Rewriting the rulebook: Redefining business and motherhood
Secret Ops
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Episode breakdown
Barbara Turley is the Founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, whose mission it is to eradicate business overwhelm and remove operational friction using a team of support assistants, clever automations, and streamlined processes.
In this podcast, we explore Barbara’s transition from equity trading into entrepreneurship and how her background influenced her business approach. We also dive into the challenges of remote work, what it means to advocate for “trustless environments”, and the use of OKRs in moving your business forward. Last but certainly not least, Barbara reflects on her journey balancing motherhood with business, challenging traditional norms, and trusting one’s intuition through the journey of her career.
- Barbara's background and the connection between equity trading and assistants
- The leap from equity trading to starting a business
- Identifying the need for assistants and starting The Virtual Hub
- Developing and systematizing the process of hiring assistants
- Identifying the right people for assistant roles
- Challenges of managing support roles and micromanagement
- Building trustless environments using objectives and key results
- Remote work challenges
- Navigating work-life balance
- Balancing motherhood and business
I'm going to throw the rulebook out the window and I'm going to be mum most of the time, and then I'm going to get really good at systems, processes, delegation and building a business as a machine to free me to do the things I want to do with my life and to free my teams
In this episode
00:00 Trustless environments
Barbara Turley challenges the emotional and variable nature of “trust” in remote teams and proposes building systems where trust becomes irrelevant, creating environments that inherently prevent misunderstandings.
00:30 Podcast introduction
Arianna Caffone welcomes listeners to Secret Ops, introduces Barbara Turley as the founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, and frames the episode’s focus on when and how entrepreneurs should bring on support staff, tying in personal life design with business scaling.
02:18 Skills transfer: Equity trading to operations
Barbara reflects on her decade in equity trading—making rapid decisions under pressure—and explains how those fast-paced, intuitive skills underpin her success in recruiting, matching supply and demand, and operational execution at The Virtual Hub.
04:38 Developing quick decision-making and intuition
She identifies her innate attraction to high-pressure environments—originally aspiring to work in an ER—and discusses how her ability to act swiftly on intuition became a core entrepreneurial asset, while cautioning against overwhelming more process-oriented team members.
06:35 Pivot after 2008: Business building
Barbara reflects on her decade in equity trading—making rapid decisions under pressure—and explains how those fast-paced, intuitive skills underpin her success in recruiting, matching supply and demand, and operational execution at The Virtual Hub.
08:33 Origin of the virtual hub: identifying the need for assistants
Frustrated by small-business owners’ overwhelm and inability to source or manage remote help, Barbara began informally matching clients with Filipino assistants, quickly realizing a scalable business in training, onboarding, and embedding support staff.
10:34 Systematizing operations: Departments, recurring tasks & projects
She outlines her simple framework—every business has departments; within them, recurring tasks that sustain the engine and projects that drive growth—and shows how documenting processes enables delegation to support teams.
12:30 Recruiting & training assistants
Barbara explains The Virtual Hub’s recruiting funnel—testing raw traits before interviews—followed by salaried immersion in a custom training program, ensuring recruits learn both role-specific processes and communication standards before client placement.
14:45 Process vs. Micromanagement: Maintaining standards
To uphold quality without micromanaging, she emphasizes codifying personal high standards into clear processes and then training assistants to follow them, allowing business owners to retain control through systems rather than direct oversight.
17:02 Remote work & trustless systems with OKRs
Moving to a fully remote model, Barbara abandoned emotional trust metrics in favor of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) tracked in Asana—making deliverables binary (done or not), reducing meetings, and keeping team engagement transparent and goal-oriented.
19:08 Performance visibility: Managing roadblocks
She reframes managerial check-ins to focus on whether team members are on track and, if not, what roadblocks exist—enabling leadership to swiftly remove obstacles or reprioritize efforts rather than policing daily activities.
21:00 Aligning sales & creative teams
Acknowledging the challenges of integrating “lone-wolf” salespeople and creatives into standardized workflows, Barbara advises upfront clarity on collaboration tools and processes, or, if misalignment persists, redefining role fit.
23:05 Navigating entrepreneurship & motherhood
Both host and guest reflect on the lack of role models for combining business ownership with motherhood, highlighting the decision paralysis around designing maternity leave, work hours, and family priorities without external templates.
25:00 Defining personal vision first
Barbara shares that she always mapped her personal life vision—how and where she wanted to live and parent—before choosing business models, ensuring everything from company structure to travel requirements served her life goals, not the other way around.
27:10 Rewriting the rule book for women
She asserts that traditional career “rule books” were written by men and don’t apply to modern women, urging listeners to cast aside outdated norms and co-create their own frameworks for success in business and motherhood.
29:17 Designing business around motherhood
Detailing how she structured work into an hour-a-day mentorship role post-children and built automation to cover the rest, Barbara illustrates how entrepreneurs can flexibly scale down live work without sacrificing company growth.
31:30 Handling overwhelming days
Acknowledging that some days simply derail—whether from business or baby—she encourages setting minimal goals, practicing empathy toward oneself, and trusting that tomorrow offers a fresh start.
33:40 Embracing imperfection & learning
Barbara reframes procrastination as a subconscious signal to pause until all “dots connect,” stressing that recognizing and respecting one’s own rhythms leads to clearer decisions and more creative breakthroughs.
36:00 Cultivating intuition vs. Procrastination
She distinguishes between avoidance and the gut-driven process of letting ideas incubate, sharing that many solutions emerge organically—often in the shower—once the mind has silently worked through complexities.
38:00 Advice to younger self: Gut instinct
If she could speak to her younger self, Barbara would emphasize the importance of developing a deep, unshakable trust in one’s own inner knowing, independent of external expectations or societal norms.
40:50 Seeking freedom as a mindset
Describing freedom not as a function of time or money but as a mental state, she explains how even in high-pressure roles, cultivating internal freedom determines personal fulfillment more than external circumstances.
42:30 Rapid fire introduction
Arianna transitions to a series of quick personal questions to reveal lighter, spontaneous insights about Barbara beyond her operational expertise.
43:02 Rapid fire personal insights
In a closing lightning round, Barbara shares favorite parts of her day (early mornings), beloved places (Sydney and French Alps), best small purchases (lipstick), guiding quotes (“Feel the fear and do it anyway”), childhood joys (horses), and her enduring aspiration: to live with unbounded freedom.
