Jason Fishman: Welcome to Test Optimize Scale. On this podcast, we talk about growth marketing strategies with industry leaders sharing their in-depth experiences, insights, and recommendations. We stray away from any of the fluff you would hear in a sales pitch, how-to video, or any outdated content designed only to increase rankings. We set out to provide you with real, actionable marketing data. Dismiss any one size fits all misdirection and allow you to stand on the shoulders of some of the best minds in the game as they discuss what they tested, optimized, and scaled in their journey. Let’s start this show.

Hello, welcome to another episode of Test, Optimize, and Scale. I have been looking forward to today’s discussion. I Barbara Turley here with us, founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub, optimizing people, business growth, automation is going to be discussing it all in detail here today. Barbara, thank you for taking time to join.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much, Jason. I’m very excited about the test optimized scale topic. I am very passionate about this topic.

Jason Fishman: Absolutely. I’ve been told it’s the scientific method in many shapes and forms. I look at it as key towards marketing, business growth, overall growth. So it’s going to be fun to exchange ideas and thoughts with you here today. Thought we could start with your background, your history, your story.

Barbara Turley: Sure, yeah. So I always say that I wasn’t the traditional lemonade stand entrepreneur. I wasn’t the one selling lemonade outside. I started my career in corporate. I always wanted to be in corporate. And I did that for a long time, for 15 years. I was in the investment banking arena, actually. I spent eight years as an equity trader and then progressed into asset management sales. Had a great career, mostly in Sydney, Australia. And as you can tell, those who are good with accents can probably tell I’m not Australian. I’m Irish background, but I did spend 20 years living inAustralia. Had a great career there. But as I got a bit older, to be honest, I started having these feelings of wanting to create something. I think that’s how it started. I didn’t know if it was a business or what, but I kind of wanted to do something that gave me bit more freedom, I suppose, and something I could create.

So rolling forward, it took me many years to sort of get to the point where I was going to do that. But the first stab at it, I had this great idea in 2007 to leave my job and try something new. And then the big old financial crisis came along in 2008 and I was like, okay, that was a bad idea. So I went back to the industry and ended up in a sales role in asset management, which actually took me on such an amazing journey because I got an opportunity during that time to get involved in the start. Well, it was a sort of startup of sorts. There was a bunch of very clever people that I was working with that decided to do a management buyout of a business from one of the investment banks. And I managed to get in on that deal and spent five years working at that company in asset management sales and just learned a whole bunch of great, amazing stuff about scaling a company like that. And I’m still involved in that company today.

It’s 12 years later, but I’m not an employee there, but it gave me the grounding, a very great grounding in then going, I’d like to do, I’d like to do something myself now. So I did. I left that and, like many corporates, I went straight into business coaching. Cause like everyone who leaves corporate thinks I should do consulting. So I did that. Didn’t really like it, but did it anyway. but interestingly, a few great things came out of that. I noticed that a lot of the businesses I was trying to help, they were smaller businesses and it didn’t matter what industry they were in or what they were doing. Essentially, if they were in this kind of washing machine of if they didn’t hire staff, they weren’t going to be able to grow. But if they didn’t grow, they weren’t going to be able to hire staff. And it was just this constant vicious cycle they were in. So I had read Tim Ferriss’s four hour work week, like the rest of the world at that point. And I knew about VAs in the Philippines and I had gotten one myself. So I literally got friends of my VA to work, to do some work for some clients so that I could free their time up, which is the most expensive time that any business has, right? It is the founder, the owner, the key teams, things like that.

And the idea was that I wanted to work with them on strategy. And honestly, before I knew it, I was getting more demand for people asking me, could I get them one of those VAs than I was for business coaching. And I was enjoying helping in this way. So I literally by accident found myself in this business. I sort of found myself running it before I realized it was even a business.

And look, rolling forward eight years now, we have 300 staff in the Philippines. We have amazing clients across the U.S., Canada, Australia. I’m proud to say I’m a mom first entrepreneur. I had two children in that time. So I’m very passionate about delegation and optimizing your time so that I could do those things. And yeah, today we’re even branching out now. We’ve a new arm of the business where, of course, VA’s is our core business.

But we do also do operational efficiency consulting and implementation. And that is all around optimizing your operations for lean scalability. So it’s perfect on this podcast to be talking about all these things. And that’s been my journey.

Jason Fishman: Well, it’s like you said in our earlier discussions, it’s not just about hiring a virtual assistant and, you know, there’s people on LinkedIn reaching out about virtual assistants, all different things show up on Google, probably some emails that show up in a founders email box about a VA, a virtual assistant. But it’s really how you use those virtual assistants in my experience and applying their time to things that are actually going to be measurable things that are better fit for virtual assistants at that. I imagine you have a whole formula, a whole list of different hacks that can be used for this. How did you start to build the model in terms of my coaching clients, I’m going to bring some virtual assistants to them. Now we’re building a business. Now I have over 300. How have you built the recipe, the roadmap for effective VA virtual assistant usage?

Barbara Turley: Yes. Okay. So I think one of the things you mentioned there that everyone always looks at, like just getting a VA. one of the things I see as a problem out there is everybody needs help, right? Time is the most, like it’s kind of the age old saying that the time is the most precious asset that we have. And that is the same in our personal life, but also in any business. And it’s not the time, it’s the time of all the key people. It’s the time of all the people that you’re paying for. And the biggest expense in any business is actually their people, in most businesses anyway. I some are running very lean with no people, but with AI, of course, that’s going to change a bit. it is a very expensive, the most expensive time is what you want to be thinking about. And everyone thinks I just get a VA and they want to throw a body at the problem. Now, I say that because getting a VA doesn’t always solve the problem. That’s number one. So for those listening who think I did that, it didn’t work, didn’t work for me, it was a disaster. There’s a whole pile of recruiting issues around that. But lot of the reason that these things don’t work is people aren’t really strategically thinking about the time allocation in any business and saying, rather than looking at all the things a VA can do, why don’t I look at all the things that my key people or me, if it’s only me, or I’ve got 10 key people or whatever, what are all the things that realistically, strategically, they should not be doing? They still need to be done, but they should not be doing. And maybe it’s not enough to warrant hiring a local assistant or someone who maybe wants to grow up in the company and have career advancement that, you know, they’re not interested in doing these lower end types of roles.

And this is where you start to go an offshore strategy just makes so much sense in this scenario. And what you’re starting to think about is, look, there’s been studies done on this that anywhere from 10, 20% to 60% of a knowledge workers day, which is all of us working online or working in the, you know, in the knowledge expertise space. Anywhere from sort of 20 to 50, 60% of people’s days being spent doing process driven, trainable, and therefore delegatable tasks. I’m not saying a VA can do all of those, but a lot of them, the reality is a lot of them are like that. And if you have three of those people in your business, and let’s say on average, they’re earning 100, 150 grand each, it doesn’t take long to do the math to go, if you take 30% off their plate, what have you actually done? Maybe you’re thinking about it this way, going, we’ve hired an offshore virtual assistant.

But if you can take 30% off three people’s plate, what you’ve actually done is created another one of them. And my argument would be, what would another one of them achieve with that time? And that’s the way to think about this. And realistically, I think one of the reasons I was successful at building this business is I looked at my own time that way from day one. everything I did, I processed it up. I looked at it really strategically and was like, could I teach somebody to do this? It’s a bit painful sometimes, and people don’t want to slow down and teach somebody. Could I process map this? Could I train this? Could I get someone doing 80% of this and I might only have to do 10% or 15% oversight? And I did that the whole way along. I had to do it because I was a mom, right, as well. And I just kept doing that over and over and over again. And what ended up happening is I created a business that was a machine, that was full of delegation. And I was only ever really using my time for very strategic things, even strategic thought. I mean, my you know, if I’m the one producing the ideas and the creativity, it’s not the case anymore that it’s just me. But in the early days, it was just me and a few VAs. That’s really how it started.

And I got good at ops because I was good at delegating and figuring out systems and optimizing things was really where I found I was quite successful at those things.

Jason Fishman: You valued your time 18 plus years. Equities trader, asset management sale. You really understood, hey, I am impactful. I’m coaching. I can’t be doing this process. Busy work. I have to be able to reallocate this. You saw the clear path. What about for founders who do not? What about for founders who say, hey, I got 40 hours, hours a week, depending how late I’m staying. Let’s call it 50 hours. I have 50 hours a week. I could probably fill five hours of a virtual session’s time, but I don’t know the exact things to do on top of that. I don’t know how to train them. I don’t know how to manage them because I see the management really where things fall apart with some of the startups that we work with, whether it’s to Accelerators we’re partnered with or our actual clients. I see that ongoing management. And like you said, that experience of I’ve tried this, it didn’t work. But just feeling the schedule, feeling there 40 hours, removing from your 50 hours. Like you said, hey, what if that removes 30% of your time? How do you go about that? How do you really fill a full time calendar? If you can only think of a few things for a virtual assistant to do offhand.

Barbara Turley: OK, so the first step, really, everybody says, I don’t know what I would give them to do. I mean, there’s times, there’s times I think that even now I can think, well, yeah, I don’t know, do I need another one? You know, and then invariably, I start to really examine myself. Like when I have that thought, I mean, I naturally do this now, right, without trying. But every day when I feel like, you know, I’m doing something that that maybe, maybe I can’t get a VA to do yet, but I start to think, I wonder, could I get this into a sort of a structure? That’s my first thought. Is there something I’m doing that I’m starting to create some form of process for? And maybe, for example, you might be testing out LinkedIn, right? So I was testing LinkedIn for a while and somebody said to me, why don’t you get a VA to do that? And I said, yeah, you would imagine I would be getting a VA to help with a lot of this.

But I actually hadn’t formulated my strategy or my process yet around this LinkedIn thing. And I was testing. So getting to the name of this podcast, test, optimize, would say test, optimize, delegate, scale. Right. So I was, I, I’ve been testing a lot of things and I’m now at a point where I’m like, OK, I think I can process this up and I can, like I said, maybe I can’t get a VA to do all of this, but I can get a VA to do some of the heavy lifting and collaborate with me. So that I think people always think it’s all or nothing. You know, they’re like, this has to be delegating all of this to a VA and not talking to them, or I do it myself. How about you think about, well, maybe there’s parts of this process a VA could do and we could collaborate together on something.

So that’s number one, it’s being very clear. Now, I will say that sometimes startups, like when you’re in startup phase, it’s chaotic, as we know. It’s not as nice and neat and structured as we’d like it to be. It depends where you’re at. If a startup is trying to find product to market fit, I find that a difficult time for founders because there’s just so many different chaotic things going on. And I think getting a wingman or a wing woman to help you as the founder, someone who’s a generalist VA who can cut across all sorts of things, even if it’s just making Canva images or getting a blog post up or putting your, you might do some videos and you want them put across social media or on YouTube and optimized a bit. Don’t be doing that stuff yourself. That’s just such a waste of your time. Like get a VA to do those things. Now managing. there’s like, there’s a lot to unpack here, right? So you’re right. Where do people get in the weeds? Let’s say that you’ve got the idea of what you want to do. You’ve got a couple of process maps and you’ve got a few things that you’re like, I can delegate this. First of all, it’s never five hours a week. And if it is, you’re not doing it right. There’s something wrong with the business you’re in. If it’s only five hours a week, there’s lots of things that you can offload. But the managing of the people. I think one of the issues is I see a lot of people sort of abdicating responsibility as opposed to delegating responsibility. And then your expectations of what an assistant is going to do can get way out of whack. Like the management piece, you don’t want to be micromanaging somebody, but you have to actively manage someone. And what I mean by that is checking in with them, figuring out are there training gaps, you know? And if there are training gaps, you’re going to have to deal with it. And managing HR, look, like I’ll talk my own book here because it is very difficult. And that is why, I mean, a lot of companies come to us because they just can’t be bothered with this part of it. And companies like us will do, will do that for you. They will take care of all of this kind of coaching and performance related issues and training and all this kind of thing. But if you’re doing it yourself, you have to invest time in it.

Now you will say, I don’t have time. That will always be the case. You don’t have time. However, it’s return on time invested. Now I come from the financial industry where the compound effect on money of interest on money is something people always fail to grasp of how exponential it is. It is the same with return on time and in that, like, sorry, return on time invested in this sort of thing. So I would say the time you invest today in getting an assistant, getting stuff off your plate, getting things moving. You won’t reap the dividends for a while, but they pay into perpetuity because the amount of it’s every inch of time that you free up is worth so much more than what you’re paying for a VA. So when you save only got five hours, I’m like, at least get them for 20 hours and don’t worry about the money. Just leverage your time and stop worrying about how you’re going to fill someone else’s time. That’s, that’s really what I think people get caught up on that. And you’ll always find stuff for them to do. And invariably you’ll get them full time if the business is actually growing, which, you know, that’s what we’re all here to do is to grow. So I hope that helps to kind of frames that up a bit.

Jason Fishman: Absolutely building out that structure, making it clear, really like the part about active management. I’ve had to explain to team members in the past, the difference from micromanaging and actively managing. And a lot of that in my perspective just comes down to the right processes. And I like pointing these things out because I personally believe virtual assistants are a tremendous value for the business.

Jason Fishman: And I’ve seen excellent quality actually come beyond expectations from virtual systems, but it all comes down to those replicable processes, which I think is an excellent exercise for founders to begin with. I read a book called The E-Myth right after starting DNA, the Entrepreneur and Myth, the difference from being self-employed and being an entrepreneur working in the business versus working on the business. And it talked about franchises, not to say every business should be franchised, but franchisable.

Barbara Turley: Franchiseable. And every business, like people will say to me, but I don’t want to sell my business. I’m like, you should still build it for sale. And like, let’s be honest, right? Even without virtual assistance, if you do this in any business, the asset value of that business is so much higher, like it’s so much higher. And that’s what I’m getting. I’m like operationalize your business because, you know, and get like top, top down, bottom up alignment on your strategy and strategy execution. And the value of that is the asset management of your company goes up a lot.

And you can plug offshore teams in at the bottom, that just rips so much cost out. And the way, really the starting point on making offshore teams really successful is actually tackling the operational structures and the frameworks that are required. And not just for getting offshore teams, but for building any machine of a business that is highly saleable, scalable and saleable.

Jason Fishman: Well said, scalable and saleable. You never know if you want to sell your business, whether it’s service-based and not a great multiplier or, you know, whatever category is, whether it’s down the line. And what I like about franchisable means, hey, you’re taking a model that’s been proven. Startups fail the first year, 90% of franchise owners are succeeding after the first year. And you don’t want a founder that’s very talented, but bottlenecking the process as things grow. You want that checklist, as if it’s a business with thousands of locations. I don’t want to name any actually, I was about to, but a business with thousands of locations and the manager comes in in the morning and follows this checklist.

If you’re able to offload that to virtual assistants, we do it for our business in more detail about that and it works very well for outreach. It gets us on the line and I have my sales people, my biz dev guys on the phone all day versus doing outreach, you know, repetition all day while customizations are still occurring. So this isn’t just digital automation. This is actually having somebody customize. Where do you see these things fail in general? And I’m sure, you know, you’re able to throw out these different ideas and the structure and the clarity and active management, but where do you see businesses fail with virtual assistants and what can listeners do to prevent that or anticipate that incurring and put some different steps ahead of time?

Barbara Turley: The major one is lack of alignment on expectations. So unfortunately, the virtual assistant industry, the word virtual assistant has exploded, particularly in the last decade or 15 years. And it has gone from anyone with a heartbeat who can type to someone who can code an app. And that is not true. Like a virtual assistant, we need to remember what is an assistant.

Now, people like to call anyone in the Philippines an assistant. Now at the Virtual Hub, my philosophy is that we want to get support teams in to take the busy work and to free the time of the key people. That is absolutely what we do. So we’re doing virtual assistants in its purest form, but clients coming in thinking that, I really want a virtual assistant to map out my social media strategy and then execute on that strategy and get me results and report to me and me not actually have to do anything is a lack of alignment of your expectation is too high for the role. And I see this happen a lot. People don’t really know what the role is and their expectation is way off on what this person can do.

Now, if you’re in this situation, you’re like, well, I can’t get, I can only afford an offshore virtual assistant. There’s a great strategy called a high-low strategy. And this is where you get a great virtual assistant to work with you all the time. And then you get an amazing digital marketing consultant or strategist. And you only need that person for a few hours a month to map the thing out and lay out what needs to be done. And then the VA can execute quite a lot of it and maybe a project manager writer or something like that. But that’s a great way to get around this problem of going, but I can’t hire a CMO. I’m like, well, neither could I for years. And I’m still not really at that level. So that’s kind of how I’ve done it. And that’s worked really well over the years for me. And that’s a way to bridge that gap between expectations, misalignment, and making sure that you’re at the right level.

Jason Fishman: I like the high-low so much better than the mid. Not that there’s a constant issue with the mid. I’ve actually seen mid-level team members advance to high level. There’s definitely a talent factor. But meanwhile, you’re getting the top, CMOs, been a CMO for X amount of years. They’re coming up with ideas with a few hours of probably pricey consulting a month. Meanwhile, you’re having someone work on their behalf, even a team of people work on their behalf at virtual assistant type rates and really working hard. I’ve been very impressed by the quality we’ve gotten from virtual assistants of our own over time. So I think mid..

Barbara Turley: Mid, I mean, if I could just share, look, mid, and this is no disrespect to any mid listening. I think you get, if you get a mid level person who’s very good and like really hungry, you can get great results, but they end up having to do a lot of stuff. And the mid people listening, you end up having to do everything, including like HootSuite and load it all up and all stuff that actually a VA should be doing, right? But the risk with a mid level person and a VA is that you might not get the results that you actually need. And I’ve had this experience where they’re like really great people, but they’re not quite at the level to get you the results required yet. Now, a VA won’t get you results, but a VA can do the grunt work. So I like this high-low thing. I think that works quite well for me. Anyway, that’s been a great strategy.

Jason Fishman: What about optimizing people? Optimizing people is such a deep topic and getting into psychology and all different areas of business theory. But I think this is important, but both for the high and the low. What are your thoughts? What are your approaches? I know you have some blueprints and models towards efficiency and overall optimization, basically a big fan of the word, of people.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So the first key thing, I think in any business is that mostly everybody wants to hire A players, right? Number one, of course you do. You want to hire A players and let them, this is the big thing. People want to hire an A player and just let them at it. I’m like, okay, that’s great. Right. A player is probably going to leave though. And with them is going to leave all the IP, right? So you’ve got no sort of sense of what was going on. You might get great results. That can be an issue.

Not saying you shouldn’t hire A players, but if you are going to hire A players or really great B players or any of sort of thing, you’re hiring them because of in here. You’re hiring them for the strategy in their mind, right? The ability of their experience to turn into strategic results for your company, your business. Otherwise, why would you hire them?

The problem is that people end up drowning in work and this is happening all over the world. They are drowning in overwork, in overwhelm, in messy systems, in busy work, in all the stuff that actually not only saps the expense of time, but it saps their expensive energy. So they don’t have as much energetic drive to do the stuff that you really are paying them to do.

So my theory is you want to really think about these people. And that could be the founder. The founder could be drowning like this. And if we can just free the founder up more, what creativity can you unlock there? And what you’re trying to do is delegation is a way to do this. You want to optimize the time and energy of the key people by taking the busy work off them successfully. So you need a framework for that. You need SOPs, you need proper delegation strategy, all of that.

In addition, you want to make sure that you’ve optimized the business framework. So we’re all kind of working digitally now and digital first companies. The office used to be the place where we all showed up to work. We all did our work. We collaborated. We had meetings. We did all these things. These days companies are not built like that because we’re all remote and everyone’s distributed.

And the best way to have, you now have to create a space where everyone shows up to work, everyone collaborates, this sort of thing. And it’s not Slack by the way. It’s something like Asana is what you want. Like we’re a big, big Asana house. You can use Trello. There’s all sorts of ones you can use, but you need an operational framework that actually brings people together. And then you need a top-down bottom-up strategy so that you optimize how the top-down strategy is set using things like objectives and key results, for example, and then what are the projects and work and workflows and everything getting done on the bottom up that is actually driving those results. And you want to make sure that there’s alignment between those two things, between strategy and execution. And you can do that sort of thing with the right setup in platforms like Asana, with the right process structures, et cetera.

And then once you have it set up this way, it’s so easy to beef up the offshore teams because you’re so systemized and so processed up and always work, always delegating. You always want to be delegating more and more and more and thinking, how much more could we be doing if we weren’t doing this bit, but we could offshore this bit? And it’s that thinking. I feel that that’s how you’re optimizing for any business and making sure that you’re optimizing the time and energy of the people who will move the needle in the business using platforms, processes, people. Those are the three P’s that you need to optimize for, essentially.

Jason Fishman: Platforms, processes, people, and really the balance of those. I’ll see organizations with every tech, every platform.

Barbara Turley: Tool bloat, tool bloat.

Jason Fishman: But they’re not that same focus towards the processes of the people, maybe two of three. And I’m just such a big process fan. Do you have process templates or recommendations for platforms where the processes should live and then actively be managed? You know, again, I can’t speak to that enough because I see things work out of the gate with each of those with product processes, platforms, people. And then a few months down the line, it’s been forgotten and just all goes to waste. What are the best places for the processes to be managed actively?

Barbara Turley: So the last thing you want is to build a big process map library for your business, like an operating manual that’s beautiful and then gathers dust in Google Drive, for example. So people always put it in G Drive or in like some sort of drive somewhere. Process maps need to be living, breathing, dynamic things. My view is that you want to, I mean, I’m a big Asana user. I’ve built the entire company on Asana, but basically when we have processes, they live inside Asana, inside the task where the checklists and the templates are.

So that when we change things, we’re not going back to try to change a document. They actually live and breathe inside the description areas. We might have Loom videos, might have things there. I like them to live and breathe inside there. I don’t really believe in using other tools. I think there’s too many tools in general.

I’m a simplicity with tools person. I think you need a great CRM marketing automation tool. You need a central hub. I call Asana like the central hub. And you can do this with Trello or whatever. It doesn’t matter about the tool. It’s the central one where everyone shows up to work and everyone does their work and collaborates and reports on work dashboards, et cetera, can be built in there. And the other tools you want as few as possible coming in and feeding up into the central platform so that you have this architecture.

And then of course rules around communication. So for example, Slack Asana is a brilliant problem. What do you put in Slack and what do you put in Asana? You need a policy around this, a communication policy. So in our company, Slack is for chat, Asana is for instructions. You can chat about it, but when you agree the instruction or you’ve chatted, we now need to put that instruction into the task where the work is happening in Asana. And it’s things like that that people skip over, all these nuances of building a machine, really.

And making sure that there’s very few places to hide in that sort of a scenario. You can very easily see if anyone’s not doing the work, to be honest. I mean, I know this because I run a company. I lived in Australia. Now I live in Europe. I had two kids with people all over the Philippines. And people have often said to me, they say, how do you always know what’s going on? I’m like, I could be up the mountain skiing where I live here and I can on my phone, I can see everything because it’s built that way. I have, you know, I can look down or I can drill down into something really quickly.

And that’s 300 people. So I know it’s possible to do this.

Jason Fishman: Talk about efficiency.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I love this stuff. Absolutely love this stuff. Yeah.

Jason Fishman: I’m a big snowboarder, I get a lot of days in a year, but being able to see the business running like clockwork and knowing where your time’s the most valuable. So maybe get off the hill and do a conference call or whatever it may be, but still moving things forward. And we use Monday.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I meant to mention Monday, great platform too.

Jason Fishman: For any of the platforms and I say this to groups, I’m less concerned on the exact tool and more about how the tool’s being used and then how it’s being managed on an ongoing basis. I’ve been with organizations that have invested heavy funds into CRM development, I’ve watched reps start to miss a few steps on the standard operating process and then within a few months it’s become worthless.

Barbara Turley: It’s a mess. It’s become a mess. And I mean, I think the other point to say here, though, is just getting the tool, Monday, Asana, whatever, does not make the business. It’s actually the processes and the way that we do things in this company. And people often go, well, I don’t want to tell my people how to do their job. I’m like, no, no, no. But we’ve all got to have a culture here. Like how do we do it in this company? how we all have to be singing from the same hymn sheet so that we’re all rowing the boat in the one direction and not all over the place. And I think founders in particular underestimate that need for structure. Flexibility within structure is fine, but you need to have structure around your communication styles, your communication rhythms and how we do this, especially when you’re getting into async communication and distributed teams, which is cross time zones and things like that. You actually need structure. And people get less overwhelmed in structure then. They know how to play the game.

Jason Fishman: And the team can participate in the development of that structure. We hold in-person summits to be able to do that even for out of state, let alone overseas team members, but definitely out of state. The replicatable factor of the processes is what stands out to me. How do you go from one account manager to three? How do you go from five media buyers to 10 for my business? How do you effectively grow while creating the same experience for every customer, for every client? I want them to feel like they’re speaking with a brand, with individuals pulling the brand, but that same consistent experience. And again, I could name 100 of the top businesses in the world that create that with their model, strive to at least take elements for early stage companies as well. And I find it makes all the difference. And you can force, I don’t want to say force, but you can instill that algorithm into team members with those processes in Asana or Monday or similar technology. You can have the check boxes just by having the process set up with something that needs to be completed at each stage. We invite clients to those Monday boards. They’re interacting with us there. And again, I’m all about that consistent experience. So being able to plug offshore virtual systems into that seems like a great way to scale a business.

Barbara Turley: Well, you know, I think as well, I think also A players and great people like to join. Well, you’ll well, look, if you use it in your recruitment strategy, it can help you to preselect, can help you to help people to deselect themselves who are not going to, who don’t want to play the game that you’re playing. People need to understand the game they’re joining as a culture. Like, you know, and I think, you know, like no race car driver wants to get into a crap car, you know, like the best driver in the world wants to drive a Ferrari. You know what I mean? So I just think you’ve got to build the Ferrari so that the A players want to drive it. And that’s really, I think people thrive in those environments better. And it releases their energy because they’re not tied up with messy processes and systems that don’t work and half-baked projects that are all over the place. That just saps people’s energy.

Jason Fishman: I think the metaphorical Ferrari can be even more valuable than a physical one as a signing bonus to an A player and letting them know, you’re going to have this whole team on top of this whole structure that’s already been validated, already working underneath you. This is, we’ve grown the business. You’re going to be able to remove a lot of your time from busy work type stuff on a day to day basis.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, totally agree with that.

Jason Fishman: And I want to ask for the title of the show for some recommendations for listeners in terms of what they can test. I know you’ve made tests to be able to find new models to build everything in terms of where you’re at today. What could they test out towards their own model, whether it’s with a virtual assistant or towards overall efficiency?

Barbara Turley: Yes, that’s a good question. So what I was going to say in terms of testing, in terms of growth, like this is nothing to do with VA or operational efficiency. But what I have found to be very successful over the years on both the employee side, when you’ve got employees and you’ve got customers and stakeholders and whatever, the most powerful thing that has worked for me in this company in growing it is actually asking the people. Right. So sometimes I’m like, well, how would I know? We’ll just ask the employees. Right. So we actually actively ask people and the clients. And we start to go like when we get a complaint, which thankfully we don’t get many complaints anymore, which I’m very proud of. And I know why is because every single time we got a complaint in the past, especially in the early years where we got smashed with complaints because we were learning. I used to say to the team, how do we make, how do we reverse engineer this entire process such that this complaint never happens again?

And we did that with every single complaint until we got no complaints. Like, you know, so testing, asking, same on the employee side, every time something stuffed up, we got a mess. We’d say, what, what, what should we do to fix this in your opinion? So those sorts of things, that’s been very powerful for me in the growth of this company. I have to say one of the most powerful things that we’ve done. And that kind of creates a flywheel of itself.

But in terms of, you know, using VAs, for example, or offshore team, you know, the thing I would remind everyone about is just everyone gets fixated. Like I said at the beginning, everyone gets fixated on what the VA is going to do. I’m like, you’ve got to get fixated on what you’re going to do. Like what are you currently doing that you could, that you really could free you up or what are you not yet doing that you could do if you had more time? And thinking about it that way will help you to be less. And, you know, that return on time invested today, what’s that going to look like in 12 months time? You know, I think that’s very powerful and to remember that, the dividends it pays later is enormous, you know?

Jason Fishman: Absolutely. And it’s not always seen without full planning and projections associated with it. What about optimizations? I know this is word we’ve said a lot, but what do you do when things are not working is how I like to phrase it. Because I see a lot of founders that, like you said, they’ve bought this big software stack and nearly having it is not producing the result they thought it would. Or marketing’s not working right out of the gate. Or maybe I’m sure you’ve seen it, maybe it was years past, virtual assistants are brought on and it’s not saving time. The work’s not fully usable, if you will. What are the best approaches towards optimization in your experience?

Barbara Turley: Okay, so I’ve had a lot of experience over the years with this and this could be like a four hour episode in itself. There’s a lot to unpack there. So I’m just trying to think of the best angle. So for me, what has started to work a lot in the last few years is I did switch to using OKRs a few years ago. And I was like, yeah, let’s try, I’ll do this OKR thing, objectives and key results. And we rolled that out quite successfully. I was very deep into it. Again, I did it myself until such time as I was able to delegate that. And it has been an unbelievable game changer for me. It has reduced the amount of meetings I have to have by 60%. I just don’t have to have as many meetings. And the reason that it did that is because we’re able to go, well, here’s the objectives and key results the company is trying to achieve. Here’s the departments and what they would need to do in order to achieve those results. And then here’s all the projects that everyone’s working on that are driving those results. And we very quickly go, well, why are we doing that project over there? That’s not actually why are we doing that thing? And it’s really, really digging all the time to ask is all the work that’s getting done actually driving the result that we want or not?

Now, this is so that’s the first step is that’s the fastest way to get to that answer. Now, when it’s not driving the result, that is so frustrating. Like I’ve been there many, many, many times and I have had sleepless nights and I know everyone knows how this feels. And when it’s not working, everyone’s going to say pull the pin quickly. I will put my hand in heart and say, I’m terrible at that. I drag things on for too long. I believe that it’s still going to work. And in the end, I end up getting very frustrated and pulling the pin too late.

So first of all, I would say it’s striking a balance of when to pull the pin, not too early that you haven’t given it enough of a crack. So how do you do that? Well, I think one of the ways people pull the pin on things is they immediately fired the person and they blame the person, right? That’s a classic. And that could be a CMO or a VA. It doesn’t actually matter. And it’s probably better to first dig into the work, dig into the strategy, dig into, you know, things like the processes, where we’re trying to find where the friction points really are. And then what you’re trying to figure out from that, is this a people problem or is this a system problem, right? That’s question one.

When you can answer that question and let’s say you’ve decided this is a people problem and you go, this person can’t do this. Then you’ve got to work out, now this is a HR thing. Then you’ve got to decide, is this a skill issue or a will issue? Now, push the skill issue aside for a second. If it’s a will issue, get rid of the person. Like they’re just not willing to do the work, right? They’re not willing to play on this team. So that’s, you’re getting into a HR case there where you’re like, this person is not a fit.

If it’s a skill issue, you’ve got to break that down and go, is this trainable for this person or not? And if it is trainable, you might want to do some more training and kind of dig into the process a bit. This is kind of more with VAs now you would do this. If it’s not trainable for that person, or it’s maybe the expectation was too much for that person’s role, be it mid or VA or whatever, then you want to start to figure out, is this a person whose skills are better fit somewhere else in this company? Could we free up time somewhere else or is there anything else we can do or do we need a new person?

So it’s kind of going through this process of figuring out, like, don’t just shoot the person straight away, because what happens if you get rid of the person, bring a new one in and the same problem happens again? And actually you find out after four people that the problem is you or the system, because it can be a mindset issue too with the founder, you know. So it’s being intellectually honest, I guess, with yourself and with the machine. And it’s painful, but it’s worth doing it. It’s very painful.

Jason Fishman: It can be confronting, but managing to point of effectiveness. That’s what optimization is all about and really categorizing, turning where it be with marketing. I’ll look at audience messaging funnel. I try to be very systematic, not just say, hey, the channel didn’t work, you know.

Barbara Turley: Yes, that’s exactly what you’re checking the system to go like, is there a little crack that we haven’t, like maybe we have it 99% but that one crack is ruining the whole thing. You’ve got to be curious and dig about these things, you know.

Jason Fishman: Absolutely, absolutely. You could get rid of the wrong person, trying to make a quick fix by doing that, whether it’s high or low. And I know, I just learned in the past few years, since 2020, since COVID, that the value of good team members, high, low, wherever they fit. And like you said, maybe it’s just finding another spot for them in the organization. But if the process needs to be fixed, you’re still gonna have that problem getting rid of the person. So yeah. And what about scale? What about once you have this to a good point, it’s working, it’s delivering, and now you need to go from one to two and two to five and five to 10 virtual assistants. What are the best models towards more market share or more business, more revenue, more team members in a good best practices type of?

Barbara Turley: Okay, so with VAs first, let me unpack that one. When you go from one to two, like one to two is okay. Sort of two to five can be okay, but then you’re starting to manage a team of them. Kind of need to create a bit of a, then you need to create a team, right? So it’s probably a good idea to figure out like, is one of them going to be the leader of this team? So you need to start thinking about who’s going to lead this team. Cause all of a sudden you’ve got five of them reporting to you and they’re all going to come to you. They’re not going to go to each other, unless you set the process, you set the tone of how this is going to work.

Now you can’t just pick your best VA, Mary, and say, Mary is now the leader. Don’t do that, right? Even if you know that Mary is going to be the leader, you want to open that opportunity up to all of them and almost do like a, please apply, right? And you can still put Mary in, but you have to allow everyone to raise their hand of who would like to opt in for the job and sort of do a little mini process around that. And the reason you want to do that is not to make everyone feel good about themselves, it’s to make sure that when Mary does go in, she has the most success in the team of leading them. The followers need to feel like the leader was, you know, won the race and that there was a race.

So when you move up to five, six, seven, 10 VAs, I mean, you don’t want all of them coming to you. You’re going to have to centralize that somehow. And that could be under departments though. It may not be all of them together. It could be departments, but if they’re all in the one thing, maybe put a team leader in place to manage some stuff for you.

I think I was going to say though, in terms of a business, I think my experience has been there’s this initial stage of marketing. Like in the early stages of any business, it’s all about marketing and sales. Like you’ve got to find product market fit and you’ve got to figure out is this thing we’re selling actually going to sell, right?

And then once you get over that and you think like, my God, we’ve got something that people want to buy, great, we’ve seen that people want to buy it over and over again, and we can sell this thing. That is the point at which usually what people do is they go headlong into marketing and sales and they ramp that thing right up. And they’ve got a massive leaky bucket called operations, right?

So my theory is you want to get product market fit, right? Startup, right? And then you’ve got to very quickly operationalize and make sure that you’ve got a good solid foundation of a platform from which you can then scale up marketing and sales and drive massive volume through the pipes, essentially. And I think people skip that step too easily. Now, I know you might think like you’d sort of think, well, we need to get after this thing quickly. But there is that moment where you can do them both at the same time, but you kind of need to take the pain there in that crevice. And I think that’s the reason a lot of businesses fail after year five, because they might get that initial bit right. And then the crevice between startup and growth is so deep and so sharp that when they fall into it, they can’t get out of it. And they blow the entire thing up.

I’ve seen that happen so many times. And it happens to the best marketers because they just go headlong after marketing. And they can’t understand why there’s no money left. And you’re like, well, there’s no profit because there’s a leaky bucket called ops. So, you know, people’s time optimizing platforms, process people offshore teams, making sure it’s lean. The most expensive thing in the company is people’s time and energy that’s being used for the right things, et cetera, et cetera. So that would be my company-wide sort of view.

Jason Fishman: Those are excellent tips towards scaling. I am familiar with those crevices.

Barbara Turley: We all are. We all are.

Jason Fishman: I know the leaky buckets with operations and also not to finger point and marketing can blame operations, operations can blame marketing as much as like you said evaluating the processes and building for growth. Barbara, these are amazing recommendations. I’m sure listeners are taking notes. I know I am. As we begin to wrap the discussion, I want to ask any final thoughts, final comments to leave listeners with and what is the best way to get in contact with you, to get in contact with The Virtual Hub for more information?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So the thing I would leave listeners with is kind of what I just said and, you know, making sure that you sort of take the pain around ops and don’t let it blindside you. It is a really important piece to scale when you’re getting into that growth phase and scaling a company, so that’s what, you know, offshore teams make up a big part of that from a cost perspective and things like that. If you want to hear more about what I’m talking about, I’ve been talking a lot on LinkedIn, as you know, because I’ve been testing out my LinkedIn.

So I’m on LinkedIn quite a lot, just talking about these issues and talking more about what I’ve talked about today. So you can find me, Barbara Turley over there, DM me if you want, follow me. And if you think you’re ready to come and chat with us about getting a virtual assistant, hop on over to thevirtualhub.com and book a call with one of our team. We’ve got people all over the world that are ready to chat to you. And the good thing is we’re not about just getting more and more people in. We really want to work with clients that are ready, and that we feel we can help. So if we can’t help you or if you need something else, we’re very good at telling you that this isn’t the strategy for you. But most companies we can help to be totally honest. So yeah, jump on over there and book a call and come and chat.

Jason Fishman: Well, I would definitely take up that invitation from Barbara, getting more information, see if it’s right for organization, finding the right growth plan. I’ve heard different approaches towards virtual assistants. Barbara, you’ve been a wealth of knowledge on how to correctly use offshore team members as well as just overall models for its efficiency. So I want to thank you so much for putting this in your schedule and podcasting today.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jason Fishman: I want to thank everybody for tuning in. We will see you next time.

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