Nevena Bazalac: Welcome to Entrepreneurship Lab, a space for all entrepreneurs who want to start, grow and sell their business.

In this podcast, we will cover different topics of entrepreneurship, from starting your business, finding your clients and branding yourself. You will be learning everything about marketing, finance, scaling your business and much much more.

As your host Nevena Bazalac, I’m welcoming you to my lab where you will together with me create, learn and grow. Welcome.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the new episode of Entrepreneurship Lab. This is your host, Nevena Bazalac, welcoming you once again. And as always, I’m bringing you some interesting information to have you scale your business, and today I have a special guest.

She’s currently based in France, and we’re going to talk about something very interesting and very important for every entrepreneur, especially when you start up, and that’s delegating and outsourcing your tasks because it’s very important that you stay productive and you focus on important tasks in your business and outsource the others.

So let me introduce to you my special guest that I’m very excited to have today. Her name is Barbara Turley, and Barbara is founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub. She’s also an investor, entrepreneur herself, and The Virtual Hub is a company that she scaled very quickly where she helps businesses with outsourcing and getting them help with different virtual assistants. And she will tell us a little bit more in detail, right, everything they are doing.

But her business grows so much. And when I got in touch and got this information about Barbara, I was very excited to bring her on because I think delegating and outsourcing is something that a lot of startups are struggling with. And I’m excited that Barbara can help us today.

So welcome, Barbara, to the show.

Barbara Turley: Thank you so much for having me, Nevena, and I’m excited to explore this topic. I have a lot of very good and interesting views on what startups should be doing in this space and why it’s so difficult, so we can delve right into that.

Nevena Bazalac: Yes, I love it. Before I go, I’m very tactical and strategic, so I like to ask specific questions. But I want you to tell us a little bit more about how you started with The Virtual Hub, what led to it and how it grows so fast, right? So tell us a little bit more about the background story and what did you learn on the journey before we actually explain to people and give them some tips?

Barbara Turley: Yes, and I think my story in itself is like a lesson in a class in, you know, tips, ramps and stuff. I found out business at all. It was very much by accident. I never had an entrepreneurial bone in my body. I was in corporate from a very early age. I always wanted to work in high finance, which I ended up doing.

I spent 15 years in the investment banking industry, and to be honest, it came to a point in my life where, as a woman, I realized I didn’t really want to be a corporate mom. So any of the corporate moms out there, I want to high 5 you because I think it’s the hardest job in the world to do, is to hold down a corporate career as well as being a great mom.

And I wanted to launch my own business, and a few things happened. My first foray into business was sort of ruined by the 2008 financial crisis because I left my job with a grand plan. I had no plan, but a grand plan, and the financial crisis came along, and I was like, well, clearly that’s not a good time for starting a business right now.

So I tried to go back to the financial industry and couldn’t get a job at all. It was really difficult, and I ended up getting a job. I took a maternity leave contract from another lady that was leaving a job, and from that I ended up working at Deutsche Asset Management in Sydney.

And to cut a long story short, as the financial crisis rumbled on at the time, I ended up doing my first big investment. I got an opportunity at that time to get involved with a group, a very clever bunch that were buying a business out of Deutsche at the time in Australia. And I hopped on the coattails of that.

And I had a great journey there working there and being a shareholder there and learning how great companies get built. I mean, that was, you know, and I’m still actually involved in the company today. I still consult a bit with them and do some work for them.

So after about five years of that, I decided that it was time for me to again look at launching my own business. I started out doing some business coaching. So I left that, and I was doing some business coaching.

And to cut a long story short, I honestly was finding any business I was coaching had the same problem. And I’m sure you’ll see this and your listeners will know this problem, where if they didn’t grow, they weren’t going to be able to hire staff, and if they didn’t hire staff, they weren’t going to be able to grow. So this constant problem of like, I’ll just keep doing everything myself until I can grow enough to hire staff.

And of course, I had read Tim Ferriss for our work week book, and I had a VA myself in the Philippines. And I started saying, well, how about we get some of my VA’s friends to help you out in your business so that we can get on with strategy.

And before I knew it, I was getting more calls for VA’s than I was for business coaching. And one day I was like, I just found myself. I literally found myself in this business sort of by accident. I think I’m running a business here.

And you know, the lesson in it is that I had no business plan, no website, no nothing, but I had an offer, and it was something that people wanted me to help them with. And eight years later, we’ve got 300 employees in the Philippines, and we’re rapidly scaling now.

So, you know, it’s taken 8 years to build it, but you know, here we are today. So we help clients all over the world today.

Nevena Bazalac: That’s amazing, and I know being in Dubai, I work personally also with so many people from the Philippines. They’re such hard workers, very professional, and they look for opportunities. So it’s amazing that you were able to connect them actually and outsource and give opportunity to people who are looking to, you know, help.

OK, amazing. I love this story. We will talk a little bit more about how you actually help, and if listeners need any help, they can reach out to you. But I want to ask you, so there is this constant problem we see actually that people need to grow to outsource, but then they are like they cannot grow if they don’t hire staff. So how do you think we can overcome that?

And I also see that even myself, before I started outsourcing, I was struggling a little bit. If you know, there is a trust and on the quality that somebody will maintain the quality of your work and deliver, and you have to put in time to train the person. So it’s not an easy step from being a freelancer. I will call a freelancer self-employed because often a lot of people don’t even have a business, but they are actually self-employed. So they’re just working for themselves.

So how do you move from that level? What do you think will be the first step to overcome?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So first thing I would say is that everything that you’ve said and everything you’re feeling and thinking is true. It is not easy to get this right. So a lot of people beat themselves up about it, go why wasn’t I able to get it right?

I can tell you I’ve hired thousands of people at this point, and it is difficult recruiting, training, managing, getting the right fit, you know, all that stuff is actually very, very difficult to do. And now that doesn’t mean you can’t do it yourself. Of course you can. You can go on to Upwork and Freelancer. You can find people directly, and if you’re only looking for one, you can get a home run on the first one you hire. It can actually be that simple.

The difference for us, because we’re hiring lots of people all the time, is we have to scale it and get it right. But there are a few tricks to it. So the number one thing, I think one of the problems I see, particularly with solopreneurs or freelancers or, you know, people starting to, in build phase, is they kind of get really, really, really busy, and then they want help yesterday, but they haven’t quite figured out what they want the help with.

And they have, so that’s part 1, and then they have a sort of a misaligned expectation as to what an assistant is versus what a specialist is. And I always see people, first of all, expecting too much from the assistant role.

And then in the Philippines, you get a bit of a yes culture problem going on. So you can have people saying yes and not really knowing how to do stuff. Training is a major problem. And of course, I saw this early on, like in the first VA that I actually placed, and I’ll be honest with you, most of them ended up a disaster.

And the reason they were a disaster was for two reasons.

Number one, I rapidly realized that when I wasn’t the one managing the VAs, if I let the client do it, they weren’t that good at delegation. They weren’t that good at systems and processes, and that was something that I found accidentally that I was quite good at. And I thought everyone was good at it, but actually they weren’t.

So that’s problem number one. Yeah, like you sort of think like whatever your expertise is, you think everyone’s doing that. I was like, but why would you want me to manage them for you? I mean, you can do it, but I realized that delegation, you know, process mapping, all of that stuff is actually quite challenging for a lot of people, and particularly business owners and entrepreneurs.

And the second problem was the training of VAs. So you would get VAs with these amazing resumes that would say they can do all this stuff, but usually they’re self-taught or they learned from a different client, and there’s lots of bad habits and there’s lots of issues.

So at The Virtual Hub, what I actually did was I decided, right, instead of being a recruiting model or the outsourcing model, what we actually do now, and this is why we’ve been quite successful, is we actually hire people. I don’t look for VAs, I just look for great people, great cultural fit with the right smarts, the right English and the right ability to be trained.

And we run our own training programs, and we actually manufacture our own VA. So we actually train people to be great VAs, and then simultaneously we actually train clients on how to get the right operational framework in place so that your delegation ability is better.

So we have like, you know, over 400 process maps that we’ve already done. We’ve a full list of what every VA can do, and we help clients to set up tools like, you know, something like Asana or Trello. You know, these project management tools are extremely useful when you transition from just on your own to now having to delegate and collaborate with somebody else, and email a disaster, like for example, for task allocation.

So it’s these frameworks that actually really help and focus on systems, processes and delegation and teams that help to bridge all those gaps. And still it’s not easy, right? But you know those that help a lot, yeah.

Nevena Bazalac: I like your model. I like that you, because I think the character and the mindset a little bit and certain things you cannot train in people. So when it comes to skills and tasks, people can be trained, but we have to look above the training, or we have all been there, right, either in corporate works that we had or in our companies where you hire someone, they’re perfect on paper, but they are not.

Barbara Turley: Terrible on the job, or terrible on the job. I mean, we’ve had people apply who were brilliant VAs on paper, like actual loads of experience, and then we’ve sort of gone, how was that such a disaster?

So you know, we have a set of core values like most scaling companies these days. And one of our core values, two of our core values, we literally hire for them because you can’t train in them. Energy and enthusiasm is in our DNA. So like if this person does not have energy and enthusiasm built in, like we can’t change that.

So negative, like victim people, we just, you can’t do anything with that. And number 2, we stay curious because you have to have a curious mind and to be able to dig and dig and dig until you find the answer, particularly when you’re a virtual assistant because often you’re given stuff to do that you have to dig around and find solutions for.

And you know, we try to recruit that so we have that sense in people. The rest is training, you know, we can train all of the other stuff within reason. So, and that’s why we’ve been successful, you know, that’s why we’ve done it that way.

Nevena Bazalac: Seeing when myself, and because I’m an entrepreneur and I work with so many investors, so many entrepreneurs, and when we talk about, and especially some people have so many multiple businesses, they tell me it’s so hard to find someone because, like you said, they would either have yes cultures, they would say yes, but they’re not able to do it, or they would just do what they’re told.

So for example, if they’re told, hey, find me the hotel, they will just find the first hotel and book, let’s say for a business trip without understanding how far this person has to travel to their meetings, you know, not being kind of solution-oriented or thinking like that entrepreneur is thinking, understanding their lifestyle, which is kind of, you know, like you cannot expect because they don’t know how the lifestyle and what they have to do.

So are you facing those types of issues? Because this is what a lot of investors and big business owners I’m spending time with are telling me, that they’re struggling with their assistants, that they don’t understand sometimes how they think and how many things they have and actually don’t solve things ahead of time. You know what I mean? They’re not reactive and proactive.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So, and I think to be honest, this problem exists whether you’re recruiting in the Philippines or you’re recruiting in America or you’re recruiting in Australia. I’ve seen this problem, and it’s really, you know, I heard Gary Vaynerchuk actually had a video out the other day, right? And it was brilliant, right? It was on LinkedIn.

And he said something like, I’m always asked this question, how do I get my employees to care as much about my business as I do? And he was like, I’ll give them one simple answer, make them equal partners.

And I think that there is a sense that, of course, you want your people to show initiative, to take an interest, but there has to be a kind of a setup in the beginning, which is hard to do, where you have to kind of explain to somebody that’s working for you what it’s like to work with you.

So I always say like, you know, make sure that you’re really clear on what things drive you mad. Like just be clear about it. Go like it drives me mad, like for example, all my team know that it drives me absolutely insane if I don’t know what’s happening.

So I’m like, I would rather be overloaded with updates, and then I can say, OK, you can cut it back this way, than to have no updates at all. So when someone says to me, well, I didn’t really want to flood your inbox and I didn’t want to, I’m like, no, no, no, you do that, and then I’ll tell you what to do because it drives me mad not to know what’s going on.

So that’s just my little thing. So I think there is a kind of a discussion when, particularly if an assistant is like an executive assistant, where they’re helping with your life, your bookings, your calendar, they actually need to know you. They need to know a lot about you and how you operate and how you like things and don’t like things.

And I think that’s a sort of responsibility of both sides to get together and actually collaborate more on that.

So I do think there is a bit of an onus on the person delegating there to kind of realize that they can’t read your mind. And unfortunately, you might want them to think the way that you do, but they’re just doing their job really. So that’s one thing.

And yes culture, I think, look, we try to recruit for people who have an opinion and who are not afraid to share an opinion, but it’s hard, right? Because, you know, these are assistant roles.

I think one of the things that’s very beneficial about what we do is, of course, we don’t just have one VA, and how we serve is client accounts. And I know I’m kind of pitching The Virtual Hub here, you know, but the reason I’ve built it this way is because I’ve been trying to solve all the problems that you’re talking about.

So all of our client accounts obviously have a VA, but they also have a results coach and a client success manager. And the three of those people actually work together to make sure that we’re aligned.

The VA is doing the job, but the results coach is making sure that we are actually fulfilling the goals that we’ve set with this client. What are the objectives and key results we’ve set for this client? And is the VA overwhelmed, or does the VA need more training, or are there some communication gaps?

And we’re sort of filling that gap and making sure that we can get success and not allow these issues to come in.

But if you’re on your own with the VA, it’s worth having that conversation and just being open about it and being candid and saying, I really need this to happen this way. If they continue not to do it, then you’re probably talking about a will issue and not a skill issue. Then it’s a HR discussion. You know, maybe there’s just not a fit for you, to be honest.

Nevena Bazalac: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I want to ask you just the question that came to my mind. What is one thing that people should delegate but they struggle the most to delegate, but they really should delegate from your experience?

Barbara Turley: Oh, that’s a great one, because everyone’s going to expect me to say email, right? Like every other company’s gonna say email. I don’t delegate my email. I don’t, because I just am.

Nevena Bazalac: I don’t delegate my e-mail. I’m like, I am the time when I respond to my emails, and I’m on top of it.

Barbara Turley: And yes. Yeah, for me.

Nevena Bazalac: I wanna know your experience.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s not that I’m on top of email. I just have a theory that you should eradicate email. Now, I could talk for an hour about that. So that’s a whole topic, right? You know, I think there’s too much email going on. What should you delegate? OK, I’m going to make this broad. Anything that you’re doing more than once, right, that has a process and is trainable, you should delegate.

That’s what I do. I mean, the minute I have to do something more than once or twice, I’m like, there’s a process here. I’m going to process this up, systemize it and delegate it. And then I’m going to circle back.

And after you delegate something, here’s the real trick. You’ve got to delegate it, and then you’ve got to see how that person performs by doing those steps. And you have to have a process map, right? So you’ve got to, you know, how does that person perform? And then when the mistake comes up, you see the mistake as a gift.

And you say, OK, this mistake is showing me where there’s a hole in my process or there’s a hole in the training or there’s a hole in the IP I have in my head as I do a process compared to the IP this person has in their head by doing this process. And there could be an IP gap, but that could be solved by just adding another step, you know, so it’s just iterating your process.

And people would say that’s so tedious. I don’t want to do that. I hate the idea of doing that. And I just say, well, you know, you could take a step back and do this work now. It is tedious, but so that you can move faster later.

Otherwise, in one year from now, I guarantee you, you’ll be doing exactly the same thing as you are today, and you won’t have moved an inch. I mean, that’s the reality. So that’s my view on delegation.

Nevena Bazalac: Yeah. Yeah, but did you notice something? So I’m not a person. People are really afraid because I learned this sentence from one of my coaches and consultants. There is no, if you want to grow it, you need to let go of control, right? So there is one part, but again, like you said, when you build those steps and processes in the process, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes, but that’s how you scale.

You need to constantly build SOPs and, you know, procedures and be very clear how things are done. But is there something from all of this experience that you feel like for your clients that you hired for virtual assistants that they’re really struggling to give and let go of?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, because I don’t fundamentally believe that you should let go of control. I think that is utter codswallop. I don’t give away control at all. I think you can give away a certain amount of control to people at the upper levels who know exactly what they’re doing, right?

But in my opinion, the reason entrepreneurs are afraid to give away control is because we are control freaks, because we’re good at what we do, right? And it’s OK to be that way. That is the reason we are entrepreneurial. That is the reason, because not everyone has that flair.

So for me, I figured out pretty quickly that I don’t like to give away control, but I actually don’t have to if I control the process and if I actually delegate the process, and then I get feedback loops.

So if somebody’s not executing the process, I can go back and be like, so why, you know? And the process also, I make sure that I have Asana running so that recurring processes, I can see work getting done all the time.

Now, I’m not micromanaging. People might think, well, that’s you micromanaging. I would say that’s active management, which is different from micromanaging. Once the process is set and the person is trained, I let them off doing it.

And then I need reporting back on how it’s going and is it done and what results are we getting from doing this process? And I build that into the process. And in that way, I actually maintain control while giving up control completely, sort of.

You know, I create a structure and allow flexibility within a structure. So that’s my advice, is don’t feel like, oh, I can’t let go of control, and that’s my problem. Don’t let go of control. Just build structures that mean you maintain control, but somebody else is doing it.

Nevena Bazalac: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love it. I love it. What is one advice or a tip you would give to everyone listening? I have a lot of startups, a lot of entrepreneurs in this podcast, self-employed, who need the next step to outsource and hire.

So you’re going to tell us a little bit more in a minute about specifically what you guys have, but what is maybe you gave us a lot already, but what is a tip or an advice or something from your experience that can be very helpful for everyone listening?

Barbara Turley: Yes. So I’m going to give you sort of two. And the first step is when you’re a startup and you’re on your own, everything is marketing and sales, right? All the other stuff, the fancy bells and whistles can come later, you know, the tidy house and all that stuff.

Everything is marketing and sales, and the first person that you should bring on, again, you’re going to think I’m just talking about my own book here, but I’m talking because I’ve lived this. The first person you bring on is a general VA who is quiet, can cut across lots of areas and can be your wing man or wing woman.

So you can say, hey, can you take this document and do this with it? Hey, can you go out and do that? And you’re sort of, there isn’t really a process that’s just kind of like they’re literally sitting beside you online, but during your working hours.

This way, I strongly recommend working in the same time zone together and being like your wing man or wing woman, and they’re doing stuff for you, and they can do a lot of that marketing stuff you want, a lot of those marketing processes, sales follow-up, this sort of thing, like any of the admin and support around marketing and sales.

When your product is selling, your product or service is now selling, and you know that the thing you started is now selling, right? So now you’re getting into scale-up mode, right? When you go into scale-up mode, then you have to start looking across departments and going, OK, now we have to systemize and operationalize and get all the systems running in each department and the processes, and then we start the need to start delegating those things, and that’s when you start to scale something.

So I hope that makes sense. Like, you know, I think I see people looking at operations when they’re a startup. I’m like, don’t worry about operations, just get sales. That’s kind of what you have to do.

Nevena Bazalac: Yes, because in my company we also help someone who’s a startup, and that’s all, like you said, focus on marketing and sales. And I always say you don’t even need paid marketing and ads. You need to see organically to be able to develop the skills, penetrate the market, like you said.

And then with big companies or even mid-sized companies, they’re growing, but they don’t have SOPs, they don’t have systems, so they need someone.

Barbara Turley: And it breaks.

Nevena Bazalac: Right, to like just so.

Barbara Turley: What ends up happening, what you know, for the startup solopreneur, what happens is they’re just doing too much themselves, and if they don’t stop, they’re not going to grow, right?

So you have to delegate down the assistant-type stuff you may need. There’s also a high-low strategy. I’ll just tell you this one. You also, if you have a great assistant, sometimes you can hire the expensive consultant because you only need them for two hours a month, and the VA can do the work.

So you might get a marketing consultant to actually help you with strategy, and then the two of you together can roll that out, you know. But then when you find businesses that are scaling, the problems that occur there are firefighting, you know, overwhelm of the team, confusion and mistakes, paying people 150 grand a year who are doing $10.00 an hour jobs for half the time, and systems start to break. There’s no process.

And then you can’t scale that because no matter how much marketing and sales you do, the bucket is just leaking all the profit at the bottom. That’s actually what’s happening there. So that’s a different sort of problem. Yeah, different, yeah.

Nevena Bazalac: Absolutely, absolutely. I love it. I want to just wrap up this episode. I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about what you do at The Virtual Hub and how listeners, if they need help, if they need a virtual assistant, they’re ready for that step, can they reach you? Can you find them the right fit for them, the right person?

Tell us a little bit more about your process, the whole process of onboarding and helping entrepreneurs.

Barbara Turley: Sure, sure. So first of all, a very important point. We are The Virtual Hub, and I’ll tell you why. There is another company called Virtual Hub. There’s a few of them actually around the world doing different things. Anyway, we are The Virtual Hub.

So just because some people have said, oh, I spoke to someone, and they were talking to a different company, they’re not us. So TheVirtualHub.com is us.

And so the thing that we do, if somebody’s looking for an accountant or a specialized kind of role, we don’t do that, right? My philosophy and the way The Virtual Hub is built is all around the fact that I think any business, if it’s one person, we want to make sure that the time of that one person is used on stuff that moves the needle, and they’re not bogged down in the busy work that is required and is important and needs to get done.

So we’ve got to figure out what layer of their work at the moment should they be freeing up their time with, right? So we want an assistant there. In scaling companies, we do the same thing, but across the business. We’re saying, like, let’s delegate down the 30% of tasks that are happening throughout this company that are stopping the key people from doing the work that moves the needle. OK.

So a virtual assistant, unfortunately, the term has been treated very broadly in the market, and it’s like anyone with a heartbeat who can type through to someone who can code an app, and I’m like that is just too broad.

You’ve got to make sure that you’re talking about business processes and the assistant that’s going to be your wing man or wing woman in a department or in the whole company and can execute the process. So that’s number one.

At The Virtual Hub, we handle most of the training, and before we actually are not a recruiter, and we’re not really an outsourced model in that we actually hire people for ourselves. This is one of the key things that we do.

We actually have recruiting teams that are recruiting for us, and we’re recruiting great people that we like the look of. We feel they’re going to be, we know what our clients are looking for. And then we have our own training platform, and everyone goes through our Academy basically for weeks and then sometimes a few months before we would ever consider even showing them to a client, right?

So when our clients are coming in, we have very much helped to productize the offer so that people know the bucket of the type of VA that they’re looking for, and that makes it really simple. So you don’t have to write a brief, and you don’t have to figure out the role. We actually help you to figure that out.

And, you know, 98% of the meetups that we have, we call them meetups and not interviews, people choose someone on the first go. So there’s no loads of resumes, interviewing loads of people, none of that. We want to get a home run on the first go.

And then we handle, we do a personalized training road map for every client account once the pairing has happened, and that personalized training road map happens outside the client’s time. It’s run by the results coach with the VA to make sure that we’re upskilling that VA in anything else that they may need specific to that client account. So I hope that makes sense.

We also have a new arm of the business, which is very exciting. Of course, our core is a VA business in the Philippines, but invariably what we have found is our clients need help with their systems, the platforms they’re using, the implementation, the process mapping, all that sort of thing.

So we have an entire other department now called, it’s basically our operational efficiency consulting and implementation team. And we do that for all clients as well. We offer everyone who wants a free call with our consultant to have a look at their systems. And of course then we charge if they want some work done, but we can offer that as well.

So we feel that we’re like a sort of a one-stop shop now for operational efficiency across platforms, processes and people. That’s really what we want to do.

Nevena Bazalac: That’s amazing. So what I’m going to do, I’m going to share a link to your website in the description of this episode. So everyone who listens, if you want to connect, to reach out to The Virtual Hub and Barbara, you can do so.

And yes, take the next step, take the leap, and it’s time to outsource and delegate and grow. Thank you, Barbara, so much for being here today, for taking the time and sharing all your experience and knowledge, and I’m sure listeners will love it and benefit from it. And I hope I will have a chance and we will interview very soon again.

Barbara Turley: I’d love to. That would be great. Thank you for having me.

Nevena Bazalac: Thank you, Barbara, once again, and thank you everyone for listening. I will see you in the next episode.