Voice Actor: Welcome to the Active Campaign Podcast, where it’s all about marketing automation for your small business so you can get more done with less time. Find all the latest tips, tricks, and strategies in our ever-growing education center at ActiveCampaign.com/Learn. And now, our host, the Director of Education at ActiveCampaign, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis: Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Active Campaign Podcast. I have with me today Barbara Turley of thevirtualhub.com. And this episode, we’re going to talk about that addition to your business that, if you don’t know you need one by now, just wait, because the time will come where you will definitely need an extra set of hands. And speaking of those extra set of hands, when it’s digital marketing, it is very, very hard to find qualified—or I should say precise—expertise of people who understand not only the multiple tools that there are to use, but how to match those tools with your specific business needs. And this person, these set of hands that I’m talking about, virtual assistants.

Those of you who have one probably have war stories. Those of you who don’t have one are probably afraid of hiring one. So I have with me Barbara. She is the CEO of thevirtualhub.com, where she trains virtual assistants specific to the digital marketing space in various platforms. Barbara, how are you doing?

Barbara Turley: Great, Chris. Thank you so much for that intro. I love the war stories part. We get that all the time.

Chris Davis: Yes, you can’t be a consultant in digital marketing without coming across a virtual assistant for a client. You meet a client, and they have a virtual assistant who they’re just above their expertise. Like, what they’re trying to do or what they need to do for the client, it’s just way above their pay grade. They’re overextended, and they’re all over the place.

Barbara Turley: Yes, it’s a very common problem. On both sides, actually. We hear war stories from the virtual assistant side, but also very much from the client side.

Chris Davis: Yes, yes. And as a consultant myself, I spent many years just one—on-one consultations with small business owners. And one of the things that I found, Barbara—and this is essentially probably why you even exist—is what I like to do up front is get everybody on the phone. Say, hey, let’s everybody meet each other, find out, like let’s talk about what we’re doing, what areas are being covered and what areas need to be covered so there’s no overlap. And for you, I was excited to have you on. By the way, everybody, Janet Kaffadar. Does she use you? I can’t remember.

Barbara Turley: She does. So Janet and I, I’ve actually worked quite closely with her, and we’ve actually become very good friends through the process. But she’s built a solid business with some of our team.

Chris Davis: Absolutely, and she was on our podcast. It was one of the most highly talked about podcasts within the community because it gave a really good example of how to effectively remove yourself from the business. For everybody, that is episode number 37, if you want to search for it. So we connected, and Barbara, I can’t explain how excited I am just to kind of hear your story and your process and just give the listeners some good insight on how should they be approaching hiring a virtual assistant in the digital marketing age.

Barbara Turley: Great, delighted to share.

Chris Davis: Yes, so what’s your background, Barbara? Where did you come from?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so this is interesting because you’d probably think that I would have come out of a digital marketing or even marketing sort of background, but I actually didn’t. I came out of the investment banking world. So I spent—I had a 15-year career in investment banking, banks like Merrill Lynch, UBS—so, totally different area. But I always had a kind of a burning desire to start my own business. And long story short, I got involved in a management buyout of a business from Deutsche Bank about eight years ago with a group of other people. And it was in the depths of the financial crisis, but it was a chance for me to sort of get involved in a startup operation, but not by myself. And I spent five years actually working in the company as an employee, as well as being a founding shareholder. And I learned an incredible amount about system, about getting something off the ground, systemization, teams, sales, how to kind of build a machine, basically.

So when I came to build my own business, I immediately knew the power of having an assistant, and I knew that I could get someone offshore in the Philippines. So I had a VA myself. Now, I don’t know whether I just got lucky or whether I was actually just very good at making it work, but I had a great relationship with my VA. And then I started doing some business consulting, as we all do when we leave big corporates. That’s the quick, fastest route to cash, is to do some consulting. And I pretty much noticed every client, regardless of industry—what they were doing, industry, product, service, et cetera—all had the same problem. They had no time. They were doing everything themselves, running themselves ragged, never able to take a holiday, completely overwhelmed, and nothing was really actually getting done.

So I’m sure you would see that as a consultant as well. So I started recruiting some virtual assistants in the Philippines just as—not even as a business—but just to kind of alleviate the pressure points so that the client and I could start working on strategy properly. And before I knew it, I was just getting flooded with phone calls from friends of clients saying, can you get me one of those VAs? And there was one day I was on holiday, and I said to myself, I wonder, is there a business in this? So I did a webinar and just jumped online. I launched a webinar. It was the most successful one I had ever done, and I had never really done a successful one prior. And I got 10 buyers, and we were in business. It was like overnight I changed, I pivoted massively, and we are three and a half years later now, and we have 70 people in the Philippines.

Chris Davis: I love it. I love it, and the good thing about it is you didn’t fabricate demand. And a lot of people do that, right? They get an idea, and they just think that people want it, like, hey, this is a good idea, people will buy this.

Barbara Turley: You know, people—I mean, I know the biggest business tip I give anyone, and it’s funny because I even knew this, I heard it before this business for me, and you kind of know it, but until you feel it, you don’t get the essence of it. You have to have a product or service that people will literally fall over themselves to buy from you. They will pay money to buy from you today. So it’s a problem that they will pay money to solve today, not at some point in the future.

So I just discovered an acute pain point, and I did it because I was consulting. So I always say to a lot of startup businesses, go out and talk to customers and unearth the pain that they have in this exact moment. And that’s where you’ll sell like mad if you can solve the problem.

Chris Davis: Yeah, that’s great advice. I mean, if you want to be—like if you want to put on the persona that you know everything, right, when people ask you, what should I do, you try to answer that question. And time has taught me that the answer to that question does not exist outside of your business. People can give you pointers, but when you need direction as far as what product should I offer, what should I do next—talk to your people.

Barbara Turley: Yes, and just talk to them about nothing. Don’t go in with a preconceived idea. Go in and just ask. And actually, this was something I learned in my old career, where I was talking to financial planners and investment committees about—we were trying to sell investment products, basically—but how we would approach it is we would go in and try and find out where was the problem. And we didn’t know what it was until we would actually go in and deeply diagnose by asking questions. And then you discover the problem, and that’s how you sell into it then.

Chris Davis: Yeah, and I think one thing that’s worth highlighting that you mentioned is don’t go in with your bias. Don’t go in trying to confirm an idea. Like, go in open-minded and truly have a conversation with your audience and see what is it that you can offer to alleviate whatever pain is pressing at that moment.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, yes.

Chris Davis: Great advice, Barbara. So, tell me this—you said you have over 70? So just one—

Barbara Turley: You know, Chris, honestly, I could have 200 right now with the growth, the way the business grew. I’ll be honest with you, the first year was an absolute disaster. Like, so, again—

Chris Davis: So, let’s talk about that, Barbara. You know what? I am very intrigued now. If the Barbara of today were assessing Barbara of the past who had that disaster, what would it be that you could pinpoint—if it was like the top three things that you could pinpoint—that you did wrong that led to—

Barbara Turley: Again, I went in going, great, everyone needs a VA. But I made an assumption that everybody knows how to delegate. I would say 50% of people have the capacity to learn how to delegate. Most people don’t actually know that it’s a skill that you need to learn and master. So a lot of the clients that we had coming in—that was on the client side—a lot of clients we had coming in just completely failed. Now, Jana Cavitar was one of our massive success stories from day one, so she was way back then. But the majority of them failed, and they blamed us and the VAs, and it was very stressful. I mean, I just found it—I was so irritated by the whole thing.

But on the VA side as well, I started to see the problem on that side. I was like, okay, these people are coming in, they’re great, they want to do a good job, but they really have no clue. They’ve sort of got resumes that say they’ve got all this experience, but they really don’t know what they’re doing. They need training. They have no idea how to communicate back to a client and how to—so the whole chain of communication was a massive problem, and education.

So then I kind of ripped it apart. I literally fired about 70% of the people. I got rid of—I actually fired clients as well, I will be honest. We just kind of stripped it all back. And I almost thought, well, I give this up. And then I thought, no, I’ve got a few key clients—Janet being one of them—who came to me and said, you have built something really powerful here. You need to keep going.

So I rebuilt it. I built an onboarding process for clients, which was not a deep training program but a simple training program to show them—simply using tools like Asana—how do you create a recurring task list? How do you write a task so that it can be delegated effectively? How do you create processes and systems so that you can offload things and not be doing it yourself but not lose control?

And then on the VA—I mean, that’s just a very brief example—but on the VA side, we built a deep training program, and we started making them go through training for like two, three, four weeks before we even let them meet a client. And that served two purposes. It meant that we could control the training, and we developed all of our own step-by-step processes for social media, webinar setups, all this stuff. And we gave them to the client, and we trained the VA in them.

But it also allowed us to see the whites of the eyes of the VAs coming through, because you can’t hide for a month in intensive training programs. You can’t be doing funny business and being slippery and saying you’re there and then you’re not, which VAs—common, that’s some of the war stories. So it led to us—the success exploding in the second year.

But like everything, it unearthed another problem. So we realized then that our target client was probably the wrong client because we had a little bit too much churn on the client side. And on the VA side, they weren’t—you know, people were leaving for various reasons. A lot of the clients we had—some of them had major—look, they were very startup, they were very early stage, and they really couldn’t—they would cancel because of cash flow issues, and they were running out of money. They were all doing product launches that were failing—not all of them, but some of them.

And on the VA side, look, I realized that we needed to grow up as a company in the Philippines. So my team on the ground there, I had deep meetings with them about what people want over there. They want security, they want benefits, they want career development. So I actually went over there and I launched a company. I actually set up a company in the Philippines, and today every one of our people is a full employee of our company there. We pay their healthcare, we pay their pension, we take care of their family, we make sure that they get bonus structures. We’ve built a powerhouse company now that people want to get into, as opposed to leaving.

Client side, we’ve started—we niched. That was the other thing we did. We niched heavily into digital because we found we were getting more success in that area. And particularly with platforms like ActiveCampaign, we’ve got a lot of clients that use ActiveCampaign, and we’ve built our own in-house training programs that are specifically for VAs because it’s slightly different teaching a VA to use these platforms so that when they hit the client’s business, they’re not able to hit the ground running totally, but almost—they’re 90% there. And then we back them up with help desks, we’ve got success coaches.

So we’ve built a kind of what I believe is a very scalable model and something where our success rate is very high now. We hardly ever lose a client now.

Chris Davis: Beautiful. And if I heard this correctly and just summarized it, the biggest mistake was just getting ahead of yourself, right? Saying, “Hey, I’m a trained VA’s,” and in doing that, you’re like, “Wait a minute. Delegation is a thing,” you know? It’s like…

Barbara Turley: You only discover those things. You know, the lessons I’ve learned is that you can’t, you can try and get ahead of your thinking. Yeah. But you don’t know the problems that are going to evolve, and you don’t know that. So you deal with, you build a solution for the first problem that you found, which is, you know, I saw people had no time. I was like, “Yay, VA is cool. Great solution.” Then I was like, “Oh, there’s another problem.” Then I built a program for that. And then, you know, and I was like, “Oh, that’s another problem.” And I’m sure I’m going to have more.

Chris Davis: Cause you’re just digging deeper and deeper, Barbara. Like, as you’re talking, you start out, like you said, everybody starts out with that initial problem. And I think most people, the issue is they just don’t dig deep enough. Right?

Barbara Turley: If want a powerhouse business, if you want to build a huge business that is a powerhouse business, you need to focus on continually getting feedback from your customer and asking them, “Where is the pain?” So we ask our customers all the time. Like, we have active, very active feedback programs. We’ve got a happiness meter on the end of every email where they can say, “You guys are awesome. You guys are terrible.” And we ask them, we say, like, “Tell us so that we can fix it. Let us fix it.”

Chris Davis: Yeah, and you know what? Another thing that stands out as far as what you’re doing right for your business, and, you know, we talked about getting ahead of yourself and the complications and that, but you really invested into your audience, which is your VAs. You’ve invested and you dug deep with them to understand their needs, specific to their geographic location. Say, “Okay, listen, I wanna provide a service to you all as well,” right? And you created a win-win.

Having healthcare in the Philippines is huge, and I don’t know if anybody listening has ever used a VA from the Philippines, but a little bit of US dollars goes a long way there.

Barbara Turley: Yes, but healthcare is very expensive. I was actually, I almost fell off my chair when I saw the cost. It’s almost the same as me paying for healthcare for myself in Australia. We did that. As a, you know, I mean, I basically took a lot of the profit that I made in those first two years and I really, I actually, gave it back to the Philippines. But it’s because I want to, I’m just so passionate about this topic, and I can see the overwhelm clients are going through.

Chris Davis: And you’re thinking long, right? You’re not thinking short. You’re not thinking right now in two years. You’re thinking long, down the line. I bet it feels like you’re really just getting started, right? Getting your wind under you. And that’s great because you have to, I feel like if you want the best out of somebody, they have to know that you’re equally invested.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. And just asking people, as you said, like, you’ve got to get on the phone and have feet, like find some way of gathering feedback. So we even say to the VAs, we go, we’ve got a very open culture, which is hard to build in the Philippines because they’re not that open as a culture. Very, they’d find it hard to speak truth with Westerners. But we’ve managed to create a culture where I’ve even said to them, if you dislike your client or you feel overwhelmed or you just don’t like that work or whatever, you can come and talk to us and we will move things around. We’ll, you know, maybe there’s a better fit for that client or, and we do the same with clients. We say, you know, if it’s not a good fit, don’t just cancel, like let us work with you. We’ve got other people, you know.

That’s great. I mean, this is, these are real issues in business that people are facing and don’t know how to solve. Right? Like, it’s everybody’s nightmare for one day they wake up and realize either A, their VA isn’t who they thought they were, but they can’t replace them because they don’t know anything else. Right? Or B, just the fact that, my gosh, if my VA leaves, I’m toast. Like, I have no issues. They know everything.

Chris Davis: And so having a company like yourself that can say, “Look, we’ve got more where that came from,” right? Like, rest assured, we’ve got your back.

Barbara Turley: If someone leaves or a VA, because sometimes they get promoted or they may have another client that wanted them to go full time or something. And we say to the client, “Don’t worry,” because what we do, we’ll typically put one of my team in. Like, if there’s a transition period, we give the client two VAs for probably like six to eight weeks, and the first VA will train the second VA. And when we’re clean, when we say, “Right, we’re ready,” we do the transition.

So we say to the client, we try and take as much of the load off you as possible of transitioning a VA. And we help you to get set up in the first place with your processes and your systems and making sure that your business is set up effectively so that one admin person leaving doesn’t collapse your business. Because that’s like, forget the VA thing, that’s like a whole business risk that you don’t wanna have. So yeah, we try and help. We’re just building more and more. There’s more videos we need to do and you… So to help even more.

Chris Davis: Yeah, so for the VA’s listening or the aspiring VA’s listening, Barbara, are you just in the Philippines, or do you take VA’s and train VA’s around the world?

Barbara Turley: Look, we’re in the Philippines. The model that we have right now is we’re committed to there. We have had a few people from India approach us, et cetera. And at this stage, we’re just in the Philippines. Honestly, I’ll be open and say, we’ve just managed to nail it there. And I just, I don’t think I could personally take on another country right now because it is very difficult to get it right. It’s been, I have a few gray hairs from doing this.

Chris Davis: Yeah, and what’s beautiful about it, Barbara, I love this answer so much, is because you said I’m dedicated to the Philippines. And in saying that, now, right, let’s back up. You’re on a podcast. Who knows how many years we listen to this podcast, right now? So there’s a temptation to be like, “Hey, anybody can be a VA, our training universe,” right? But, you know, you’ve been there, done that.

Barbara Turley: I’ve thought about launching the training program as a separate entity where VAs can sort of come and get certified. We’re not, you again, we’re just not as part of, part of me is not doing that because I think, you know what our core, but it’s like, we get asked, you know, “Can you guys do bookkeepers and accounting?” We got, “No, we do digital marketing, general admin, and platforms like Active Campaigns.” So, you know, funnel builds and things like that. We’re very specific about what we do.

And the minute I got more specific about who we hire, what our ideal client is, and what we actually do, the business started doing an awful lot better. So it’s like the core business is VA’s in this area. In the Philippines.

Chris Davis: I love it. The marketing mathematics tells you that the smaller you go, the bigger you get. Yeah. Right.

Barbara Turley: I’m stressed because if I was to launch all over the place, I would be, I mean, I have a 15 month old baby, so I also had a baby. I need the women listening out there. You can do it. I’m not superwoman, but yeah, I like to have my free time too. I actually am very committed to my own well-being and not being overwhelmed myself.

Chris Davis: That’s important because we all want to run businesses like that. And for you, what I really love beyond just the dedication is your appreciation for systemizing, right? Understanding how important it is to document those processes and then systemize them so that you can easily train and get other people up to speed, and then they can go and do the same thing for these other businesses.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, and you know, we always say as well, people always say to me, “Are you not afraid of automation coming in, bots and things, and all these new bots that are out there?” And I say, “No, we welcome that,” because what we’re trying to say to clients is, first figure out what is your task list, what does your business look like, what keeps the engine running, what’s your project list, what moves it forward? Then let’s figure out, what do we eliminate, what are the useless tasks that really shouldn’t be done?

Then what do we automate? Because, as you know, we can automate a lot of stuff that people are doing. Like, people are still doing booking, getting VAs to book calendars for them. I’m like, you know, there’s Calendly. There’s all these, you can integrate it on your site. We do all of that stuff. So we figure all that stuff out. And then you get your VA doing the more high value stuff. So, you know, there’s always the stuff to delegate at the end. And then make sure there’s a feedback loop where that VA or your team can give feedback to you on their experience of doing a process, because maybe they’ve got a better way of doing it, or maybe it’s too clunky. Or if mistakes are happening, there’s probably holes in the process. So don’t shoot the person first. Check the process.

Chris Davis: Yeah.

Chris Davis: Yeah, definitely, definitely. Okay, so for the clients listening, and they’re hearing this and they’re like, “You know what? I think I may want to give this a try. This sounds exactly like what I was looking for.” What is the onboarding process like? Do they just go to the virtual hub com and say, “Hey, I want a VA,” and then you assign them a VA and all is well? Like, what is that process like?

Barbara Turley: No, so it’s a bit quite lengthy. So we won’t just, you know, “Hey, yeah, VA tomorrow.” We do make people come through an onboarding process with us, which people actually love. The feedback is that they love it. And they’re like, before, and then they go through it and go, “Now I know why I have to do that.” First, you have a call. You don’t have a call with me, used to be me, but I’ve got two great strategy consultants, one in Australia and one in Ireland, so that we can do US time zones and all that as well. So all the US guys, we totally cover your time zone. Jump on a call with one of our guys and they help you to figure out, firstly, is a VA what you need? Because we don’t want you coming in. We’re gonna help you first figure out, is a VA what you need right now? Because sometimes a VA is not what somebody needs yet. You may need a strategist first or you may need something else. If it’s a VA, are we the right fit for you?

Is that, is what we do suitable for what your needs are? So it’s very valuable, that call, because they really, really help you to figure that out. And then when you come in, there is a bit of a, there’s a commitment fee, but it’s 240 US dollars. So it’s just for you to kind of put your stake in the ground and for us to go, “Okay, we’re now, we’re going to go ahead for you and start training.” Then we put you through our short three or four part video series where it helps you to get Asana set up, if that’s what you’re gonna use, or Trello or one of these project management tools. Get your task list sorted out, and then we invite you to meet some of our candidates, and usually you get to meet three people. One of our team, our client liaison manager, is on the call with you on the interviews, so you get to chat with them. Our master trainer attends the interviews as well so he can give you insights into what were the strengths of these people through the big training programs. So you get to chat with some of our team, and people love that.

Then when you choose your person you want to work with, usually most people choose in that first round. Then we do a client onboarding call where we take you through how our business works, how to engage with us, our membership site, where to find everything, tips and tricks, et cetera. And then you kind of start with your VA. And after that, we have check-in calls, usually about every, we don’t do them very often. In the beginning, it’s probably every six weeks, and then it moves out to kind of quarterly on a needs basis. And we invite feedback every week for the first six weeks, and then we move to monthly thereafter. So it’s quite a, it’s an ongoing process of training and engagement, and the whole way you get to meet a lot of our team.

Chris Davis: Nice, nice. And I would imagine as people have gone through that entire process, the retention of your client and the VA that you’ve matched them with is probably pretty high.

Barbara Turley: Yes, it’s very high. The ones that I’ll be honest with you, the ones that are tricky are the, we do a level one VA, which is an admin VA. Those ones tend to be tricky. I’ll tell you why. It’s because we don’t control the training for that. We train on general admin stuff, but when they go into the client’s business, often there’s a kind of a mismatch of what needs to be done or there’s, you know, the client maybe is not totally sure of how their process works.

Whereas when we move into social media and stuff like that, the processes are quite developed for those things. So we get more success on those ones actually, higher success rates.

Chris Davis: Interesting. Okay, cool, cool. No, this is all great information. What would you say, in closing up here, if you were, in all of your experience with what you’ve seen as far as training, onboarding, clients matching, growing businesses, you mentioned earlier that sometimes your VAs go and get hired full time, which is amazing.

What would you say are any pointers you would give a client to help them identify when they need a VA?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a good question. Look, I mean, I’m not going to say this because I obviously, you know, sell the whole concept of VAs, but I got a VA from day one. Right. So I got one on day one of business. Now, not everyone is ready for that. But the reason I did is because anyone in business these days, and most of the people listening to this podcast are doing online something. Right. You’ve got an online strategy. If you’re spending your day building social media images and, you know, Canva things and all that stuff, right, you’re really wasting your time and you need to have a look at what business that you’re actually in because you’re doing busy work and you’re not really getting after sales.

In the beginning, when you start a business, you need to be about selling, selling, selling. So if you’re happy to not have an online presence yet and just get out and do a beta program, like you want to launch programs and stuff, my advice, I did this, I made this mistake myself. I had the VA, I launched a massive program, spent a whole pile of money on membership sites and everything, and honestly it kind of bombed. Like, it was one of those tragic moments in my life of going, “What did I do?” And in hindsight, I should have just gotten 10 people that were interested in what I was doing and ran a Skype group of a kind of live training to see, would people buy it? So in terms of VAs, if you’re willing to go that route of just kind of…

Barbara Turley: Rolling your sleeves up and getting sales and forgetting about all the other stuff in the background, you don’t need a VA yet. But if you want to have a social media presence and you want to have your website running nice and you want to be blogging and all these things, there’s an awful lot of work to be done in the background that’s going to tie up your time. And that’s probably an idea to think about a VA. But when you really need one, yeah, think sooner rather than later. Don’t wait until the sales are flooding through the door before you get like an Active Campaign or a VA, because then you’ve got to implement these things and they’re going to slow you down massively.

Chris Davis: Yeah, and I would imagine you would want your VA to grow with you. As your strategy evolves and all of that, you will want your VA to kind of go through those experiences with you.

Barbara Turley: Yes. Now the challenge then is people usually come to us, and some people listening will want this as well. Some people come and say, “Look, I only have about five hours a week.” And now we, I will be honest, we do a minimum of 20 hours a week. That’s because of what we do in the Philippines. So we’re part time. That’s the business that we have. I have a podcast called the Virtual Success Show where we actually delve into all of these questions we’ve gone through. And one of the shows is, “Think you’ve only got five hours a week to delegate? Think again.”

And it’s basically getting people into a growth mindset of saying, if you’re committing to this business, you need to just think a bit more, like you said, the long game. So some people can’t afford it and that’s fine, but you really got to think about it strategically. Because anyone you hire for three, four, or five hours a week is not really committed to your business. They’re freelancers that are going to have about 10 of those. And that’s why they do disappearing. Yeah.

Chris Davis: That’s a great point, Barbara. That is a great point.

Barbara Turley: And you think, “When I’m ready, I’ll take her on another 10 and then we’ll move up.” And you’re like, “Well, hold on a sec, there could be another client out there that’s gonna whip them up.”

Chris Davis: You’re right. It reminds me, I watch Shark Tank, and sometimes the entrepreneur will be like, “And I’m giving you 1% of my business,” and the shark is like, “That’s not even enough to get me excited. Like, I can’t commit to just one. I want more.” And you have to think of it the same way with the VA’s. It’s like, five hours, okay, that’s cool, but that’s not enough to really get me motivated to, you know, like do more and more for you.

Chris Davis: Give me some more hours and you’ll see a total different outcome.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, use one of those hours every week to have a solid meeting about the future of the business and the future of their career.

Chris Davis: I love it.

Barbara Turley: Think about that perspective. That’s why we’ve got success, because that’s what we focus on.

Chris Davis: The thing is, Barbara, I know we’re getting to our end point, but it’s worth stating, we have to think bigger. I think the thing that technology does in a good way is it enables us to reach more people, right? It enables us to operate like a bigger company at a lower cost, right? As technology evolves and the cost lowers. However, in that, it’s so easy to get caught up doing stuff. Like you said, if you spend five hours that week, maybe you’re like, “Well, it was just 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there.” But if a total five hours and you spent that doing Canva work…

Barbara Turley: Yeah, spend it with your kids. If anything, spend it with your partner.

Chris Davis: Like, take two of those hours and instruct your VA what to do. And now you’ve got three hours to spend with whoever. Your business is still growing. And like you said, your kids, your spouse, your partner, whoever is better off, you’re all better off for it.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and look, you know, as my final tip, sales solves everything. Get out selling. You got to always be selling. Always be selling. In business, you’re in the business of sales and that’s kind of, you don’t have to be doing it yourself. But, you know, there’s obviously online ways and all that. But you just need to be, you’re selling. That’s what you’re doing.

Chris Davis: Absolutely. Well, Barbara, I want to thank you. This has been great, great, great info. As I mentioned, I was excited because we see it as a company, our people who are clients that use our software, they need VA’s, and very rarely do they, do we come across an account who has a VA that really knows what they’re doing. Like I said, most the time the VA, they’re just over their head. It’s just like, “My gosh, I’m so overwhelmed. How do I build this out?”

So knowing that there’s a company like yours out there that does some serious training and vetting on tools like ActiveCampaign, and you’re not limited to just ActiveCampaign, you guys train on all of the platforms that also integrate with ActiveCampaign as well.

Barbara Turley: Zapier, all the Zapier stuff that we do. That’s actually not that hard to do. We do a lot of that. You know, obviously you may get to a level that’s quite tech, but, you know, we can do most of it.

Chris Davis: Yep, yep. So from Active Campaign to you, we appreciate your service and all that you’re doing. I know everybody in Singapore that is a VA and in your program and family members of those in your program are better off because of it. And from one business owner to the next, I wanna thank you for setting the example of what it takes to really grow a business. Let’s think bigger, stop doing everything and dig deep and always be selling.

Barbara Turley: Thank you for having me.

Chris Davis: Yes, it was great, Barbara. So yes, thank you. Thank you for everything. Best of continued success to you and all that you do. And if people want to follow up with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you?

Barbara Turley: Best thing to do, jump on thevirtualhub.com and hit the talk to us button, and you’ll go straight in there to talk to one of our guys. If you want to connect with me personally, LinkedIn is the best way to find me. Jump on LinkedIn and even Google Barbara Turley, you’ll find me there.

Chris Davis: Great, great, and everybody, all the links will be in the show notes as well. Thank you so much, Barbara, and I’ll see you online.

Chris Davis: Thank you for listening to another episode. This one was great to record because, as I mentioned in the beginning, it talks about that extra set of hands, that it’s not always clear when you need them and where to find them. But I want to challenge all of you listeners to really start thinking differently about your business. Look at yourself as the manager and owner of the business, more so than the doer.

And I know it’s hard because sometimes it takes more to explain to somebody what to do than you just doing it yourself. So I understand that, and I know good help is hard to find. And hopefully after listening to this podcast, you have a better appreciation of the power of sitting down, systemizing, mapping out the processes so that you’re getting your business ready for delegation and someone else to run it for you.

Without losing revenue, right? You don’t have to be doing everything for your business to grow. And if your business requires you to do everything for it to grow, we can all argue that perhaps you’re taking the wrong approach. So hopefully after this episode things are a bit more clear when it comes to getting those extra set of hands, where to get them from, and the importance of it.

If you’re not subscribed to the podcast, please do so now. We are in iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Google Play, SoundCloud, anywhere that you can subscribe to a podcast, we’re there. So those of you who are subscribed and my new listeners, go and leave us a five star rating. Please spread the word, let people know this podcast is out there. It’s for you all. If there’s ever a topic or if you’d like to be on the podcast, you can visit ActiveCampaign.com forward slash podcast and there’ll be a link to be a guest. Just click on that link and you can appear on the podcast. You can even refer someone else to appear on the podcast.

If you are struggling in ActiveCampaign, somehow, somehow we have a plethora of resources for you. The first and foremost I would offer, or I would recommend, you jump on a one-on-one call. ActiveCampaign.com forward slash training. Jump on a one-on-one call and talk to somebody live and in person over the phone.

Chris Davis: About your specific needs. And if you’re more of a self learner, self starter, hey, I’d like to figure it out on my own, ActiveCampaign.com forward slash learn is the education center where you can search and find any content around marketing, automation, and Active Campaign to help. All right. This is the ActiveCampaign podcast, the small business podcast to help you scale and propel your business with automation. I’ll see you on the next episode.