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Josh Cary: Welcome to the Hidden Entrepreneur Show. My name is Josh Carey. You want in on a little secret? I was in hiding for 40 years. Yeah, I was hiding every part of myself in every situation. And I can tell you one thing: hiding sucks. I’m now on a mission to help extraordinary people like yourself rediscover the world around you, connect beautifully with others, and excel tremendously in all you set out to do. Join in. It’s the Hidden Entrepreneur Show.

So as you know, you’re tuned into the Hidden Entrepreneur Show. It’s Josh Carey right here, sitting with another fantastic guest. It is Barbara Turley. She is the founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub. She places virtual assistants across digital media, social media, and all kinds of media in your hands as an entrepreneur so you can grow, so you can succeed. Welcome to the show, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: That’s a great intro, Josh. Thanks so much for having me.

Josh Cary: My absolute pleasure. I want to start with something interesting that I rarely, if ever, discuss, and it is the current times that we find ourselves in. And I’m just intrigued to hear from your point of view with our current scenario, with everybody being virtual themselves, probably not having found themselves in that environment prior. And now, it’s almost our new normal. You hear that all the time. From your business over the past six to nine months, is it—are we embracing you more, less, or exactly the same?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a great question. And when this thing first hit, we had a raft of cancellations come through as people were like—the panic set in—and cancellations came thick and fast for a few days. And then it was really interesting because all of a sudden, within a week or two, the cancellations were cancelled. People were like, no, no, no, I’ve realized that I actually can’t get rid of the VA because if I do that, then I’m really screwed.

So that was the initial funny sort of weird experience. And then we had a lot of issues where clients were realizing that they were in massive pain financially. I mean, some of them had lost 90% of their own clients. So we worked heavily in those early days with our clients to just get through, whatever we could do together to just all get through.

And what’s been interesting since then is initially things kind of died down, and it was just the same as normal. We just didn’t lose any clients, but everything was in this kind of holding pattern. And then all of a sudden, I think around June, July, it was like the switch flipped in people’s heads everywhere, and they realized, my God, this is—we need to get with the program here. This is not going to end.

And I think it’s even more now—I’m noticing even like September, October, as we’re rolling through this year—that switch is flipping for more and more people where they’re saying, even if we find a vaccine, and even if, even if, even if—are we going back? We’re not, right? So people are realizing that it is a fundamental change in how we are working. And therefore, if we are all remote now, or we’re all used to it now, it really is irrelevant where anyone is.

And that makes offshoring and VAs and all of these things that some companies may have avoided in the past just so much more palatable and just much easier. It’s a no-brainer now.

Josh Cary: Are there certain job descriptions in your stable that, because of these past six to nine months, are now in more demand? What don’t I know? What should I know?

Barbara Turley: Oh my God, like digital—anything digital is like—I mean, digital was big anyway, but I’ve heard someone describe it as we’ve done 10 years of digital transformation around the world in the space of eight months—like six months really is like a 10-year transition.

And because of that, every company is trying to—and that’s not just digital marketing, by the way. We’re talking systems, automation, platforms. People are trying to get into the next century in the space of five minutes flat.

And coupled with that, what’s also happening is the need for an examination of what I call your people budget. So it’s like the last bastion of wastage where we have automated to within an inch of our lives in business. We have looked at efficiency across lead generation in things like clients and marketing, and we’ve done everything really efficiently.

But what we’re realizing now is that of our budget that we spend on HR and people, how much of our people’s time is being spent on tasks that are actually easily delegatable? And Harvard Business Review did a study on this, and they reckon it’s about 40% of people’s time.

So if it’s easily delegatable, meaning there’s a process there, then we should be freeing up our onshore or our more expensive staff’s time to do more of the revenue-generating or more of the business-building stuff. And we need to be more efficient with everybody’s time, and our people budget needs to be spent more efficiently.

Josh Cary: Are we talking about good old-fashioned working on your business versus in your business?

Barbara Turley: Yes—and with your team, if you do have a team. So for example, no longer are people going to be accepting of paying $80,000 a year to someone to do $10-an-hour jobs, or five-bucks-an-hour jobs—meaning stuff that is process-driven could easily be done by a virtual assistant in somewhere like the Philippines, like what we do.

And that concept is becoming—because everyone’s watching the budget now and they’re watching the pennies, right? Or the cents—that means people are focusing on this, and they’re starting to think, hold on, maybe I could be more efficient with the money that I’m spending on my human capital here.

I’m not talking about getting rid of people or firing people. It’s more rejigging your tasks that are being done so that your sales team can get after more sales, that your strategist can get after more strategy and take on more clients, and that the admin stuff is not holding people back.

Josh Cary: I’m sure I don’t even want to right now get into the money reserve, meaning people logically know that they could and should hire in this regard, but they’re like, no, I can’t afford it or I don’t want a new expense on it right now. But besides that, do you find that people will resist this—again, aside from any financial concern, whether founded or not? Do you think founders and entrepreneurs resist it because they want to hold on to a sense of control?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it is—I’d love to unpack. There are so many things I can unpack in that question, right? So I’m just going to try and start at the top and go, okay.

Naturally, the entrepreneur is brilliant at startups, right? Entrepreneurs naturally go out in the world and they find problems to solve, and they get very excited about solving problems. And usually that’s brilliant when you’re doing product-to-market fit and you’re trying to find the thing that’s going to sell.

The problem comes later when you have solved the problem, you’re selling like hotcakes, you’ve got the thing moving, and now you want to scale. And what most entrepreneurs forget is that is the moment when so many of them die, because the skill set that you now need in order to take to the next level is systems, processes, teams, leadership, organization, delegation.

You need all of these concepts, and that’s less of the entrepreneur and more of the business builder or the integrator, the implementer. That’s why I think people resist it—because they can’t get over that hurdle. Entrepreneurs naturally resist wanting to do those things like building processes, leading teams, managing people. It’s not their natural skill set. So that’s a big problem number one.

I think the other thing—the losing control thing—is wrapped up in that, because if you’re good at building systems, processes, and leading teams, you actually gain a sense of control by giving up control. You actually gain more control because the process—you’ve got structure.

Whereas I think what entrepreneurs imagine is delegation as giving away to someone else and not having any oversight. That’s abdication. That’s not delegation. Even if you hire a strategist or somebody amazing on your team who’s high-level expertise, they still need to report to you. You still need somebody overseeing the overall direction and strategy, if that makes sense.

Josh Cary: Is this—as you say, the building of systems, processes, and leading of teams—is that a learnable skill?

Barbara Turley: It is to a certain extent, right? But it takes—it’s like anything—it is an absolutely learnable skill, except for people that are not naturally good at it, it’s quite painful, right? And they will resist it.

So I often say building processes to some people is like sticking needles in your eyeballs. It’s like you just don’t want to do it. But it’s that whole thing of mastering that—that’s a business skill that so many businesses don’t master. And because they don’t master it, they don’t grow. And that’s the honest truth.

It’s got nothing to do with how great a marketer you are or how great a salesperson you are or an entrepreneur. The scaling part is about operationalizing all of this stuff, and that involves mastering this skill across this sort of COO role—your chief operating officer type. So you either hire it or you get to learn it. Either way, it’s got to be done.

Josh Cary: You founded The Virtual Hub by accident. What happened there?

Barbara Turley: Well, first of all, I wasn’t the natural-born entrepreneur, right? So I wasn’t the one with the lemonade stand or making ribbons and selling them on the side of the street as a child. I wanted to be a doctor. That didn’t happen—long story, won’t get into it—but I ended up studying economics at university and loved it.

I found myself in the financial markets. I just wanted to work in big corporate investment banking, trading floors, and I did all of that. I was an equity trader for 10 years, and I loved the nature of being in that world.

And I had no interest—no interest—in starting my own business at all until I got a bit older. Then it was more a sense of wanting to lead my own path or develop my own path. Like many of us coming out of corporate, we want to have flexible time and all of these things.

And I started thinking about wanting to have more of an impact, or I wanted to build something—not just a career. I wanted to build something that was great. And that yearning went on for years before I eventually—again, such a long story—but I started out with that in the last big financial crisis, where I got an opportunity to sort of hop on the coattails of a number of very clever people that did a management buyout of a business from one of the investment banks in Australia.

And basically, we launched an asset management business that went on—and I’m still involved in that company today, it’s 10 years later—but it went on to be a pretty massive company managing 20 billion of funds under management today.

And that kind of whetted my appetite to go out and do my own thing and build something. It didn’t start out as The Virtual Hub. I started out doing some consulting, and I had a website called Energize Wealth, and I had this big vision of teaching women more about wealth creation and all of this stuff.

Anyway, I found that some of the clients I was coaching were smaller businesses, and the problem I kept seeing was that they were all trying to do everything themselves, but they didn’t have enough money to hire any staff. So they were in this going-nowhere type situation.

So naturally, I was like, well, we can just get VAs online in the Philippines and try to free up your time. And before I knew it, I was getting asked for that more than anything else. And I was like, there’s a business here—people are asking me to solve this problem. I don’t know why, but they were.

Within a month, literally, I had formed the early iterations of The Virtual Hub. No website, no business plan, nothing. It was like, boom—we’re in business. That was kind of it.

Josh Cary: And aren’t some of the most extraordinary businesses and entrepreneurial ventures done that way? You just turn around and you’re like, I’m asked for this over and over again. I guess I should pursue it a little bit.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, totally. Getting to this hidden entrepreneur thing, which is obviously the topic of this whole podcast, I was thinking about this. I wasn’t naturally entrepreneurial, and I still don’t think I am. I just was able to—I accidentally ended up in a business that was kind of leading in. I’m more like a COO type. I’m very system, processes, teams.

But the interesting thing was I didn’t even know that about myself until I started doing this. I had no background in leading people or HR or recruiting or anything. And I just naturally found myself being quite good at it and mastering it, and then helping clients to do the same thing. So, and out of it today, we’ve got 150 staff in the Philippines and a rapidly growing business right now.

Josh Cary: 150 staff means you can place 150 VAs.

Barbara Turley: Yes, yeah. So we’ve got 150, and they’re employees. We have a Philippine company today. So we have—it’s a fully full-blown setup now. It’s not like the early days where it was like a motley crew of a few people thrown together trying to make a business. Yeah.

Josh Cary: I want to go back for something you said. I missed what you glossed over. You wanted to be a doctor?

Barbara Turley: I did. I burningly wanted to be a doctor. And when I walk into a hospital today, I still get that little tingle of—I know why. I just can’t even explain it. It’s like that little—I saw myself here, and it didn’t pan out that way.

Josh Cary: I get that exact feeling every time I step on an airplane. I always wanted to be an airline pilot—not quite a doctor, but I wanted to be an airline pilot. And to this day, I’m just enamored by the whole plane experience.

Part of my story, as you know, I’m blessed with two adoring children, a seven-year-old daughter, a five-year-old son. So now I have the excuse when I fly with them to go visit the cockpit and like, come here guys, come here, the pilot wants to speak to us. And then we all go and cram into the cockpit before we take off, of course. And I’m like the little child in that circle. I’m like, come on, take a picture. Come here, come here. Look how great this is.

But I don’t know what it is, but I’m so drawn to it. So I get that feeling. Give us a little hint of how that didn’t happen.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, I worked really hard. I worked really hard in my final year at school, and I studied like mad. And in Ireland, where I’m from at the time—and still today—it’s quite difficult to get into medical school. I think it is anywhere, to get into medical school.

And when I got the results, I just missed out on enough points, as we call it in Ireland, to get into medicine. And I just felt that I had done as well as I was going to do. And I just didn’t have the energy in me at that point to go back and repeat that year at school to try to get in again. I was probably a bit impatient.

And I just decided, you know what, I’m going to go to university and I’m going to study an arts degree, and I’m just going to do it for a year and see where it takes me. And I have that sort of nature. I’ll tend to just go like, let’s see what’s behind this door. Let’s see what’s over here.

And I ended up absolutely loving it, and I just totally forgot the whole medical thing and went this path and enjoyed a very dynamic and fun career—and hard too, like everything. And today, although I have that tingly feeling about being a doctor, I also know that I’m glad it didn’t happen for me. I prefer the path that I’m on, this path I ended up going. It’s better for me personally.

Josh Cary: Yeah, I really appreciate that sort of awareness, acknowledgement, and in retrospect. Was there a space of time where that wasn’t the case, where you were sort of questioning or kicking like, why didn’t that happen?

Barbara Turley: No, honestly, no, which means it probably wasn’t the right path for me, or who knows. I just—I guess I just—no, actually, no, it was funny. I didn’t have that feeling.

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Josh Cary: Help us connect the dots from early on in the very beginning. What was life like growing up for Barbara Turley?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, I came from a great family—lots of cousins. I have three brothers. I have great parents, and I didn’t have any—I was brought up lucky, I guess. I’m one of the lucky ones.

I was brought up with pretty much—I was thinking about this before this podcast, going, you know, what would I say about this? And sometimes I think to myself, I’ve been successful in my life, right? But I had every opportunity to be successful. I almost feel like there was nothing—I was given every opportunity, really.

I had great education, I had very supportive parents, I had a really strong family. My mother, in particular, was great at planting very positive seeds in my head. She used to say things—it’s only now that I’m in my 40s and a mom myself, I’m like, wow, she knew what she was doing, right? I don’t know if she did know, but she would say things like, you can be anything you want to be.

And this was ringing in my ear all the time—you can be anything you want to be. She would actually say things like life is a bed of roses, but roses have thorns. In other words, you can enjoy—life is amazing, right? But just beware, because it’s OK to prick your finger every now and then because there are thorns.

So I think I was brought up with a very positive kind of attitude. And being in a house full of boys as well, I never felt like I was the girl as such. I was still kind of celebrated as the same as them. So, yeah.

Josh Cary: How old were you with those memories? As early as what do you remember your mom sprinkling in those words of affirmation?

Barbara Turley: Look, I’d say it was pretty young. Probably seven, eight, nine. I mean, I don’t know if I actually remember it then, but there’s things she used to say that I just know are embedded in my subconscious. So it must have been pretty young.

We had our shared fights and things like that, and we knocked heads a lot when I was a teenager. But I think it was much earlier than that—she had already planted a lot of deeply ingrained positive self-worth in my head.

Josh Cary: Yeah, I’m sure you could relate. Being a parent is extremely challenging—let’s just use one blanket word. And I’ve come a long way, 40-plus years, not as my ideal self, and now trying to make the most of all of this time, especially as a father and using that to my strength and my advantage.

I deliberately—and I have done this with my two children—as often as possible, daily, certainly, I’ll whisper in their ear just these verbal thoughts of affirmation: I love you so much, you’re so beautiful, you’re brilliant, you’re clever, you’re generous—and just throw in all of these adjectives as often as I can. So I’m glad that you’re—

Barbara Turley: It works. Yeah. Well, because there were also moments of negativity, so I was thinking about this going, yes, there were lots of fights in our house. Yes, my parents fought. Yeah, there were loads of problems.

My brother is profoundly deaf. That brought a lot of issues—frustration—into our family and all that. But I think you only remember—well, maybe it’s my nature—but I seem to remember more of the positive stuff. It’s like filling up the bank account. If there are a lot of positives, then you can outweigh anything of the negative.

And you need both sides really to balance in life. And I think too many parents today—and I do this to myself, by the way, as well—every time there’s a negative experience where I might shout at my daughter, I think, you know, damn, I’ve ruined it again.

It’s like, my God, lay off yourself. We have to have light and shade to experience life, and our children need to learn that too.

Josh Cary: Yeah, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in these handful of years that I’m on the other side of my darker times, it’s that it’s not about living a life of absolute perfection, as you would define it, 24/7.

But for me, it’s really having a less-than-ideal moment and then sooner than later recognizing what happened, why it happened, and just making a choice to correct it for next time. And the quicker you can, like you said, not beat yourself up and just move on and experience the now good in life overall, the better we all are.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I 100% agree. I think that’s just the secret because every time we’re trying to live positively all the time or feel amazing about ourselves all the time, that’s not real life.

Life is full of—we have to experience anger, we have to experience sadness. And I think one of the things I’m trying to teach my children—well, my children are four and one, so the one-year-old probably doesn’t know—but I’m trying to teach my four-year-old at the moment that it’s okay to feel angry.

Because I think in our generation—you and I, I’m in my 40s as well—maybe as children we were told that anger was bad and that you should—it’s like you were kind of berated for feeling anger. It’s like a bad thing that you don’t want to show.

And therefore that can cause a lot of problems later in life, because anger is one of the breadths of emotions that we feel as human beings. And we have to learn how to process anger correctly. I’m still learning how to do that.

Josh Cary: Why do you say that we have to experience anger and that anger is okay?

Barbara Turley: I just feel it’s the breadth of emotion. It is an emotion. We feel grief, we feel sadness. If you’re not accepting of anger, then when someone in your life dies or passes away—and I don’t even want to say it, I haven’t experienced this yet—but anger is part of grief.

Or let’s say you’re moving on from a career or a relationship or a job, or just something dies—you’re going to feel anger. And if you don’t know how to deal with it, or someone is going to upset you at school or bully you or whatever, you might feel anger.

So I think it’s important that we learn to deal with these emotions and not pretend that they don’t exist.

Josh Cary: Yeah, it’s so true. As a parent, it’s the best life lesson if you’re willing to be in school for that. Because my kids are teaching me constantly. They’ll do something, and it’ll trigger an emotion. And then afterwards, I have to figure out why—because I want to figure it out. Why did that get to me?

Because it’s my problem, right? It’s not their problem. It’s nothing they did. I heard this a while ago—the quote: when you’re angry, you’re not angry with who you think you’re angry at. It’s never about that. You’re angry at yourself.

And the more I tell myself that, it’s now so obvious, and that’s freeing. That’s powerful.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and just as you were saying that, what I heard in my head was actually my dad. This wasn’t when I was a child—this was more recent, maybe in the last 15 years.

He went off and studied philosophy and got all into it. And one thing he did say—I’ve remembered it over the years because he was right—is when you feel something like that, you have to ask yourself one question: is there truth in it?

Now the truth could be no, there isn’t truth in it—it’s my own lack of self-worth that’s making me feel like I’m an idiot or whatever. But is there truth in it? And is that truth real for you, or is it because you have low self-worth?

That’s something that has stuck with me over the years. I’ve found it quite powerful to reset myself.

I’m in a people business, and sometimes I can feel pretty triggered by people, because people are not a widget—they walk and talk and change their mind. And I’m in the business of selling people, so you can’t always guarantee the product.

Sometimes I can get quite triggered, but usually it’s my own sense of perfection or my want to have everything perfect, or that my word is my bond kind of thing. That really triggers me, but I’ve had to work on that over the years.

Funny—I’ve ended up in a business that helps me deal with that trigger daily.

Josh Cary: I’m sure no accident, right?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I know. Thank you, universe.

Josh Cary: You mentioned your brother is deaf?

Barbara Turley: Yes, yes.

Josh Cary: How has that affected or positively affected your life?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so I think he’s amazing, by the way. He’s profoundly deaf. He had a tough—of course he had a tough time, he couldn’t hear in a world that is hearing.

But he has just inspired me so many times over the years because he doesn’t care. He went off when he was 18—he was like, I’m moving to England. I want to go to university in Manchester, and I’m going to study law.

And my parents were like, what—you want to leave? And he was like, yeah, I’m off. Then he went to live in London. He’s kind of like a hustler—he’s forged many different paths in his life.

He’s both content and happy and full of life at the same time. He had some very hard times. He caused hard times for our family too. There were moments of me feeling very empathetic and sympathetic toward how he was feeling, but also very angry at his disruption of the family because of his own frustration.

But these days, I just look back and think, what an inspiration. He just doesn’t care. He doesn’t let his deafness stop him at all.

Josh Cary: And I know that stereotypically we talk about gratitude often, but especially now, where the person tuning in is in fact listening and hearing this, you should not take anything for granted.

Barbara Turley: Yes, because I do lots of podcasts, right? And one of the things he said to me one day, he said, I would love to hear some of your podcasts. And I thought, that stings, you know, because he doesn’t listen to them, obviously. I mean, he can do subtitles and stuff, but not the same, you know.

And the other thing, I remember one thing he said to me once, which, like, again, difficult to hear, but true. He said the only thing he ever wanted to hear was my mom’s voice. So, you know, that’s like tearing up saying that, but we take all those things for granted. You know, the sound of your own mother’s voice is like—someone who’s deaf doesn’t get that, really doesn’t get that experience.

Josh Cary: Yeah, I mean, I get overwhelmed with the true miraculous nature of life—the miraculous nature of life. And we take so much for granted just by definition and the way life is set up, that you are forced to look and see and take a moment of gratitude, or else every miraculous moment is going to pass you by—least of which this very moment that you and I, Barbara, are experiencing right now. You’re across the world, right? How can that happen?

Barbara Turley: Well, I mean, this pandemic that we’re suffering right now, this year that we’re in—isn’t it amazing that it happened? I mean, thank God it happened right now because the technology is here for us to overcome it to a certain extent and to keep some semblance of this economy, this global economy, which I believe is the next—we’re all now the frontliners in this new pandemic, which is going to be the global unemployment and the angst that’s going on. There’s a lot of anger rising around the world.

So thank God for all this technology and for digital and for what we can now do to keep this all going.

Josh Cary: Yeah, I was reading something the other day, and it really—I never put two and two together—but it was just bringing up the idea that if this happened 20, 30, 40 years ago, how do you—really think about what we have at our disposal right now to make this somewhat bearable. But if this didn’t exist, how do you educate your children? How do they learn virtually without it even being a thing? They would have had to send home books and papers of instruction of how to do it.

Barbara Turley: And nobody would have a job left. That would be—you know, so I mean, we’re talking about being a hidden entrepreneur here. If there’s any hidden entrepreneurs listening, I would just say to you, you know what? Stop thinking about it.

The world needs as many people as possible now more than ever to step up, to rise up, to create jobs, to create lives, to get your idea out there. If it fails, don’t worry about it. Get out and do another one. My first business completely failed, right? That’s the whole story. But I’ve had lots of failed ideas within this business. And in fact, arguably parts of this business have failed as well.

But you just have to get up every day. And the way I see it is, gosh, I’ve got this responsibility now to all these people in the Philippines who are on my payroll, and all these other people that I can create jobs for them. So when we—circling back to the beginning of our conversation—digital right now is rising, and I feel a personal responsibility to sell like mad into it because I can create jobs.

I can help business owners to get their businesses more stable through cost-effective teams, to get on board with the remote and systems and all of this stuff so that then they can go on in their economies to pay more tax, to hire accountants, to hire salespeople, to hire other people. And that’s the knock-on effect.

I went off on a total tangent there, but that’s kind of—anyone listening, now is the time. Just get yourself a mic and get a podcast going, or whatever you want to do. Facebook Lives—don’t even worry about the podcast.

Josh Cary: I know it’s also true—and then just convert those into a podcast. It all works. You know the deal.

So the Hidden Entrepreneur was founded on the premise that I spent a lifetime hiding behind fear, using that as an excuse to keep myself hidden. I really didn’t want to rock any boat. Can you tell us about a time where you were overcome with so much fear in a certain situation, and you were still able to power through?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a good one. Oh—here’s another thing my mom used to say to me. I can’t believe I forgot this one at the beginning: feel the fear and do it anyway. She used to say that to me all the time.

And actually, that’s kind of what I do. I just go, I have felt fearful at many times, but I just go, I don’t care. I want to do it anyway. Now that’s my nature, right? So I was sort of brought up with that sense of a bit of grit.

But I think when you’re in moments of fear, what ends up happening is you get into a moment of indecision. And then what happens in indecision is you sit on the fence while everybody else is playing the game, but you’re not in the game. You’re not making a decision.

And people worry about making right decisions. And I think in my first job as a trader, I can remember a moment of being frozen with fear and not knowing what to do—and indecision. And this is the stock market that moves every second. It’s not waiting for your fear, right?

And I remember the head of trading saying to me, he goes, what are you doing? Just make a decision. It doesn’t matter. Just get in—buy, sell. I was like, do I buy, do I sell? I don’t know. But the point was that it didn’t really matter at that point. You just have to trigger that first decision, and then you make another decision, and then you make another decision.

And if you make the wrong one, you’ve just got to make one to find out where you’re going, and then you just keep moving forward. So that’s always the philosophy I’ve had in my life. And I naturally have it in my being.

I will say that I think it’s kind of ingrained in my DNA somewhere. I have that kind of fighter attitude, and that’s what’s helped me get through fear. But I see a lot of people getting frozen and not realizing that it’s okay if you make the wrong decision—you just have to make a decision. It’s buy or sell.

Josh Cary: What a fascinating woman you are. I love all these little topics we’re touching on and the overall theme here—amazing. As we look to wrap this up, what is the one thing that the person listening still needs to hear? What hasn’t yet been said that they can take away with?

Barbara Turley: I’m imagining the mindset of people listening to this—maybe thinking they’re a hidden entrepreneur at the moment and that it’s hiding in them. I think not enough people—and maybe this is a feminine energy thing—not enough people, women included and myself included at times in my life, have learned how to listen deeply to truth that is within.

Fear stops you because you always think, no, I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But there is a knowing that is deep inside. There is the voice that is telling you that you’re right and that it’s time for you to step up to whatever it is.

And it’s learning to listen more deeply and to trust in that part of yourself. You won’t know whether you’re going to fail or succeed, but listening to that voice deep inside is the first step. And if you fail, it’s OK, because the voice will keep going. It’ll keep telling you where to go.

There’s another voice holding you back—that’s fear and doubt and all those things. You have to go deeper than the fear and doubt voice into knowing deep within what you want. I think that’s about the only way I can wrap up.

Josh Cary: Yeah, it is. That’s exactly how I lived all of my hidden years—knowing consciously full well what I was capable of, yet still making the choice. And that’s what caused a lot of the angst, the anger, the frustration, the confusion, the despair. Because I was like, I know what I can do, and then I see people doing it, and that causes some jealousy, right? And then what’s that about? Because I’m—yeah, exactly. And it’s like, God, I could do that. Look at that.

Barbara Turley: Feel the fear and do it anyway. Who cares? Just do it, right? I mean, it’s hard to do that, but that’s the one-liner I think people should put on their wall: feel the fear and do it anyway. Who cares?

Josh Cary: And while you say it’s hard, sure, it starts off that way. But the more you do it, the easier it gets. Because the more you do it, you then see the outcome is not as scary, right?

Which is what I tell my daughter every time she has to go to the dentist. I’m like, you’ve been through this before. You know there’s nothing to be concerned about. You kick and scream all the way leading up to it, and then you get there, and it’s like—so it’s the same thing.

Now you have proof, you have feedback of the opposite that you can use and say, well, that wasn’t too bad. And then you just build on that—the momentum.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s important, though—I don’t go out and blow up a load of money and destroy yourself. I just want to say, don’t just blindly jump in.

But get in, dip your toe, try stuff out, make some decisions, see how it goes, see what the market’s telling you. With business in particular—and again, I learned this the hard way—I went out and created a whole business around what I thought people wanted. And I was like, nobody bought that. People are asking for VAs.

So the market’s tapping me on the shoulder. And I didn’t think, I’ve never been to the Philippines, I don’t know anything about recruiting—I didn’t care. I was like, I’ll just get a VA online and let’s see what happens. And lo and behold.

It’s easy to look at what I’ve built today and go, wow, look what she did. Oh my God. I’ve had some dark moments with this business. It looks shiny and beautiful on the outside, and that’s what you want to present to the world.

But the journey’s been hard. It’s the fighter in me and that fight to win that’s gotten me through those times. So there will be moments where you’ll think this business is rubbish, I’m doing a terrible job, what have I done? But every business suffers from that. That’s normal. It’s just hidden.

Josh Cary: Nicely put. How can people follow up with you to keep this conversation going?

Barbara Turley: Sure, we actually have—I’m not very active on social media, you’d think I would be, but I’m not really. I do have a podcast—shameless plug—The Virtual Success Show. It is quite about VAs and stuff.

But we have a special link for your listeners. If you go to thevirtualhub.com/hiddenentrepreneur, there’s some free goodies over there for anyone who is thinking about starting that business or someone in the phase of having a business but doesn’t know how to delegate, is afraid of letting go. There’s some guides and stuff there for you.

Or thevirtualhub.com—we’ve got loads of content over there. My podcast is there. And of course, LinkedIn. If you want to find out more about me personally, just look up Barbara Turley on LinkedIn, and you’ll find me there.

Josh Cary: We are connected there for sure. And thevirtualhub.com/hiddenentrepreneur, you said—very excited. Thank you for putting that together. Barbara, this has been extraordinary, tremendous. Thank you so much for coming on, showing up, and opening up like you have.

Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me.

Josh Cary: And thank you, everybody, for tuning into this episode. So great to have you joining us each and every time. I appreciate it so much. We’re going to do it again before too long. Until we do, go get them.

Voice Actor: Thanks for listening to the Hidden Entrepreneur Show. Make sure to subscribe through iTunes or Google Play so you can get notified every time we publish a new episode. And we’d love to hear your thoughts with an honest review on iTunes. Finally, follow us on your favorite social media platforms to keep the conversation going with Josh Carey and today’s guest. Until next time!

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