Voice Actor: LeadershipAnywhere, discussions with leaders of distributed companies. Learn how to improve your remote team’s productivity, boost your growth, and build better remote operation. Your host is Peter Benei, founder ofAnywhere Consulting, helping remote leaders build better companies.

Peter Benei: Welcome everyone. Welcome on the LeadershipAnywhere podcast. Today we will talk about virtual assistants and VAs in general, why it should be used by every scale up leader, every founder, every manager and every remote company. What VAs can add to your business in general and in like specific details as well. To discuss, have Barbara Turley, who’s running a whole company around… Hi Barbara. Thank you. Thank you for joining.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me on the show. Very excited to talk about this topic.

Peter Benei: Really excited because I do believe that this is one of the best kept secret of remote work. Having VAs that can boost pretty much everything internally, whether it’s ops, marketing content, or just pretty much operating as a founder or as a leader in a remote business. To start, tell me your story. Before the call, we discussed that you are doing this for more than 10 years now. And I’m always super excited to hear someone who is doing remote work for more than a decade like myself, because I presume we see a little bit differently everything in terms of remote.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s funny because when I first came to the remote work thing, I actually felt like I was late to the party. And I think it was because I was actually working in corporate. So my whole career, I was not the startup founder that had lemonade stands and tried lots of different things. I was in corporate. I had worked in an equity trading floor for almost 10 years. I loved it. Was very much in the trenches like that. Loved it. And then I worked in asset management sales for a further five years. But interestingly, the reason I had an idea that someday I would like to do something by myself, that was about as far as I got.

And really it was when I hit my early 30s, telling my age now, but I had this realization that I didn’t really want to be a corporate mom. That was really how it started for me. And hats off to the corporate moms out there. I think it’s really a hard gig and yeah, well done to all of those moms doing that. And I started thinking about maybe I’d run my own business or what would I do? But I really had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And the truth of the matter was I saw. No idea. I was still working in corporate at that stage. But I had an opportunity during the last big financial crisis in 2008 when everything was just a mess and the whole industry was a mess. I got an opportunity during that time to literally hop on the coattails of a few very clever people that I still know and that I knew back then that were basically buying a business out of one of the big investment banks. They were trying to take a business out and do a startup in that way.

And I got an opportunity to be involved in one of the starting sort of employees and I became a shareholder and I bought some and I got some for free and all of these bits and pieces and I worked for some. And that really whetted my appetite. I spent five years working at that company and I’m still very much involved with that company today, 12 years later. I really got to see how great companies get built. I worked with amazing people there and I started thinking, I wonder, do I want to build my own? I wanted to build something and that was really the crux of it. Then I was sitting on a flight to Brisbane from Sydney, where I was living in Sydney, Australia. And I was sitting on a flight for work to go and see some clients. And I literally saw this tiny ad in the back of the flight magazine. And it was for a guy that I ended up becoming friends with in the end. He was a guy called Jero Staric. And he had built a blog and he was blogging about blogging as a business back then. This is like probably 13 years ago or so.

And I just had never heard of this. I was like, well, people just write online. And so I started delving into that world and I did a course with him and it just started to open a world to me that I didn’t know existed. But there was a lot of people in that world. And by the time I eventually made the jump, I did feel like I was last to the party. I had met so many internet entrepreneurs at that stage, like over the following few years, by the time I ended up doing my own thing. And like many who leave corporate, I did end up consulting. So I did some business coaching and consulting. And I found that all the clients I was coaching and consulting with, it didn’t matter what they were doing, industry, online, offline, and what they actually were doing. They all needed staff, but they couldn’t really, if they didn’t grow more, they couldn’t get staff. And if they didn’t get staff, they weren’t going to be able to grow. It was this kind of vicious cycle. A lot of them were in.

And I knew at that stage, I had obviously read about VAs in the Philippines and I had gotten one for myself. That was the truth. And I got a few of my VAs friends basically to do some work for some clients. And it went so explosively well that friends of clients started contacting me and asking me for VAs. And I literally, before I knew it, I was running 10, 15 VAs. And I thought, wow, I’m here. I literally was in business before I realized what I was doing.

Peter Benei: The business made itself for you.

Barbara Turley: Yes it did, it was very much by accident and then became organic after that.

Peter Benei: Yeah. Basically, you realize later on that, I’m actually building a business now, which I actually figured that I want to do.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And I realized I was quite good at it. I thought, is everyone good at this? And I realized accidentally that I was very good at operations. I was very good at delegation. And that’s really what people needed help with. Yes, getting VAs, but actually making the entire thing work was really what I found I was very good at. So rolling forward to today, we have 350 employees in the Philippines. We have clients all over the world. We also have an operational efficiency implementation sort of team that process and platforms and stuff like that for clients.

Peter Benei: This is an amazing journey. And it’s so weird that you said that you felt that you’re like late in the party. I felt exactly the opposite. I don’t know, like 10 years ago, when I told others that I’m working online, it sounded like a scam or I don’t know, you’re making money online and stuff. And most of the people who were on that thread, they were either digital nomads or like you said, internet entrepreneurs or something like that.

Barbara Turley: I think I was probably in that world a lot. And I came into contact with a lot of the big internet entrepreneurs. And I thought, wow, look at these people doing all this crazy stuff. And I was really enticed by that world. And it seems exciting to me. So I read Tim Ferriss’s book as well. Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Workweek.

Peter Benei: Yes, that’s the gateway drug. But yeah, but it changed during the times I think. Personally, I also came from enterprise, but from an advertising world and I had to change my, I don’t know, ICP or ideal clients from enterprise level clients to startups and scale-ups because they were just simply, they were more open to work remotely with others, either as a consultant or whatever it is.

Barbara Turley: That was the same for me. We have dabbled with enterprise clients now, but not back then.

Peter Benei: Now, yes, obviously. That’s the change. So within five years or I don’t know, six, one or two or three years before the pandemic, people started to realize is that, okay, so this is like people like working from their laptops. It’s a thing now. And people are coding and just coding, but also doing marketing maybe and operations and stuff like that. And HR, finance, can do it online, whatever. And the pandemic hit and obviously it was like a big boost for remote workers.

Barbara Turley: Interesting about the pandemic actually, when the pandemic hit, people were saying to me, how are you guys coping? And what are you doing? Cause we were actually office-based by then. But interestingly, I had started out as a virtual company way back at the beginning. And then when we got to about 65 or 70 staff, these were, they were contractors back then. This is way back in the day. I got some advice from a great mentor of mine and she said, it’s time that you grow up this company and you need to come to the Philippines and incorporate here and make everyone an employee and pay their benefits and private help. You can really grow up as a company and move to get office space. And I did all that and we moved into office space. And within two years after that, the pandemic hit. But the great thing was that we were able to, because we had started as a remote company, we still had the operational framework of a remote company. And I kept all of that, except we were in an office, but it was so fast to just move everyone out. Like I was like, what’s the problem? We just put them all at home. And for me, that was an easy move. Yeah. We never went back.

Peter Benei: This is exactly what others should do, by the way, even if you have an office, you should operate as a remote first business anyway, because it’s just so faster and smoother and clearer for everyone. But now you’ve worked with a lot of enterprise clients as well, like myself and other remote workers as well. Now people are actually working remotely, it’s a legit thing. And right now we are debating at all around whether we should return to office or we should work remotely entirely and what is hybrid, what is not.

Barbara Turley: On that debate about whether we should go back to the office or whether we should be remote, the debate is raging online and there’s two sides. There’s like the back to office crew.

Peter Benei: I know. And no one listens to anyone.

Barbara Turley: No, and everyone’s fighting about it. And I feel like when I’m watching these debates, far be it for me to say that I know the answer. However, when I’m watching the debates, I feel like both sides have lost sight of what the problem actually is. And I feel like location, what we need to do is build digital first companies that render location and trust irrelevant. Build companies that it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the office, distributed, remote, whatever it is you want to call it, you’re just people working in a virtual, like in a digital first company where the office is now in the cloud.

And we need to create spaces that we all show up to work, collaborate on work, do work, report on work, but not in the physical space. Even if some choose to be in the physical space, that would be my view.

Peter Benei: 100% behind everything that you just said. Yes. People should build remote first companies and by building that location, time, and whatever becomes 100% irrelevant. Let’s talk about VAs and let’s start from the basics. And sorry, that might be super basic for you, but what is a VA? How would you define a VA? Because it’s visual assistance. Anything else added to that terminology might be useful.

Barbara Turley: Okay. So I love this question because you might think it’s a very basic question. However, no, the problem with the word virtual assistant or two words, virtual assistant is that it has gone from, it literally now has morphed into meaning of anyone with a heartbeat who can type through to somebody who can code an app. And that is fundamentally flawed. That is not a virtual assistant. What we have to remember is the word assistant. Just because someone’s virtual does not make them a virtual assistant. If somebody is a coder or a developer, if somebody is a writer, that they call themselves virtual assistants, but really an assistant is somebody who is there to assist on process execution, is not a specialist. It doesn’t mean they can’t function as that, but you really want to measure your expectations around what a VA truly is. And that is not to downgrade any of the virtual assistants who might be listening. In fact, I think there’s a lot of virtual assistants marketing themselves out there as virtual assistants when actually they’re online business managers and should be charging higher and should be marketing themselves differently. But because the word has gone so broad, it’s quite confusing for everyone. And then expectations management can be difficult when you do hire one.

So, If you think about you want to, when you have an assistant, their role really is to execute process that has been developed by somebody else. Can they develop the process? Sometimes they can in collaboration with you or someone else. Sometimes they can, but to expect somebody to walk in and build your systems and processes and then execute as an assistant is a completely misalignment of expectations. So that’s number one. You just have to measure your expectations.

Peter Benei: Sorry, I love the terminology and thank you for clarifying that. Sorry for stopping you, but I also want to clarify a little bit about the terminology. To me, a VA is someone who’s working online, it’s virtual and it’s an assistant, meaning that he or she is more, so they are more like a small or a very defined specialist within a niche. Meaning you can have a marketing assistant, marketing virtual assistant who’s writing some sort of copy, managing your socials, whatever, stuff like that. I do have a VA just like that or a graphic designer assistance, meaning just reframing pictures and stuff like that, doing the saving out, printing out stuff like a graphic design process.

I also have that too. Or it can be a business process manager, some business process assistant. So like scheduling stuff, being in contact with others, much like an executive assistant as well. Where everyone is trying to get to is that they need to work in a specific niche, but without a highly specialized knowledge to get some really huge bandwidth of work of the chest from the actual specialist within that niche. So usually what I see as a bad operational example for scale-ups, people wear many hats, right? Because they are short on staff or whatever they have their problem. Let’s say on the marketing department, because that’s where I’m comfortable. A marketing manager usually is the one who’s writing the content, designing everything around it, scheduling the content, tracking, reporting, so many stuff. Why not use that marketing manager as a skilled, highly skilled professional, delivering marketing results and everything that’s, I wouldn’t say not specialized, but more assistant focused work can be done by a marketing VA for that company. So this is how I see that. I wouldn’t expect at all from a VA to create the entire process of the system for that company.

Barbara Turley: So I hear people asking that though, and I’m like, that’s just way off.

Peter Benei: That should come from the manager or the leader of the company.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Or the owner. So we actually see these problems.

Peter Benei: How do you handle that?

Barbara Turley: Misaligned expectations on the discovery calls were very clear and usually on, and to be honest on podcasts like this, I go out and podcasts a lot. A lot of people hear me on, I really rein in the definition because it is, it has gotten a little out of hand online, maybe in the smaller end of the market more than the scale ups are get it. They’re pretty okay. Sometimes startup founders may not get it so much, they also because there’s so much to do there. And there’s just, they need a real jack of all trades that can like a wing man or a wing woman that can fly alongside them and do lots of different types of tasks. That’s okay. That can happen too. But yeah, it’s just to be clear. One of the ways I explain it too, if you look at, I think a lot of everyone’s optimizing for everything right now, like all companies, they want to optimize their platforms, their processes. But actually what we’re not looking at is optimizing our people. So one of the most, now that real estate is gone, more or less, the most expensive asset in any company is their people. And they’re allowing like 30, anywhere from 20 to 60% of people’s workers time to be taken up every day on repeatable process driven and therefore delegatable tasks or processes.

Voice Actor: LeadershipAnywhere, discussions with leaders of distributed companies. Learn how to improve your remote team’s productivity, boost your growth, and build better remote operation. Your host is Peter Benei, founder ofAnywhere Consulting, helping remote leaders build better companies.

Peter Benei: And if I was to take 30% of the stuff off their plate, get it out of their heads into a process map and figure out what parts of it can be delegated and get an offshore team strategy in place, what have you actually done? People look at the cost of the offshore team member. What I would say is what you’ve actually done is cloned the average of those three people and what are they going to do with their time? And that’s the way you really want to be looking at this. And that’s optimizing for human capital, if that’s what you want to call it, or your human capital budgets. And I don’t think enough companies are looking at it that way.

Peter Benei: I agree. I think we should talk about the price or the cost, shall we say cost. I think it really hurts the terminology and the image of the VAs. So most founders, and I’m sure that you have this conversation with most of your discovery calls and most of the prospects that you have. Most founders view VAs as more affordable, sorry, more affordable alternative to do X, Y, Z. So they put on their cost saving glasses when they talk to you. On the other hand, that’s not the right attitude. Actually, when you hire a VA, it’s an extra current HR budget, but it’s an investment. How can you change the viewpoint from saving costs to doing investment in your people? Because I think that’s the golden ticket for VAs. Just to, especially for the audience, let me give you an example. When I personally hired my VAs, most of the jobs that they do or most of the tasks that they do, I wouldn’t say they are simple ones, but delegatable ones that I did before many times, meaning that they are refined and easy.

Barbara Turley: And teachable. You can train. Teachable and trainable.

Peter Benei: Yes. Teachable, trainable, meaning delegate. Can I do that on my own? Sure. I did that many times. Why would I pay for someone who’s doing virtual assistance for me for a work that I actually can do because that’s the investment in the business. I will win those hours, not by the actual numbers of the hours, but 10 times of those hours, because I don’t need to deal with those things anymore. I just maybe, I don’t review or…

Barbara Turley: It’s not just a time suck. It’s not just actually a time suck. It’s an energy suck. And what you’re thinking about is like the most expensive time and energy in any company is being sucked by stuff that maybe you might even like doing it. Maybe you like being in Canva, creating images for social media, but it is the best use of your time if you want to grow the business or you just want to be a consultant for the lifestyle that you want to grow and live a certain way. That’s the choice of whoever is listening to this. But it’s really, yes, the way to look at it is not about the cost of that. Yes, the cost savings, of course, going offshore. Everything you to an option. Yeah. You need to have an offshore team strategy.

And the reason you have to have an offshore team strategy is to ensure that your onshore team or your main team or whoever, whatever way you want to describe it, are using their time and energy for the work that moves the needle. And not for the work, the busy work that needs to be done, but doesn’t need to be done by them. And I’m a living, walking, talking example of it because for six, we had, we got to 150 employees before I ever had anybody else in the company outside of the Philippines. And most of the people on the team seriously grew up with me as VAs. Like our financial controller started out as a VA10 years ago. I trained her up and mentored her into roles. We’ve had HR people, we’ve had trainers. We’ve had all sorts of people progress on from VA roles with us and go into leadership positions in my company. And it’s only in the last two or three years that we’ve started. We’ve got someone in the States, someone in Australia. We’ve got a smattering of people, but we’ve got 350 people and we’ve only got five that are not in the Philippines.

Peter Benei: Wow.

Barbara Turley: For me, I know I’m talking my own book, but it’s just an absolute no brainer. And at the same time, I talked about not wanting to be a corporate mom at the start of this. I’m running this business eight and a half years. I have a seven year old daughter and a four year old son. And I very much was a hands-on mom and still am. I’m picking up from school and I’m doing the school runs and it’s fine. It works with my lifestyle. And that was what I wanted.

Peter Benei: Yes. And you don’t need to focus on the nitty-gritty details because it’s done internally by others. That’s the key here. And by not focusing on the nitty-gritty details, you can actually focus on growing.

Barbara Turley: That’s how I grew it. I mean, you need space in your head. And I’m with you. Like I often will do a process myself for quite a long time until I refine it and I get it really nailed down. And then I delegate it. There’s always a moment where I think, yeah, this is going right. And now I’m going to teach one of my team members. And invariably, 80% of the time I can get a VA to do it or I can get a VA to do 80% of it. And I only need sometimes a fractional consultant or someone to do the other bit. So that’s quite useful as well.

Peter Benei: So how, if I’m a startup founder or a leader in a scale up, how should I approach having a VA? How would I know which processes and which kind of work or what kind of work can be done by a VA? And when should I reach out to you? Is there a tipping point maybe?

Barbara Turley: Yes. So in the early stages, when you’re a startup founder, let’s say it’s just you and maybe there could be another couple of people, but let’s say it’s small.

Peter Benei: It’s under 10 people.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Under 10 people. Look, under 10 people, I still think you need VAs, but in startup culture, as you would know, startup is all about product market fit. It’s all about marketing sales, right? You need to get that right. And often it can be very chaotic and very messy. And it isn’t, there aren’t nice neat processes and your systems are not really developed yet because everyone’s just running around trying to find this, you know, throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. So in that scenario, you still can utilize VAs really well. So founders who are finding themselves doing a lot of different things and are a bit chaotic need a great generalist virtual assistant that can literally like a wingman or wingwoman that flies alongside them and they can delegate stuff ad hoc. Go research this. I need to find out that. Can you book this meeting? This sort of thing, right? That’s an assistant. In your marketing team, as you just said, in marketing, there is so much doing that needs to be done. That is actually grunt work, but it’s so important to get it done. And you want to make sure that you’re not tying up the time of the marketing creatives and the people trying to drive the strategy with trying to do all the doing. So VA is there, massively useful in sales, massively useful for sales follow-up, even appointment setting, these sorts of things, following people around on LinkedIn. And there’s a whole entire LinkedIn process we have now developed that VAs can help with. So that’s in that stage. And that goes on into scale up. But then once you get into a scale up phase, a lot of operational stuff can start to take over. So as you really develop your systems and processes out, is the work that you tend to do with clients to help them to really get that stuff dialed in. It’s always about asking: how much of this actually needs to be done by the person with the IP in their head? Or really, could we process this up, train it, and actually delegate most of it to a VA? You will find that you could have teams of VAs in these businesses, and the dividends it pays later are enormous, not just from the cost-saving point of view, but making sure your key people, their energy is being used to drive the company. So, VAs all the time.

Peter Benei: Yes, sorry to jump in, but I think we analyze or described two fundamentally different types of VAs here. One type of VA that most founders pre-scale up phase during the startup phase, they already have probably a product market fit or something. They are still early at the stage. They need someone to help with more, so it’s a little flexible VA. It’s a desktop researcher pretty much.

People who need to be able to think through a brief, execute on it, but the brief is very broad. Let me give you an example. For example, sales. You want to sell your B2B products to certain type of audience who are by the way, actually attending certain type of events because people in B2B love events. And the only thing that you need to do is to research all the events, all the exhibitors, all their names, all their contact details, put it in a spreadsheet and then the salespeople can actually execute on that list. But I know it sounds super simple.

Barbara Turley: There’s a little work in it though. There’s little work in it.

Peter Benei: But it’s a week of work or even more. Do you want to do that on yourself as a founder or like a marketing manager? If you have someone in house already, why not having the marketing manager or the sales manager doing the actual work, like reaching out, outreach and stuff like that, or content creation. Do they really need to build a really out of basis within two, I don’t know, three to four days or a week? No, you hire a VA, pay, I don’t know, small amount of fee and it will get done. That’s it. But the second part is a more structured or less flexible approach. Once you reach a certain stage, like a scale up or something, you will probably understand what sticks and what’s not within your strategy. So probably you will already have some defined processes on how you do things. And that’s when you actually need to understand or realize what are those processes that you can outsource to a VA or get the help of a VA. Small processes only. So those VAs are, I wouldn’t say less flexible, but they are more focused on one single process and they execute it the same.

Barbara Turley: Yes, that’s a good point. Actually, I think the founder type VA needs to be someone who is very resourceful. Someone who likes when you give them a problem, they like to go hunt. And even if they come up with all the wrong answers, they’re quite going to go out. There’s those types of VAs. I call them the real generalists. Whereas in the scale up phase, you want to bring on people that are methodical, recurring. They want to come to work and execute and do a great job, but they may not want to be challenged too much to be doing sprints and things like that. You just want them executing.

Peter Benei: Yeah, it’s not just a personal trait, but it can be a personal trait as well. But the narrower your process, the less likely you as a leader need to review that process all the time because it just replicates anyway. Interesting. I think we should talk a little bit more about the tipping point because when startups need to realize that, okay, so this cannot go on forever. We need to hire someone who can help with integrative work. Do you have any kind of insights on when others realize that there is a tipping point and they need to hire a VA? What drives them? What is the main pain?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, unfortunately, usually when the tipping point has come, it’s already chaos. And then you’re, it’s not that it’s too late. It’s never too late to get a VA, right? Never, ever too late. However, if you leave it until that point where you feel, usually it happens at midnight. The founder is up. I’ve had these stories with clients. Someone will say, and my wife was up till midnight answering customer support tickets and we just couldn’t do it anymore. Why did you do that in the first place? It’s okay because maybe they didn’t know what the answers were or the templates or they didn’t have a process or things just took off. And the problem then is you get a VA in and you just want to throw it at them and say, my God, I’m so relieved. Can you just do this? But unfortunately you have to realize that you’re going to go through some pain first because the VA is coming in and you are doing the job and trying to build a plane and fly it at the same time. So it’s difficult. If a VA is not fast enough, people just get annoyed and get rid of the VA. I’m like, no, you need to take a step back here for a moment, unfortunately, and you need to slow down for a second so that you can speed up later. And that can be very difficult for a founder who’s in full flight to accept, but it is better because otherwise you’re going to crash the plane. It’s just a fact of life. So the tipping point is usually too late, but unfortunately people don’t realize that they should get help before they need it. And VAs are so cost effective. I got one from my original business when I started it, because I had read the four hour work week. I hired one full time and I didn’t think I had enough for her to do, but invariably after two weeks I did. So that was how it started.

Peter Benei: But can the VA define their roles? That’s the main question. Can the VA help the founder to define the briefing, define the template, define the documentation in order, because the most problem, you frame the problem really well that when you are on a full flight mode and considering support tickets at midnight, which is, we are laughing at it now, but I have.

Barbara Turley: People are doing that.

Peter Benei: Jesus, have endless examples like that all the time from founders. And they are surprised why they don’t have time to do actual meaningful stuff for the company. But that’s like a separate discussion. Hire a VA. Is that when they are in this full energy mode and full flight mode, it’s really hard to slow down and think about what they are doing. So that can be outsourced to someone else. And the question is how can a VA assist them to shorten that, shall we say short flight mode or something?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so first the quick answer is yes, 100% they can help you and help you a lot, but here’s how you do it. You don’t say to them, I’m desperate to help. Can you just figure that out and go build me a process? That’s not how it works. Just video yourself. If you’ve already been doing it yourself, just stick Loom on and video yourself doing it. Give the video to the VA and say, can you turn that into a process map for me? Then here’s the trick though. Now I want you to go and execute that. So turn it into a process map, some steps in the video that have a process map. Then I want you to execute that process and you see what comes back and you wait for the mistakes. Cause invariably what’s going to happen is this. You didn’t realize that between steps five and six, there’s a way that you think and there’s IP in your head. That means that you’re thinking about those steps as you do them slightly differently. And the person who doesn’t have that IP in their head is going to do those steps potentially differently and maybe not get the same results. Now, this is what frustrates people. They go, but I showed her this. Then you have to watch for mistakes and then you go back and iterate the process together and you go, I see. Yes. OK, between five and six, we’re going to stick a step in there and teach that person the bit that they didn’t know and don’t shoot them for it. You have more IP than them. And that is how you collaborate on getting your processes and your systems really well-oiled and a VA can absolutely help you with that. Maybe by making a mistake. Sometimes a mistake is a gift because it shows you where the hole in your process is. And that’s a good starting point.

Peter Benei: I can see that you operate how many? 300 VAs?

Barbara Turley: 350 staff. Yeah.

Peter Benei: Jesus Christ, so.

Barbara Turley: It would say to me, how do you know everything that’s going on? I’m like, I know everything from whose grandmother died to literally everything. Everything that’s going on. It’s not, I’m a huge Asana user as well. We’re an enterprise customer of Asana. We’ve built OKRs and all the water falling up and down the chain. There’s a way to build that. There’s information tickets and stuff. And I know when I’m needed for help or.

Peter Benei: But I understand and know that you are doing this because the process that you just showed and explained it’s almost mind bogglingly simple, but still it’s super effective. And it really touches the pain point that I also all the time see when again, step five and six, there is a secret IP, secret knowledge.

Barbara Turley: You don’t even know that you’re doing this.

Peter Benei: Yes, you’re not self-aware, but that’s where the process gets a bottleneck from others. And personally, I usually tell to everyone that when you do that little video or whatever you use, when you do that briefing, understand that no one, even yourself, no one is a mind reader. And there is a reason why you are building this business. And there is a reason why that VA is not building your business. So you do have a secret source because just by giving the fact that you are the one who’s running the show and understand that secret sauce somehow should be transferable, at least on an execution level to someone.

Barbara Turley: I think with documentation as well, here’s an interesting thing. When you see, and this has happened to me recently, so this is a good story. So recently, like in the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen a department go in the weeds. Like they weren’t really getting any results. Like it was just, I didn’t know it was a mess in there, but everyone was coming there complaining and we’re not getting the right this, that and the other. And I just wasn’t getting any results. So I went and had a look and I was like, this is a mess in here. I could see it. So for a start, this is a mess. But instead of shooting the whole lot of them that were in the department, I said, okay, I’m just going to take a look at it. Just let me have a look at what you’re doing. I asked each one of them to explain to me the process. They hadn’t written it down. So that was my fault. Cause it didn’t, it wasn’t there. Each one of them had the steps slightly mixed up.

Like they were like, I don’t know. Does she, yeah. I think she does that bit second. Yeah. That was it. Yeah. This sort of thing. So I went in and tidied it up and I thought to myself, I know my role here. Now every founder is not going to be able to do this. I’m just good at this is one of my skills. I can do this, but you need to go in and I just said to them, just leave it with me for a couple of days.

I’m going to go in and clean the place up and I’m going to reformulate a bit of a strategy, a bit of a process. And then we’re all going to meet back here and we’re going to discuss the new process and then we’re going to roll that out going forward. And the stuff that got messed up, we’re going to just try and get a strategy to siphon that off for now and then rolling. So get them on a new train. And everyone was happier. They were all overwhelmed. One of them nearly resigned. I was like, I know, let’s go on with the job. The problem is the process is a mess, right? And actually in truth is because I did let them develop that process themselves and it wasn’t because they weren’t able to develop a process. I’m just better at it than them. And I had some more knowledge about that area and I was able to help and I mentored them into it and now they’re off to the races again. It’s fine. But I had to slow down for those few days and I was like, oh, I’m going to go in there and tidy up the house.

Peter Benei: It’s funny that you said you tidy up the house. I always feel like I’m doing like house cleaning work or something like that. But yeah.

Barbara Turley: Declutter.

Peter Benei: Declutter. I’m like the Marie Kondo of businesses.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. That’s a good line. You should use that. That’s a good one. Maybe I should use that one instead.

Peter Benei: Please. I’m not sure that should be true. I don’t know. But yeah, it’s like the same, but by the way, and that’s last question on the VA stuff. I think that’s where a company like yours can excel because you can hire a VA two ways, right? As a founder, you hire, I don’t know, from platforms and you do DIY yourself, right? I think it can work for those who are already documenting and already understanding what they are doing so they know that the process can be outsourced to someone else. Although most of the time I see the exact opposite by the way, but whatever. Or they can go to a specialist company who are actually managing this. And not because they have a bunch of VAs under their belt, but because they have you who actually go in and explain what the heck needs to be done and how it should be done. Am I correct?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, we’ve got a lot of best practice. Like we’ve got client success managers that deal with all of our client accounts. And really a lot of the reason a client might come to a company like ours over doing it themselves is that we handle training as well. We have our own training platform.

So we actually manufacture our own VAs to be totally honest. We don’t go out and recruit them for clients. We actually hire people month and month and month for ourselves. And I take risk on doing this because they all go on the payroll and everything and they’re sitting in training programs for anywhere from a month to three months with us. And it’s only when we feel that they’re really ready and that they’re actually VAs, even if they’ve no experience. And then we start to place them on our client accounts. The training demands and the onboarding demands and the kind of management demands, a lot of people don’t want to deal with that. And we deal with that really well. So that’s a lot of the reason. And also some scale ups, like the idea that you can scale us up and scale us down within 30 days notice and the person doesn’t lose their job, we actually retain them on our payroll, as long as they’re not bad egg. And it’s our job to try to move them onto a different account. And I think a lot of our clients love that because there’s no guilt in letting someone go. If it’s not working out or you can just bail back, we go, no problem, we’ll whip them back. We put them on a different account and it’s my job to get out and sell that basically. And we have supply demand matched all the time.

Peter Benei: You pretty much operate like an agency then.

Barbara Turley: We do, but do agencies keep them on the payrolls? Yeah, yeah, but they probably do. Yeah, yeah, they do. Yeah, we’re largely.

Peter Benei: Agencies can learn a lot from the internal training program of yours, by the way. Because most agencies, yeah, anyway, don’t go on the trial, yeah, but yeah, the operational model is much like an agency of a marketing agency or advertising agency. And they also make money on the margins and stuff like that. Same model.

Barbara Turley: The other one is culture. Some people have like big teams of VAs with us, so they might have eight or 10 VAs. We give them their own results coach. We organize all of their team building events and the parties and whatever things the parents want to do. We facilitate all of that. And then ones that only have small numbers of VAs with us, we have team buildings and they’re all part of a team. We do weekends away, we do dinners out. We’ve all sorts of fun things going on in our culture. And that means the client doesn’t have to worry about the VA just sitting on their own in the Philippines or somewhere with a laptop. They have support. A lot of support. Yeah.

Peter Benei: Sure. That’s super important.

Barbara Turley: And they have health benefits and all these kinds of things. Yeah.

Peter Benei: Nice. And time zones. So most of your people are busy in the Philippines or APEC area. Yeah.

Barbara Turley: We are Philippines based and we operate 24-5. So we don’t do weekends because they just fundamentally like to have weekends off. I agree with that, but we do operate 24 hours. So we facilitate the US time zone in their time zone.

Peter Benei: And then you have clients in weird time zones as well. For example, us like Europe.

Barbara Turley: We have your, yes. So that’s like a mid shift in the Philippines. Night shift is the US and day shift. We operate the three time zones really is what we do. And I was, I used to be very against the night shift when I first started it. And then I went to the Philippines and I realized there’s such a night culture there because I’m alive at night. I thought, and some people like working at night. I’ve offered to have some of our longer-term people. I’ve said, would you like to go to a day shift? And they’re like, no, it’s my lifestyle. My wife works at night too, or whatever.

Peter Benei: Totally. One last question I always ask this from my guests. How do you see the future of remote work or flexible work? I don’t even know how to call that.

Barbara Turley: I think it’s a bit like the AI conversation. People say to me, what do you think? Is AI this? And what do you think about it? I’m like, one thing I know is the cat’s out of the bag and it’s not getting back in. So whether we like it or not, work is changing and it’s a good thing. I do agree. It’s a good thing for the planet. It’s good thing for people. It’s a good thing for parents, for non-parents, whatever way it’s good for everyone. I do think fundamentally it is also good for companies, but they need the right operational framework to make it work so that they’re not asking in their heads the question, how do I know my people are working? All these stupid questions that are silently going on in the heads of certain companies. I think there’s a bit of work to do and we’re not quite there yet. Some companies are just not able to catch up yet. They’re not there yet, either mentally or operationally. I also think though, I like to highlight to people that it’s not new. Like distributed teams, I worked on trading floors in the 90s where we had direct lines and microphones that went straight into the London offices and the New York offices. And it was like a collaboration across time zones and across continents. And technically, although teams were in the office, but the other team was distributed from you.

So we were remote from each other, but we were in an office, but we were still remote from each other. So it’s just an evolution of the concept and to try to wrap our heads around it. And also accepting that some people like to work at the office. Some people lament the death of the office and that sort of thing. That’s okay too. It’s okay for, I don’t think we should be bashing those that go, really like the office. I like the commute and I want to go to work. That’s okay too. It’s really, we have to just try to move the conversation towards location irrelevancy where possible.

Peter Benei: Yeah, office is optional. Thank you for taking this late night calls for you. I know it was late in Australia. Appreciate your flexibility on time. Really appreciate it. Where can people find you?

Barbara Turley: If people want to hear more about what I’ve been talking about, I tend to talk about this on LinkedIn where we met. I think LinkedIn is definitely the next, like it is the networking place right now for business. It’s an amazing platform. So Barbara Turley over there, you can follow me on LinkedIn. And if you’re ready to come and talk to us about how VAs can maybe help your business, please come to thevirtualhub.com, book a call with our team. You won’t get to speak to me because I’m the master delegator, of course, but I do have trained an amazing team to speak to our clients all over the world and have a chat about whether we can help you or not. And if we can, we absolutely will. And if we can’t, we will send you in the right direction of what to do next.

Peter Benei: Thank you. Thank you for plugging that in. Really do appreciate your time for this call and all the insights that you shared. Thank you very much.

Barbara Turley: Thank you.