Voice Actor: Welcome to the Bean Ninjas Podcast where you get an all access pass on what happens behind the closed doors of a fast growing global bookkeeping and financial reporting business.

Bean Ninjas: Hey everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Bean Ninjas podcast. Today I’m trying a different format. I’ll be recording a series with Barbara Turley. She has previously been on the show and I’ve previously been on her podcast as well. And today we’re recording episode one in a series where we’re going to be chatting about challenges that we’re facing in our own businesses and topics that we’re interested in and things that we’re learning related to me running Bean Ninjas and Barbara running the Virtual Hub. Hi Barb, it’s great to be chatting with you again today.

Barbara Turley: Hi Meryl, I know we’ve been having some great conversations about business recently and the things we’re doing, so it’s been very valuable for me.

Bean Ninjas: Yeah, it’s funny, you came onto the Bean Ninjas podcast and I’ve done two episodes with you now on your podcast as well. And I think we realized as we were chatting that even doing three episodes together, we still have so much more to talk about. And something that I’ve wanted to do is more of a series where I’m talking with another business owner who’s facing similar challenges to what I am at Bean Ninjas and to dig into different topics. It’s actually something I’ve wanted to do since we started the Bean Ninjas podcast but I hadn’t really found the right person. So yeah, I’m excited to do a series with you.

Barbara Turley: When I finished doing some podcasts with you I realized there were the same sort of things I had about a hundred million questions that I wanted to ask you because we have similar business models in completely different areas. I was like I wonder what Meryl was doing with this or that or what she would think of this idea and when you came to me with this podcast series idea so BINGO, let’s share it with everyone cause I’m sure people have these questions too.

Bean Ninjas: So for anyone that hasn’t listened to the last interview with you, do you wanna just give a couple of minute overview of your business and then I’ll do the same in case anyone from your audience isn’t familiar with Bean Ninjas.

Scaling your Business: Agile sprints, Metrics, Onboarding and Sales for Scaling Businesses

Barbara Turley: Yeah, sure. I’m sure there might be some listeners on our virtual success podcast that could do with hearing a bit more about my business as well. So the Virtual Hub has been running for just five years now. And we are a company that recruits, trains and manages virtual assistants, mainly from the Philippines for businesses all over the world and mainly in the digital marketing, entrepreneur space is kind of where we play. Digital marketing implementation is what we do for businesses all over the world.

Bean Ninjas: And roughly how many staff do you have?

Barbara Turley: Coming up to 150 employees now and we have full offices in Cebu in the Philippines. So we are an office based, very highly structured and organized kind of culture. But yeah, we run 24 hours as well. So that’s another key sort of thing that we do. So how about you?

Bean Ninjas: We’re a bookkeeping and financial reporting business. So we do bookkeeping and reports as well as cash flow forecasts and dashboards. And we try to tell the story behind the numbers. That’s the core business. And I’ve recently, so this year, 2019, been working on a financial literacy training product. And the beta version of that ran in March. This year we’re just about to launch the second round of that in August. So that’s taking a lot of my attention, but our core business is bookkeeping and financial reporting using Xero.

Barbara Turley: And I think one of the key things I definitely like about all the listeners, I guess, to understand, your listeners probably know this, but you are a virtual company, which is a key thing and you have a global footprint virtually. So do you want to just give us a bit more depth on that and that your business is quite different in that way from just the run of the mill bookkeeping business?

Bean Ninjas: Back to our origin story actually. When we started Bean Ninjas, I was looking at what kind of business I wanted to run and I wanted something that I could run from anywhere in the world and that had global potential and the ability to scale. So that’s why we decided on bookkeeping and Xero as the platform that we were going to specialize in. And the business started in Australia, so our head office is on the Gold Coast.

Bean Ninjas: We also, well now actually our largest market is the US and we also have a presence in the UK and Hong Kong. And our intention is that we will continue to grow the international markets, not just focus on Australia.

Barbara Turley: You know, it’s funny when you say that because although we have very different businesses, my goals when I started this business were exactly the same as yours. I mean, I’m living in Australia. I’m from Ireland. My husband is Hungarian. So I always wanted an opportunity to potentially move if I wanted to and work from anywhere. So I had the same goals about the business I wanted to create. It had to be virtual, had to be global, I could work from anywhere to do it.

So I think that that’s probably why we have such aligned business models and the way that we do things are very similar.

Bean Ninjas: And something that you’ve been working on recently is doing a sprint series. And that’s never something we’ve done in Bean Ninjas. And I’m really intrigued to hear about it and also maybe to test it for myself. So could you talk a little bit about what a sprint series is and then how did it go for you?

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. So the hilarious thing about this, and I think the biggest message I would give anyone listening to this who’s keen, including you, is I know a little bit about sprints and the whole agile concept, but I am not in any way an expert or even moderate expert in any of this. I’ve never done a sprint. I just know a bit about that concept, about the idea of getting a lot of people together and crunching time down into a defined timeframe, and then having fast kind of daily meetings that go through where we are every day dealing with problems as they come up so that you sort of sprint into the end of a project and get it finished.

Now all the agile experts out there, and I had a few comments on my LinkedIn, I was talking about this on my LinkedIn profile and a few of them commented they were asking me questions that were very specific to agile and I realized gosh I actually don’t really know what I’m doing. However, I didn’t let it stop me and I just kind of made up my own version of it and it worked unbelievably. I was very surprised, blown away in fact, about the benefits and the results from doing this concept.

But taking a step back, I came up with the idea to do it on a whim. Again, I was sitting here one day feeling overwhelmed actually. I’m about to have a baby. My second baby is due in four weeks. So I have this nesting thing. Other women clean the house. I started cleaning the business. So I had been sort of on a cleaning project of the business and I was finding myself getting overwhelmed and frustrated. My team was overwhelmed and everything seemed a bit too chaotic, even though everyone was trying their best to move initiatives and projects forward that we’d been working on. Honestly, some of these things have been going on for months. My whole team was feeling under pressure and I thought, you know what?

I’m going to do a sprint. It’s just on a whim. And I put it on LinkedIn. I sort of put it out to the world that I was going to do this thing. Got the team together. I didn’t know how they were going to react because I thought, are they going to think, Oh my God, we’re going to be under so much pressure. And I did it across multi-department companies. Talking about taking on a huge project, but it was across everything from marketing and sales, HR, onboarding, data security was the one I took on myself, training, we’ve revamped our entire training platform. There were a lot of departments involved in it.

And we isolated a two-week timeframe. I really had two goals. The first goal was to figure out business as usual kind of has to go on, that’s the problem. But I wanted to see how effective my leadership team could delegate and were delegating down their own channels to their own teams to free themselves up to do the big work. So that was sort of test number one, like whether we could be delegating more and being more efficient with the to-do lists of every department.

And then of course, the second big goal was to create a sort of a finish line and to get some of these projects that have been meandering forever actually to completion. And for me to feel like we had done something or achieved something. That was kind of the goal. I did set some rules of the game as well.

I made it a game. So I said to them, this is going to be a fun experience. We have to have some rules and we’ve just got to be open-minded. And the rules were that you weren’t allowed to work longer hours. Otherwise the objective of delegating down the channels to other team members was going to fail. So there was no like working till midnight and all that sort of thing. Now some of us ended up doing it anyway, but you know, it was okay. We had a daily huddle every day and everybody only had three minutes.

And everyone had to follow the same structure of like, you know, what have I done? What’s the next step for me and where are the roadblocks? And that’s kind of agile, I know that is an agile concept of the sprint that you do this. And then the other, the third sort of rule was that everyone must know and take an interest in each other’s big rock project. We called it the big rock project. So each one of us picked a big rock that we were working on and everyone else had to be interested in listening to what other people were doing. So I might pause there as I’ve sort of given you a whole chunk of stuff that I’m sure you can dissect into. Have you got any questions about how I set it up?

Bean Ninjas: I do. I’ve got a whole lot of questions. And I like the rules too, especially the not working longer hours, because I see as well that the managers and the leadership team of the business, there’s one thing to maintain what you have and that’s just having everything ticking along. You drive a business forward by either refining something through a project or creating something new. And so the more time that leaders in the business can spend on those types of projects that actually innovate or improve something, the more the business will progress. And it’s easy just to get caught in the day to day and just be maintaining something.

Barbara Turley: And I’m overwhelmed. I think, you know, a lot of our leadership teams, we don’t realize that they’re not, you know, they can feel in chaos because they’re stuck in the day to day, just like a business owner. It happens the same to your leadership team or the heads of your departments and things like that.

Bean Ninjas: So how did each of the different leaders within the business pick their rock?

Barbara Turley: So in the prep, so first of all, I put it out to the world. I put it on LinkedIn and I’m not very big on social media myself. And I just thought I’m going to put this out there. And then I brought everyone together. Funnily enough, I put it out to the world before I brought my team together, which I think was a risk, but we should have told them first. But anyway, I brought them together and I was kind of worried. I wonder if there is going to be a collective groan, you know, of Barb’s pushing us really far.

So sorry, I brought them all together with the concept and there was an excitement with them. I think it was like, wow, this is because I made it like a game. And then I had individual 30 minute, well, 15 to 30 minute meetings with each person that was going to be leading a project to discuss with them the current projects that are on their list, the things they really want to achieve or the big roadblocks in their department. So what are the big things? And I kind of knew what they were.

Barbara Turley: And then we isolated together one big thing that they felt would move the dial and that they would like to see move to completion. And they were excited to be given the space and the, I guess I gave them the permission to focus on one thing, which I hadn’t anticipated that I needed. They felt like I had given them permission to not focus on the other little projects or the other stuff that was going on and they could really focus for two weeks.

So then each person developed their big rock project, we called it. And then we all came together the week before the sprint started to present to each other what big rock project we had chosen. And again, we did it as a huddle so that it wasn’t a two and a half hour meeting. It was a 30 minute meeting where everybody had to present the big rock project, the problem they wanted to solve with this project. So it was very quick. It was like, what problem do you aim to solve?

Why do you want to solve this problem and what results do you expect to see from solving this problem in your area for the business? And that really got all of them focused on what is the problem and why do I want to solve it for the business? Why is this a problem for us?

And that meeting was actually, again, eye-opener because the other people in other departments were like, I didn’t realize that you were suffering from that problem or I didn’t realize that’s what you did. You know, this kind of thing across departments was very, very handy. So people started to, I think there was a newfound respect for each other when they started to realize the types of expertise and projects the others were working on. And in a virtual environment, I guess you don’t get to see that every day. So it’s important to come together and realize that everyone is actually doing very good work.

Bean Ninjas: Again, there’s so many gems in that. And there’s a couple of points that I want to talk about that you’ve mentioned before I ask more questions. The first was giving someone permission to work only on one thing. And that’s actually something that AMP, who’s our marketing guy, we’ve been working on together because with one person running a whole marketing department, there’s so many things that we could be doing each week. And so we try to have a theme. We know the overall objective for the week, but then try to have a theme for each day. So if we’re working on SEO, we’re not, we don’t have to have our head in SEO every single day of the week. Or if we’re working on email, writing emails, then again, we’re trying to do that just for that day because there’s such a variety of projects and some things aren’t going to fit into this week or next week and maybe not even the month. And so we agree upfront that it’s okay to push those projects out. And I’ve found that it really helps to free up head space to feel okay that you’ve picked the priority project or couple of projects and it’s fine to let everything go.

Bean Ninjas: Yeah, that you’re not going to come in as the owner and go, what’s happening with this? And they’re like, well, I wasn’t prioritizing that. Like this fear thing. And not that your team wouldn’t have fear, but I think it’s a natural kind of, unless we lay the foundation and the agreements and the priorities and we discuss it, people can feel very overwhelmed and they try and keep all the balls in the air. Big high achievers will. They’ll try and spin all the plates at the same time, you know, because that’s the type of people we hire of course, because you want them to be high achievers, but allowing them to say, well, you know, we want that particular plate to just spin faster right now.

Bean Ninjas: And tell more about the huddles. So have you done huddles before, or was there any adjustment for your team getting used to being so concise and kind getting to the root of the problem or what they’re trying to achieve?

Barbara Turley: No, my team is good at that because I brought in the huddle concept about two and a half years ago and it was to solve a problem. This is great for anyone running virtual teams or to be honest, any team. I was finding that we had such strong processes. We had Asana, our communication channels were very strong and we were still missing things. Mistakes were still happening. So I thought, okay, let’s bring everyone together at one point in the day, because we run 24 hours, so it’s hard to get everyone at one point.

And we bring everyone together where we actually run through, like it’s mainly the pipelines that we’re doing. So if you imagine in a business like mine, you have pipelines running like there’s virtual assistants, there’s people applying for jobs, so there’s recruitment. Then there’s people coming through the training pipelines and progressing through each stage of our training program. So that’s a pipeline. Then moving into HR pipelines of onboarding and all the necessary requirements of getting an employee up and running and all that sort of thing, and the ops pipelines. And that doesn’t even get into the client side of clients leads coming in, marketing sales, and then onboarding clients and matching clients and VAs together. So we have a 30 minute call every day where my entire leadership team is on that call. And we do hope it is 30 minutes and it’s like, okay, we start with recruitment. So the recruitment team know we’ve ascertained what metrics they’re going to talk about and how they don’t go off track. So we’re like, how many people applied? How many people showed up? What is the passing rate? Anything else you’re noticing, anything weird going on and then we move on. So we, it’s bang, bang, bang. And it’s solved the problem of plugging a lot of holes where processes can’t just stand up to actually people discussing it together on a call.

Bean Ninjas: Interesting. I won’t go into meetings too much more, but I think that’s another topic. We’ve been testing all kinds of different things with how we structure meetings, who comes to them, what we talk about, what goes in a report and what we discuss. So let’s table that, I think, from another episode.

Barbara Turley: We can do that. Meetings are here. I’m not a big meeting fan.

Bean Ninjas: Not a fan at all, but they’re important, especially with virtual teams to bring people together to have a chance to build relationships.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So, we had this structure already, so I didn’t need to teach my team about a huddle. We also recommended to clients, so all our team leaders and everyone, like we were always talking to clients about the power of a 10 minute daily huddle. Even if it’s just you and one VA, it’s like, it’s important to do it, you know, to set the stage. So that was pretty easy for me. They understood how to do it. A couple of people did run over time and I had to kind of reel them in and go, no, what problem are you looking to solve? But that’s training for them so that they enjoyed being pulled in to go, yeah, you’re right. How do I narrow this down to what I want to say? So that was very powerful for us.

Bean Ninjas: Then how did it go? So you had the huddles happening. Overall, how did it go with the sprint?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So I think that the key thing that we did right by accident, again, all of it, we were just winging it as we did it. Like, so I said, look, we’ll have a prep week and then we’ll have a two week sprint and then we’ll have a review week. However, the prep week was to prepare for the sprint, but we had actually spent the eight weeks prior to that. We were all in a bit of chaos. There were problems kind of cropping up everywhere. It was very clear what needed to be fixed. So there was prep that actually accidentally happened prior to that first week anyway and the projects were already kind of there to be done. So it wasn’t like we were scrambling in week one to make up what to do and find out where the problems were. We had already done that work for the weeks before. Then we moved into the sprint and what we did was, there was a 30 minute call every single day and it was straight after the daily huddle that we normally have. So it was like the whole team came on. Each person, look, it wasn’t a requirement to have moved it forward every single day, but the big realization, the energy on that call was high.

People were excited and there started to be healthy competition where people were like, wow, they’re really moving that project forward. We should get onto this. Like we need to get this one. And it was sort of like it became a game and they really, really enjoyed it. And as I was moving through every day, I’d say, and the other thing was I took one on myself. So it pushed me to kind of act like one of, I wasn’t the leader of it. I was one of the people running a project and how I was presenting and what I was doing was helping to drive the others forward as well. And then periodically through the week, I think giving people the space as well to say where they’re stuck. You know, I said, like, is anyone overwhelmed? Everyone had to say whether they were overwhelmed and then we could kind of learn from each other how we were dealing with that. So it wasn’t just the projects moving forward. It was the team dynamic, the sense of achievement across each member of the team, seeing what others are doing.

So any feelings of, well, she doesn’t actually do anything. So you never hear from her. You know, this kind of silent kind of stuff that can happen in virtual teams. All of a sudden everyone was like, wow, she’s really punching above her weight there. You know, doing lots and realizing what everyone’s doing. And I thought it was going to be overwhelming for them all. They all said resoundingly, including myself, that overwhelm was actually eradicated because of the process and the focus. That was the biggest eye-opener for me and connecting the connections of my team just went through the roof. They actually started realizing that there was cross-pollination of the project as well. They were like, oh my project is actually kind of melding into yours because you need help in this area. My project is going to help that part of your project. I didn’t anticipate any of that. I didn’t even realize that was going to happen. And it did very much so.

That’s really interesting.

Bean Ninjas: It is hard to get that kind of collaboration happening with virtual teams. I know with managers and their teams that with that collaboration, you can still put things in place and I feel like that works pretty well. I know at Bean Ninjas it does, but then the cross department, it’s much harder. And if you have a joint project, it is much harder. So as we’re talking, I’m already thinking about the Bean Ninjas sprint series.

Barbara Turley: To give you an example, one thing that was huge was the customer success team, the girls that do my customer success and support, they developed, the one they worked on is a transition process. Now, what we mean by that is let’s say we have a situation where someone resigns or something happens or whatever, and we need to transition one VA out, put a new VA in. And our whole sort of value proposition to the market is that we eradicate overwhelm as much as we can for our clients.

So it is very overwhelming if you have a great VA and that VA all of a sudden leaves or goes off to do something else or has a baby or anything, and you have to transition someone in. So we take over that process for all of our clients and we say, look, we’ll give you a new person, but we’ll handle it as much as we can. But we needed a more robust process and structure for how we do it across teams so that we get the same result for every client and not just kind of ad hoc.

Then what we found is that the girls worked on that. They did a fantastic job. It was one of the most impressive kinds of projects. They were all impressive, but this one was nailing it because it helps not just with client success, client retention, which helps on the sales side. It actually helps the team leaders and the entire operations department. It helps on the HR side because you don’t have some employee or VA going into a new account unprepared, and doesn’t know what’s going on, is overwhelmed, might resign, might just be like, I can’t deal with this. So it helped across so many departments. It solved other smaller rock problems in other departments by the girls doing that big rock project and sharing it so openly with the team.

Bean Ninjas: And what were a couple of other examples of rock projects?

Barbara Turley: Training. We run huge training programs. One of our value propositions to the market is that we train VA’s in digital. So certain segments of digital marketing implementation we do. But because that moves quite fast, we have to revamp training programs quite fast. And demands from clients as well, we realized. So the customer success girls were saying, we’re getting…

So sorry, the guys decided to rebuild the training program. They wanted a new platform and they wanted to bring in way more training. And then what transpired through the huddles was the customer success team were saying, actually clients are asking for that. Actually clients are commenting on that. And then the HR team said, you know what, when we review all the client evaluations, we do these evaluations for HR and KPI’s and salary discussions.

The HR team said, wow, if you can solve that problem, one of the big things we see on the evaluations is that we score low in aggregate in this area. So if you’re going to bring out a training on that, that would really, I think, ramp up this area. So, you know, again, it was just a lot of our team didn’t know what actually happened in training because they’re not involved in it. So all of a sudden, our training program has taken a whole new angle. Everyone is contributing and collaborating and helping the trainers to understand what we need more of.

Bean Ninjas: So if you were to do a sprint again, or actually that’s a question, are you planning to do another sprint and is there anything you’d do differently?

Barbara Turley: Yes, we’re going to do it again. We’re going to do it every quarter. I think what we’re going to do is the first part of the quarter, we’re going to just sit back and watch. I’ve said to everyone, I want you to just take a break after each sprint. Now we do review after the sprint, which I’ll talk about in a second, but then you’ve got to spend the first six weeks of every quarter just watching. Watch the holes, watch the complaints, watch the mistakes, watch the kind of, let the overwhelm build, right? And then just observe.

Write things down, be observant. Next few weeks, maybe six weeks of the quarter, we’ll do that. Then we start to move into planning the project. So then you’re going to start going, this thing here that I’ve seen over the last six weeks is really a problem. I’m going to focus on this one. And you start to think about what that would look like. So what problem would I like to solve? What would it take to solve it? All that sort of thing. And then you pick your big rock for this quarter. And in the final two weeks of the quarter or the final three weeks, let’s say, we do the sprint. Now we do have to plan more effectively because you do need to shut down some of your business as usual tasks because you can’t have everyone under the pump. So you’ve got to have moments of like, we probably need to cut recruiting and training for a few weeks during the sprint so that we can take the pressure off because that’s across the board. Sales, onboarding, HR, etc. and plan a bit more effectively for it, I think.

But we’re going to try that, yeah, because everyone enjoyed it. They felt energized. That was what the feedback was.

Hopefully we can record another episode down the track where we can share how we’re both going with this sprint and it’ll be nothing.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so you’re gonna do one?

Bean Ninjas: I love the idea. I mean, we do work in public and we try to work really quickly. So try and stay focused on something and have short timelines. I haven’t done that with a whole group of people or the leadership team. Our team would really enjoy it too. So yeah.

Barbara Turley: The thing I would add to it, I think it would be important to do some sort of celebration at the end. Because projects, they didn’t all finish at the end of the two weeks. Some of them are still going, but they moved, they’re almost finished. Like they’re kind of, but I think we probably should have had a celebration. Well, we’re virtuals. It’s hard to do a celebration dinner, but we do have people in certain locations. Maybe we should do some sort of celebration to celebrate the end of the sprint or the achievements of the sprint.

Or I think another thing I’d like to do is maybe share it with the rest of the whole company so that they know what we’re working on. So there’s like town halls that we’ll build off the back of it to say, here’s the things we did and tie it into what the employees actually asked for. So I’m very transparent with all the people that we have in the business. I actually asked them, what do you want? And then we go, okay, we can’t really do that one, but we can do this one. And then we tell them like all the time what we’re working on that they’ve asked for. So we can tie those into the sprints as well.

So before we wrap up, is there anything else sprint related or any other lessons that you wanted to share?

Barbara Turley: I think the biggest one for me was that whole concept of not allowing your lack of knowledge of this thing to get in the way. I sort of thought, maybe I should learn more about sprints and how to do them properly. But what I discovered through doing the one we did was I don’t know if we did it right. I really don’t know. But all I know is the results that we got and it served the purpose we needed. So do I really need to look at Agile more closely?

I don’t really have time at the moment, so no, I’m not going to let that get in my way. I just, we got the results we wanted from it and I think we’ll learn as a team and it was very exciting.

Bean Ninjas: I love it. It’s a great example of just going ahead and doing something, as you said, rather than letting something like not having enough knowledge about a job get in the way.

Barbara Turley: For me, to spend a month studying Agile and overwhelming myself even more and then not actually doing it. Look, I am a big fan of, I’m a bit like that. I’m just like, let’s just do it. Screw it. Let’s do it. And just make it up as you go along. And it has worked very well for me over the years doing it that way. It wouldn’t work for everyone. And you have to kind of accept that you might be sort of swimming a bit going, okay, well, let’s see if this works.

Bean Ninjas: That’s actually my philosophy of business. And I had to learn that because as an accountant, all of my training is about not sharing reports with a client until you’re sure they’re 100%. And there’s a lot of it, it’s very conservative. And I had to learn all of that. And then going into business realized, no, it’s all about a lot of success in business, I think, is to do with speed of execution.

Barbara Turley: 100%. Yeah. I think I have a natural tendency to do that. It is one of my kind of personality traits. And also like I spent 10 years working on a trading floor, an equity trading floor where you never really know what’s going on. But if you don’t make decisions and do something like the whole name of that game is just get in the game and start playing. You don’t have time to read 400 analyst reports to figure out what trade you should make when the markets are open. So for me, I have that natural tendency to be like, yeah, let’s just do it and we’ll figure it out as we go. So I think that’s really benefited me.

Bean Ninjas: And I think some people will be like you and will have that natural tendency. And some might be like me that maybe didn’t have that naturally, but I just had to learn it and force myself to do it. And so I think whoever you are listening to, the lesson from that is just to make yourself uncomfortable and try it. And I mean, what have you got to lose? You’ll learn from your first iteration and then you can, or your first sprint or whatever it is, and then you’ll learn from it and improve next time.

Barbara Turley: The thing is, it’s not like you’re going to fail. Like I was thinking, could you fail at it? Not really. I mean, what’s failure? Like, you know, maybe it just bombs out or people fight or something. I don’t know. But that would be learning anyway. Like you’d learn a lot about your team from it. So there’s no failure in this. There’s just discovery. I think that’s definitely what I found from it. And like I said, I was just so blown away by all the little things I didn’t even realize, the results that we were going to get from it. And I got way more than what I ever thought in different areas actually, in different ways.

Bean Ninjas: This has been so much fun. I’ve loved the first episode in this series and I’m looking forward to recording the next one with you.

Barbara Turley: Yes, me too. Sharing this with both of our podcast listeners is a great idea. For all my listeners as well, we’re going to be doing lots of these, Meryl and I, just discussing, again, we have virtual companies. Both you and I run big virtual teams. So this isn’t just about virtual teams. But I think in a virtual world, the stuff that you and I are doing is going to help those that are running virtual teams a lot, specifically.

Bean Ninjas: Thanks for listening to the Bean Ninjas podcast. Here are three ways to grow your freedom business faster. Number one, download our free Xero Small Business Toolkit. Go to beanninjas.com forward slash podcast gift and use our cashflow forecasting template as well as the other resources available. Number two, subscribe to this podcast. Don’t miss another episode as we’ll be bringing you more inspiring guests, small business finance and Xero tips and also an inside look how we are growing Bean Ninjas into a global brand. Finally, they say the best way to retain what you learn is to share or teach what you’ve learned with someone else. So leave a review on iTunes with your key takeaway from this episode. Alternatively, you could also post and share this podcast on social media. Be sure to tag us at Bean Ninjas or use hashtag Bean Ninjas on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

This will help us to grow our community and help even more small business owners to create freedom through stress-free finances. So once again, download, subscribe and share. That link again, www.beanninjas.com forward slash podcast gift. Catch you on the next episode.