Cashflow Hustle: Hey there, everyone. We have a few deals we’re working on coming down the pipeline in the online business and real estate investment spaces. If you’re an accredited investor interested in passively investing in various commercial real estate opportunities or anyone interested in investing in online businesses alongside me, then head on over to jbgcapital.com/show. Choose the topic you want to chat about, fill out the form, and schedule a call. Hope to talk to you soon. And now for the good stuff.

VoiceActor: Welcome to the Cash Flow Hustle Podcast, the show provides listeners with massive value through guidance, tips, and stories from a broad spectrum of active entrepreneurs and thought leaders in the real estate, business, financial, and personal improvement arenas. If you find yourself on the journey to financial freedom and independence and are looking to get out and stay out of the rat race, then buckle in as we take a deep dive to help you achieve the life of abundance and fulfillment that is rightfully yours. And now here’s your host and fellow cash flow hustler, Justin Grimes.

Justin Grimes: Hey there, fellow cash flow hustlers. This is your host, Justin Grimes. I appreciate you tuning into the show today as we explore actionable tips and stories aimed at creating cash flow and ultimately a more fulfilling life. With us today is Barbara Turley. Barbara, how are you?

Barbara Turley: I’m good. Thanks, Justin. Thanks for having me.

Justin Grimes: Yeah, awesome. Happy to have you all the way from Australia.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I’m living in Australia, but like you were chatting earlier, I hail from Ireland originally, but I’m living here in Australia now.

Justin Grimes: Awesome. I appreciate you hopping on from around the world basically today. So a little bit about Barbara. She is the founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, one of the fastest growing producers of digital marketing virtual assistants for businesses who need to free up time and eradicate overwhelm by leveraging highly cost effective offshore teams. After a corporate career spanning 15 years in the investment banking industry, she started her corporate escape from within by jumping on a management buyout business opportunity.

The Power of Strategic Outsourcing

This led her onto a journey into entrepreneurship, Angel investing, and to develop a keen interest in scalable business models, content marketing, and all things digital. So that’s the bio I got. You mind sharing a little bit more about your background and what you’re up to these days?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So at the moment, I’m the founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub, which is a business in the Philippines that recruits, trains, and manages. We basically produce virtual assistants, well trained in that digital space. But, you know, given that, you would sort of think that my background was all in HR management or at least recruitment or something to do with training, but it actually is not. My whole background was in finance, in the investment banking world. Actually, I spent a very long time on the equity trading floors of investment banks. I was involved in the asset management side of the business. I was involved in sales, nothing to do with the Philippines or teams or running anything like this. So I always call it my accidental business because I didn’t actually mean to end up in this arena at all, it just kind of happened organically.

Justin Grimes: And did that opportunity just present itself? Did you find yourself in need of this, you know, virtual assistants and things like that? So you just kind of filled that void and grew business out of that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So basically, obviously I had a very long corporate career. And like many people, when they leave the corporate world, the first thing that you end up doing is a bit of coaching and consulting because it’s the fastest path to cash. And also you get great insight into what businesses are struggling with or what you might actually sell to them.

And what I noticed was pretty much all the businesses I was working with, they all had the same problem regardless of the industry, what they were doing. And the problem they had was essentially that they were just buried in overwhelm and they didn’t have the funds necessary to hire people in their own country because a lot of these were small businesses and they were just getting buried by all the to do lists that needed to be done. And you can’t really grow business successfully if you don’t have people you can delegate to.

So I started recruiting. I had read Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week like, you know, the whole world had. I had a virtual assistant myself in the Philippines, and I just started recruiting them to help clients, not as a business at all. It was just like a kind of an add on thing. And then before I knew it, I was getting more demand for that than I was for business coaching. So I was like, yeah, I think there’s a business in this. That was kind of it, right? It just started like that.

Justin Grimes: Yep. Interesting. So let’s kind of jump into, I suppose, the power of virtual assistants. Was your first one helping you with business tasks or personal or a variety of things?

Barbara Turley: It was business. It was mainly business. So anybody running any sort of online strategies, even podcasts, you know, I’ve got a podcast, at the time I had an online TV show. I was blogging. I was doing the whole digital thing that really today any business is doing this sort of thing. And she was helping me with a lot of the, you know, I mean, obviously I was producing the content, but she was getting it up on the WordPress blog, putting images attached to it. She was making sure that the podcast went live on time, all that sort of thing. And it freed me up to make sure that I could actually get after sales and more like the cash flow, as this podcast is about, make sure that my focus was actually on where’s the money coming from as opposed to doing all the, you know, 5 or 10 dollar jobs that shouldn’t be taking up your time at all.

Justin Grimes: And how did you come up with that list? So I found myself in similar situations, certainly where I’ve got more tasks than time in the day. So how did you kind of come up with your list on what to delegate? Can you kind of walk through that process? I suppose what you find would be most effective.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s very overwhelming. So the biggest problem that I see, you know, clients who come to the virtual hub, they feel, I guess if they sat down and thought about it, they would kind of come up with a list. But you almost become rabbit in the headlights because you just don’t know where to start. You think, I have so much to do, but I just can’t write it down.

So my recommendation is always to first of all, accept that that is the way it is. And it’s OK to feel that. It doesn’t make you a bad business owner or anything like that. It’s more just even if you’re just a one person business, you want to kind of isolate each of the little departments that are in the business. So if it’s just you doing everything, there’s still marketing, finance, sales, you know, there’s even legal with contracts. There’s all these little areas within the business, and then you’ve got to write down within those each department.

There’s two kinds of task buckets that you want to look at. One is your recurring task list. That’s the stuff that keeps the engine of the business moving, the operational kind of stuff. And the other one is like your project task list. Let’s say you want to write an ebook, or you know the ebook you’ve been sitting on for four years trying to create because you just haven’t got time. Well, there’s a whole pile of tasks attached to getting that done that you could delegate to a VA. So you got to just methodically go through it and create your list.

Justin Grimes: OK. When you’re so after you’ve kind of identified what your list is and things like that, what do you find to be maybe one of the more effective ways to onboard or train that individual? Do you write standard operating procedures or record video? Or what have you found most effective?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So I think a combination of those is great. But let’s say you love to record video. What you can do is record the video of you doing it and then ask your virtual assistant as their first job to create an SOP based on video. But then you got to check that though, because lots of people are like, I told them to write an SOP and it wasn’t right. Like, well, you need to have some oversight.

So yeah, a combination of those things. It’s very important to remember that you can’t just hire someone and expect them to solve your problems for you. You hire a virtual assistant so that they can execute the processes and the standard operating procedures that you have developed for your business and you have trained them on and you’ve trained them to be successful in doing this. So that’s kind of where the assistant really helps.

Justin Grimes: OK, so you got to set them up to succeed by establishing what those clear objectives are and helping them to succeed. Yeah, how about from a performance? You know, I suppose you’re setting up those objectives and trying to establish measurable goals as far as maybe as simple as I need you to do this by this date or, you know, kind of how do you gauge the effectiveness or performance of that individual?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, whether they’re any good. Let’s be honest. Yeah. Look, let’s look at the elephant in the room. I mean, the Internet is littered with stories of people failing with outsourcing. You know, they had VAs who said they were working and they weren’t. There’s VAs that, you know, there’s a lot of these stories out there. It’s not as easy as people think to get right.

OK, so let’s assume for a second that you have a great person who’s smart with good communication skills and is genuinely showing up for work on time and doing the right thing. Because online we know that you can also get shafted. So you don’t know what people are actually doing.

So let’s assume for a second that you’ve done that, that bit is OK. Then it comes to your process. So if the person is genuinely following your process, let’s say mistakes are still happening. What you want to do is don’t shoot the messenger first. You want to try to look at your process and sit down with that person and discuss together why it is not working.

You might find that there’s a thought process that you have while you’re doing a process that that person doesn’t necessarily have and that you just then you might put some more steps into your process to teach somebody who’s not you to do it. So that’s number one.

If that’s still not working, you know, you will get to a point where you have to kind of try and get them into something else. Maybe they’re very creative and you’re giving them an analytical job. But again, that’s kind of the recruitment game.

Now, if you’re in a situation where you’re doing all of that and you’re still finding that this happens a lot, right? When I hear clients say, oh, well, she said she did the work and that it was in G Drive and I can’t find it. I just don’t know where it is, right? People do lie, right? So, you know, you’ve got to have your kind of intuition high as well. And you don’t want to be blaming people, but you want to make sure that your business is structured in a way that these things actually won’t happen, that you call people out, that you have oversight over what people are actually doing. And that’s OK, even in a virtual environment, to expect that of your employee or the person working for you.

Justin Grimes: OK. And, as far as your business scope, is this kind of so do you take a variety of clients and different niches and things like that? So for example, real estate professionals and things like that. Or do you have a specific niche?

Barbara Turley: No. So we have businesses all over the world. So we operate 24 hours. So we cover all time zones. But we have such diverse businesses. Like one of the businesses that we have is in Australia and they run, they’re a big fishing business. They teach people how to catch barramundi, which is a big fish in Australia, but they run massive online programs for this. So they have a digital component. Even though they are a fishing business, it is very much an online digital component. So we help them a lot with that.

So, the thread, I guess, you know, we have real estate agents, we’ve got naturopaths, we’ve got coaches, we’ve got e-commerce businesses with everything. But the thread that ties all of our clients together is that they all have a digital online presence or they have systems and sort of technology they’re using. You know, it might be Shopify or it could be WooCommerce or whatever. It could be Infusionsoft. The thread that ties them all together is the online digital space which we typically operate in.

Justin Grimes: OK. And can you kind of walk through maybe just the high level of what you would, what a customer of yours might expect? I guess as far as what your exploration phase may look like all the way to execution of a project?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, sure. So first of all, we do dedicated stuff. So we don’t actually do projects. There are companies that do that, but we are typically on the way in. We’re pretty strict about who we take on and that’s not just for our benefit but also for the benefit of those who come to us because everyone has a free outsourcing strategy call with we’ve got someone in Ireland and we’ve got someone in Australia, two guys that do that.

And basically what that call is about is to help people ascertain, first of all, is the business actually ready yet to bring in staff in, you know, do they have systems or is it just somebody going, you know what, I’m so overwhelmed I can’t cope, I needed a VA yesterday. And you’re like, OK, throwing a body at that problem is not going to solve that problem for you. And we help them to figure out how to solve it and then to come back to us.

The other thing is that sometimes, you know, if an accounting business came to us looking for a bookkeeper, we don’t do that. So we would just turn that away. So a lot of the initial stages are really helping us to figure out, is somebody ready? How do we help them to get ready? If they are ready, are we a good fit for them?

Then once we decide, that’s great, looks like we can work together, they come in and we take people through a fairly deep client onboarding experience where we actually teach them some. It’s sort of project management 101, but we teach them best practice for, you know, using LastPass, how to secure your business when working online, how to set up your project management tools so that when the VA actually comes to work with them, they feel completely ready, totally on board with how we operate. And they know how to get success within what we actually do.

So we’re very much about, we’re not just a recruiter, we’re very much about trying to help people to get success with this so that they don’t waste time, energy, and money. Now, it doesn’t always work out 100% of the time, of course, with people, businesses, but we do have a high success rate, which we’re proud of. Yeah.

Justin Grimes: Nice. As far as the recruiting process of your talent there in the Philippines, can you talk a little bit about that or you guys, how did you find that talent?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So the reason we chose the Philippines, number one, people have said, why wouldn’t you go to Vietnam and all these other countries? Look, I’ve had a lot of success in the Philippines. The education system is great there. The English is very strong, and they’ve got a very Western kind of vibe about them. So it’s, culturally, the closest culture you’re going to get in the Asian region for outsourcing. So that’s the reason that we are there.

But in terms of recruitment, I’ll be another elephant in the room. It is hard, right? I mean, I’ll tell you the stats. We would hire, for every 100 people that apply for a job with us, we would probably hire between 2 and 5. Now 5 would be on a good stretch. It’s usually around 2 to 3, and that’s after kind of anywhere from a two to six week process that they have intensive with us.

So we don’t just recruit. Look, I’m not a believer in resumes or interviews because you can say anything in an interview. You can say anything on a resume. We actually bring people in and we put them to work for a while, and they have to go into a training program and a vetting program with us, and they’ve got to bring it and show it to us. And every day we actually cut people out. We’re like, not, not, not going to make the cut now, sorry, goodbye, you know, best of luck, but not for us. And then we whittle it right down.

And what we actually find is that, interestingly, sometimes the people with the most experience who you’re really excited about turn out to have really bad work ethic or low character or just disappear or stuff that you just don’t want happening. From HR perspective, we had one guy that was stealing, we caught that early before we put that into a client’s business. So that’s kind of how we vet them. It’s been a very, very long time.

Justin Grimes: OK. And, as far as your business scope, is this kind of so do you take a variety of clients and different niches and things like that? So for example, real estate professionals and things like that. Or do you have a specific niche?

Barbara Turley: No. So we have businesses all over the world. So we operate 24 hours. So we cover all time zones. But we have such diverse businesses. Like one of the businesses that we have is in Australia and they run, they’re a big fishing business. They teach people how to catch barramundi, which is a big fish in Australia, but they run massive online programs for this. So they have a digital component. Even though they are a fishing business, it is very much an online digital component. So we help them a lot with that.

So, the thread, I guess, you know, we have real estate agents, we’ve got naturopaths, we’ve got coaches, we’ve got e-commerce businesses with everything. But the thread that ties all of our clients together is that they all have a digital online presence or they have systems and sort of technology they’re using. You know, it might be Shopify or it could be WooCommerce or whatever. It could be Infusionsoft. The thread that ties them all together is the online digital space which we typically operate in.

Justin Grimes: OK. And can you kind of walk through maybe just the high level of what you would, what a customer of yours might expect? I guess as far as what your exploration phase may look like all the way to execution of a project?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, sure. So first of all, we do dedicated stuff. So we don’t actually do projects. There are companies that do that, but we are typically on the way in. We’re pretty strict about who we take on, and that’s not just for our benefit but also for the benefit of those who come to us because everyone has a free outsourcing strategy call with, we’ve got someone in Ireland and we’ve got someone in Australia, two guys that do that.

And basically what that call is about is to help people ascertain, first of all, is the business actually ready yet to bring in staff in, you know, do they have systems or is it just somebody going, you know what, I’m so overwhelmed I can’t cope, I needed a VA yesterday. And you’re like, OK, throwing a body at that problem is not going to solve that problem for you. And we help them to figure out how to solve it and then to come back to us.

The other thing is that sometimes, you know, if an accounting business came to us looking for a bookkeeper, we don’t do that. So we would just turn that away. So a lot of the initial stages are really helping us to figure out, is somebody ready? How do we help them to get ready? If they are ready, are we a good fit for them?

Then once we decide, that’s great. Looks like we can work together, they come in and we take people through a fairly deep client onboarding experience where we actually teach them some. It’s sort of project management 101, but we teach them best practice for, you know, using LastPass, how to secure your business when working online, how to set up your project management tools so that when the VA actually comes to work with them, they feel completely ready, totally on board with how we operate. And they know how to get success within what we actually do.

So we’re very much about, we’re not just a recruiter, we’re very much about trying to help people to get success with this so that they don’t waste time, energy, and money. Now, it doesn’t always work out 100% of the time, of course, with people, businesses, but we do have a high success rate, which we’re proud of. Yeah.

Justin Grimes: Nice. As far as the recruiting process of your talent there in the Philippines, can you talk a little bit about that or you guys, how did you find that talent?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So the reason we chose the Philippines, number one, people have said, why wouldn’t you go to Vietnam and all these other countries? Look, I’ve had a lot of success in the Philippines. The education system is great there. The English is very strong, and they’ve got a very Western kind of vibe about them. So it’s, culturally, the closest culture you’re going to get in the Asian region for outsourcing. So that’s the reason that we are there.

But in terms of recruitment, I’ll be another elephant in the room. It is hard, right? I mean, I’ll tell you the stats. We would hire, for every 100 people that apply for a job with us, we would probably hire between 2 and 5. Now 5 would be on a good stretch. It’s usually around 2 to 3, and that’s after kind of anywhere from a two to six week process that they have intensive with us.

So we don’t just recruit. Look, I’m not a believer in resumes or interviews because you can say anything in an interview. You can say anything on a resume. We actually bring people in and we put them to work for a while, and they have to go into a training program and a vetting program with us, and they’ve got to bring it and show it to us. And every day we actually cut people out. We’re like, not, not, not going to make the cut now, sorry, goodbye, you know, best of luck, but not for us. And then we whittle it right down.

And what we actually find is that, interestingly, sometimes the people with the most experience who you’re really excited about turn out to have really bad work ethic or low character or just disappear or stuff that you just don’t want happening. From HR perspective, we had one guy that was stealing, we caught that early before we put that into a client’s business. So that’s kind of how we vet them. It’s been a very, very long time.

Justin Grimes: OK, and the people. So when you do, you know, bring on a new customer, if they have a variety of things, a social media outlet, they want to do some video, some audio and a blog and stuff, do you kind of form that whole team for them and kind of fill in those pieces for them basically?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So there are two models out there. What we do, we do dedicated stuff. So a lot of our clients come to us because they want the same person who’s trained across a number of different things working with them dedicated. So they feel like, look, for all intents and purposes, the people look and feel very much like an employee of yours with our model, except you don’t have all the tax implications and local issues around employees. Basically they’re employees of ours, but they look and feel like that for you.

The other model is where you get a project manager and in the background there’s video editors, audio guys, and the project manager manages all of that, but you don’t know who’s actually working on your business. We don’t do that. I’d love to, but it’s kind of almost a different business model that I’d have to build separately and I haven’t had time yet to actually build something like that.

Justin Grimes: I got you. OK? No, that’s good. That makes perfect sense. I would like talking to the same person every day if I were in that position.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. They get used to your business. They know yours and they’re working for you. That’s kind of how they become an integral part of your vision and your business. Yeah.

Justin Grimes: Yeah, perfect. OK, we finish up here with a couple other things. First, are you ready for the Rapid Hustle round?

Barbara Turley: Sure. Hit me with us.

Justin Grimes: All right, let’s do it. First, a word from our sponsors.

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Justin Grimes: What is your favorite resource, book, podcast, or other that you found useful in your journey so far?

Barbara Turley: So it is one of the most pivotal books for me. There’s two actually. The E Myth by Michael Gerber, which a lot of people will have heard of. If you haven’t, please read it. It is like the Bible for creating a business that is a machine that will run without you.

And the other book is more interesting, it’s a different vibe. It’s called Built to Sell, and what I loved about this book is it’s actually a story about a guy in New York who runs an advertising agency and a friend of his who’s a great entrepreneur helps him to return it from a business that ties up all his time to a business he actually sells one day that he’s really proud of. You know, he actually grows it into like a multi $1,000,000 business. So because it’s a storybook, it’s like reading a kind of fictional character, but you learn a lot from that book. So for me they were great.

Justin Grimes: OK, good. Yeah, I appreciate those recommendations. OK, give yourself one piece of advice as you begin your journey, whether I guess it was, I suppose, in your newest venture here with the Virtual Hub, what would that be?

Barbara Turley: Oh yeah. Gosh, how do I pick one? I think the thing for me was when I left my corporate career and I made the transition to doing my own business. And that was five years ago sort of now when I made the big jump to do that.

And I think, I don’t know if this would fall on deaf ears now, this advice. But looking back, I love the name of your podcast, actually, the word hustle. I think I was still too emotional about stuff not working. You know, like in business, you’re going to try lots of things and stuff will fail and clients will be annoyed and, you know, there’ll be complaints everywhere. And really the strongest business that you will build is when you take all of that, you take it on the chin and you’re like keep rebuilding and evolving the business based on that feedback and based on those mistakes rather than letting them define you, let them build what it is that you.

So I’ve done that quite well, but I think I suffered a lot of emotional turmoil before I learned that that’s the way to do it, you know?

Justin Grimes: Yeah, that tough lesson learned, but great advice, I think. Yeah, you hit it right on the head. Yeah, it’s just part of life. It’s part of business. And those who are successful, ultimately they’re able to kind of roll with it, learn from it, and make the best.

Barbara Turley: I still get annoyed. I still get annoyed. Let me tell you, I was thinking, oh my gosh, I sound like I sound like I’m this Zen monk here. I’m totally not. But I just waste less energy on it now than I used to. I use it.

Justin Grimes: Yep, fair enough. OK. Yeah, good stuff. Finally, how can the Cash Flow Hustler listeners get in touch with you?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So if you head over to thevirtualhub.com, you can book a free strategy call with one of our outsourcing strategy consultants there. We have Peter in Ireland and Adam in Australia. So they’re not in the Philippines, but they are really good at helping you to figure out, you know, where you’re at and you get actually some free strategy advice on that call regardless of whether you join us or not.

Also, if you are interested in the outsourcing game, on our website we have a ton of content. So shameless plug, I’ve got a podcast as well called The Virtual Success Show where it’s really tactical. We tell you everything to do with things like when is the time to fire your VA to how to have the difficult conversations, all of that sort of thing. And we’ve lots of guides and everything on our website.

Do you want to connect with me personally? I post a lot of my content over on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is kind of where I build a bit of my network over there.

Justin Grimes: OK, awesome. We’ll have all that stuff in the show notes connecting any of the listeners who are interested in this space with you. So I really appreciate you taking the time to hop on with me this morning, this evening, in the middle of the day for me. OK, early.

Barbara Turley: Evening.

Justin Grimes: For me, yeah. All right. Good. Well, yeah, I appreciate you taking the time to share your journey with us. And I look forward to watching what you continue to do on your journey.

Barbara Turley: Thanks, Justin.

Justin Grimes: All right, thanks. Talk soon.

VoiceActor: Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Cash Flow Hustle. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review on iTunes, Google Play, or the listening platform of your choice. Also, please check out cashflowhustle.com, find us on Facebook, or reach out on Twitter @Cashflowhustler for more useful content to help you on your journey to financial freedom. Until next week, embrace the journey.