Voice Actor: Welcome to the Digital Velocity Podcast, a podcast covering the intersection between strategy, digital marketing, and emerging trends impacting each of us. In each episode, we interview industry veterans to dive into the best hard-hitting analysis of industry news and critical topics facing brand executives. Now, here are your hosts, Tim Curtis and Eric Martinez.

Tim Curtis: Today on the Digital Velocity Podcast, we’re excited to welcome Barbara Turley, an accomplished investor, entrepreneur, and visionary founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub. Under her leadership, the company’s emerged as a leading force in integrating highly trained virtual assistants into businesses, revolutionizing operational efficiency and digital marketing strategies. Barbara, welcome to the show.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me, guys. Excited to be here.

Tim Curtis: Yeah, you bet. I’m excited to dive a little bit deeper into this. So we had the privilege of talking a little bit before the show. Before we get into some of the topics today, we’d love for you to share just a little bit of that background with the listeners.

Barbara Turley: Sure. At the moment, these days, I live between two continents. I’m very lucky to be able to live between Europe, where I’m originally from, and the beautiful beaches of Sydney, Australia, where I spent 20 years. And I’ve built a company that enables me to do that. It’s really irrelevant where I am. Some of that is to do with the type of business that I’m in. However, I’m very passionate about the fact that the right operational frameworks, the right model, the right approach, and the right distributed teams and things like that actually enable you—and many, many business owners, and even people on your team—to live anywhere.

So we have people in the US, obviously a lot of people in the Philippines, and people in Australia, South Africa, and Ireland. I’m in France at the moment.

So it really doesn’t change anything about how we run the company.

Tim Curtis: That’s so amazing. You said 10 years you’ve been running The Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s coming up to about 10 years—nine and a bit. And I’ve also had two kids in that time. So I’m a very passionate mom-first entrepreneur. I believe in automation and delegation, and systems really free you to kind of live life on your terms, I suppose—the way you want to do it—and you just do it your way. I’ve always kind of done it my way, you know, regardless of the rule book.

Tim Curtis: Yeah, it’s healthy to build a company like you’ve done, but to set it up in a way that allows you to still place priority on the things that are most important in life. I think that’s fantastic.

Let’s dive in a little bit about that. We’ve heard that term “virtual assistant” for some time now. That did not start—just as news to everybody—that did not start at the pandemic. That was well before the pandemic. People at different times have thought, well, what exactly does that mean for me? How would I use a virtual assistant?

There’s a wide variety of virtual assistants out there. There are all sorts of different ways you can engage them. Why don’t you give us a little bit of a definition of your term of virtual assistant and how you see virtual assistants today?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a great question, and thank you for starting there. Because I think, you know, the term “virtual assistant,” like you said, has exploded onto the scene. It’s been there for decades, to be totally honest. Big companies have been using offshore strategies and stuff like that for a long time. But especially since the pandemic, a lot more people are talking about this concept of virtual assistants, and they exist in every country.

But I think it’s really important to remember the word assistant in there. And I think this is where the break happens sometimes with expectations, because the word “virtual assistant” has turned from anyone with a heartbeat who can type into someone who can code an app. There’s a lot of depth, and it’s a very broad term.

But I do think that the point of having a virtual assistant is really to focus on that assistant word. And that’s the word that seems to get forgotten by a lot of people. Therefore, people are hiring VAs, as we call them, and the expectation can sometimes be a little too off the charts. Similarly, some people are advertising themselves online as virtual assistants, but actually they’re more like online business managers. I feel the term has kind of gotten too broad.

That brings me to my philosophy around how to structure a company or how to use virtual assistants. Really, the way I see it is that in every business, no matter the size—it doesn’t matter if it’s a billion-dollar company or a very small business—there are departments. I’m going to oversimplify this for a second, but there are departments: there’s marketing, sales, product delivery, product creation, legal, and so on.

Within each department, there are really two buckets of things that need to be done: recurring tasks and processes, and project-type things. Recurring things are the types of workflows that keep the engine of a business moving daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Within that bucket, you will always find things that are being done the same every time, the same every week.

When something like that is happening, it means that you can create a process for it. Again, I’m oversimplifying, but a lot of people forget that you can process-map something. Once you can process-map something, you can usually train it, and then you can delegate it. You can actually turn it into what I call the support layer of a department.

Not everything requires super IP or the most strategic and creative people in a department to execute every day. You’ve got to find all of that support-layer stuff, process-map it, and this is where you can really leverage the concept of virtual assistants—because you can train them to execute on these things every day, every week, every month, whatever.

It frees up key people in any business—even if that’s just the owner—to focus on the work that moves the needle. That’s kind of the way I see the use of virtual assistants: making sure that you’re actually thinking strategically about tasks to be done and jobs to be done, as opposed to full-blown roles. Does that make sense?

Tim Curtis: It does make sense. You know, a little bit of my own story in relation to virtual assistants—I probably had the textbook definition in my mind of a virtual assistant, which was really that admin assistant role that I had been used to. I’d had an admin for years, and it wasn’t until I had a very specific need.

It was working in PowerPoint. I needed to create an org chart. For anybody out there who’s worked with PowerPoint, it is the absolute worst tool ever developed in the world. To put an org chart in there, it just always messes up—you drop another box in and it changes the whole thing.

I was in a fit of frustration. I’d been working on it for probably about three hours, couldn’t get it to undo itself, and then I thought to myself, well, wait a minute. I know there are virtual assistants that can do this stuff. I actually threw a job out on a virtual assistant board. I had a gentleman from Melbourne, Australia, who said, “I can do that. And I can do it while you’re asleep.”

So I said, “Okay, fine.” I woke up the next morning—he had delivered it. It was there. It was perfect.

It was the first time where I thought I need to change the way I think about the term “virtual assistant,” because you’re right—it’s not this very narrow definition of what a virtual assistant can be. There are all sorts of potential use cases for what you could do with a virtual assistant. I found that, if anything, the problem was me—I wasn’t thinking broadly enough.

Yeah, exactly. That was a real-life lesson for me on how I need to change my paradigm.

Barbara Turley: You know, I think a really important point to make there as well is that the person who did that for you did not need to have specialized IP in your business, what you do, your industry—nothing. Even HR, you know, even though it’s an org chart, the person can just Google, “What is that?” They don’t even need to actually know what they’re doing.

So people get all caught up on, “Well, I want to hire somebody with experience,” or “I want to hire somebody with whatever.” My view is you want to hire somebody who is enthusiastic about what it is that you do, has the right attitude to life in general, has a growth mindset, likes to learn, is trainable, and has the right smarts. You can teach those people anything, to be totally honest.

I think people confuse the strategy and execution layers in a business. And I would say there’s the strategy layer—that’s really important to get right, and you want your A-players there. And then underneath that, there’s the execution layer. And part of that, you will need some people with certain IP or whatever, but there’s a huge amount in the execution layer that people underestimate could be done by an assistant.

If you put the work in to creating a process, mapping it out—and yes, that’s painful—but a VA can actually help you with that as well. And then training it, practicing it, delegating it. And while that is a lot of work, some people listening are like, “I don’t have time for that.” That’s usually what I hear.

Yes, you don’t have time. But this idea in any business of slowing down to speed up later—it’s a marathon, not a sprint, all these sorts of things—and it is annoying. But the dividends that it will pay you in six months or a year’s time are enormous, because you will not be doing that job anymore.

Whereas if you don’t delegate it now and you don’t spend the time to offload it properly and successfully, in 12 months’ time you will still be doing it—and you’ll be frustrated as hell.

So for me, for example, I’m the most impatient person in the world. And the minute I find myself doing something two or three times, I’m like, “I wonder if I could process map this and train a VA and delegate.” And I have done that over and over and over again, to the point that now I have a 350-employee company.

I work from anywhere in the world, and I’ve had two children along the way, because delegation is always my first go-to. I always think to myself, what part of this can I delegate? Sometimes I have to do 20% of it, sometimes it’s 50%, sometimes it’s 80% in the beginning, and then I migrate to 10% over time. But that’s okay, because I move on to the next thing then.

People just think, “I don’t have time today.”

Tim Curtis: Just sitting here thinking about that last statement. In some cases, the challenge for people, almost the insurmountable part, is that process mapping. That seems very intimidating for a lot of people who don’t think in a process-oriented way. That becomes a real impediment. But you had a really good line there—you say there are VAs that can help with that.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely.

Tim Curtis: How nice would that be? I hired a chief operating officer, an integrator, if you will, to come into the business because I needed additional support on the operations side. Now he does that stuff all day long—process mapping, etc. I have no desire to sit down long enough to do that. That’s a really good point: having a VA that can actually help with the process to turn over to a VA.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, because not every business has the capacity or the ability to take on a COO or an operations manager or a process-mapping genius. And it is painful. It is something, though, I think as a business owner, is worthwhile.

Look, any business owner has to learn things that initially you’re like, “I just hate doing this.” But the idea is to try to grow the company, grow the business. A VA can help you process map. Sometimes you may have to just record a Loom video and just talk about it. Get a VA to create a little process map.

And here’s the trick: when the VA brings it back to you and you spot holes or they make a mistake, that’s when you iterate. You don’t blame the person—you go, “There’s a step there that I just know.”

And that’s how you find the IP that you haven’t put into the process, but it’s the bit you didn’t realize that you know how to do. And you turn that into a step or train it.

Now again, a little bit painful. But like I always say, at the end of the day, if you want to move forward, you have to invest time in the growth of the business. And if you don’t have the ability to take on a COO role or an operations person, then a VA can help massively with process mapping.

Eric Martinez: It’s really funny that you say that because I actually had that situation come up last night. We just hired a new assistant in our company. I had her scheduling some meetings. She scheduled the meeting, but she scheduled it wrong.

When we were chatting about it, I realized that she saw me say, “I want you to schedule a meeting between these people,” and assumed that she was going to read the whole thread. She’s new to the company and their culture and working with me.

And I said, you know what? That was my bad. I should have made sure that my expectation was that she’s reading the thread so she understands the context in order to make sure that the right people are on the call. Not a big deal—really easy to iterate and solve that problem.

Barbara Turley: You know, some people would say, “Well, my expectation of someone is that they should have that knowledge.” The way you were on that would be to say, well, first, never assume anything, right?

But what you could do there is rather than having to write all the instructions—because you’re thinking, “Well, it’s in the thread”—you could just say, “Make sure to read the thread to get the context,” and then wait to see the mistakes. It might be easier just to say what you want, but…

Eric Martinez: I was moving fast, and you know how that goes, right? Sometimes you’re moving so fast and you forget a step because you’ve been doing it so often for so long. I do those things—but how would they know if I don’t communicate it to them in some way or form?

And that’s where you have to iterate. So Barbara is kind of shifting into the idea of innovating remote work. Given your extensive experience working with remote teams, what innovative strategies have you found most effective for managing and scaling?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a great question, and something that’s been a game changer for us over the last two years. I’ve tried lots of things over the years.

The first iteration I did—I just sort of stumbled upon it and it worked in the early days. I’m a huge fan of the Asana platform. Now, those who don’t use Asana, there are other tools that do that sort of thing, but I do like the way the company is iterating over time to move into this future-of-work type thing.

But a couple of years ago, I started to implement objectives and key results. That has been an absolute game changer for speed of execution, eradicating about 70% of meetings from my calendar, and being able to work completely async.

So how that works is: when you’ve got a lot of people, they’re all working on stuff and everyone is really busy. But sometimes as the COO or CEO, you’re like, “Yeah, but we’re not getting any results—or where are the results?”

You’re chasing updates, or you have recurring weekly meetings where team members come on and give updates, or you’re waiting in Asana for updates. What ended up happening to me was that the company got so big that I just couldn’t manage that anymore, and I was looking for a new way to do it.

Now, Google started using objectives and key results in year one, like way back in the early 90s. I started researching this and it just made so much sense to me.

Basically, setting objectives and key results for the company as a whole, and then having each department set objectives and key results for what that department contributes toward those goals. Then you cascade those down to the teams and ensure every project, workflow, or pipeline connects to a key result.

You start asking: “This thing I do every day—what is it driving? Is it driving a key result?” And if it’s not, we need to ask ourselves, should we be doing that anymore, or what is the purpose of this work?

And with that, we brought in a method of status updates, because realistically I thought to myself, what do I really want to know? Or what does a COO really want to know? We want to know: are we on track or off track with our objectives for the year?

And if we’re off track, what’s the roadblock—and do I need to step in to help remove it? Because if something is tracking toward goals and metrics, maybe we don’t need to have a meeting every week. Maybe we’re just on track, and then we can have connection calls instead of update meetings.

So that’s been a huge thing for us. It has increased our speed of execution a lot.

Eric Martinez: You know, I had a very wise friend who used to repeat this—he was actually a recruiter—and he kept saying one of the key things you need to know is: do your people know how they connect to the bottom line?

And you’re saying the same thing in a different way, but it’s the same concept.

Barbara Turley: I’ve worked in big companies that don’t get it right. It’s just a way of working. But I think once you work in that way, location becomes irrelevant—and trust becomes irrelevant too.

There’s a big debate online at the moment about “you must trust your people,” and I think it’s the wrong conversation. Trust is very emotional and means different things to different people.

Instead, let’s create a way of working where we’re collaborating on roadblocks, rowing in the same direction at the same speed toward the same goals, and everyone understands how their work connects to that. That’s very powerful.

Tim Curtis: We work with a lot of e-commerce companies. How do you utilize virtual assistants specifically to optimize operations? I know you talked a lot about automation elements and process mapping. Are there more specifics on how you get inside a company to deploy those virtual assistants to really start optimizing and streamlining operations?

Barbara Turley: Do you mean so we can free up the time of the people who are currently doing the work, or do you mean to make sure the VAs are working properly?

Tim Curtis: More with the goal to free up the people that need to be freed up. What we often see in companies, especially when we do some of our own consulting, is that oftentimes companies are over leveraged. In other words, they have their highest leverage employees—their highest seasoned employees—working on things that really are not a high return and that need to be handled by someone who is not at that level of seniority.

So that’s kind of the idea: to free up those kinds of resources to do and to provide for the business things that have a real return.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. So I talk about this all the time. What’s interesting about that actually is that when your key people talk—let’s call those your key needle-moving strategic people in any business—and it doesn’t matter. Actually, we’ve worked with lots of e-commerce businesses, but we also work with financial services companies, we work with yoga teachers, we work with all kinds of coaches—there’s a whole gamut of industries.

Your key people, when they are bogged down in the doing, that’s a different brainwave state than when they’re in creation and strategic mode. And it’s actually quite difficult to shift from all the busy work—the doing, doing, doing—and shift your brain state into what you want them to be doing.

What you’re paying for actually is their time and energy to be focused on stuff that’s going to move the company forward—strategy, creation, etc. It doesn’t actually matter what type of company we’re talking about.

And we have done this for a lot of e-commerce businesses as well. But I’ll go back to what I said at the beginning of the show: when you break any company into its constituent pieces, which is the departments, and then you look at what are all the jobs to be done in these departments, you start to split out—call it a “stop doing” list.

We all want to create to-do lists, but it’s better to look at all the stuff that needs to be done in every department within reason. Start with a few areas and figure out, like I said, what stuff is kind of rote, process-y, probably below the pay grade, maybe, or the intellectual grade of the person that’s currently doing it.

And usually what happens is they know it would make more sense for an assistant to do that role, but it doesn’t maybe make sense for an American assistant or to hire someone locally to do that. You need to have a more cost-effective solution there.

And how you really make that work is to actually sit down and make your categories departments. And under each department, just start to jot down as a team what are all these things that I’m doing.

Then we’ve got to make a “stop doing” list. Process mapping, by the way, also doesn’t need to be difficult. People overcomplicate that. I’m like: back of an envelope, couple of bullet points—that’s how you start a process.

And then you start to slowly delegate to an offshore virtual assistant or whatever, and work on making sure that that’s delegated successfully. And the idea being that you always want the key people in the brain state of strategy, creation—whatever the thing is to move the needle forward—and focusing on those OKRs, and actually making sure that we’re meeting those things.

I know what I started with there about breaking the company down into departments—that is actually really key in how you simplify it. Just make that simple structure to start with, and you’ll find that it will evolve over time.

Tim Curtis: And you’re not kidding about the tendency to overcomplicate a mapping process. I don’t know what it is. You’ll say those things and you’ll see people literally their pulse quicken because they’re just intimidated by that.

Barbara Turley: Really? Because the word “process mapping” is intimidating. It sounds like engineering or something.

Tim Curtis: It does sound like engineering. That’s exactly right. It sounds very complicated, like you need a PhD to complete it.

Barbara Turley: No, I did a process yesterday for LinkedIn. I mean, I hate doing it as well. I’m actually quite good at it, but I don’t like doing it. I just find it tedious. But I also don’t like doing all the work.

So yesterday I sat down after like two weeks of procrastinating on a LinkedIn thing, and I was like, I’ve got to just—so I did it. And it was only five steps. I was like, step one: I literally go step one, do this, and then step two.

And then I got to step six, and then I went back and added a few little bits because I was like, that person—I mean, obviously the person would know to hand the baton to the next person involved—but let’s just put that in so there’s no holes or lack of clarity.

Tim Curtis: The other aspect of that, when you do start to really—number one—get familiar and comfortable with the concept of handing something off, especially someone that is likely sitting overseas somewhere, right? Another country.

Once you have finally gotten to a level of comfort with what, for so many, is a completely nouveau concept—they’ve never worked in an environment where they’ve done those things before—then the paradigm of thinking begins to change.

And you begin to see little things that could be process mapped to make it more automated maybe, or something that could then flow into a virtual assistant type. And I think with the advent of AI, with the amount of automation that people are putting in, with the dispersed workforce, there’s a whole litany of things that we’re getting used to now.

And I think it’s really the exercise that we need to conduct internally within these organizations—to say we need to think through all of our processes because we are working in an unexamined rhythm, doing the same things over and over again.

And when we really begin to think about those processes, then we can see where, if we did this and we did this, and we brought virtual assistants in to help with these parts of the process, we could speed our timeline up.

Barbara Turley: At the end of the day, when we’re building a company, of course it requires entrepreneurial vision, because that’s how it starts. Most entrepreneurs and founders are visionaries. They have this vision, and they move fast, and they don’t want the detail—it’s just so tedious for them to even think about this.

But there is a moment where founders and startup entrepreneurs are brilliant at that beginning bit, which is product-market fit or product creation. And in a startup, everything is product-market fit, and honestly, process mapping and all that stuff comes later, once you’ve got product-market fit and marketing and sales nailed.

And the thing is selling—it’s when you’re scaling up. And that’s the point at which what got you there won’t get you to the next thing. Every entrepreneur and founder needs to remember that now we’re into the scaling phase.

And scaling is when the business needs to become a machine. It is quite engineering-like—it needs to be engineered properly. You need the right operational frameworks to put people into so that you can get the best, most efficient use of human capital budgets, if I could put it that way.

So you make sure that everything’s running like a well-oiled machine. And that sort of thing appeals more to COO types and integrators than it does to the traditional founder or entrepreneur.

But if you’re someone who can’t hire that other person, you don’t need to make it complicated. Literally just bucket out your departments, bucket out what needs to be done, and now you’re actually starting to create the bones of a machine.

Use tools like Asana for project management and running the company. And then you don’t need to be so afraid of putting people in.

As Michael Gerber says in his book The E-Myth, systems run your business, people run your systems. And a system really is just a series of smaller processes, and a process is just a series of steps.

It doesn’t need to be complicated. You don’t need big mind maps of processes—just bullet points on a page will do to start off with.

And then you’ve got the seeds of that sort of thinking that helps people who are more visionary go, “I can handle that. I can do that. That’s okay.” That’s how I started.

Eric Martinez: So I’ve got a question for you then. There are process-oriented people and there are creative people and strategic thinkers and all that you were talking about.

So when you start realizing that you’re bumping up against that scaling issue, and you probably bump your head up against that ceiling a couple of times and bounce down, bump up again, hit your head again—that hurts—why can’t I bust through that portion of the ceiling?

One of the things I have failed at as a business owner is I’m like, okay, I need a person to do that for me. And my tendency has been to hire that person in-house and get them geared up. But I really only need about 20% of that person for that particular thing, and then there’s 80% of this time and capacity and energy to go on to other things. Hence the concept of a virtual assistant.

As you’re starting to build that machine and build out the bones, if you were doing this today and you’re that entrepreneur bumping your head against that ceiling, when do you use the VA and when do you hire that full-time person? Because I think that’s always the tricky balance. If I have that full-time person, I have the full allotment of their hours. I can utilize them in a variety of ways, but there are downsides to that choice as well. So from your perspective, when is the right time?

Barbara Turley: So I want to unpack this properly. I’m going to use my own business as the example. Today there are hundreds of staff and great systems and a global presence and all that stuff, but it did not start that way.

And I did not have a background. My background was always a single contributor type role. I came out of corporate, I did not have an entrepreneurial bone in my body. I actually was an equity trader for a long time, which is very much not a single contributor—you’re part of a team—but I wasn’t running a team.

I’d never been to the Philippines, had no background in HR or recruiting or any of that stuff. The original iteration was not a VA company. I was actually doing business coaching. I was into automation and systems and all that stuff, but from putting VAs inside client businesses, it actually became apparent that we needed more of that.

And I ended up in this business, but it started out with a few VAs thrown together.

What I started doing really was constantly delegating—continuously process mapping, systemizing, training, delegating, and constantly doing that all the time. It is a bit painful, but constantly doing that all the time.

And then at some point you get to a stage where you’re like, the VAs are full, right? So you fill them first with this support-layer type stuff. And then you reach a point where you’re like, what I need now is beyond the skill set of that person. That’s when you need to start bringing in more strategic players who are experts in their field.

There is a great strategy I used for a long time called a high-low strategy. Basically, you have most of the support and process work and you’re delegating it to your assistants. You’re the one running that though—that becomes where you start bumping your head up against the strategy thing. You’re now head of marketing, head of sales, head of everything, right?

But as long as you’ve got lots of people doing the doing, you can handle that for a while. And then a great strategy is to say: “Okay, now I don’t need a CMO, nor can I afford it. Or I don’t need a full-time head of something.”

But you can hire great fractional consultants to come in and bridge that gap for a while, and still have your doers doing the doing until you’re big enough to hire people in those higher roles.

I hope that’s making sense. I think where entrepreneurs get stuck a lot is they try and throw a body at a problem. They go, “I’m bumping up against the ceiling—I need to hire someone to just handle this for me.” They’re desperate for someone, pay big money, someone comes in, it doesn’t quite work out.

It’s hard to recruit in any role—it doesn’t matter. I think you’re better off first trying to get your delegation muscle working really well.

And of course I’m selling my own book here because I sell VAs, but this is how I did it. I just kept exercising that delegation muscle and kept delegating to VAs first before I started to hire the bigger roles.

And then when those bigger roles do come in full-time, they’re like, “Wow, so I have a team.” You won’t be doing any of this stuff because we’ve already refined the process.

So it’s just this idea of not throwing a body at a problem—you’ve got to think strategically about what you’re doing.

Eric Martinez: That makes perfect sense. I think it’s also a very uncomfortable spot for some people.

Barbara Turley: It’s terrible. Even for me—I’m making this sound really easy. It’s not. But nothing is easy though.

People who are great marketers find that easy, and the vast majority of people don’t. It’s the same sort of thing—you’re never going to be brilliant at or love every department.

So you have to start to think about how you can grow a business. I mean, unless you’ve got funding, I suppose—but I’m talking about bootstrapped businesses.

Eric Martinez: As you go through this process and you start using virtuals, are those all contractors? Are they on your payroll? I know I’m getting into a little bit of nitty gritty, but I think business owners, particularly entrepreneurs or owners of small businesses, don’t give themselves the permission to hire the help they need to scale their businesses. And I think this is true at any level of company, but I think it’s really true in that small and mid-sized business where you’re big enough to have people, but you’re still small enough that you don’t have everything you need. And that is today’s society to a T in my opinion—those businesses operate that way. So what do they need to do to give themselves permission and think of it in a framework that makes sense?

Barbara Turley: There’s two tricks for this. The first one is more business focused. The first trick is to say to yourself, nobody has launched a business to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week. Nobody ever got up in the morning and said, this is what I want to do with my life, right? So let’s be honest about that.

Everyone looks at the cost. Everyone goes, if I pay a VA, this is how much it’s going to cost. I would say, stop that thinking and go: if I was to free up this many hours of my time, how much more would I grow this business? I’m tipping that you have the capacity—or your key people, if it’s a larger business—to grow, to have more impact than the cost of the VA.

So it’s really that whole thing of thinking about, well, what would be the impact on the business if I was freed up? And even the brainwave state thing—if I actually was more in that mode than the cost of the VA.

Now, just because you can do Canva images doesn’t mean that you should be doing them, even if you love doing it and you’re brilliant at it. I would still say to people, do that for the love of it. But at the end of the day, the job that you’re in, if you’re a business owner, is you’re in the business of business building. And that is a mindset shift—you’ve got to get out of technician mode and think about how are we growing this business?

And the energy of the owner and the creative mind of the owner and the key people is actually the thing that you want to expand. And the only way to do that is to take the busy work off them such that they can actually move forward and move the needle.

So that’s tip number one.

But the other tip I think is also really important that nobody ever does is to sit down and forget the business model, forget the business vision for a second, sit down and—this is what I did—and you map out your personal vision for your life. And you think about what do I actually want personally?

If you were to remove money or success or any of these things from the equation, how do I want to feel every day? How do I want to live every day? And then you work from there and you ask yourself, the business model that I have, does that serve that or does that take away from that?

I’m not saying you can change things, but it is a really good mindset to be in. It is my life. We all want to be successful in business. I’m really passionate about this because this is what I did. And every decision I ever make in business is driven by my personal vision for my life first.

And I didn’t start that way. I’ve grown into that, but I think it’s really powerful.

And then to remember that probably the person who can move the needle the most is usually the business owner and/or the other key roles that you have. Busy work is the death of any business. Delegate or die. That’s actually the truth.

Tim Curtis: Yeah. When you see those organizations where they’re needing to give themselves permission, for example, to hire something, typically what you’ll see is that same struggle to release or to bring in additional resource. You’ll see struggle in other areas of the business. It won’t just be limited to this because there’s a larger cultural change that needs to happen, which is we need to embrace the concept of engaging others to come alongside and help.

Barbara Turley: Look, I think on that point as well, there is also a perception out there or a fear that is real where people go, I just don’t want to give up control. And my argument would be if you learn to delegate properly, you don’t give up control. What you do is you’re not the one doing it, but you control the process.

I don’t feel like I’ve relinquished control of anything across the business because we now have department heads and all sorts of people, but we still collaborate. And I’ll go back to this objectives and key results thing. We are collaborating as a leadership team to figure out, are the processes right? Are we getting the results we need?

I feel really across things and really in control of things without actually doing any of the doing. So I think we’ve got to forget this idea that delegation is relinquishing control. It doesn’t have to be. We’re all control freaks really, all entrepreneurs—we don’t like to admit it, but we actually are. And that’s okay. It’s just a matter of managing that.

Tim Curtis: Or we pivot here to close. I have a question I’d love to get your feedback on. And it’s one that when I do get the opportunity to sit either one-on-one with CEOs or chief marketing officers, or I also have a lot of opportunities to sit within CEO groups and to hear what the tone and the conversation is.

And the largest—the number one point that was always being discussed in these groups was the tension of hiring in-person versus hiring virtually. You know, and the challenge in the back and forth. And what you really found was people had a personal preference and they led with that personal preference. Their bias was somewhat informing the way that they were looking at things.

But in this new world in which we live, the concept of virtual, of course, cat’s out of the bag—that’s done. My question to you is how do you facilitate a culture and an environment where you maintain those things that are important to you like culture, while still engaging either in a hybrid environment or in this case through VAs?

In your opinion, what’s the trick of the trade there to manage or lead through that?

Barbara Turley: Okay, so first of all, it takes work. People think that once we go remote, we just work the way we used to work, except now we’re all remote. What happens there is connection dies. You can’t just take how we used to work and then put it into a distributed model that’s remote and spread all around the world.

And I think that’s some of the problem in the thinking of people who don’t want to do this remote thing. It’s a big fear and I get it, and it’s real because in their head they’re going, I don’t see how we can make our business the way we do it. It’s not going to work over there. And they’re right—it won’t. You need a new model.

So this is a raging debate on LinkedIn at the moment if you’re following any future of work stuff. COVID was an experiment and we were forced into it, but now we have the choice.

But in order to make it work and make it successful, you have to put work into the operational frameworks—how we work, how we collaborate, how we communicate. And it is different from being in an office environment.

You need to get really good at the boring stuff, which is documentation, process mapping, things like how to write a status update rather than have a meeting—and don’t write war and peace.

We’ve created a way of working at The Virtual Hub that I call flexibility within a structure. So for example, you bring great people in who do great work and have brilliant experience in a certain area. Great.

And you say to them, that’s brilliant. However, how we work here is that we work off objectives and key results. We have an update cadence that is bi-weekly or monthly or whatever it is.

And how we do it is, in our company, for example, everyone does their status updates in the same way. And it’s basically a summary of where we’re at—what we’ve achieved, what’s the roadblock, and what are we doing next.

Because the roadblock is where we may have to trigger a meeting. We may, we may not—we may be like, we can solve that roadblock.

And then obviously we’re big users of Asana. You don’t have to use that platform, but you definitely need a place in the cloud where everyone shows up to work, does work, collaborates on work, reports on work, and has this kind of connection.

And it’s not Slack. Slack is just noise, to be totally honest. You can use Slack, but another rule we have at The Virtual Hub is that Slack is for chat.

We can chat about something, but when we agree the instruction, the instruction must be put at the site of the work. And that’s in Asana—whether it’s at the task level, the project level, the objective and key result level, or the team level.

The actual instruction is put at the site of the work. And that’s the documentation thing. I don’t mean big books of documents. I’m just talking about how we actually structure things—it’s different in a virtual environment. That’s how you make it work. You move to the new frameworks.

Tim Curtis: Yeah, I think I saw, as an example, I think there’s a lot of those integrations where they will come in with Slack. But you have to understand Slack is a wonderful tool. It’s amazing how you can communicate and dialogue via Slack. You can maintain a culture. There’s a lot of those fun things within Slack, but it is not a project management tool, and it is not a replacement for that. So yeah, no arguments here.

Barbara Turley: I could talk here for hours about the operational structure. I mean, interestingly, in the last two years, because this is such a major problem, we’ve actually launched an entire department. We have an operational efficiency consulting and implementation team with system architects, and our consultant sits in Sydney. We’ve got project managers, and we actually do that work for clients where we build Power BI dashboards for them so that they have live feeding data to help make decisions quicker in an online environment and things like that.

And I mean, we just launched it because we’ve been doing it this way for, like I said, eight years. I mean, we’ve been doing this for a long time, and it is a different way of working when you’re in a fully remote environment. And those who feel like we can’t go to a remote environment, we don’t feel like it’s going to work—they’re probably right, because the way they’re currently doing it is probably not going to work in a virtual environment.

Tim Curtis: No, and it’s ripe for change.

Barbara Turley: Don’t get overwhelmed though. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Start with one step. That’s why actually bringing on remote VAs can be handy with process maps and stuff, because you can put those in Asana and just start there. And you’re like, that’s working really well with those remote teams. Maybe we could do this with other people who are not in the office this week or next week or whatever. That’s how you build from there.

Eric Martinez: That makes perfect sense. So just before we move to close, Barbara, we could talk about this all day long. And I would ask you lots of nitty-gritty questions, which nobody wants to listen to. But are there any last pieces of advice that you would like to leave the audience with? Because there’s a lot to unpack in this particular episode—lots of little action items that you have noted throughout the conversation. If there was one last piece of advice, what would that be?

Barbara Turley: I’m going to follow on with what I just was talking about, saying that I know you’ve got to start with the end in mind, but that doesn’t mean that you today have built what the end is going to look like. Like anything, if you want to move into this digital realm and get digital velocity—what you guys are talking about—if you want to get digital speed like that in terms of operations and stuff like that, it really is just not getting overwhelmed.

Don’t overcomplicate it. It actually can be as simple as bullet points on a page to start with and delegating one small process, a simple one, to an assistant, maybe bringing on a VA and trying that, and building from there. Otherwise it will be overwhelming, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s just slowly, methodically going through each process and slowly delegating.

You’re not going to delegate all of it in one day. It might take six months, but that’s okay—just one step at a time. And that’s really powerful. I think people try to go too fast and then they get all caught up and overwhelmed and it doesn’t happen.

Eric Martinez: I think that’s right. Many people who listen, though, like that’s fast—but that’s one of the things I tell the girls when they’re making a lot of mistakes: it usually goes to rushing and not taking time to do things properly so that they can do it faster later down the road. So I think that’s very good advice for anything that we do.

Barbara, if anybody wants to reach out, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So I’m putting a lot of content out at the moment on LinkedIn, actually. And we have a process, of course, for that, where I only do the bit that I need to do. I only show up and do the podcast. All the other stuff happens in the background.

So on LinkedIn, please connect over there—Barbara Turley on LinkedIn. I talk a lot about these topics. And of course, thevirtualhub.com. If you want to pop over there, if you’re just thinking about getting a VA or you want to have a chat with us, we’ve got lots of content on our site to help you.

And you can also book a call with some of our team, and they can help you decide what we can help you with and if we’re the right fit for you, etc.

Eric Martinez: Yeah. And you know, everybody remember the VAs aren’t just one thing—lots of different potential for utilizing virtual assistants in your business. Well, that’s it for today’s episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I’m Eric Martinez from Blue Tangerine.

Tim Curtis: And I’m Tim Curtis from Cohere One.

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