VoiceActor: Welcome to the Bean Ninjas podcast, where you get an all-access pass to see what happens behind the closed doors of a fast-growing global bookkeeping and financial reporting business.

Meryl Johnston: In today’s episode of the Beanagers podcast, I chat with Barbara Turley, who is the founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub. And we have a great chat talking about hiring and running teams in the Philippines. And that is what her business is all about. She has around 150 staff working for the Virtual Hub. And we also dive into leadership systems and running startups. Hey Barbara, welcome to the show.

Barbara Turley: Hey, Meryl, thanks so much for having me.

Meryl Johnston: And you’re the CEO and founder of Virtual Hub. Could you tell me and the audience a little bit about that business and how you got into that?

Barbara Turley: Sure, actually, everybody always loves this story because I call it my accidental business. A bit like how you started Bean Ninjas. I didn’t really intend to create something so huge. So basically, the Virtual Hub is a company that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants in the Philippines and only for businesses all over the world who are engaging in any sort of digital marketing or online strategies. And we specialize in the implementation and all the to do lists that get attached to those kinds of strategies. So really, how I started it, I was in corporate for about 15 years, loved it, and had no real desire to run my own business until the sort of last five years of that time. And like many of them, we left corporate, I did some consulting and I was doing some business coaching. And I found that I was sort of struggling to figure out what sort of a company I would build, what would I sell.

And I stumbled upon a problem that I felt all of the businesses were having, regardless of whether they were online, offline, you know, businesses, brick and mortar, didn’t really matter what they were doing. They all were in that sort of, I call it, the deep crevice between startup and growth that can actually last for 10, 20 years. In that, if they didn’t hire, they couldn’t afford to hire staff, so the revenue wasn’t enough to hire staff. But without hiring people, they were never going to get out of that crevice. And I’m sure you see this probably with clients coming through to you guys as well.

So I started recruiting. I had a virtual assistant in the Philippines myself, and I basically started recruiting a few of her friends in the early days just to help the clients out. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about it as a business. And over the course of, I’d say about a month, maybe a couple of months, I started getting calls from friends of clients saying, “can you get me one of those virtual assistants?” And I was getting asked more for that than I was for business coaching.

There was one weekend I thought to myself, I wonder, is there a business in this? So I put on a webinar. I had built a bit of a list at that stage of prospects or whatever. And I did a webinar, and it was very simple. It was just how to successfully and confidently use virtual assistants to grow your business. And it was probably the most successful webinar I ever did without putting much energy or money or anything into it. And literally overnight, The Virtual Hub was born. Within a month, we were in business.

And I pivoted out of coaching and into this. So that’s how it started.

Meryl Johnston: Wow, so what did those first few years look like?

Barbara Turley: In those first few months, we were like, wow, I’ve hit on, you know, when you launch something and everyone wants a piece of it, I was like, wow, I’ve hit on the thing that everyone was talking about. But very quickly, within, I’d say, about six months of starting, it started to very badly unravel. And it was extraordinarily stressful for me because I realized that the problem people were facing was that they didn’t know how to get an offshore team member. So they were on board with the idea that this is a cheaper, cost-effective way to do this. And I thought the problem was they were too afraid to go on to Upwork or get their own VA because you can do it yourself. And I couldn’t understand why people wanted to pay me to do it. So I thought that was the problem, but that actually was just stage one of the problem.

And stage two started to raise its ugly head very quickly thereafter, where people, or at least the clients we were getting at the time, had no idea how to delegate. They had no concept of process or how to run a team, even if the team is just you and one other person. Communication was an issue. They expected VAs to be mind readers. The VAs were annoyed, the clients were annoyed, and they were all complaining to me on every channel possible, from text message to Skype message. So I used to wake up every morning just in hell, going, I can’t deal with this anymore. So I really shut the business down. Actually, after about eight months, I hated it.

And I sort of thought, well, look, I am onto something here. I just need to slash most of the staff and most of the clients, which I did. So I paid it right back. And then I spent the following year, like really heavily building training programs for clients on the way in to make sure that they were ready for a VA before the VA arrived. And I also built a training program for VAs so that I could have more control over what they actually said they were able to do on their resumes. Because most of the time it was rubbish. They didn’t actually know what they were doing at all.

So that solved a lot of problems in that first kind of, that was the first 18 months to two years was building a lot of systems.

Meryl Johnston: Wow. And so have you found that now that you’ve built these training programs that that solved that stage two problem that you mentioned, that the clients had identified that they needed a VA but actually they weren’t quite ready? They didn’t have the systems. They weren’t confident in how to communicate or delegate. So has that helped?

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. And again, it was very, in those early days, it was a very basic kind of program. I just taught them how to use Asana. I was like, just use Asana and here’s a concept of a recurring task list and here’s how to create a process. It was very, very simple. In fact, it was so simple, I was almost embarrassed putting it out because I thought, lots of us who start businesses assume everybody knows the stuff that we know, the stuff that we think is simple. But people didn’t.

And I remember there was one client who said to me way back in the early days, I remember he said to me, you know what? That training that I got was a game changer for me and my business, even without getting a VA. And that was when I realized that I had actually really unearthed that second big problem and that the business I was building had to solve this problem in order to help clients to get success with VAs.

And then, of course, after that, I realized that the VAs weren’t as trained as they said they were. So I started to look at both sides of the equation and think, well, how do I make sure that this is a successful pairing on both sides? So a VA gets a great career. They feel supported. They feel trained. They know what they’re doing. And the client similarly has trust in the fact that we are behind this VA training them.

Look, today, I mean, if I were to fast forward, we’re now nearly five years in, and we have 140 staff right now, and they’re all employees. So I made them all employees in the Philippines. And it is now more like a machine, so we can have high confidence in our success rate. It’s not 100%, but people businesses, you’re never going to be 100%, but we do have a very high success rate these days on both sides of the fence.

Meryl Johnston: And what does your internal team look like now? You’ve mentioned that it’s a lot more like a machine, and I love systems, and I love talking about team structures and how you figured out what the key roles were and whether that evolved from your first couple of years to where you are now, five years into the business.

Barbara Turley: Very much so. And I will be open in saying that it has been a labor of love for me, in that I had to learn a lot of things myself along the way. I found I had some natural talents when it comes to leading people, and I love mentoring people. But that sort of was my strongest point, but also became my weakness. So, for example, in one day I had two VAs, and then I got three VAs and four VAs. And before I knew it, I found myself having five, six, seven VAs to help run it. But they were all reporting to me, and I was becoming my own bottleneck big time.

And I thought, wow, I can’t really do all this anymore. So I started to elevate some of those VAs into more project manager-type roles. Now that brought with it a lot of challenges because I see a lot of clients trying to do this. They’ve got a magnificent VA, but then they try and elevate them into a different role and they underestimate the training, mentorship, leadership, know, hand-holding that is required even for a rock star A player to become that next role. And I spent a lot of time in the weeds trying to do that.

Arguably, I should’ve hired somebody who knew what they were doing. I don’t know because I think even though it was difficult in the early days for me to do this, those who were always deeply knew me, they deeply knew the business, they were building the processes with me anyway.

So I think it was sort of six of one, half a dozen of another, really. And then over time, I mean, now my team today. I did get a great piece of advice from my co-host on the podcast that I have, Matt Maloof, who you met, Meryl. I remember talking to him about this problem when I didn’t know who to hire next. And he said to me, I want you to do the org chart of your business when it has a hundred people first, and then figure out what you need to hire next.

And that was a very pivotal moment for me and a piece of advice. When I did the org chart, I realized, wow, I’m going to need like, if you’ve got 100 people, you need like five or six team leaders, you need a head of HR, you need a head of operations, et cetera, et cetera. So I started to think about team leaders at that point. I realized that I needed to start thinking about team leaders to run the teams of VAs that were working for clients.

So I’m hoping that gives you a sense of just this evolution of the team. I tried to start with the end in mind. So today, I have 140 staff and I do have a head of operations, a head of HR, five team leaders. I’ve got a finance manager. So I have the structure now. And I probably have too many staff right now on my internal team for the size of the business, but we can grow. I could probably triple the business with that number of staff.

Meryl Johnston: That’s an interesting concept around how deep a leader needs to be in each area. And I actually have a similar point of view as well. For example, when we’ve been working on SEO, even though we use external consultants to help us and then we do some of it internally based on their feedback, we go and implement that. I felt like, to make the most of that relationship, I need to understand SEO. So I will go and read about it and make sure that I’m asking the right questions and we’re talking about the right things because I think with any kind.

Barbara Turley: A hundred percent agree. I’m just nodding and smiling as you’re talking. Anytime I have not done that and I’ve gone, no, I should let go and let them deal with it. Maybe it’s just me. It’s been a disaster, right? Because I’m like, so you didn’t know to ask this? Or the risks, there’s just too many risks in it. So I tend to want to be pretty deep into something myself, and that’s worked very well for me. Cause then I can step in and go, that’s not working. I can know by looking at a dashboard that something’s not working.

Meryl Johnston: Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes I’ve reflected on that similar trait that I have and thought, is this a weakness? Am I spending too much time on some of these things and going too deep? But yeah, it has worked for me. And it’s the same kind of thing when I have engaged with contractors where I haven’t got a good enough understanding of what they’re doing. I don’t know if they’re doing a good job, and sometimes they’re not. And I don’t know enough to call that out early. So I prefer to know as much as I can. And the more you know. So if I were with my skill set, my core skill set being accounting, I feel like I could outsource that if I wanted, really well, because I would know exactly what to look for. Whereas some of these newest skills, like SEO, have taken me a bit longer to figure that out.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. We just had an issue recently with Google AdWords. That’s a very technical area, and I did hand that over. I experimented with not being involved with that. It’s funny, even though I wasn’t involved, months ago I was bringing up the fact that I was feeling like there were issues with it because, even though I don’t understand how they were doing it, it was like, we’re not getting the right reporting. I know the metrics I should be seeing. We were getting nothing.

Eventually, when I dived into it and had a deeper look, and I thought, I’ll just learn a little bit here, I discovered some shady stuff that was going on. And I was like, never again. So it gives me a lot of sleepless nights. And I find, for me personally anyway, when I do it this way, I get success faster. I have no sleepless nights really. I do have a few, but I don’t get that sense of tying myself up with internal anxiety around not knowing what’s going on. And maybe that makes me a control freak. I don’t know.

From my perspective, I think it makes a much stronger business. My team is happier because they feel like I’ve got this. And also, if I ever come to sell this business, it is highly scalable and saleable, which is what, you know, I don’t know if I ever will, but that’s really what we’re all trying to achieve here, is that you’re building an asset, and the asset will be valued higher based on how systematized it is, how process-driven it is, and how much IP does or doesn’t sit with your top players. So if someone wants to buy your business, and someone at the top holds all the IP in their head, and you’ve no idea what they actually do, they can just walk out the door, and the business is worthless. So for me, I don’t like that sort of structure. I prefer the structure I’m going after, but it doesn’t work for everyone.

Meryl Johnston: That’s a great point about selling your business, and even though you may not be intending to do that, it makes the business more valuable when that time or if that time comes. But I think it also makes for a more enjoyable business, too, because when you’ve created all of those systems, then as the CEO, you can be focused on other areas or growth or innovating. So yes, it sounds like we have a similar style where we get in and learn about all these different areas of business and then hand them off and have the systems and the reporting channels in place to make sure they’re working well. But having that, all of those different systemized areas, make for a more valuable business.

Barbara Turley: I honestly think as well, if I really think about it, like as the leader of a business, the founder or the CEO or the person who, you know, the person leading the business, and you don’t have to be involved in the day-to-day processes. You don’t have to be involved in the operations, but you need a level of oversight and reporting structure such that if risks are happening down the channels, even right down at the lower ranks or wherever the people are, that your system shows it to you very quickly. So, for example, I’ve worked on a dashboard recently where I said to one of my guys, I know we have HR processes and I know we have sick leave and all these different things, but I would like to have a dashboard where every day I can see, like, this month we had this many sick leaves and that was 50% higher than last month. So very quickly, I can go, we have a problem, right? There’s either, or do we have to make sure people are washing their hands in the office? Maybe we need a wellness program. Maybe there’s a virus going around. Maybe people just see a few others that got away with slacking off, so they decided to do it as well. So you need to have a way that very quickly you can actually look at data and go, there’s a change there, and ask the question.

Meryl Johnston: It’s interesting. My thing for this quarter that’s coming up from the 1st of July is metrics. And we have monthly reporting around financials, but we also have weekly reporting internally around things like leads coming in. There’s marketing metrics, sales metrics, and we’re doing a project this quarter around exactly what weekly metrics are we looking at to flag where we need to take action or where we need to focus out.

Barbara Turley: In my view, that is actually funny because we’re working on the same project at the moment. So I’ve sort of given you a theory that we’re working on as opposed to an actual dashboard that we have yet, but it’s in the works. But I think like that, and that’s the job of the leader of the business in my view. And people who don’t see it that way are the ones who like to go out and do all the sales and just sort of be the external. They’re not really looking at what’s going on internally, or at least have your ops person reporting to you on that. But again, I still think you should have the dashboards as the leader. You can see anything you want to see in a second.

Meryl Johnston: I look forward to comparing notes in a few months about that.

Barbara Turley: I want to know what platforms you’re using. We’re already like, I don’t know. Is it Google Data Studio? Is it like, how do we do this? So we’re still in the throes of figuring all that out.

Meryl Johnston: Now I’ve got some questions from my team for you about hiring staff and managing staff in the Philippines. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just run through some of these questions and get your insights. So the first one is, what are the biggest mistakes you made when initially hiring staff in the Philippines?

Barbara Turley: Yes. So the way back in the early days, the biggest mistake I made was interviewing them myself. I know in the early days you had to because nobody else was interviewing them. But I rapidly discovered that one of my strong points is not interviewing people. And it took my initial small team of VAs to approach me one day and say, Barb, we don’t think you should interview people anymore. Good on them for taking that. That was risky, telling me that. And I said, yeah, OK, why?

And they said, because you want to give everyone a job. We think that it should be more metrics-driven, more this, more that. And they were right. And we got higher success rates when I actually stepped away because I got too emotionally attached to the story that people tell you. So everyone has a story, and I wasn’t focusing enough on the skills and the deep questioning around cultural fit, or I’m just not very good at that, to be honest. So it was better that I allowed my team to come up with something. We’ve evolved it over time, of course, but that was a big learning for me personally. Today, I would say the biggest piece of advice I could share is that today we have a high success rate with recruiting and hiring because we do hire very slowly, but we are extremely metrics-driven. So, for example, people have to apply for a job with us, and when they apply, if they fit the first few broad criteria.

They have to come into our office and sit a five-hour exam where they may fail in the first hour. So there’s like toll gates on the five-hour thing. We look at the results. It’s pretty mean, the stuff we do. It’s mean, but it’s effective, right? They’ve got to do quite a lot of study, assignments, and things. And there are certain things that we’re looking for throughout that process. And only if they pass all of that do we even look at the resume and then invite them for interviews. So they’re only invited in for an interview, you know, if we feel that they have already demonstrated that they are smart. They may not have the experience, but they have the smarts and the skills to do what it is we’re teaching. And then we put them through a month-long intensive full-time training program where there are toll gates every week at metrics-driven. There’s no favoritism or any of that. It’s like, you know, a pass or fail kind of thing. So our success rate is high because of that. So I would encourage anyone to, we all focus on resumes and interviewing people. Resumes can say anything, and some people shine in interviews and they’re terrible on the job. So it’s better to be more process-driven and metrics-driven, I feel anyway, depending on the level, I guess, but that’s my approach.

Meryl Johnston: It sounds like a really strong approach to finding the right people. If you had 10 people go from initial application, maybe I need to say if you had 100 go from submitting their application, how many would actually make it through that? It sounds like quite a rigorous process.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, hardly any. So basically, at the moment, we are getting on average about 500 applications per month. And here’s the hilarious thing. About half of those will book in for the appointment. They will be like, yeah, my time started at eight o’clock on Friday, and they won’t show up. They won’t cancel or reschedule, and we’ll never hear from them again. And then they go on our blacklist because we’re like, that’s a character issue, right? You may have had something come up. You may have panicked. You may have been like, I’m not sure this is for me.

But a professional would contact you and say, look, I’ve rethought it. I just want to let you know that I’m not attending. To not show up is like step number one for us. We’re like, if they’re not even going to show up or contact us for the test, what kind of an employee are they going to be? They’ll go AWOL. They’ll just disappear one day. So that cuts about 50% of them out. And then of the people left in the Philippines, a lot of them will fail our first test, which is English.

Even though they speak great English, we have very rigorous testing around grammar and ability to put a thought down in a proper paragraph and punctuation and all these kinds of things. So a lot of people will fail at that point. Anyway, we whittle them down and then some people, like about 40%, will fail in the interview even after all of that because we see traits that were just not really like character flaws or cultural just mismatches or too much ego, this sort of thing.

So out of 100 people, our hit rate is between 2 and 5% will be successful. So it’s really hard to get 10 employees. We’ve got to have like 500 people in the funnel.

Meryl Johnston: Do you get so many applicants in the funnel?

Barbara Turley: So there are obviously job sites that are specifically in Cebu where we’re located. But what we have found recently is that we did a lot of work in the last two years on our employee brand in the Philippines. I realized about two years ago that we actually have two types of personas that we’re going after. We’ve got the client side where we want specific types of clients. We also have an employee side. So I realized that we need to have a separate brand in the Philippines that is all about building a career with us. Forget about the virtual hub and what we do on the client side. And we worked very hard. We have our own website over there and a completely different messaging. We have a different social media strategy and over two years of pain in building that and being consistent and getting no traction, like literally no traction whatsoever. All of a sudden we reached a tipping point in about January of this year, that all the work we were pushing, pushing, pushing, a few people started to show up and say, I saw you on Instagram. And we were like, oh, that’s interesting. And then that kind of gathered momentum. And a lot of our stuff is coming through Facebook and Instagram at the moment, where people are looking at it because we share stuff about our culture and our people and what it’s like to work for us and all this sort of thing. And that attracts people. And sometimes they just show up and say, I want to apply. How do I apply?

That’s great. It’s almost like a separate marketing strategy and content strategy.

Barbara Turley: A separate thing, yeah, completely.

Meryl Johnston: We’ve started on the very early days of that with some blog posts profiling. We’ve done one so far with our Philippines team members, and then tried to write content about how to be a good accountant. So, how to be a good virtual accountant or work for Australian businesses. But it sounds like we’ve got a couple of years of hard work ahead of us to really build a profile as a good employer of accountants in the Philippines. So we’re very early days with that.

Barbara Turley: Look, think as well, you thought about how to become a great VA concept, but there are a lot of people out there who want to become a freelance VA, and we’re an employee model. So those are actually different mindsets. People who want to work from home, like freelancing, tend to be less successful with us. They might have more experience, but they are difficult to manage, right? Because they always think the grass is greener, they can do better by themselves and all this sort of thing. So we have pitched all of our employee branding around, you know, being part of our culture, not necessarily what it’s like to be a VA, more like what it’s like to be one of us, to be part of our team. And that’s been more successful for us because we stopped attracting people who were getting burnt in the freelance market and thought, “Oh, I’ll just go and get a job for a few months just to get myself over the hump. And then I’ll go somewhere like The Virtual Hub and I’ll get a client and then I’ll pirate the client and I’ll lie and I’ll take them directly.”

So that’s a risk that we face in the business as well. We obviously have strong contracts around that kind of thing, but that’s something that we have to watch out for.

Meryl Johnston: The next question is, what do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of remote work or an office workplace? And I think this, the context of this is, I believe you have an office for your team.

Barbara Turley: So the work-from-home model is fine, right? The remote working thing absolutely works fine. And it was great for me. I still have a number of people on my internal team who work from home. It works fine, except you need to have it, and I learned this the hard way, and I see a lot of people doing this in the remote culture. People are too easygoing. So you say, look, I don’t mind when you do the work. Like, you know, it’s up to you. You work from home and do your thing and whatever you want to do as long as I get the results.

In my experience, there are lots of people who work well with that, but the majority of people, human nature is that we will leave things to the last minute. And what you’ll find, Filipinos tend to live with the whole family. So it can be like four generations living together. Everyone’s minding the kids, and there’s always some sort of thing going on. And before you know it, your work is being done at three o’clock in the morning with a baby. You know, some women are trying to breastfeed a baby and do their work.

And then she probably will decide, well, now I could probably get a job during the day because, you know, Barbara doesn’t care when I do the work. So she gets a full-time job during the day that you don’t know about. And your work all of a sudden is showing lots of mistakes. And then they’re lying about it. And, you know, this whole problem happens. So I always say, if you’re going to do work from home, have flexibility within the structure. So you might say, look, our business is, you know, we are remote, we are flexible, but we need to all be online. We are in Australia and we work from eight to five or whatever it is, and we would like you to be online at least for 80% of that time. We need to be contactable. You know, we might just ping you on Skype and do something. So that works for me. And I found that that worked fine until I had about 50 staff. After 50, disaster. I couldn’t track them. You know, people were in the shopping mall and saying that they were working and all this, you know, because they could do stuff from their phone. And I bit the bullet at that point and said, “That’s it, I’m going office-based.” And since I made that decision, and I have a lot of structure, I have happier employees, happier management teams, and I have happier clients, and I’m less stressed out. So personally, I would never do the work from home again, but in the Philippines and even some Westerners like us, unless someone is very organized and you have a good structure and good boundaries as a business, I think it can work then, but if you’re too laissez-faire about us and like, yeah, you do whatever you like, that can get tricky.

Meryl Johnston: Thank you. And was that a big project organizing the office and getting that all set up?

Barbara Turley: Oh, yes. If I had known how difficult that was going to be before I did it, I probably would have just shut the business down. I mean, I had to do something, though. I realized that I had to, for myself, I had to make a change. And I realized a personal thing. At the time, I thought to myself, “Why am I doing work from home?” And I realized that it wasn’t for my own benefit. It was because that was what the Filipino people wanted. And I was like, hold on a sec.

So I’m giving you what you want, but it’s keeping me up all night, and it’s making a mess in my own life, my personal life. So I thought, no, it doesn’t actually work for me actually. Might work for other people listening, but it didn’t work for me at scale. And I realized, how am I going to have 500 people working from home? Like what a nightmare that would be. Even data security and all these things started coming up for me. And I thought, nah, just put them all in an office and create the culture and the branding and the whole thing that I want.

I had to set up a Philippine company. This was the thing I went and did: the company structure. There’s a lot of red tape involved in that, and I don’t live in the Philippines, and I had a young baby at the time. But I got through it and we’re going strong. We’re good.

Meryl Johnston: So I’ll ask one last question, which is, what are the characteristics of your best employees?

Barbara Turley: Yes, I can answer this one quickly. My best employees are those that are smart and agile. So I’ll use the word agile because they don’t get wedded to it. Now, some of them are trained to do this, but it is a personality trait. They need to realize that I might create a process, or they might create one, and then the market might very rapidly tell us that that process is not working and you need to iterate. You need to change it.

So the ones that are very successful with me are the ones that have learned that very quickly and are okay with going, “Oh, my process is not working.” You know, so with recruitment, for example, we need to kind of iterate that a lot. We’re always testing new things, same with marketing. So the best people end up there. The other trait for me personally, my best people, again, maybe it’s me being, you know, control freakish, but they tend to work the way I do. So they slot into the machine that I’ve built very well.

For example, they love Asana. They like to be organized, and they want to update each other. They’re good at, you know, plugging into the system instead of coming in and wanting to change the whole system to suit what they want to do. So I’ve had some very talented people with a lot of experience come in and just not get that that’s what we need here. And they try to just go off their own path. And it makes a mess for the rest of us. And they just didn’t get it. And I was like, you know, you really, so when I’m recruiting and hiring for the bigger roles, which I do get involved in these days, I’m very clear about how you feel about plugging into this system. If I can tell that they’re not really on board with that idea, it doesn’t matter how good they are; they’re probably not going to work here for me anyway.

Meryl Johnston: Did you have any final thoughts or tips for new business owners in their first couple of years to stick with it? And just generally, doesn’t need to be related to hiring or outsourcing, but just a couple of thoughts about what it takes to be successful long-term and then the best place for anyone in the audience to get in touch with you. Yeah.

Barbara Turley: It depends. So in the very early stages, when you’re in that sort startup-y stage where you’re still testing the market, I think people get very caught up, and I did this as well, but people get very caught up in, and anyone listening to this might dive headlong into building processes and systems and hiring VAs. And when you haven’t really got your product-to-market fit right yet, I’m like, in the early days, honestly, don’t even worry about any of that stuff. You’ve just got to focus on sales and get feedback from the market and refine your offer.

And once you’ve kind of nailed what it is you’re going to be selling, and you can see that there’s demand for this thing, then you’re sort of like, now we’re in business. And at that point, you need to realize that when you change, you shift gear. And a lot of people fall here because they don’t want to make the change. They love the sales part, the startup, the crazy, the chaos, but you can’t grow that. And you will end up, I call it internal leverage. You’ll end up getting swallowed by your external leverage because you’ll do loads of sales.

You’ll love digital marketing and funnels and Google SEO and all this stuff. You will get deep into that, and you’ll get all these leads coming through. And people who want your service or product and your delivery will be terrible because you won’t have the infrastructure, the systems, the processes, the teams. So once you figure out, like, what is it we’re selling? And yes, there’s a market for this. People want it. Then you have to shift gears very quickly and go, now I need to build the machine quickly before you ramp up sales too much because you’re going to go into chaos.

And at that point, you need to make a commitment, not just to hiring, learning to delegate and mastering the art of delegation, but you have to master the art of system building and process building. And lots of entrepreneurs like, they would prefer to stick noodles in their eyeballs than do that. But the reality is like, honestly, we will hire someone to do it for you, but that’s going to be very expensive or just take the pain, commit to it, it takes about two years, 12 months to 2 years.

And then you have something that is scalable and saleable, right? And then you can push as many sales as you like down the pipes because the pipes are big enough to cope. I hope that makes sense, but I have really strong views on that. And I think that’s why people fail. They don’t do that bit.

Meryl Johnston: We’ve articulated that really well and agreed that in my case, it’s taken closer to 2 years than the 12 months.

Barbara Turley: I think it will take two years. Yeah, I think people think they can do it. You know, I see people trying to hire VAs and in three months they’re like, it’s just not working. I’m like, you have so long to go before. I mean, you can fire the VA, but really, usually the VA is not the problem. Now, as long as you’ve recruited, trained and hired well, because there’s a lot of slippery VAs out there, you can be careful online. But if you have a good person who’s genuinely good and enthusiastic and showing up and smart enough, the problem is not them.

And if you find yourself churning through staff, it’s time to look in the mirror and go, “What am I doing wrong in the business?” Because the people are probably not the problem. It could be something else.

Meryl Johnston: Well, Barbara, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. It’s been so much fun chatting with you, and when’s the best place for our audience to get in touch with you?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So if you pop over to thevirtualhub.com, you can book a call with one of our strategy consultants that we cover across the globe. So we’ve got US coverage and Australia. We can do 24 hours. So we can cope with all of that. And you can have a free call with one of our consultants, and they figure out, you know, are you ready for this? Are we ready for you? Are you a good fit?

But also our website is full. We’re sort of going the route that you are, Meryl, with Bean Ninjas, in that we want to be a thought leader in this whole concept of building scalable teams and systems. And we’ve a lot of content over there that really helps you to figure out how to get ready and make sure that once you do invest money in an offshore team, in the case of what we do, that you will get a return on investment from us. Because otherwise, if you don’t do the work first of what I’ve been talking about, you’re just throwing a body at the problem, and that’s going to cost you time, energy and money. So we’re very clear with people about that, and our website’s all about that kind of thing. I’m trying to get more active on LinkedIn, but as you know, running a large team means that social media can be the place where you’re not that present, but on LinkedIn, you can find me personally, just Barbara Turley over there.

Meryl Johnston: Fantastic. Thanks again, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Thanks.