Eradicating business overwhelm with virtual team development
Expert Authority Effect
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Episode breakdown
Have you ever had overwhelmed with your business and just thought there are all these great things you want to do, but you’re not sure how you’re going to get it done? Barbara Turley, Founder of The Virtual Hub is going to be sharing with you how you can build the team and how it’s going to impact your business for the better.
Barbara Turley’s mission is to eradicate “small business overwhelm” by simplifying the offshore outsourcing process and facilitating cost-effective business scalability. She and her team at The Virtual Hub make this happen every day through digital marketing, social media, personal assistant, and administrative support for growing businesses.
People have lives. Their life isn’t their business, even though it’s a large part of it and everyone experiences overwhelm. How do you take people out of that and get them back on that path of being productive?
- How to free up your time to grow your business
- What should a business owner do
- Why you don’t have to have experts in every role within your business
- How to let go of control
- Mistakes that business owners make
- How Barbara Turley started
- Barbara Turley’s advice
- Internal leverage concept
- Barbara Turley’s success story
- What to invest time in
- How to delegate effectively
- How efficient and cost-effective is your delivery and your operations
As businesses grow, you have to continue to evolve and develop your team, your systems, your processes
In this episode
00:00 Understanding Business Overwhelm and Delegation
The discussion opens with the topic of business overwhelm, emphasizing how common it is among entrepreneurs. Barbara Turley shares her experience and expertise in reducing overwhelm through effective delegation and virtual team development. She highlights that overwhelm is a recurring challenge and outlines the necessity of regularly reassessing workloads to stay productive.
01:32 Evaluating and Delegating Tasks Effectively
Barbara explains the importance of determining whether the business owner needs to perform specific tasks or if they can be delegated. She suggests that playing in one’s “genius zone” and identifying tasks that can be processed and outsourced are crucial steps to regaining time and focusing on growth.
03:35 The Business Owner's True Role
The conversation explores the metaphor of the business owner as the conductor of an orchestra. Barbara emphasizes that the owner should lead and oversee rather than be involved in every task, reinforcing the need to build and delegate systems.
05:10 Challenges in Finding the Right People
Barbara addresses the common complaint of not being able to find the right people to delegate to. She asserts that this is often a process problem, not a people problem. Strong systems and well-documented processes are necessary to support successful delegation, even to less experienced staff.
06:37 Mindset Barriers to Letting Go
Letting go of control is identified as a major mindset challenge. Barbara explains that business owners often fear losing control, but with the right systems, oversight, and training, it’s possible to delegate without actually losing control.
08:02 Realistic Expectations for Transition
Barbara debunks the myth that delegation and systemization can happen in seven days. She outlines realistic timelines, suggesting that true transformation typically takes six to twelve months, depending on the business’s starting point and the roles involved.
10:17 The Importance of Starting Now
Barbara and Mario stress the importance of beginning the delegation and systemization journey immediately rather than delaying. The passage of time is inevitable, and the earlier one starts, the sooner the benefits are realized.
11:39 Preparing Before Hiring
Barbara warns against hiring team members prematurely. She advises defining roles clearly, preparing processes, and planning onboarding thoroughly before adding new hires to avoid creating additional stress and inefficiencies.
13:09 Scaling Teams and Leadership Structure
As teams grow, Barbara explains, the need for structure increases. Once a team reaches a certain size, project managers or team leads become essential to prevent overload on the founder. She shares her experience at The Virtual Hub, which now has a full leadership and operational structure to manage 150 staff effectively.
15:03 Delegation and Trust in Business
The discussion begins with the importance of delegation in business growth. Many entrepreneurs fail to scale because they don’t trust others to handle responsibilities, resulting in them becoming the bottleneck. The conversation emphasizes the necessity of building systems and trusting a team to avoid burnout and to develop a sustainable, scalable business.
17:08 Commitment to Systems and Processes
Barbara Turley underscores that achieving business dreams requires commitment to systems, processes, and effective teams. Success comes not from working harder, but from creating a business machine that functions efficiently without constant personal oversight.
18:49 Accidental Beginnings of a Business
Barbara shares her journey from the corporate world to accidentally founding The Virtual Hub. Initially starting as a consultant, she stumbled into the support assistant business due to client demand. Her story illustrates how identifying and solving a common problem can organically lead to a viable business model.
20:40 Starting Lean and Focusing on Sales First
The conversation highlights that you don’t need branding or a website to start a business. Barbara emphasizes finding a problem people will pay to solve and focusing on generating sales before investing in branding or infrastructure.
22:33 Planning, Speed, and Mindset in Business Growth
The discussion turns to the importance of planning, execution speed, and mindset. Setting clear goals and understanding the journey helps entrepreneurs avoid unnecessary delays while still moving quickly and effectively toward their vision.
25:24 Business is Business – The Universal Skillset
Barbara explains that building a business is a universal skill that transcends industries. Whether you sell products or services, the foundational skills—particularly operations and systems—are crucial for sustainable growth.
26:49 The Value of Internal Leverage
The concept of internal vs. external leverage is explored. While many focus on marketing and sales, Barbara points out that operational efficiency is where real profit lies. A broken delivery system can nullify gains from increased sales.
28:36 Planning and Scaling Through Assistant Support
The need for planning when hiring support assistants is discussed. Entrepreneurs often seek help too late and without preparation. Slowing down to establish proper systems ensures smoother scaling and long-term success.
30:08 Sustainable Growth Through Team Building
Mario reflects on his experience with rapid client growth and the realization that he needed help to sustain it. The discussion reinforces that business owners must plan for scalability early to prevent breakdown and burnout.
30:44 Client Success Story and Business Transformation
Barbara Turley shares a compelling client success story involving an e-commerce business that scaled from using a single ineffective support assistant to a high-performing team of 17 support assistants. The transformation was driven by simplifying processes, strategic delegation, and ongoing consultation, resulting in a multi-million dollar enterprise.
32:36 Balancing Business Growth with Parenthood
Barbara discusses how she built a thriving business while raising two children by mastering delegation. She emphasizes the importance of investing in recruiting and developing strong systems to enable business growth without personal burnout.
34:28 Avoiding the Chaos Trap in Hiring
The conversation turns to the importance of preparation before hiring. Barbara explains that if a business is chaotic, adding staff won’t help unless there are clear systems in place. She advises taking time to slow down and plan for long-term success rather than rushing into hiring.
35:37 Relaxation After Delegation
Barbara describes the satisfaction and relaxation that comes from seeing a well-delegated team perform efficiently. For her, relaxation includes enjoying simple pleasures like listening to podcasts, doing yoga, or sipping a glass of Australian Shiraz while appreciating the results of her hard work.
37:44 Imperfect Action Round: Rapid Insights
In a series of rapid-fire questions, Barbara shares key insights:
- The fastest path to cash is solving a current, monetizable problem.
- The biggest client mistake is misaligned expectations when hiring supports assistants.
- The best customer lifetime value strategy is focusing on client success.
- An optimal model combines expensive strategists with cost-effective implementation teams.
43:11 Most Impactful Business Book
Barbara names Scaling Up by Verne Harnish as the most pivotal book for her business. It led her to significantly restructure and scale her company, and she continues to use its strategies for ongoing growth.
44:00 Resources and Next Steps
Listeners are directed to visit thevirtualhub.com/expert-authority for valuable resources, including a guide on avoiding support assistant failures and a free course on scalable success. The page also offers the option to schedule a consultation.
Podcast Transcript:
Eradicating business overwhelm with virtual team development
Voice Actor: EA interviews episode 169 inspiration transformation success stories and the imperfect action round seven days a week. Join Mario Fachini for today’s expert authority effect interview.
Mario Fachini: Alright, ladies and gentlemen, I am excited to have none other than the lovely Barbara Turley here today, founder of the virtual hub.
And I don’t know about you, but have you ever been overwhelmed with your business and just thought like there’s all these great things you want to do, but you’re not sure how you’re going to get it done? I know that I have. And it’s why I started building a team years ago and continue to grow it. And I’m super excited to have her here because she is going to be sharing with you how you can build the team and how it’s going to impact your business for the better.
We’re going to thank our sponsor and I’m going to bring it right up. How would you like to grow your wealth easier than you think with the change you probably don’t notice anyhow automatically? That’s why I started the compounding interest snowball investing with Acorns and advise you to get started simply and easily today at EA interviews.com forward slash Acorns.
Here she is ladies and gentlemen, the lovely Barbara Turley from Chamonix, France. How are you doing Barbara?
Barbara Turley: I’m good, thank you. Thank you so much for having me today, Mario.
Mario Fachini: I am excited for you to share because you are solving the problem that I would confidently say every business or some fact checker is going to say 99.9999% of businesses have.
Barbara Turley: Absolutely, and you know, I’m apparently the best at it as a delegation and eradicating overwhelm, but I still feel it myself. So overwhelm is just something that’s part of business and you know, there are ways of eradicating that we can talk about today.
Mario Fachini: Well, I’m glad we can because I’ve had so many people, even my own clients in years past, working on publishing one of their business books or working on a live stream or something. And every single time when you’re working together for eight weeks, you know, 16 weeks, most of my clients a year and a half, things come up, you know, it’s called life. And at some point it’s like, I can just sense the energy and then something happens.
And they’re like, okay, what are we going to talk about? And I’m like, stop, what’s going on? And I’m like, is it the kids, the husband, the wife, the this, that, or the other thing? Because it’s always something. And it’s just like, you have to remember that people have lives, their life isn’t their business, even though it’s a large part of it. And everyone experiences overwhelm. How do you take people out of that and get them back on that path of being productive?
Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s a great question. And I think every time overwhelm hits you really, you know, I experienced it myself today and I actually said to myself, I need to take myself through this process again. And it’s almost like every quarter you need to do this no matter how good at it you get. So first of all, everybody experiences it. But one of the first things you’ve got to sit down and say to yourself is everything that I’m currently doing stuff that I absolutely need to be doing.
What you’ll find is a lot of stuff that you’re doing, you need to stop doing and delegate to somebody else effectively. The reason people don’t do it is because there’s overwhelm even involved in trying to think about how you then delegate to somebody effectively. But the first step is definitely asking yourself, do you really need to be the person doing this task or doing this part of the job?
Mario Fachini: How would you decide if you are? There’s a lot of stuff I don’t like doing, but I probably should, but maybe I shouldn’t.
Barbara Turley: Well, two things. The number one thing that you want to think about, most people will say that you should play in your genius zone. And of course, that is true, unless your genius zone happens too well, unless, you know, if you’re making Canva images yourself, but you’re trying to run a business, then you have to ask yourself, you might be brilliant at it. But is it an effective use of your time as an entrepreneur or as a business owner? So that’s number one.
The second thing is if you can create a process for it and it can be delegated, then as a business owner, it should be delegated because your job as a business owner is to run the business, to work on the business and not necessarily so much in the business. Now, I know that’s a bit of a cliche, but it’s definitely asking yourself if it can be processed up, then do and then delegate that so that you can free up your time to grow the business more.
Mario Fachini: I want to ask you to repeat that one more time because it is that powerful. It is a great expert authority insight. What is your role as the business owner or CEO?
Barbara Turley: Your role is to be the conductor of the orchestra. You don’t see the conductor playing any of the instruments in an orchestra. That’s the best way I can put it. You’re there to lead. You’re there to build systems and then delegate those systems for your people in your business to run those systems for you.
Mario Fachini: Play devil’s advocate, but what if there’s no good people out there and I can’t find the right ones?
Barbara Turley: The first step with that is usually, usually that is a process problem first. So a lot, see this happen with so many business owners, they’ll say, you know, delegation doesn’t work for me. I can’t find the right people. I want A players who can, this is the best one. I want somebody who can just step in and hit the ground running without me having to micromanage.
And I’m like, all of those statements are just so loaded with problems because first of all, even if you do find a player that can step in and hit the ground running, they are still not going to hit the ground running from day one because it’s your business and it’s how you’re doing stuff and unless you’re going to hire an agency or a consultant or an external expert to come in and work for you, you’re dealing with having to create processes and systems and teach people in your business how things are to be done and to learn to delegate effectively.
The most cost effective way of doing it is to make sure that your systems are so strong and your processes are so strong that you can actually delegate those to more cost effective staff so you don’t have to have experts in every role within your business.
Mario Fachini: What if someone doesn’t want to let go of the reins?
Barbara Turley: Mindset issue. Where do I start to unpack that? If somebody doesn’t want to let go of the reins, the first thing that you really need to do is to think about why. So there’s usually trust issues. There’s fear issues. People fear losing control. At the end of the day, as entrepreneurs and business owners, we are all control freaks and it’s totally fine. We can just put that out there and say it’s OK to be a control freak. And a lot of the reason that some business owners are successful because they are a bit control freakish, right? They like things done the way they like them done.
People see delegation as losing control. But if you have the right foundation, you’ve built your systems properly, you have the right processes built, and then you train your people on how to run the systems in your business correctly and how to report back to you and you have a level of oversight, then you can let go the control without losing control.
And that’s the key. So you don’t want to lose control, but you need to let go of the control and have oversight so that you’re not losing it completely.
Mario Fachini: For some of those people who might be on the more extreme side, I don’t even want to say OCD because I’ve run into some people that they’re so extra with it. They’re more like CDOs. They even organize the OCD.
How long do you think is a reasonable expectation for them to say, okay, we’re going to have a 30 day transition window, a 60 day transition window, a 90 day transition window? Do you think you can really just pull this off in seven days and change your entire company around and let go of the reins in a week?
Barbara Turley: No, no, can’t not in seven days. No. So first of all, let go of the reins of your company. There’s so much to unpack here. So I’m just going to try and unpack it from the top down.
Letting go of the reins of your company, it sort of implies that your company is already built. Now, as we know, companies are dynamic, living, breathing, evolving things that are always growing, evolving and changing as the market changes, as you change, you know, as the needs of the client or the customer change.
So to think that you can just delegate it all out, systemize it up in seven days and, now, wipe your hands and sit on the beach, absolutely not, right? Because the minute—what you’ll find is the minute you delegate one department successfully, you’re going to have to move on to the next one and the next one.
And by the time you get through 12 months, you’re usually circling back. And as businesses grow, you have to continue to evolve and develop your team, your systems, your processes. It’s sort of a never-ending thing.
That’s not to make people feel like, no, I don’t even want to start. But the idea is that if you don’t start this work, you’ll never get there. But to think that you can do it in seven days is really misguided.
I think if you’ve got no processes and no systems in your business, you’re probably staring down the barrel of about six to 12 months to really nail it and just systematically going through it every week, putting a new one in.
But typically, if you’re going to delegate to somebody, I would sort of allow anywhere from about 6 weeks to 3 months, depending on the role. If you’re hiring for a very high leadership role, even if they have deep experience, you can still expect about a six month kind of window of putting someone in and really getting them deep inside your business.
But with a VA, I would say eight to 12 weeks you need to allow.
As long as you have the onboarding and training process in place that you can roll out with that person, you can do it at the same time. You don’t necessarily have to be that organized, but give it time.
Mario Fachini: And that’s a great point you bring up because so many people I’ve heard, they’re like, well, you know, it’s going to take so long this and that. I’ve, you know, like with book publishing, I’ve condensed it down to eight weeks for people to publish their business books. Some people say six months, 12 months, 18 months. It takes so long.
Well, the time’s going by either way. I’d be excited. You can aim for 12 months from now and know, hey, this will be off my plate instead of think about it now, don’t do it. Think about it six months from now, don’t do it. Think about it a year from now and then whenever you do get around to it, it’s still gonna be another 12 months from the time you decided to move forward with it, right?
Barbara Turley: 100%. And you know, when people say to me, I just don’t have time for that right now, I go, well, that’s fine. I totally get that you’re overwhelmed, but I can guarantee you if you don’t do this today, you’ll still be doing what you’re doing in 12 months time. You’ll be doing what you’re doing today and you’ll still be overwhelmed and you still won’t have delegated and it will still be an uphill battle that you’re facing.
So either you take the challenge today or you continue to be overwhelmed and you take the challenge in 12 months time or whatever, but at some stage, if you’re committing to a business, you’re going to have to climb the mountain and stop sitting at the bottom.
Mario Fachini: And how many people decide to move forward after that point?
Barbara Turley: After I say that? Yeah, yeah. What I always advise is the last, the first thing you do is get the mindset right, okay? So you’ve got to let all that sink in. You let all that percolate and go, yeah, okay, I get that.
Then after that, the next step really is to think about, if I’m going to bring a person in, usually the mistake people make next is they go and hire someone before they’ve even thought about what role is this person going to play? What tasks do I actually want this person to do? And do I have any processes for them and how am I going to onboard them?
So usually then what happens is you hire a VA in the case of VA, for example, and you find yourself waking up every morning and thinking, oh my God, what am I going to give my VA to do today? And that’s created a whole new job for yourself, plus a new person on your payroll.
So that’s a huge mistake. You need to try and plan this out and then delegate and bring someone in at the point where you’re ready with your processes, your systems, and you know what this person is going to be doing for you, so you can lead them.
Mario Fachini: Yeah, that’s very smart because you don’t want to hire one person, let alone 5, 10, 15, 20. And now you, I’ve joked with people, go, you don’t want to stop doing the fun things that are taking up your time only to become a babysitter and project manager.
Barbara Turley: Absolutely, and you will become a project manager. Like if you hire a lot of VAs, it’s great. The first few VAs you get, it’s great. But then after that, or even team members, it doesn’t really matter whether they’re VAs. But when you get past about five to seven people reporting to you, you’re now in a whole world of pain because now you need a project manager so badly because they’re all coming to you. They’re all reporting to you.
And you can’t really have more than about five to seven people reporting to you effectively. After that time, you need to start either having project managers or encouraging those people to have team members under them, in which case you need to teach them how to delegate as well.
So you see, it just kind of keeps going on and on. This whole evolution doesn’t really stop if you’re growing.
Mario Fachini: That really does make sense. I just hired four new people and I’m thinking about it going, yeah, you hit that spot because the total number I’m up to now, it’s nearly triple that. I was thinking about this just a week or two ago for what I’m planning on doing over the next six to 12 months with people and freeing up my time even more so I can focus on the show and some other things.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. And look, you know, the reason I literally say this from the heart, because I have felt this myself. It’s not like I was like, I just knew how to do all of this. I was good at delegation, but as I’ve grown the Virtual Hub, I’ve discovered that we have 150 staff now. So we’ve got, you know, we’ve got 16 leaders. We’ve got a head of operations, head of HR. We’ve got a master trainer and a learning and development manager. We’ve got the whole stack of the corporate structure.
But, you know, I remember in the early days of having five, six, seven people and going, oh man, I mean, you know, this is really… I’m now overwhelmed again. So, and even now I get overwhelmed because I’m trying to onboard new leadership members and stuff like that. So, you know, it doesn’t end, but you grow the business at the same time.
Mario Fachini: Well, it’s an important skill to have and it’s an important thing to do because I’ve seen some really great people, entrepreneur friends of mine, speaker friends of mine, other podcast hosts even, and authors that, you know, we came up together five, 10, 15 years ago and some of them are still stuck and it’s why I did the, you know, no one can do it as good as me and I joke about it, but the sad reality is they might have a couple of people, but if you never trust anyone other than yourself, you’re only going to be, you know, you’re tied to yourself 24 hours a day and heaven forbid you go speak somewhere or travel or take a day off. What do you do? It’s like they don’t have a business. They are the business.
Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, as well, what I would say is, you know, when we go through big economic cycles, like big areas of the business cycle, for example, when recessions hit or, you know, a crisis hits or anything like that, what you’ll find is the companies that come out of that really strong are the ones that were built right beforehand.
They’re not necessarily the ones that just got lucky. Sometimes there are a few that get lucky in those sorts of environments. But it’s important to remember that as long as your company is built right in the first place.
And we’re not even talking about VAs here. We’re talking about scaling businesses. But if it’s built right and you have the right systems in place and you’ve got a machine built that people can step in, you can delegate to run that machine, you can actually get back to the joy of building the company that you originally dreamed of.
You didn’t dream of working seven days a week, 24 hours a day. You dreamed of building a scalable business or a lifestyle business or whatever it is. But usually people fall down by not delegating. And the trust issue is a big one.
So sometimes you will hire people that will be a mess, right? That they will be the wrong hire. But what typically happens then is people, you know, entrepreneurs will say, it doesn’t work for me. I tried and it didn’t work. Well, that’s a mindset issue. You have to have a sort of a commitment to say,
Mario Fachini: Yeah, I mean, I’ve said this in presentations too. Do you want to scale a problem? I want 10,000 leads. Great. One, could you handle it? Two, what’s your conversion ratio? Three, let’s assume all of them convert. Could you handle it?
Barbara Turley: Yeah, so there’s a really good and interesting thing I used to talk about a lot years ago that you’ve just reminded me about. I used to talk about this concept of external leverage and internal leverage. Everybody wants to go after the sexy stuff, which is the external leverage, which is going out and being on podcasts and advertising and marketing and sales and leads and funnels and all this stuff, right?
But the internal leverage is how efficient and cost effective your delivery and your operations are, and that’s where your profit is, right? That’s your profit margin right there. So people don’t focus on what they do if they put loads of leads and loads of sales into a broken machine.
And that tears up all their profits because the machine, the actual business machine itself, is not efficient and it’s not cost effective to run. And that’s how people find, I’m doing all these sales, but I’m not actually making any money on the back end. And that can happen for a number of reasons, but one of them is leaky operations.
Mario Fachini: That’s a great point you make because I find most people who are wanting to talk about that, the leads, the conversions, the sales, the funnels and all that, aren’t willing to invest what it really would take to do it properly for a long enough time. And their expectations are so low to begin with nine times out of 10, they’re literally better just picking up the phone, calling, reaching out via email and taking a look at their existing customers.
And you can double or triple the profit margins just by doing that before you take three to six months to, you know, like you’re talking about building the business, the funnels the same way, 30 to 60 days in most cases. And then you need to continually, you’re combating Facebook, Google, all those. And I have nothing against it. I got funnels running right now with ads and all kinds of stuff. They’re fantastic. But I also didn’t start last month. Or in the last year. It’s like, realize where you’re at. You don’t need to.
Enjoy the journey. Take a couple years and go, here’s where I want to be 12 months from now and aim for that. Don’t freak out.
Barbara Turley: Plan it out. You can change everything in a year. People overestimate what they can do in a day and they underestimate what they can do in a year. So if you just try to put one foot in front of the other and figure out your plan for the year and then keep moving forward with it, you’ll have days of total overwhelm, but you’ve just got to one foot in front of the other and you will build a machine very quickly if you do it that way.
Mario Fachini: Yeah, and enjoy the process because one day might be good or bad. But overall, it’s like, look at what you did. Most people wait for three to six or nine months to think about it. You know, they don’t even accomplish what they want in five years because they just hesitate.
Barbara Turley: Well, people don’t plan because, you know, as well, people will say, I need a VA. I needed a VA yesterday. And you’re like, well, that’s OK. But you’re just, you know, you’re, there’s a sort of you need to take a step back. You need to slow down.
Documents today and we’ll get you one. You’re what?
Yeah. You need to slow down in order to speed up sometimes, you know, and you might have to slow down for a month or two so that you can speed up across the entire 12 months and actually hit your annual, your year long goal or your 12 month goal. And then your three and five year goals are the same thing.
Mario Fachini: Yeah. And I’m glad you’re helping people with that because there’s so many people like I started with that need it. And I remember when I went full time in business in 08, I got a couple dozen clients in the first six weeks and I’m like, okay, things are going well from a sales perspective and you know, fulfillment was well and it was only a couple of months. I’m like, I need more help.
And so many people were like, well, you know, and I’m just like, maybe I don’t need a team. Maybe I should keep it. But then like I woke up in my own common sense and was telling me like, there’s no way you can maintain this because when you extrapolate it out, it’s like, what if you got 10 new clients a day? Well, great. Who’s fulfilling them? How do you maintain them ongoing? Is someone taking up their time doing it? If it’s all on you, there’s a point where it’s going to break.
Barbara Turley: And you’ll break as well. And then, you know, like you said, you didn’t start your own thing to have a glorified job at the end of the day. You want to build something. So that’s what most business owners want to do, I think. So it’s important to be honest with yourself about that.
Yeah, and I would have to agree also because there’s so many people that want to do it and they just don’t. And I’d say you nailed that fear and it’s all in here.
So I want to ask you, who’s your biggest success story?
Barbara Turley: As a client, meaning? Yes, there’s an interesting story, actually. There is an e-commerce business that is one of our clients, and has been a client for a long time. And this person had a part-time VA many years ago and reached out to me on LinkedIn. This was back in the beginning and I had listened to one of my podcasts. I have a podcast called The Virtual Success Show. If you want to have a listen to how to get success with VAs.
And he felt that he wasn’t really getting the return on investment or the success that I had been talking about in the podcast. So as it turned out, he was living in Sydney and so was I in Australia at the time. So I said, look, I’ll come and see you. So I actually went to see him and to cut a long story short, I said, we got rid of that original VA. I was like, that’s not going to work.
But also his systems, his processes were very complicated. And like what you said, back of the envelope piece of paper, just drew out a simpler version of this process. And today he has 17 members with us and his business is a multi, multi-million dollar business. I actually still consult him quite a lot on the build of his team. So yeah, he’s got them all in the Philippines and he’s growing. He’s probably going to be putting on like two, three people in the next few months again.
So that’s been a really beautiful one to watch because he sort of listened and did everything I told him to do and then managed to delegate effectively. So he’s very, very happy.
Mario Fachini: Well, I’m happy to hear that. That’s always fun because there’s a lot of people I believe that are hunkered down, whether they have a new business, middle business, or a huge business, if you don’t have it set up right, they don’t really get to enjoy it. And I love hearing those stories of how to enjoy it and just the transformation.
Barbara Turley: Well, here’s the thing, right? I like I’ve built a big business. This is, you know, it’s, it is a big business and it’s growing. And I’ve had two children at the same time and I’ve managed to be a part-time mom and a part-time business owner. So now that’s really hard to do, but in order to do that, people have asked me how did I do that?
There have been times of extreme overwhelm, I will say, so it’s not easy. But the way to do that and to actually be present in your children’s life and to have, you know, not running yourself into the ground completely is to be a master delegator. Like if I could just pick one thing, you know, you can be a master marketer, but if you can’t delegate and build systems and teams, you’re just going to market yourself into a black hole because you’re going to fall down.
So, you know, to be able to delegate effectively is a seriously good skill to deeply learn about and deeply master. And the second one is probably recruiting, like because people don’t spend any energy on recruiting. And then they wonder why the people that are coming into their business are not really able to cope or it’s not working and everything’s broken because we don’t invest any time in learning how to be amazing at that or amazing at delegating. That’s probably why.
Mario Fachini: When you said the people always ask you I need someone yesterday and I need them to hit the ground running it’s like do they even know what you’re selling or you just want to like are you gonna even have a.
Barbara Turley: I’ll give you the name of a competitor. We’ll just pass them on. Yeah, no, not really. We do help people to figure that out. But sometimes if somebody is a bit of a chaotic mess, we don’t try to make a sale. We’re just like, look, honestly, if you want to take our advice, we’ll give them some masterclasses and some free stuff that will actually help them to figure this thing out.
And we try to encourage them to slow down for a minute, even though it might be painful, but to think about the marathon and not the sprint, and that’s really important to remember.
Mario Fachini: That’s a good point too, you know, life in a track meets at the marathon and you got to enjoy it. Which brings me to my last question before we thank our sponsor and go to the imperfect action round. It is the wheel of whatever and your whatever question is. Here we go. It’s going to land on the one I want it to.
This question is right here. After you’ve delegated and outsourced this, what’s the best way to relax?
Barbara Turley: What’s the best way for me to relax or anyone?
Either or both.
Depends what you’re into. For me, I love when I’ve managed to delegate loads of things. The team is all on fire. Everyone knows what they’re supposed to be doing and is executing quite well. And I sit back and I think, wow, I can listen to a podcast. I can actually have a coffee. I can just, you know, so sometimes for me personally, it’s actually just it’s like it’s like that sense of like you’ve planted the garden and all the flowers are coming up and you can just look at them and go.
Barbara Turley: Wow, I did that. That’s so for me, I find that quite relaxing. You know, I do yoga and all the other sorts of stuff that you’re supposed to be doing. I do love to go out and have a glass of wine as well. Yeah, sometimes to Shiraz. Do you like Shiraz? An Australian Shiraz, actually, I quite like.
But, you know, to be able to sit back and kind of congratulate yourself and enjoy the moment that you built this and. That’s before the chaos of the next level starts again and all the overwhelm comes back. Just take a moment to watch your team as they work and watch them enjoy what they do as well. That’s really key.
Mario Fachini: I like that. That’s a great high note to continue on. Enjoy the moment. We’re going to thank the sponsor. Enjoy this moment. And we’re going to come back for the imperfect action round.
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Mario Fachini: And we are back with the imperfect action round. Barbara, are you ready to take imperfect action?
Barbara Turley: I was born ready.
Mario Fachini: Excellent, great answer. So these are just 60 second quick answers, rapid responses. The first one is, what is the fastest path to the cash?
Barbara Turley: Find a problem that somebody is willing to pay you money to solve today and not in the future.
Mario Fachini: I like that you said, you money.
Barbara Turley: Yes, because lots of people have problems they’d like you to solve either for free or in the future and that’s not going to make any money. But they will have something that they’ll pay you for.
I’ve joked with people before. I don’t like dealing with my own problems. Why do I want more of yours?
Mario Fachini: Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way they can fix it?
Barbara Turley: Yes, hiring a virtual assistant because it’s cost effective. I’m not going to say cheap because it’s cost effective. And then expecting to get a strategist and complaining that the person can’t strategize or run your business for you. That’s a huge problem. It’s expectations management about what you’re hiring, just be clear about what you’re hiring, what role you’re hiring for.
Mario Fachini: That’s a very good point that a lot of people don’t touch on.
Barbara Turley: Yeah, I see it all the time. I wish they’d show more initiative. I thought they would know that I wanted this. I’m like, you need a strategist for that. You pay someone 500 bucks an hour for that. So not five, you know.
Mario Fachini: I totally can relate to that. And on the other side of the thing is when you are doing coaching consulting and you say it is $500, $1,000 an hour and people are like, well, I thought it’d be 10 or 20. It’s like, well, then go to McDonald’s and get them to give you a business growth strategy that’s going to increase your business six figures a year.
Barbara Turley: Or just remember that if you delegate effectively and you do have cost effective team members in your business that can execute processes, you can bring in a very, very expensive consultant, but you only need them for a few hours a month. It’s called a high-low strategy because you’ve got the team members to actually implement. So that’s a really good strategy of getting both, right? So you use that’s cost effective as well and you get the best consultant you can.
Mario Fachini: That’s a very good strategy because on the other side, you could have the strategy but if you have no implementation, now it’s costing you exponentially. Now it’s costing you and it’s not an investment.
Barbara Turley: Exactly. So the most cost effective way is to have a really slick strategist that knows exactly what they’re doing, pay up for them, and then have a cost effective offshore team that can implement and maybe have a project manager in the middle if you really want to go that route. But that’s kind of the strategy you want to be running.
Mario Fachini: That is gold right there. I think I just might clip that part out. That’s gold. There’s another really good question. What the heck is it? You got my wheels spinning. Thank you. It’s the same one I’ve asked like a couple hundred times. What is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?
Barbara Turley: Yes, so this one we’ve been playing with this at the Virtual Hub actually quite a lot. So I’ve been thinking about this for many years and I truly believe that focusing on customer and client success is, I know it’s a new thing, it’s a buzzword, everyone’s got client success managers now, but if you make sure that your clients are not just looked after, because a client that’s looked after is happy, a client that’s getting success will rave about you.
And those are the cheapest leads you’ll ever find in the market. It’s so worthwhile putting the effort into making sure that people actually get success with what it is that you’re doing.
Mario Fachini: That’s another great point. You should write a book on all this.
Barbara Turley: It’s in the plan. I had to have my kids first. Not ready for the book yet.
You are.
Mario Fachini: They are. This is very good. They have a great mom, and you’re sharing some incredible insights here. So thank you for that. The last thing, speaking of books, is what would you recommend? What books have impacted your business in life?
Barbara Turley: Yeah, I look, you know, this is maybe this is maybe the one everyone says, I don’t know. But on my first, I think it was not the first time I went to the Philippines, but I had just had my daughter. She was about 11 months old. I went to the Philippines for a week for work and I had this nine hour flight and it was like, wow, I have nine hours of no children. So I read a book the whole way to the Philippines and it was Vern Harnish’s Scaling Up, the most pivotal book.
I completely rebuilt the business after reading that book and I’ve gone on to do the live scaling up program and I’m currently not rebuilding, but I’m just taking this to another level. Best book ever. It’s a real business book, but it did change everything for me from a business perspective.
Mario Fachini: Excellent. I’m really happy to hear that. Verne is awesome.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Mario Fachini: Well, I have gotten a lot out of this and I want to learn more. I know Expert Authority World does. Where would you like us to go to learn more?
Barbara Turley: Sure. So we’ve got some special stuff for you guys to listen and watch. So if you go to thevirtualhub.com forward slash expert authority, we have a couple of things over there. You can download something we spoke about earlier, which is the five reasons people fail with VAs and how to fix it. There’s a little downloadable over there.
And there’s also a scalable success formula e-course, which is based on some of the things I’ve been talking about. And you can also, if you feel ready to talk to us about getting a virtual assistant in your business, you can book a call to have a chat with us and see if we’re a fit over there.
Mario Fachini: Excellent. Well, thank you again so much Barbara.
Barbara Turley: You’re very welcome. Thank you for having me.
Mario Fachini: Alright, Expert Authority World, have another great episode today. I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a great day and God bless.
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