Michael Johnson: What’s up, what’s up everybody. Michael Johnson here with the Business Choreography Podcast. I’m excited you joined me today because we have a very, very special guest today. We are so excited and privileged to have on the show Barbara Turley. Barbara is an investor and founder and 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 virtual assistants into client businesses or into clients’ businesses. And we are excited to be able to glean as much knowledge and wisdom from her today as we possibly can. So without further ado, let’s cue the intro and we’ll jump right in.

Voice Actor: Listen, there’s a lot to learn when growing and scaling your business. That’s why we created the Business Choreography Podcast where we talk about choreographing your marketing, operations, and sales into dynamic systems that increase your revenue and your impact. We’ll explore solid business principles and discuss all things that make businesses dance to success with clarity. We’ll help you figure out where the holes are in your business and what you can do to fix them. Think of us as your official business choreographers, aka your insider growth strategists. Remember, your choreography matters. Welcome to the Business Choreography Podcast.

Michael Johnson: Barbara, thank you so much for being on the show today. It is a pleasure to have you.

Barbara Turley: It is a pleasure to be here with you. What a brilliant intro. That video is awesome.

Michael Johnson: Well, thank you. It’s super fun. We love it. We love what we do and excited to share with everybody your story. And so we’ve got to dig in because everybody that listens knows I love backstory. I love being able to hear the journey.

Unlocking Business Growth through Delegation & Support Assistants

And I think it’s not only inspiring, but I think it helps a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs keep going because there are great times and there are also really hard times.
And sometimes hearing other people’s journeys helps us to just keep plowing forward, know that we’re doing something great for everybody. So let’s start from the beginning. Let’s talk about the journey. Let’s talk about the goods and the bads, and we’ll go from there.

Barbara Turley: And everything in between, huh? There’s always a story. Yes. So, well, for all those listening out there that maybe started like I did in the corporate world. So I was not the entrepreneur with the lemonade stand. I was not selling things when I was five. I was not naturally entrepreneurial focused. I always wanted to work in the corporate world and I did that for many years. I worked in the financial industry for about 15 years. And as I got older, I worked in the financial markets, which was very exciting. I worked in a trading floor, which I loved. But as I sort of approached 29, 30, I sort of thought, I don’t see a future for myself if I want to have children and these sorts of things in this world, which was a bit of an eye-opening experience for me because I thought I didn’t really know where I was going at that point. I did proceed on for another five years thereafter, but it was around the time of the financial crisis in 2008, which was very destabilizing in our industry and for the world, those that remember it. So I kind of had a plan that I wanted to leave. I think it was 2007, I made this grand plan that I was going to leave and start my own business and all this sort of thing. And then the whole world fell apart and I kind of said, oh, maybe I shouldn’t do that yet. And it was quite fortuitous that I didn’t because I ended up working in another role. I went into asset management sales and an incredible opportunity came my way to join an entrepreneurial bunch of people. I really, I hopped on their coattails. I couldn’t take any credit for what we did, but they were buying a business out of one of the investment banks in Australia where I was at the time. And I got to be involved in a sort of a startup of sorts back then. That’s 12 years ago now. And I worked there for five years and it really taught me so many things about how great companies get built. And eventually I went on then to exit and to start my own company. My first one was not great. It was a bit of a failure, to be totally honest. As we often find, you know, I spent a fortune on a website and I had branding and I was all upset about logos and all these things that you think really, really matter in those early days. And while it was a great learning experience, out of it came the business that I’m in now.

So I did a product launch that didn’t go very well, and I was a bit jaded after it in that first business. And after that, I just started doing some business coaching and consulting, really, just to kind of take a break for a minute.

And through that experience, I just noticed that so many small businesses that I was coaching at the time had the same fundamental problem. If they didn’t hire staff, they weren’t going to be able to grow. And if they didn’t grow, they weren’t going to be able to afford to hire staff. It was this kind of plateau that those smaller companies reach doing everything themselves, not really able to afford staff. So I, like everyone else at the time, had read Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. I had gotten myself a VA online at the time. And I just started realizing that, you know, these clients, if I was going to get any traction for them, I should probably get a VA for them.

And I started doing that. And before I knew it, I was getting more demand for VAs than I really was for business coaching. And I was really enjoying doing that. And that was really how it started. There was no website, no business plan, really. It was just a need that I found myself fulfilling by accident. And then found myself quite enjoying it. So that was very much the beginning of it. I mean, the first year was kind of a disaster thereafter. But that’s a whole other story. But we’re eight years later now.

And we’re now 300 employees in the Philippines. We have clients all over the world. And I’m very proud to say that I had two children in that time as well. So it’s been a very amazing journey. I’ve learned a lot and I did get to work for myself from home, from anywhere in the world actually, and have my children. And interestingly, as I see the debate raging online now about distributed teams, remote work, work from home, I’m like, I built a company that way 10 years ago.

Like, it’s not really that new, right? You know, I actually have lived in Australia. I live between Australia and Europe. The team are all in the Philippines. We have staff in Dublin. We have people in Australia. We have people in South Africa now as well. So, yeah, it’s highly possible to do it that way.

Michael Johnson: My goodness. Wow. What a crazy way to end up starting such a successful company. And I love it. I have so many questions. I’m going to start with this and we’ll kind of bounce back around. But you said you filled a need, and I think that so many companies that find massive success oftentimes are doing that. They find a need, they go, I can fill that space, let’s get that out to people and let’s help them. And it helps the business take off.

What have you seen when it isn’t a company that found the need first to help the growth of the whole company and instead they were going, okay, I have this idea and I want to do that? I see that growth be a little bit more challenging. What have you seen?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I’ve done that. So I’ve lived that experience. So the first business that I had, there was a need. OK, so the first business, the idea I had because I had spent so long in the financial industry. Women in particular used to ask me all the time about money and the money industry. And I find I loved economics. I loved the financial markets. I loved everything to do with it. And I just loved, I understood money at a very deep level.

And I thought, wow, all these women. I mean, these people want to understand money, but I had a keen interest in helping women to not only understand money better, but to also kind of fall in love with money in a good way. Because as women, we often see money as kind of the root of all evil. You know, these sort of things go around it. But really, you know, money is just a tool, right? And it’s a tool to do things with. And if you can do amazing good with it, then that’s a good thing. And you should go out and try and make loads of it so that you can have more impact. And that was really what I wanted to do.

So I did start a kind of an education platform and I had this idea. I thought if I make it like a Vogue magazine and really feminine, but it’s about the heavy hitting topic of money. And theoretically, that was a great concept and it looked amazing. And there was a need. I had gone around and spoken to people, there was a need. But the interesting thing was the need, I learned this later when I, the second problem that I solved, and I’m trying to unpack this properly.

I was trying to solve a need that was so huge that you kind of need to solve a smaller one and then solve the next layer and the next layer of a problem when you’re a startup, unless you’re funded and you’ve got loads of money. I would have needed like a much bigger team. It just was a much bigger thing. And it would have taken off had I put more energy into it, but it was kind of just me on this website with this blog. And I know influencers have done this. I didn’t really feel I had the energy in me to do that. And what I found with the virtual assistant thing was I was sort of solving a need that people had today that was acute enough for them to pay money for today.

Right. Whereas the other business was like, well, I’d like to save. I’d like to invest someday, but that’s like out in the future. It wasn’t an immediate thing when you’re trying to sell something. So that was the biggest lesson I learned was you need to solve a problem that somebody has today that is acute enough for them to pay money for it today, not in 10 years’ time. And that was my lesson really. And from that, honestly, I solved the first little need was getting a VA. Second need was training VAs and training clients. Third need was managing everything. Fourth need was kind of creating culture and dynamics and all these things. So it has morphed.

And today we even have an operational efficiency consulting and implementation team, and we do that for clients too. So we don’t just do VAs, we actually do the whole gamut now of operational efficiency. And I didn’t know that that was the journey I was going to go on back in that, you know, when that thing happened.

Michael Johnson: You think like that’s pretty normal though. I mean I hear that a lot with the most successful companies. It’s like, you know, I just didn’t know that was the journey I was going to go on, but I just started with that. And I really want to emphasize what you said. So everybody listening, if you’re not driving pause, get a note card out, because my favorite is in the world. Everybody knows I like note cards. I’d still love to write.

Barbara Turley: Forgotten art, huh?

Michael Johnson: Exactly. And write down that you can solve an acute need first and it doesn’t need to diminish the overall size of what you’re doing or maybe the vision that you have because I think that sometimes we as entrepreneurs feel that way like, if I go after the little thing, I’m not going after my dream. It’s like, but you said it so brilliantly.

Barbara Turley: That’s actually what I read when you, just before you said that, I was thinking to myself, we’re told from business coaches and they’re right, you have to have vision, right. And we map these huge vivid visions, to put the words of Cameron Herold on his new book Vivid Vision, it’s fantastic. And then we feel like that is just such a mountain to climb that… and that’s what I did the first time around. The vision was a little too big for me.

And then I just was able to tackle this one problem. And it wasn’t sexy. There was nothing sexy about what I was doing at that point.

And I was like, this is like going from driving a Ferrari to driving a scooter or cycling a bike. But that was really how it started. And not getting distracted with shiny objects. You can keep the vision there. And interestingly, now my vision is much bigger and it has become much bigger. But I’ve grown up into it. And also at a pace that was suitable for me personally. I did want to have children. I didn’t want to work all the time. I wanted to live wherever I wanted to live. There were factors in my personal life that drove my decisions too, you know.

Michael Johnson: I think that’s huge because you still had your cake and ate it. Yeah, and I’ve always hated that term, like you can’t have your cake and eat it too. And I thought, well, why would I have a cake then?

Barbara Turley: Well, I used to hear this thing is women just can’t have it all, or they can have it all just not all at the same time. I mean, I think a lot of women say I can have it all, but they drive themselves into the ground. And I was on a mission to show I’m going to have it all. And I’m not going to drive myself into the ground because part of what I wanted was actually not to work full time, to be a fairly hands-on mom. So I’m a very hands-on mom. And there have been times that’s been quite stressful, but I have pulled it off.

And someday I think I should do a TED talk about this. It’s really people who said, how did you do that? I’m like, cause I’m the queen of delegation. That’s know, exactly. And I learned how to do that really well, you know, so.

Michael Johnson: Okay, so I have a bunch of other questions as well. That one’s awesome. You said you had your startup and you had one that failed. And I know that there are a lot of listeners out there that have had their fair share of startups that didn’t succeed. I know I have. Anybody that’s got a business that’s working or maybe they’re in the middle of one that’s not succeeding. How do you continue? How do you continue after having one that isn’t and doesn’t turn out the way you want it to? How do you walk away or move on to the next thing? You’ve done it. What would be your advice?

Barbara Turley: Okay. So I want to think about this for a second because it’s obviously devastating when it happens. And I have to admit my first business, when I say it failed, I mean, I did a product launch online. I was doing the online programs. I had like an online TV show. I had all the stuff. And the product launch, like the thing with product launches online is that you’re supposed to keep doing them. And eventually, you know, I mean, eventually you get better at it and you start to sell in the flywheel and all that.

But after the first round of it, I was so depleted by that experience that I said to myself, I kind of let it fail because I thought I don’t want to do that ever again. And I realized this was not the thing for me. I was so jaded by it. And then I sort of thought, again, I let it go. But again, I really focused on just trying to solve a smaller problem.

I didn’t know that’s what I was doing at the time. I was scratching around trying to find something to do, to be totally honest. If I’m brutally honest. But if I look back, you know, just finding a smaller problem to solve and sometimes within a business that fails, we forget that there are gems in there. Of course. So we let the whole business fail. But maybe there was a small little tiny piece of it that could turn into something massive.

And I’ll share a story with you. So we have a developer that works with us, been with me for years since the beginning. And he started out as a VA. I always tell this story. He loves this story. He started out as a VA, very, very talented guy. Terrible VA. We used to have to call… I was like, he wouldn’t get out of bed. He was just like… I was like, he’s like a diamond in the rough. He was a disaster of a VA. And I really should have fired him. Like I should have fired him.

But I remember saying to him one day, I just know you’ve got something. Just go away and build, find a problem and solve it for us and show me what you can do. Cause he wanted to be a developer, but he wasn’t a developer. And I was like, you’re not a developer. So he went away and he knew that all the other VAs were complaining about this one thing, this task they had to do at the end of the day that was a bit tiring and cumbersome. And he created a little tool that automated it for them. And that was about seven years ago. And today, that tool is our own custom-coded in-house machine that we built over the years.

I just feel like that’s another example of we just kept iterating. We just kept adding little bits on. And one day I was like, my God, we have a race car here. We should… And I kept saying to him, do you think he can do this? And maybe you can do that. And now we actually have like a SaaS tool as part of the company. So it’s been, you know, you got to find the little nuggets somewhere that you can work with and maybe take another risk. It’s all risk. No doubt. There’s nothing without risk.

Michael Johnson: Yeah, there’s no doubt. Talk to me about people’s fear of using VAs because I know you deal with it on a daily and you’ve had to figure out how to overcome that. I know we’ll have listeners out here right now that are probably in that space thinking to themselves, you know, I’ve had a VA and it didn’t work out or I’m just worried about it or they’re foreign and I don’t know how to deal with that. And I just, I want people having to complain about dealing with somebody that’s foreign. Talk to us about all those fears because you deal with it all the time.

Barbara Turley: They’re all real. So anyone feeling that way, you’re not imagining it. It is all real. I hate to tell you that. I have lived every second of it. You know, the VA world is an amazing world. Obviously it is because I’m in it and it has the power to change the life of business owners, of your team, and change the trajectory of your business dramatically.

The reason it does that is not because of the VA, it’s because of the time they free up. And what you do with that time is the important piece to look at. So that’s number one.

However, getting it right is not easy. I know this because recruiting the right people is an excruciating job. I know this because we have over five or 600 people that apply for a job per month with us. We hire 1.5%. And that’s after an excruciating testing period long before we ever interview anyone. We’ve already put them through testing.

And then after testing and interviewing, these days we don’t hire for skills anymore at all or experience. We hire for character, for values, for ethics, and for smarts and enthusiasm. Now you might think I don’t mean like people were jumping up and down. I’m talking about people who have a positive growth mindset as part of their DNA because you can’t teach that. So the rest of it you can teach. We hire for that today.

And that’s why our success rate is high. We don’t have the problems of people going missing and all that kind of thing that happens.

The second layer is people can say anything on a resume in an interview. Some people interview really well and are terrible on the job. So again, if you’ve had issues with awful work, let’s say it’s the VA’s fault, it could be that they didn’t really have the training they said they did. However, it can also be terrible delegation ability on the part of a client.

So let’s say that you’ve got a great person who knows what they’re doing and who’s lovely to work with. If you’re still having issues, it’s usually because the operational framework of the business is not quite set up for a distributed team. And once you bring on someone remotely, you’re now dealing with distributed teams across the world.

So for example, email is not a task management tool. It is a shocking way to manage task instructions with anyone on your team. You need to start looking at tools like Asana or Trello, these sorts of tools that bring project management and task management in a company together.

The second thing is you need to be very clear on what you want them to do. And although I like people to have process maps, if you don’t, you need to work with a VA on developing them. What process is this VA going to do? Are you happy with it? Get them to develop it and show it to you. Are you happy with that?

And the third tip is to say, if you show people what success looks like for you—for example with social media posts—show them what success looks like for you, what’s an amazing one, and also show what an absolute dog looks like for you so that they know. There’s context and you’re both aligned on expectations and vision.

And then the last bit comes down to communication. It’s just being direct and having open communication and not being afraid of it, which is the hardest part.

Michael Johnson: What about the fears surrounding remote work? I mean, how do you make that choice as a business owner to hire remotely and a VA instead of hiring in-house? Now we have choices, the world’s opening back up again. You can hire in-house if you wanted to, but what’s the distinguishing factor as far as what you’ve seen now being in that space every day?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So just from a company perspective, and I talk a lot on LinkedIn about this at the moment, because my philosophy is today we all need to focus on building the business of the future, which is digital-first businesses. And when you do that, location becomes irrelevant. Right. You can operate in, it doesn’t matter.

Even if you’re all in an office, it still is irrelevant whether you’re there or not there. Everyone thinks that remote is a new thing. It’s not. There’s always been businesses where consultants or salespeople are on the road.

So it’s just that more people are doing it now. And there are ways to build your operations so that the office becomes something in the cloud. For example, tools like Asana, you can create a space where people show up every day to collaborate, do work, report on work, and interact.

And then you bring in things like Slack around the edges. But it’s about creating a company where location becomes irrelevant. And then the world opens up to you.

Michael Johnson: Yeah. And I recognize that a lot when I was the CEO of a software company. Even now looking back at it, we had this huge office. Each of our departments were set up in their own spaces. There would be people inside the company that never saw the other people in the company for days, maybe weeks at a time. They might as well have been remote.

Barbara Turley: Exactly.

Michael Johnson: I think that’s where a lot of businesses are starting to come to grips with and understanding that, hey, my customer support team never ever sees the developers. Why does it matter if they’re in the same building?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And I think the issue at the moment, and this is the raging debate really, is how do I know my people are working? That’s actually what everyone wants to know.

You can build alignment top-down and bottom-up using objectives and key results. Waterfall them down into departments and projects that drive those results. And align everyone around a core platform. Then you can see if someone is delivering or not.

So don’t worry about it. Build a framework where you don’t need to trust people. Make it irrelevant whether you’re trusting them or not.

Michael Johnson: When you alluded to it earlier, the idea that you have hundreds and hundreds of applicants but you’re taking 1.5% of that. A lot of people that don’t want to work will be offended by that. But the truth is you’re hiring the best for what you’re doing. And I think a lot of people from the industrial age are still in that mindset.

Barbara Turley: It’s too emotional. I’ve seen people say trust is so important. I’m like, forget trust. Trust can be broken so easily. Not because either side meant to break trust, but because expectations were different.

So I think if you build the right framework, and I believe in flexibility within structure, you set the structure and then it’s called active management, not micromanagement.

Michael Johnson: We love calling a lot of that choreography within the operations because you’ve got to choreograph great movement.

Barbara Turley: I was just going to say it’s like a dance, right? It is actually, you’re right. It’s like a dance. And you know, you’re going to step on someone’s toe if you don’t know how to do the dance the way that you’re supposed to do it.

Michael Johnson: We were just talking about that. It’s also the flow of it. And that changes within each organization, with the culture and with the leadership, because the flow is going to be determined by their overall method of leadership. It doesn’t, everybody doesn’t need to be the same. It just needs to be appropriate and it needs to flow with that entity. But I love this. This is so pertinent. I hope that our listeners are just like, my gosh, this is amazing.

Talk to me a little bit about, they’re hearing this and they’re going, okay, a VA, I’ve been there, it didn’t work out, but I know I really need it. I want to hire some more. I want to get that into my system. Talk to us a little bit about the process of jumping in and working with Virtual Hub and how that goes and what it looks like and how that’ll all go down.

Barbara Turley: So a few key things, and I will do a shameless plug for my own company here because I built it. This company has been built from my own issues with people. The problems, exactly what you’re talking about, clients have given us this feedback over the years and I kept saying, how do we build a company where this problem never comes up again? So we just have kept iterating.

So I would say, first of all, definitely come to us because with us, we’re not a recruitment agency. So we’re not going to take your brief and go out to market and try and recruit what you’re looking for. We actually recruit for ourselves. We have a huge recruiting team. And every month we are just hiring people. We have targets for the amount of people we want to hire. We know what we’re looking for. And then they go straight into our own learning and organizational development department to be trained. And we train them ourselves, regardless of their experience.

We’re just like, you could say you’ve all this experience. You still need to do the training. And then we score them.

And the purpose of the training is, you know, sort of twofold. Number one, we want to manufacture our own VAs because we know what our clients are looking for. And in the training, we can start to see what natural skills people have, even people with no experience. It’s amazing. Some of them end up brilliant at social media and you’re like, wow, they didn’t know they were good at that, but they’re doing it in their own personal life amazingly. And now they’re amazing at work doing it.

So we figure out where their strengths lie and then we start to take them down pathways that suit their natural skill sets, what they want to do, and we hone those skills in certain areas. And only after we’re happy that we think these people are really talented do we then start to look at the client side and go, here’s the demand, these clients, and we start positioning VAs to go and meet these clients. And we get a home run every single time. I think there’s like one every quarter where a client might say, can I meet another few? It’s so rare. Usually they’re like, they were all great. I don’t know who to pick.

So that’s number one.

Number two with us, we’re really believers in, like it’s not just bums on seats. You know, we want the client to get success. At the end of the day, the best part of our business is when you get longevity of employee and longevity of client. So the two heads of the beast, as I always say, we look after the employee experience is extremely important in our company, the culture, and the client experience. Loads of companies just focused on the client experience, but the employee experience is so important to get right.

We do integrate VAs into client businesses, but they also come with a results coach and a client success manager. So it’s like a three person team for every client account. And the reason we do that is because sometimes, you know, you might have a great VA, but maybe that VA is overwhelmed or needs extra training, doesn’t know how to communicate that very well with the client because they’re at that level. Results coaches are watching for this stuff, mentoring and training those VAs and liaising with clients saying, we’re going to upskill on the training. And we do all the training outside the client’s time. So that’s a big deal.

And we’re constantly, so we set goals with the clients. We actually set objectives and key results for each account. And then we’re tracking towards, are we reaching these goals? Because we want to get return on investment for clients. That’s key to our business model. And we’ve been very successful at that. Our NPS score is 90 with clients and our ENPS score is 78 with our VAs. So we’re very proud of that. We’ve put a lot of work in to do that. So we’re really focused on success as opposed to just numbers through numbers.

Michael Johnson: This is huge. What’s the process? Say our listeners are listening right now and they go, okay, I want to start and what’s going to happen?

Barbara Turley: First, you’re going to jump on a call with one of our teams. So we have someone in Ireland, we have someone in the Philippines, we have someone in Australia. So we’ve got great people you can speak to. And we don’t have anyone in the US, but we have an American in Ireland. So she does the US and she’s great.

So first of all, they’re going to run through what your needs are, what you’re looking for, fears that you have. So we ask that on the call, like, tell us your fears. We want to write this down so we pass that to the client success team to go: “This client has had a VA before that burnt them or the trust is not there.” Whatever the fear is, we need to know so that we can make sure that we don’t deliver on the fear. We actually deliver on the success that you’re looking for.

And obviously the first step is making sure that we’re a fit for what you need. Then after that, you get to meet the onboarding team. You have a kickoff call with your client success manager. And then we start to proceed towards meeting a selection of our VAs. We always have that.

Basically, because people are coming out of training, it’s hard to run this model, but the model works like this: they come out of training, we’re always kind of forecasting ahead. We always have 10 on the bench ready to go. So we keep churning through. It doesn’t always work out that way. But technically, depending on the type of VA you’re looking for and what your needs are, we could have somebody working with you in seven days. Could be anywhere—seven days to four weeks at the worst.

And then you have weekly, you have an end-of-month call with the success manager, the results coach, the pod, and your client journey goes on thereafter. So there’s an entire client journey that happens thereafter. So we’re very much with you every step of the way, rather than just giving you a VA and go best of luck with that.

We also help you with your process maps. We’ve got 400 process mapped tasks that VAs do. We’ve got a super task list. I do podcasts and I do master classes for clients and we help people even with their operational framework setup. Everyone gets a free consulting call with our operational framework team as well in case we can help them with taking that a little bit further too.

Michael Johnson: Right. Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about who this is for, like what size companies out there should be thinking, okay, yeah, that’s the right fit or, I’m not quite ready for that. And I’ve got to prep for that a little bit better.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, this is always the question we get asked. And the interesting thing is we span the globe. Mainly our markets are Canada, US, the UK, Australia, a little bit of New Zealand. We can technically do anywhere. But they’re kind of the biggest markets that we have. And we work 24/5.

So we are big believers that you need to work in the same time zone together to have a better relationship. And our clients are very diverse, but there is something that ties them all together. So we have everything from one-person businesses right through to 60, 70, 80 person businesses.

We’ve got the whole spectrum and everything from a one-person yoga teacher right through to an asset management company. We’ve got all the breadth of types of clients, but the thing that ties them together actually is this commitment towards a digital-first type setup.

So most people today don’t realize, but they’re pretty much on that path already. So if you’re already running social media and you’re out online, you’re heading towards digital transformation really. And you can take that as far as you want to go.

But we do like clients to have either—if you don’t have it set up yet, that’s okay because we can still help with this—but if you’re already using a tool like Asana or Trello or ClickUp or one of these things, that really helps. However, we have gotten clients onto those things as well and helped to onboard them onto a better framework when you start to bring more team members in.

But that’s really it. We’ve done everything from logistics to business process work. And the key thing to remember is time. What we’re actually selling is time. We’re selling your time though.

The most expensive time a company has is that of its key people. And studies have been done on this that anywhere from 20 to 50% of people’s day is being taken up by tasks that are usually recurring or process-driven and therefore delegatable.

And if you’re growing a company, you want to make sure that the most expensive time in your company, which is your key people, their time is being used to move the needle.

Michael Johnson: Right. Right.

Barbara Turley: Yeah.

Michael Johnson: I love this. How can people get in touch and how can they find their way to you because there are some people that are ready to move so what do they do?

Barbara Turley: Sure, so if you want to delve more into what I’m talking about today, I talk about this on LinkedIn quite a lot, and I’m going to be doing lots of stuff over on LinkedIn. So you can just look up Barbara Turley on LinkedIn. And if you are ready to come and have a call with us, jump on over to thevirtualhub.com. There we are.

And book a call. Come and have a chat with us. And we’ve got a great team there ready to chat with you and help you out. So even if you’re not ready to sign up yet, just come and have a call. It would be great.

Michael Johnson: Absolutely. Guys, go check out thevirtualhub.com. What a cool, cool thing that Barbara’s done. Already done all the hard work, already put in the time, already gone through the ups and the downs of making it work and come together all so that you can take advantage in the easiest possible way and gain back your time.

Wow. You’d be crazy not to check this out. So go do that for sure.

Before we close up, Barbara, what kind of great words of advice and wisdom can you leave us with as we close up today?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s a bit like what I just said about the time thing. I think people, you know, I actually put a post on LinkedIn the other day. I was saying I’m going to create a new C-suite title, the Chief Time Officer. Nice. Who should go around a company and look at how time is being spent. Right. Because it is the most, like after real estate, and we won’t talk about commercial real estate, but after real estate, the biggest expense on anyone’s books, any company, is people.

So like looking at your people’s strategy and your people’s budgets and figuring out like, bringing in an offshore team strategy, makes, it’s like a no brainer. If to get it right is harder, but do it because it’s the thing that frees your company.

Michael Johnson: I love it. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today and your time with us.

Barbara Turley: Time well spent, you see. Time well spent.

Michael Johnson: Absolutely. And nothing like changing the world as we go. Guys, thank you so much for joining us on today’s show. And as usual, don’t forget, keep on choreographing your business. We’ll see you guys on the next episode. Take care. Bye bye.

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