Drew McClellan: Are you tired of feeling like the lonely lighthouse keeper as you run your agency? Welcome to the Agency Management Institute community, where you’ll learn how to grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money, and keep more of what you make. The Build a Better Agency podcast is now in our third year of sharing insights on how small to mid-size agencies survive and thrive in today’s market.

Drew McClellan: Bringing his 25-plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McClellan.

Drew McClellan: Hey everybody, Drew McClellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Thanks for joining me. If you are new to the podcast, welcome. Glad to have you. Every week, we try and talk about a different topic that I think will help you build a stronger, better, more scalable agency, more profitable, and also one that is a little more worry-free. Not that I think agency ownership is really ever worry-free, but a little more anyway, and something that you can continue to enjoy and that will help you meet your personal and professional goals. So that’s my purpose.

If you are a regular, welcome back. Thanks so much for sticking with me.

Today or tonight’s topic, depending on when you’re listening, is one that I think many agency owners like in theory, but either have tried and had a bad experience or are leery of trying. And I think as agencies struggle, A, to hire well, B, to retain good employees, and C, to get a scalable margin of profit into what I think of as task work,

Drew McClellan: I think all of those challenges are presented to us every single day. And so what the topic today is really about is how to use virtual assistants to augment your ongoing staff and to build out a team of people who help you do the tasks that, quite frankly, no one in your shop really wants to do.

Drew McClellan: It’s difficult to monetize them because they’re very labor intensive, but clients don’t understand it. Things like reporting, grabbing data and putting it into a dashboard, link building, some administrative elements of SEO work.

Build a Better Agency: Ways to Grow Your Agency with Support Assistants

For some agencies, what they’ve done is they have, as I said, augmented their staff by adding some virtual assistants. Now, we’ve all heard the horror stories, and I certainly am going to be asking our guest about those in terms of language barriers, time barriers, inconsistency, not being reliable in terms of showing up, or the quality of work isn’t what you want it to be. And I think that my guest, Barb Turley from The Virtual Hub, has solved some of those problems.

So here’s what I’m asking for you to do: as Barb and I talk over the next hour, what I’m hoping you will do is just stay open to the possibility. Some of you, as soon as you heard me say “virtual assistant,” you went, “Nope, not going to do it,” or, “Nope, did it, never doing it again.” But I do think that there probably is a place for this.

And when you think about it, many of you swore to God that you would never use outsourced copywriters or art directors, and today many, many of you are doing that. So I suspect this kind of falls into that vein, that this is one of those things that wasn’t how the business was built back in the day. It’s a new concept. It certainly has some pitfalls that we have to figure out how to avoid, but it is a way for us to bring some smart economics to our business.

So we’re going to dig into all of that: how to find a good virtual assistant, what kind of work makes sense to give them to do, and what kind of stuff you should not ask them to do. And then, what’s your role as an agency owner or leader in making sure that that relationship works and that the output of work is of a high quality and actually serves your clients and your agency well.

So with that, let’s jump into the conversation. Barb, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us today.

Barb Turley: Thanks so much for having me. Very excited to be talking to your audience today.

Drew McClellan: So, you know, you live in a world that I think a lot of agency owners and leaders have this fuzzy understanding about. And in theory, they go, “A virtual assistant, that might be kind of nice to have.” But there’s a lot of fear around it — a lot of fear about finding the right one, about consistency. I’m going to get somebody kind of in my groove, and then they’re going to go on and do something different. Is this really a career choice, or is this somebody doing this in between gigs?

Drew: So how do you dispel, when somebody calls you and they’re interested in this, how do you dispel those fears so that they’re willing to give it a shot?

Barbara: Well, the first thing I would say is all of those fears that you have listed are absolutely legitimate fears and things that do happen. So I wouldn’t necessarily dispel those fears because, in the broader direct market, if you’re going to go to the Philippines, which is where I specialize in — but obviously any of the outsourcing markets — you may come up against people who will ensure that those fears come to life for you.

So I always say to people, look, it’s an amazing thing to get right if you can get it right, specifically, especially for an agency, because it’s a great way to leverage a team that’s offshore. It’s much more cost effective and all of those lovely things. But it’s not as easy as people think because the recruitment part of it and the management part of it — that’s where we come in, and we will remove the fears around all of those issues you just brought up because we actually take care of that on the ground.

And I’ll tell you now, it is extraordinarily difficult, right? So those fears are real.

Drew: Yeah, I bet. What kind of things — so I’m an agency owner, which actually I am — what kind of things am I doing right now that a virtual assistant could do for me and take off my plate? Because if there is one common sort of ailment that agency owners and leaders have, it’s that there’s too much on their plate, and they can’t get it all done, and they’re working 60 or 80 hours, and they sort of feel like the hamster in the wheel.

Barbara: Absolutely. I mean, there are so many things that you shouldn’t be doing as an agency owner. But if I was just to narrow it down, some of the biggest ones are things like, let’s say you are a digital marketing agency and you have an SEO part of your business, which involves link building, which we all know is an excruciatingly arduous task of sending lots of emails. It’s very much an admin task, actually.

Your job as the owner or as the agency head or whatever is to come up with the strategy, the process, how it’s going to work, how you’re going to get success, and then your job is to delegate that. And that’s a perfect task to be delegating to a virtual assistant, where you could be paying 10 bucks an hour instead of paying one of your project managers who might be on 100 bucks an hour. So it’s classic.

Another great one: we’ve got some Facebook ad agencies that are using virtual assistants to tinker around in PowerEditor and come up with a lot of the reporting. So a lot of the admin part of getting the reports out, the analytics — again, you’ve got to set that up, and you’ve got to do a bit of training with your team, and you’ve got to take ownership of how they’re going to be doing that. But it pays so much dividend to get that right in the end.

Another example: those doing social media. Granted, you can have people offshore do your social media content calendars and all that sort of thing. If you want to maintain control of the content, which a lot of agencies do, part of the job is creating Canva images, creating and loading everything into Hootsuite or HubSpot or one of these scheduling tools for all your social media accounts. That’s another classic one.

So the list goes on, really. Blog optimization, all this sort of thing can be done by virtual assistants.

Drew: And how do I, as the agency owner, screen a candidate to see if they actually have the chops to do that work? Because what a lot of agency owners are probably thinking is, “I’m not sure a virtual assistant from the Philippines can optimize a blog post or can understand Google Analytics enough to pull a report,” or whatever. If I were going to hire someone,

Drew: how do I screen them to know that they actually know what they’re doing?

Barbara: Yeah, I wouldn’t screen them to know that because they’re probably going to tell you that they can do it, and then you’ll find out pretty quickly that maybe they can’t or their experience was limited.

You’ve got to accept that if you’re going to be going to the Philippines, it is, as I said, a very, very cost-effective leverage strategy for any business, but you have to take ownership of the training demands.

So in my experience, at our — we’re sort of an agency as such in that we recruit, train, and manage. So we actually do our own training programs and all that sort of thing. But we do encourage clients, particularly agencies that know exactly what they’re doing, that you have to then take the person that we’ve pre-trained and you’ve got to kind of have your own processes already ready to go. And you’ve got to do some training with your new team to get it to pay the dividends that you want.

I wouldn’t just be like, “Okay, so you say you know how to optimize a blog post. Here’s a blog. Off you go. Goodbye. I’m not going to talk to you for a month.” Even with optimizing blog posts, that’s quite a big job, but there’s lots of little jobs within that, like keyword research, narrowing down lists based on competition and search and all these things.

And you can create your own metrics around that and give it to a virtual assistant to bring you back the data. So again, you’re not hiring a specialist. You’re hiring someone that you’re going to work with. And I think that’s the mistake a lot of people make when they’re offshoring, is they think they’re going to get an expert. And you might hit a home run, right? You might, but it’s actually quite difficult. So it’s just accepting that in order to get the benefits of it, you have to have that kind of an approach to it.

Drew: Well, honestly, I don’t know that that’s any different if you’re hiring a VA from the States either.

Barbara: I agree.

Drew: I don’t think the offshoring — I mean, I think you have language issues maybe in some of those cases — but the reality is, I think if you hire a virtual assistant from anywhere, the more precise your system or process is, because you’re really asking them to follow prescribed steps, right?

Barbara: Absolutely.

Drew: Yes, absolutely. The reason I sort of stress that point is that you would be surprised at the number of people who still show up on our doorstep at The Virtual Hub and say they want somebody who’s going to show initiative. The lines get blurred between what is strategy, what is process development, and what is actually execution of a process that is very detailed and has been trained on for a VA.

Drew: Right. And so what you’re saying is that the best use of a VA is a repetitive task that they can learn and then just follow the recipe over and over again.

Barbara: Absolutely, and then you work together. The next step that people miss sometimes is they roll out a process that’s recurring and then never really have a check-in point with the virtual assistant to see how it’s going, improve the process, or get better results.

It’s also important to engage them in what you’re trying to achieve so they don’t feel like just a monkey in the Philippines doing a repetitive task. They need to feel like a really important input to a strategic business and to the decisions or direction you’re trying to achieve.

That’s a key thing as well — to make them feel part of the business so they can get more success for you and stay more engaged. If you just give someone a repetitive task and ask them to do it every week with no engagement strategy, you’ll find that mistakes will naturally slip in. And that applies to any country. Like you said, it wouldn’t matter where the person was.

Drew: Right. So if I’m the Director of Account Services and I’m going to, on behalf of my agency, engage with a virtual assistant, how often should I talk to them? How often should I check their work? How engaged should they be with the team? What’s the best practice around all of that?

Barbara: Yes, that’s a great question. Number one, we’re big fans of using a project management tool and not using email for internal team and task communication. For example, I’m a huge Asana user, but there’s also Trello, Teamwork PM, and others.

So first, you’ve got to bring them in. If you’re working with an offshore person at this level, my advice is not to treat them like a contractor or a freelancer. I would probably steer clear of freelancers for other reasons too.

You want to fully bring them into the business. Give them a business email address, for example, [email protected]. Invite them into your project management tool, your Slack channels, and any other meetings you’re having with the team. Fully incorporate them into your team.

Also, set expectations from the start around the communication flow that already exists in the business. For example, are you someone who likes to deal with questions or roadblocks immediately because you’re available all day? Or are you in meetings all day and it would drive you crazy to be interrupted? You need to set that expectation from day one. Then, set your meeting rhythm.

Barbara Turley: You probably have a meeting rhythm already with your team. Maybe you’re running daily huddles, maybe your weekly strategy meetings. I would encourage the huddle technique, which is like a short 10-minute meeting where you address: what have I done, what am I planning to do, and where am I stuck? That’s the big one.

And to do that with a virtual assistant is very powerful. Ten minutes a day, and have it as a non-negotiable in your diary, especially in the first kind of six to eight weeks of working together.

Drew: And does that imply that I’m working with this person 40 hours a week as opposed to — I might buy 10 hours a month from them? Because that sounds to me like I have an employee now.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, just dealing with what we do at The Virtual Hub, we specialize in dedicated staff. So we do part-time contracts of 20 hours per week or full-time at 40 hours per week. So that’s kind of how we operate.

Drew: Okay, so if I was hiring a virtual assistant through you, the minimum I’m getting is 20 hours a week. So it’s more like you’ve got to have a good, strong task list.

Now, if you are going for a virtual assistant where you’re just doing 10 hours a month or whatever, that can work great, but I think at the minimum you want to have some check-in points during that month. Maybe it’s a bi-monthly meeting. I wouldn’t do monthly. I think initially you want to do maybe a little bit more often, but you just have to have check-in points where you address the roadblocks and how it’s going.

Drew: Yeah, right. And typically, in your model and sort of in your view of this, are they transparent to the clients? Are they interacting with clients? Are they completely behind the curtain? How does that typically work when your agency — because I know you work with a lot of agency clients — so how do they integrate this part-time contractor? Because that’s really what it is, part-time or full-time contractor. How do they integrate them with clients?

Barbara Turley: Yep. So typically, the agencies that we’re working with have the virtual assistants doing the backend work, but they are very much engaging with the team — the team, even if the team’s only two people, right? They’re engaging.

So when I say back office, I don’t mean like they’re just way off in the Philippines and nobody speaks to them. They’re very much part of the team.

We have a couple that have a VA doing some client-facing work, but it’s more like an onboarding process. They may have the VA emailing to follow up for documents that are needed or a contract to be signed. But that, again, would be a process.

But in general, it is more the back office and internal team that I would recommend, unless you build them up. I mean, an agency wouldn’t — I don’t think you’d want people of that level engaging with your clients. You want to show, you know, your agency wants to have the top people engaging with them, I would think.

Drew: Right. So what are some of the mistakes? One of them, obviously, it sounds like, is not having enough touch bases with your virtual assistant. What are other common mistakes that agencies or business owners or business leaders make when they engage with a virtual assistant? Again, regardless of where they live, to me that’s kind of irrelevant. But how can I mess this up?

Barbara Turley: Oh yeah. So the biggest mess-up point is in the first four weeks, probably the first week. Usually where people mess up is they come in with an expectation that this person is going to hit the ground running. And the reason I’ve said it that way is because we hear this all the time: “I thought they were going to hit the ground running.”

I’m like, look, even if you hire somebody who’s an MBA-qualified US whatever in your business, nobody comes into any business and hits the ground running. It is quite a…

Barbara Turley: They might, but really you have — you’re shaking your head because… So people have this perception that if you hire the right person, they’re going to hit the ground running. So usually with a virtual assistant then, in the first week, they kind of go, “I don’t know.” And then they panic, and because it’s offshore, they immediately go, “This doesn’t work for me.”

So that’s a huge mistake. And it’s a mindset issue that you have to come in — you’ve got to make sure that you do not have that bias before you come in.

Barbara Turley: You’ve got to come in with an open mind. You’ve got to come in prepared to potentially take a pause for a month in some processes to get them delegated effectively. Then, after that first hump, you need to have an onboarding time with a new person in your business. You’ve got to tell them about what you actually do, what you’re trying to achieve, all that stuff, and then delegate the processes slowly. Don’t slam someone on day one with a recurring task list that’s, you know…

So that’s number one.

The second one I see all the time is people try to — I call them the lemon squeezers — where you hire somebody for whatever, 10 hours a week or even 40 hours a week, doesn’t matter, but you actually try and shove a full-time job down the throat of a part-time person, and then you blame them because they can’t get the results for you. So that’s a major issue that we see.

Barbara Turley: People think, “Well, I can do it in four hours a day, so why can’t they?” And I go, “Well, they possibly will get to that level, but again, you need some time.” And again, if it’s costing you 10 bucks an hour, or if you go direct, you can get much cheaper than that, is it — it doesn’t matter if it takes a bit longer or they take their time with something.

Then, once you get through that first four-to-six-week hump, let’s say you get through there, the next kind of major milestone is after three months.

Barbara Turley: People tend to see slippage or mistakes happening. Usually the problem with that is there’s no leadership. You’re not doing the check-in milestones. You’re not kind of leading that person and your team. And those are issues that happen in any business. It’s not just with VAs, but we see that quite a lot.

Host: Right. So I would guess — I’m surprised that one of the mistakes that you didn’t list, and maybe it’s coming next, is that agencies come in expecting the VA to have a process. So like, I hire a VA to, let’s say, optimize blog posts, but I don’t feel like I should have to teach them how to optimize a blog post. They should just know how to do that, and they should know how to do it the way I want them to do it.

Barbara Turley: Oh yeah, yeah. So the good thing about our agency is that we actually — our business at The Virtual Hub — this was a problem in the market, and I decided to go after it. That’s why we’re doing quite well, because we run massive training programs where we train on specific processes around all of these things, and we give the process to the clients.

We say, “You can have the process. Your VA has been trained in this process, and we will ongoingly help and support along the way.”

Barbara Turley: But you can modify the process to your own liking or just use it or not use it, use your own. That’s kind of how we operate. So we’ve sort of eradicated that issue a little bit.

In the direct market, though, you will still find freelancers that will have their own process. The problem with freelancers — and I’m probably going to get nailed here for saying this — I love freelancers for certain jobs.

Barbara Turley: But what you’ve got to remember — I heard, I think it was Gary Vaynerchuk the other day did one of those Facebook Lives on this. And he was talking about how the problem with hiring a freelancer is that you’re hooking up and dating when actually what you’re looking for is a marriage.

So it’s tricky, right? They will come in and have their own process. It may be completely misaligned to your process, even if they have experience. And then it’s very hard to break that and get them to do something else.

Barbara Turley: Because they have their own idea about what they want to do.

Host: Well, I think one of the things agencies have begun to embrace is this idea of finding a contractor for a specific skill, hiring them for a specific task, and then you move on. And we certainly use outsourcing for maybe certain kinds of art directors or things like that.

But I think what I’m hearing you say, which is an interesting sort of mental shift, is that really the best way to use a virtual assistant is to not think about them as a temporary hire.

Host: But instead to think of them as you’re augmenting your staff through a contract relationship. So again, they’re not an employee, you’re not obligated in that way, but ideally this is someone who is going to stick with you for a period of time. So again, that’s…

Barbara Turley: What I’m really talking about, you’re right. My background was all in investment banking before I did this. I was a business coach for a long time before I did this. And I saw the same problem coming up all the time. Lots of businesses, the issue they face is that they can’t scale what they’re doing because they need people or they need systems. And they’re kind of hamstrung because you’re like, “I need more clients so I can get a salary in and hire someone or contract someone.” So there’s this bind all the time.

Barbara Turley: If you can nail this offshore thing and have that mindset shift — particularly as an agency where there’s, like we started this call, so many things to do, it’s just incredible the to-do lists that you guys have — if you can get this offshore team running as part of your scalable business strategy, oh my God.

Your agency, your people in the US or wherever you have them, you put them doing more higher-value work and getting more clients and dealing with more accounts — boom, business growth.

Barbara Turley: So it is a mindset shift. I think when you’re sort of online just doing contractors here and there and tasks, it’s fine in the early days. But if you want to scale your business, if you want a really successful agency where your margins are higher, then this strategy is something you want to be thinking about in a more long-term way.

Get someone in on a long-term basis into your business. That’s kind of where we specialize, I guess. I’m very passionate about that because that’s where we specialize.

Host: Yeah. And again, to me, I think the offshore thing is sort of — while there may be an economic value in hiring somebody from the Philippines versus a VA from Georgia — Georgia US, not Georgia the country. Right. I picked the wrong state.

Even a virtual assistant here might cost you 25 bucks or whatever it is. But the point I think that’s interesting in this is the idea that I think many people would go into a virtual assistant relationship thinking that it is short term. And what you’re saying is when you find the right one and they are able to sort of adapt to the way that you work and they learn your systems and processes, this can be a good long-term solution.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and why would you train somebody up like that and then have them… And I think as well, because your mindset is short term, that person feels that. So they’re going to be skipping on to the next client. They’re not committed to you because they can feel it. They know they’re just a fly-by-night for you.

There’s a lot of — I mean, just to voice the other side — I hear it in the Philippines a lot, that people who are on Upwork and trying to do the freelancing thing are getting railroaded by clients because clients are getting them to do work and they’re not paying them for it, doing runners and all that. So there’s a whole industry-wide problem about this short-termism and nobody really committed to anyone. That fuels annoyance and irritation on both sides.

Drew: So I have a couple agencies whose owners have partnered with a virtual assistant, and that person manages their email. Talk to me about that. The idea of letting someone else in my email — when I think about that, I think, right, I’d be like, no. And I can’t imagine that anybody else — I mean, there are certainly plenty of emails I get that anyone could answer.

And I think if they — I don’t like that.

Drew: How I answered them for a period of time, like, “When is that workshop?” or “What time does the workshop end?” You know, that kind of thing probably somebody could. But is that a common thing that people hire a virtual assistant for?

Barbara Turley: Look, I have a view on this. I do have clients that use their VAs for certain amounts of email, but here’s my theory on email. The first step with email is not to delegate it. The first step with email is to eradicate and automate as much of it as possible.

So you want to try and minimize your inbox by clever strategies. So, for example, you want to have — and these are where VAs start coming in — I’m a big fan of removing all the small questions and the customer support stuff to a customer support channel.

Barbara Turley: So, for example, you could tell your clients, “Just email [email protected].” You can integrate that to things like Asana, where the tickets pop up there, and you can have VAs manage that.

And over time, you would ask a VA for those kinds of questions to build you — and we have a process for this — a structure around what level is the question. Are they commonly asked questions?

Barbara Turley: The more FAQs you’re getting, you may want to put that on your website or on the autoresponder so people get an idea.

So there’s that. You want to move some of that stuff off your email because then you want to move some of the — all your subscriptions and all that sort of stuff off your email. If you do a lot of that and you automate some of it and you just kind of are clever about your email, all of a sudden your email is down to a point where you can actually manage it yourself.

And it’s the important stuff like podcast interviews or whatever, or you can flick something to your VA if it’s an easy one that comes in.

Barbara Turley: But look, I do have a lot of clients that — you have to have a system. You have to have a system for how that email is going to be managed.

I mean, look, you have to have a voice in the response that matches your brand. You can be realistic about it. I would say three to six months to get somebody to really emulate your brand voice.

Barbara Turley: Your email responders — don’t think someone’s going to walk in on day one and solve your email problem. They won’t.

Drew: Yeah, I just can’t imagine it.

Okay, I want to ask you about sort of the ugly side of, like, when does it not work and how do you sort of separate in a minute, but let’s first take a quick break.

Thanks for tuning in to Build a Better Agency. I just want to take a quick second and remind you that throughout the year, AMI offers workshops for agency owners, agency leaders, and account executives.

So if you head over to the AMI website and you check out under the training tab, you’re going to find a calendar of all of the workshops we offer throughout the year. We cover quite a wide variety of topics, everything from biz dev to creating a content machine for your agency to making sure that you are running your business based on the best financial metrics and dashboards that you can.

We also have a workshop on agency owner management hacks, all the best practices that agency owners are using to run their businesses well and profitably.

Drew: And of course, you’re always going to find our Account Executive Bootcamp and our Advanced AE Bootcamp. So go ahead and check it out on the website, and hopefully one of those will meet a need for you and your agency, and we’ll see you soon.

Let’s get back to the episode.

All right, we are back, and we are talking about how agencies can use and leverage the power of virtual assistants. And again, whether you go through a central hub like Barb’s firm or you hire them in a different way,

Drew: to me, the question is, how do you find the right person? And then what kind of work can they do? But sometimes it just doesn’t work.

So how do I know? Because one of the mistakes you said that we make is that we come unprepared or maybe our expectations are unrealistic. So that first week is a disaster, and we think, “I need to fire this person. This is not working. I was right all along. This is not for me. I want out.”

So how do I know when I actually should fire a virtual assistant or a virtual assistant firm that’s helping me do this? What are the non-negotiables in this space?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so for me — and I’ve been through a long journey with this, right? I’ve met every problem in the market myself through building my own business. And I’m proud to say that we have eradicated a lot of the recruitment problems that happen, particularly in the Philippines and offshore.

So, for example, I was talking to a woman recently. I was at the Digital Marketer Conference down here in Australia, and this woman asked me exactly the same question.

And I said to her, “Tell me a bit about your virtual assistant.”

And she said, “You know, when he shows up, he’s great.”

Barbara Turley: I was like, “What do you mean, when he shows up?” And she’s like, “You know, full time with her. He shows up whenever he feels like it.”

I’m like, “Okay, just fire his ass.” I mean, that’s just not acceptable.

If you’ve set an expectation — like one of my strong expectations with my team is that we’re heavy users of Asana. We have huddles every day. So I’m like, “You know what? If you don’t show up to the huddle or if you’re late and you don’t come prepared…”

Right. Yeah. Unacceptable.

Barbara Turley: And you don’t update everyone in Asana — and I call it handing the baton — if you don’t hand the baton correctly the way we’ve set up to the next person and it all falls apart, I’m gonna nail you for that.

But those expectations were set by me from day one. You’ve gotta be really clear on your boundaries, your expectations, not in a mean way, more in just being very clear that this is how we operate and showing somebody what failure looks like.

Drew: Right.

Barbara Turley: So you will fail in this role if you, you know…

Now, try not to go on about skills yet. So let’s say that you’ve gone through the first — let’s say you’ve recruited well and you don’t have those issues of people going all flippery and all that.

If you’ve invested a bit of time and you’ve got a good process, so the first step when somebody’s not working out so well with a process is to just, before you shoot the messenger, take a little review of the process together.

Barbara Turley: Because sometimes with processes, there are steps in processes that you have a certain amount of IP that you don’t realize you have when you’re doing a process, but your virtual assistant may be missing. So you might be able to fill a gap in for them.

Now, let’s say you’ve already done that and it’s just still not working. I mean, at that point, I think it’s okay to say, “Look, you’re a lovely person. You’re just not the right fit for the speed at which we work.”

But I would give it a bit of time.

Barbara Turley: And I think, look, at The Virtual Hub, we don’t hire for skills. We’re very strong about this. If we try and hire for skills, we end up in all sorts of pain.

We hire for things that you can’t teach: character, enthusiasm, and smarts, right? And English, obviously.

And the only way that we can find those things — you can’t find that in an interview or from a resume. We put them through an intensive training program with us full-time for a month just so we can see the whites of their eyes every day for a month, because you can’t hide for that long. You see people’s character come through.

So again, you could do that in your business. If you see a character that you’re not sure about coming through, then just, you know, is it a culturally good fit for you in your business and the way you operate? You’ve got to think about those things.

Skills you can teach, you know, especially if you’re asking them to do sort of process-driven repetitive tasks.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, they should be able to deliver that. Yeah, yeah. And look, another little tip — sorry, just to round that out, though — with your process and your repetitive tasks, you also have to set up a structure, I would recommend this, your reporting-back-to-you structure. So that’s kind of your weekly meeting or whatever meeting you’re having of the results. You know, how’s it going? And have a little look. That’s kind of an oversight thing that you have to do with any team.

Drew: Yeah. And other things like writing or graphic design, are there things that it’s just not realistic to expect a virtual assistant to be able to do, that you really do want to go to an Upwork or someplace like that to get?

Barbara Turley: Writing, 100%. People ask VAs to write blog posts for them, and I’m like, look, you can ask them. Someone might produce an okay piece of content, but they will hate every second of it because they’re not a writer. And they’ll do it because you asked them to, and it’ll be crap content, really.

I mean, they’re virtual assistants. The problem is the word “virtual assistant” is very broad, and it’s anyone with a heartbeat who can type, right to an accountant. Be realistic about a virtual assistant. They are there to assist you with certain processes.

Things like writing, web development, coders, all that stuff — they’re all specialized areas. Graphic design is, but it depends. If you’re just doing Canva images for social media, most virtual assistants can nail that with a bit of rounding, testing, and stuff. But again, they’re not graphic designers, though.

Drew: Yeah. So really we’re talking about administrative tasks for the most part.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, yeah.

Barbara Turley: Well, that’s in general virtual assistant, right? Specialist virtual assistant could be a graphic designer.

Drew: Sure, right. Is it better — so I’m thinking about a lot of agencies that I know, and in some cases the owner could probably use their own virtual assistant, yes. And then the agency, for specific tasks like SEO reporting or blog optimization or whatever it is, they could probably use a different one.

Is it better to spend 40 hours and have that person — to buy one person for 40 hours a week —

Drew: and have them have multiple bosses? Or is it better to say, you know what, those are three sort of different channels, so you’d be better off getting three people for 20 hours and let them have one sort of focus? And they’re focusing on Drew and what he needs you to do as the agency owner, and you sort of work together as a team, but he’s not having to share you with other people because then that…

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So the trick with this is you can get one person, but it depends how organized you guys are as a team and how structured you are in leading one person and making sure that person isn’t scattered. Again, it comes back to a leadership thing.

I think it’s probably better to do the part-time because they’re different personnel. Some of our VAs are great at the techie stuff. They love tinkering with Infusionsoft and setting up campaigns and all that sort of thing.

Barbara Turley: Others prefer social media, and they’re a bit more graphic-design-y type, you know, bent. So again, they’re different personality types. The ones who like to do link building tend to be not great conversationalists because it’s just back-end work completely — reporting, all that stuff.

So yeah, it’s probably better to not scatter one person, although our VAs can do all that stuff. Yeah, you’ve just got to think about that. But again, if you hire three people, then you’ve got to think about you’ve got three people to integrate into the business from offshore. So just keep that in mind.

Drew: Right, yeah. Well, I wasn’t even thinking about the skill sets. I was just thinking about even in an agency with employees, when a full-time employee has multiple masters inside the agency, they sort of get pushed and pulled in a lot of directions, and they get conflicting priorities. And my priority is more important than someone else’s, but the other person’s priority is on fire. And then you make the poor employee, or in this case virtual assistant —

Barbara Turley: Yeah.

Drew: either have to negotiate between you or try and decide what matters more. And so, as we were talking, I was just thinking, I bet that could be sticky.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and with a Filipino VA, because you’ve got to understand the culture they come from. They are non-confrontational. So instead of negotiating with the three of you, they’ll sort of try and just work themselves to the bone to get it all done.

And what you’ll find is everything will get done, but it’ll be littered with mistakes, missed deadlines, them feeling down on themselves because you’re the boss, right? So they don’t feel like they could go to you and say, “Hey Drew, you’re putting a bit too much pressure on me.” They’re never gonna say that because their culture won’t allow them.

So you’ve gotta keep that in mind as well, that they won’t say that to you. You have to see that. It’s a leadership thing at the end of the day, yeah.

Drew: Well, it’s a struggle for agencies, even with their own employees. I think a lot of times somebody who’s shared across departments or an art director who works on multiple accounts will feel sort of that push-me-pull-you between teammates sometimes.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, same offshore.

Drew: Yeah. So what do you think the — obviously the obvious upside of this is that you can get a lot of work done at a lower cost than if you hire a full-time employee, and that you’re getting some tasks off of higher-paid people’s plates. But are there other — have you seen other benefits?

So I might think about, you know what, if I could get rid of some of this sort of mundane task work — if I could say to one of my employees, “You know what, you don’t have to do the SEO reporting anymore” — I would think the satisfaction from that person, not the virtual assistant but the teammate on my team, my employee, would go, “I love you most of all. I don’t ever want to work for anyone else. Thank you so much.”

So I have to think that part of the rationale behind this is really to free your people up from the work that they don’t like to do.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, 100%. And they feel like they’ve got an assistant. And don’t think that the virtual assistant then in the Philippines is getting dumped with all the crap because for them, how they see it, right, is that it’s still a third-world country, right? So for them, they’re working with an amazing US client that’s running an agency. For them, that’s a big prestigious job, and they’re really good at it.

They don’t feel the same way. So you’re making them happy by giving them responsibility for that.

Drew: Right, right.

Barbara Turley: Good strategy.

Drew: So we got to wrap up. I have more questions, but of course we could keep talking for hours. The Australian accent — I could just talk to you forever.

Barbara Turley: Well, actually, I meant to tell you that I’m actually not from Australia. I’ve lived here for 17 years, but I’m actually from Dublin, Ireland. I forgot to tell you.

Drew: It’s kind of a little mix. I like it, yeah. So when you go back home to Dublin, then do you pick up your full-on Irish accent?

Barbara Turley: Yeah.

Drew: That’s crazy. Any last-minute tips for us if this is something we’re going to do, if we want to be successful at this? Boy, it sounds like it would really relieve a burden, to your point earlier, and let me scale the business. Any last-minute tips that we haven’t talked about?

Barbara Turley: No. I mean, look, the thing I would say is that I’ve given a lot of tips through this podcast. Even listen back to it again because there’s a lot of things you need to do to get ready before you hire someone.

You can absolutely go direct, but there’s a couple of things I would just say. Obviously I’m blowing my own trumpet here because I run a business like this, but even for us, right, in The Virtual Hub, for us to hire 10 people — and they’re all full-time employees of our company in the Philippines, so we actually hire them, right?

In order for me to find 10 of them that are good, 200 people come through our offices and sit a five-hour exam, of which about 20 will end up maybe entering the training program, and we’ll whittle those down to maybe eight that will end up getting hired. And that’s after about a six-week process.

So don’t underestimate how difficult it is, even if people have expertise in this market, because you’re dealing with an offshore country, a culture that’s different.

So don’t beat yourself up if you’ve done this route before and it didn’t work and you feel like, “That was just so painful.” It is quite painful. But if you get it right, and you can use an agency like ours or if you go direct, maybe bear in mind that you’re taking on quite an enormous task. But if you get it right, it will pay dividends in the end enormously.

And we can see it with our clients. Our clients are growing. They started with one. Now we have an agency that’s up to four with us, and they’re really growing their team offshore. So it’s definitely possible.

Drew: Thank you so much. This has been fascinating. And I’m hoping that a lot of people who had a preconceived notion about what working with a virtual assistant might be like are sort of looking at it through a new lens. So I appreciate your perspective and your sharing all of these ideas and tips so that we can do it well.

Barbara Turley: Great, thank you for having me.

Drew: You bet. If folks want to track you down, if they want to learn more about your business or reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Barbara Turley: Sure, they can find out about me on LinkedIn. I like to connect with people over there. And then on our website, thevirtualhub.com, we actually have some — we’re gonna have the link, I think, in the show notes. We’ve got a special link for your listeners where we’ve got some free goodies there that’ll help you to kind of take this show and take the next steps.

We have the mistakes people make with the VAs and how to fix it. There’s an ebook there. You can book a call with us there.

Barbara Turley: And also I think we have a scalable business success formula e-course that takes a bit more in depth into what I’ve talked about today.

Drew: Okay, that’s awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time.

Barbara Turley: Thank you so much for having me.

Drew: You bet.

All right, guys, this wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. Again, there are so many different ways to skin the cat and to get the work done. I think Barb just outlined for you an option that I’m guessing a lot of you have kind of pooh-poohed in the past, or you’ve tried it a couple of times and it didn’t work.

I have lots of agencies that have successfully figured out how to make the virtual assistant work. And part of it is really understanding what their wheelhouse is and what they can and can’t do.

And I think, as Barbara told you, a lot of it is about what we put into the relationship. So it can’t be as one-sided, I think, as sometimes we would like it to be — that we could just send them an email and they magically know how to do everything and do it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good option for you.

So give it some thought. Go over to the website. It’ll be in the show notes. And check out the tools that Barbara’s put together for you.

Drew: But don’t dismiss it. Don’t decide off the bat that it’s not the right choice for you.

With that, we’re going to wrap up this episode. I will be back next week with another guest who is going to challenge you to think a little differently about your business as you think about scaling and growing it.

In the meantime, you can track me down at [email protected]. And as always, ratings and reviews make me very happy. So I would appreciate it if you would take the time to do that. It’s how we get found by other folks.

Drew: And it’s also one of the best ways for me to get some feedback from you about what you like and don’t like and what you want more of. So we can fashion the show to be better and more helpful to you the more feedback we get.

So with that, I will catch you next week. Talk to you soon.

Drew: Thanks for spending some time with us. Visit our website to learn about our workshops, owner peer groups, and download our salary and benefit survey. Be sure you also sign up for our free podcast giveaways at agencymanagementinstitute.com/podcastgiveaway.