Tom Poland: Hello everyone, a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing the Invisible. My name is Tom Poland, beaming out to you as ever from on the sand, next to the waves, a little Castaways Beach here in Queensland, Australia. Joined today by Barbara Turley. Barbara, a very warm good day. Welcome, and where are you hanging out?

Barbara Turley: Hey Tom, thanks for having me. So I’m in a very wet Sydney today. So I’m sure Queensland is much sunnier than where I am, but I’m in Sydney right now. I’ve been living here for about 17 years.

Tom Poland: And there’s a bit of an Irish lilt coming through. You migrated from Ireland.

Barbara Turley: I did indeed. I was attracted by the sand and sea and ocean of Australia and came for a year and never left.

Tom Poland: Right. You’re not missing the weather in Ireland at all.

Barbara Turley: Yeah.

Tom Poland: Funny that. OK. Off geography and climate and back to you.

So for those of you who don’t know Barbara, she is an investor, an entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub. She’s also, congratulations, eight months pregnant with a second child, not officially in her bio. Just thought I’d slip that in.

The Virtual Hub is a company that recruits, trains, and I think extremely importantly, manages virtual assistants for businesses who need to free up time and energy so they can go to the next level. What a good idea.

So, Barbara, the title of our interview today is How to Confidently and Successfully Use Virtual Assistants to Scale Your Business. We’re to tell people how to do that in just seven minutes. Your seven minutes starts now.

Question number one is: who is your ideal client?

How to Confidently and Successfully Use Support Assistants to Scale Your Business – In Just 7 Minutes

Tom Poland: Perfect, thank you. Six and a half minutes left.

Question two: what’s the problem you solve for those business owners?

Barbara Turley: So a lot of the problem people were facing is they wanted to get a virtual assistant, but really that’s not the crux of the problem. A lot of the problem is training demands, onboarding a VA, managing a VA, and then making sure that your business is set up properly to get success with offshore teams before you hire a VA.

So although we recruit and train and all that, those are the problems that we really solve with the clients. And we get success for a lot of clients by going deeper. We go a lot deeper.

Tom Poland: So this is immediately radically different to almost, well, all of the online freelancer-type websites.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, freelancer. I mean, you can do it if you want, but you’re taking on a whole other job. You might see the home run, but as everyone knows, the internet is littered with disaster stories of VAs in the Philippines and India. You know, it’s not as easy as people think, but we think you’re 80% of success.

Tom Poland: Yeah, the person you’re hiring is coming in, you know, from a knowledge point of view completely naked, and unless they’re equipped with what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and who to do it with…

Okay, so question number three is: what are some of the typical symptoms that people are going to be experiencing before they find The Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: They may have tried outsourcing before. They may have tried and it has either failed, or they tried it and it was a roaring success, but the person left, and they tried again and then they failed after that because it’s actually very hard to find good people.

Managing staff overseas is a challenge all by itself. Even when you have a rockstar VA, they can be slippery. You know, sometimes people say to me, when they’re there, they’re great, which is a major problem. So consistently…

So we’ve eradicated pretty much all of those issues with the business model that we have. So people are frustrated and they don’t feel confident that they can get success, which comes back to the title of what we’re talking about today.

Tom Poland: And so that must be quite frustrating for some people to feel like that sort of scalability is there almost within grasp, but it’s a bit elusive.

Barbara Turley: Because other people are doing it. You see other people succeeding online and hearing about it, and Tim Ferriss writes about it, and everyone’s talking about it, but you can’t get success yourself and you wonder why. So those are some of the feelings that people have.

Tom Poland: Right. And in fact, a lot of those other people that we perceive are very successful using virtual teams are probably struggling as well.

So four minutes left. Question four. Some people are going to try and do this on their own or go to one of those websites that won’t be named. What are some of the common mistakes that you see people making, again, before they get to you? So what are some of the war stories that you hear when people get to you? They go, “Thank God I’ve got you because this is the mistake I made before.”

Barbara Turley: Yeah, sure. So just on the recruitment side, when people go to other websites, they do it themselves. They underestimate the amount of work involved in trawling through and the numbers of people that you have to go through to hit a home run.

So they tend to hire based on rapport or resume or interview. But really, anybody can say anything in an interview. Some people interview very well that are terrible on the job. You know, there’s a lot more to it than just trolling through websites and getting resumes.

The other mistake people make is they underestimate how much work they need to do in their business to make sure that their business is ready for a virtual assistant or for a virtual team and that the reporting lines are in place.

So just getting a great person doesn’t often solve the problem. It just means you’re throwing a body at the problem. So really you’ve got to try and make sure that your systems, your processes, your communication channels, and your structure of your business is correct before you go this path because you’re going to waste time, energy, and money otherwise.

Tom Poland: Yeah, you’re actually going to be worse off than doing it yourself, and you’re wondering why they’re not getting the results.

So thank you. Two and a half minutes left.

Question number five: one valuable free action that an audience member could take that’s not going to solve the whole problem, but it might take them one step closer.

You’ll be overwhelmed.

Barbara Turley: Well, I wrote a little ebook on this, which is short and to the point. You can get it at thevirtualhub.com/ leadsology. It is The 5 Biggest Mistakes People Make With VAs and How to Fix It.

So I ran through all the mistakes there. It definitely will help you to get a picture of where you may have failed before. Or if you’ve never done this before, the mistakes other people are making. So definitely worth going there and downloading that ebook there. You don’t even need to sign up for it. It’s just a download.

Tom Poland: Oh, okay. So www.thevirtualhub.com/ leadsology. Yeah. And you might in fact be a woman ahead of your time because I was about to ask you for one free resource.

Okay, but that’s okay. Let’s get back. If someone grabs that resource, what’s one action they can take that’ll take them a step closer to cracking it?

Barbara Turley: Yes, the biggest one, it’s tedious, but it’s worth doing. You have to map out the tasks that you need done per little department, no matter how small your business is.

We all have departments: marketing, sales, HR, finance. What are the recurring tasks in each of those departments that are bogging you down? Those are the first little small, easy-to-outsource, easy-to-delegate tasks that you need to get clear on, and you need to have a little process for each one about how you like it done. So therefore you maintain some level of control over how it’s done when you delegate it.

Tom Poland: Perfect. Thank you.

And question number seven, 40 seconds left. What’s the one question that I should have asked you, but I didn’t?

Barbara Turley: The one question you should have asked, but you didn’t. Let me think of that for a second.

Probably people struggle with onshore versus offshore, you know, like how’s the English offshore? That’s a big one. In the Philippines, for example, where we specialize, English can be hidden. So just because someone speaks great English on the phone doesn’t mean that they write great English. That’s a tricky one. Very true.

Tom Poland: Very true. Perfect.

Barbara Turley, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for checking out our Marketing the Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here, please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated.

And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours, then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.

Barbara Turley: Thank you.