February 18, 2016

How Dan Norris, Co Founder of WP Curve is Using Virtual Teams To Build A Million Dollar Business

How Dan Norris, Co-Founder of WP Curve, is Using Virtual Teams To Build A Million Dollar Business

Want the transcript? Download it here.

 

In this episode, we had the pleasure of interviewing the inspiring Dan Norris, serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder of WP Curve, on how he is building a million dollar business using virtual teams.

 

This episode is jam-packed full of great insights and tips from Dan on how to engage your virtual teams for maximum success. Some of the things he touched on are:

 

  • Why doing what you love and delegating the rest is the wrong approach if you are a true entrepreneur building a scalable business.
  • Why ‘working with people’ and ‘managing people’ are two totally different skillsets.
  • Why it is crucial to have your expectations clearly laid out and documented.
  • How to build processes for everything so every angle of your business is systemised and your virtual team can manage it effectively.
  • How to build flexibility within a structure that works for your virtual team.

 

Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

 

Tools & resources mentioned in this episode:

 

Trello

Slack

Zapier

Google Docs

How To Use Trello and Zapier by Dan

 

In this episode:

02:13 – Where it all started

08:06 – Some of the early challenges

10:18 – Dealing with different work ethics

13:25 – The importance of systems, tools and processes

13:53 – Dan’s ‘must-have’ tools

17:04 – Creating processes is NOT boring

18:35 – Train your people to use your systems, your way

21:47 – Managing your staff

23:15 – Consider the costs of growing your business

24:13 – Your biggest mistake could be saying ‘Yes’

27:29 – You should be delegating everything

29:12 – Wrapping things up

 

Barbara: Hey everyone welcome to the show! And as always, I’m joined by my fabulous co-host, Matt Malouf. Matt, how’s it going?

 

Matt: I’m going well Barbara! How are you?

 

Barbara: I’m great, thanks! Good week?

 

Matt: It has been an amazing week and I’m really looking forward to today’s episode.

 

Barbara: Yeah, me too! I mean I’m super excited because someone I’ve been following from quite a long time, has been actually an inspiration to me in building Virtual Angel Hub and how to manage virtual teams, which is actually not as easy as people think, is our guest on the show today and that is Dan Norris, who is co-founder of WPCurve. And not only is Dan a very passionate entrepreneur with a huge obsession of content marketing and everything in digital, he’s also running a big virtual team and with 30 people at the moment in Philippines and a co-founder who lives in the US, so truly global virtual teams. Dan welcome to the show, we’re really excited to get chatting with you!

 

Dan: Well I’m excited too, thank you for having me!

 

Barbara: Yeah, it’s good! So, just to kick off, do you want to give us quick background into how you ended up with such a big team of virtual staff? Where did it all start for you?

 

Where it all started

 

Dan: Right, so two years ago I just sent an email to my list and asked them if they wanted ongoing WordPress support and I made the offer of unlimited small fixes each month for $70 a month and at the time I had one developer in the Philippines, Andrew, who was a really, really good developer and he’d worked on a lot of stuff with me and I really didn’t want to lose him. And actually the other thing I said was 24/7 too, so I had small jobs 24/7 and I only have one guy in the Philippines which is the same time zone as me and I had a bunch of people say yes to it and so I was like, doing it on my phone at night time. So I knew straightaway I was going to have to hire people. What ended up happening was I found a co-founder in the US to manage that side of the world, which made things a lot easier. And I’m also not a WordPress developer, so I was always going to hire people – it never would have worked without doing that, so that was probably a good position to be in. But since then I think we had 10 people sign up in the first week and we’ve had about that many every week since, in the 2 years since, and we’re up to, I don’t know, 800 or 900 hundred customers now and I think 40 people in 7 countries.

 

Barbara: That’s fantastic, yeah! Absolutely amazing! And when you started out, did you, I mean obviously this kind of came out of nowhere for you then – you sent an email to your list, there was demand and before you know it, you’re in business. Sounds a bit like that!

 

Dan: Yeah, but I had been in business for 9 years prior to that.

 

Barbara: I mean in this business!

 

Dan: Yeah, I mean my first book, ‘The 7 Day Startup’ was about the story of how I started WPCurve and how to give people a framework to sort of do the same thing because I learned that it was much more useful to launch something much quickly than it was to think about something for months and months and debate it before you actually learn what was going to happen after you launch. And a lot of people thought that it was going to be a bad idea to do the unlimited and how was it going to work 24/7, all those sort of things. But once I launched I figured those problems were relatively easy to solve and so it happened quite quickly. But the back story is it took me 7 years before that I was an entrepreneur who failed every single year before that.

 

Barbara: Oh okay! And what about the 24/7 thing, I mean, did you know how you were going to fulfill on that before you offered it?

 

Dan: Yeah, I knew I was going to go to bed with a live chat app next to my head, for as long as it took to find someone, somewhere overseas where I could afford to hire someone to manage that side of the world but as it turned out I met Alex who became a co-founder and managed that side of the world. So my job was a lot easier although I also had to give away a big chunk, like half of the company. But yeah, it worked out well because I’d really, I was just like, I’m just going to launch this thing. I was going to have to get a job, I was starting to look for a job, I was desperate so I really had no idea how any of it was going to work. But as it turned out most of the problems we had just kind of solved themselves or we figured out ways to solve them. And finding my co-founder in the US was definitely not something I planned but it was a big bonus at the time.

 

Barbara: How did you find him?

 

Dan: He found me through my blog, my content.

 

Barbara: Was he a WordPress guy? Was he a developer or was he just an entrepreneur?

 

Dan: Nope, he was just sort of someone who manages teams. He’s probably useful for you to talk to because he does more of the hands-on kind of managing the performance of the team kind of stuff, I don’t do a whole of that. I just got pretty good at hiring people, finding people and kind of threw them in the deep end and if they didn’t work, replace them! But, it’s not quite as simple as that, but he’s more hands-on and I’m more systems. I’m a glorified developer, I know how to code pretty badly and I can solve problems if I really have to but he’s not technical at all.

 

Barbara: What I’m interested to know, before we’re going to move in to some key tips from you in a second, but I’m really keen to know, you were a developer, you knew a bit of developing, you were an entrepreneur. But in terms of managing people, had you ever done that before?

 

Dan: I do have a HR degree and I started out, well it’s pretty much useless really, I don’t know if it taught me really anything about managing people. But I worked for the Government, I had couple of people working for me there. Andrew and the remote team of 3 or 4 people with my agency before that and I had a small team of local people, 3 or 4 people in my office. So yeah, I’d managed people before, I mean I don’t think I’m particularly good at it and it’s not something I really love doing, I like working with people but I like working with people who don’t need to be managed. I think Alex is someone who likes managing people, for me I just like getting shit done and it’s probably good that we have a balance of having Alex there who can do more touchy feely stuff and I can just sort of focus on the systems and getting the work done.

 

Barbara: Yeah right, okay and what about, did you bring Alex in, was he in pretty early in the piece or are there any issues like the early days – how big were the issues before you had him involved in managing people?

 

Dan: No, he was very early! I can’t remember how early but it was I think you know I’d launched it and written a blog post about the fact that this thing had sort of started to take off and I’d started to kind of tell that story about my last business failing and this one launching quickly and doing monthly report so I was getting a lot of attention and traction with that content and he was reading that and it was a matter of months I think after I launched, not even months maybe 5 or 6 weeks, I can’t exactly remember.

 

Barbara: Sorry Matt I have totally taken over the conversation.

 

Matt: Totally okay!

 

Barbara: I’m sure you’ve got a ton of questions for Dan too?!

 

Matt: I do! Dan, what I’d love for our listeners to understand is, what are some of the challenges that you experienced in the early days with growing a virtual team?

 

Some of the early challenges

 

Dan: I mean there were a lot of challenges but no really insurmountable challenges early on, you know, it was pretty easy. We found it quite easy to find people. I’ve got a process up on my site where we document exactly what we do, I don’t how if you’ve seen that, but if you Google ‘WPCurve hiring developers’ then I had this process locked down, it was pretty solid for finding developers so it wasn’t hard for me to find people. I had a couple of good guys already and they were really good at referring other people to us and then we’d have a trial process where we’d pay people for a trial and we’d sort of weed out the ones that didn’t know what they were doing and get the ones that were good. All that’s public up on our site, that post and the process we use. So all of that I found pretty straight forward. The issues, like the challenges that had been the hard ones to solve came later, when we just had lots of clients and lots of people. Like 5 or 10 people, you know, we didn’t really need a team leader, we were just kind of chatting up in conditionally on Skype and eventually we moved to Slack, probably I don’t know, very early on when slack came out, probably a year and a half ago maybe and that helped things a lot. But eventually we got to the size where we needed team leaders so Alex had to employ someone in that role. We still don’t have one in Australia where the biggest team is, so that’s an ongoing issue and the team performance, you know, we’ve had some people really not perform very well. Some people act fraudulently and have to be removed. We’ve had those kind of issues happen since we started getting a lot bigger but for the first year or so I think we were probably only up to 10 people and all that was pretty manageable.

 

Barbara: Did you have, Dan, any because one of the issues and challenges that people, this is you know all over the internet on chatrooms and entrepreneurs talking about this issue, particularly with Filipino virtual teams, is the constant drama, you know the lack of attention to detail, the constant sort of personal issues that come in that impact work and stuff like that so you know parents are getting sick, going to hospital, everyone seems to be getting rushed to the hospital all the time. Like I have heard that millions of times but how did you deal with that sort of thing? I’m sure you were getting the same issues because this is something quite common.

 

Dealing with different work ethics

 

Dan: Yeah I mean, there’s a few ways we deal with them. One is we have pretty high expectations. We have a trial process where people have to turn up on time, they have to do certain work and then they have to do it well and if they don’t do that, they will not get a second chance on that, so that weeds out a lot of people. We expect people for the most part to be online during normal work hours, to be live chatting with us via Slack when we need them, to be communicating with the rest of the team, if they don’t do that, if they kind of go disappearing, MIA all the time which has happened to some staff, then they’re not suitable for us. Like that’s the way I manage people, I need them there to chat with me when I need them. So if they don’t do that then the alarm bells are ringing and we sort of exit them eventually, I think, but at the same time we’re flexible, so I mean we have our best guys you know like Andrew’s just had something that he needs to be away from work for and you know that’s fine, that’s all completely normal and accepted and we give them benefits that they don’t get elsewhere and we’re flexible with you know with people obviously got family troubles or blackouts. You know we’ve got a bit of flexibility around that and we’ve also got processes for that, blackouts or brownouts, we have the capacity to give people back up free 3G dongles and we let them work from cafes, or we pay for their co-working or in some cases we’ve bought them generators, like Andrew’s got a generator because he’s a really important employee and he’s got a backup 3G, we pay for all of that. So there’s solutions to all these problems, I think, the team stuff got a lot trickier as we got up to sort of 30, 40 people and we had to build systems around, like, how good are these team members, how quickly are they doing the jobs, how do we actually measure how good they are, like is it from customer satisfaction, or the amount of the jobs they do or the amount of jobs they refer to other developers because they can’t do. These are all things that are ongoing challenges for us, that we’ve had to build our own systems to solve. So they’re not all solved yet but they are all solvable. The other part of it is, if you’re hiring people for a 5th or a 10th of what you’re paying someone in Australia or in the US then there’s a certain amount of flexibility you can have just from a pure financial basis where, you know, even if they do have a lot of public holidays or they do have a bit of time off work, it’s still financially more sensible as long as they’re not completely taking the piss! It’s a lot more sensible to hire those people than it is to hire someone locally. So if they’re doing the equivalent job and then with the equivalent attitudes, I think the combination of all those different things is probably how we manage it.

 

Barbara: And then just, you know, again something that a lot of I’m definitely my clients and a lot of the listeners will actually be suffering from is, an inability to accept, in some instances, that systems and tools are sort of vitally important to making this work. So I’m really interested to hear first of all your thoughts on systems, tools, processes and setting them up properly and maybe what are the sort of ones that you just couldn’t do without?

 

The importance of systems, tools and processes

 

Dan: Well I mean if they’re thinking that then they’re either not an entrepreneur and they should go back to work or they’re not an entrepreneur yet and they should just learn to listen and do some research. So there’s not really any other scenario that I can think of you where you don’t think systems and processes and tools are important but you do want to run your own business or run your own team. There’s not really any room for any flexibility around that.

 

Dan’s ‘must-have’ tools

 

So what tools do we have? I’m pretty good at writing processes, I like doing it because I have been working with Filipinos for a long time and some of them are amazing. I mean they’re like any staff over here, some staff are amazing, some just need so much hand holding and you add in the language barrier on top of that and also a little bit of cultural differences about work ethic and the high quality attention to detail, you need to get really, really good at writing processes. So, my main go-to for this kind of thing is a combination between Google Docs, Trello and Zapia and so what I’ll do is, as an example, I’ve got a virtual assistant that manages my Instagram account. On Monday I’ll have an automated job from Zapia that creates a task in Trello, assigns him the task and the task is ‘Generate 50 ideas for the week for posting on Instagram’ and that task will link to a Google Doc where I’ve written out all the information in that Google Doc about what he has to do to generate the ideas and every time he asks me a question, I don’t answer it directly, I go into the Google Doc, update the Google Doc and ask him to read the Google Doc again and by the time he asks, or every time he makes a mistakes, same thing. So between that and the constant communication with Slack – Slack is the other absolutely crucial tool we use.

 

Barbara: Just for those people who don’t know what Slack is or are not familiar yet – Slack is a cloud chat system that you can use with your teams. Would that be right?

 

Dan: Yeah and it’s a lot more than that! You know we have, I don’t want to explain it just go and use it! If you’re using Skype to chat to your team, don’t use that. Get them on Slack – you can add docs in there, you can add files in there, you can – if you’re bored, you can put a word in and a random automated gif will pop up which could be funny or really rude, depending on which setting you have. It’s really cool, you can have channels, you can have groups, you can have automation in there so like when a customer’s signs up with us, it goes into a channel in Slack so every day we can just get a really simple list of, you know, who signed up the day before. So I mean, we can’t live without Slack, so that’s a huge one. So Zapia does the automation, Trello is the task list, Google Docs is for the process, where you can both manage docs at the same time. So in some refusing task on your computer, I’d swap it to Trello, if you’re using any kind of manual work to create tasks, swap it to Zapia, if you’re using Skype, swap to Slack, if you’re using words, swap to Google Docs.

 

Barbara: So what I’m hearing here two really loud messages here. The tools that are out there are you absolutely have to get onboard with them if you’re running virtual teams, and number two is if you know systems and processes are not your thing then probably you’re not going to succeed.

 

WP Curve

Dan: I already told you exactly how to do it and exactly what tools to use and all those tools are free so there’s no excuses!

 

Barbara: Yeah absolutely! There are so many people trying to get away, Matt I know you see this as well, people want to get away from creating processes because it is boring. I mean I like it but,

 

Creating processes is NOT boring

 

Dan: It’s not boring, what’s boring is doing the same thing twice. There’s nothing more boring that doing the same job twice, writing a process to prevent yourself from doing the same job twice is the opposite of boring.

 

Matt: Smart, it’s extremely smart! I’m so glad you said that Dan because certainly I know it’s one of the things I’m a big believer in and teach. Just a follow on from that, how much time do you spend training your teams to use the systems? Does it take long to get a new staff member up and running in the systems?

 

WP Curve

Dan: No! Sorry I just got a bit sidetrack, I just remembered I’ve got a blog post on this exact topic and I’ll paste it in the chat here, you guys if you want to link it up in the notes or whatever you can do that or maybe you’ve got content on it. But it just describes exactly how you use Zapia or Trello to automate tasks.

 

So, our systems are very simple, we’ve got our own help desk system. I mean, actually WPCurve has a guide to using Slack, I can give you the link to that as well, that’s on our blog. But Slack is so easy to use, I mean, unless you haven’t used software before it’s not going to, once you actually set it up it’s not that difficult for your team to figure how to use it. Here’s the guide to using Slack so one thing about me every time we talk about anything, I’ve got a blog post for it so, I should have warned you about that!

 

Matt: So not so much about the actual software but actually I understand doing it the way that you want it done. Because the software they can learn, but I’m sure the systems around that, that’s specific to your company?

 

Train your people to use your systems, your way

 

Dan: Yeah so we have a combination of things. We teach them the software, we teach them our software which is specific to our company, we have a Google Doc which tells them how to use all that stuff and we associate a team member with them, team leader with them on their first day so that they can talk to someone about that and get up to speed. So, all of that stuff is done that way. In terms of expectations we have again mainly Google Docs, I think we’re playing around with the idea of having a Wiki or something at the moment but to me just having everything in Google is a really big benefit, like another piece of software would have to be really good to use instead but we have a doc that says, actually we have a bunch of docs, a bunch of docs that they have to read as the first thing they do on day one. One of them is like, expectations and you know what being a developer at WPCurve is all about and then the details of how we manage clients, how we do jobs, the procedures for doing specific types of jobs and how to use the system, all of that stuff. They don’t work on client jobs straightaway and they don’t work on difficult jobs for a couple of days or weeks and once they’ve done a few simple jobs like Slack reviews and once they are up to speed, they sort of pass through that onboarding process and become a proper team member. And then eventually they might become a senior developer if they achieve certain targets and get paid more and be allocated more exciting projects and sites that are more critical customers and more high-level customers.

 

Matt: Fantastic! I mean I think that, thank you for such a detailed summary because I think I love the whole having the induction phase and also escalating them as their experience or as they earn the ability to have more interesting work and the like, which I’m sure gives them something to strive for.

 

Dan: Yeah I mean at the end of the day like we don’t know these people when they’re signing up. They need to prove themselves. The two-hour trial is a good start and that proves themselves enough to be given a chance at a position but to give them access to client sites and to let them code on someone’s website not just review it, then they need to prove themselves that they know what they’re doing and that they’ve got the right standards and they’re available and all those things before they got that opportunity.

 

Barbara: Yeah and trustworthy as well, I suppose?

 

Dan: Well, we’ve got systems for that too like they don’t get full access. We’ve built our own system where if they’re working on one client’s website, they’ll get access to that one website but they won’t o get access to all websites. I build a technology around that we needed to build to make sure we’ve got the security in there.

 

Barbara: So just to sort of wrap things up because I think there’s a lot of really great tips there. What, if we were to sort of wrap this up into, what are your top, I guess, your top 3 tips in summary for getting success with virtual teams now that you’ve been through this whole process yourself.

 

Dan: Yeah well we really haven’t talked about the management of …which is I mean a whole other episode. Maybe I will get Alex back, if you can convince him to be in the podcast which is hard work.

 

Barbara: I think you could give us your insight quickly now, I mean managing I think is one of the hardest parts.

 

Managing your staff

 

Dan: Yeah I mean processes is the answer really, we’ve got processes for absolutely everything now. You know, if a staff member isn’t performing, we got systems to use to document that. We’ve got a process, you know, with communication that we use to make sure that they’re up to speed. If they go below certain quality scores their stuff gets reviewed and we’ve got a process for that. If its looking like they’re not going to work out and we need to get rid of them, then we’ve got a process for that. We’ve got every week, we have an automated process for our admin teams and look at the quality score and their response time and go into the management channel in Slack and fill us all in on what’s going on. So between having a process, know that you need a process, having team leaders to actually be the first port of call for the staff to talk to rather than the co-founders, otherwise we’d never get any work done. And having the systems, all of which are free virtually, is more or less how we go about solving most of these problems.

 

Barbara: Yeah so I guess like what I’m hearing here is top 3 tips is obviously processes to within an inch of your life because you need a process for everything, you really, really do in depth processes. Use the tools, they are out there. And then, in terms of management, it’s an ongoing process there as well so it’s not just like get someone in, train them up and off they go. It actually never stops really, does it?!

 

Consider the costs of growing your business

 

Dan: Yeah and you need to factor these costs in as well. I mean if you’re a new business, and I don’t know what your audience is like, but one thing I have in my first book is just this idea of ‘What does your business look like at a certain scale?’ And if you look at your business, with say 200 monthly customers, how much is it going to cost to support all those customers and at that point, do you need team leaders to manage your team? How much do those team leaders cost you? Do those team leaders need to be US based or Australian based, in which case they’re going to cost you five times as much? Factor all those costs in because this could end up a lot more expensive than you originally thought, so that’s important if people in your audience are new businesses.

 

Barbara: Yeah some of them are, actually Matt, this is something that you’re a big on. Actually this is an exercise Matt got me to do, which was thinking about well what does this company look like in 2 years’ time and therefore what does the org chart look like and how do we move towards that, rather than this constant like ‘Oh, I need another person, Oh I need another person’. It’s thinking ahead!

 

Your biggest mistake could be saying ‘Yes’

 

Dan: One thing about that is the biggest mistake people make is they say ‘yes’ to too much, they do too many things. So in our case, even with a thousand customers, we still really employ only two types of people. We’ve got team leaders, we’ve got admin people, we’ve got developers and that’s all we’ve got because that’s all the work we do, we don’t do any other kind of work and if you’re starting a business and you’re like, ‘Oh I’m going to create or help people with their websites’, then before long, customers are going to ask you for SEO info, AdWords and for Social Media and for WordPress fixes and for design. At some point, you need to define what you’re going to do. If you say yes to all these things then you’re just going to end up employing all these people, the whole things going to be a mess, you’re not going to be making any money and this was exactly what I do in my first business, which is why I get people now to think about what’s one thing you can do and multiply that by a thousand rather than finding, you know, a thousand clients that want something different each time. And have to build that complexity in to the business somehow which doesn’t work and is extremely expensive, if it did work.

 

WP Curve

Barbara: Yeah that’s fantastic advice! Matt, anything just to finish before we finish up?

 

Matt: Dan look, I just want to thank you but most importantly because everything that you’ve said is amazing and simple and I really, I just want to reiterate everything that Dan’s talking about today is that the systems that you need, the processes, the management, this is the same whether you have a physical business or a virtual team and what Dan has done amazingly well is taken what happens in a bricks and mortar business and built this amazing virtual business with people all around the world but the end-of-line fundamentals are exactly the same. Would you agree Dan?

 

Dan: Yeah, most of my content that I put out there is for people that are trying to start a business or they’ve got a really new business and I think a lot of people struggle with this idea of, if I build this business in this way that is proceduralized and you know I’ve got systems for everything and it’s scalable and I’m going to build a really “big business”, then it’s going to be much harder for me to manage and I’m going to be stressed out and working all the time. In fact, I found the opposite is true. I found with my agency, I was working all the time and I was stressed out the whole time because it was fundamentally unprofitable. This business is 10 times the size but I do much, much, much less work on this business and I can leave for weeks and the thing keeps running and so if people have that mindset of, ‘I don’t want to build a big business’, I mean don’t even call it a big business, ‘I want to build a good business’ is what you should be saying. And if you tell yourself, ‘I don’t want to build a good business’, you’re a crazy person. So I think, think about, if you want to build something that is scalable and systemized then it’s going to be a better business, it’s going to be an easier business than it will be if you build something where you’re just saying ‘yes’ to everything and scrambling the whole time trying to make money.

 

Barbara: Yeah and not figuring how to delegate because obviously, you know, if you’re build something with lots of systems, that’s scalable, there is very, very few that would need no people to help run it.

 

You should be delegating everything

 

Dan: What I say about delegation is you should be delegating everything even if you’re good at it. I hear a lot of people saying that delegate what you’re not good at, which I think is rubbish because the point of delegation is not to find people to do things that are better than you, the point is for you to build a business that can scale and you can’t build a business that scale where you do any of the work. So I think you should be delegating everything and whether or not you’re, I mean, there’s always going to be a period where you need to do stuff yourself, if you’re starting literally from zero but the goal should be to eventually delegate everything and for your work to be something you love doing that you probably don’t have to do. That’s ideal! That’s the situation I think I’m in, where I can do these things like these podcast interviews, we don’t really have to do but I love putting this content out. In the last year, I’ve written 2 books, I’ve presented around the world, I’ve started a brewery and a whole bunch of stuff but I would never been able to do if I didn’t have a business that was fundamentally, you know, I was able to scale and proceduralize. So I think people say like, sorry I’m going to rant here like it annoys me because people say, ‘I’m not very good at delegating.’ Well then, you’re not very good at being an entrepreneur and you either don’t be an entrepreneur or you just live your life not being good at something, or you get good at it, so you’ve got to stop saying things like that.

 

Barbara: I’m so glad that you said that because honestly I think it’s time that somebody actually comes out and says like it is. Because what you just said there, if you’re not willing to actually invest time in creating systems, training your teams and getting the right people in place to run the systems that you’ve created, then go work for someone else because that’s what being an entrepreneur is all about.

 

Dan: And if you’re a good employee then come and work for me!

 

Wrapping things up

 

Barbara: Well Dan, thank you so much because this topic honestly, I know Matt and I have talked about this a lot and people are struggling with this and we needed to, I actually need to get more people talking about this issue and talking about success, Matt and I talked about this to the nth degree. This actually shows people and for them to hear from multiple different people the same thing about how to get success with this, it’s actually not hard, it’s like you’re not listening!

 

Dan: Yeah! It’s also a bit of a mindset thing. I’ve been doing this for quite a while now, I’ve been following Chris Ducker and James Schramko, who I’ve become really good friends with over the years, I’ve been following those guys for years, learning about outsourcing in the Philippines. Dan Andrew is another guy I have been following, who started a multi-million dollar business building physical products, travelling around the world. So you start listening to a lot of this sort of content and enough of it – ‘The Four Hour Work Week is another one. You listen to enough of that type of content and it really starts to rub off, so definitely keep putting the content out there and eventually it’s going to have an impact, that kind of stuff has had a huge impact on me.

 

Barbara: Yeah, Dan thank you so much. This has been a really awesome interview!

 

Dan: Thanks for having me.

 

Matt: Thank you Dan

 

Barbara: And so guys, we will be back next week with more virtual success!

 

The Hosts

 

wp curveMatt Malouf

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

 

wp curveBarbara Turley

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing and systems automation space.


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