Unlocking business growth through delegation & Support Assistants
Business Choreography
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Episode breakdown
Barbara Turley is an investor, entrepreneur, and Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub – a business she started by accident that scaled quickly to become one of the leading companies that integrates in-house trained support assistants into clients businesses.This strategy frees up time and energy so that businesses can focus on optimizing their operations further to achieve business growth goals. With a strong focus on customized training and ongoing career development, The Virtual Hub ensures that her team is trained in cutting-edge programs (like Hubspot, Ontraport, etc.) to best meet their clients’ unique needs in digital marketing, social media, operational support and administrative services.
- How Barbara Turley started The Virtual Hub
- What steps to take when your startup doesn't succeed
- How to address and manage the fear associated with using assistants
- Setting up for success with remote teams
- How to effectively oversee your remote team or employees in a virtual work environment
- Building a strong and positive company culture
We all need to focus on building the business of the future, which is digital. It's a digital first business, and when you do that, location becomes irrelevant, right?...Tools like Asana, you can literally create a space where people show up every day to collaborate, to do work, to report on work and interact
In this episode
00:01 Barbara’s journey into entrepreneurship
Barbara Turley shares her background working in the financial industry, her shift toward entrepreneurship after realizing corporate life wouldn’t align with her personal goals, and the challenges she faced during the 2008 financial crisis. She describes how her accidental foray into assistants began through business coaching and identifying a common need among small businesses.
06:47 Lessons from a failed startup
Barbara discusses her first business venture focused on financial education for women, which didn’t succeed. She reflects on how trying to tackle a massive problem without adequate resources and focusing on future-oriented needs rather than immediate, pressing ones led to its failure. The experience taught her to start small, solve an acute problem, and expand from there.
09:35 Building a business by solving small, immediate problems
Continuing from her failure, Barbara emphasizes the importance of addressing urgent, solvable problems. She explains how filling the immediate need for assistants created traction for her business, which gradually expanded to cover training, management, and operational consulting services.
11:09 Work-life balance and having it all
Barbara talks about societal expectations, especially for women in business, and how she challenged the belief that women can’t “have it all.” She highlights her experience balancing motherhood, entrepreneurship, and personal priorities without burning out, largely through effective delegation.
14:24 Finding value after failure and the power of iteration
Barbara shares advice for entrepreneurs dealing with failed ventures. She emphasizes looking for small, successful elements within a failed business that can be repurposed or iterated on, citing an example of an underperforming assistant on her team who eventually built a vital internal tool.
16:43 Common fears around hiring assistants
The conversation addresses typical fears business owners have about hiring assistants, such as trust, productivity, communication barriers, and foreign labor concerns. Barbara acknowledges these challenges and stresses the importance of clear processes, expectations, and hiring for attitude over skills.
20:56 Remote work vs. In-house hiring
Barbara discusses how modern businesses need to embrace digital-first, location-agnostic models. She reflects on how offices often functioned remotely even pre-pandemic and emphasizes building operational frameworks that make physical location irrelevant.
24:05 Managing productivity in remote teams
Addressing managers’ unspoken fear—whether remote employees are actually working—Barbara advocates for clear, measurable objectives and operational alignment through tools like OKRs. She advises building systems that make trust a non-issue by focusing on deliverables.
26:14 Structuring flexibility within a business
The discussion covers balancing flexibility with structure in remote and hybrid teams. Barbara argues that while autonomy is valuable, company culture and operational processes should guide how work is executed to maintain alignment and effectiveness.
29:06 The Virtual Hub’s process and approach
Barbara provides an overview of The Virtual Hub’s services, emphasizing how it differs from typical recruitment agencies by training its own staff, integrating VAs into client businesses, and offering ongoing support through results coaches and client success managers.
34:58 Who The Virtual Hub is for
The conversation outlines the ideal clients for The Virtual Hub, ranging from solopreneurs to larger businesses, with a common thread of being committed to digital-first operations. Barbara stresses that the company essentially sells time by offloading process-driven tasks from key staff.
37:18 Final words and time management wisdom
Barbara closes with advice on valuing time as a company’s most expensive and limited resource. She proposes the idea of appointing a “Chief Time Officer” to optimize how time is spent in a business and reiterates the ROI of leveraging offshore team strategies.
