Voice Over: Hi, it’s John Murphy from John Murphy International and welcome to another podcast in the series of Winning Teams podcast, the podcast that does what it says on the tin to help you to create and sustain winning teams in your business.

John Murphy: Today’s guest on the Winning Teams podcast is Barbara Turley, who hails from my homeland in Ireland. Barbara is the CEO and Founder of The Virtual Hub, whose mission and I quote from her own site, is to eradicate small business overwhelm by simplifying the offshore outsourcing process and facilitating cost effective scalability. That’s a big promise, Barbara. You’re very welcome here this morning.

Barbara Turley: Thank you, John. Thank you for having me.

John Murphy: Can you tell us maybe just a little bit about your background and the story of setting up The Virtual Hub and then we get into the details of it?

Barbara Turley: Sure. It’s a bit of an interesting story because you would think, you know, running a big team and being in the offshore outsourcing sort of game that I would have AHR or recruitment background or something like that. And I actually don’t at all. I had very little experience of running teams prior to this business. I spent most of my career in the investment banking world. I had about 15 years in that where I worked in equity trading for about 10 years, some in Davie stockbrokers in Dublin where I started out and then moved down to Australia. And then, you know, really where this business was kind of born out of was I. During the financial crisis of 2008, which seems like so long ago now, I got an opportunity. I was working at Deutsche Bank and I got an opportunity to be involved in essentially a management buyout of a business from Deutsche Bank. And it was basically the distribution rights to their managed funds in Australia. So I got involved in that. And to cut a long story short, I did it because I wanted to learn how to build a great company. I wanted to get really, really into that sort of thing. I learned a massive amount by being involved in that company. I’m still a shareholder there, but I don’t, I’m not obviously there day-to-day. And I spent five years there and it sort of grew my appetite to want to build my own company.

So I did leave and I started out consulting, as we all do when we leave corporate. And I was doing a bit of business coaching and I had this kind of vision for creating a platform for women who wanted to create wealth and impact. And the whole website was about teaching women more about investing, wealth creation, but also just about money in general. And what I found was that was all going fine. Everybody loved the concept. And I had a few private clients that it was business coaching. But what I found very quickly was most of the clients I was coaching, they all had the same problem. And the problem was that they were completely overwhelmed with all the stuff that you need to do in a business. Not necessarily the strategy, but more all the doing. So I started recruiting virtual assistants in the Philippines purely because I had read The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss like everybody had, I think at the time. And I had a VA myself. And I started recruiting them as a kind of a side business. And before I knew it, I was getting quite a lot of demand for this. And I was thinking, Gee, I’m getting more demand for this than anything else. I wonder if there is a business in this? And I literally started out that way with no business plan. You know, it wasn’t what I intended to do. And I actually call it my accidental business because I didn’t mean to start it. But within about a month or two, I rapidly saw a huge gap in the market for people who really needed help with this. And pretty much overnight from nothing, The Virtual Hub was born with no website, no name, nothing. But, you know, it’s four years later now and we’re, we’re flying along at a different pace. But that was really where it all came from, where it all started.

John Murphy: Isn’t it interesting that the act that so often businesses happen, you know, by that accident that you referred to, that you suddenly discover a need that perhaps you haven’t seen before, and then you’re able to grow that for use. I mean, people talk about using VAs. There have been people who’ve had some good experiences, some bad experiences. Why should somebody go to you rather than them doing it themselves?

Barbara Turley: OK, so a couple of reasons. So let’s first deal with the good experience, bad experience issue that’s out there. So the Internet is littered with stories of people who’ve been burnt by going to, you know, Philippines, India, they’ve had terrible experiences, work not done, you know, VAs saying they’re working and they’re not. All those stories are everywhere and we hear them all the time. So there is a little bit of a look that the selection process for finding a great VA can be a minefield. So you can go online and you can find your own VA and sometimes you strike gold, right? And you do really well. And that can work really well. In my experience, though, the actual job of finding that person means that you’re creating another job for yourself that you don’t really need right now if you’re already overwhelmed. So recruiting, training and managing virtual assistants offshore is an entirely new job all by itself. So I’ll just give you some stats on how our recruitment process goes.

So in our recent round of finding people to come through our training programme, and I’ll get on to that in a second, we had 180 people come and sit in our offices for a 5 hour exam. And of those 180 people, only 7 actually were people that we hired in the end. And those were seven people that came through an intensive 3 week training programme and had to make it to the end of that training programme in order to be hired. So for anyone listening, if you have the time to invest in that, in finding the diamond out there, then I think by all means you can have a go at it yourself. But if you really don’t have time and you’re not interested in kind of going through that pain yourself, then, you know, come to a company like us and we can do it for you. And we also handle quite a lot of training, particularly in the digital marketing implementation kind of area. We have our own training programmes for that. And we train VAs before we train them and we sort of put them through live simulations in our own marketing team before we ever let them meet a client. So that’s a really key differentiating factor of The Virtual Hub of what we do.

John Murphy: And I mean for many people there’s the finding of it. But also, so let me just ask another question there before I get into that. So who is your target market?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So, you know, look, every business these days has a well, has an online strategy, or if they don’t, they probably should. So small, what I’m finding is that small businesses are overwhelmed with the amount of work involved in maintaining a social media presence or maintaining a digital marketing or online presence in general. They’re finding that it’s, it’s great to have one, you know, but you need to keep blogs updated. You need to keep your WordPress site going. You need your content calendar every week. It’s actually quite a lot of work. So where we play really well is the small business that either has a digital strategy themselves or is working with a strategist and needs somebody to execute the To Do List on the back of that. So companies that are using platforms like for example HubSpot, Infusionsoft, Ontorport, Active Campaign, where we play really big in that sort of space. Anyone following the digital marketer kind of concept? We’re really, really strong in that particular space.

John Murphy: And for many people, when you’re actually talking about dealing with the VA, one of the challenges is that, you know, you’re talking about the Philippines. How do you manage the time zones?

Barbara Turley: Well, we run 24/7. We don’t run 24/7, sorry, we run 24 hours on business days. So what you’ll find now, I struggled with this a little bit in the beginning because I thought, oh, is it ethical to have people working at night time? Until I actually went over to the Philippines and I realised that the whole place is alive at night time with an awful lot of people working nights.

And the whole, it’s not like there’s no shops open or anything. Everything’s alive the whole 24 hours. So a lot of people actually want to work on those night shifts. So we serve all time zones in people’s own time zones. And I would recommend it if you can get a VA that works at different time zones to you, but it presents a lot of challenges. You need to be even more organised as a business owner if you want to try and get success with somebody working in a completely different time zone to you. So I would recommend always having an overlap of at least a few hours where you have connection time. So we do. We do it that way.

John Murphy: And I mean, when you look at what you’re doing, I mean you set this business up at the same time as you know, you’ve got a small baby. How do you manage to actually juggle the whole lot?

Barbara Turley: I have an epic team. I like to think I have a winning team, right? Look, my daughter is 21 months old, the business is 4 years old. So obviously I was going through pregnancy, you know, childbirth and you know, young baby to toddler while building this. And it makes me sound like Superwoman. But it really is down to my team. And it’s also down to my commitment to making sure that I empower a team to run the business for me while I focus on growing the business. And that’s a really key tip, I think for any business owners out there, you’ve got to try to remove yourself from the day-to-day running of a business if you want to scale it and if you want to, you know, maybe one day sell it or, you know, make sure that it’s an asset that you’re actually building. So my team I’ve because I knew I was going to be having a baby, I focused very heavily on that from day one. I was very process driven. I have a habit of creating processes for everything and then nailing them over time. So watching for mistakes and then mentoring people up into running processes. And eventually what I did was I started out obviously with a team of VAs. Then I found that I was kind of running off my feet with too many people reporting to me. So I gave some of those VAs, I elevated them into leadership positions themselves and I gave them team members, so junior VAs that worked under them. And then I had to go through this period of helping them to become leaders in their own right and making sure that I didn’t lose connection with what was actually happening with the processes down the line. So that’s a really key thing. I think I just learnt that along the way as opposed to having learnt it anywhere before. And I found that I was naturally good at it, which I didn’t know before I started this business. I accidentally found out I was quite good at this. So it’s about building not just a winning team, I guess, but a good organisational structure with proper reporting lines and proper oversight, which means you can be the conductor and not necessarily the doer. So it’s constantly evolving. I mean, I’m never quite there, but I’m always about 80 or 90% there, so.

John Murphy: Oh, that’s a pretty good, pretty good hit rate. Is all of your team virtual?

Barbara Turley: Yes, yes, yes, they’re all in. They’re actually, the team that is predominantly in the Philippines. I am in Australia and I have a salesperson in Australia and then I also have a salesperson in Ireland. So we can manage sales calls globally with any clients that, you know, from the US or the UK that want to speak to somebody local. So our sales guys are Ireland and Australia based.

John Murphy: And how do you help the client to actually get the most of the VA? Because I think if you think about a lot of the clients that you have would be business owners like myself and other people. But what, you know, is how do you get them to optimise the VA and to understand what the VA can do for them?

Barbara Turley: Yep. So we’re really focused. One of the things that I guess maybe this came from my coaching and consulting background that I did for a while when I figured out the people, I guess this is about, you know, unearthing the problem. So initially I unearthed the problem that people were overwhelmed and they had too much on their To Do List and they needed to bring in staff. But most small businesses can’t really afford or struggle to hire people in their own countries because it’s a bit too expensive and you end up doing everything yourself. So problem number one was, well, they didn’t really know how to go offshore and I kind of did. So therefore I was recruiting staff. But then what happened after the first iteration of the business was it started to go wrong and I started getting complaints. Clients weren’t getting success. I couldn’t figure out why. And it really was quite chaotic for a while in the early days until I realised that the majority of people have no idea how to delegate effectively. And it’s just not natural. Some people are naturally at it but most people have to concentrate on it and it is a learned skill that you must master if you want to get this offshore outsourcing thing working for you and you want to get the return on investment. So I built us a mini training programme for clients and an onboarding process for clients where we just take them through some simple tasks. We give them task lists of, you know, like a huge task list that they can pick stuff from. We give them training on using tools like Asana, which is a project management tool or Trello and how to kind of structure things so that your VA can hit the ground running basically when they arrive. So you need to have processes developed and all that kind of before a VA arrives. And then the next problem that went well for a while and then I had more problems and I thought, OK. And the next problem that unearthed after a while was that the virtual assistants in the Philippines, you know, they do have a bit of experience. Some of them are great.

But typically if you’re relying on resumes and interviews, you know, they can say anything, right? So I just found they weren’t trained enough. They just sort of half knew what they were doing, but they just weren’t trained to the level that our clients need and want. So we started training VAs and what started out as a two or three day training program has now turned into anything from 3 to 8 weeks of intensive training before a VA ever meets a client. And that gets us massive success and it gets the client massive success. And we’re focused on success rather than churning through lots of clients and lots of VAs. We want to have longevity of that contract.

John Murphy: And yeah, no, it’s interesting because, I mean, that’s quite a comprehensive piece of training you do before they actually get in front of a client, isn’t it?

Barbara Turley: Yes, we do a lot of work with them. I mean they even come and work on our team for a while. We throw them curveball tasks. You know we really grill them and we get them from already good to really successful and able to just walk into a client and be confident and be able to help the client. We also have support desks. We’ve got help desks and we have an ongoing support program for both the client and the VA. So we don’t just leave them once you make the match. We actually have quite a lot of ongoing training and support that happens in the background.

John Murphy: And typically what sort of tasks, I mean, for somebody who runs their own business, what sort of tasks should you or can you outsource to the VA?

Barbara Turley: Yep. So there’s a whole, I mean, there’s a million things you can outsource, but most people struggle with this first question. They’re like, I don’t know what to give them to do. So let’s take for example, we’re on a podcast right now. Now this is quite a big task, but it’s a good one to start with. So you’re obviously recording a podcast. I also have a podcast and I don’t know how you manage it, but the only part of my podcast that I do is this bit, the recording bit. And then, yeah, so I drop it in Dropbox and then we have an entire process that happens on the back end of that, which is managed by there’s an editor, there’s a transcriber. And the VA manages the entire process and then takes the transcript and the edited thing, puts it all over. You know, iTunes gets it all up there, repurposes it into an infographic, gets it up on the blog, right, with the right images, and creates social media content from it. So might create like 8 tips and quotes from a particular podcast show that we might do and uses them over social media over the following two weeks to keep promoting the show ongoingly. So that that’s quite a lot of work, right? So if you were to do that yourself, I mean you would just be overloaded. Sure, you just can’t do it.

So that’s that example also with if you’ve got a, if you’re writing content of any description, if you’ve got a blog post or anything like that, you can’t just whack a blog post up on WordPress and hope for the best. There is actually a process attached to making it Google friendly, making it readable, making sure that there’s images on it, that sort of thing. VAs can do all of that sort of stuff too. Now, of course, that’s more on the sort of digital end of things. They can manage your YouTube channel. There’s lots of these things they can do. But on the admin side as well, I mean, sometimes all you need is competitor research. You might just need somebody to go around and look at the pricing of all your competitors. Put it onto a spreadsheet, put it into, you know, put it into some sort of data file that you can use. You might want somebody to manage your calendar bookings for you. Live chat on your website, you know, various bits and pieces like that. The list goes on.

John Murphy: And then, I mean, if you’re looking at that, that’s quite a lot for one person, one VA to look after. I mean, in terms of, you know, understanding how to do all of that. Do you do kind of one VA for one client? Is that the way it works?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Well, we actually do part time VAs because we do find that look, the majority of our clients coming through 20 hours a week is actually quite a lot of time. Now our minimum is 20 hours, but lots of the companies don’t do part time contracts, they just do full time. We find out what clients are needing that part time is fine. So we do part time contracts, a minimum of 20 hours a week.

John Murphy: So, in terms of 20 hours a week, that’s what each client is committed to actually, using with you. And yeah, that’s what, that’s where they have. OK, fine.

Barbara Turley: But if you wanted a full time like so for example, you can choose full time, though of course, it just means that if you’re part time, the VA will have another client the other end of the day or whatever, you know, the other end of the contract, yeah.

John Murphy: And what are the most common reasons that it doesn’t work for the client or with the VA? But let’s talk about the client. What are the most common reasons that the client fails with a virtual assistant?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so biggest reason #1 is not being adequately prepared before the VA arrives and underestimating how much preparation needs to be done in order to delegate effectively to anyone. Doesn’t matter whether they’re in the Philippines or somebody’s just going to show up in your office as an admin, you know, virtual assistant type person.

People underestimate how much you need to do to get ready, but they also underestimate the level of the dividend that that pays you in the long run if you actually do the work. So it is worth it to do it. But that’s problem number one. Problem #2 then is typically, let’s say you are ready and you’ve created your task list and your processes and all that sort of stuff. What we find then is sometimes clients will like it, we’re all really busy, right? So the tendency is to go, oh, thank God, I’ve got a VA and you throw them the task list and are like, here’s your task list. Let me know if you’ve got any problems. And then you don’t speak to them again because they’re offshore and virtual and you sort of just forget about them. And then you’re like, where’s the work? And then they might have a list of questions that they haven’t been able to catch you to answer. So things can get really badly delayed. So what I recommend for that to solve that problem, I recommend people introduce the huddle, daily huddle technique and particularly when you have virtual teams, you can do it obviously in an office in a stand up type way, but it’s a non negotiable 10 minutes very fast meeting that happens every day and it’s in your diary and everyone has to show up. That’s the thing. And it unearths the problems and gets the questions answered pretty quickly. So if you have your task list and your processes and then you need this sort of check in call just to quickly run through things and make sure things are on track. And then the final one is making sure that there’s, there’s one thing about delegating a task list, but what everyone forgets is that you also have to set up the reporting system of how you want the work reported back to you, the results. So people forget this one. And what happens is the work kind of gets done. Or I’m trying to think of a good example of this. I know that I struggled a lot with this in the beginning where people are like, oh, that that was done ages ago. I’m like, I didn’t see anything though. Where’s the output? And they’re like, oh, OK, I can show it to you. But unless you actually set up a sort of a process for oversight and how you’re going to review things, then things can fall over pretty quickly and you get frustrated, causing resentment.

John Murphy: I can see where, you know, I mean, you’re obviously very organised, you’re very structured. I would imagine that there are, you know, quite a lot of your clients who are entrepreneurial style who are not good on process and are not good on that sort of discipline. How do you manage that and then to make sure that the relationship between the client and the VA is effective?

Barbara Turley: So look, my view and not everyone is going to share this view. So I don’t want to get shot down for saying this, but I think if you’re an entrepreneur, like the entrepreneurial spirit is to fly by the seat of your pants, big vision, big ideas, all that sort of stuff.

But if you want to build a big team and a scalable business that is an asset and I mean, there’s no point in building a business really, even if you’re never going to sell us, you really should be looking at it as an asset that you’re building and you’re building asset value. If you want to do that, then you need to focus on systems, processes, and teams because all the other stuff is external leverage. It’s basically, you know, going out to market, doing lots of PR, being great on TV, whatever those things are that you might be good at. But if the internal workings of your business are chaotic, you can’t grow that. In fact, all you’re growing is chaos. So that’s the advice I kind of try to get people to see that it’s worth it to slow down temporarily in order to speed up later. And not everyone’s going to get that. But if you’re not prepared to do that or to listen to our advice on our sort of onboarding processes, we tend to turn some people away. I’ll be honest with you. If we feel that they’re not going to get success, then we sort of say, look, you either need to commit to this or you’re really going to waste your time, energy and money. You know we don’t want you to do that.

John Murphy: And do I mean, do you find that part of the job is that you’re managing the client as opposed to managing the VA?

Barbara Turley: It used to be a massive management of clients, but in the early days, and you know a lot of people on this, listening to this will probably resonate with this. But you know when you start a business in the early days and you kind of realise after the first six months that you’ve got completely the wrong client, like the client you just don’t want. So that definitely happened to me in the beginning and I probably had the VA’s I didn’t want either. So I sort of sacked half the clients and half the VA’s and started again. And I got very, very clear about who our ideal client really is. And they are people, you know, they are small businesses, but they are businesses that are committed to growing a scalable strategy. And they do understand the importance that systems, processes and teams play in taking their business to the level that they want to. And that was really key for me. So yeah, getting clear on that has made my life and the team’s life a lot simpler with clients.

John Murphy: So what’s the future for The Virtual Hub? Where does it go? What do you want to build it to? What are you building?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So look, initially when I started out like I said it, because it was such an accidental business and I was having a baby. I mean, there was a time it was absolute chaos, as you can imagine, you know, and it was running very fast. I was always good at putting in systems and processes and all that, but I struggled to see further than kind of a year or two. I sort of had a big vision in my head that I knew where I wanted, I wanted to create impact and all that. But I got a chance last year to really review what we were doing. And I realised that I’ve always wanted to create impact and change people’s lives, I guess. And that’s a really broad statement. But I want to see business owners, I want to see the overwhelming lift. I want business owners to see that teams are such a rewarding part of growing a business and are the key to, I guess real growth. Not everyone wants to do it, but teams play an integral part. And now that I’ve been to the Philippines a few times and I’ve met a lot of people over there, I’ve realised the impact that companies like mine are having on the ground over there, like we’re creating sort of next level careers. I’m seeing it all the time with the VAs that are wanting to come and join our company now and they’re saying that they’re, they’re kind of jaded of the call centre industry. That’s been huge there for a long time and has paved the way, I guess for companies like mine to come in. But they’re really keen to join us because we want them to think for themselves. We want them to share ideas. It’s not scripted. And when I started to realise that, I realised that I also needed to create an ideal man, an avatar for the Philippines and I needed to create a brand and a brand identity and an employee value proposition in the Philippines. So I went over there and I actually created a company. I have a Philippine company now and all of our team are employees of that company. We pay all of their healthcare, all of their benefits. And we have full blown offices there now. And we’re launching a wellness program. So I don’t just want to have 1000 people, like obviously I’d love to have 500 people and really be a specialist in this sort of digital VA space. But it’s really more than that. I want to create a culture there for people, it’s very hard to get in, but people really want to work for this brand and we’re doing a lot of work right now on creating that. And I’m getting a lot of joy out of imagining that out and actually trying to make that happen. So it’s been a big year to bring this through this year. But we now have the platform set for being able to sort of take it to 5–6 hundred, 700 people, maybe even 1000 people one day.

John Murphy: Right. That sounds fantastic and it does sound as if you’re doing it in such a professional and also with a very, very much a kind of a big business mentality where you’re creating and adding value to the local community, which is fantastic because I think a lot of people have a kind of a feeling or a sense, whether they articulate or not that well. If I’m going to someplace like the Philippines, is it a bit like, you know, kind of having the sweatshop mentality and you’re obviously going very far away from that?

Barbara Turley: Oh, yeah. Look, I mean, you know, there’s people on our team, there’s VAs in our group that have bought houses. You know, they’ve gotten mortgages. You know, they’re excited, they’re doing well, they’re growing their careers and we’re supporting them in, you know, so many of them. I mean, healthcare is so expensive in the Philippines that the one thing I’ve gotten a lot of little letters of gratitude about is the fact that we now pay for them to have private health cover with the best hospitals in the Philippines. We also allow them to bring their, you know, to try and get some of their children on. And as they grow with our company, one of my biggest visions is to try and get as many of their families and, you know, their children covered under the private health plans that we can because it’s so important to them. So no, it’s not sweatshop stuff. It’s really, well, I guess some of them maybe are a bit like that. But I know that I’m a very ethical person and I care deeply about the people on both sides, the client and the VA. That’s really important to the vision, yeah.

John Murphy: It sounds fantastic and it sounds if it really, you really are building something that has got both an alternate idea both on the professional and on the personal and on the professional basis. So well done to that. Two quick questions I ask everybody. One is a book or books that they would highly recommend that has an impact upon them.

Barbara Turley: Yep. So the first one, which I think is I’ve got two books that I would like to share given we’re on a podcast talking about teams and winning teams. The Zappos Experience is a fantastic book if you are trying to build an epic culture. It’s about, you know, the culture of your company and making a culture that people desperately want to work for and that they absolutely love. So that’s that. That was huge for me. That book I just like earmarked so many pages in it. It’s ridiculous. It was almost the whole book. But that has been very inspiring for me and I’m trying to really focus on that as I build this culture out. And the other one is a book called Built to Sell. Absolutely fabulous book. If you want to think about it, you know, there’s one thing to build a business, but if you want to build a really solid asset that could be saleable one day. And really, if we are running our own businesses, we do one day need to think about what we would do with this asset. Is it saleable? And this book is fabulous. It breaks. It’s actually a story about a business owner in New York. So it’s a fabrication. It’s a fictitious story, but it’s easy to read it because it takes you on a journey with this guy who goes through this with his own business and a mentor. So it’s like a storybook, but it gives you all the gold, right? So it’s a fantastic book.

John Murphy: Very good. And neither of which I have read, so I will certainly add that to my collection because they sound worth doing. The other question I ask and I kind of hesitate slightly to ask somebody who’s got a 21 month old baby, but daily rituals. Do you have any, do you hold to them? What are they?

Barbara Turley: Oh, look, you know what, even before I had the baby, I used to, I always say on these interviews, I go, you know, I’d love to say that I get up at 5:00 every morning and do yoga and I’m all them and I have like my flowers on my desk and all that stuff. The reality is that I do none of those things. But I do have a look, a ritual I used to have, but I don’t have any more because of my daughter. I’m just too busy as I’m an avid reader so I used to read in the morning with a coffee. But these days, look, I do, you know, I love coffee. I like to get out because I work from home. So I like to get out and just live by the beach so I can see the ocean and have a coffee and just have some time by myself in the morning if I can get it. Other than that, look, I’d love to say that I have more rituals, but I don’t. But as you said, I’m a pretty organised person in terms of running the business. So one of the business daily rituals I do have, which I’m very strict about is the daily huddle with the team. So I would, I know that’s not a personal life thing, but it actually did, it was a game changer for me in the business when I started doing that and committing to it. So that is one daily ritual that I do.

John Murphy: That’s fantastic. Can you just maybe for those that haven’t come across the daily huddle, can you maybe just elaborate on exactly what that is and what you do during that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, sure. Sorry, I should have elaborated on that. So it’s basically if you Google Scrum technique, this is where it sort of came from. And look, there’s loads of books on it. I didn’t read any of them. I just read a bit of the thing on the website and thought that sounds great. Basically it’s called a stand up daily meeting. You can do them virtually. You don’t necessarily have to stand up. You just have to all be on a call and you answer everyone. It’s very quick so that you don’t get bogged down in stuff on the call. And each person has to go around and answer three questions: what have I done, what am I planning to do, and where am I stuck. And where am I stuck is the really important one because that’s where you start to say if they say I’m stuck on X, Y and Z, you either take it offline. So you say, OK, let’s discuss that in a meeting tomorrow or you can answer it straight away because sometimes they’re just stuck because you haven’t gotten back to them because you’re too busy. But on that call, you can just go, oh yeah, sure, tell them this or say that, you know, very effective thing every day and make it fast, 10 to 15 minutes and that’s it.

John Murphy: Yeah, if I’m not correct, was the origin of that Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller?

Barbara Turley: I think it was, you know, I don’t know. All I know is it works.

John Murphy: Yeah, no, absolutely. But I think it’s great discipline to have. I think it’s, and it’s certainly one that, you know, I keep on promising myself I’ll do it, but I don’t. But I think it is a great one. So Barb, before we wrap up, where can people get in touch with you?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So if you’re interested in talking to us about, you know, maybe a virtual assistant, like I said, I’ve got fantastic two strategy consultants, outsourcing consultants, one in Ireland, one in Australia. And you can book a call with either of those on our website, which is thevirtualhub.com. If you want to connect with me personally, LinkedIn is usually the best place. So you can find me just under Barbara Turley on LinkedIn.

John Murphy: Great. Well, listen, it has been fantastic. I’m sorry, I did take up a lot more of your time than I said I would, but it has been really, really interesting. I wish you continued success, Barbara, with it and thank you so much for being on the Winning Teams podcast.

Barbara Turley: Thank you.

Voice Over: I trust that you found today’s podcast valuable. You know, here on the Winning Teams podcast, we’re all about helping you to make your business more effective. So my question to you is, can you truthfully say that you have a winning team? Is your top team working as effectively as you think it should? Would you like to see your team get things done quicker? And would you like to see them step out their silos and support and challenge each other? Well, if the answer is yes to any or all of the above, and I can tell you from my experience, I’ve no doubt that many who are listening today will be saying, oh absolutely yes. Well, I’m offering you a free 45 minute top team analysis session. During the session, I will give you actions and strategies that you can immediately implement. We’ll dig deep to identify the underlying issues specific to your team and then some great tactics to correct the problem. This will be an action oriented session, so to arrange that session, email me at [email protected] but call in the subject line and I will send you a link to my calendar. I look forward to catching up with you.