Cindy Pham: Want to hear 25 remote work experts share their amazing strategies and processes for building successful remote work companies and remote teams? We’ve got speakers from leading companies like Thinkific, Evergreen Profits, Dynamite Circle, and Tribe Theory, and more. Register for your free ticket now at www.remotbusinesssummit.com.

Anfernee Chansamooth: That’s right, www.remotebusinesssummit.com. We will see you there November 18 to 22. Woohoo!

Cindy Pham: Welcome to Founders Connect Podcast. We help lifestyle entrepreneurs to grow their business online and create a happier marriage.

Anfernee Chansamooth: Did you know that approximately 45% of marriages end up in divorce and 65% of all startups fail due to founder conflicts? Well, we’re here to change that.

Cindy Pham: Each week we bring you an inspiring guest and practical tips to help you with business, relationships, and sustainable living.

Anfernee Chansamooth and Cindy Pham: Now let the fun begin!

Cindy Pham: Hi, I’m Cindy Pham.

Anfernee Chansamooth: And I’m Anthony Chansamooth.

Anfernee Chansamooth and Cindy Pham: And we’re from Founders Connect.

Anfernee Chansamooth: I have with me one of my really cool friends, Barbara Turley, who is the CEO and founder of virtualhub.com. That’s a VA outsourcing company. Currently, how many staff have you got in the company?

Barbara Turley: We’re currently at about 140. We sort of oscillate between 140 and 150 employees, actually, at the moment. They’re all employees.

Anfernee Chansamooth: Amazing. All right. And that’s all Filipino-based?

Barbara Turley: Yes, all Philippines.

Anfernee Chansamooth: And you’ve got an office, I think it’s Cebu. We just missed it when we were last in Cebu. We were like, Barbara’s here, but the timing didn’t work.

Barbara Turley: Yes.

Anfernee Chansamooth: Awesome. Okay. So it’s a business you started by accident. I love this part. Okay. That exploded in its first 12 months to become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages VAs in the digital marketing and social media space for businesses who need to free up time and energy so they can go to the next level. I love the mission, which is to eradicate small business overwhelm and pave the way for more businesses to scale successfully using offshore team strategies. Now, Barbara is also a mom to Ruby and Alexander and a wife to her best friend. Is it Eti? How do I say the name?

Barbara Turley: It’s Eti—Eti, with a strong “t”.

Anfernee Chansamooth: There you go. An adventure lover with passion for horse skiing, tennis, and time out in nature. That’s why we resonate, though I can’t ride a horse for crap. But anyway, I love it. Welcome to the show, Barb.

Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me, Anne. Great to be sharing all these strategies on your show.

Anfernee Chansamooth: I love it. Okay. So this one is going to be all about you and your journey. Tell us what you were doing before you started The Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: Sure. Listen, I had a really long corporate career. I spent about 15 years in the investment banking area of the corporate world and loved it. I had no desire, really, to be entrepreneurial, or I wasn’t into small business. I was in the big end of town and loved it. But probably in the last five or six years of that journey, I did decide that I wanted to do something myself, but I wasn’t sure what, which a lot of corporate people go through. I got involved in a startup in the financial industry.

And that was my first dipping my toe, really, into doing something startup or for myself, by myself. But I did it with a group of other people, which made it a lot easier. It was tough, but it wasn’t the same as going out on your own. And that just whetted my appetite to sort of try my own thing. So that’s the quick and dirty version.

Anfernee Chansamooth: I love it! And I was going to say that we love quick and dirty—that’s probably not going to go well. And now I just want to preface to anyone hearing chickens in the background in this audio: it’s because I’m in Bali and there are chickens behind me making sounds. What has been—now you’ve had many, because we’ve known each other for a while—but I’d just love for you to share what’s been one really courageous decision that you’ve made in your journey so far?

Barbara Turley: Sure. Look, I think the biggest one actually was commenting on social media the other day about this. I’d been in business about three years by the time—I guess the first big decision I did, or the biggest scariest one, was to actually start a business in a country I’d never been to, which was the Philippines. And I continued to not go to the Philippines for the first year of that business because I was having a baby. So I couldn’t actually go. So I guess that would have been scary move number one. And you would think that would be the biggest one. But interestingly, I think the scariest one was really when I took it more seriously a few years later, when I realized that I should really make everyone an employee. I made a decision to go to a kind of up-level and take it seriously. So I launched a Philippine company. So I now have a company in the Philippines. I went office-based, so I moved away from remote work from home, which is interesting for some of the discussions we’re going to have later. And I made everyone an employee, and I invested a lot of money. It cost a fortune to do it because everyone needed to get private health cover, all the statutory benefits that you have to pay for employees in the Philippines, much harder to let people go. You can’t just sack people. You can’t just say, sorry, goodbye. All of that sort of thing. And it brought with it a lot more complexity, but I felt it was something I needed to do. And it was a massive growth experience for me personally and for the business. It was the best decision I made, really.

Anfernee Chansamooth: Yeah, we’re definitely going to jump into some of those decision points that you went through going from remote workers into office-based. I can see why this is coming up in some of the interviews we’ve been doing with the summit. There is, like you say, this illusion or this dream—yeah, it sounds great, you can work from anywhere—but that does come with a caveat. It’s like you’ve got to have certain things in place for the business to grow and to service your clients. So we’ll get into that.

VoiceActor: You are listening to the Founders Connect Podcast, helping lifestyle entrepreneurs to grow their business online and create a happier marriage. Now back to the show.

Anfernee Chansamooth: Now tell me about—so we’ve got you on the summit, and you’re going to be speaking about how to hire only high-quality performers for your remote team. You’ve got quite a rigid process for doing that, which I love. So we’ll jump into that soon at the summit. But can you just tell our listeners, why do you embrace the remote? What’s your feeling about the remote work revolution and what’s going on now in the world? Because, I mean, obviously, 10 years ago this was just an idea, and some companies like IBM were just testing it as an idea. And now it’s kind of prevalent in a lot of companies where outsourcing is a thing. It’s real. And what’s it meant for you and your business and your life?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so first of all, I just want to define for everyone this concept of remote, because the word remote, as we were talking about, sort of implies digital nomads—people just floating around the planet, remotely working from wherever. Other people think it just means work from home. But what I’d like to say is that these days, the concept of remote means everything from large corporations that have remote offshore teams that may be in an office—they’re just remote from the head.

So remote has actually been around for a long time. It’s just that we haven’t viewed it as remote, as seen as nomadic. So for me personally, I’m the remote one. My whole team is in an office. My whole operation is in a fully set-up office, but I’m the one who’s actually remote from there because I’m in Australia. So it’s up to me to make that work. So I just want everyone to kind of expand their mind into what remote means.

You don’t necessarily have to have a whole team of people in India working from home to be a remote business. You might just have several different offices in different places. You might have—it works in lots of different ways. So obviously what it means for me is that it hasn’t stopped me launching a business in the Philippines when I don’t live there. That, for me, has been the biggest thing. I’ve launched an entire business off the back of this concept of not having to be present in order to run a lot of people or to have a company that runs a lot of people. I hope that makes sense.

Anfernee Chansamooth: Yeah, it does make sense. And I really love the distinction you made, or even just your redefinition, if you will, of what remote work means. And you’re right, there are different flavors. There are those who are the nomads, there are those who are hiring nomads, like you say, other business owners, but their teams are location-based. So there’s a mix, there’s a real mix. And there’s those who have split—some of their team are sitting in an office in Houston, and some of their contractors are outsourced and working all over the world.

So it’s kind of really what we see is that technology has enabled us to have different variations of what that means to different people.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, yup.

Anfernee Chansamooth: And for me, I’m quite passionate about having you involved in this because you are a mother of two. And that’s something we’ve seen, even in my role at Be Ninjas, is a lot of our team are working-at-home moms. And so that’s given them the flexibility, if you will, to be at home and witness those important moments when the kids are growing up and whatnot. And that’s something that, if we go back five years ago, it might have been very difficult, even with our corporates.

That idea of, oh my gosh, someone’s going to go have a baby, they’ve got their maternity leave—now what’s it like to reintegrate them into the company? That’s a challenge for both the mother as well as for the company. So now we’re kind of finding this place where that’s actually been resolved with remote work, right? So really, really cool.

Okay, so I’m going to just ask you any final words you have around the topic that you’re going to be talking about, which is how to hire remote performers and high-quality performers, and what kind of systems you need to have in place to make that really work, and what you’ve learnt over the years?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, sure. So just touching on a high level on this, I think the first thing I would say about hiring remote workers or remote staff or remote anything is to take it as seriously as you would if you were in a large corporation hiring people in an office in a big city. So a lot of us think we sort of fly by the seat of our pants a bit when we’re doing remote. We just do a quick Skype interview, have a quick look over the resume, and we’re all cool. We’re not doing any background checks. We’re not actually diving deep into who this person is. Are they a cultural fit? We don’t even worry about cultural fit because we think, well, they’re all from the Philippines, so who cares? But that’s actually the wrong approach. So definitely the first step is to take it very seriously and to have a process around how you are going to recruit that is deeper than just a chat on Skype. That’s what people are really doing, and you’re getting burnt that way. That’s how people are going to get burnt.

Anfernee Chansamooth: Yeah, I like just having the right mindset around hiring. Whether it is—what I’ve experienced—it doesn’t matter whether they’re remote or they’re in the office, your hiring process needs to be solid, and you need to really know what you’re looking for and how to vet the right people in and out, right? So that’s really key.

Okay, cool. So for everyone listening to this, I want you to come and join myself and Barb on the summit. It’s a free summit for you guys to register. It’s remotebusinessummit.com. Just head over there and grab your ticket. Now to check out Barb and her team and her company, just head over to thevirtualhub.com. Is that correct, Barb?

Barbara Turley: That’s it. Yep, you’ll find us there.

Anfernee Chansamooth: And you’re also on a podcast. You’ve got—what’s the name of the show?

Barbara Turley: The Virtual Success Show. So we’re on iTunes, and you can catch it on our website, actually. If you just go to the content tab on the website, you can catch—we’ve lots of content on our site, actually, for anyone who’s really trying to navigate this whole outsourcing thing. So we teach a lot there.

Anfernee Chansamooth: I love it. All right, guys, we will see you guys real soon. And Barb, we will see you on the summit.

Cindy Pham: Thanks for tuning in and remembering to live passionately,

Anfernee Chansamooth: purposefully,

Cindy Pham: and confidently. Till next time, ciao!