Voice Actor: You’re listening to the Fearless Business Podcast. You’re in the best place to learn about how to grow a business, get more clients, and make more money without fears and limitations, all while having fun in the process. Robin Waite is the founder of Fearless Business, a business accelerator helping coaches, consultants, and freelancers double their income and more. Now here’s your host, Robin Waite.

Robin Waite: Welcome back, everybody. It’s the next episode of the Fearless Business Podcast. I’m your host, Robin Waite, the Fearless Business Coach. We’ve got an amazing guest with us today. I’m just going to hit record on my camera as well.

We’ve got an amazing guest with us today in Barbara Turley, who is an investor, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, which is a business she started out by complete accident, exploded in the space of 12 months to become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants.

So welcome to the show, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much, Robin. Thanks for having me.

Robin Waite: It’s my absolute pleasure. You talk about something called a lean business model. I’m really curious to know a little bit more about that.

Barbara Turley: Sure. I mean, look, it’s a concept that’s been around for a very long time. It wasn’t me who coined the phrase. I’d love to say I wrote the book, but I didn’t.

But one of the things I’ve been talking a lot about recently, which a lot of coaches like yourself or consultants, et cetera, should be talking to their own clients about and thinking about for their own business, is that in the last 10 years—we’ve had probably 15 years of amazing amounts of digital transformation—we’re all moving online. Digital has been huge.

And then in the last year, in this pandemic that we’ve been in, we’ve had another 10 years of digital transformation happen in about six months flat.

But one of the key areas that I feel is still something that’s not looked at enough is the resourcing around your human capital—the asset that is your people.

Now obviously larger companies will try to look at this, but it also applies if you’re just a solopreneur working by yourself. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working on your own or whether you have a larger team.

It’s thinking about how you and/or members of your team are actually spending their time.

And what you find is studies have been done on this by Harvard Business Review and various other studies where they found that 30 to 40% of any executive’s time—and I would hazard that any of us running businesses would class ourselves in the executive category—30 to 40% of your time is generally being taken up with stuff that is easily delegatable, quite process-driven, and should be done by somebody else.

Now, the next layer down from that is saying, well, now that we’re all virtual anyway, and lots of the viewers today and the listeners are probably always been in a virtual or remote scenario, we’re working online, working from home, etc.

But these days everybody’s remote. So does it matter whether you’re in the next room, the next house, the next state, country, or across the world? Not really. We’ve all been trained now to work in a very remote environment.

And therefore it’s time to really start thinking about places like the Philippines, where our company is obviously based, and outsourcing to not just the Philippines, but finding talent that is lower cost than you or members of your team to do these types of tasks.

I’m not going to use the word low value because every task is valuable in any business, but tasks that you shouldn’t be spending your time doing.

And that is the next layer of this lean business model that is now a topic of conversation for every business, particularly as the economy starts to try to come out of the slump that we’re in.

It’s going to be up to the business community to bring the global economy back once the pandemic finishes. So it’s a very important topic.

Robin Waite: So you heard it here first, people. One of the first things you need to be doing is doing a bit of a time audit and working out which tasks are systemizable and process-driven that you can potentially look to outsource and save yourself up to 30 to 40% of your time each and every day, each week.

You mentioned there about using virtual assistants from overseas. Obviously, a lot of people have some trepidation about this, but places like the Philippines speak better English probably than you or I can a lot of the time, so language isn’t necessarily a barrier.

But what are some of the common worries, concerns that people have, and how do you encourage them to overcome those worries?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so the first thing to say, because there will be people listening and watching this going, “I tried that, it was a disaster”—it’s not simple, right? So it’s not an easy thing to get right.

The fears that people have are not necessarily… some people in my position will say you shouldn’t worry about any of these things. Well, that’s not true, because you should.

So let’s deal with the English one first. I have people on my team—seriously—who speak better English than me, right? Sometimes they come out with words and I’m like, “Wow, that’s a big word.”

So in the Philippines there are people with extraordinarily good levels of English. However, in a country with a hundred million people, you’ve got to be very careful because yes, English is a concern.

And one of the first things that we’re doing in our business when we’re hiring people is our English tests are so high it’s almost painful to get through them. You have to have that as the first layer of checking before you check anything else—grammar, written English, verbal English, etc.

And other concerns people have are things like trust—like what happens if this person runs away with all my data?

My answer to that typically is that that’s a fear you have regardless of where you go. That’s not particularly associated with the Philippines or anywhere else. Somebody in the next room from you, or living down the street working for you, could do the same thing.

So it’s about thinking about that in a more holistic business way. And there are tools and strategies out there to help you protect your data, your systems, even simple things like using LastPass, which is a password vault.

So getting up to speed on the types of security measures that any business should have helps you alleviate that problem. While it’s not something you shouldn’t be concerned about, it’s not necessarily something that is just for the Philippines.

Then the big elephant in the room when you’re working with offshore VAs—let’s be honest, we’ve all heard the stories: either they do the work and you have to do it all again yourself, or they say they did the work and actually it wasn’t done, or they say they were working and then they disappear and you never hear from them again.

So those stories are real. Those things definitely happen.

It’s about unpacking all of that. Recruiting the right people is very important, and then managing them properly.

But what I see happening is that when you’re dealing with a culture like the Philippines, it’s a “yes” culture. Sometimes you bring on people and they say they can do lots of things and actually they can’t really. Then they become overwhelmed and might run a mile rather than tell you they weren’t able to do it.

So this is the going AWOL thing, or finding out that the work didn’t get done because maybe they were trying to figure it out by calling friends in the first place.

So it’s being very aware of that. You’ve got to do testing with people to make sure they have the skills they said they had. That comes down to your recruitment strategy.

And the final one is people making mistakes. That can be a skill issue, a will issue, or a process issue.

For example, a lot of people know how they do something themselves, but they’re not good at articulating to somebody else how they would like it done. When it’s your business, you have a way of doing things.

It’s about building systems and processes within your business that can be delegated to somebody else, and rather than putting that accountability onto someone else, that is your responsibility as the business owner or leader.

It does require leadership. These people are there to assist you, not necessarily to develop strategies or processes for you. And those are the big ones. They tend to be the big fails.

Robin Waite: The one I always take away from that, and which I always encourage the Fearless crew to take on board, is to make sure that when you’re delegating something, delegate responsibly, don’t delegate responsibility.

Because that’s often where things go wrong. If you don’t know how to systemize it and you’re not clear on your process and it’s not well documented, how do you expect somebody else to actually take on that responsibility and do a good job with it?

So you mentioned one app there, LastPass. There’s a whole gamut of different apps which people can use. Which ones would you say are your favorite apps that small business owners can integrate into their business?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So full disclosure, LastPass can be a little bit irritating, right? The first time I used it many years ago I was like, “This thing, I don’t know…”

But there are other tools like it. I think the first step is thinking about if it’s just you in the business and you’re starting to bring on other people, regardless of where they are, you need to think about security first.

It’s not about not trusting people, it’s about having a business that is nicely ring-fenced.

So do start to educate yourself around stuff like LastPass.

I’m also a huge fan of Google Workspace—it used to be G Suite. They keep changing the name—but collaboration tools like Google Docs and Google Sheets are fantastic because you can collaborate live.

There’s none of this “it’s saved somewhere in my drive” or “I can’t find it in Dropbox.” It just removes those problems.

And the third big one is to use a project management tool. A lot of people go wrong using email for task management with VAs. It is an absolute disaster. Email is not a tool that should be used to deliver instructions.

You need to use a tool like Asana, which I’m a huge fan of. We’ve used it for many years. There’s also Trello, Teamwork PM, and more advanced ones thereafter.

For me, those are the starting point for anyone looking to run a team or start to delegate effectively.

There’s also Zoom, obviously, and another invaluable one is Loom.

If you haven’t heard of Loom, it’s great for delegating tasks where you record a quick video of yourself doing it. You can attach the link into Asana and things like that.

Robin Waite: I totally agree with that. Loom is such a great way—within two or three minutes—especially when doing work on the podcast around Canva and editing.

Just to be able to say, “No, when it comes to the text, you just do this, this and this,” quick screen record, download it, or cut and paste the link into ClickUp actually.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s really good. And look, when you’re trying to give feedback to someone and you’re like, “I need to jump on a call and organize that,” or you’re trying to write stuff, it’s painful.

With Loom, you just jump on, speak your feedback, point and click, and show things. It makes it really clear for the other person. They quite enjoy it.

And you don’t even have to be in the same time zone to do that.

Robin Waite: That’s it. Or even using things like Slack and WhatsApp and just doing a quick voice note. A voice note speaks a thousand written words, and a video is just the ultimate, isn’t it?

Barbara Turley: A tip though—especially on things like Voxer or WhatsApp voice recordings when you’re dealing with offshore.

I’m Irish, you’re English, and I have a habit of speaking too fast, using slang or local vernacular that someone else might not understand.

So it’s important to make sure that in audio you’re very clear and you don’t just do a brain dump with no punctuation. Imagine it like verbal diarrhea—try to be clear in your messaging and break it into points rather than one long voice dump.

Robin Waite: So we’ve now hired a whole team of virtual assistants. We’ve got them set up on project management tools and they’re communicating well.

But maybe there’s a few problems starting to creep in. When should you fire a virtual assistant?

Barbara Turley: Okay, so this is a great one, right? Because often people wait too long to get rid of someone, and other times people just blame the person straight away and then just keep churning through VAs. So they’re two sort of opposite ends of a similar problem.

So the first step, obviously—look, recruitment is a very difficult thing to get right—so let’s just park that over to the side for a second and assume that you’ve recruited quite well. You’ve got a good person, but you’re noticing mistakes are happening, stuff’s taking longer than you thought, and you can’t quite put your finger on it. You’re wondering, are they doing a load of washing while they’re supposed to be working? All these things naturally creep into your head.

But the first step, before you go and fire anyone, is to sit down and ask yourself: there’s a kind of process for this.

And what I always say to people is, before you go and blame the person or “shoot the person,” let’s go back a bit first and start to look at the process.

And what you want to do is ask: I wonder, are there holes in the process where me doing it or someone else doing it has a different thought process than this person? And maybe we need to put in a couple more steps, or make something a bit clearer, or maybe there’s a training gap there.

If you’ve then tweaked all of that, or found out where the roadblocks are, and you’re still finding that there are holes, etc., you want to start looking at—and look, I actually went through this exercise with a client recently—where we had to look at the tech they were using.

And what we realized was that the VAs were trying to tap into a system that was in Australia. Now, the Philippines is quite far from the servers, and it was causing a massive lag that we only, through testing, figured out was actually causing a time delay in how long it was taking them to do something.

And that in itself is a major problem. But we had to go there next to see: is it internet? Is it tech? Is it how things perform in different locations?

And then finally, when you’re going through all of that, then you have to start looking at the people.

But before you blame the person, you have to ask two questions: is it a skill issue, or is it a will issue?

Now, dealing with a skill issue first—if it’s a skill issue, can the person be trained on this? Or maybe is this above their level?

And that’s a call you have to make. You might want to try and train them first, and if they’re still struggling, I don’t want to use the word firing because that sounds like somebody’s done something wrong—maybe it’s time to part company at that point. But only after you’ve ascertained that the skill issue is something you can’t get over.

And if it’s a will issue, that’s attitude. Now that can be somebody lying, and typically if you’ve gone through this whole process and you still can’t quite put your finger on it, it’s probably just a wrong fit, to be honest. There’s some reason why you guys are not fitting together, and if your intuition is saying there’s something wrong there, you probably should listen to that.

Robin Waite: I’ve got a personal story actually—an experience I had recently in making a transition from working with a VA into actually taking on somebody full time, which explains exactly that.

So I had a VA who was processing the podcast for me, producing it, and getting the blogs live and all that side of it. And we booked them for about between 10 and 20 hours a month.

And as we started to layer in more parts of the process—things we wanted to do in order to promote the podcast—we just reached a natural impasse. And I realised it wasn’t a skill issue at all. It was just that, and it wasn’t even that we could have booked more hours and she could have done it, but it just reached a point where the number of steps in the process became too much and overwhelming for her.

We tried to bring in an extra team member to take it on, and that’s the point where skill then broke down.

What I actually ended up doing was reaching out to one of the coaches on my team, a guy called Stefan. His specialty is finding people, training them up to be leaders, and setting them up with his sprint formula, which is all based around Scrum and sprint techniques and using all of the tools you just mentioned.

Anyway, initially we were like, do we go down the VA route? He said he’d look at the traditional VA ports of call. He went onto places like Upwork and Fiverr and various other VA websites.

And actually, we lucked out because he managed to find somebody from Upwork who was based here in the UK. She had a job, but she’d graduated with a marketing degree and was looking for something a bit more solid.

And the money was right, she was in the UK so we didn’t have to worry about time differences, she was very enthusiastic, and she needed a job at that particular point. So everything kind of fell into place.

And I suppose my point here is that we had to go through it, and it didn’t get awkward or uncomfortable, but it just came to a natural end with the VA company I was using after about six months. And we needed to move things forward.

Now it’s pretty much a full-time job for Jess to manage the podcast. So I totally get it—it’s such valuable advice, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s true. I think as well, the other thing people forget is that hiring people, managing people, delegation is a skill that is not talked about enough in the business community.

It’s something you have to master, just like marketing and sales. But there’s less importance placed on operations—and delegation is part of operations, as are automations and systems and all that kind of thing.

If you don’t invest the time, energy, and money into actually trying to master that as a skill—even if it’s just you on your own in the business—you end up paying dearly for it. And you pay in frustration and irritation.

And part of being great at delegation is accepting that when you start doing it first and you start in this game, there will be moments where the business will have to slow down for a second so you can transition, make a decision, or pull someone out and put someone new in.

And that’s just all part of the game, right? It’s not that you’re failing. It’s just that in order to do that, it’s going to take time.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Robin Waite: It’s all about finding a better way, isn’t it, at the end of the day? Let’s shift gears a little bit.

So obviously you run The Virtual Hub, and I want to understand a little bit more about that. But you also mentioned that you built this business after having a baby at the same time and finding those high-quality virtual assistants. So tell us a bit more about that story. How did that unfold?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, actually I was a business coach. I was in corporate for 15 years. Here’s the short version: I was in corporate for 15 years.

If you Google me you can find out all about that corporate career. I kind of wanted to dabble in my own business, so I left corporate and started consulting, as we all do.

And I was enjoying that—looking back I wasn’t really—but at the time I thought I was enjoying it enough.

But I found that all the businesses I was working with, it didn’t matter what the business was—online, offline, product, service, anywhere in the world—they all fundamentally had the same problem.

If they didn’t hire staff, they were never going to be able to grow. And if they didn’t grow, they were never going to be able to hire staff. It was like this cycle they were stuck in.

Some were in it for 10 years, others for a year. And the only way I could really help clients was to try to get them staff and teach them to delegate.

I had a VA in the Philippines myself because I had read The 4-Hour Work Week—no other reason. And I started getting friends of my VA to help out.

And before I knew it, I was getting phone calls from friends of clients saying, “Can you get me one of those VAs? I’m desperate.”

And I just remember thinking one weekend: is there a business in this?

It was literally like that. I put a webinar on to the small list I had and found that people were desperate for help with this problem, and that I was naturally good at operations.

That’s kind of the whole thing.

Now obviously we’re six years later. We’re coming up to 200 staff. The business has grown exponentially—but it was not simple.

Nothing is ever linear, right? It looks amazing now, but those early days were very difficult. I made a lot of mistakes and I almost got out of the business completely because it was so difficult.

But yeah, I had two children at the same time. Completely mad—please don’t do what I did. I always say I have three children…

Robin Waite: I think many entrepreneurs go through a similar journey though. It’s that kind of ups and downs and you just have to weather the storms and then look forward to the good times.

There is a certain makeup when you run your own business—you have to be that kind of person to get through.

Barbara Turley: Always up-levelling. Yeah. And you have to love what you do. And I ended up loving it actually.

I found a lot of fulfilment in helping our team grow great careers, and hearing people say how you changed their lives.

Even clients saying, “I didn’t know the freedom I have now because I learned to delegate.”

And it’s not just the VA—it’s the up-levelling of their mindset.

They realise, I could still be a solopreneur, for example, and I don’t need a huge team, but I can free myself to grow the business more and do the things I love.

And some of our VAs have been with clients for four or five years.

Robin Waite: What are some of your favourite success stories from both your staff and your clients? What are some of your best wins?

Barbara Turley: Yes, lots of them. Let me think.

There was one Christmas—we did a sort of voice box thing at one of our Christmas parties, back before COVID when you could do Christmas parties.

A couple of the team said they had worked in call centres their whole lives and had never been able to take Christmas off to go back to the province and spend it with their families.

And they were like, “I’m taking two weeks off and I’m so elated.”

It was like a dream for them.

And I thought, wow—that’s something we wouldn’t even think about in the West. That they had been working on Christmas Day.

That really lit me up.

And I hear those stories all the time—how much we’ve changed somebody’s life by building the company we have. We’re a very supportive culture.

On the client side, there are many stories on the website as testimonials.

But one that sticks out: a solopreneur in Australia who, through working with her VA and learning to delegate, managed to travel around Australia in a camper van while still working and running her business remotely.

That was very uplifting.

And we have larger companies as well that have built teams with us, which has been amazing to work with.

Robin Waite: I’ve always been a slight sceptic of The 4-Hour Work Week—which you mentioned—but how realistic is it?

Barbara Turley: It’s not realistic at all.

If you want to run a hobby business, maybe. Anyone who says they can run a growing business in four hours a week—no.

Now, have I met people who can run a business part-time? Yes. I’m one of them.

I have two children, I’m quite hands-on with them, and I work maybe 20–25 hours a week and cope.

But The 4-Hour Work Week? No. I think that’s more of a hobby concept. I don’t think you can grow a business on that basis.

Robin Waite: I need Tim Ferriss to come on and refute it. But it’s funny, isn’t it? Tim Ferriss, who wrote the book, seems to be like the hardest-working guy out there. But again, it’s about the DNA makeup of an entrepreneur. We all just love what we do, and we can’t not work. That’s just the way it is.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I love what I do as well. I don’t think I would ever want to just retire and not do anything. I’d be bored.

Robin Waite: Yeah, it’s that fit. Well, a $10 million question—if you won the lottery and you won $10 million, what would you do? And my first answer is, I’d go straight to work the next day. Why would I not want to work?

Barbara Turley: I’d probably launch a foundation or something. I’d want to do something like that.

Robin Waite: It’s the same for me. I’ve always dreamt of—I’d like to run a little, not like a co-working space, but an incubator for small business owners so that they can get access to free advice, good-quality free advice.

Because I think that’s one of the things in this day and age—you literally can’t get any type of business education really without having to pay for it.

I mean, albeit that said, Clubhouse has been an absolute revelation because you can log into there and, if you get into the right room with the right expert, you can get some really great free advice at the moment. You can jump up and ask questions and things like that.

Even still, if you then want to go into depth with it and have some help with accountability, coaching always costs you money. And I’d actually like to have an incubator whereby people kind of get the coaching, but without necessarily having to make the investment.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, yeah. I think as well, look, for anyone listening who’s thinking about this coaching thing as well, getting the right coach is key—someone that works with your energy and your way of being.

But also these days, online there’s so much stuff out there. It can be overwhelming. But if you can just focus on the power of singular focus and a sense of urgency—not trying to do too many things.

People underestimate what you can do in a day or a week, but you underestimate what you can do in 12 months if you just slowly take one thing at a time and inch forward with what you’re trying to build.

Robin Waite: So what are you working on next with The Virtual Hub? Where is Barbara taking the business?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, we’re actually in a really exciting time. Like I said, we’re six years old now, and there’s a whole backstory of the good times and the bad times. And I like to share that because, like you said about coaching being expensive, you can learn a lot from hearing the backstories of people who’ve actually built businesses.

So we’re at a stage where it’s a compliment from our clients that they are constantly asking us for more—they trust what we’re doing. It’s hard to get right.

They ask us for stuff that’s outside of scope—can you find me this, can you do content, can you manage podcasts and all of this.

So my vision for The Virtual Hub was always to have loads of VAs who are really well trained, with this amazing collaborative culture. And then in the middle have the “hub,” which is the expert-level stuff.

So we’re about to launch, for our clients only at this point, a service called The Content Machine. It’s for people who need to churn out blog content and repurpose it all the time. There’s demand for that.

And the other thing we’re launching is the Pod Concept. Every client gets—we don’t just give you a VA—we give you an entire operational framework plus an ecosystem of support.

Every VA has a results coach, and every client also has a results coach. Their job is to make sure we know your goals and that we’re actually hitting them.

The VA is there to do the work, but the results coach is there to make sure: do we have training needs, where are the gaps, how long is this going to take.

And then every client has a client success manager. We’ve launched an entire client success team. Our forward strategy is all about client success, because that’s what brings you the business in the end.

Robin Waite: When you made the jump to set the business up in the first place, how scary was that?

Barbara Turley: Well, the first part wasn’t, because I didn’t intend to set it up. It was kind of an accident. Before I knew it, I found myself in business—like, “Oh my God, we’ve got 10 VAs. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

But the big scary part was two years later when I decided to incorporate in the Philippines. That was a big move.

I made them all employees—I think I had 60 staff—and the cost of it was enormous, but it was the right thing to do.

And today we are a fully fledged Philippine company. We have health cover for everybody on our team. We’re really going for it. We have our own brand in the Philippines.

We want to be an employer of choice and have a great culture. So it’s not just the client side—it’s the employee side as well.

Robin Waite: That’s absolutely amazing. I hope that inspires some people just to take action, because what you’ve set up there is really wonderful.

A couple of questions just to wrap up. How can people get hold of you if they want to know more about The Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: Sure. We actually have a special page for you guys. If you go to thevirtualhub.com/fearless, we’ve got a little mini guide to help people understand the reasons people fail with VAs and how to fix it.

And there’s also a scalable business success formula, a little e-course there from me—some of the tips we’ve been talking about.

You can also book a call there if you want to speak with any of our consultants about whether we’re a fit for you and how we might be able to help.

Robin Waite: Excellent. We’ll make sure we share that link in the show notes so everybody can go and connect with you.

Right, final question then, Barbara. I did prep you for this earlier. We’re going to jump into the Fearless Business Time Machine. It’s a bit better than the DeLorean in Back to the Future—this one actually works.

So you get to punch in the date. What year would you go back to, and what would you say to Barbara T minus X years?

Barbara Turley: Yes, I would go back to the beginnings of The Virtual Hub and tell myself to take my own advice.

Although I was doing webinars about delegation at the time, I think I should have gone and learned from even more people doing it better than myself.

I learned a lot over the following five years about what not to do, and I’ll probably learn more over the next five years.

These days I’m a huge follower of Michael Gerber and all the people talking about systems, processes, team, and leadership—how to bring the best out of your people and not just be process-focused.

So yeah, I think I could have done more to educate myself even further.

Maybe my ego needed a bit of a beating at the time—maybe that’s why I thought I knew more than I did.

Robin Waite: Well, I think you do have to fail and struggle a little in order to turn out even better. Because what you’ve created is pretty remarkable.

And you could argue that if you had listened to someone else and assumed their advice was right when it wasn’t, it could have turned out very differently. It could have just been a white-labelled version of somebody else’s idea, and that’s not what you’ve built.

Barbara Turley: No, and it’s very organic actually. You’re right—that’s a good point.

Everything at The Virtual Hub has been built from feedback. Every time we got negative feedback, we’d get angry and then ask, “What can we change in our process so this doesn’t happen again?”

And we did that week on week on week—from both the employee side and the client side.

If you do that consistently, you end up with a powerhouse built by feedback. It’s the hardest thing to do, but if you take it, listen, and actually believe what people are telling you, that’s what we’ve got.

Robin Waite: It goes right back to the lean business approach. Lean Startup by Eric Ries is one of my favourite books. The second business self-development book I ever read—the first being Built to Sell, which you can see over my shoulder there.

Barbara Turley: That’s my favourite book.

Robin Waite: I think there’s a lot people can learn from that.

Listen, Barbara, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. We’ll keep in touch, and I’d love to hear how your story continues over the years to come.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.