Jake Carlson: Hey guys, Jake Carlson here, host of the Modern Leadership Podcast. Are you ready to focus on amplifying your leadership superpowers? Let’s go!

Jake Carlson: Good morning, my friends, and welcome elite achievers. It is my pleasure to be with you today. My pleasure sounds too formal, huh? Not what I had planned for this great episode of Modern Leadership, the podcast where we dive in with authors, entrepreneurs, and leaders to find out what makes them tick, how they became who they are, and to share their leadership wisdom. So let me start today with a quick story.

As you know, I have been podcasting since 2014, with over 250 episodes. And for almost all those episodes, I did the editing myself. I know, if this were a text message, I can see you sending me the face-palm emoji. But hang with me a minute. Two months ago, I hired a virtual assistant. What’s that, you asked? I hired a remote expert, someone better than me at podcast editing, to do what they do best so that I can do what I do best, interview guests. And as business owners, we should be doing just that, hiring people better than us to do the things we suck at or shouldn’t be doing so that we can focus on what we should be doing. But don’t take my word for it. Let me introduce this week’s guest expert, the founder and CEO of Virtual Hub, Barbara Turley. Barbara is on a mission to eradicate small business overwhelm. You know what I’m talking about, right?

By simplifying the offshore outsourcing process and facilitating cost-effective business scalability, she and her team make this happen on a daily basis. Her business was started by accident and exploded in just the space of 12 short months to become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants in the digital marketing and social media space for businesses who need to free up time and energy so that we can all go to the next level.

Barbara, you are awesome. Welcome to Modern Leadership. How are you?

Barbara Turley: I’m great, thanks for having me. Excited to be on this show.

Jake Carlson: Well, and I can see you on the other end of the microphone here with your hand against the palm of your forehead saying, Jake, Jake, Jake, 2014, it took you that long, come on now. And we’re gonna get into that, but before we do, introduce us a little bit more to Barbara Turley. Who are you?

Barbara Turley: Who am I? Well, as we were chatting off air, I live in sunny Sydney, Australia, but I originally hail from little Ireland in Europe. So I’ve been living in Australia for about 17 years, but I am originally from there. And to the short version of who I am, I originally had a very long career in the financial industry. And you would think, being in the outsourcing industry in the Philippines now, that I would have had a background in HR or some sort of offshoring or something about training, but I actually didn’t. It was completely different, at the end of the industry of the world. I was in the financial investment banking arena for 15 years, but I always had a dream of running my own business, and I wanted to build a company. I always wanted to build something. Didn’t know what that was. And as many people are leaving corporate, I left and did a lot of consulting in the first year that I left corporate, and I discovered that I guess one of the things I discovered was something I was good at that I assumed everybody else was good at, but they weren’t, is operations, systems, processes, teams, that kind of thing. I saw so many businesses struggling, doing things they shouldn’t be doing themselves, and trying to do everything themselves, and caught in that terrible bind of can’t grow the business because I have no time or money to hire people to do the stuff that I shouldn’t be doing.

Jake Carlson: Well, it’s a scary spiral, right? I mean, it just goes around and around and around and around.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. And I just happened to have a VA myself in the Philippines because I had read The Four Hour Workweek, like we all had, by Tim Ferriss. And I just thought, I just started saying to clients, how about I try and get, I’ll try and get you one. And it just grew from there. It grew very organically from an idea, a side thing that I was helping people with, into the Virtual Hub, which today has over a hundred employees in the Philippines, and we’ve got offices, et cetera, there.

I’ve ended up in a completely different career and industry and everything than I started out in. So that’s kind of the brief synopsis of my career.

Jake Carlson: Well, it’s so fantastic to have a, you know, a virtual staffing expert on the show because this is something that has been on my mind for a long time and far too long. And some of the questions that I’ve been dying to ask an expert, I’ve just written them all down, and I want to talk to you about them because I think a lot of the listeners are going through some of the similar challenges that I went through when I was thinking about doing this.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, there’s a lot of, you know, people underestimate the amount of work involved in getting it right. They think it’s made out to be a really simple thing by, you know, by the Tim Ferrisses and people of the world that say, just, you know, just get a VA and everything’s gonna be great. But it is more difficult than people think. So I can definitely blow some of the myths open for you.

Jake Carlson: Well, the first myth, and this is the one that I struggled with for the longest time. So as I mentioned in the intro, we’ve got this podcast. And when I sit down and edit the podcast, we’re looking at about two hours of work for me to go from basically beginning to end, all the editing, all the posting to do that. And I do one episode a week. And so the first struggle that I had is how am I going to hire a virtual assistant and do two hours a week’s worth of work?

And one of the things that you dispel is that we only have, that often we think that we have a lot less work than we actually do. So talk to us a little bit about that.

Barbara Turley: I’m really glad you brought up the podcast thing because shameless plug for my own podcast, which is smaller, got a podcast called The Virtual Success Show. And since the beginning of the show, well, probably the first few episodes, but maybe by around episode six or seven, all I do is show up and record. I do nothing else. And when I’m finished recording, I just throw it in Dropbox, and then there’s an entire process that gets picked up by my VA and a number of other people. She just manages it, and it all shows up on iTunes. There’s transcripts, there’s social media posting for two weeks thereafter. It all just runs like a well-oiled machine. And really, you should only be doing the recording. There’s absolutely no reason why you should be doing any of the other stuff, but you need to have a very solid process that you can hand over, and then you can train someone on, and you can make sure that it’s being done properly and the right reporting back to you is happening so that you don’t have to check everything, you know, and that you know it’s actually happening on time. So, two hours of work there, I would suggest that when you first hand over something like that, it will actually take the person doing it longer than two hours. So the first mistake people make is, well, I can do it in two hours, why are you taking four hours to a new VA? And usually it’s because, you know, you’ve been doing it for a long time, so you’ve nailed it. But it’s gonna take a new person, a virtual assistant, longer than that to do it.

Barbara Turley: The other thing to remember is that within that there is more than one skill set, so you could get a virtual assistant to do the majority of it, but the editing part, you need an audio editor for that. You actually look, it’s not hard to edit them, you could teach a virtual assistant to do it, but you might actually want to just add a person into that little team who is a, you know, it could just be a freelance editor.

Jake Carlson: So tell us a little bit about that. Why would we go in that direction? What’s the advantage for us of hiring, let’s call it an expert in audio editing?

Barbara Turley: With podcasting today, most podcasts, I think, are pretty easy to edit because you do them in one hit. Okay, so you sit down, you record, you need an intro, an outro, using tools like Audacity, most VAs can handle doing little bits of editing like that. But if you want somebody to go in and equalize the, maybe my voice is louder than yours, if you want somebody to be equalizing the sound, to take out the ums and ahs and pauses, the mistakes, to actually literally go through it with a fine tooth comb and make it like a proper radio show, like a proper production, and be really, you know, then you want somebody who’s an audio expert who has the right tools to actually do that, because you can’t really do that just on a basic laptop or whatever. But you don’t need it, necessarily. I don’t use it, so.

Jake Carlson: Yeah, and one of the things that I was thinking about that you kind of brought up there, and that is, as you work with a virtual assistant, they often are work within the constraints that you give them. So the process that you create, they’re very good rule followers or action followers, doing the things that you ask them to do, but not venturing outside as far as, and I’ll give you an example, pulling out from the episode the stuff that needs to be, you know, the important parts and cutting out the stuff that doesn’t need to be. And so one of my hesitations of going through with a virtual assistant in the past has been, you know, how much freedom and flexibility can I give with minimal oversight?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, then the real answer to that is you’re blurring the lines between an assistant and an expert. And this happens all the time in the virtual assistant world. Now, the word virtual assistant, unfortunately, is extremely broad, and it goes from anyone with a heartbeat who can type right through to someone who can code an entire website, okay, or do your bookkeeping, or they’re all classed as virtual assistants.

But you’ve to be realistic with yourself and understand what your needs are first. So, for example, because I’m good at creating, I like to create my own processes. I know how I want things done. It’s very easy for me to hire a VA, basic, you know, sort of, I mean, not the lower, lower level, but someone who’s very good at running online tools, can follow my instructions and, you know, do what I want them to do. But in terms of them taking creative license with your material, I think you’re getting more into expert stuff there, and I’m not sure whether I would necessarily go to the Philippines and places like that if you want somebody at that level. Being honest, unless you work with somebody for a long time, you know, I’ve got someone on my team who’s been with me for four years, and she can do that now, but she wasn’t doing that on day one. That took about a year and a a half for us to develop that relationship and for me to mentor that into her. So yeah, just being clear and don’t blame the VA if you haven’t first figured out what level of person you’re really looking for.

Jake Carlson: Well, and I think that speaks to one of the other challenges that many of us face when considering using a VA, and that is, I don’t have time to create the processes, the procedures, the this is how to do it, in order to offload some of the work. And so we just continue to grind it out on our own, saying I just don’t have time to train anybody.

Barbara Turley: I’m sort of smiling with gritted teeth as you’re talking because I feel so passionate about this problem. I hear this all the time. What I say to clients, what I used to say to clients when I was a business coach, is, if you do not break that mindset, in 12 months’ time your business will be the same size, and you will feel the same, and you will still be as frustrated. If you spend the next six months slowing down to speed up, and what I mean by that is just taking a step back and saying, if I want to build a truly scalable business that works without me one day, then I have no choice but to systemize up this business. And systems run your business, people run your systems. And if you want to be able to put in cost-effective people to run your systems, then your systems need to be strong.

Jake Carlson: Yeah, and you stole the quote right out of my mouth. I absolutely believe that, right? Systems run the business. And so what are some of the things that we can look to a virtual assistant? Maybe if we’re trying to dip our toes in the water and get a little bit excited about this, what are some of the things that we can try out with a virtual assistant?

Barbara Turley: Sure, so let’s go back again to the podcast example. Okay, so what I would do there is I’m presuming, I’m assuming with your podcast, you’re doing things like, okay, you record it, you drop it in Dropbox, you’ve got to create a process for what do you do thereafter? Let’s assume for a second that you just top and tail it and maybe take a bit of a couple of mistakes out, and there’s nothing really requiring an audio expert, but something that a VA could do. So let’s assume a VA can run this whole process. So step one is obviously to pick up the audio.

Barbara Turley: Well, step one, you’ve got to get really clear here. Step one is to check every Tuesday for a new episode, like you’ve got a prompt. Now that might sound like you’re spoon-feeding someone, and you sort of are, but it’s putting in a little circuit breaker so that you don’t get the, I’m sorry, I just forgot to check. You know what I mean? Cause it’s like, well, it’s a step in the process. So how did you forget, right? So you never get these problems of I just got busy and I forgot, right? You know, or I was out that day, and Mary didn’t know how to do that. You know, this kind of problem that occurs.

Jake Carlson: Oh yeah, it happens all the time, and you can’t just assume that everybody knows what’s going on in your mind. Through this process, you’ve got to be able to put it down in a process, in a system that they can check the boxes and know what needs to be done.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so for example, so I’ll just go on with this, and then I’m gonna make another point on that in a second. So you gotta list out, like, really granular, what are the actual steps? Even like, you know, the ABCs of it, check the thing to make, you, is there an episode, you know, top and tail the episode, check for this, this, and this, have your little checklist of what you want them to edit out. So be really specific. This is if you’re not using an editor and with creative freedom. Then there’s obviously, you know, there’s a transcription. There is the show notes.

Now, show notes are creative, right? So you potentially may want your VA to liaise with somebody else who’s a creative who writes show notes. If you’ve got a good VA or if you’ve got a good process for show note writing, you know, you can have a go, and a VA might be able to actually replicate that in an okay enough way that you can do it. Next step, then, is obviously you’ve got to get it up on iTunes, get it up on your blog. You might want some little social media posts with some quotes from the podcast. You want to promote that podcast across distribution channels, across your social media.

There’s a ton of tasks within that entire thing that I just laid out, and all of that stuff a VA can do. My VAs do it for me. So it’s just about being very clear. And with processes, what I would say is, just to circle back to how granular do you need to be, let’s look at it from a business perspective again. If you want to build a highly scalable business that potentially someday could be sold,

Barbara Turley: The more detailed your processes are, with nowhere to hide, the more valuable your business is as an asset. So, forgetting VAs for a second, that’s why you want to take time out, and you don’t want to get into the mindset of, don’t have time for this. Well, if you don’t have time for this, then why are you building a business?

Jake Carlson: Yeah, and while we’re talking about virtual assistants in this episode, what you just brought up actually translates to any employee that we have. I mean, when you look at the average tenure of somebody working at your office nowadays, whether it’s a virtual assistant or whether they’re actually there at the brick and mortar with you, their lifespan with you is probably two to four years maximum, meaning you’re gonna have to retrain or bring in new people anyway. And so having these systems, having these processes, whether you’re outsourcing it, whether you’re using in-house people, having them down is the way to create a scalable business.

And you’re absolutely right, Barbara, when it comes to selling a business, and by the way, you said if you choose to sell it, you don’t have to, but you should always be looking towards that opportunity. And what people are gonna be buying, they’re not gonna buy your desks. They can go get their own desk. They’re not gonna buy your telephone system or your computers. They can go get their own. What they’re buying is your process, your system that makes them money. And so this is a great point that you brought up. And just to round that point out, what you’ll find is the more time and energy you put into building the system and building this thing that is your machine, the more cost-effective employees you can put into it. People who don’t have any systems and they’re always trying to look for the A players, you know, the way you’re like, I just wish I could hire someone that would come in and just take this pain away. Well, then you’re going to have to accept. You can do that, but you have to accept two things. You’re going to pay up for that. And you should, if that’s the way you want to go.

Barbara Turley: And the minute that person leaves, all that IP is gonna walk straight out the door, and you’re gonna be held ransom for more salaries, higher wages, higher bonuses, hiring the next A player, and always feeling a sense of anxiety about the business that you don’t have your hands around it. The more you systemize and create processes, it’s like, you know, one person goes, slot the next one in, and actually, the lower value stuff, or the more process-driven areas, you can look at the Philippines or you can look at other outsourced countries where it’s an awful lot cheaper, and you can get your local people maybe doing more high-value stuff, like more sales or more client relationship stuff or, you know, actually building your business with you because they’re not bogged down all day in the grunt work. But you can successfully outsource as long as you have good processes.

Jake Carlson: Yeah, and what we’re talking about here is delegation. And I’m a big believer that you should always attempt to delegate down to the lowest compensated person qualified to do the job. And I think, unfortunately, many of us as business owners, we tend to hold on to too many tasks that really should be delegated. Now, I know you, Barbara, you are a delegation master. This is something that comes natural to you. But for the rest of us who don’t delegate very well or easily, help us to understand how we can become better delegators.

Barbara Turley: Sure, so the first thing is the mindset. So you’ve got to get out of the mindset, I don’t have time. Yes, you don’t have time. The reason you don’t have time is because you built the business in such a way that you now don’t have time to create your processes. Business is, and I know this is a cliche, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, right? So what’s wrong with strategically saying for the next quarter, we are going to, as a business, we are going to focus on our processes and on our operational development?

Barbara Turley: Maybe that means that your sales might sort of, you might have to take a step back, I mean, for a second. I’m not saying sales should go down, but you may need to kind of just recalibrate and take a breather, and then stop doing lots of marketing and lots of external leverage. External leverage is stuff like PR, marketing, sales, et cetera, and focus for a little while on internal leverage, which is making sure the infrastructure within your business is able to actually cope and it is a machine. And lots of people are not willing to kind of, they’re playing the short game and not the long game. So that mindset’s very important.

Jake Carlson: You talk about this idea of the marathon and it being a cliche, but the truth of the matter is what you just said is important for us to dive down and understand. And that is what you said for the next quarter, and many of us feel like, as we get up and go to work every day, and we look at our business, we’re looking at this short game. As you mentioned, we’re looking at what’s going to happen over the next three or six months. And we see that as the life of our business.

But what you’re talking about is building a sustainable business where three months, one quarter, is a small blip in the amount of time that you’re going to have your business, and taking the time over the next three months or six months to really internally build up your foundation inside will have a long-term impact. But many of us feel like, as we get up and go to work for three, six months, well, that’s the life, that’s the livelihood of my business. Can’t just focus internally on that. What else will happen? And so this is a great kind of gut check for the leaders listening to really take a step back and focus on where the destination that you’re going to? And notice that three months is a small amount of time.

Now you look, Barbara, you started your business five years ago, and it exploded in the space of 12 months. You had no idea where it was going or what you were gonna do, and all of a sudden it exploded. So talk to us a little bit about this time frame mentality, this mindset of an owner.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a great question because, you know, in that first year for me, I’ll be honest, because I didn’t strategize this business out, I didn’t start with a business plan or an idea, it kind of came at me. People were asking for it, and they were like, hey, I heard that you get these VAs, can you get me one? And I was like, maybe there’s a business in this. That’s kind of how it started. And then it sort of got out of control. The first year was all about, I did lots of sales. So the things I’m talking about here are things that I’ve learned from my own experience, my own scars, basically.

I did lots of sales, but the operations were kind of a bit of a mess. Even though I kind of knew all this stuff, I just didn’t have time to catch up. And eventually, I ended up with a business that I didn’t like, and I couldn’t move forward with. I was just stressed out every day. I had terrible clients, terrible VAs, and nothing was working. And I actually fired half the staff, and I fired a load of clients, and I just pared it all back to kind of the bare minimum, cut my own income back dramatically. Like, I really did have to take some pain.

And I rebuilt it, and I went, that’s it. I know I’m onto something here. I know the world needs this, but I’ve got to rebuild it. And I started rebuilding it. I built a client onboarding process. I built a VA onboarding and training process. And I think, you know, starting with that mindset I just talked about, taking your three-month thing to try and get started. But the next step is to realize that it never ends after those three months, like it’s an evolution. Its processes are living, breathing things. They will go wrong.

You’ll hire someone, you’ll stick a VA in there, and there’ll be a mistake in that process, and you’ll want to shoot the VA because you spent so much time building your process, until you sit down and look at it and go, well, actually, I probably didn’t mention that when I’m doing that process, I have this thing in my head that I do, that’s my IP, that I didn’t show that person how to think like I do when they do that process. So they evolve over time, and mistakes, as long as you’ve got a good person that’s genuinely doing the right thing, okay, let’s just park that elephant in the room over in the corner for a second. If you’ve got a great VA that’s genuinely doing the right thing and not lying to you, then mistakes can be a gift because they’ll show you where the holes in your process. And if you look at it that way, that’s the next step for you in the mindset of developing out and keeping moving with this.

Jake Carlson: I can’t help but point at that elephant in the corner of the room and ask another follow-up question about that. And that is, we’ve got people across the world from us. If we’re in the United States or even if you’re in Australia, you’ve got people working for you that are not in the same room as you. You can’t keep your finger on them every day, knowing how many times they are at the water cooler or not doing their work, not focusing in. And so how do you gain this trust for your team when you can’t really see them and keep an eye on them at all times?

Barbara Turley: You know what, trust. Of course, you want to trust your team. I would throw that out the window. Just build your system so that nobody has to rely on trust, including them. So, for example, step one is mindset. Step two is to create your processes and make sure that you’re evolving and working with that person to spot the mistakes. Step three is reporting back. The amount of clients I see who just create their process and their task list, hand it to a VA, and then don’t speak to the VA for a month, and then they wonder why it’s all gone pear-shaped, because that person’s going to have questions.

You just need touch points, like communication and team connectivity, which do not require physical presence. So I’m a big fan of the daily huddle. Now this is a scrum technique. If you want to look this up, just Google it. But the concept of a daily huddle, I use two things. I’ve got processes. You also have to have a project management system. I use Asana. There’s Trello, there’s Teamwork PM. There’s loads of them.

Email is not a project management system. The amount of people trying to use email for team communication and having a disaster with it and then blaming their team, just trust me, it doesn’t work. So you need to have a system that joins your team together in terms of projects and tasks that are ongoing. You need a chat system. You can either just use Skype groups or Slack or something like that, or just use Asana, because you can chat in there as well. And then the final piece of the puzzle is you’ve got to bring that team together.

Barbara Turley: I call it the non-negotiable 10 to 15-minute catch-up every day. And you, as a business owner, again, it’s a mindset. If you don’t show up to that meeting or you’re the one always canceling it, it tells your team that it’s not important. We have a daily huddle every day. And my team, I’ve got my head of recruitment, my trainers, there’s like eight people on there, and they have to report to me daily on their numbers, their stats, where their processes are at, and the problems.

So that then I can give feedback and go, okay, do this. Okay, my advice is that, why don’t you try this. And in 20 minutes flat, I can just get my team mentored, my leadership team. And also, they have to show up prepared for that meeting every single day.

Jake Carlson: Now, do you hold those meetings on, like, Zoom or webinar?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, we use Zoom. We used to use Skype, but now there’s too many of us, so we use Zoom. With your project management tool as well, let’s say that you’re with a client onboarding process. I run things called pipelines, sales pipelines, and things. There’s tools you can use for it. I just use Asana for it. And we’re all on Zoom, and then we’ve got all of our different pipelines. We’ve got recruitment, we’ve got training pipelines, client onboarding, all the different sections of our business. And I can see people being moved through that pipeline based on our process.

Jake Carlson: And it’s all being done through Asana for you? Yeah. Asana is very powerful. If you haven’t checked it out, go ahead and take a look at it. It’s something that we use in our business as well. And I love it because, like you said, email is not a project management system, although too many businesses are trying to do that. If you have processes, which you should have and you need to have, you need to have some sort of process management system, like an Asana or a Trello, that you can use.

This is great. Before we move on to the next section, Barbara, I wanted to ask you, what’s the biggest key takeaway that you want our listeners to take away from this discussion of virtual assistants?

Barbara Turley: The big key takeaway, and obviously this will sound like I’m, you know, I’m obviously in the business of selling virtual assistants, but putting that aside for a second, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in or where you are in the world. If you put in place the things we’ve talked about so far on this podcast, you can very easily have an offshore team that can run a lot of stuff for you. And every business needs to make a margin.

And if you want better margins and more cost-effective scalability, you are mad not to try and make this scenario and this opportunity work because there’s an opportunity right now in the world where you can get really great staff offshore. As long as the hiring part is a whole other game, okay. So I know people have been burned trying to do this online themselves, but if you do get it right, and we can talk about that, I’m very open about the problems there. I’ve been burnt myself, but it is worth investing the time and energy in doing this. And you know what, even if you don’t end up with an offshore staff member, you might end up with an intern in your office. The systems and processes that you build will still help with these kinds of things, regardless of whether you use offshore or not.

Jake Carlson: Yeah, they have value. Like we’ve talked about, my favorite quote from this episode of the podcast is that systems run businesses, and, of course, people run the systems. It’s now time, Barbara, for us to change gears just a little bit and to talk about my favorite subject or section of this episode. And that is learning from leaders, where we find out a little bit more about you on a personal level. How does that sound?

Barbara Turley: Sure.

Jake Carlson: All right. The listeners want to know what book you are currently reading. What’s on your Kindle or bedside table?

Barbara Turley: I was just thinking about this question before we came on air, and I was thinking, I have a two-and-a-half-year-old. Should I say that Peppa Pig and Telma the Unicorn are high on my list right now? My bedside is full of children’s books, but I don’t get to read. I do love, I’m an avid reader, and I don’t get to read right now as much as I would like to, but the book I am reading right now is called Traction, which I’m sure a lot of you have heard about.

I love books that are about, I mean just what I’m talking about, you know. I mean, it’s not like I invented this material myself. I’ve read books like Built to Scale, and Traction is another amazing one. Books like that are kind of where I get my kicks from.

Very nice and very great recommendations. And we love Peppa the Pig too, so thank you for sharing that. How about your leadership superpower?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so I was having a read of the five ones that you mentioned in your free quiz, and I decided not to do the free quiz. I thought I’ll do, I’ll think about what I really feel has been one of the secrets to my success. And I do think that I do have a natural ability to delegate well, but I think it’s more that I don’t just delegate a task to people or a process. I actually invest a lot of my own energy and time

Barbara Turley: In helping them to be super successful at it. Once you do that, you get to lead your A player team by virtue of the fact that you follow everything I’ve just been talking about. And I think I’m naturally good at that. I just think it’s one of my really strong natural skills.

Jake Carlson: And we can see that through this episode. I mean, delegation is so vitally important for scalability of a company, and you’ve brought us great wisdom and insight in delegation. I would agree that is your leadership superpower. How about a motivational quote, philosophy, or mantra, something that you live by?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so a very good friend of mine who also runs a very large business in the Philippines and has been sort of a mentor to me in terms of the Philippine side, she said to me one day, she was, it’s a, I think it’s like a quote from Egypt or somewhere like that. I don’t even know where it’s from, but the dogs may be barking, but the caravan still passes. And it’s a proverb. And it essentially means that there will always be noise, you know, when you’re having the really tough times in business, where clients are annoyed and things are going wrong.

And this one for me is like, the dogs will always be barking, but the caravan keeps going. And you just got to keep your eye on the prize and keep moving forward because there will always be noise and dogs barking.

Jake Carlson: Yeah, and I think that’s a beautiful quote. I love that one because, on so many levels, it flows nicely, but the message is so powerful. So thank you for sharing that. Our final question, then, is the book that you most often gift to friends, family, or colleagues.

Barbara Turley: Do you know, I don’t have an answer to this. I was thinking, gee, I don’t know if I’ve ever given a book to anyone as a gift. Isn’t that terrible? I think once I bought a book for my husband, my dad is a big reader, but no, isn’t that terrible? I haven’t really gifted a book. I think I’m more a bigger reader than anybody else in my immediate family or friends.

Jake Carlson: Well, and I think that the definition of gifting can be broader in that you kind of gifted us a couple of books, Traction and Built to Scale. Of course, Peppa the Pig. I mean, gifting a book is often what you recommend for other people to read. And I’m sure on your podcast, you’ve often said, you know, this is a book that meant a lot to me or something like that. So, you know, moving forward, book most often gifted, I would suggest that somebody who reads as much as you, probably imparts gifts of books to many, many people.

Barbara Turley: Because I do talk about stuff I’m reading all the time, and I’ve had people gift, in that context, gift books to me as well. It’s just kind of a, I guess the ones I’ve mentioned were gifted to me by other people, so that’s always a good one. The other one is The Zappos Experience, which, from a culture perspective, I mean I’m trying to build a culture of people in the Philippines, so I found that that was gifted to me by somebody else. So there’s another one for anyone running larger teams where they want to build, like, a big cultural vibe of people.

Jake Carlson: Very good. Well, Barbara, our time is running short, and before we let you go, tell us, how can we find out more about you and connect?

Barbara Turley: Sure, so if you want to learn more about all the things we’ve been talking about, I talk a lot about this on our podcast called The Virtual Success Show, where I’ve got a great co-host called Matt Maloof, who’s a business coach on there. Also, you can get that on our website, thevirtualhub.com. And also, for more, a couple of free gifts for the listeners, for you guys, if you go to thevirtualhub.com forward slash ML for modern leadership, on there we’ve got a couple of free downloads and free goodies on scalable business success and all that sort of thing that you can get.

And you can also book a free strategy call with one of our outsourcing strategy consultants if you want there too. And if you want to follow me more personally, LinkedIn is kind of where most people follow me. I do post some content and stuff over there as well. And I’m always talking about all things business scalability, not just outsourcing and VAs. I’m very passionate about it, as you can tell.

Jake Carlson: Yeah, well, these are all great, and I’m going to link them up on the show notes. We love free gifts, and thank you for making that offer to the Modern Leadership audience. I appreciate having this conversation with somebody who took something that I’ve been very hesitant about. I struggled. It’s been an obstacle in my life to make that commitment to step over into, you know, delegating some of these tasks. And I thought that it would be great to have you on the show to talk about, you know, some of the challenges that I went through and help dispel the myths.

So thank you, Barbara, for coming on and being this week’s Modern Leadership guest expert.

Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me.

Jake Carlson: All right, my friends, we just went down a journey, the kind of journey that I’ve had to go down myself over the last year as I’ve realized I cannot continue to grow my business. I cannot scale my business. My business will never get to the point that I want it to without delegating some of these tasks away. And you heard me say it in the episode. I need to find people who are better at doing the job than I am that can free me up to spend time doing what I’m good at.

Delegating down to the lowest compensated person most qualified to do the job. Now, it’s important to note that I said most qualified to do the job because we can’t compromise quality. But we really need to use our efforts and our intelligence to the highest and best use for us and the skills and talents of others for the highest and best use for them. And with that being said, of course, everything that we talked about on this episode can be found at Jake A Carlson com slash ML115 for episode 115 (jakeacarlson.com/ml115).

And until next week, I want to wish you the very best of days and an even better life. And, of course, remember that everything is figure-outable.

Jake Carlson: Thanks for listening to the Modern Leadership Podcast. You can find me on Facebook at Speaker Jake, on Twitter at Jake A. Carlson, and, of course, the website jakeacarlson.com. See you there.