VoiceActor: And now, welcome to Like a Boss. Insights with influencers, creatives, online entrepreneurs, and badasses like you. Here is your hostess, Heather Havenwood, Chief Sexy Boss, helping you rise to the top.

Heather Havenwood: Are you a coach, consultant, small business owner, or online entrepreneur? Do you want to significantly grow your business, triple your lists, and double your sales conversions? If the answer is yes, then launching a podcast is the next step. You see, being an expert in your field, having a website is no longer enough to be noticed in today’s marketplace. I call it the influencer effect. Being an influencer is the key.

Heather Havenwood: You see, people do business with people they know, like, and trust. And having your own podcast helps people to connect with you. If you’re interested in having me help you launch your own podcast, grow your influence, and promote your business, then go to influencergrowthformula.com. That’s influencergrowthformula.com. And let me help you rise to the top.

Heather Havenwood: Hi, everyone! This is Heather Heywood, and welcome to another edition of Like a Boss. Insights with influencers, entrepreneurs, and badasses like you. I think it’s called entrepreneurises, like a big princess thing. So we have a princess woman, a badass on the line. Barbara, are you there?

Barbara Turley: I am. Thank you so much for having me. Very excited to be here.

Heather Havenwood: You’re welcome. Very excited to actually meet you and connect with you and talk with you. We have a virtual friend, I call it the Sarah Nook Show. She’s on the line. You’ve been on the call. I call it virtual because she’s in Tel Aviv. You’re an Australian. I’m in Austin. So there’s nowhere we’re to have coffee together.

Barbara Turley: She and I have virtual coffee about once every six weeks. We just call it virtual coffee, yeah.

Heather Havenwood: Oh my gosh, yeah, I should totally start doing virtual coffee with the core points. Okay, let’s tell me who you are. So Barbara is an investor, entrepreneur, and working with an overseas support assistant, founder of the Virtual Hub. She’s CEO and founder of it, so a business she started by accident that exploded in the space of 12 months. She’s one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual systems of the digital marketing and social media space for businesses who need to free up their time and energy so they can go to the next level, which is me. And Barbara is a mum.

Heather Havenwood: She’s in Australia, so I gotta go there. Mum to her gorgeous daughter Ruby, wife to her best friend Eddie, and an adventure lover with a passion for horses, skiing, tennis, and time out in nature. And as I’ve already told her before, earlier in the green room, that time out in our world means bad girls.

Barbara Turley: Well, when I’ve been a bad girl, I need to go out in nature and chill, right?

Heather Havenwood: You’ve been a bad girl. Go out of nature. Go, go, go, right? That’s actually not a—I think I’ve been bad. I think I need to go out in nature. So thanks for being here, Barbara. I really appreciate you being here very much. It’s gonna be a fun conversation.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s great to be here.

Heather Havenwood: Thank you. So Virtual Hub, let’s talk about the accident, the obvious thing, the elephant in the room. What was the accident? How did you come to booth Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, I love talking about that because I think in business, we all have ideas about having business plans and we should have strategic this, that, and the other. And look, I come from an investment banking background, so I had all of those thoughts in my head that you have to have this big vision, and then you have to work out a business strategy, and then you’ve got to drive that thing until you make it work. And I did do that. I started out with an actual business. Look, a website I still have, but it’s quite dormant. I started out with, it was called energizewealth.com, and I was doing lots of video and podcasting, and the concept was really good, but I ended up doing quite a lot of business coaching. And through the business coaching, I realized that it didn’t matter what business I was coaching, what industry, what area of the world they were in, they were all suffering the same problem. And it was that they were completely overwhelmed because they were trying to do everything themselves.

Barbara Turley: They couldn’t really hire staff locally because they weren’t making enough money just yet to kind of cope with that. But then if they didn’t hire someone, they were never going to get out of the trenches. So the time issue became a kind of a common theme that I saw. Now, I had a virtual assistant myself in the Philippines, so I called her and I was like, do you have any friends that need jobs? I mean, I’ve got these clients, and maybe we can help them to get a VA. And to cut a long story short, I literally wasn’t even charging money for this. It was just a side gig to help clients out. And before I knew it, I was getting more demand for that than business coaching. I was getting people calling me going, can you get me one of those VAs? And I was like, I wonder, is there a business in this? So I did a webinar, just a free one. I didn’t even spend money on Facebook ads. And it was like the most successful one I ever did. And I got a few buyers off that. And I was like, my God, we’re in business. I mean, we didn’t have a name or a website or anything, but we were getting flooded with people wanting VAs, and we were struggling to find them. I mean, that resulted in a whole host of other problems coming later, but that was the start of the business. It was messy, no vision, no plan, nothing. It was just product sell.

Heather Havenwood: Right, that’s how it usually happens. So let’s talk about what exactly does Virtual Hub do, because we all know we can go to Upwork and find some VA there, but what is the difference between going through an agency, which is what you become, right? So Virtual Hub is an agency, right? Versus going direct.

Barbara Turley: So that was my initial question when I was thinking, is there a business in this? Because I was saying to myself, why would anybody use me or pay me extra to do this? Or why wouldn’t you just go on Upwork like I did? But what I rapidly found was that it’s not as simple as people think, actually, to get it right with the VA thing.

Barbara Turley: And the internet is littered with stories of people being burnt online, people having VAs that said they were working and they weren’t, lying, messing, sloppy work, all these things. So I realized quickly when I started recruiting that the problems—I always say, you know, I solved the first problem, which was people wanting to get a VA. But then what happened quickly after that was the second problem raised its ugly head, which was how do you get success with a VA? And I realized that the clients actually weren’t ready. Something I think I was naturally good at was things like processes and delegation and systems. I’m quite sort of built that way naturally. But I found a lot of clients hated that, and they just wanted to hire someone and hope to God that they just did the job, and it didn’t really work out that way.

Barbara Turley: And then shortly after that, again, I realized there was a third problem, and that a lot of the VAs in the VA world, they say they have experience because they may have touched a platform like Ontraport or Infusionsoft or HubSpot, but they’ve never actually been trained properly.

Barbara Turley: They sort of just know a bit about it, or they’ve learned from YouTube. So I actually realized that they needed deeper training as well. And then the fourth piece of it was helping them to communicate more effectively together, the VA and the clients, so that they would get success. So it was actually a lot more to it than just recruiting and putting a—someone said to me, throwing a body at the problem is never going to solve the problem. It’s not just the person you need. There’s a lot more than that. Yeah.

Heather Havenwood: There was a lot more than that. I’ve been burned by a virtual VA. I’ll tell you the story just because I think it shares. So I spent, oh my God, six months with my team. I had two Americans on my team, and I decided to get—they were like, you need a VA in the Philippines. There’s just all these other pieces. So they, as a collective, helped train her, and they are very good. And I honor that. And then we’re all up and running, you know what I mean? One of those like, we’re all up.

Heather Havenwood: We’re good. We’re like on the track. And then she—she’s like, I need—she basically what I call hijacked. It was like, I need double the money.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, she turned into a disaster, yeah.

Heather Havenwood: And I’m like—so then she’s—what’s interesting, this was through an agency. I went to the—now actually, believe it or not, this is actually a kudos to the agency. So I’ll give you why it saved me to go through an agency. So it was through an agency, and she started doubling, and I had an agreement of the pay through the agency, and they take their cut, right? And I knew that, and that’s all on the up and up and agreements. And so I said, well, first of all, you can’t ask me for a pay raise. You have to go through the agency, number one. Number two—

Heather Havenwood: No, you know, that’s the first thing. No, you’ve only been on my software six months. You just got up and did it. You basically just got paid to be trained. No way. And she started like scary stuff. And I immediately killed all access to everything quickly because it was social media. And I went to the agency, and luckily it saved me because they got in between and they protected me.

Heather Havenwood: You know what I mean, and they’re an American agency similar to yours, or Western, and they’re actually the ones that really did save me. And they’re like, you know, if it would have been in Upwork, there would not have been much I could have done.

Barbara Turley: No, you would have been completely burned, yeah. It’s been really bad, yeah. I’m nodding because these stories are like—you know, look, I’ve even been burnt myself because in the early days of this business, I didn’t know everything that I know now. I mean, I’ve been burnt by hundreds of VAs, but today, you know, there’s ways of—look, I’ll be honest with you, we no longer recruit for skills at all. We recruit for character, and it takes us six weeks intensively before we would ever even consider showing someone to a client. And they also become full-time employees of our company in the Philippines so that we have them under Philippine law. So there’s a much more—yeah, so these days our success rate’s high, but those stories are just so—they’re everywhere. It’s really difficult to get it right because your character and work ethic’s very important as well in person.

Heather Havenwood: And I think the Filipino market, they’ve become savvy to know that it used to be you would go on there and you’d find people no matter what, but now you have to really be careful because they’re savvy. They know what people want. They know how to scam. They just do.

Barbara Turley: And I think the thing is, look, there are beautiful people. Of course, I’ve got lots of Filipinas and love them. But we also must remember that they are still an up-and-coming culture. And I can remember—this is a funny story actually—I can remember many, many years ago in Ireland, where I’m originally from, back in the 80s. I can remember when all the Americans were coming to Ireland, right? Because they wanted to find their roots, and there was a sort of a trend of this.

Heather Havenwood: Really?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, there was a huge trend. All these Americans used to come to Ireland, and they would be looking for their ancestry because a lot of them came from Ireland, and they would rock into Ireland. At the time, Ireland wasn’t the country it is today. It was sort of like going through a very tough time, shall we say. There was a lot of unemployment, and people used to try to scam the Americans, and they would tell them, you know, if you pay me this, I’ll take you to see a leprechaun—but leprechauns don’t exist, right? And I almost think about it now, and I go, it wasn’t that we were bad people. We just weren’t there yet in terms of this new money that was coming into our country, right? And I really feel in the Philippines it’s sort of the same thing. They just think, gee, we can get away with this, and they’re sort of trying it on, but it’s turned into a bit of a scam culture now. Yeah, so you’ve got to be careful. I agree with you. It’s very hard.

Heather Havenwood: Yeah, it’s very hard, very challenging, but it’s an interesting conversation about it because I remember a friend of mine recently talked about how they have a very big company, have lots and lots and lots of Filipino employees, about 20, and they live in the States. So this is really—it was at a mastermind. There’s all these big-time people there. And she says, don’t pay your Filipinos more than what you told them. And we’re like, what? So they had an agreement, right?

Heather Havenwood: And then they decided to give their people bonuses because they had a good year, and so they gave them bonuses, what I call more like American bonuses, like a thousand dollars, you know? And one of them, as soon as they gave the bonus, they bolted, this employee, and went on a vacation for like three—just like, see ya!

Barbara Turley: Oh, yeah.

Heather Havenwood: And they’re like, what? So they were told by the other Filipinos, and they’re like, don’t do that. People don’t know what to do.

Barbara Turley: Don’t pay them. You know, the other thing you have to be careful of is—I know you want to be like, as Westerners, we’re like, my God, we could change their lives with a thousand dollars. But you have to remember the unintended consequences of going into a culture and throwing money around, because what’s happening over there is the nurses are all leaving the nursing industry and becoming VAs. We get loads of nurses because they get paid nothing, and they know they want to be VAs. Even working for an agency, they can get paid like three or four times more. But online, the big drawcard is—so you get all these people leaving the other industries. And from an economic point of view, it might be good for the person in that family, but when it starts to spread, you get all these unintended consequences, and then you get people—they get burnt themselves online because everyone starts to think they can get rich quick, you know, with all these Westerners that are going to pay you this big money.

Barbara Turley: So we actually promote our clients paying bonuses to their VAs, but we heavily help them to understand—pay a hundred dollars. A hundred bucks, that’s fine. If you are going to pay a big one, we also have to coach that employee on what that means and what to do with that money, and that you also have a tax bill that’s coming because of that money and all of this sort of thing.

Barbara Turley: So we have a lot of programs internally to help them to cope. So I’m sort of trying to work on the Philippine side as well with our company in making our culture.

Barbara Turley: Something that they want to be part of, and that they feel like it’s sort of a family thing with them as well. So it’s really something I’m very happy with.

Heather Havenwood: Let’s talk about the legalities. You said something about you’re actually in the Philippines, so there’s a different tax structure.

Barbara Turley: No, so my company is not in the Philippines. So basically, the structuring is it is a Western company. Our company is actually based in Hong Kong so that we have Western contracts and things like that. And it’s a global position for the client contract. But we also have a wholly owned Philippine company. And the reason I did that was because I wanted to offer all of our employees the benefits that they would get in their own country from being an employee. So they get private health cover, they get all their pension payments. So we do all of that for them.

Barbara Turley: And the only way I could really do that successfully was to have a local entity. So that’s number one. They like to be employees of a local entity because they’re protected. So the labor code and the law over there, I’m bound by employment law in the Philippines. It’s good for the employees, but on the flip side, it’s also good for me because they are under Philippine contracts. So for example, we often have clients saying, “Can my VA sign an NDA?”

Barbara Turley: I’m like, you can get a VA to sign an NDA, but an American NDA in the Philippines is worth nothing. Like, you can’t do anything with that. You can’t go after a Filipino. But we actually are under the legal system there, so therefore, if we did have a major legal case—my God, we haven’t, thank God—but if we did, we have more legal recourse in that country. So they’re bound by their own legal system.

Heather Havenwood: Because you’re based in the Philippines, is that what you’re saying?

Barbara Turley: All our employees are under that company, yes.

Heather Havenwood: That’s really interesting. So with that said, let’s talk about having a VA, right? What are some things, three crucial steps to success with a VA?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So the things I really noticed when I first started was people were getting a VA, and then the complaints would come: it’s not working, they don’t know what they’re doing, right? And I honestly—I nearly shut the business after about six months because I couldn’t cope with the amount of people who were complaining. I was thinking, how was I able to do this and other people can’t? Now, there were some issues around work ethic and character of some of the people that we originally had.

Barbara Turley: But a lot of the issue was that I think clients didn’t fully understand how to get ready before a VA arrives into your business. So usually they’d get a VA, they’re already overwhelmed, frustrated, and exhausted.

Barbara Turley: The VA arrives, and they just throw them a whole pile of logins and a couple of videos, and they’re like, okay, I’ll see you in a month. Make sure the work’s done. So I developed this kind of onboarding process for clients that we take them through. And step one really is before—and this all has to be done realistically before you get a VA—so that you calmly onboard somebody into your business. So the first annoying task, and nobody wants to do this, but it is crucial, is to clarify exactly what tasks are going on in your business and which ones are going to be delegated to a VA. Now that sounds very simple.

Barbara Turley: But when you think about it, people go, well, I’ve got a couple of hours, I don’t know. But you actually have to go through each little department in your business, even if it’s just you. You already have a marketing department, you have a sales department, you have a client delivery department, you have a finance department. And what are all the little tasks that fall out in those departments that could be done by somebody else that are probably being done by you or someone in the U.S., or someone who’s being paid a lot more money than what you would pay in the Philippines.

Barbara Turley: That’s step one, and you’ve got to break those down into what I call recurring tasks and projects. Now, they are very different things. Recurring tasks are the types of tasks that need to be done daily, weekly, monthly on a recurring basis that are the same every time, and they keep the engine of your business running, basically. That keeps the engine alive. Projects are things like, I want to write a book, I want to write an e-book. That’s not a task. That’s an entire project where there are a ton of tasks attached to that.

Barbara Turley: And then once you get clear on that, my advice is always to delegate first the recurring tasks so that you can get the engine stuff off your list so that you can focus on your project list and get that done first. But you really have to sit down and figure out what you want to delegate first before you start going wild, you know, throwing VAs ad hoc tasks everywhere.

Barbara Turley: Second step is the most boring of all. I’ll try and make it interesting, but process mapping your business. Nobody wants to do it, okay? Everybody says to me, I don’t have time to sit down and write a process for every single thing I’m doing in the business. And my answer to that is, well, if you don’t have time today, you definitely won’t have time in 12 months’ time because you’ll still be doing—you’ll still be peddling, you’ll still be doing all the things that you don’t want to be doing. It is an investment of time in the business.

Barbara Turley: At the end of the day, we’re all creating businesses that are assets. And if we look at it from a financial perspective, any business that is processed up and systemized is far more valuable than something that is chaos on the inside.

Heather Havenwood: Do you help them with templates and things like that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, we do, yeah. So we have a certain number of processes. We just give them to the clients and go, you can use that if you want to.

Heather Havenwood: Right. Do you—so there’s a lot of different pieces. I think that when I’m working with clients, you’re right, they don’t have the systems in place, but that’s because they’re just doing what needs to be done. They don’t know how to do the breakdown, different little pieces. And I don’t think the Westerners understand how tiny the details need to be. Can you talk about that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and unfortunately, it is tedious. I will be honest, it is very tedious. But even the Western VAs—I know quite a lot of Western VAs and OBMs—Sarah and a lot of her team are OBMs—and they would say to me that they also prefer to go in and work with a business that is quite, when they go in and it’s like, here’s how we operate, here’s the thing, here’s how it all works, it’s much easier for them to go in and get success.

Barbara Turley: Now, my advice is if you don’t like doing this, you could use a firm like Sarah Knocked’s firm, she’s sarahknocked.com. She actually goes in for three months and helps businesses to create all of this stuff that we’re talking about, get you all streamlined and nicely set up with all your processes so that you can actually bring a VA in and slot them into that cheaply. That’s how you’re able to do it from a cost-effective perspective.

Heather Havenwood: So, okay, got it. I mean, if you just want someone who has a template, do you help them with that process? Like if someone comes to you, hey, I want a VA, and they’re not ready, what do you do? How do you help them get ready?

Barbara Turley: Yes, to a certain extent, we do. So we are building out more process templates because I’ve realized, like you say, that it’s just easier to give people the processes. So we have a lot of the digital ones. We’ve got things like blog—you know, when you just write a blog post or you’ve got a writer that writes it, and you’re like, now I’ve got to put it up on my blog and get images and attach them and all this stuff—we’ve got a whole process for that. And we train the VAs on those processes. We’ve got a social media content calendar creation process.

Barbara Turley: And what we say to clients is, take a look at them. You can use them, modify them, not use them, whatever you want. You just get them once you join us anyway. And we’re rolling out more and more of that and helping more on that side, yeah.

Heather Havenwood: What—so we had the first way, second way, what’s the third way for success in VA?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, the third one is the doozy that sees everyone fail: communication. I mean, how many marriages have fallen apart on bad communication?

Heather Havenwood: Yeah, well, yeah, that’s challenging. So how do you suggest—I’m going to ask you—I’ve worked with VAs, and some people are like, I use Skype. Some people use—I use monday.com. Some people use Slack. I use all these different places. What do you suggest? What’s the structure you suggest?

Barbara Turley: First of all, your VA should use the structure you use, and you shouldn’t use the structure they use.

Heather Havenwood: Well, what if you don’t have a structure? What if this is my first VA?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, okay, so the simplest way, I feel the simplest way to start is using—first of all, you need to realize that email is absolutely not a communication tool. So if you’re trying to use email for task flow back and forth with a VA, it’ll go fine for a little while, and then it’ll all fall over, and somebody will be like, I didn’t get that email, I can’t find that thread, I don’t know what you said there. It’s just a mess, right? And then you’ll get frustrated and blame the VA.

Barbara Turley: So email is an absolute no-no for communication and task management. You’ve got to use a free tool like Asana or Trello. They’re both free. They help you to put your tasks in there, and then you can communicate back and forth inside that platform. You don’t even need to bring in a new one. If you want, then just add on Skype for the ad hoc little things. The only rule that I have about this is to remember that whatever instruction you give over Skype or over the phone, put it into Asana as well so that it’s on the task and you can track what everyone’s talking about. So it’s better to kind of have some little rules around your communication. So that’s number one.

Barbara Turley: Number two, what saved me is a daily 10-minute daily huddle meeting. Now, the huddle concept—you can Google it, you don’t have to go wild with it—but all it basically means is you catch up for a non-negotiable 10 minutes every day at the same time, and it’s the quick-fire round. It’s like, hey, what do you need? Where are you stuck? Because the “where are you stuck” question is what’s going to keep things moving when a VA is stuck with something or they’re waiting for you to get back.

Heather Havenwood: Now, I was told by someone who does VA work never to talk to them, like never to actually have a conversation, and just keep everything Skype because they get nervous and stuff.

Barbara Turley: No, no. Look, I used to do a lot of typing and everything in Asana so that we would have flow. And then I realized that I was still getting a couple of problems and mistakes when I had more team members. When it was just me and one VA, it’s okay. But then I had more of them, and I was like, it’s not working. So I brought in the daily huddle, and it kind of just brought everything together. But the rule is, on the daily huddle, whatever we talk about, whatever department—like I’ve got about 10 of them on the huddle at the moment—but each one of them has to, they’ll ask me questions, I will discuss things, and then they’ve got to actually put what I said into Asana so that there’s no, is that what you said? I don’t know whether you said that on the huddle or where did you—there’s no confusion, and therefore there’s nowhere to hide. Okay, when things go wrong, it’s like, well, we have a process for how we communicate.

Heather Havenwood: What about the process—I mean, do you—I’m sure you have a start of a process, but then as you move forward and as things grow, you’re like, let’s add this to task. What’s the structure that you have people do that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so with processes, this is another thing. They’re like living, breathing, dynamic things. You don’t really set and forget. So basically, the other rule is that when you’re working with anyone—this is not just VAs, this is anyone on your team—get them to do the process and then get them to give you feedback on their experience of doing it. Because they might go, listen, I think this bit’s always a problem. And then you realize, we should probably add a step there. And you can just keep moving them and evolving them together as you work together on.

Heather Havenwood: Okay, got it. Do you suggest a particular app or something for the SOPs?

Barbara Turley: Look, just use Google. Look, I’m all into simplicity. So I use Asana. I’ve built a multimillion-dollar business using Asana, Ontraport, and Google Drive, and a couple of zaps throwing things together. And it works really well for me because it just keeps everything simple. We don’t use Slack. I haven’t brought that in because I felt it was just another tool that we didn’t really need. Use Zoom, you know, so just keep it simple. Put them in Google Drive, yeah.

Heather Havenwood: So what are the top things that people should immediately outsource?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, you know what, the funny thing is people always say they always want to try and get rid of their email. That’s the trickiest one. So things like customer support and email are the harder ones to outsource because it takes a long time. You can’t just give someone your email and expect them to be able to pick it up tomorrow. The easier ones are things like—look, if you have our process, I think a lot of social media stuff, it doesn’t have to be the whole thing. Social media is quite a task-heavy thing.

Barbara Turley: These days, there’s so much to do managing all the content on your blog. Even if you’ve got a podcast, I mean, I’ve got a podcast, and all I do is record it and drop it in Dropbox. And then there’s an entire process on the backend that gets done by all our VAs, right through to my social media distribution and everything. So those kinds of things that you can process up pretty quickly, they’re the things you should outsource first. Email is okay, but it’s going to take you about three months to work with somebody to really nail that one, because you don’t work with that. You can’t really put a process in place for email. It’s kind of—you’ve got to teach people your voice and all this sort of thing. It’s tricky.

Heather Havenwood: Let’s talk about price structure. What are the prices that people are going to expect? Is it going to be cheaper than the Western people?

Barbara Turley: Oh yeah, of course it is. Even coming through us, it’s cheaper. Our pricing—we’ve got three levels of VA. Level one is kind of your general admin VA. Level two is more your social media, WordPress, blog management, that kind of thing. And level three is when you need somebody trained on HubSpot or Ontraport, like the big CRMs, because it’s heavy on us. But the pricing goes $8 US an hour, $10 US an hour, to $12 US an hour. So it’s very affordable, even using us.

Barbara Turley: But we have a minimum of 20 hours a week. So we only go part-time or full-time staff. We don’t do like a couple of hours here and there. We do dedicated staff, basically. So they look and feel like an employee in your business. That’s kind of how we operate.

Heather Havenwood: And then as far as pay, does the Westerner or the client pay you, and you pay the team member? How does that work?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, we do anything to do with money. We handle all of that for the client because we just find it’s better. So we organize all their salaries. We take care of all their pay reviews. We take care of all their private health cover. We do lots of—

Heather Havenwood: And the pricing that you’re talking about, is that US or Australian?

Barbara Turley: US, that’s US dollars. We do multi-currency pricing because we have global—we also do US time zone, which is awesome. So you get somebody in your time zone.

Heather Havenwood: Oh, that’s nice. Well, I’ll definitely be hiring you guys. I need a VA. So what’s a general VA? You said the $8 now. What’s that mean?

Barbara Turley: Look, that’s really our level one VAs. That’s really when you just want somebody, you know, create a couple of invoices for you, maybe answer the phone, maybe follow up with a client to get some documents, you know, just kind of very more like just an admin assistant. They’re not gonna do your social media. They’re not gonna be very creative in terms of like your brand colors and, you know, kind of creating stuff like that for you. They could probably post a couple of things, but you wouldn’t want them to be creating your Canva images and stuff like that. They’re probably not that way inclined. They might do a couple of spreadsheets for you. They could probably throw a Word doc together or create a PDF of something, that sort of thing.

Barbara Turley: But when you get up into wanting somebody to go into your WordPress site, lay out your blog content correctly, put some images there, maybe, you know, just make it look good, that’s more our level two VAs because they have a bit more of a creative bent. They’re just different-minded.

Barbara Turley: Level three is like, you know, you want to just draw out a funnel on the back of an envelope, take a photograph of it, and say, can you go and build that in Ontraport? That’s what they’re going to do. They’ll build it and put all the zaps in place and make sure it all works.

Heather Havenwood: What about ClickFunnels? You talk about Ontraport. Do you have anybody here?

Barbara Turley: We do ClickFunnels as well. We do. We have quite a few VAs. We do lots of different platforms. It’s just not—that’s not one we get a lot, but we do quite a bit of that.

Heather Havenwood: Well, I use ClickFunnels. I don’t use them. Yes.

Barbara Turley: Do we have VAs that do that? Yeah, that’s a big one too.

Heather Havenwood: And you use Infusionsoft too, but I don’t use Infusionsoft.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, Infusionsoft—I would be openly honest and say I think it’s our weakest area, but I’m about to go and talk to Infusionsoft about getting some more training so that we can kind of up the—because it is a big platform, you know, a lot of people use it. So yeah, it’s confusing still.

Heather Havenwood: I tell all my clients who come to me and say they have it, I say, get off of it. I’ve been on it for almost 11 years. Wow. I just don’t need it now. It used to be, when they first got started, they were the thing because there were so many different things you can do. But the market, CRM market has matured, and we’re now at like 10-plus years in the CRM systems, and we just have more options now that are simpler and easier to use.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely.

Heather Havenwood: MailChimp and Ontraport, other ones, they’re more user-friendly because they can build from scratch. So Infusionsoft—I call it InfusionCon, ConfusionCon is what I call it.

Barbara Turley: I know, I think they’re trying to sort of—yeah, look, ActiveCampaign’s been a big contender. We do a lot of ActiveCampaign. I’ve got some good to say. I’m very impressed with them as a company, the way they’ve really come up the ranks and just changed the game within the CRM market, I think.

Heather Havenwood: Yeah, they have. They’re doing a great job. They have to. And then you have the MailChimps that you can do a lot with MailChimp.

Barbara Turley: A lot! Yeah, so we do MailChimp, obviously, as well, but yeah, that’s sort of like our lower level.

Heather Havenwood: ClickFunnels and— I mean, you know, building up a funnel can be a 30-minute task if you know how to do it. So this is great. Where can people find you?

Barbara Turley: Sure, so we’ve got a couple of freebies for you guys who are listening. So if you go to thevirtualhub.com forward slash like a boss, over there you can get a free—there’s a download of the types of tasks that you can outsource, a quick one. Then we have a more developed—we’ve got a seven-part little e-course that I developed on some of the stuff we’ve been talking about. So how to build a scalable business model using outsourcing and leveraged, cost-effective offshore staff basically, how to get it right. And you can also book a call there, a free call, a strategy call with one of our strategy consultants. We have one in Ireland and one in Australia where you can figure out if we’re a good fit for you, because, you know, also we’re not a fit for everyone. But yeah, the guys can really help people to get started there and figure out what they need to do to get started.

Heather Havenwood: I love it. Okay, cool. I love that. Well, great. So tell the website one more time.

Barbara Turley: It is thevirtualhub.com forward slash like a boss.

Heather Havenwood: Nice! Like a boss. Great. Barbara, thank you so much for being here again. That’s thevirtualhub.com/likeaboss. Go check that out right now. And if you’re interested in getting a VA and someone that’s already trained and already trained in particular things online, please reach out to Barbara or the team at thevirtualhub.com. And thank you so much, Barbara, for being here. I really appreciate it.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, thank you for having me. Awesome interview.

Heather Havenwood: You’re welcome. Okay, everyone, this is Heather Havenwood. Check us out on Spotify, iHeart, Google Play, iTunes, Roku, and of course YouTube. And you can find me on Instagram at Instagram.com/HeatherHavenwood. Bye, everyone. Have a great day.

Heather Havenwood: Are you a coach, consultant, small business owner, or online entrepreneur? Do you want to significantly grow your business, triple your lists, and double your sales conversions? If the answer is yes, then launching a podcast is the next step. You see, being an expert in your field, having a website is no longer enough to be noticed in today’s marketplace. I call it the influencer effect. Being an influencer is the key.

You see, people do business with people they know, like, and trust. And having your own podcast helps people to connect with you. If you’re interested in having me help you launch your own podcast, grow your influence, and promote your business, then go to influencergrowthformula.com. That’s influencergrowthformula.com. And let me help you rise to the top.

Voice Over: Thank you for listening to Like a Boss, helping you rise to the top. Join Heather’s mastermind at InfluencerTribe.com, where she helps you become an influencer and dominate your field. Follow Heather Havenwood on Instagram. Interested in interviewing or scheduling a call with Heather? Go to CallWithHeather.com. For more, go to HeatherHavenwood.com.