Voice Actor: This is the Mark Struczewski podcast.

Mark Struczewski: She is an investor, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, a business she started by accident that exploded in the first 12 months to become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants 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. Barbara Turley, welcome to the show.

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

Mark Struczewski: I am so excited to talk to you, and I’ll tell you why: because you have been a world traveler, and she’s actually in the French Alps right now, but she’s not French. She actually was born in Scotland, went to Australia, then she married a guy from Hungary, and she settled in the French Alps because it’s kind of like, I guess you told me, equal distance between Scotland and Hungary. So I think the world traveler Barbara is fascinating to have on the show today.

Barbara Turley: Oh yeah, except there’s only one problem. I’m not actually from Scotland, but I’m from Ireland, which is close by. But we won’t hold that against you, Mark.

Mark Struczewski: Well, thank you. I always get those things confused. There is an actress, I think her name is Roma Downey, and I thought she was Irish, but I guess she’s Scottish. I love that Scottish accent, but I can’t get it on my Siri, on my phone, so I’m using the Australian accent right now. I wish they had this Scottish accent, but they don’t give it to me, and I don’t like what they did with the Irish accent. I’m kind of weird like that. I’m a nerd, but I make no apologies for that.

So the reason why I wanted you on the show today is because you want to talk about delegation. And as many of my listeners know—and if you’re a new listener, hello, welcome—I have this thing called the ODAE method, which stands for Outsource, Delegate, Automate, and Eliminate. And one of those D’s is delegation. That’s why I brought Barbara on the show today, because, Barbara, we live in the year 2020 and we have more technology, especially automated technology, that allows us to delegate, maybe to a person or to artificial learning or whatever the case may be. I think people are doing too much. I think people are doing things that are unnecessary, don’t need to be done by them anymore.

The Power of Delegation – Barbara Turley

So let’s talk about delegation, because you obviously have a company that deals with that.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And I love your ODAE method because I’m a total subscriber to that myself. I slightly mix them up in how I approach it in that you outsource—for me, automation comes before delegation—so that we can start to, well, eliminate, I suppose, what must come first, but then automate, and whatever’s left, we start to delegate.

And I think not only are people doing way too much, especially business owners, just doing way too much stuff, but we’re also doing an awful lot of useless stuff. So, for example, the eliminate question—we’re doing a lot of processes still that are not actually giving us any return. And we’re really bad as business owners at trashing stuff and going, that doesn’t work anymore. Let’s shorten it, make it more efficient, let’s optimize it.

And also, we’re using too many tools. So automation tools, cloud-based tools—there are so many of them, but so many businesses are cluttered with too many tools. And all of that stuff together results in kind of dumb stuff being done and lack of return on investment. And invariably, we end up blaming the people that we’ve hired or the people that we’re trying to delegate to for that lack of return on investment often. So there’s so much to unpack there, really, in what I’ve just said.

Mark Struczewski: Yeah, one thing that really stuck out—and I want to make sure the listener doesn’t miss it—is that you said people are using too many tools. There are people who are not embracing technology or automation, and there are people who are using, to use your words, too many tools.

You still have to be involved, and I think that people are trying to automate things and they don’t really understand how automation works. They don’t follow through to make sure it’s actually giving the correct results. And I think there is—I’m so thankful no guest has ever said that before—that there is such a thing as using too many apps, too many tools, and your phone and your technology becomes so cluttered that you’re like, okay, is it working? I don’t know, I don’t even know how to check it because it’s so complicated. And I think there’s something to be said about using too many tools.

Barbara Turley: 100%. I mean, I think one of the things people forget about automation is often—and look, I am a delegation expert, I run a company where we have people that we put into businesses to help them to delegate and that sort of thing—but we’re also big automation people in that we use a massive amount of automation, and we tend to attract clients that are using lots of automation as well.

But one of the things about automation is that people tend to look at what a tool can do for them, and then they go and put the tool in and they do that thing. But what you start to realize once you get more than a few tools doing some stuff for you, you start to realize that now you need to be a system architect.

So now you need to look at the business from the top down and identify what problems, on a grander scale, are we trying to solve, and then look at whether the tool that you’re choosing is solving for the business that’s in two, three, four years’ time from now, or is it just solving—is it like a Band-Aid that you’re putting over a problem that you have today? And that’s why people end up with too many tools, because they’re band-aiding everything up and they’re not strategically starting to think ahead about, if the business in three years’ time and my plan for this business is X, well, is this thing I’m bringing in today going to be something that will solve for the problems that are going to come up in two, three years’ time?

We can’t always do that, but that’s the concept of system architecture and automation architecture as opposed to just bringing in a tool to solve a problem.

Mark Struczewski: As you were talking there, the word that came up to my brain was why. Why are you adding this automation? Why are you adding this tool? And I think we get caught in the shiny new objects—ooh, a new app, let me get it, let me use it, let me use automation. And to your point, we’re not thinking of the future, and we’re not thinking about, do I really need this tool, or is it just a new shiny tool out there just because it’s been written up in Success Magazine or on the internet and it gets rave reviews?

Do you need it? I mean, tell me if I’m wrong—if you think I’m wrong—that people are not stopping to think, do they really need that tool?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I mean, look, I’ll give you an example. Slack, right? The tool everyone loves is Slack, right? Amazing online communication tool, has revolutionized many teams and businesses, and is an amazing tool. And I looked at Slack several times and I thought about bringing Slack into our company.

But the reality was that when I kept looking at it, I realized there were a number of issues—I won’t dive into all of them now—but for our specific business, it was going to be an issue that once we got to a certain size, because we have so many people and so many Slack messages going back and forth, that we were rapidly going to get into the situation where Slack was going to become an extremely, extremely expensive tool for us to have and not really solve the problem that we were trying to solve at the time.

So it might work for lots of companies, but for ours, it actually didn’t make sense. And it took months for me to get to that. And that was months of analysis and looking deeply into the tool and wondering, well, what happens in two years’ time if we have 250 people across this tool and way more than 10,000 messages going on? Then we calculated what the cost of bringing that tool was going to be, and it was going to explode for us.

And it didn’t really make enough sense with what we were trying to do at the time for how we currently operate. We’re also a G Suite house, so we have chat and we’ve got other things that we get as part of that expense that we already have that we weren’t utilizing more effectively. So because everyone was talking about Slack and everyone was like, everyone’s doing the Slack channels and we have all this stuff, it didn’t really make sense for our business, being honest.

And we have other tools that we already had for free, effectively, from the other stuff that we had. So hope that makes sense for how I’m sort of seeing tools today.

Mark Struczewski: Yes, I thank you for sharing that. That’s incredible. And I think it’s funny because you referenced G Suite, and they just underwent, again, another name change. Now they’re Google Workspace. They’ve gone from Google Suite to G Suite, now they’re Google Workspace for business. It’s like, pick a name, stick with it, okay?

It’s just like everything—they keep changing the name like every other year—and it’s like, you know? And they go, it’s not G Suite anymore, it’s called Google Workspace. I’m like, why did you have to change it? What was wrong with G Suite? So it gets confusing because you tell someone, I’m on Google Workspace, and they go, I’m on G Suite. G Suite is not—why change? They’re just trying to keep us on our toes.

But it’s really interesting. This is a good topic to talk about because I think that you go to the app store—whether the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store or you go into your Mac store, whatever the case—there are so many apps out there. And I tell people that before you either get a free app or a paid app, you need to stop and think.

Number one, like we already talked about, do you need this? Number two, before you get the app, go talk to other people that you know in your network and say, hey, I’m thinking about getting the XYZ app. Do you use it? What do you think about it? Because people are always in a rush to get the latest and greatest thing, where if you don’t know that much about the app other than what you’ve read on the internet, then go talk to some people who are using it.

Because they may tell you, yeah, I wish I never got this app—worst thing I ever did for my business—but you don’t take the time to do that. You just read the reviews, go get the app, and then you’re frustrated. But if you would have taken the time to talk to some people who use it, you may have saved yourself some aggravation.

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Barbara Turley: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s hard to do system architecture, but I think it’s something that in this digital transformation that we’re all going through—digital transformation has been around for a long time, but with COVID and this pandemic that’s happened, digital transformation has moved 10 years in the space of 10 months, realistically.

And if we’re all going to move into this space, which we are rapidly, then we do need to consider things like system architecture. I’ve actually just put two of my best guys into a department called system architecture, and they run across—they are multi-department. So they talk to all the department heads and discuss what problems they’re having and what they’re trying to do, what’s Nirvana for them. And they go off and architect something to solve that problem using the systems that we already have.

And then to bring in a new system, there’s a whole process that has to happen around that, like a business case for how and why we’re going to do this.

And the other thing I think people are really going to have to—this is me starting to talk my own book here—but I firmly believe that now that we’re all in a remote environment, right? Everyone’s remote now. So what does it matter whether you’re in a different house, a different state, or a different country? It really doesn’t matter anymore.

So the case for cost-effective team structures makes more sense today than it ever did, because delegating—what you’ve got to do is make sure that the structure of your team is such that you have it in a cost-effective framework. Meaning, if your time as the business owner—or you’ve got a team that are in the US or whatever—you’ve got to look at what are they actually using their time for, because you’re paying for that time, including your own.

What is that time being used for? And what you’ll find is typically about 30% of the time is being used for easily delegatable tasks that aren’t being delegated to a lower-cost, more cost-effective person. And these days, you can have people like that offshore, and it’s not necessarily lower-value work. It’s just easily delegatable stuff that you can lower your cost of delivery.

And today, in this environment we’re in right now, what business doesn’t need a better bottom line and a lower cost of delivery? So delegation is more than freeing up my time to go to the beach or to have this sort of laptop lifestyle from a business perspective.

All of this stuff—automation, system architecture, delegation, running virtual teams, and doing it cost-effectively and efficiently—is a massive topic that I think next year is going to explode open even more than it already has.

Mark Struczewski: I agree 100%. And that’s one of the reasons why I tell my clients and the listeners of my podcast what the ODAE method is. The O-D-A-E method is you take about two to four days and you list everything you do—everything you do. You don’t edit, you don’t judge it, you just write it down.

And then you put it aside for a day, then you schedule some time, go someplace quiet, and you go down, and anything that can be outsourced, you put an O next to it. You do the same thing for D for delegation, A for automation, E for elimination. And then you actually outsource, delegate, automate, and eliminate.

And if you do that correctly—and I know people who are super productive who have done this and found some things they can get rid of—you’re going to have fewer things to do, and more importantly, the things that are left over are the things you should be working on.

So I encourage everyone, if you haven’t done the ODAE method, go ahead and do it and free yourself up from doing these things that maybe you’re not good at or you’re not proficient at. Have someone else do it so you can concentrate on what you’re really good at.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I mean, I would even add to that. Look, at the end of the day, regardless of what we like to do or what we’re good at, if you’re a business owner or you’re wanting to build a business, let’s just talk about that—if your goal is to build a company or to build a business that potentially could one day be sold, even if you never intend to sell it, it doesn’t matter.

You still have to have that in your head because that’s the best return on investment that you’re going to make personally in this company. Then your job is to build the business. And it doesn’t matter whether you really like—people say you should stick in your genius zone. I’m like, well, yes, you probably should. But if your genius zone is creating Canva images, and you love doing that, well, is it really a good use of your time?

Even if you’re going to build a company that does that, you’re still going to have to delegate that to other people to do. So it’s this balancing act between understanding that your job as the business owner is to build the business.

And eventually, when you’re running teams, what I have personally found myself doing now these days—and we’ve got 150 staff—my job is actually to mentor the leadership team. My sole job is to get the strategic direction of where we’re taking this company, how we’re going to grow it, and then to grow the leaders so that they can then lead the people that they need to lead. And that’s how I see my role.

And I’m not going to be able to do that if I’m stuck all day building ActiveCampaign campaigns or doing stuff—even if it lights me up to do it. I still have to work on freeing up my time so that I can do that big job of building the company, creating the impact that I started this company to do, because none of us started a company to work seven days a week and work 15 hours a day. I mean, let’s face it, who’s doing that? That’s a glorified job.

Mark Struczewski: Yes. And I tell you, letting go of those things was so difficult for me. My wife was in the travel industry, and obviously that’s virtually not existing at this point. And what I finally let go of was the post-interview processing for the podcast, because it wasn’t—number one, I didn’t want to do it, okay? I like doing the conversations, but she does all the post-processing stuff and gets it up on the internet and stuff like that.

And so I talked to her and I’m like, you’re collecting unemployment right now. I said, would you like to help me with the business? She said, yeah. And so she loves doing that kind of stuff because she’s a geeky nerd and she loves doing that stuff.

But I had a tough time letting go because it’s called the Mark Struczewski Podcast, and I wanted to have my finger on every component of it. But to your point, it was not a good use of my time. I’m the content creator. She would never be on a podcast or create videos or content for LinkedIn. That’s not what she wants to do.

And so even though she’s my wife, she’s my business partner, it was really difficult to let that go because I felt like I was losing control. And I gotta imagine people listening to this conversation are going, yeah, Barbara, I hear you, but man, how do I let go? I mean, it’s my baby. I want to keep it under control.

Barbara Turley: Yep, that’s a great—listen, that’s a great topic to bring up because that feeling of loss of control. So let’s talk about that for a second. My other big passion—this makes me going to make me sound really boring now—but my other big passion is creating. So how do you give up control but still maintain control, right, without doing anything? Well, that’s process, right, and training.

So here’s the thing: you’re still going to have to overlay more than likely, especially in the beginning, there’s still going to be 10 to 20% involvement from you. But how you do your podcast, right, and the way you maintain control with that, but by getting someone else to do it, is firstly nailing down what is the process step by step—literally every single step that you go through. And then you’ve got to nail down that process, and then you’ve got to teach someone else how to do it, right?

And that means working with that person for a while and pointing out the mistakes and showing where they’re going wrong, and then teaching that person to think like you do while you’re doing it. Now, the alternative is you pay more money and you hire someone who’s an A player who knows exactly what they’re doing, but you’re going to pay up for that, right? And then that person probably isn’t going to stay long-term.

So in terms of using offshore staff or virtual assistants, etc., to do these things, if you take the pain upfront, it pays the biggest dividends later, right? And then you might have to go in and look across the work and approve stuff at the milestones and all that. But at the end of the day, that’s going to take 10% of the time that it used to take you to do the whole thing. And that’s how you—once you design the process yourself, you architect the process, and then you architect the training—I’m using the word architecture here quite a lot—because then you control it without doing the work.

So does that make sense? Like that—how you maintain control but give up control, but still maintain control at the same time?

Mark Struczewski: Yeah, it does make sense. And I’ll tell you, when I documented the process for the post-processing for the podcast—it’s just an example I’m using—I went through step by step, because everything’s in my head. Everything’s in my head. I went through every time I clicked something, every time I typed something, I wrote it down.

I was not aware of how long the process is because, to your point, my wife didn’t know how to do this. So I can’t assume she can read my mind. And so I sat down and really slowly documented everything I did, and I figured it like 10 or 15 steps. It was like 75 steps to do the process at the end of my show, because it was all in my head and everything bled together. I knew how to do this, that, and the other thing and make the images in Canva and load up to the internet—it was all in my head.

But when you document that and you give it to someone, you train someone, you have to go through every step as you did in the beginning, which you take for granted now. And that was very challenging for me to write that down. And when I first did it, I’m like, my gosh, that’s really complicated. But to me, I’ve been doing it for three-plus years. It was a no-brainer. It was so simple, but she didn’t have any idea how to do it. Now she does. But when I trained her, it was like—I’m like, why don’t you know this? Because it was in my head and not hers.

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Barbara Turley: Yeah, and the other thing on that to point out—I just love the fact that you discovered that it was 75 steps—because most people will go, it’s just a quick, I just do this, a couple of steps, and that’s it, until you write it down. And then you’re like, oh, okay.

And then the classic that I hear from people who are trying to delegate is, you know what, it took them four hours, it should have only taken one, it’s quicker to do it myself. I go, yeah, but there’s 75 steps that the person has never done before, even if they kind of know how to do a podcast, because they’re all your steps.

So you have to allow a person time to not just learn your thing, but to learn to think how you do because it’s your baby. You know how to do it. So it’s just this whole process of people don’t want to spend the time to delegate effectively, and then they just want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, it just doesn’t work for my business. And I go, no, no, no.

As far as I’m concerned, I can make this work in any business. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a billion-dollar company or one woman sitting at the table making stuff to sell on Etsy—it works for every business. It’s a mindset problem, and delegation is a skill. It’s something that needs to be mastered. It is not something we are all naturally good at.

And it’s one of these skills in business that we all assume that when we start a business, we’re going to be great at it, and we’re not. So a focus on learning how to delegate something effectively and efficiently, and then learning how to have somebody report to you—those are skills that we’re not taught, and you have to learn how to do that if you want to get success with this. Otherwise, in 12 months’ time, you’ll still be doing it yourself, and your business will not have grown. Or it may have grown, but you’ll be overwhelmed. That’s what happens.

Mark Struczewski: Absolutely. I tell you, one of the things that really caused me a moment of pause is when my wife said, well, why are we doing it this way? Why don’t we do it this way? And I’m like, how dare you insult my process? But she figured out—because she was not in the process—she said, well, why are we doing it this way? So she actually improved the process, but I kind of took offense to that. I’m like, wait a minute, it’s my process. But the thing is, I’ve been doing the same thing for three and a half years. She looked at it with fresh eyes and go, huh, this doesn’t make any sense. And she was right. But I was kind of offended at that because I thought my process was perfect.

Barbara Turley: I will do that. I mean, we’re all—like I said—it’s your baby, right? And who doesn’t—we are so emotionally connected to our businesses as well. The person who owns the business, the business owner, even someone who’s just the podcast owner or whatever—it is literally—we are so emotionally connected to it that we become emotional about it.

And the control—we’re all control freaks when it comes to this stuff—but recognizing that and saying to yourself, I’m a control freak about it, and that’s okay because I built it. It’s my baby. It’s my thing. And all you want is someone to come in and learn how to do it properly and honor the fact that it’s your thing.

But you also then—once they learn it and do it—then you need to create an environment through which that person feels comfortable and safe to tell you that they think it’s a dumb process, if you know what I mean. So let’s say you’ve got a virtual assistant in the Philippines. Clients will say to me, but they don’t give me any feedback, there’s no initiative. And then I talk to the VA, and they’re like, well, I don’t really want to say, but it feels disrespectful for me to say, because they’re going to make them feel insulted.

So you need to actually create within your team—even whether they’re in the Philippines or anywhere—you have to have, and this is leading teams 101, you have to, as the owner and the leader, create the environment in which people feel safe and free and comfortable to make a suggestion, and it won’t be shot down, to make a mistake—for it to be like, look, we all make mistakes, here’s what we’re going to do, here’s how we’re going to fix it, and make sure that mistake doesn’t happen again.

You’ve got to create—and that’s nothing to do with systems or processes—that’s to do with leadership. And that’s a whole other topic around delegation. So it’s not just systems and processes, it’s leadership and team structure and communication. There’s a lot more to it. So that’s why delegation is difficult, but it pays the biggest dividends in business.

Mark Struczewski: And I like how you said this applies to billion-dollar companies or the single mom who’s creating things for Etsy. So if you’re just a solopreneur thinking this podcast doesn’t serve me, if you’ve been listening carefully to Barbara, it does, because we all need to have processes.

So for the longest time, when my wife worked outside the home before COVID invaded our lives, I did everything myself, and I was a solopreneur. I did everything myself. I had my processes, but I still had processes. You cannot—I don’t know how people can run a business successfully without processes. You have to have processes, whether you use automation or delegation or something, otherwise it can get out of control very quickly, correct?

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. The best way I can explain this—the most simple way—is let’s go back to this billion-dollar company or a solopreneur just producing a couple of things to sell online. It doesn’t matter how big or how small the business, or whether you have plans to grow it big or you just want to have a nice life and sell a few things online.

All of those businesses still have departments. You still have product creation, product delivery, marketing, you have sales, you have invoicing, you might have inventory, you have accounting—you have all this stuff that needs to be done.

So within each of those little departments—if you write those departments down—within each one, you will find that there are small, quick, process-driven, repeatable tasks. I call them the recurring tasks that need to be done daily, weekly, monthly, whatever it is, to keep the engine of that little business or large business—it doesn’t really matter—going.

And then there are project lists, which are things that need to be done in order to move the business forward. And when you start to think about it in those terms, then you start to realize, well, if I was to do that and actually write those things down and process these things up and get very clear about what all those things are, well, then I probably could delegate.

And you might think, well, my business isn’t big enough, I don’t want to. Well, maybe you’d like to pick your kids up from school every day, or maybe you’d actually like to have a bit more free time to yourself and still have a business rather than a glorified job. So that’s kind of where I want people to think—that delegation isn’t just for great big companies.

It could even be that, let’s say you just want to be—you don’t want to manage staff in the business—well, then get a cleaner and learn how to delegate properly there so that at least you free up that part of your time.

Mark Struczewski: Okay, Barbara, before we wrap up, I do this really cool thing on my podcast now. It’s called Mic Swap, and what I do is I change microphones with you and allow you to be the host for one or two questions. So this is your opportunity to ask me any question—that could be about productivity or anything else. Just don’t ask me my credit card numbers or social security numbers. So what are one or two questions you’d like to ask me so maybe the audience gets to know me a little bit better?

Barbara Turley: Yes. Okay, so I do have a question about productivity. It’s such a huge topic, and so many people talk about it, struggle with it, as we’re all still overwhelmed doing too much stuff. What do you say to people as the first place to start to reduce overwhelm? If they’re saying, I’m totally overwhelmed, I’m doing too much, what’s the first thing you say?

Mark Struczewski: The first thing I say to them is you’ve got to allow yourself to breathe. Many people are doing way too much, and there’s no breathing room or white space in their schedule. And what I want people to do is realize it’s okay to get up and walk away from your computer, from your Zoom meetings when you’re done coaching clients.

You need to get outside, even if it’s cold. Yes, I know it’s COVID. Or maybe if you can’t go outside because you’re locked down, maybe you run around your house, you do some dancing exercises, or just be silly. Because what happens is when you’re always in a state of working—you’re working, working, working—your brain gets tired, and you need to have time when you’re not working.

Go watch a silly video on YouTube. Get the blood flowing. These are simple things. Everyone comes to me and expects I’m going to tell them how to plan better or I’m going to tell them how to use this app. But what it boils down to is you’ve got to allow yourself some space to have fun and to have some time where you don’t do anything—just be stupid—because that is going to help you be in a better space to be more productive.

Barbara Turley: I totally love that because I wasn’t expecting you to say that. Because in the world of productivity, we’re always talking about the latest app, how to be more efficient and stuff that is actually quite—I’m going to use the word masculine energy because I can’t remember whether it’s right brain or left brain—but you know what I mean? It’s all quite logical and technological stuff. Whereas what you’re talking about is actually going away and being what we would imagine to be unproductive in order to be more productive. Does that make sense?

Mark Struczewski: And a lot of people think it’s crazy when I tell them that—like, are you serious? Yeah. Now, don’t go watch YouTube for 12 hours. I’m saying go watch a YouTube video that makes you laugh and then go back to work, just to allow your brain to relax. We’re not giving our brains time to relax during the day.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Why do you think it is that—and this could be too complex a question—why do you think it is that we allow ourselves so easily to go into overwhelm? It’s like we’re moths to a flame with overwhelm, especially business owners. It’s like we’re attracted to it.

Mark Struczewski: I think it’s a badge of honor that we work too many hours, we work seven days a week, we’re always working on something, and we feel guilty if we sit down with the family to watch a movie or if we go out to dinner or if we go for a walk or have fun. We’re like, well, I’m not a real business person, I’m not a real CEO, I’m not a real entrepreneur if I don’t work, work, work.

And so I think that people really think it’s a badge of honor. I’ve got to pay my dues. It’s like if you’re a new doctor, you’ve got to work those 72-hour shifts nonstop. I don’t want that doctor operating on me, I’m just saying, okay? I want the doctor being well-rested to operate on me. I want the trauma surgeon to be well-rested.

And so I think the answer to your question maybe is not as complex as it needs to be. I think people think it’s a badge of honor.

Barbara Turley: I agree with you. I agree with you. I’m thinking nobody ever wants to say, well, I run a multimillion-dollar company and they only work an hour a day—only. See, I even said that, only. It’s kind of, you know, I’m almost embarrassed to say that. But actually, if we—the topic we’ve just been talking about, about automating and delegating effectively—actually it is entrepreneurial freedom that pays the highest dividends if you do that. But people will resist it because of that mental shift that you’ve just mentioned is actually ingrained in our psyche that we have to be doing all the time.

Mark Struczewski: So how did you like being the interviewer for a couple questions? Was it kind of fun?

Barbara Turley: I love being—yeah, I love, love—I have my own podcast as well. Shameless plug, The Virtual Success Show, where I’m actually the host. So I quite enjoy hosting podcasts too.

Mark Struczewski: Well, you know, that leads to my next question. I was going to ask you, where can we find out more about you? So tell us about your podcast. Tell us about where we can find out more about you.

Barbara Turley: Sure. My podcast is The Virtual Success Show on iTunes. It’s on—not Google Play—what’s the one? Spotify. I almost said Shopify there. Everyone’s shopping online these days. Spotify, you know what I mean?

So that podcast—I talk, it’s very tactical. So we talk about things like how often should I talk to my virtual assistants? So it’s extremely tactical. And it was born out of my own frustration of being asked the same questions all the time and seeing clients and people struggling with the same things all the time. And I thought, I’m just going to record this, and then it turned into a podcast. So it’s quite useful in that way.

But also, we have a page that is specifically for your listeners. We’ve got a couple of goodies there. If you go to thevirtualhub.com/ski—S-K-I—we have a mini guide there, which is the five reasons people fail with VAs and how to fix it. So that’s quite useful.

We have a scalable business success formula there—it’s an e-course that you can sign up for. And also we’ve got a link there where you can book a call with one of our consultants to talk about how The Virtual Hub might be able to help you in your business if we’re a good fit. Yeah, and you can get that at thevirtualhub.com/ski.

Or you can find us on Facebook, The Virtual Hub, LinkedIn, and you can also connect with me on LinkedIn personally—Barbara Turley on LinkedIn. Lots of.

Mark Struczewski: Excellent. Well, listen, I am so thankful you came on the show today, played along with the mic swap, and shared great insights today. So thank you so much for being on the show.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me.

Mark Struczewski: And just before we go, don’t forget to head on over to my website, MisterProductivity.com—M-I-S-T-E-R, MisterProductivity.com. Find out how I can coach you for less than a dollar a day—no joke. And also you can get my top five productivity tips and so much more. It all happens at MisterProductivity.com.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Mark Struczewski podcast. Until we meet again, my friend, go be productive.