David Barnett: So if anyone’s going to own a business, they need to know how to delegate. Hey everyone, it’s David Barnett from davidcbarnett.com, the blog site, YouTube channel, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, Amazon, podcasts, where I talk about buying, selling, financing, and managing small and medium sized businesses. Today, we’ve got a very special guest. This is Barbara Turley from The Virtual Hub, a company that helps people set up and use virtual assistants all around the world. And today we’re going to be talking about delegation. Barbara, how are you today?

Barbara Turley: I’m great. Thank you, David. Yeah, thanks for having me on the YouTube channel. Very excited.

David Barnett: Well, no problem. Barbara is this month’s guest, special guest speaker in the Business Buyer Adventure group coaching program. Over there, we had an hour long conversation where we talked about the opportunity in outsourcing or using virtual assistance based in the Philippines to help companies no matter what kind of company it is anywhere in the world. But I wanted to have her come onto the main YouTube channel to have a discussion with us specifically about delegation, because it’s something that anyone who is ever involved in business that wants to grow beyond simply themselves has to figure out how to do properly, or else you’re never really going to unlock the potential of how employees can help you. Isn’t that right?

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, yeah. I think it’s one of the big skills out there, and it is a skill that’s not talked about enough in the entrepreneurial community as the bit that trips so many businesses up. They’ve got the right product and right everything else, but they haven’t mastered this delegation skill and problem.

David Barnett: What, you know, why don’t we look at this from, you know, from the point of view of the employee? You know, what are they looking for in leadership from the business owner in order for them to feel good about coming to work every day?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I mean, look, any employee, doesn’t matter at what level they’re at, but most people will tell you what they really want. People love to come into a machine where there’s a balance between there’s strong leadership and there’s strong learning delegation with direction and there’s strong strategy, but there also is room to grow, room for ideas, room for people to expand themselves. But then you do need a certain level of process management and kind of, you know, not chaos. I mean, nobody wants to join a company that’s in chaos, you know, and sometimes business owners think, well, I just want to hire A players and let them at it. And that’s OK if you’re at that level, right, where you’re allowing, let’s say, a head of sales or department to build out a machine. But the problem is that most people, you know, they want to work for something that is quite enjoyable and everyone knows what they’re supposed to be doing, and there’s no confusion as to who’s doing what and how you do something. That’s in my experience.

David Barnett: Well, and in my experience, I’ve found that when people and, you know, just from everything I hear from talking to people, you know, everyone has friends and people that they talk to, is that when you have that kind of chaos going on, a lot of smart people will realize, hey, the prospects for the future of this thing may not be so solid if they don’t quite know what they’re doing. And so, with that doubt constantly eating away at people, it means that they’re more open to looking for other opportunities, maybe. And you can end up with all kinds of problems if people don’t feel that it’s, that’s your point, a secure, well-run machine.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and I think, you know, it’s when people listen to me talking about this, they’re probably thinking, but lots of people don’t want to work in a highly processed and told what to do scenario. I’m not actually saying that. What we’re saying here is clear guidelines around how do we communicate as a company? How do we, as a company, do stuff, like how do we attack projects and how do we run meetings and how does everything kind of flow? And that’s kind of the basis of the framework that you need in order for delegation to then be successful. But many people just want to, I hear it all the time, I just want to hire eight players and let them at it. I’m like, well, yeah, but there needs to be a cohesiveness and leadership across an entire business, even if the business has only two people, like a solopreneur and assistant. It doesn’t matter. There has to be a cohesiveness of how we’re doing stuff here.

David Barnett: What are some of the examples that you’ve seen of people who, or some of the common mistakes that people make where they’re just not getting it right?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I think one of the big ones is there’s no onboarding of new people, you know? So people go, hey, great, you’re employed. Okay, here’s what you need to do, or here’s, do this for me. Or, you know, it’s very ad hoc. Now it’s difficult because usually, particularly smaller businesses, we’re all in chaos, right, anyway, because we’re trying to grow, and the growth stage is quite painful and busy. But people need to take a step back and go, right, if you’re employing someone or you’re bringing anyone on board, you’re obviously thinking long term-ish, you know, you’re not thinking about the next month.

So it’s okay to spend onboarding time and to say we need to just settle back for a minute and take a step back so that we can move forward faster later. Now, people think when you’re hiring higher up roles that that should be faster. I actually would hazard it’s actually the other way around. In my experience, hiring like a head of operations or a head of HR, there is like a six month onboarding experience for a lot of those people because they’ve got to get in under the hood and sort of have a look at what’s already being done and get to know the culture, the whole vibe that’s going on, get to know you, get to know how everything’s done, and then rebuild, usually. And that can take six months. So I actually think getting a VA on board is actually faster. That’s like a six week kind of onboarding experience that you would have there with someone doing that role.

David Barnett: You know, what’s interesting is I just made the connection as you were speaking there, talking about sort of a higher up level manager and somebody who’s buying a business. Because what I often see is that when someone buys a business, there’s a transition period with the former owner. But then there’s this other period. I call it the normalization period, where the new owner now knows what they need to keep things running day to day from what they’ve been told by the old owner. But then they do exactly what you described as they start to examine how everything is operating, and then they start to plan out what changes they might want to make. And I usually tell people don’t make a major change for the first year because you need to figure out why is it being done. Is it just tradition, or is there an actual reason why they’re doing it in a certain way?

Barbara Turley: It could be a good reason. It just could be legacy, and you won’t know that for a long time. And I also got some advice a few years ago. Somebody said to me, also don’t hire big roles more than once every six months, because you, as the owner, you can’t onboard a head of learning and development, head of ops, and head of HR at the same time. It’s quite difficult to do that. And I guess unless you’re starting from scratch, but you’ve just got to be careful that you allow things the time it takes to get things right. Yeah.

David Barnett: So let’s fast forward to the point where I’ve hired someone, I’ve onboarded them, they’re aware of the culture I have and the mission of the business, and they’ve gotten to know me a little bit. What sort of things should I be thinking about when I want to start taking chunks of workload and assigning it to them? What should I be thinking about?

Barbara Turley: Okay, so again, it depends on the level we’re talking about. Let’s say it’s somebody who’s in a higher up role who has expertise, right? Then you still want to be able to hand over processes to them, unless it’s a blank canvas. I mean, we’re sort of thinking, you know, sometimes a whole department is just a blank canvas with a couple of people thrown together. And that’s okay, but you’ve got to give them the mandate then. If it’s a blank canvas, you need to allow that person, you need to give them a mandate for what your goal and vision and everything is for this department and what you’d like to see them achieve so that then they can go and build processes and systems and get the team structure right.

If you already have processes and systems, then you need to hand that over to them with the mandate of saying, you know, let’s start to do this stuff, have a look under the hood, and then I need report, like report back to me on what your thoughts are and what we should change here. Now that’s a higher up role. Hiring a VA, totally different, right? VA, people get confused with virtual assistants. They think that they’re coming in and they’re going like, people say, I just want them to look over my process and kind of tell me things that might be wrong. I’m like, well, that’s actually a strategist. That’s not.

David Barnett: Some kind of consultant, yeah.

Barbara Turley: That’s a totally different thing, right? And, you know, we actually do have VAs of The Virtual Hub who, surprisingly, have ended up being able to do that to a certain extent. But if I was going out selling that, I mean, we would just get killed in the market because you can’t deliver that. So with a virtual assistant or someone who’s in an assistant type role or an execution role, you already need to have a machine or you need to have processes built and then a clear training plan and an onboarding plan and then let them at it, but also give them the mandate that we’re now going to have huddles that could be with you or with a leadership team or whatever, where we’re going to discuss your feedback of this process in time. Give them a chance to do it for a while first, and then they come back and go, look, this process is clearly two years old. I think this step we could probably change for this. Or I was thinking this is an idea. You might get a bit of that, but don’t expect too much either because they’re execution people that are coming in to execute the processes that you’ve built. And I think that’s the bit I see people making the mistake on, who’s building the process and who’s executing. They’re two different things.

David Barnett: So it almost sounds like, you know, we talk a lot about, or there’s a lot of talk out there about empowering employees and, and, you know, delegating responsibility. It’s almost as though you’re suggesting that some people are fully on board with that idea and they just want to offload to a lower level employee, hey, you know, you be creative, come up with something, where in reality that employee’s not really that interested or qualified to be doing that.

Barbara Turley: They’re not qualified to do it. You might get the odd unicorn that like just, you know, it’s like a diamond in the rough that you discover accidentally that this person is amazing. And it’s not to say that an assistant isn’t amazing. I think what you’ve got to do is like, if you have somebody that can do that, develop process, evolve process, and execute, then I would suggest that that person needs to be promoted and you need to offload the execution and the doing of the depends on how, how, how simple the process is, but you could probably go lower level again. So what I see in businesses often is that you have people in the US who are great, except they’re using 40% of their time, potentially, to do stuff that is execution of process that could easily be handed over to a virtual assistant in the Philippines that works on the team as well, but just handles the execution. And this person then can, their skills and talents can be used to run that and manage it, evolve the process, and not get bogged down in the doing. So again, you might find someone who can do both, but should they be doing both from a cost-effectivity point of view? Probably not. That’s just my view on that.

David Barnett: Yeah, well, and it makes sense. And, you know, in the conversation you and I had before, I had mentioned that I know people now who are getting virtual assistants for their assistants for exactly that purpose because they, as their assistant develops and gains more skill abilities, you know, training to do more complex functions, they’re saying, do I really want this person managing the mail merge of the Word and the Excel thing, you know, like—

Barbara Turley: 100%. And then it’s about looking at your budget for your, you know, every business has—we all look at our budgets for every department, except we don’t really do it very well in the human—I hate using the word human capital—but like in your people, and you’re sort of looking at all the hours that you’re paying for. Like, you know, if you’ve got someone amazing in your team who’s an account manager or something, if you dive into their work, you might be paying someone a hundred grand a year to do like 40% of the time could be a $10 an hour job, you know, offshore. And then you could free up their time, and what could they do amazing for your company with that time if they weren’t bogged down in all the doing? And if you ask any executives, they would say, I wish I could get rid of this, this, and this, but they haven’t processed it up. It’s all in their head, and these are all the issues around delegation, right, and how you actually make it cost effective to do it.

David Barnett: Now, Barbara, I’ve worked in sales organizations throughout my whole life, and everyone knows the $100,000 account manager does the high value work during business hours, and they do the $10 an hour work at night after supper.

Barbara Turley: I don’t know why they don’t have virtual assistants. I might hire someone, you know, going UpWork. Yeah, but that is—therein lies the problem, though. And what you find happening then is that, you know, when you get people who are unhappy in their job or like you try and get feedback from your team and you’re like, I don’t understand why he’s unhappy. He’s getting paid this much money and he only does that. And then you dig in and go, well, they’re unhappy because they’re up till midnight every night doing work they don’t want to do, but they have to do it to keep the job. So they’re just, you know, it’s just—you lead to burnout, unhappy people because they’re doing stuff they don’t want to do.

David Barnett: This is bringing back so many memories of back—one of my first careers was with the Yellow Pages, and some of the older guys that I worked with had trained their spouses to do paperwork.

Barbara Turley: That’s actually—you know what, though—that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. They were clever because they were training their spouse to do it. But how about if we just hired—like, how about if every business was strategic about this and was like, let’s hire an assistant? Now, the next step, though, then is managing change management, because sometimes some people, if you don’t manage that conversation correctly, your higher level people might think that you’re trying to siphon them off and slowly offshore. So you’ve got to be very careful about how you manage the conversation around taking work off them. And yeah, I’ve fallen into this trap myself. So that’s just another tip. But again, this is all delegation. This is the topic of delegation, right?

David Barnett: Right. So basically, to encapsulate the conversation that we’ve had here, it’s about figuring out exactly what you want the other person to do and be able to guide and lead them so that they understand exactly what it is you want them to do. And then, obviously, we need to have some sort of measurement or follow up to understand that it’s being done correctly the way we want it. The person gets that feedback so they know if they’re doing a good job or not.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And I mean, people say things like, I’m afraid of giving away control, and we’re all controlled by—all business owners—it’s our baby. We don’t want to give away control. But there is a way to give away control but still maintain control, and that’s when you have strong systems, processes, reporting lines, who’s doing what—everyone’s clear—and the whole thing is like a beautiful, streamlined machine. And when you find problems occurring, it’s usually because there’s communication gaps, there’s confusion, there’s misunderstandings. Those are all process holes, actually, that can be fixed, but it’s all this game of managing the chess pieces on the board kind of thing. And somebody—it’s leadership, I guess, but I call it delegation, but it’s more than leadership. Leadership is an element in delegation.

David Barnett: And of course, one of the biggest things that I see people doing is they’re just—they don’t want to—I get it, you know, entrepreneurs, a lot of them are entrepreneurs because they feel like they’re the only ones capable of doing things to a certain extent. I remember I took this program years ago about effective personal productivity. And one of the big lessons I took away from that is that just because it’s not done exactly the way you would have done it, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not acceptable. And even if somebody does it only 80 or 90%—

Barbara Turley: I know. You do 10%.

David Barnett: You would do, if it’s costing you, you know, a quarter of the price to get it done to a 90% satisfaction level, it might be fine.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And I think, you know, sometimes the extra 10% might be something you might tweak. So, for example, I was constantly writing my own copy for a long time because I was really good at it. And then I allowed my team to take that over and sort of—with a bit of training—it’s taken a while, right? Back and forth and whatever. And now what I do is they write it and then I just tweak it. It takes me about 15 minutes because I don’t have to go from scratch, right? So I just tweak it for voice and stuff like that. And I think, you know, maybe some people would say I don’t even want to do that, but I’m like, well, it takes—it’s nothing really for me to do that, and I actually quite enjoy it. So there’s a way of just saying, well, if it’s 80 percent, OK, maybe you can overlay the other 20 percent and make it really good, you know, or give them feedback on stuff to change.

David Barnett: Well, whoever wrote your words for today did a great job.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. I was thinking in my head, who wrote that.

David Barnett: Sorry, couldn’t help. All right, so Barbara, people want to learn more about your company, about The Virtual Hub and how you help people specifically getting virtual assistance in the Philippines. How can people contact you and find out more?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So for me personally, I don’t do much social media, but you can find me on LinkedIn. So Barbara Charlie on LinkedIn. And also, we have a special link for you guys today. It’s thevirtualhub.com/DCB.

David Barnett: Those are my initials, David P. Barnett, DCB. And I’m going to put that link in the show notes of YouTube. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, in the show notes, the link will be there.

Barbara Turley: Yep. So on there, on our site, we actually have tons of content on our site. I also have a podcast—shameless plug for my podcast—which is quite a tactical podcast about—it’s branching more into delegation now—but it’s a lot about VAs and how to talk to them and communication and stuff like that. And you can get that on our website under the content section. The special page for you guys—you can download—there’s a link there for a guide, why people fail with VAs and how to fix it. It’s like the five things people do, and that’s a great little thing to make sure you don’t do those things. And you can also get—there’s a scalable business success formula, your e-course there, and you can book a call with one of our team to discuss whether we’re a good fit for you and how we can help you. So yeah.

David Barnett: Awesome. Well, thank you, Barbara, for spending some time with us. I think it was a great conversation, and I think it’s definitely a skill that anyone is going to have to work on if they ever aspire to be a business owner or they want to grow beyond a certain level. Thanks very much.

Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me.

David Barnett: All right. Have a great day. And for everyone else out there, if you’ve enjoyed the video today, don’t forget to give it a thumbs up. It helps with the algorithm on whatever platform you’re watching. And if you never want to miss any of my interviews or videos or education pieces, be sure to head over to davidcbarnettlist.com, which is where you can sign up for the email list. You can also find that sign up on my blog at davidcbarnett.com. And thanks, everybody, and we’ll see you next week.