing, was probably the very early-stage thing. Post that, I was more getting involved in companies that were moving towards that VC stage, but I just got in just before that. So, you know, it’s kind of in that gray area, a bit more lucky break type stuff.

Trey Downes: Well, did any of the investments that you participated in, did they ever present to you like a business plan, or was it just like you said—was it just a conversation? Because I know a lot of people now that are—I’m definitely in that process where we’re starting to write a business plan, and I’m learning about angel investors and venture capitalists. Like, what is it that catches your eye? Is it the business plan, or is it the pitch?

Barbara Turley: Okay, so here’s a really interesting one—full caveat here. I was a trader for 10 years, right? I’m used to making very fast decisions and seeing opportunities quickly, right? You learn that on the trading floor. But I’ve always said this to people, look, business plans are great, right? Of course you want to see that. You want to see some solid ideas. You want to see the structure. But I am big into—I just know if it’s a person I want to back or not. So the people running it—are you going to back them, right, or not? Because the best business plan in the world run by a terrible team will fail. That’s basically it. So you can look at business plans, but you’ve got to have that kind of moment of that energetic feeling of going, I’m going to back this person. This person is going to succeed. This person is going to take this one home. And that’s really the crucial point.

Trey Downes: I love that because it’s more about the person than it is actually the piece of paper that you’re handing over saying, “Hey, look, in a year or two years, I’ll be profitable.” I like that a lot. How do you—I mean, how do you get good at that, though? Like, how do you read someone and say, “Hey, look, I think you’re going to be successful”? Is it something that they say? Is it how they carry themselves?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, because you’ve got to—I was just thinking as you were talking—I’ve got to be careful that people listening don’t get sold, because there’s obviously the great salespeople out there. So it’s a very hard question to answer, and I don’t mean to be vague. It’s more like—I remember when I first was a junior trader in my very early career, and I just couldn’t understand how the traders in the room would see it. They would say to me, “Do you see the market turning? Do you see it turning?” And I’d be like, no, I don’t see anything. I just see all these trades going through. And the head of trading at the time said to me—I’ll never forget this—he said, “Watch the flow, watch the volume changing, the composition changing.” And over time and experience, you learn to—it’s like you can feel it on your fingertips. Now, that doesn’t make it easier for your listeners to understand how—I just mean that sometimes there is risk involved in all investing.

So the trick is that you’ve got to start small if you are thinking about this. You’ve got to dip your toe. You’ve got to hone your intuition around people. And then you’ve got to not invest too much—don’t put all your eggs in one basket. See how it goes. And hopefully, you back a couple of winners. It’s a little bit like gambling in some ways.

Trey Downes: Now, is that a thrill for you? I mean, when you invest, are you hands-on, or do you kind of sit back and just kind of watch?

Barbara Turley: I sit back, generally. I have no interest in being involved. I run my own company, I’m like, oh my God, I’m too busy doing that. I think as well, I’ve also invested with people who have extreme experience in the thing that they’re doing. So, you know, it’s not just knowing that they have the right—you know, people who are magnetic—you know they’re going to be winners. But they also have the experience. They’ve either done this before, they’ve been involved in other startups, or they have a background in the industry they’re going into. That can be a good thing, but it’s not necessarily the thing that makes one person successful over another.

Trey Downes: So talk about The Virtual Hub. I know that you run a team of—I think you call it Angel—what is it? What is it? It’s virtual angels or something like that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, well look—so the company is now called The Virtual Hub, but in the early days I actually called it Virtual Angel Hub. And the reason I called it that is because I was like—virtual assistants in the Philippines, for me, were like angels that flew down from heaven and took all my to-do lists off me and lifted my overwhelm off me so I could actually move faster and get things done. A couple of years later, I found that the word “angel” was becoming problematic in lots of ways, and we rebranded. So we rebranded to The Virtual Hub, which is more of a neutral-style brand because obviously we’ve got a lot of male clients, got a lot of male VAs, and all that sort of thing. So yeah, but they are like angels sent from heaven sometimes.

Trey Downes: So talk about that. What is a virtual assistant?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So a virtual assistant—and actually, this is a great question because people often mix up virtual assistants with strategists. That sounds crazy, but people think they’re going to get more than what they will with an assistant. The problem with the word “virtual assistant” is it’s very broad. It can mean anyone from someone with a heartbeat that can type to someone who can build a website and code an app, right? And all of a sudden, everyone thinks these are all virtual assistants. There are generalist virtual assistants, and then there are very specialized ones that are coders and developers, and they’re not virtual assistants really—they’re just specialists. So in the pure sense of the word, a virtual assistant is someone who is going to come in and assist you to execute the processes and the systems that you have built and that you’re going to train that person on. They are an assistant, and that is really—it’s a crucial thing to get right because I see businesses all the time hiring a virtual assistant and, as someone put it to me, throwing a body at the problem. So the problem is you’re overwhelmed, and your answer is to throw a body at the problem. That doesn’t help at all. You’ve got to build your processes, your systems, and then you’ve got to bring someone in and teach them how to run your systems and processes in your business for you. That’s a virtual assistant.

Trey Downes: So, so I wrote a podcast. What would a virtual assistant do for me?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, perfect one, because I also run a podcast—shameless plug—called The Virtual Success Show, where we talk about all this stuff.

Trey Downes: Check her out.

Barbara Turley: We talk about all this stuff on the podcast. And the only part of the podcast that I do is I show up and I record or I interview people. Then we drop it—I’ve got a co-host as well—and we drop it in Dropbox, and there is an entire process that we’ve created that it just shows up everywhere on social media. There’s snippets everywhere, the correct links, it’s on our website, there’s images attached, it’s optimized for traffic. But we worked really hard on creating that process and nailing it, and then getting our VAs to run it like a well-oiled machine and report back to us properly on results, what they’re doing, having oversight over it. And that means that you can keep your podcast going without doing all the work.

Trey Downes: How did you come up with this idea?

Barbara Turley: Probably, yeah, that’s a good question. Probably through sheer overwhelm. One of my—I mean, overwhelm, I still suffer from it—but one of my missions with The Virtual Hub is to help smaller businesses eradicate the incredible overwhelm that just engulfs you with all the stuff, all the doing that has to be done in any small business, even medium business. And the key—look, the overwhelm will increase if you hire people, be they virtual assistants or other, and you’re not set up properly before those people arrive to work in your business. If you just, like I said, throw a body at the problem, you will be even more overwhelmed. So a lot of what we do at The Virtual Hub is to help clients to, first of all, get ready, help them to realize there is some work involved in this, and then we’ll put your person in and help you to do that and get success with it.

Trey Downes: It’s an interesting transition, going from the financial world to the virtual assistant world. How did you start that? What sparked it? That is blowing my mind.

Barbara Turley: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, look, you would think with my background that I had strategized this up, I created a business plan. No, I didn’t. This was totally by accident. I mean, this was like the most accidental thing that happened. I left my corporate job. Now, I was an employee in an asset management firm that I was also a shareholder in, so it was kind of an interesting dynamic. And I remained a shareholder, but I left as an employee because I wanted to run my own business, I wanted to build my own company. Didn’t really know what that looked like, but I had a keen interest in digital marketing content, all this stuff. So I became a business coach and consultant, which a lot of corporates, when they leave their corporate job, the easiest way to make money quickly is to consult. And I found that I was consulting to small businesses, and I could see they all had the same problem, regardless of the industry or the business. They all were overwhelmed and had no time. Couldn’t afford to hire staff in their own country, but just were doing everything themselves. You can’t grow if you’re doing that. You just can’t. It’s very difficult. So I had read The 4-Hour Workweek, like everybody else, Tim Ferriss’s amazing book. I had gotten myself a VA in the Philippines online, and I started recruiting. I started finding VAs online just to help clients out. And before I knew it, I was getting phone calls way more for VAs than it was for business coaching. And one day I was like, I wonder, is there a business in this? So I put on a webinar. I had built a list online at this stage—not huge, maybe two or 3,000 people—had a bit of a following, put on a webinar. I was like, hey, do you want to learn how to do this? And I made an offer at the end, and I got 10 buyers, and I was like, boom, we’re in business. No website, no name, no concept, nothing, no business plan.

Trey Downes: That’s crazy.

Barbara Turley: Five years later, we have 100 people in the Philippines. Full offices. I have a company over there. It’s like, it’s crazy, yeah.

Trey Downes: What’s your exit strategy on that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, well, hopefully I can exit with a few less wrinkles and gray hair, but it’s challenging. I’ll be open—it’s a challenging business to be in. I mean, it’s very rewarding, but it has taken me probably the guts of four years to learn what I didn’t know I didn’t know about the Philippines, about running people, HR, all that stuff. I think I would have built it much bigger, much faster had I had more of a plan and had I had more experience in that particular arena of HR management of people, et cetera. So it took me a long—I think it’s taken me a long time to get to 100 people. Other companies have thousands of people in the Philippines. But our growth now—last year I set up a Philippine company. I made everyone an employee. I got all their benefits sorted out and their healthcare and made it—I legitimized the whole thing. And we are growing much faster now. So I can see that next year we can double and probably the year after double again. So exit strategy—I’ve always wanted to build a company that had impact and that could one day be sold, should I ever choose to do that. I’m not sure if I ever will, but you always want to build a company that you’re going to design so that it can be sold, even if you never intend to. My goal right now is to get to 500 staff. I’d like to have a humming, successful 500-person-strong business that has a strong brand globally, but also a strong employee brand in the Philippines where people—the culture is strong. People want to work there, like the Google of the Philippines.

Trey Downes: So talk about how you left your job and you were setting out to be a consultant and coach. Were you scared? Were you nervous? Talk about your emotions when you made that transition, that leap of faith.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it is an extreme—anyone listening to this who’s doing it, thinking about it, has done it, knows it’s very challenging. It’s your fears. It’s almost harder leaving corporate with the big salaries and all that because you’re leaving a lot behind, and the risk of not making the money and having to pair back your lifestyle can be debilitating emotionally. And then the other issue I faced was the fear of what will people think? What will all my ex-corporate buddies think of me working at home and trying to make a crust out there on my own? Even if you’re a very strong person, those emotions will take you over. So it’s about—my biggest tip on how to do this right is to get fully prepared before you do it. And that’s not just emotionally, it’s financially. So what I did was two things. I did get lucky—not everyone’s going to have this experience—but mind you, it was five years of planning. I got an opportunity to do that management buyout, to be involved in something in the corporate world first, and I saw that as my ticket out. I thought this thing is either going to—I had a feeling it was going to go really well—and I thought, well, it’s going to kind of cushion me. And I had some income from that after five years, but it was five years of building that. And I learned a lot from being in that kind of half-in, half-out scenario.

But what I think you’ve got to do—the other thing I did was I paired back my expenses incredibly. I mean, I literally—there was one stage I had no car for a few years. I really pared everything back. I stopped with all the lifestyle that goes with corporate. I just stopped all of that. And you absolutely have to do that if you’re thinking about leaving and being serious about running your own thing. Because when the money starts to go down, the savings that you’ve put away compounds all the emotion and the feeling of not being good enough and all these things that are going to come up for you as a high achiever who was once in corporate. So a lot of that came up.

Trey Downes: So it took you five years to get out. What was the day that you decided that you wanted out? Was it an event? Was it the corporate lifestyle? What was it that made you want to be an entrepreneur?

Barbara Turley: Look, I had originally wanted to get out on the first day of the five-year plan. So it wasn’t really a five-year plan. I did decide—look, it’s a bit different for me because I’m female as well. So I had been on the trading floors for like 10 years, loved it in my 20s. It was great fun, fast-paced, lots of partying, all that sort of jazz. Then I got to about 29, and I could see pretty clearly that this was not sustainable if you want to have a family, if you want to meet someone. So really not a sustainable life. And I was exhausted by the time I got to kind of 29 and thought, I can’t keep doing this. So I just started to have a craving for something different. I get bored quickly. I think that’s also my nature. So once I do something for kind of five, 10 years, I’m like, okay, I want to do something totally different. And I did, but I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, I had no plan. And like I said, I got a lucky break that I got involved in this management buyout situation. And I remember the opportunity was shown to me, and I was like, yep, I’m in. I just knew that I wanted to learn. I had a lot to learn. So I used that as my kind of springboard.

Trey Downes: So you didn’t know a whole lot about what life was going to look like after you left. Was there anything, as far as resources that you read up on, or was it just kind of like, you know what, I’m just going to go ahead and see what happens?

Barbara Turley: No, I did do a lot of planning. I mean, I started—the first thing I started doing was—when you’re in corporate, you’re very shielded from all the online stuff, like even all these podcasts and everything. When I was in corporate, I wasn’t listening to any of this stuff. I wasn’t surrounded by people who were doing any of this stuff. So I think the first step really is to start changing the podcasts you’re listening to, the webinars you’re attending, and you need to start opening your mind to all this stuff that’s going on out there. Read about startups, read about the mistakes, interview people, talk to people. And eventually, you start to get a feel for what’s going on out there. And then you start to feel like you’re in a new space. So that’s what I started to do.

Trey Downes: Talk about being a mother and being a CEO. Like, how do you balance that?

Barbara Turley: Yes, I get asked this one a lot. People say, are you completely mental? So I have a four-and-a-half-year-old business, and I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. So you can imagine. So the trick with this is—I do get times of massive overwhelm, I will be honest—but I do structure my day. I’m very strict with my time. So I’m very strict that I don’t farm my daughter out to daycare five days a week or anything like that. I’ve got her in daycare three days a week. When she was a baby, it was probably like she was nine months old before I did anything. I just used her sleep times. And you have to become a master delegator. You have to get the three things you have to get right: systems, processes, and team delegation. And if you nail those three things and you’re strict with your time—and it’s not easy to nail those things, by the way, you’ve got a lot of things that you’ve got to get right there—but you become the conductor of the orchestra. You’re not the person playing all the instruments.

So if you’re still playing any of the instruments, you need to stop doing that because you need to teach someone else how to play it. And then you’ve got to be the conductor, the leader, and learn to lead. And that is something I didn’t know that I was good at until I stepped out of corporate. And I realized that so many things I learned in my corporate career that seemed like second nature to me, other people didn’t really know how to do this, particularly in the entrepreneurial world. All those meeting rhythms and agendas and milestones and deadlines and how to run projects and things like that—I was able to actually do that and to lead that sort of thing. And you have to become 100% committed to that.

Trey Downes: Well, that just goes to show leadership, right? Like being the conductor of the orchestra—you were forced into a situation where you had to be that. Do you think people were born with that, or is it learned?

Barbara Turley: Yes, they can—it can be learned. Most people will not. Some people are very good at it, but leadership style is a problem too. And look, I’m good at some parts of it. There’s definitely parts of it I need to be better at. I think I have a natural bent towards being good at it, but I have managed to teach some of our clients who weren’t naturally good at it. There’s just some tricks and tools and strategies, and once you nail them and you commit to them from a mindset perspective—you can’t fall into the “won’t work for my business, this doesn’t work for me.” I always say to clients, if that’s how you think, then you’ll still be in the same situation in 12 months’ time that you are today. That’s just how it is, right? So you either learn to run a business like it’s a machine, or you pedal for the rest of your life. That’s just my view, to be honest. A business is a machine, right? Systems run your business, people run your systems. That’s kind of how you stop the IP walking out the door as well, that whole problem of people leaving.

Trey Downes: I really love that. Man, I don’t know why they don’t teach us in school. It’s crazy.

Barbara Turley: Yeah.

Trey Downes: So what would you say to Barbara when she’s 21? Like, what advice would you give her?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, you know, I would give her the advice—don’t obsess so much about what you’re going to be. When you leave school, you leave uni, you’re like, I want to be a—I always wanted to be like a doctor or a lawyer. I needed to define what it was I was going to be. And I really struggled with that for a long time because I didn’t get into medicine. And I did really well at school, but I didn’t quite make it in there. And what I discovered about myself along the way is I’m a bit of a free spirit. Sometimes you just got to roll with it, and you’ve got to learn to see your opportunities because there’s opportunity everywhere. And it’s better to learn that skill than to pigeonhole yourself too early.

Trey Downes: How good are you as far as recognizing the opportunity? Is there something that you feel inside of you saying, look, you might want to look at this or take the chance right now? Is there something inside of you, or can you just realize that it’s going to happen?

Barbara Turley: Look, I will say it is something I’m very good at. I don’t know whether it’s part intuition, part deep training of being—like anyone who’s worked on a trading floor will probably know what I mean. When you’re in the financial markets, money moves so fast. Things change on a dime. Other people won’t see it, and you’ll be like, I can see it changing. And I just find it hard to explain to other people how I do that. I don’t know if I can teach that. I just think it’s been honed over years of having to do it as a job. I literally did it for 10 years.

Trey Downes: Has there ever been an example of a time where you just felt like something was guiding you, something was leading you to a certain purpose or a certain event, and you didn’t see it at all, but then when it happened, you’re like, that’s why this happened?

Barbara Turley: Well, this business is probably the greatest one because I didn’t see this one coming. Had I been—I think sometimes when people get really stuck on a business plan or a strategic direction and they don’t remain slightly open and slightly fluid, you can’t pivot. So you have to be able to go, you know what, close that, open this. Like, okay, we’re moving out of that, we’re moving into this, or make definitive, fast decisions. And I think that’s something I’m naturally good at. Yeah, people have asked me why I have been successful in this particular business, and it is actually—I’ve equated it to being like I’m still trading. There’s still supply-demand dynamics. Like, for example, we run 24-hour time. We run all time zones. So 24-hour operations in the Philippines. That’s three different time zones. We have three different levels of VA, and we do part-time and full-time staff. And we have clients coming in with different briefs. We have VAs coming in and doing different things in training. And every day, we all come together on a pipeline huddle meeting, the whole team, where I’ve got the trainers and everyone on there. And basically, my role on that meeting every day is to match supply and demand. And it’s like being a trader. It’s the same skills. And I didn’t realize that until recently when somebody asked me why I am successful at this. I think that’s it. I always seem to—the trades work out okay. But it’s hard.

Trey Downes: Yeah, well, I think making decisions is always hard. I don’t know. I see it too in my leadership role where it’s hard to get people to make decisions. And I think the biggest takeaway is just make one. And if it’s the wrong one, then we’ll go back and we’ll look at it and look at your options that you had available to yourself. And if there was a better one, we’ll look at that and why you didn’t choose that, and we can go from there. I think the biggest problem that people have is that they’re just scared to make a decision. They’re scared. Just do something. Just choose to do something. If it’s not the right thing, then go back to the drawing board if it’s the wrong choice and see why you made that choice and then try to work on it in the future.

Barbara Turley: I 100% agree because even when you’re a trader, right, in the financial markets, you can buy or sell, right? There’s only two. You’ve got to do one. If you sit there and do nothing, you’re not in the game. The minute you make a decision, then you’re in the game. You’re in flow, right? So you make a decision, you see what happens. You’ve got to pivot and move and make another decision. The problem—you’re right—when people get stuck in indecision or no decision, they are no longer in the game, and everyone else is playing. Things are happening around you, but you’re not in it. And you need to be in it in order to win it.

Trey Downes: Can you carry that over to your personal life?

Barbara Turley: I do pretty much, yeah. I don’t like indecision. I don’t like sitting in—if there is a situation where I don’t make a decision, at this point in my life—I’m now in my 40s—I finally have accepted that when I don’t make a decision, I need to stop thinking about it and allow it to percolate longer in the back of my head without thinking about it, because there is going to be a reason that it’s going to come up later as to why it wasn’t—there’s a reason intuitively that I’m not making a decision. Could be a better opportunity has come.

Trey Downes: Are you scared of making the wrong decision?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I think we all suffer from that fear. I mean, of course, there is the “feel the fear and do it anyway” kind of thing. There’s always fear. But again, it’s a skill in my career that was honed where I was almost bullied into making fast decisions really quickly and then having to switch decision-making fast. Yeah.

Trey Downes: That’s crazy. I don’t know how I would work under those circumstances of just being, like you said, bullied into making a decision. I guess you just kind of learn that, right? Like you come in as a rookie and you don’t really—you’re so green and you don’t really know what’s going on, and you’ve got to make these second decisions. And it’s like you’ve got people pressuring you like that. Talk about pressure—that is immense pressure. I don’t know how you could do something like that and actually like it.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I enjoyed it, though, and that could be my personality. I thrive on that sort of—I did actually love that, and I loved the dynamic nature of it, probably because I get bored quickly. I don’t like routine. So I love—I used to go to work every day and not have any idea what’s going to happen. But again, I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to work in a hospital. My original plan was I want to be a doctor in a hospital where it’s crazy, like in the ER and all that. So obviously my personality was drawn to that sort of fast environment, I guess.

Trey Downes: I like that. Yeah, I’m kind of the same way. Not so much of making quick decisions all the time, but I definitely like that fast pace. I think I’m like you, get bored sitting still for a long period of time. But you said you are the type of person that is a free spirit. Your profile says you’re from Australia, but you have an Irish accent. How did you end up down under?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so again in my corporate career, you’ll actually laugh at this. So I was going great. I had this corporate career. I was 24, technically the time in your life when you don’t want to be, you know, making massive changes. You want to go on that career path, right? And I was like, you know what? I’m kind of sick of this. I want to go to Australia for a year and go backpacking. And my boss at the time was like, you’re making the biggest mistake of your career. You’re this, you’re that. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, maybe, I don’t know, I’m going anyway. So I just am a bit like that. I kind of got bored of the, and I fully believed, nobody could tell me that I couldn’t take a year off and come back and just pick up where I left off with another firm. Now, maybe that was just a bit of, you know, I don’t know, is that egotistical? Is that what? I just felt like, well, I’ll just deal with that when I come back. And I did, and you know, so I went to Australia as a backpacker, absolutely loved it here. Went back to Dublin after a year, got back in the career and everything took off, actually took off even better than it was before. But I couldn’t let go of Australia. I was like, wow, I just loved that lifestyle. So I literally left again and was like, you know what, I’m just gonna go to Australia on a holiday visa and I’m gonna use all my contacts in London and all the investment banks and I’m gonna tell them, you’ve got to introduce me to people in Sydney in the investment banks here, because I’m going down there and I’m gonna get a job. And I did. I worked at UBS for about a few months and had a 10-year career here.

Trey Downes: Wow, talk about like just picking up and going and just living your life. Like that is an example of that. Like I think so many people live this life of comfort. Like they never leave, you know, here in the States, they never leave where they come from because they’re scared of the outside bubble that they’ll get into and that, that uncomfortableness of just that, I don’t know, uneasiness of change. And like I, like, I used to be like that. Like I, I’m from a small town in Delaware. And when I came to the city, it was kind of like, wow, like it was kind of a wake up call. It was kind of like, you know, I love this, but I didn’t realize that until I got there. I went backpacking in Bangkok and Thailand for a month in college. And it was phenomenal. Even though I was like that small town, like country guy, like, haven’t really flown anywhere and then end up going 24 hours on a plane to Bangkok and then hanging out with some buddies for a month, going to two weeks in Bangkok and then two weeks south of Thailand was, I grew up so quick. Like it was just phenomenal. And like that sparked like something inside of me to like really chase and pursue my dreams. And I think what you’re doing now is, is just that, like you’re pursuing your dreams. You’re pursuing.

You’ve created something, right? You stepped outside of your comfort zone, left the corporate world. You created this. Well, it wasn’t what you started at first. You wanted to go to like the coaching and that side of things, but it evolved into this.

Barbara Turley: It’s something you can teach your kids as well. Travel is such an important thing for your children and to teach your children and to let them go because they will learn this early in life, that you can spread your wings and you can see how different cultures do things and things will keep moving. Stuff will happen.

Trey Downes: Yeah, it’s a great lesson for everybody because it’s like even though you might take that leap of faith towards something, things could change and you might find something else that you’re better at. Not saying you’re not a good coach or speaker or anything like that.

Barbara Turley: I was a horrible coach, I’ll be honest with you. I also hated it. So I actually am so glad. I have no patience, you know, like I just think, I’m a good coach to a point and then when people don’t take action, I’m like, oh, come on. Like I just, I just can’t bear it. I know. Yeah. Oh, about a year and a half. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh look, some of the people I coached would say I was a great coach, but I got to the point where I was like, look, if you don’t do what I’m doing, I got to the point where I was saying to people, if you do everything I tell you to do, right, you will be successful. But if you start fumbling around and messing and not doing it and taking action, you’ll end up in the same position that you are today in 12 months time. And I became a little bit too, that’s quite an aggressive line to take with people who are trying to be coached. But I realized through coaching that I actually want to build a company. I don’t really want to coach other people to build theirs. That’s the truth.

Trey Downes: That’s powerful. That’s powerful. Do you ever get to go to the Philippines to visit your employees there?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I do, I was just there in September, yeah. I mean it’s an awesome spot. I don’t get to go for long, that’s the problem because I have a two year old, so I kind of fly over, fly back, and I’m like working 24 hours when I’m there, but it is…

Trey Downes: How long’s that flight?

Barbara Turley: Eight hours from, yeah, but it’s a beautiful location. Like, the most beautiful beaches in the world and everything are in the Philippines.

Trey Downes: I want to respect your time, how can people connect with you?

Barbara Turley: Sure, so the quickest way, if you want to connect with me personally, LinkedIn is kind of where I connect with people. I share some content and stuff over there. If you want to know more about The Virtual Hub, you can go to thevirtualhub.com and connect with, you can book a free strategy call actually with one of our consultants there. You don’t get to talk to me, because like I said, I’m a terrible coach. The only time people get to talk to me is through these podcasts, because I’m too busy trying to run the ship.

Trey Downes: That is awesome. And what’s your podcast? Go ahead and plug that again.

Barbara Turley: Sure, it’s the Virtual Success Show and that is on iTunes. It’s also under the content section on our website, thevirtualhub.com. We’ve got the podcast there. We also have lots of guides. So, you know, we’ve got like over on the website, we’ve got a ton of guides about like how to secure your business before a VA, what questions to ask in interviews. Tons of content over there to help you guys with outsourcing and VAs and all that stuff.

Trey Downes: What episode are you guys on?

Barbara Turley: We’re on, oh, you know what? I should know that off the top of my head. I don’t know. I think it’s about 55 or something. But we’ve even, we do shows like, for example, we have a show, when is it time to fire your VA? Like, it’s like literally the questions that we get asked. So it’s very tactical.

Trey Downes: That’s great, though.

Barbara Turley: It’s not just waffle. Very tactical show.

Trey Downes: I’ve been thinking about getting a VA for a long time. What is the average cost?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so obviously if you go direct, you can obviously get cheaper VAs. You can go direct to market and get them on Upwork and all these places if you have time for that. For us, the cost, we do multi-currency pricing. We operate in all time zones. So for the US market, for example, our pricing is from eight US an hour up to 12 US an hour. But we do a minimum of 20 hours a week. We’re more like a dedicated staff kind of place. We don’t do like two and three hours and stuff like that.

Trey Downes: Barbara, real quick, at the end of my shows I always try to have the guest kind of give me like a kind of like a pep talk. So I’ll give you a scenario, like let’s say I am an employee in a corporate setting and I want to go out on my own and create and build my own corporation. I have reservations. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I know that my heart isn’t in my work. What would your advice be to them as far as going out and achieving their goal?

Barbara Turley: Okay, so the first step definitely before you even think about a business plan or anything is to take a look at your own personal financial situation and you take a knife. This is where you’ve got to like, do some financial planning. You start to look at your, the way you live, where you spend money and the way you live, the way you spend money and where you spend money. And you have to ask yourself, what am I willing to slice to take a knife to in terms of my expenses in order to make this dream of mine happen?

And that’s where you will find that you will come up against a lot of emotional barriers around, my friends all like to eat at this amazing five star restaurant and blah, blah, blah. Cause you won’t be doing that anymore. So you’ve got to like, you’ve got to be realistic. There will be a few years where it will be quite tight and you’ve got to ask yourself like, am I willing to take the pain? And if the answer to that question is hell yeah, I don’t even care.

Then you take the next step is then you’ve got to figure out what… I would look at your expertise and don’t discount what you’ve learned in the corporate world because I did and I didn’t think that I had learned anything particularly useful. It turned out that I had a lot of skills that I didn’t realize I had. And consulting is the fastest way to earn money quickly, but it also is the fastest way to figure out what is the problem that my great business is going to solve that people will pay money for today.

And the only way to get the true answer to that is to go and consult for a little while. Now that’s if you’re doing like, you may end up in an e-commerce business. You may end up in, I don’t know, selling scooters online or something, but even with something like that, unless you’ve got a background in that, just be careful like launching into something massive like that because you, you know, you might, there’s a lot of things you don’t know you don’t. And my final tip. All the social media that you see about all these guys doing seven-figure funnels and eight-figure this and blah, blah, blah, nothing is easy. It is hard work in the beginning. It will pay off, but you’ve got to just focus your attention really heavily on your customer or client and solving whatever it is that is their pain point.

Trey Downes: Beautiful. I love that. What? Why do you think people quit? Like what you see these guys on YouTube or Instagram and they’re creating these videos and they’re not getting the results they want. It’s like, is it a generational thing or is it like they’re just, I don’t know, are they just not seeing the results that they want?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, I think it’s a bit of an emotional roller coaster like we talked about. I mean, my first thing after the corporate world, was consulting and coaching, but I also had a platform called a website called Energize Wealth, which was all about, I had this vision of inspiring more women to be into the money game, right? Because I found it quite an exciting game. So I had this whole feminine, I wanted to make a website that was like a Vogue magazine, but had all these very meaty topics. I had… I did an online TV show called Feminine Wealth TV. I did loads of things. I did it all. I even did this massive product launch that kind of flopped. And the problem was that I didn’t know this at the time. I was probably at a tipping point, but I was so exhausted by the product launch and by the whole failure of it, and then the emotional thing of what will people think, that I just kind of disappeared off the scene for four months and couldn’t, I just couldn’t handle it. And I did more coaching. And then out of the ashes of that, that’s where The Virtual Hub came from. So maybe it was a good thing, but I think sometimes we just give up because we run out of energy. And you don’t realize that you’re at, you might be at the tipping point, but you might be a year away from the tipping point as well, you don’t know.

Trey Downes: You just don’t know. You don’t know unless you keep going, right? You keep going. You gotta keep going.

Barbara Turley: Well, you’ve got to keep shifting and changing too though, because if you keep going persistent, like people say you have to be persistent. I’m like, well, if you’re persistently going after the wrong thing that’s not working, well, you’re just going to tire yourself out. You need to really, you know, I heard Eben Pagan once say, he’s like one of those big marketers. He said something that was pivotal for me. He said, with marketing, stop expecting it to work because 99% of the time it won’t work. And you’ve got your job as a marketer is to keep testing and trying and measuring and testing new things to find the thing. And when you’ve hit on the thing that works, it will explode. But because we keep expecting all these webinars to work and funnels and online whatever, you know, we get a bit, I know I became kind of down about the fact that I wasn’t, it wasn’t working for me, but it won’t work. Most of it won’t work.

Trey Downes: What’s your favorite quote? Inspirational quote.

Barbara Turley: Feel the fear and do it anyway. My mother.

Trey Downes: Ohh.

Barbara Turley: My mother, I think I was lucky. I mean, I had very strong parents, but my mom used to say that to me as a child all the time. You can be anything you want to be, just feel the fear and do it anyway. So maybe that’s why I am the way I am.

Trey Downes: What book has inspired you to become the entrepreneur that you are today?

Barbara Turley: I have to remember the names, isn’t that terrible? You know that one, I think it’s called, is it Built to Sell? I think it’s called Built to Sell. I should know the name, I know the content. But it was a pivotal book for me where I really, when there’s a few of them. There’s The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. I mean, I kind of knew that stuff, but when I read the book, it really cemented what I intuitively already knew, that a business is a machine. Systems run your business, don’t get caught up in the whole people thing, you need people, but you need to build a machine. And that cemented that thinking for me. And then the next one, think it’s one of those Rockefeller books, ahh gee, I’ll have to come back to you on that, Built to Sell.

Trey Downes: Built to Sell, creating a business that can thrive without you. Does that sound familiar?

Barbara Turley: Yes.

Trey Downes: By John.

Barbara Turley: Yes.

Trey Downes: Yeah, I cannot pronounce his last name.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a great book. Yeah, that’s a story book actually. It’s like a story about this guy in New York who has this advertising agency and one of his friends is a billionaire and he helps him to build a machine basically. So that kind of cemented again. Not as often as I’d like. I used to be a huge reader. These days I listen to podcasts a lot because well, you know, I’m out walking with my daughter. I’m being a mom most of the time. I can’t really read a book when you’re, the nighttime it’s like read a book. My God.

Trey Downes: How often do you read?

Barbara Turley: Not as often as I’d like. I used to be a huge reader. These days, I listen to podcasts a lot because, well, you know, I’m out walking with my daughter. I’m being a mom most of the time. You can’t really read a book when you’re in nighttime, it’s like, read a book.

Trey Downes: Barbara, thank you so much for joining the show today. It has been an honor to have you on my show. I cannot wait to check in with you in the future and see how much of the VA world you’re tearing it up.

Barbara Turley: Thank you for having me.

Trey Downes: I want to say thank you to Barbara for coming on the show today and hanging out and giving us a ton of valuable content and great advice. Learn from her experience and take it all in.

If you would like to follow me on Instagram, can follow me at Tdowns80, on Twitter at DownsTrey. Hit me up on Facebook at Trey Downes, D-O-W-N-E-S. Hit me up over there and see some of the behind the scenes activities that I am currently doing. You can also check out my YouTube channel. I think it’s Trey Downes. I can’t remember. It’s… I’ve been putting some content up there recently.

And I can’t remember. I think it’s, yeah, check me out. Trey Downes over there. I’m some your superior self-ranse, getting into that platform a little bit. And also, if you’re in the Canton area, I am trying to start a coworking space over there, building the community currently.

It’s gonna be a community that is supportive about your success and supportive about your needs to achieve that success. It’s like a brick and mortar mastermind, I guess. I’m building the community as we speak and our next meetup is going to be February 24th at 12 PM. If you want more information on our coworking space in Baltimore, hit me up at Trade Downes, D O W N E S at superiorself.net. Email me your thoughts, your concerns. Let me know if you’re interested. We are building the community early and we want to get people that are like-minded about success and community driven to apply. If you guys want to hang out, you can come check us out on the 24th. It’s going to be at Smaltimore. Email me, or you can check us out on Meetup. We have a place over there. It’s going to be under blend Baltimore. I’m super excited to start that journey in my life and I hope to see you guys over there. Check me out, hit me up, whatever you want to do. I’m here for you guys and I will talk to you guys later.