Barbara Turley: I don’t have time to create processes. I don’t have time for this. I just want to hire people who know what they’re doing. Like, you can do that, but you’ll pay up for it. And when that person gets offered by somebody else, they’ll walk out the door, and the IP will walk with them.

Voice Over: You’re listening to Real Marketing Real Fast, the only podcast that brings you unfiltered, undaunted, insider information on the latest tools and technologies for online marketers. Prepare to dive deep into marketing myths, breakthrough models, and cutting-edge strategies that will have an immediate impact on the growth of your business. And now here’s your host, marketing expert Doug Morneau.

Doug Morneau: Well, welcome back, listeners, to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today’s guest in studio is Barbara Turley. Now Barbara is an investor, she is an entrepreneur, and she is the founder of a company and the CEO of a company called the Virtual Hub. It’s a business that she started by accident that exploded over the space or the course of about 12 months and has now become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants for businesses that need to free up more time and energy so they can go to that next level.

Doug Morneau: Barbara’s deep background comes from the investment banking side, so she is very keen and very smart when it comes to business numbers and making sure the business is making a profit. With her company, Virtual Hub, she has a strong focus on customized training and ongoing career development. She ensures that her team is trained in cutting-edge programs like HubSpot and Ontraport to make sure that she meets the needs of her clients and the unique needs that they have in digital marketing, social media, and personal assistant services.

Doug Morneau: So Barbara is also a mom to a gorgeous daughter named Ruby, wife to her best friend, Eddie, and an adventure lover with a passion for horses, skiing, tennis, and spending time in nature. So, with that introduction, I’d like to welcome Barbara to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today.

Doug Morneau: Well, welcome to the Real Marketing Podcast today, Barbara. I’m super excited to talk to you and, you know, allow you to inform our listeners on the opportunity that exists working with a company like yours and working maybe offshore, something they haven’t done before.

Barbara Turley: Great to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

Doug Morneau: So do you want to share just a little bit of your background, kind of how you got into this business, and, you know, just fill in the blanks for our listeners?

Barbara Turley: Sure. I’ll try and give you the short version because I’ve had a very varied career, as we were chatting off air about. So I started my career in the financial industry and spent many years in equity trading. So I was on the trading floors, which I absolutely loved, for about 10 years. And then I sort of hit my thirties and was like, you know, trading floors are great fun in your twenties because it’s going to work hard, play hard. I had a great time.

Barbara Turley: But I was sort of burned out by the end, and I did a bit of a switch in the industry, and I switched into the asset management side. So anyone in the industry will know that one side is called sell side, the other side is called buy side, and buy side financial industry in the asset management, funds management area was a little less raucous, would be the word I would use, a bit more professional. I went into sales in that area.

Barbara Turley: Sort of not really knowing where I was going to take that or what I was going to do. But I also had a burning desire deep inside, as many people do, to one day do my own thing. And I didn’t actually know what that meant. Like, my own thing—does that mean build a company? Does that mean just be a consultant? You know, I just had a kind of a niggling thing. And to get a long story short, I got a great opportunity, you know, in the worst financial crisis that our time has known, which was in 2008. An opportunity presented itself to me.

Barbara Turley: In the worst, like, blood on the streets time of that crisis, where one of the banks in Sydney—I was working at Deutsche Asset Management here in Sydney—and they were selling off some assets, basically, or keen to get rid of some of their parts of their business. And the CEO at the time, who I was working closely with, decided with a group of others to sort of do a management buyout or do a sort of a startup with that part of the business.

Barbara Turley: And I got an opportunity to hop on the coattails of that, basically, and get involved. So I did. I took the opportunity with open arms, and that’s about 10 years ago now. And I mean, that company today is a funds management business that’s running about 6 billion of assets now. It’s huge. So [that’s amazing.] It was an extraordinary experience. Yes. I’m still actually very much involved from the shareholder side in that company.

Barbara Turley: But it gave me a great opportunity to see how a great company is built and the scalability that, you know, the decisions. I was very close to the decisions that were being made around growing the company. So after about five years of doing that, the niggle came back. I was like, I want to do this for myself.

Doug Morneau: Something on your own.

Barbara Turley: Totally mad. Even the CEO was like, are you mad? You want to have children and build a company? I was like, yeah, I know I’m totally insane. But so I started doing a bit of business coaching, sort of consulting, as many corporates do when they leave the corporate, the safety of corporate. And I noticed that I was coaching a lot of smaller businesses and everything diverse from like a natural path to a swim school, to a lawyer. So they were very different businesses, but they all had the same problem. They all were too small.

Barbara Turley: Revenue-wise to hire staff, but unless they hired staff, they were never really going to be able to grow it properly and get out of the trenches of the terrible, you know, overwhelm of running your own business. So I had read Tim Ferriss’s, you know, four hour work week, like lots of people. I had gotten myself a VA in the Philippines to help me out with a few bits and pieces. So I started recruiting a few friends of my VA, purely not as a business, but just to help out the clients I was coaching.

Barbara Turley: And before I knew it, honestly, I was just getting a few more phone calls for VAs than I was for business coaching. And I literally, in one weekend, was like, I think there’s a business in this. And overnight, I just pivoted out one, and the Virtual Hub was born in about two weeks. That’s really no name, no website, nothing. I just did a webinar to the people that were on my list and was like, does anyone, anyone keen for me to do this? Do you want me to recruit? You know.

Barbara Turley: Would anyone buy this kind of thing? And it was the most successful webinar I ever did. And we were bang, we were in business. That was it.

Doug Morneau: That’s amazing. I mean, I read the four hour work week as well, and it kind of wrecked me. I went, hey, I’ve got all these staff here, and I could have some remote staff and have less staff here and free up my time and work home base and get out of the car for commuting, spend more time with my kids. Hey, that’s not like a good plan.

Barbara Turley: Yes, I mean, it is the holy grail, and offshore has been hailed as the panacea to solve all cost efficiencies and lots of problems in business. I will say it’s not as simple as people think, and lots of people have been burnt with it, and we can sort of dive into that if you want. It’s a challenging thing to get right, but when you do, the dividends it pays are enormous for your bottom line in your business.

Doug Morneau: So why don’t we start with the why and then maybe start in the how? I mean, because, like you said, there’s a couple opportunities. There’s a small business that doesn’t have any employees, and then there’s larger businesses, thinking back to the Tim Ferriss, that have a bunch of staff, but there’s still opportunity for them to work with someone like you and to have extended remote staff.

Barbara Turley: Definitely, yes. So the why, if we were to delve into the why first, I mean, like we were talking off air, you know, I’ve been involved in large business, I’ve been involved in small business, I’ve seen both sides of the fence and the challenges that every business faces when they’re trying to grow. The bottom line is every single business, regardless of whether you are a solopreneur working from home, just making an income, to a $5 billion asset management business, it is all about, at the end of the day.

Barbara Turley: How much profit is left after you have, you know, done all the bits and pieces involved in the business. And if there’s no profit left, there is no business. You know, so people don’t like to think about this, but making money is a very important part of being successful and having impact. You know, you can have impact if you make money, right? The making money piece. So if we were to look at that, a huge cost for any business is people, you know, your staff. It’s a very important cost, but—

Barbara Turley: I mean, I feel it’s a no-brainer to think about, well, if we could have a part of our team that is offshore, even if that’s just one virtual assistant helping us out at a very cost-effective price, then why wouldn’t we add that strategy to our business and ensure that the people we do hire onshore are people who are—I don’t want to say doing higher value work, but maybe doing different work. It might be more revenue-generating work.

Barbara Turley: It might be more strategic work, and you lift your onshore people out of the kind of doldrums of getting bogged down in the task lists that can be done by people offshore. And then you give them great careers as well, because they’re all loving working for us and companies like us in places like the Philippines, for example. It’s a really—it is a business strategy that honestly any business can look at, regardless of whether you’re online, offline, where you are in the world, what your business offering is. It does actually work anywhere. It’s just a matter of getting into that mindset of understanding that it is a strategy you can leverage.

Doug Morneau: So if we’re saying, that sounds good, but how do I start?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s the—so everyone starts on Upwork. Everyone goes to freelancer.com or Upwork and then invariably gets burnt, and people go, this doesn’t work for my business. I had a terrible experience. Some people hit home run on the first round, and they’re like, it was great for me. But the reality is the majority of people go into one of these marketplaces, get overrun with—they put a job ad out, and then they get like 500 applications from people from India and Vietnam and all over the world. It becomes very overwhelming.

Barbara Turley: They try and choose someone, and it’s a disaster. So that’s a very common story that happens out there. The reason it is is because a number of things. So there’s obviously the recruitment and HR challenge, but putting that aside for a second, even if you hire an amazing VA, let’s say you find somebody online, you get an amazing VA, even if they’re in America—you don’t have to hire in the Philippines—but let’s say you get an amazing VA. If your business and your mindset is not set up properly before that person arrives, your chance of failure is much higher, and you will naturally blame the VA because you’ll say that they weren’t able to take initiative, they didn’t do this, that.

Barbara Turley: But unless you’ve got a business that has a very—you’ve got a very clear vision, then you have a strategy attached to that vision, and attached to your strategy are all your recurring task lists and project task lists and processes that are involved in running your business, your likelihood of success is lowered if you’re not really having a focus on those kinds of things. So I’m hoping that makes sense.

Doug Morneau: Yeah, that totally makes sense. The other side, I think, of that, that sometimes people forget or may forget, is that you’re dealing in different cultures. I had read a book by the guy, it was David Livermore, called Driven by Difference. And he talked about how innovative companies grow through diversity. And so you’re hiring somebody that’s maybe in a different country, in a different culture.

Doug Morneau: Their work environment and their expectations are different than who you’ve got working with you in North America or working with you, in your case, in Sydney, because that’s the—

Barbara Turley: They’re in a different culture. And also, you have to remember they were brought up differently. For example, let’s look at the Philippines, for example. You know, people—that culture is rapidly evolving, right? I mean, I will say it’s growing and evolving very fast, but they’re still, I think, brought up very much to be workers and not to be almost taught that their voice is not important. You know, that they’re there to do the task and not to assume that their opinion or their voice has any importance, right?

Barbara Turley: That’s a problem. When, you know, cause when we’re hiring people, we have programs and everything internally to encourage both clients and virtual assistants to understand that the VA’s voice, the client actually wants to hear their opinion, and we make it okay for them and teach them how to be like, yeah, I actually would like to share my opinion. So culture, that’s a cultural problem. And when people working with VA’s offshore will understand the yes culture, they’re like, yeah, they just keep saying yes. And then they make a mess of it.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, you know, that can—the train stay,

Doug Morneau: Yes, they are. Absolutely. Can you do this? Yes. Can you do this? Can you do this? Yes. And then you’ve given them, you know, two weeks’ worth of work you want done in two days. How come you didn’t get it done? You said you could do it.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and they run around and try and find somebody who can help them, and they’re sort of closed and think, well, I’ll just say yes, and I won’t tell them that I actually don’t really know how to do something.

Doug Morneau: So backing it up a bit, you’re saying expectations and have some systems in place and in mind before you pull the trigger. Now, is that something that someone, you would typically work through with a client? So someone, if I came to say, Barbara, I’m looking at leaning out my business and I’d like to expand with some offshore staff. Are you gonna push back and go, okay, well tell me about the tasks and what it is that you wanna offshore before you can take the next step?

Barbara Turley: Yes. So we have some outsourcing strategy consultants that everybody gets to speak to first. They’re sort of salespeople, but they’re not selling on the phone. What they’re—the idea behind those guys is I’ve one in Ireland and one here in Australia, and their job on that call is to dig in and see, is this business ready? Because we don’t want businesses wasting time, energy, and money on this if they’re not ready, because we could sell a VA all day, all day, right? But if you bring a client in that is actually not ready,

Barbara Turley: you’re going to have a very unhappy client who is even more overwhelmed than they were before they got the VA because all they’ve done is throw a body at the problem. You know what I mean? They have a problem in that their business is chaos. And then they throw a person into it and think that’s going to solve the problem, and it doesn’t. And then they invariably blame us because we sold the thing. So it’s very important to, you know what I mean? So we don’t take them on when they’re like that. I would love to say that we help people

Barbara Turley: you know, build up all their processes. We do, to a certain extent. We do have a client onboarding thing, and we actually give clients a lot of processes, but you still have stuff in your own business that we could never know that you have to build yourself. So we heavily advise clients, we tell them how to get ready, and we say, look, here’s the things you need to do to get ready. And you need to focus on this for a while. And you can either get a VA now and get a VA to potentially help you with this project,

Barbara Turley: or you can go away and digest what we said today and come back in maybe six weeks or three months. And they do come back. Sometimes it takes 12 months, and they come back, and then they’re ready, and then they start their offshore team strategy. So our success rate is high because of that.

Doug Morneau: Well, that makes sense. I mean, you’re dealing with qualified people. And I even like what Tim Ferriss talked about—if you’re working for somebody else, even in a sales role, like why would I want to do all the data entry stuff when I make money talking to a prospect? [Absolutely.] So even people that are full-time employed and that are making, you know, a good six-figure income can definitely support one or two VAs to help with the other tasks, to help them leverage their time and grow their income.

Barbara Turley: Well, interestingly, you know, we have a couple of clients that are large. We’ve got a few marketing agencies that—and what they eventually realized is, well, if you’re paying, as a marketing agency, your top staff, your account managers, your project managers, and your creatives in the States or Australia or whatever, a lot of the time in marketing, as we know, a lot of the work that needs to be done is grunt work. I call it because it’s like analytics and filling out spreadsheets and data, this sort of thing.

Barbara Turley: And realistically, if you’re paying somebody at that level in the US and they’re getting bogged down and, quite frankly, annoyed because they don’t want to do that kind of work, you’re just leaving money on the table because you could free up that person to do more of the strategic or the sales or whatever it is that they’re doing. Give them a VA to work under them so that they can get—so you’ve got this kind of process going where the VA’s are doing all the tasks and the implementation and somebody’s running them. So the account manager can actually run them. And that works very well, that strategy.

Doug Morneau: So do you have an example of a client that you helped that has been in business, had some staff, and then looked at leaning down and leveraging your experience and your knowledge and grew their business?

Barbara Turley: Yes, we’ve had a few. A lot of our—you know, everyone always thinks we must have a massive client list. Actually, we don’t. We have 120 employees now, but we have fewer clients than that because our clients are growing their teams. So what we—yeah, we’ve had people, we have some people who are up to five VAs, teams of five now, and they’re seeing, you know, they get one and then all of a sudden they’re like, my God, actually, I want three. Actually, I need four, you know, so that’s kind of what starts to happen if they really take on board

Barbara Turley: the things that we talk about and the things that we advise, you know, that we have had a lot of people do that. And that’s really what we’re about. Like the Virtual Hub, really, we recruit, train, and manage VAs, right? That’s essentially what we do in the Philippines. But really our goal is twofold. We actually want to have cost-effective scalability, and we want to see our business and our clients grow because we know that the more VAs we put in there, obviously it’s good for us, but it’s good for their businesses and means they’re growing. But also we want to provide dynamic, fun, exciting careers for people in the Philippines so that they can also grow. And that’s kind of the twofold mission that we have. So it’s about success rates as opposed to numbers.

Doug Morneau: So if you’re working with somebody that, you know, take on three, four, five VAs. Now I noticed that you’ve got—I looked through the services that you offer, and I checked how to look at your website. So it looks like you also can put someone in place to help with the project management and building out the systems as well.

Barbara Turley: We can, but they’re not—and this is where you have to be really careful. So there’s a balancing act between—like, we do have clients that come in and they say—they might give a project brief to a VA and expect the VA to map out the entire project and all the task lists attached. We have VAs that can do that. But if I go and sell that and tell the market that that’s what we do, we would end up failing because that’s where people will take that too far and think they’re going to get a strategist and someone to run their entire business for them for 10 bucks an hour.

Barbara Turley: You know what I mean? There are people who actually think that. Yeah, there is a real misconception. So you’ve got to be very careful that you remember that this person is not a project manager. They are a virtual assistant who we like to think is smart. We have taught them how to do things like create a process map.

Barbara Turley: For example, but you need to know what you’re doing yourself, or you need to have a strategist on your team that is actually building the strategy and working with that person, and that person’s just doing the work, not actually coming up with the plan.

Doug Morneau: That’s right, this is not—That’s not another C-level employee you’re hiring.

Barbara Turley: No, no. So, you know, they can execute the tasks. And I would prefer, honestly, if people were not asking VAs to map out project plans because that’s a project manager, really.

Doug Morneau: So what advice would you give our listeners now that say, hey, this kind of sounds interesting. You said you need to be prepared and have some systems. Can you dive a little bit deeper on some specific things that they can take away at the end of this podcast and begin that exploration?

Barbara Turley: Yes, because that’s a very broad thing that I’ve said, and people go, I don’t even know where to start with that. Like, forget about how do I start with a VA? It’s like, where do I start with even, you know, systemizing my business? The simplest way to do it is to remember that every single business, no matter how small or how large, actually has departments. Like, even if you’re just on your own at your kitchen table, you have marketing and sales and product delivery and product creation and accounting and HR and all these different areas.

Barbara Turley: Legal. So I always recommend that people just list out all those different little departments, and then underneath those departments, the first task that you want to do is to list what are all the tasks that need to be done daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, whatever it is, under each of those buckets. And that’s going to give you your recurring task list. And the recurring task list is things that

Barbara Turley: jobs that are non-negotiable, kind of painful, but need to be done on a regular basis, on time, and to keep the engine of the business running, if that makes sense. So they’re not—they don’t require somebody coming up with a strategy or anything. They’re just like the phone needs—you know, live chat needs to be turned on every day at 8 a.m. or whatever. And this is how we do it. So you break all that down, try to get a little process for each one because the way you do it and the way you want it done in your business will be different to other people. So you’ve got to have a little process for each task. Then after that, you’ve got your project list. You know, do you want to create an ebook? Have you got visions of, you know, revamping your website, all of these things? That’s a project list, and the project list is what drives the business forward. And you might have projects under each of those buckets as well. And then after that, you can go through each of the tasks. Bit tedious, I will agree. But you go through each of the tasks and go, what are the ones that I need to stop doing? [Yeah.] And that actually somebody else could do with my guidance. And you’ll find that you’ll cut your list down. Your to-do list becomes much smaller because your stop doing list becomes very large.

Doug Morneau: What I found is it really made me focus on systematizing the business, and I found the easiest way for me, because I don’t like sitting down and writing big, long project plans or task lists, was if it was, for example, setting up my social media program, you know, I can do a screen record and I can go in and set up the account and go through the whole process from start to finish, and then I can share that, and then we can get on a Zoom call and answer questions.

Doug Morneau: But so you do it once, you’re doing it every day already, so just record it and then share that with somebody else, and then you never have to do it again.

Barbara Turley: And then ask them as their first task—this is what I would recommend—ask your virtual assistant to create a process map or a process step-by-step written thing from your video so that then you have it now as a process. So they can actually create that for you. They take what’s in your head and what you’ve shown them on a video, but also go back through it with them and make sure each step is there so that they haven’t missed something that might be, for example, sometimes when we’re doing a process, we don’t realize that as we do a step, there’s a thinking part of it that is not actually reflected in the video that you did, and that doesn’t get picked up when they do it.

Doug Morneau: No ESP, they can’t figure that out.

Barbara Turley: Yes. So people go, they just keep making mistakes. I’m like, well, actually, if you were to work with them, you’d actually discover that the mistake is there’s a piece missing.

Doug Morneau: What we’ve done is given it to somebody else to do, say, okay, you do the task list, then give it to somebody else and let them go through the process. And they’ll very quickly figure out whether or not it’s got all the right ingredients.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, all the bits, exactly. And that helps you to evolve your processes, and they are ever-evolving things. They never stop. They’re like living, breathing, dynamic things, processes as your business grows. So that’s like the easiest way, I think, to just sit down and get started is to do that.

Doug Morneau: So yeah, it’s not that difficult. It sounds like a really huge task, but when you think about the investment—now I’ll ask you a question that wasn’t on my list because you’re the investment person—what sort of ROI would you? Is there any way to look at this? I mean, cause you’re looking at existing staff now and you’ve got maybe people you’re paying too much to do jobs that are not in their wheelhouse or aren’t growing your business.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, there is a way to look at that. I mean, if you’re in that situation where you have a team already onshore, you want to be looking at each person’s role, each person’s task, work with them, what you’re going to delegate down to the VAs, all that sort of thing. And then once you—the first couple of months, realistically, don’t expect ROI, right? Because really that sort of six to eight weeks, you’ve got to allow a transition, a training time, onboarding people, all of that sort of stuff. A lot of people hire VAs, and in a week, they’re like, this is not working. And I’m like, okay, but in a week, you actually need to allow time to onboard somebody correctly and to hand over reins. But over time, what you should see is that if you’ve got a salesperson, you’ve freed their time a lot more. I mean, if their conversion rate or their sales rate was already X, then you should be seeing an increase in that rate. If you’re not,

Barbara Turley: maybe they’re still getting bogged down, micromanaging the VA. I don’t know, but you’ve got to talk to them about that. And you want to see data to actually see what has been the uplift after four or five months, six months. I would say at the six-month mark, you’d want to be seeing uplifting other areas of the business.

Doug Morneau: Well, and I think if you step back and just use a little bit of common sense and said when you hire an employee onshore, your expectation isn’t that you have ROI the first day either. There’s an onboarding process, and there is a learning process regardless of where the employee is.

Barbara Turley: And look, honestly, people sometimes think, you know, I just want to hire A players, and they just come in and know what to do. I’ve hired people who were, you know, had all the experience in the world, you know, were not in the Philippines. They’re like Western people. It still takes time for them to get into your business because it’s your—it’s like a new house. They don’t know where all the rooms are. You know, it’s like you go show them around. It takes a while.

And yeah, people are just—I just think people have unrealistic expectations around hiring, you know. And the other thing people say is I don’t have time to create processes. I don’t have time for this. I just want to hire people who know what they’re doing. Like, you can do that, but you’ll pay up for it. And when that person gets offered by somebody else, they’ll walk out the door, and the IP will walk with them. And then you’re, you know, in a bad situation that you can—you’re held ransom then for more salary, more money, more bonuses, whatever.

So it’s better to systematize your business. And actually, if I was going to go from my investment background, forgetting VAs for offshore or anything for a second, the more systemized your business is, the higher the asset value. Somebody else can just buy it and walk in and take it over.

Doug Morneau: I’ve got a friend of mine—that’s all he does is he works with people that have businesses that want to move 10 years down the road or five years down the road to sell it. And they spend a lot of time developing systems. So you’re not dependent—if you think of Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth, that’s your biggest risk, is having all your value of your business in one or two key employees because if they leave, you’re toast.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. So, I mean, I’m just a big fan. I mean, look, my entire team is in the Philippines. I have two or three people who are based outside, like in the Western countries. But I haven’t—I’ve had great success with systemizing. I’ve had people who—I haven’t had people who have really left. I’ve had people that I’ve promoted to other roles, but it’s been easy because I’m like, well, their role has already mapped out and systematized. So it’s easy to just promote someone else up into that role and move them into a new one. It becomes very simple to move people around.

Doug Morneau: Well, and I think the myth, too, is that because they’re in a different country that you need to micromanage and oversee what they’re doing. And my experience has been just the opposite, that the different level of work ethic is—well, I mean, it’s just not the same.

Barbara Turley: No, no.

Doug Morneau: I’ve never had—that’s beyond—yeah, I’ve never had one of my onshore employees send me a note on Saturday saying, “Hey boss, I’d like to work today because my daughter and my husband have gone to visit their mom.”

Barbara Turley: I was thinking, I was thinking the work ethic is a bit low. I mean, honestly, in the Philippines, it’s touch and go there. You’ve got to like—it’s good work ethic, but it comes with a few other challenges, for sure.

Doug Morneau: Well sure, I mean, you’re dealing with third-world issues in terms of there’s electricity and there’s storms and there’s internet and there’s all the other stuff, but I’m not going to put my most mission-critical issue there or key staff there that if their power goes out, the business shuts off.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, I think the advice I do give to people about the oversight thing—so people go, I don’t want to micromanage them. I don’t want to have to check it. I don’t have to check the work all the time. And I say, well, you can’t not check anything because you’re running a business, right? But the way to do it, the way I’ve discovered—and I learned this the hard way—is to have good reporting lines. So teach them how they are to report results to you visibly. So don’t just say I did this today.

You’ve got to be able to see data of actual results, and you’ve got to have, you know—I run a day—I’m a big fan of the huddle concept. So the daily huddles and weekly huddles and things like that, where you just get straight to the point. And what are the results? So if somebody is doing, let’s say, somebody’s doing a bit of SEO or something for you offshore or social media—like hard numbers, you know, how much—just show me the data reporting of engagement this week and make them talk you through it. That’s actually quite effective. Nowhere to hide there, right? If you’ve—you know, don’t need to do the job or not.

Doug Morneau: They need to be monitoring their screen time on their computer. I mean, that’s—you’re right. You’re looking for output, not how long you’re sitting behind the screen.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, yeah.

Doug Morneau: So what’s some of the bad advice that you hear? So stealing, seeing as you’re a Tim Ferriss fan, I’ll steal his line. What’s the bad advice that you hear when you’re out at a cocktail party around this particular industry?

Barbara Turley: I think the biggest one—and lots of people would disagree with me here—but people say to me, honestly, like, I don’t mind when they do the work. I just want the result. I go, yeah, well, we’re all human. And my advice on that is if you—my experience in the Philippines is if you are too flexible—like you can offer flexibility, there’s nothing wrong with that—but you need to have flexibility within that structure. So what I mean by that is if you say to somebody in the Philippines,

Barbara Turley: I don’t mind when you do the work as long as I get the results, you’ll find that the work potentially might be done at three o’clock in the morning with a baby on the hip, right? And then there’s another job going on during the day, and your work’s—all of a sudden, what you’ll find is it’ll be great for four weeks, and then the slippage will happen because the person will be exhausted, making mistakes. They’ll take on other people’s contracts online

Barbara Turley: and things like that. And that’s a cultural thing because they haven’t developed enough yet. I just feel the culture is not really ready yet for this sort of too much flexibility. I think it’s better to have some sort of structure on it and work with them on what works for them, what works for you. But you’re the business owner at the end of the day, so you can put some structure on.

Doug Morneau: Yep, absolutely. You wouldn’t do that locally—say, hey, come into the office whenever you feel like it. That wouldn’t go over very well.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And human behaviour—I mean, you know, human tendency is to put off and procrastinate until the last minute.

Doug Morneau: That’s right. Why do today what you can do tomorrow, or put off to tomorrow?

Barbara Turley: They’re going to—you know, that’s what’s going to happen, and they’re going to take care of the family. You know, there’s also family things and stuff in the Philippines that you have to take into account. So if you offer too much flexibility, you’re trying to be nice. You’re actually shooting yourself in the foot, like really badly. So that’s my biggest—the biggest myth out there is, yeah, give them flexibility. I’m like, yeah, within reason.

Doug Morneau: So do you want to just walk our listeners through the difference between the services that you’re offering and what people may do after having read Tim Ferriss’s book and go to look to hire somebody on their own?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so we’re, you know, sort of a full service. We’re not a recruiter. I will definitely say that. So people, when they come to us, sometimes get confused. They think we’re going to send them—like a pure recruiter will take your brief. They’ll go out to the market, advertise, get a load of people in, do a sort of bit of maybe interviewing, testing, and then show you a ton of resumes and keep showing them to you until you find someone you’re happy with. I found that model to be just fraught with risk on both sides. It just didn’t work, right? So the model that I have today is that I employ—my company in the Philippines employs everyone before we employ and train before we ever introduce them to a client.

Barbara Turley: So, on average, about 250 people per month apply for a job with us. And after a very grueling sort of three-week experience that’s pretty intensive with us, we might hire 10.

Barbara Turley: 10 of them will make it, right? It’s actually very frustrating. Maybe on a good month we might get 20, but I’d say 10 would be the average. And then we put them through—even if they have experience—we have our own digital marketing training program where we put them through to see, do you really have what it takes, and what level are you really? Because we’ve got level one, two, and three VAs. One is kind of general admin. Two is like content management, social media, WordPress blogs, that kind of thing.

Barbara Turley: And level three is people who can navigate building, let’s say, a campaign on HubSpot or on Ontraport. As long as the client’s given them what they want, they can build it and maybe put a few Zapier integrations in, stuff like that. So we’ve got to ascertain, really, is somebody going to be able to do that? And we teach all of that ourselves. And only at that point do we then go to a client and say, we’ve got maybe two to three people you can meet. Hopefully, we’ve got three. Sometimes we only have one.

Barbara Turley: But our success rate is high because of that. So we say that we’ve already picked this person. You don’t have to pick them, but that’s who we are putting forward to represent our brand.

Doug Morneau: Now, do your clients typically hire one person to start, or do they start with a half-time with somebody, or what’s the usual onboarding?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, people always love to start with the part-time, which is fine. We don’t mind that at all. But what we have found is that because our success rate—about two years ago, our success rate went through the roof because we started our own training programs and we did a whole pile of things internally to make sure that we had this success rate. What we found is then the person would start part-time and then the other part-time time another client would have. And the VA was so good that neither side would give up. They’re like, I’m not letting my VA—no, I don’t care. I want—

Doug Morneau: The worst settlement, who gets the dog?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, people would say things like—clients would say—one client tried to offer another client money. They were like, tell him I’ll pay for another VA for a month for him if he gives me the whole time. [That’s hilarious.] The other client said, that’s only money.

Doug Morneau: That’s funny.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so what we recommend now, if somebody is going to go part-time, we’re like, look, it’s better to start full-time. And then if you find that your task list is not developed enough, you can always downgrade. That’s easier. But taking a part-timer and thinking I can build them up in three months’ time—we’re like, no, because they’re already on our payroll. So we’re like, no, we’ve got to fill them. [Sure.] So, yeah. But we do part-time for smaller clients, though. We do. We do.

Doug Morneau: That’s a great point, and that totally makes sense. Like you said, when you’re looking at the amount of tasks and stuff you’re to take off your desk, it’s going to make a huge difference to your day.

Barbara Turley: Well, the other thing we do say for clients that need to start with part-time, though, we do say, look, don’t panic, and we start with part-time. And then what we recommend is get another part-timer that has different skill sets. Like, don’t worry if you can’t get this person full-time. We can work with you on different solutions. There’s different solutions to that.

Doug Morneau: Right. So you could have a general VA, then you could have somebody that’s more advanced as doing your Ontraport or your ActiveCampaign or building your own products. [Exactly! Yeah,] that’s really cool.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, yeah. So you can have a cheaper one and then a more expensive one, and you don’t have to have, like, the one that does everything.

Doug Morneau: So, what parting words of advice would you give our listeners that this is a new idea to them?

Barbara Turley: I would say number one, it takes your mindset. You’ve got to—there’s a lot of fear and mistrust and all that stuff, which I completely understand about offshore. But I want you to open your mind to the cost effectiveness of this and the ability to scale faster if that’s what you want to do, because you can hire a number of staff—for the one person you can hire in America, you could probably hire five in the Philippines. So just think about that, like, in terms of your business. And number two, the systemization thing is tedious. Most people find it very boring, and they absolutely hate it. I completely understand that.

I don’t particularly like it myself, but even forgetting VAs, it is going to be so beneficial to your business value, and the dividends it’s going to pay you from a business perspective are worth every minute that you spend on it. So just—and then you can plug cheaper staff in to run it, right? That makes it easy. So it’s just about expanding your mindset into making this possible for you and your business.

Doug Morneau: That’s really cool. So, now do you have all of your staff in one location, or are they working remotely, or how do you generally structure that from your company side?

Barbara Turley: Yes, I started off with the work-from-home model. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you want to go on Upwork and find a VA, you can find tons of them. They work from home, and that works pretty well. You’ve got to keep a bit of a tight rein on them. But what I found is when I got to 50 people, that model completely broke down, and it was too hard to manage everyone. And I just realized, in order for me to grow the way I want to grow this company,

Barbara Turley: I had to take it more seriously. So I set up a company in the Philippines, and I have full offices now in a beautiful location called Cebu, which is one of the nicest beach locations in the Philippines.

Doug Morneau: Yeah, I’ve been there. It was beautiful.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, great talent pool there, great work-life balance. Manila’s pretty bad with traffic and typhoons and stuff like that, so the people, I think, are happier in Cebu. And so they’re all in one office, and we have full office setup there, and they love it. So yeah, it’s much better for us.

Doug Morneau: Well, and that’s what I assumed by the size of your company and what you’re doing, that you’d have to have everybody in one location. And I guess the added benefit is that there’s no question in terms of quality of equipment and latest updates of software and internet and phone and all the things that you’re going to need to rely on to get your work done.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and even things like, you know, we’re rolling out—I don’t know, the Americans weren’t that into this, but in Europe, they had that big GDPR data protection thing that happened last year. Like, I mean, we actually are a data processor, technically, because we’re VAs. So we had to roll out an entire thing around that that, thankfully, we had offices because actually that would be impossible to roll out with the work-from—

Doug Morneau: Well, and it’s going to keep going. I mean, I do a lot of work in the email space, and we’re seeing California now in America looking at a very similar legislation to GDPR. And I’m just hoping that the Americas can get together and not have a different set of rules in every state, just to what they did with GDPR and go across the country.

Barbara Turley: Well, interestingly, Europeans these days—I think we got a lot of European business out of that because the Europeans were rapidly realizing that they actually cannot legally use a work-from-home VA with flimsy—so they can get away with it, but it’s not actually really that great to do that.

Doug Morneau: Yeah, I mean, I’ll be as compliant. That’s right.

Barbara Turley: It’s not really compliant. Yeah, it’s difficult. Yeah. So those are the things that—in my role, I have to navigate all this sort of stuff.

Doug Morneau: Well, I’m glad that you’re there doing that, and it’s not me.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I don’t mind it, actually. I quite enjoy that business—that sort of company growth side of things and making sure that we’re delivering what the market needs and wants as much as we can. It’s really hard, just like any business, you know, but we’re constantly evolving.

Doug Morneau: Well, I just want to say thanks so much for taking time today to share with our audience. I think you’ve got a great offer. I really enjoyed looking through your website. I must say that all the stuff that you’ve got up there and the educational information and even the response from your email autoresponder was very professional and very well done.

Barbara Turley: Oh good, because, you know, when you look at your own website, you’re like, we need to redo that, change this, and that’s too old. But I do have a podcast there, actually, as well, under the “Our Content” tab on our site, where I started a podcast to educate people. And it’s literally like—we talk so tactical on that podcast around even things like when is it time to fire my VA, you know, questions people have around how to do this and all the pitfalls and everything. So we just—you know, it’s warts and all on that podcast. We don’t hold anything back.

Doug Morneau: Well, that’s—you know, and if you look at the stats with podcasting right now, it’s in the news just about every single day. I was reading just last night that Spotify has got 42% of the Americans’ ear in terms of listening to podcasts right now. So it’s just exploded.

Barbara Turley: I think it is the greatest untapped marketing source out there right now. People don’t realize that, you know, everyone’s listening to podcasts. I mean, I’m on this podcast—I mean, something I do a lot is podcasts. I’m on podcasts all the time talking about this because that’s where people are. And they’re, you know, in the gym, they’re in the car, they’re listening to podcasts.

Doug Morneau: Yep, and you’ve got your VAs that can take your transcription and get it up to your blog and create your social media posts and share it out there to the world to help you grow your audience.

Barbara Turley: And we have a process for that that we give to clients. So that’s one of the processes we’ve built for you. So you don’t have to do any of those things—social media, all those ones—we’ve actually got all those built. People could just take them and use them.

Doug Morneau: Well, that’s fabulous. I mean, I hear that complaint a lot in the podcasting circles that I’m in—people that are podcasters that are doing all the stuff themselves. Thinking, why don’t you outsource it?

Barbara Turley: Oh, come to us. We’ll get you a VA that can do that. It just, like—all I do is record the podcast and put it in Dropbox. I don’t even—it just shows up everywhere. Even this one that I’m on, eventually this will go live. They’ll take this, they’ll take a couple of snippets out of it, turn it into an image. They’ll spread it all across our social media and tag you guys, and I don’t have to be like, hey, did you see that podcast over there? I just do it on our website. There’s a system for that. Yes.

Doug Morneau: There’s a system for that.

Doug Morneau: Two questions, and I’ll let you get back to your day. One is, who’s one guest that you think I absolutely have to have on my podcast?

Barbara Turley: I reckon you should interview James Schrammko in Australia. Okay—who’s—I think you know him. James Schrammko is SuperFastBusiness. And then I have an interesting one I’m going to give you, too, right? Matt Maloof is my co-host, actually, on our podcast, The Virtual Success Show. And he’s a real systems guy, right? So if anybody is sort of thinking, I’d love to do all this, but I can’t be bothered building systems, I hate it, then Matt is ace at that sort of thing. That’s kind of what he—he’s got a coaching business in that, and you can get a flavor for him on our podcast. And I reckon you should have him on your show.

Doug Morneau: Well, that would be good. Yeah, systems are important. So whether or not you’ve got a VA or not, if you want to grow your business and work—as Michael Gerber says—work on your business, not in your business, you need to get it systematized.

Barbara Turley: He actually has a book—I’ve just realized, I just saw it on my shelf here—he wrote a book called The Stop Doing List, which is where I got that stop doing concept. And that’s like a tactical book that shows you how to do that.

Doug Morneau: Very cool. So now, Barbara, can people get in touch with you, learn more about what you’re doing, and how you can help them out?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So we have a special link for your listeners with some freebies on there. You can go to thevirtualhub.com/RMRF. But we’ll put it in the show notes anyway. RMRF. Yeah. And on there you can get—we’ve got a free mini guide. You don’t even need to sign up for that. It’s just a downloadable, which gives you the five reasons people fail with VAs and how to fix it. So that’s always easy.

Doug Morneau: That’s a good start. Find out what not to do.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, yeah, because these are like the things we see all the time and why you’re going to waste money. And then the next one is we’ve got a scalable business success formula, which is kind of more of what I’ve been talking about today on this show. And you can also book a free consult with one of our strategy consultants if you feel like you want to dive into—are you ready? Is this for you? Are we for you? All that sort of thing. You can have a chat with them.

Doug Morneau: Well, that’s super cool and super generous. I just appreciate you setting that aside for our listeners to check it out. So listeners, we’ll make sure we get the show notes transcribed. We’ll make sure that we’ve got Barbara’s information there and a link back to the website with those offers. So thanks again, Barbara, for sharing with our audience. And thanks, audience, for tuning in. If you have not subscribed to the podcast, please don’t be shy. Subscribe to the podcast, leave a review. If you’ve got some comments or some questions for Barbara, definitely reach—

Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me.

Doug Morneau: And contact her, and I look forward to serving you on our next episode.

Voice Over: That’s all for this episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Now it’s time to take your marketing to the next level by visiting dougmourneau.com and downloading our advanced marketing white papers, as well as exclusive resources based on today’s episode. That’s dougmourneau.com. Until next time, we look forward to serving you right here on Real Marketing Real Fast.