Rhett Power: Welcome to Power Lunch Live on LinkedIn. I’m Rhett Power, your host. We do this show every week, every Monday, actually every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and most Fridays. And we do it at 12 noon Eastern Standard Time or thereabouts when the technology guys cooperate. Sorry we’re a little late today, but that’s okay. Now you got to bear with me today. I’ve got a big old head cold. So if I have to blow my nose or if I have a coughing fit, you’ll have to excuse me today.

But the point of the show is to talk to today’s thought leaders, bestselling authors, people who are doing amazing work in the world who’ve built amazing companies, and people that we can learn from. And that’s the whole point of the show: that we can learn from their success, find out what they do that can help us be better at what we do.

Now, the fun part about the show is that it can be interactive and the way that happens is if you ask those questions. So please do that today if you don’t mind, so that you can get to the questions that you want answered.

Now, we do broadcast on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and I think Twitch, and also LinkedIn, obviously. So you can ask questions on any of those platforms. If you like the program, give it a like or share so that your network can benefit from these conversations as well and we can grow our audience.

Now, today, I think it is a really interesting topic. I’ve got Barbara Turley. Now, she’s an investor, an entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub. And it’s a business that was started by accident. And so we’ll talk about that a little bit today. But it’s become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants.

And I know a lot of us, particularly in this world, in the coaching world, and in the content world, creating content out there on social media, have thought about and have maybe even tried hiring a virtual assistant with varying degrees of success. And so I want to get into that and talk about how you do it right, how you hire, and how you ask the right questions and how you manage somebody in that way. Barbara, welcome to the show.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me. Very exciting being live streaming on all those platforms at the one time. I’m very impressed.

Rhett Power: It’s interesting. It is a lot of fun. And I think it is a new thing. It’s the new wave. It’s where content development and social media is going. So how did this happen by accident? How did you create the Virtual Hub by accident?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, I mean, everyone loves to ask that question. And literally I share this because it wasn’t intentional. I didn’t set up a massive business plan. I didn’t even know anything about the Philippines, to be totally honest. I had just left corporate after about 15 years in the whole investment banking world and had a very, I guess, rich and exciting career there. But I always wanted to start my own business.

So like a lot of ex-corporates, I started a coaching business. I was doing a lot of business coaching for smaller businesses, smaller medium businesses. And I noticed that it didn’t matter what sort of business I was looking at. At the lower end of town, the sort of small business world, the main challenge they were facing was that if they didn’t hire staff, they were going to struggle to grow or to get all the stuff done that you need to do, right?

But they weren’t making enough money really to hire staff in their own country. So it was this kind of vicious cycle of, well, if I don’t hire staff, I’m never going to grow. But if I don’t grow, I can’t afford to hire staff.

So I had a virtual assistant in the Philippines. I had read the four hour work week like everyone else. And I just found her online myself. And I just said, do any of your friends need a job? Because I’ve got clients that need VA’s. And I started out just getting help for the clients more so that we could get moving with strategy and that I could work with them. I could get the task lists off their plate so that we could focus on growth.

And before I knew it, I was just getting more demand for VA’s than I was for business coaching. So it was literally one day I thought, I wonder, is there a business in this? And I did a webinar. I had a bit of a small list of people that I had built up online. I did a webinar and it sort of just resonated. And the webinar was, how to confidently and successfully use VA’s to grow your business. And that just seemed to hit the nail on the head. People wanted to know how to do that. And it started very organically. I had no name or anything. All of a sudden I was in business overnight, really. No website, no name, no brand, nothing. Just an offer of something people wanted. So very much by accident.

Rhett Power: Word of mouth, right? So why do you think the industry is experiencing so much growth? I mean, as a business owner or somebody that’s looking for somebody, what should I look for in a company or in a virtual assistant?

Barbara Turley: Well, look, first of all, why has there been such an explosion? I think it’s twofold. Number one, a few people started talking about it probably 10-15 years ago.

Remember that large companies have been offshoring, which is going to places like India, the Philippines, for decades. I mean, this is not a new thing. But in terms of the small business world, it only really opened up in the last 10 or 15 years. And it coincides with the internet and the explosion in digital marketing and the explosion of being able to do cloud-based SaaS products and all of the above has led to us enabling more businesses to be able to use offshore teams successfully. So that’s number one.

In terms of what we discussed before we came on the show, there are challenges with this. A lot of people think that it’s just as simple as going online and finding a virtual assistant. And sometimes it is as easy as that, but it is something that is fraught with a lot of people who have failed at it. A lot of people have been burnt on both sides of the equation, both the virtual assistant side and the client side.

And the internet is littered with stories of people saying it doesn’t work for my business. I’m sure you’ve heard this and people are terrified to try again, et cetera. Like any new sort of phenomenon that takes over, of course, there are going to be teething issues and challenges. And one of the things that I obviously talk about a lot and I’ve helped a lot of clients through is how do you get it right? It’s not just as simple as going online and finding someone. There’s a whole gamut of things that have to go right in order for you to be successful at this. Eighty percent of that, I would suggest, is actually how a business is run: the systems, the processes, the setup.

And your ability to delegate before you actually then go and try to recruit someone, which is a whole other task all by itself, and then onboard them and bring them into your business successfully. And those are all the things that people forget. It’s not just recruiting someone online. There’s a lot to it.

Rhett Power: Yeah, no, absolutely. And that goes for any employee, processes, whether that works or not, whether you bring somebody on, it depends a lot on you. Why do you then focus so much on it? Because one of the things I noticed that I thought was really different about your company is that you spend a lot of time on training and upskilling.

And that’s different. And why do you focus on it?

Barbara Turley: Yes. So one of the challenges, look, there’s lots of people doing what I do and there’s lots of business for it, right? So there’s lots of technical competition. I mean, I don’t really care about competition because I think I’m from a place of abundance. There’s so many people out there looking for what it is that we do. But what I noticed is that the churn rates are very high. So I started to ask myself, well, why are people failing at this?

Like, why was I able to build a great virtual team?
And run them and scale a business doing this, but other people seem to fail so miserably at it and blame the VA, right? So this was a major problem. Number one, I felt that clients needed to be trained properly and onboarded properly on how to delegate and specifically how to do this with virtual Philippines-based teams, which is what I specialize in.

But at the same time, the digital world is moving so fast that what you find is the VA’s that are out there, they’re sort of getting experience by picking up projects here and there. Some of them are very experienced, but there is a shortage of people with genuine, solid training. There’s no training for VA’s out there, really. There are some programs.

But I noticed that sometimes they would say that they’re good at something because they’d had a smattering of, you know, a couple of blog posts or they’d worked for one or two people, but they don’t actually know what they’re doing. So it’s better to come in. And I took the philosophy of, how about no matter how much experience they have?

They come through our training program. And it serves two purposes for us. Number one, yes, we want to train our people so that we want the market to know that any VA’s that come through the Virtual Hub are all trained the same way. And they’re trained in the latest in what’s happening in digital marketing and funnels and all the stuff that we’re kind of doing.

But number two, it also helps us to weed out who’s any good. Now, what you find sometimes is people with no experience come out the best because you train them yourself. They’ve got the right work ethic, the right character, the right enthusiasm, and the right smarts. Skills can be taught. Work ethic can’t be taught. And for us, in a month-long or six-week-long full-time intensive training program, there’s nowhere to hide. So you discover character flaws. You find work ethic issues, all the stuff that happens with employees. And you find the best of sometimes a very bad lot and that’s why we do it. So it does serve two purposes. It’s not just a weeding out process.

Yeah. Right. It’s for your reputation too, obviously. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, yeah. And also we do different levels of VA. So sometimes VA’s come in and they say, they can be great in interviews, but how are they really on the job? So we start to grade them through the weeks of the training and we can see who’s more creative, who’s more technical, who’s capable of managing, for example HubSpot as a CRM for a client and who’s just not, who’s better at admin and calendar management. It’s hard to decide that until we actually get in and look at how they perform.

So yeah, that’s why we do it.

Rhett Power: So I mean, this is often to me one of the things I do a lot of coaching and I hear quite often, you know, I want a virtual assistant, I want somebody to help. And it’s often for a small business, medium-sized business, this is the first time they’ve thought about managing somebody remotely, the first time they’ve thought about offshoring in this way. What’s the conversation you have with them about how this works? Because you’ve got to give them a sense of confidence too that this can be helpful for them.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so the first place that we would go to on our sales calls, they’re really discovery calls, because we’re trying to discover, is this person, are we a fit for what they need, genuinely? And are they a fit for how we do it?

Right. So let’s talk about the first part of that equation first. Are we a fit for their needs? Well, you know, usually we would say, we’re not about, I mean, the churn thing in our industry is massive, where people just want to make sales. They just want to get a VA into a business. But what we’re looking for is saying, well, our VA’s are quiet, you train them well, we’re all office based.

So all of that stuff is done. But we know the types of environments that they are going to be successful in. So, for example, is the client OK with using project management tools like Asana, Trello? Are they on board with that kind of thing?

Are they systems, you know, process-driven type business? Because our VA’s do well in those scenarios. What kind of mindset does the client have? Is the client kind of a, well, I just want to get a VA who’s going to, I can just give them a task list and not speak to them for two months and they’re just going to do a rock star job for me and I don’t have to actually do any engagement?

So there’s all these kinds of things that we’re trying to decipher on the initial discovery call to see whether we are a good fit for each other. Because all of those things lead to success. Because our metric is not numbers of clients or numbers of VA’s. It’s how much success, what’s the longevity of the relationship, and what’s the success rate of that particular client and that particular VA. So that’s very important for us. So on our sales calls, we’re looking out for that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Rhett Power: How do you understand what kind of time—so if I need a virtual assistant and I know I need one in order to handle the growth I’m having in social and content development and all that, how do I determine from my side, from the business side, how many hours I need or what?

Like that to me seems like a really hard thing to determine, like actually breaking down the hours of what I need.

Barbara Turley: Yes, yes, a very common question. And it is quite difficult because initially everybody thinks they only need three hours a week or five hours a week. And what you find is, I mean, look, I’ll be straight up here. We do a minimum of 20 hours a week because we’re sort of in a position of saying, well, there’s a number of reasons why we do it that way. But we just feel that if you’re taking it seriously, you’re bringing on someone in the Philippines, you should be delegating the majority of your task-based, process-driven, day-to-day operational type stuff out to that VA, and you should be able to get that out successfully so that you can focus your time and energy on sales, strategy, you know, growth, et cetera.

So the people who are coming to us saying, well, I just need a few hours a week. I actually did a podcast on my podcast about this called, it’s called, I think you need only five hours a week thinking because it’s…

Yeah, come to us and we actually have testimonials saying this that the biggest mistake they made was not going full time because what invariably happened was they got a VA for 20 hours a week and then realized that they filled the 20 hours, the VA was amazing, and then they wanted that VA full time. And when they tried to upgrade, the other clients that we placed them with on the other half of their time said no way because my VA is so good I’m not letting them go and there’s fights over VA’s.

If you delegate, you’re really streamlined with the business and you really think about it, you want to grow, so it’s probably worth making a bit of a commitment in the beginning. Because I’ll tell you one of the problems that’s out there on the freelance market, nobody’s committing to each other. So you’re getting someone for five hours a week and they have another 10 clients with the same sort of… and it’s like dating. I mean, if nobody’s committing to each other, then nobody cares, right? So nobody cares what’s going on in your life.

And people get a VA for five hours a week and expect that VA to care about their business like they’re a full-time employee with benefits. You know, it’s just a mindset thing of thinking, well, am I committing to this and am I doing this for the long haul or am I just looking for a few hours a week help that’s never really going to grow?

Rhett Power: Yeah, no, that makes total sense to me. Is it five hours a week? If that’s one hour a day, Monday through Friday? I mean, that’s hard to get into. It’s hard to get into any kind of rhythm with the business or any kind of… I mean, yeah.

Barbara Turley: You’d be better off, I mean, you’d be better off finding a really good VA and then using, if you feel that initially you only have 10 hours a week, well, use the other 10 hours to really bring them into your vision and really start to redevelop your processes and work together on redefining how you work and how you delegate. But most people are not willing, they’re not playing the long game. Most people are just playing the short game and they just want the quick fix, which is a few hours a week, which is fine in the beginning, it’s okay, it’s just…

I like to sort of get people thinking about it and go, well, is that really a long-term strategy? Probably not.

Rhett Power: What is, what’s a really, to understand the cost of it too, what should I be looking to budget for someone 20 hours a week?

Barbara Turley: So the reality is that there’s a whole range. So for example you can go direct into the market and find someone yourself so you can go onto freelance or Upwork or any of these places and you can try to recruit and hire and manage someone and you can probably get that from, I mean you know you can go to sort of $3-$4 an hour if you want. I mean it’s all about quality too and you can find somebody for five bucks an hour who’s really good.

Then you might go like someone like us where you come to an agency, you’re paying anywhere from $8 to $12 an hour, but we have a full office set up. We pay all their benefits. So we have a lot more, you know, they’re an employee, a full employee of ours in the Philippines. So of course you’re paying extra. And then we do all the HR management. And if it goes wrong, we just take over for you. There’s no… so we do recruitment, we manage all of that and the training.

And then you might go up the curve where you might want to be US-based virtual assistant. And some people, it’s okay to think about that too because sometimes you might want a Philippines-based one and a Western-based one for a more strategic or more online business manager type, maybe slightly higher-end role with more of a project manager role. And for that you’re paying anywhere from 30, 40, 50 bucks an hour right up to $100, maybe $150 an hour. So the range is quite high.

What you need to decipher is if you’re talking about the lower end, the Philippines, if you have the time and the energy and maybe a bit of expertise in going out and finding your own one online, and you’re willing to put the work and the energy into that, of course that is the cheapest route to go. But coming to an agency like ours, we’re going to do all that for you. And trust me, recruitment is hard. Like even for us, the hit rate is so low, it’s excruciating. So I sort of say to people, just be realistic that if you’re already busy, it might be worth just thinking about paying the extra to hire someone like us to do it.

Rhett Power: Well, in handling, I mean, again, that it puts a little security in it, right? And yeah. And, I don’t have time or the expertise to teach somebody HubSpot or no, or, you know.

Barbara Turley: Let’s face it, things go wrong. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be a catastrophe, but things happen in the Philippines. Like somebody has to resign because they’re from the province. They go back to the province because a family member is ill. This sort of thing happens, right? So if that happens to you and you’ve got someone direct, well, their internet could be terrible down there. You might not be able to work with them anymore.

With us, we just step in and put in, we do a transition program for free where we help the client completely transition into a new VA. And the idea is that we take as much of the work off you as possible in a transition like that. And we do that as part of our service. That’s part of what we do.

Rhett Power: Are there ways that have been successful and obviously you’ve seen what’s worked and what hasn’t, but what, so like I work on Slack a lot. Is that something you train them on as well? Project-based apps for spreadsheet or ways to sort of communicate?

Absolutely.

Barbara Turley: Yes, we’re pretty strict about how we… look, we don’t make clients do it, but we’re very anti-email. Email for managing tasks is always, always, always, in my experience, a disaster. I can’t explain why, but it’s just a disaster. So typically we will take clients who are using tools like Asana, Trello, Wrike, you know, Teamwork PM, using Slack as a communication tool. Slack’s more of a communication tool than a project management tool or a task management tool.

Google Drive, all these sorts of G Suite, Hangouts, Zoom, all the various tools that are out there that people are using. Typically we’re attracting clients who are into those tools already so that we don’t have to train them on it. But we train all the VAs on how to use them. LastPass for security or OnePass for these sorts of things.

So yeah, we like to attract clients who are already on board with those ideas so that we don’t have to do too much heavy lifting on the client side to get them on board with how to do this because we find the success rates are higher with those clients.

Rhett Power: And what’s the average time like in terms of communication? Would I communicate with somebody daily or is it a once a week thing or what do you see as a successful equation there?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it depends what the VA is doing. So I have team members that I engage with every day. I’m a big fan of the daily huddle concept for any business. I think as a leader of a business, I get on a call with my entire team every single day for 30 minutes. And we all have a segment where we quickly go through the pipelines and then run for the day. But there are other members of the team who I only connect with weekly.

The marketing team, for example, has a weekly huddle.

Barbara Turley: There’s a HR huddle once a week where we just run through various issues. It depends what the role is. But if the role is someone, a virtual assistant who is running, you know, things that are day-to-day and they may need your time every day, it is worth just having a non-negotiable 10-minute, very structured catch-up where it’s not a chat. It’s kind of like we get on this call.

I run through the thing for the day and the VA has a chance to run through the questions they need answered for the day or the roadblocks. Now clients always shy away from being too busy on this and that. I go, honestly, it’s a game changer if you do it. 10 minutes a day.

But again, if the VA is only working on social media content calendars or weekly type things, then maybe a weekly call is okay or twice weekly. But you do need to be connecting with them though. I do think you need to be connecting.

Rhett Power: What’s the most common stuff that they’re working on?

Barbara Turley: Social media.

Rhett Power: We talk about digital marketing so yeah, that’s a good question. I know what my needs are and yeah, what are they?

Barbara Turley: Across our VA’s, the predominant thing is things like calendar management, email management. On the lower end, the admin stuff is calendar management, email management, sometimes answering the phone, customer support, this kind of stuff.

Then in the middle sort of section are the social media people doing a lot of social media, or blog formatting. Now, they’re not going to write content, but as you know, if you’re putting out content, even if it’s video or whatever it is, there’s a lot of work. There’s one thing to get the content, but then there’s the distribution of the content and making sure that your content looks good on your website and that it’s actually structured properly for keywords and SEO and all this kind of thing.

Social media is a huge time suck, but it’s something that kind of has to be done. Repurposing your podcast into Canva images with quotes on them and things like that, that’s all VA work really, and getting it out across social media.

And then on the upper end, it’s things like, we sort of specialize in the CRM platform. So our VA’s are doing things like creating newsletters on Ontraport or HubSpot, maybe building workflows or campaigns, but they won’t strategize them, but they can build them out. And they might be able to put in some Zapier integrations to make it work with Calendly or Asana, things like this. So those are our level three VA’s that are doing that.

Some of those are building landing pages and just integrating stuff across your business.

Rhett Power: Well, that’s helpful to know what they typically do.

Barbara Turley: Now just on that, so for us specifically, I’m talking a lot about the things in digital, not just digital marketing, but anyone who has a kind of an online presence as part of their business. Of course, there are VA’s that do a bit of bookkeeping. There are bookkeepers that are VA’s. So we don’t do bookkeepers, and we don’t do accountants and this kind of thing. But there are other companies that do virtual assistants that do this kind of thing.

Just to clarify that they can do that sort of stuff as well and some of them are trained on Xero or MYOB, things like that. Yeah.

Rhett Power: And so, okay, so that’s interesting, because I know a little bit now more about what I could expect when I’m looking for someone to help me with my digital stuff. In terms of sort of your onboarding process, can you talk about that a little bit? What’s the time? You know, if I wanted to hire someone, how long does it really take to kind of onboard them and get them comfortable?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Look, I would say on average, you’re looking at six weeks from the time that you pick the VA. Now that means that from the time that you sign, let’s say you sign up with us, right? It can take anywhere from two weeks to six weeks to get a VA even started with you because there is a… it depends on the level.

Often we get ahead of the curve. I will try to get… supply is an issue, so recruiting is very, very difficult. It’s the most difficult part of the business that we do. And so I try to get ahead of the demand by having people on the bench.

Now, what that means is I have people trained and ready to go. But invariably what ends up happening is I have a load of people trained and ready to go who are on the night shift for the US or they’re on the day shift. And then we get clients on the opposite end.

So at the moment, I have a load of people on the day shift available for Australia. And all our demand is US night shift and we can’t seem to recruit for that. So I’d like to say that, you know, we have people always ready to go, but we don’t. It’s difficult to do that.

Let’s say between two and six weeks to get someone in. And then when they start with you, I think you’ve got to be realistic and think about at least a four to six week, you know, ramp-up period for them. We’ve trained them on a lot of processes, but you have your own processes in your business that you need to kind of onboard them with and just get used to working together and get a rhythm going.

Yeah, get comfortable with each other and start that process of learning together, right? It’s kind of similar to bringing on an employee.

Absolutely, it’s the same. In fact, people always think that bringing on someone in the Philippines or whatever, well, they don’t even look at it as bringing them on. They see outsourcing as giving it out to somebody that they don’t then really have a relationship with or they have a minimal relationship with. I try to encourage the clients that are coming to us, I say to them, this person is an employee in our business in the Philippines, right? But they look and feel like an employee in your business, right? That’s the way we want it to be because that person is embedded in your business then.

Barbara Turley: And you want your business to grow with that person. And hopefully then you put on more team members with us. And it’s like a partnership really. That’s the way we like to see it.

Rhett Power: Yeah, that makes sense. It makes sense for the business to have that sort of inclusiveness, make them feel like they’re part of it, right? You want them to buy into what you’re doing and enjoy being a part of the team. Yeah. Well, this has been fascinating and interesting and very, very helpful. And thank you so much for your time.

Absolutely, yeah.

Barbara Turley: Yes, thank you for having me. And like I said, there’s just so much to get right with it. I always say to people, if you are, if you commit to getting it right and you invest the time and energy in actually getting it right, the dividends it pays your business in the end are enormous because the cost of activity of having a solid offshore team that actually works for you is massive. Right. So it’s worth getting it right. It’s really worth it.

Yeah.

Rhett Power: No, absolutely. I know the benefits of bringing on this is my second or third startup. And so I do understand the benefit of growing the team. And so, but in a lot of ways, this kind of help really makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. So.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I like to think so. Thank you for having me.

Rhett Power: And we’ll put a link to the Virtual Hub on the bottom of this feed. And so that you can find out more about what Barbara does and her company and the work they do. And maybe they can work with you to help your business grow. And thank you for spending some time with us today here at lunchtime and wherever you are, whether you’re in Ireland like you are today or in… it’s not lunchtime yet, but probably dinner time. Anyway, thank you for spending time with us today, no matter where you are in the world.

And until tomorrow, we do have a Friday program tomorrow. Stay tuned for that. You can go to Power Lunch Live to find the schedule and more information about the show.

Until then, have a great day and go out and do good work. Thanks.