Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. Today’s guest has a company that, when you hear it, you might think, this is so easy. Of course I could do that. I can copy it. I gotta admit, I thought that too, but it’s a lot harder than it seems. And I want to understand why.

What Barbara Turley does is she runs a company called the Virtual Hub. They are basically outsourcing simplified.

Here’s why outsourcing needs to be simplified. I, like many of the people who I interviewed, read The Four Hour Work Week soon after it came out. And somewhere in there, Tim Ferriss talks about how to hire outsourcers. And he makes it sound like such a revolutionary concept that I had to go and use one of the companies he mentioned. And man, was it frustrating. It was so frustrating. They didn’t get anything done. Then the person had to go for a wedding, and I had to be happy for him for going for a wedding. But then I had to go and train or get ready for somebody new. And I didn’t get anything going in the first place, and I’m paid for it. Now I have to go get somebody new.

It was such a frustrating experience. And I thought for a while there, maybe this actually doesn’t work. Maybe this whole virtual—it might as well be virtual reality outsourcing, as unreal and ineffective as it is. But eventually, through a friend, I met someone who became my assistant, and yes, he’s kind of virtual, and it worked out. And I realized there must be a way to do it.

And what I realized to Barbara was, part of it was me. The way that I sent over instructions made no freaking sense. Of course the guy didn’t know what to do. He must have been sitting there going, how do I please this guy? And then also, frankly, on their part, have some kind of system so if the guy goes away, I don’t have to figure out for myself what to do next.

So that’s what Barbara did. She said, I’m gonna create outsourcing simplified, make it really easy for the person who’s hiring an outsourcer to get a virtual assistant who knows their work. And also, let’s accept that a lot of people who are hiring aren’t that great at it. We’re going to teach them how to give instructions to somebody who’s not sitting right next to them and needs things explained explicitly. So that’s her idea.

She’s got this business. It’s ramped up. It’s doing well. I invited her here to talk about how she did it. And I know it’s hard because we tried something similar at this company that I created. And I want to know how she overcame it and what we could have done differently.

All right, so if you’re in the people business, you’re gonna want to learn how she did it. If you’re selling to entrepreneurs, you’re gonna want to know how she did it. And we can learn all that thanks to two great sponsors. The first is a company that Barbara’s company actually uses. It’s called ActiveCampaign. It’ll do email marketing so right for you. And the second is a company that I wasn’t sure about, but man, do I love now. It’s called StartEngine. They will help you raise money for your business.

Barbara, good to have you here.

Barbara: Thank you, Andrew. I’ve been nodding at everything you’ve been saying because I have felt that pain myself, and I have heard people echo exactly what you’ve been saying.

Andrew: Get an assistant thing. Every time I was struggling, someone would say, get an assistant, and I’d go, I tried it. Quit making it sound so simple. Thank you. Now I’ve got my problem, and I’ve got the problem of dealing with them.

But you could eventually make it work, and I want to find out from you how you make it work for your clients. But first, let me ask you the tough question, the revenue question. What kind of revenue are you guys pulling in?

Barbara: Sure. So we’ve just kicked into seven figures, which I’m really proud of because—

Andrew: Within 12 months? Annual revenue of—

Barbara: Not within 12 months, no, no. Look, the business is four years old now, but in the last 12 months, I practically rebuilt it, and we can sort of get into that. But we’re into seven figures now.

Andrew: Since the beginning, seven figures over four years?

Barbara: No, no, no—year. So we’re doing that per year.

Andrew: Okay, so over a million dollars a year. And what about profits? You got people from the Philippines. What are you making, like 90 percent?

Barbara: Yeah. No, everyone thinks that. So let’s blow this wide open, right? So everybody thinks that. And of course, we take a clip, we charge up what we charge out.

The big thing is that, as you would know, when you’re starting out, you can either go and make a nice income and you’ll get to a hundred grand or 200 grand or whatever—great. What you’ll rapidly realize is when you actually scale something up to seven figures, everyone thinks that’s the goal to get there. But the costs involved sometimes in getting a business, particularly like what I’m doing, to that level actually explode as well.

So we are profitable, but over the last year, I’ve pretty much taken 90% of the profit and invested it back into the business. Some of that has been in—we’ve gone to the office model. So we’ve got offices in the Philippines now. I set up a company there.

Andrew: You rented office space there? You’ve incorporated the whole thing?

Barbara: Yes, yeah. And there’s a couple of reasons why I’ve done that. Look, I was doing a work-from-home model when I started this business.

Andrew: Meaning everyone in the Philippines could work from home. Right. Why don’t we—if we’re going to start unraveling the story, let’s go way back to the beginning.

You told our producer, listen, I’m not super entrepreneurial. You’re not finding lemonade stands sprinkled throughout my childhood. But here’s what you are. You are somebody who just values freedom. And in your 20s, you were a stockbroker working in Ireland, where your accent comes from. And you said, I want to go do what? That shocked your boss at the time.

Barbara: I had an amazing job in a big stock working firm in Dublin, but I wanted to go to Australia. I wanted to live in Australia. And I remember him sitting me down and saying, you’re making the biggest mistake of your career.

Andrew: What was it about Australia? They captivated—

Barbara: Look, the weather in Australia is just amazing. I had been there before as a backpacker, like we all do in our twenties. I had gone back to Dublin, got the big job, done everything I was supposed to do, and I couldn’t settle. I just found myself really struggling to settle back home.

Andrew: People say Spain’s got nice weather just like Australia, it’s in the same time zone. But is it fair to say that—I remember going backpacking—there’s a sense of freedom that comes from backpacking. You almost want to go back and eat the same food and go to the same country to experience what you were like before. Was it that, a connection with that freedom?

Barbara: That’s what my dad said.

I tell you what, because everybody said to me, why can’t you go to Spain? Why can’t you go wherever? I was very specific about what I wanted. I wanted to stay in my career, so I needed to be in an international city with a decent stock market. And I wanted to live by the beach, and I wanted to have nice weather.

Now you’d sort of think San Francisco, where you are, might have those things, but Sydney—Sydney’s better. Sydney was the vibe that I was looking for. And 11 of the global investment banks were already here, and they had massive footprints in Asia. So I was very strategic about what I wanted to do, and I did come down here and built an investment banking career over 10 years. So I was very successful when I got here.

Andrew: So why leave? Why, if you’re finally on this track—you got the sun, you got the investment banking career, you’ve got the high profile, people respect you in that space—why? What got you into entrepreneurship?

Barbara: I got bored. A couple of things. Look, I’m very itchy. I get bored with things very quickly. If things are too routine, I’m a hunter, not a farmer. And also, I wanted to be a mother, and I didn’t want to be a corporate mother.

Now, no offense to the corporate mothers that do it. I think you are amazing because I think it’s really difficult to do that, and I didn’t want that. And also, it was, again, I have this freedom. Freedom is my highest value.

And in your 20s, working in the big banks, making loads of money, big party lifestyles—great. But when you get to 30, I was like, I don’t want this anymore. And once I made that decision, I just didn’t want it anymore.

Now, it took about five years for me to actually exit that because I did a whole pile of things along the way. One of them was an entrepreneurial pursuit within the financial industry. So I got involved in a management buyout of a business from Deutsche Asset Management. And so I got a chance to kind of learn the entrepreneurial thing.

Andrew: What does that mean? Did Deutsche fund your buyout of your department?

Barbara: No, no. Look, the financial crisis in 2008—most of us in my industry remember—it produced a lot of blood on the street. But they say you should buy when there’s blood on the street, and there was blood on the street.

There was a business that was going to be sold in Australia by Deutsche, and a group of us got together. Kudos to the CEO of Australia at the time—he asked me was I interested. And I was like, yeah, I want in.

Andrew: You’re one of the people who bought it.

Barbara: I’m one of the people who bought it, yeah.

Andrew: What did you guys do?

Barbara: So we bought the distribution rights to their managed funds in Australia. And then over the course of the following five years, we eventually actually bought the funds from them and repackaged them as our own. And look, that company today is running $5 billion of assets.

Andrew: If you’re managing a fund, how does that bring you into contact with entrepreneurs?

Barbara: It doesn’t at all. No, it doesn’t at all. I wasn’t actually managing the money. I went into the sales side at that point.

Andrew: I see. So I’ve got here in my notes—it helps you understand how big teams work, and you saw the struggle of entrepreneurs. I mean, the people who bought it along with you—they are the entrepreneurs who struggled.

And then you said to yourself, look, I’m going to do something else. You got into coaching consulting. What’s coaching consulting for you?

Barbara: Yeah, look, when you leave corporate, the natural progression is to do some consulting because it’s the quickest money, right? So I picked up quite a bit of small business coaching kind of by accident, actually.

I think people just respected that I had this background, and I got a few clients. And I saw that they were all having the same problem. They all had no time, and they were trying to do everything themselves. They had no systems, no processes, no teams. They couldn’t hire people because they’d no money.

So the natural thing was for me to go, look, you can get these VAs in the Philippines. I had one myself. So I started recruiting VAs, not as a cost thing, just to help clients out. And before I knew it, I was like, I’m getting more demand for this than business coaching. Hmm. I wonder, should I pivot?

And I actually just pivoted out of that and created the Virtual Hub—the initial stages of the Virtual Hub—which was very different to what it is today.

Andrew: So at first it was, I’m just adding this on as a service to help the people who I’m coaching. And then what was it? What did you do differently when you hired for them? Did it work out? What did you do right that they didn’t do right at the time?

Barbara: So just from the way everyone tells you in business, right, when you’re starting up—you’ve got to find a problem that people will pay money for you to solve today, not in the future, but today.

So I found that people were willing to pay me money right now to get them a cost-effective person. So when you solve for one problem, what you usually find is that you will unearth another problem.

The next problem was I discovered people didn’t know how to manage a virtual assistant. In fact, they had never even run a team before, and they didn’t know how to delegate effectively or write a task. So I realized then that I had to solve this problem and help people understand how to manage an offshore person.

And of course, then the next problem that raised its head after that, when people still weren’t getting success, was for me to go, well, maybe it’s the person.

Andrew: Maybe it’s the VA.

Barbara: Yeah. So the resumes—you can interview people, awesome, people can rise in an interview. Their resume can say whatever. And then you hire them, and they actually don’t know what they’re doing, or they go AWOL, or all the problems.

Andrew: Let me see if I understand this. First problem you found was people just didn’t know how to run their business well. And you realized, hey, you know what? The problem is they don’t have the time to think about their business because they’re doing all these micro tasks. I’m going to bring a VA for them.

Bringing a VA helped, but actually it didn’t, because the problem still stuck around. You said, what is the problem that is leading to this ultimate issue, which is they’re not running their business right? It’s that they don’t know how to work with their virtual assistants. So then you started training the client.

And then you went back to the virtual assistant and said, what’s with—

Barbara: And then I was like, we need to launch a training program. I mean, VAs are kind of—they’re working online, but they’ve never been—even if they’ve got digital marketing experience, you need to train them properly.

Andrew: Let me take a step back before we get into that. When you saw that people were the way I was after reading Tim Ferriss’s book, they’re not working with the VAs right. What are the problems that you saw that you helped unlock when you worked with them?

Barbara: Look, I think a lot of it is people assume that when you hire someone, you’re just going to tell them a couple of things, and they’re going to go off and be all showing initiative, and they’re going to know your business. People assume that everybody thinks the way that you do. But when you employ somebody or you bring someone in, a VA, right, they’re a virtual assistant. They’re there to assist you and not to take your business and run it for you. Although you can get to that point, but you’ve got to work with somebody. You’ve got to learn how to create your recurring task list. You’ve got to learn how to write a task effectively. You have to have processes and a system for how you do things. And then you have to train that person that comes into your business on how you like things to be done and how you want to be reported to. But those are things that you only learn by accident.

Andrew: You know what? So if I think back to my first version, this is not a task that I sent out to the virtual assistant, but it was something like edit my interview. And to be editing takes five to 10 minutes, I swear.

But I would send it over and say, I need you to use ScreenFlow to edit, I need you to do this other stuff. And then they wouldn’t get it done. And it wasn’t until later that I realized, step by step, show how to edit. And then I felt like I was being a jerk for doing step by step. It’s like I was telling the barista how to pour my coffee. I felt like I was doing too many step-by-steps and belittling them. And what I realized was, if they were sitting here, I wouldn’t need to do that. It’s the remote part that means I have to be explicit about every step.

That’s what you’re talking about, or am I missing something?

Barbara: Yeah, no, there are two things I want to point out here. So number one, if you hire an editor, right, so somebody who specializes in audio podcast editing, you can just give them a podcast and say, look, just make me sound great. If you hire a virtual assistant, that’s such a broad term. These guys are doing everything from admin, like answering a phone or replying to an email or managing your calendar.

She’s sometimes being asked to build a website. We’ve got our VAs—clients will say, can you build my website for me? I’m like, well, they could have a go, but they’re not a website—you know, you just got to be clear about what you want. So when it’s a virtual assistant, you do need to lay it out, and you need to have a process for that.

Andrew: So you started showing them, here’s how to lay it out step by step. What about what to give them? I remember I didn’t know what to give someone else. Kagan, a friend of mine, said, Andrew, I want you to have two monitors. I said, yeah. He goes, on one monitor, I want you to have an empty doc. And by the end of the day, I want it to be full with everything that you did. And then start picking off things that are easy. And that helped me.

It didn’t solve all my problems. It turned out there are a lot of things I didn’t know how to explain to someone else that just took up a bunch of my time. But at least it helped me identify it. Did you do anything like that?

Barbara: Yeah, you do. You have to kind of—first of all, people think they can come up with a task list tomorrow within a second. It takes time for you to actually figure out what are the—like I always tell people, break it down into two lists.

The first one I always recommend you do is your recurring task list. Now, this is the tasks in your business that need to be done daily, weekly, monthly. They are routine, and they keep the engine of your business moving. Then you’ve got to create exactly what all of those tasks are. You’ve got to figure out which ones really need you, and hopefully hardly any of them need you. If a lot of them need you, you need to think about what you’re doing, and you need to reframe it so that you can actually delegate that.

The other one is your projects list. Let’s say that you want to launch a podcast. That’s not a task, that’s a project, okay? Out of which a lot of tasks will fall. So there’s the setup, there’s the little image, and you’ve got to lay out all the tasks within there.

Andrew: So you were showing them how to do that. That still didn’t really solve the problem. And then you said, maybe it’s the VAs who I need to work better with.

Barbara: Yes. Look, it’s been a—yes, so that was kind of the next stage. And then after that, I’ve kind of come back again to client. But with the VAs, then I realized that it’s actually better if I—and actually this was a major pivot in the business as well. I realized that instead of allowing clients to come to us and say, hey, here’s my brief, here’s what I want, we actually do it a little bit differently here.

We actually say, hey, here’s—we sort of productized it, right? So I’ve kind of created a product of people. And I say, here’s how we train them, here’s the people that we have, here’s what we do. If that looks and feels like what you need in your business, and I’ll help you to figure that out, then we’re the people for you. But if you’re looking for, for example, an accountant, we don’t do that. We actually specialize in people who are trying to get their digital marketing strategy. Yeah, it took a long time, a lot of pain.

Andrew: That took you a while to get to also. First it was, I’m gonna have them do everything, and then you went to—

You know what, let’s come back in a moment and talk about what happened when you went to investigate what was going on with the virtual assistants. But the company I’m gonna start talking about is a company called StartEngine. Do you know StartEngine at all?

I didn’t fully trust StartEngine because I didn’t know it. In fact, I even interviewed the founder of StartEngine on Mixergy, and you could hear the first 10 minutes of me just saying, is this BS? Am I about to mislead my audience? Because here’s why. What they do at StartEngine is help entrepreneurs raise money. Now, how many people come along saying that, and then they basically are there to fleece the entrepreneur by charging them stuff?

But I talked to the founder, Howard Marks, and here’s what he said. He said, I made money in the video game industry. I started investing in companies. They were basically all flops. He said, why? Because they couldn’t raise the next round of funding for one reason or another. And he realized, meanwhile, this whole Kickstarter thing—people are spending tons of money to buy a product, but they get no share in the success of the business.

Like the Oculus people—millions of dollars, people paid to get Oculus, the goggles—they own no share of the business. It was the venture capitalists who owned the share of the business who made out big. And he said, huh, what if we allow crowdfunding? What if we allow people to sell pieces of their business the way that they might sell pieces of their product on Kickstarter? And it took off.

And actually, there’s a car company, a couple of them, that have taken off because of this, and there are other businesses. Like some guys got this golf cart riding thing—you stand up like a surfboard on a golf cart. Anyway, all these things that ordinarily wouldn’t get money from venture capitalists, he was able to raise money.

Barbara: I love that idea.

Andrew: So this is all he does. Think of it as—I don’t think this is the right approach—they probably don’t want me as a sponsor to talk about it this way, but think of it as Kickstarter for selling equity in your business, for actually getting people to put money into investing in your business.

And again, it took me a long time to even trust this guy. We had a mutual friend. I still didn’t trust it. And then I started looking into it. He also is into ICOs—what is it called? Initial coin offerings. Thank you.

Barbara: Coin offerings.

Andrew: Which again, I thought—did he ever do any one of them? He did one of the biggest ones, the one for Overstock. I’m fully bought in now. I think it makes a ton of sense. Anyone out there who’s looking to raise money could be as skeptical as I am and go and investigate them.

And if you’re interested in working with them, I’ve got a special URL called mixerg.startengine.com where they’re gonna give you $5,000 in premium service fees to receive free legal and accounting services, direct onboarding and marketing guidance, and campaign page creation and design. Basically, look, guys, you’re gonna be doing me a solid if you use the URL mixerg.startengine.com, and they’re gonna give you some services for free.

But the reality is, whether you go to my special URL or go to their site directly, whether you mention me or go directly and say you never heard of this guy, Andrew Warner, who was a bit of a jerk to the founder, it doesn’t matter to me. There is a new way to raise money. If this is the way that makes sense to you, go check them out at startengine.com.

If you throw in mixerg.startengine.com, they’re gonna give you a bunch of extra stuff, and they’ll know that you came from me, and it’ll help me. And I think having somebody as skeptical and as hard as I am on your team as the referral will help you. But if you don’t think so, I don’t care. Go try using them. This is revolutionary, and I want my audience to take advantage of it. ICO, crowdfunding, lots of different options. Check them out, mixergy.startengine.com.

I’m so glad they’re a sponsor. I’m really sorry that they’re probably not gonna continue re-upping with me because of the way that I’ve been mentioning them. But man, they’re good. I wish I—I love that he came up with this idea.

All right. Coming back to your story, Barbara—you then start investigating. What did you find on their side when you started going to investigate in the Philippines?

Barbara: Yeah, there’s a lot of—okay, so there’s the culture. Okay, so let’s start with the big one. There’s a cultural—people have said to me, why do you specialize in the Philippines? There’s a couple of reasons.

Number one, they speak amazing English, right? Their English is never going to be perfect, but it is amazing versus the other Asian countries. Number two, their education system is really strong. And number three, they are the closest that you’re going to get to the Western culture. They are actually quite American in the way that they are in their culture.

But you have to remember that although all of those things are true, there is still a cultural block in how their culture operates versus how we are. So that creates a massive communication barrier. And anyone listening is going to be nodding when I say this—they have saying yes, they go yes to everything. And then they go and try and figure out how.

Great, but sometimes they make a mess of it, or they don’t come back with the result, or they don’t do the work. And the client’s like, but she said yes. And I’m like, okay, we have a major—this is a major problem because they’re afraid to say no. It’s a yes.

So I had to really work—there’s a lot of not just training on the skills, but there’s a huge amount of coaching that we do around helping—well, finding people who are not yes people, but then training them on how to actually engage with the client on this level, like how we’re engaging, and not to be afraid of that.

Andrew: Not afraid of interrupting the way you and I have done—me more than you in the conversation—not to be afraid of guiding.

Barbara: Idea sharing. The VAs were like, well, I don’t want to say my idea because they own the business. Surely they know what they’re doing. I’m like, half the time they don’t. They want to hear your opinion.

Andrew: No, it’s not an area that you’re working on. So if you’re using ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft on a regular basis, you’re going to know more than the founder.

Okay, so you went in and you started to do this. You told our producer one of the ways that you got started was you did this webinar on how to confidently work with or successfully hire a VA. Who did you do this to, and why did this work?

Barbara: Yep. So I had done other webinars before with the business coaching thing, and they were okay, but selling on these things is hard. And I thought, okay, people are asking me about this VA thing. I think I’m just going to do a webinar and see what happens.

It was the most successful one I ever did. I just couldn’t believe it. I didn’t spend any money on it.

Andrew: I’m gonna do one on how to work with and hire a VA, and then at the end say, if you want, I’ve got a service where you can hire them through me.

Barbara: Yeah. So it was basically, I’m going to show you how to confidently and successfully—and I think those were the words that resonated because people were not confident with it, and they couldn’t get success. So I was showing them step by step how to do that using tools like Asana, creating your task list, basically showed them exactly how to do it.

Andrew: What’s a technique in Asana that would help somebody get the most out of working with an assistant?

Barbara: Yeah, so number one tip, biggest tip—Asana can be Frankenstein if you’re not careful. Don’t go nuts, right? Just get into Asana and create two lists. Create your recurring task list, and within there have sections: daily, weekly, monthly, and lay out your tasks in there. One project, that’s it.

And then your other one is to-do list. And those are the quick 30-minute things that you want done today, tomorrow—off-the-top-of-your-head sort of things, but only 30-minute tasks, nothing like a project. And just keep it simple like that and delegate your recurring task list first and create processes for each one.

Andrew: So within the task list, have a list of steps for doing it.

Barbara: Absolutely, yeah. I would—or like a link to a Google Doc—but it’s better, if you want someone to actually read it and follow it, I would just put it in the description and keep bullet points. Use bullet points. Don’t go nuts writing stream of consciousness with no punctuation, which I see all the time. People write tasks like a massive paragraph with no punctuation and just a brain dump and expect people to decipher what they want.

Andrew: Yeah. And you’re right about Asana being really helpful as a project management task list, but Frankenstein really is the word. Part of it is, I think, the responsibility of Asana. I can’t tell where I’m chatting in there. I can’t tell if somebody—some people create tasks with sub-tasks and then I think dates on some, dates on others, you can’t find them.

Okay, so you’re saying simplify things like that. Out of that, you said you got 10 signups to our producer. Ten signups for what? What are people at the time paying for?

Barbara: Purely just to recruit a VA at the time. I think actually—sorry, at the time I had done a bit of recruitment. At this stage, I was charging a fee, one fee, but I would take care of payroll. So I was like, I’ll pay them, I’ll do all that, I’ll do HR, and I’ll just charge a small clip on top of what—you know. So I think I was charging like six bucks an hour or something Aussie, which would be—I mean, you know, it was nothing. It was purely a test case.

Andrew: On top of?

Barbara: No, no, in total.

Andrew: $6 an hour. I pay you, you take care of the virtual assistant. I just know that I’ve got someone to work with. I was gonna get one person who is gonna be my person—you—

Barbara: Yeah. Yes, yeah. So I was doing it as a beta test. I realized afterwards that it was like a beta test. And look, two of the clients that joined at that time are still with us four years later. The others, most of them failed. There was a time I had to fire some clients as well, cause we just couldn’t work with them. But that’s all learning too, and your ideal client.

So I realized that we were in business, and I just thought, wow, we’ve got to get a website or something. We’ve got nothing here. We just—you know.

I rang my VA and was like, hey, I need 10 of your friends. Have you got 10 friends that want a job where we can have a look at this? Okay. Yeah, it was very sketchy in the beginning. It was just a try.

Andrew: And it was all people who—how’d they get on your list? How are you able to get them into the webinar?

Barbara: Yeah, so I had a list at that point because I had built another website, which is still there, but I don’t do much with it today. I had built a following on a site called energisewealth.com, which is—well, I suppose it’s still there. It’s about—it’s “energise” with an S, the British spelling. It is there.

The point of it was to teach women about money, basically. So it was everything from investing, like savings, right through to investing, and just get them more comfortable with money mindset and stuff like that. So I had built a pretty big list through that. People were very interested in that.

But monetizing—okay, I just didn’t really—I lost a bit of energy for it after I saw—look, as I said, I’m hunter, not farmer. So I saw this VA thing and was like, hey, I’m going to jump on this bandwagon because that’s more interesting to me right now.

Andrew: You know what I see? I see you’ve got your podcast on there, I see you’ve got your Pinterest connection and all that, and the revenue there was coming from—

Barbara: Business coaching, really. Really, it was business coaching. I did do a product launch. I had an online product, which was okay. Look, I did a massive launch. It was great for branding, but I’ll be honest with you, it was kind of a flop. It didn’t sell enough, and it was very tiring to do that launch.

So from the ashes of that, though, I had to think of what am I going to do next. So I offered the VA thing, and here we are four years later. So it’s a good story. Sometimes you can pay that disaster.

Andrew: So you ended up with the first four people. And then—again, I’m going back to the notes—we do pre-interviews with our guests, and you said, look, you talked to someone who said you’ve got to find something people are going to pay for.

This became something that people would pay for and was profitable from day one because you were taking a little bit of a commission, a little bit of a cut in what you were paying.

Barbara: Zero dollar spend. It was zero dollar spend. This is the key thing. This business started with—I had to invest nothing, not even fifty dollars on Facebook ads. It was profitable from day one.

Andrew: Here’s the part then in the same section of the notes that shocks me. You say six figures was easy, meaning to get to $100,000 in revenue was easy because of what? If you’re charging—you said $6 Australian—that’s like $4.43 US dollars today. So how are you getting to $100,000 with that kind of price?

Barbara: So the first 10 I took in, I said, were kind of a beta test. We got going with that. And then they told their friends. Then I did a couple of speaking gigs. Then I did a couple more webinars with other people.

And I just found that people were so desperate for this that I just got flooded with demand. And I actually had a problem where the money was flowing in really quickly. It was easy to do that, but to deliver on it was very painful because the feedback loop was just daily—clients complaining, VAs complaining about clients. So it was really messy in the beginning.

The money side of it was the easy part, actually. It was more just navigating the—

Andrew: I wonder why. I’m looking at our expenses. I’ve got an assistant, but I also have—we use Fancy Hands for a few bucks per task. They’re good for those little tasks. Then you’ve got freelance sites—I’m about to talk about all your competitors.

Why is there a desperate need? There’s Ask Sunday, I think is the one that Tim Ferriss talked about. There’s Hire My Mom. Why, with all this out there, do people still feel such pain?

Barbara: I think people have tried it, and they get scared. They’ve either been burnt, or they don’t know anything about the Philippines. They just don’t even know where to go.

You go on Upwork—look, of course you can go direct. You can go direct and find a VA yourself. You don’t need to come to me. But the problem is that you’re going to get about 5,000 applications for your job ad, or you’re going to have to look through so many people, then interview all of them.

I’ll give you the stats. For every five people that we employ in the Philippines, almost 200 people will come through our offices and sit a five-hour exam before we will even look at their resume. So it’s really hard.

Andrew: You know what? I actually feel like I get why you guys would be better than Upwork. I’ve never had good results with Upwork. Like you said, it’s a lot of work on my part to pay someone six bucks an hour instead of $16 an hour.

Barbara: We don’t even charge $16 an hour. We’re still cheap. Our lowest level of VA is still only $8 US an hour. I want to make the point that we’ve got a really great business here. There’s no objection on pricing.

Andrew: Back then, I guess I didn’t realize there was that much demand, but you’re saying there is. You’re saying what you saw was people needed help, they didn’t know how to get it, you were reaching out to them. It wasn’t anything about your marketing back then. It was just—they needed this, it was that desperate.

Barbara: You find the problem, people need it.

Andrew: Okay, so you then said, all right, finding the people who need an assistant who is inexpensive and good is easy. Creating the good assistants is not easy. Creating the good relationships between the assistants and the people is not easy. So then you started training.

When you trained, did you start training first or hiring? What did you work on first?

Barbara: I started—well, I was putting people in clients’ businesses first, and then I started training kind of on the go. It was really, like I said, a bit messy. But now these days, we actually hire them and we train them.

So I take a lot of risk on in the business that I have today in that I basically say to people, I’m going to back myself that we’re going to go out and find the people that we want because I know what our clients need. And then the client has to trust that we’ve got their back and we’re going to put the right people in.

And we’re going to train them. And sometimes we take people with no experience and bring them in. But if they’ve got the right enthusiasm, the right attitude, and what we know is going to work, we can train them to do anything. We’re looking for a personality type, a work ethic, and a character.

Andrew: How do you test to see if they have a work ethic and character?

Barbara: You put them in a training program with us for six weeks.

Andrew: To see if they can survive the training program.

Barbara: Yeah. The training program runs anything from about three weeks to six weeks, depending on the levels. Like if we’re going to go into HubSpot or Entroport or Infusionsoft, they spend a lot more time with us. But it’s very difficult to hide your character full-time on an intensive program where you’re in the room with us over the course of even two weeks.

Andrew: Okay, so you’re paying for the training?

Barbara: Yeah.

Andrew: You test them beforehand to see if they have the ability to learn?

Barbara: Yeah.

Andrew: Do you also look for somebody who’s connected to the people who work with you because that helps?

Barbara: Yeah, we do. But funnily enough, sometimes the referrals—people refer their friends, and you would think that that would be where you’d find the gold. Often not really. Sometimes they apply, and they don’t get through, and the friends are like, she didn’t make it.

We try to be—we’ve got very clean metrics, so it’s not an opinion thing.

Andrew: I find that that’s a hard thing to have metrics on.

Barbara: Yeah, so we grade their testing when they come through. The English tests that we have are the first test. There’s a whole raft of tests.

Andrew: And that’s pretty easy to come up with a number for. What else are you testing throughout?

Barbara: We have a process that we make them do. For example, we actually give them a podcast, and we ask them to create an infographic from it. So they’ve got to pick out the top five points that were made in the podcast. And then they’ve got to follow a process that we give them.

So it’s testing around, can you follow instructions? Do you understand what we’re doing here? Can you decipher? Have you got good smarts? That’s what you’re looking for.

Andrew: What about as they work with the client? Do you have a way of measuring that?

Barbara: Yep, so we have KPIs attached to everything, but we do need quite a lot of client involvement for that.

And actually, here’s the thing—another problem I discovered after we fixed all those other things—I found that clients would come to us and say, just, yeah, this problem. And we’d say, look, let’s jump on a call with you, your VA, and us. And they’ll go, I don’t want to tell them.

And we’re like, but if we don’t give them the feedback—

Andrew: They don’t want to tell them that they didn’t do it.

Barbara: If we don’t discuss how to give constructive feedback in a way that everyone feels great, how are we going to solve this problem? Otherwise, you’re just moaning, right? You just want to complain.

Andrew: From what I heard, firing is a big issue for you too.

Barbara: Yes. I don’t fire people particularly easily. I try to hire them slower.

Andrew: You were—apparently at one point—it was a big issue for you.

Barbara: Yes, it was. Learning to fire somebody has been probably my biggest weakness. I would hang on to people for a little bit too long because I really believe in people, and I love mentoring people.

And I definitely have hung on for too long with some people. But I’ve had to learn that myself. I’ve had to learn to navigate that emotional part of myself and put more metrics in place.

Andrew: Because then it becomes clear to you and to them that this is not working.

It’s so weird for me, by the way, to be sitting down during an interview. I’m getting antsy now, but I’ve got cracks in the heel bone because of running. When it first happened, I had all this pain, and I said I’m going to run anyway. Then people say, Andrew, if you’re feeling pain, you shouldn’t run. And I go, I have to run now to prove to you that I am strong enough to run.

Barbara: Running’s overrated. I’m not a runner, and I just look at runners and go, see, it’s painful.

Andrew: I love it. I love it. I’m now forced to sit. I realized standing up in these interviews was an issue too. So until this heals up for the next six weeks, I’m going to try to sit. It’s hard. I’ve been standing most of the day.

Two years it took you to fire your first person.

Barbara: Yes, it did.

No, they were there. The first person that I eventually fired—look, sometimes people do a great job, but this is the thing that I now don’t hire. I see it in the beginning.

When they’re slippery, right—if a person online—and everyone listening who’s had a VA that was slippery will know what I mean. They’re there, then they’re not there. Then they say they’re there. Then they sort of lie and all that.

It’s like when someone’s cheating on you. You can’t catch them, and it’s just slippery, and you keep blaming yourself. So I have gone through the pain of that, and I’ve also seen clients go through it. And we have now eradicated that problem.

How? Well, with VAs that work with clients—one of the reasons I went away from work-from-home is I couldn’t grow that. Work-from-home is great, right? But you can’t go to 500 people on that model.

Also, I just felt I needed people who want to show up for work on time. They don’t want to do it whenever they feel like it because that just doesn’t work.

Andrew: You’re saying that if they are in office, there’s not much room to be slippery, but if they’re at home, stuff comes up.

Barbara: Kids, they’re working at three o’clock in the morning, and they tell you, I’m a night person. You’re like, nice—it’s not working, right?

Andrew: Do they have to work US time? US, Europe, or Australia?

Barbara: We run 24/7 now, so we have a night shift that runs in the office. But those are people that choose to work the night shift, and we pay more for that, and we’ve got lots of programs for that.

When people are given too much flexibility, I say you’re better off doing flexibility within a bit of a structure. Because as humans, if you give yourself too much flexibility, you won’t do anything. Nothing gets done.

I learned through my own experience of allowing too much freedom—you have to have some form of structure. So again, I was great with processes, and I needed to bring that into how I manage people, because you’re managing people at the end of the day.

Andrew: All right, let me talk about my second sponsor and then come back here and find out how you grew beyond this.

The second sponsor is a company called ActiveCampaign. You know them. What do you know about ActiveCampaign?

Barbara: ActiveCampaign are awesome. They burst onto the market a few years ago, and they’ve really—ActiveCampaign took a problem and massively solved for it.

Andrew: What’s the problem?

Barbara: I think the gap between MailChimp and Infusionsoft was too big. Ontraport came in and solved a lot of that problem in terms of pricing. I’m a big Entroport user myself. But there was still a gap in that MailChimp-to-Ontraport space.

And I think initially ActiveCampaign came in and solved for that problem massively. And now they’re solving more problems—they’ve really become a contender in this CRM space.

Andrew: Yeah, because the problem with MailChimp was you couldn’t really do marketing automation. They could say yes you could, but it was hacky. You couldn’t really say someone did this, did that, tag them, and then follow up properly.

Infusionsoft—you’re right—you could do everything, but it gets so complicated and convoluted.

Andrew: On top of?

Barbara: No, no, in total.

Andrew: $6 an hour, I pay you, you take care of the virtual assistant. I just know that I’ve got someone to work with. I was gonna get one person who is gonna be my person, you—

Barbara: Yeah.
Yes. Yeah. So I was doing it as a beta test. I really, I realized afterwards that it was like a beta test. And look, two of the clients that joined at that time are still with us four years later. The others, most of them failed. There was a time I had to fire some clients as well, cause we just couldn’t work with them. But, you know, that’s all learning too, and your ideal client. So I realized that we were in business, and I just thought, wow, we’ve got to get a website or something. We’ve got nothing here. We just, you know.

I rang my VA and was like, hey, I need 10 of your friends. Have you got 10 friends that want a job where we can have a look at this? Okay. Yeah, it was very sketchy in the beginning. It was just a try.

Andrew: And it was all people who—how, how’d they get on your list? How are you able to get them into the webinar?

Barbara: Yeah. So I had a list at that point because I had built another website, which is still there, but I don’t do much with it today. I had built a following on a site called energisewealth.com, which was a—is a—well, I suppose it’s still there. It’s about—it’s energized with an S, the British spelling. It is there. The point of it was to teach women about money, basically. So it was everything from investing, like savings, right through to investing, and just get them more comfortable with money mindset and stuff like that. So I had built a pretty big list through that. People were very interested in that. But monetizing—okay, I just didn’t really—I lost a bit of energy for it after I saw—look, as I said, I’m hunter, not farmer. So I saw this VA thing, was like, hey, I’m going to jump on this bandwagon, because that’s more interesting to me right now.

Andrew: You know what, I see it. I see you’ve got your podcast on there. I see you’ve got your Pinterest connection and all that, and the revenue there was coming from—

Barbara: Business coaching, really, really. It was business coaching. I did do a product launch. I did do a product launch, and I had an online product, which was okay. Look, I did a massive launch. It was great for branding, but I’ll be honest with you, it was a kind of a flop. Like, it didn’t sell enough, and it was very tiring to do that launch, and I didn’t. So from the ashes of that, though, I had to think of what am I going to do next? So I offered the VA thing, and here we are four years later.

So, you know, it’s a good story. Sometimes you can pay that disaster.

Andrew: So you ended up with the first four people, and then—here’s, again, I’m going back to the notes. We do pre-interviews with our guests, and you said, look, you talked to someone who said, you got to find something people are going to pay for. This became something that people would pay for and was profitable from day one because you were taking a little bit of a commission on the—a little bit of a cut in what you were paying. And I liked that you were—

Barbara: Zero dollar spend. It was zero dollar spend. This is the key thing. This business started with—I had to invest nothing, and not even fifty dollars on Facebook ads. It was profitable from day one.

Andrew: Here’s the part then in the same section of the notes, shocks me. You say six figures was easy, meaning to get to $100,000 in revenue was easy because of what? If you’re charging—you said $6 Australian. I looked it up, by the way. $6 Australian is like $4.43 today anyway in US dollars. The Australian dollar is losing value, apparently, to the US dollar. So how are you getting to $100,000 with that kind of price?

Barbara: So the first 10 I took in, I said, were kind of a beta test. We got going with that. And then they told their friends, then I did a couple of speaking gigs, then I did a couple more webinars with other people. And I just found that people were so desperate for this that I just got flooded with demand. And I actually had a problem where the money was flowing in really quickly. It was easy to do that. But to deliver on it was very painful because there was—the feedback loop was just daily.

You know, clients complaining, VAs complaining about clients. So it was really messy in the beginning. The money side of it was the easy part, actually. It was more just navigating the—

Andrew: I wonder why? I’m looking at our expenses. I’ve got an assistant, but I also have—we use Fancy Hands for like—what is it—a few bucks per task. We’ve decided—I had a guest on here who was from Mod Pizza. The guy is incredibly famous. There are tons of articles written about him in the UK. We did a pre-interview. We basically asked him the same questions that he’s been asked a million times before. I said, somebody’s gotta do research before the pre-interviewer. So we said, all right, let’s go to Fancy Hands. I’ll do it. They’re good for those little tasks. They’ll do research, but that exists. And then you’ve got—what? What is it called? The freelance site. I’m about to talk about all your competitors.

Why is there a desperate need? There’s Ask Sunday, I think is the one that Tim Ferriss talked about. There’s Hire My Mom. There’s—why, with all this out there, why do people still feel such pain?

Barbara: I think people have tried it and they get scared. They’ve either been burnt, or they don’t know anything about the Philippines. They just don’t even know where to go. You go on Upwork—look, of course you can go direct. You can go direct and find a VA yourself. You don’t need to come to me. But the problem is that you’re going to get about 5,000 applications for your job ad, or you’re going to have to run through—you’re going to have to look through so many people, then interview all of them. I mean, look, I’ll give you the stats, right?

For every five people that we employ in the Philippines, almost 200 people will come through our offices and sit a five-hour exam before we will even look at their resume. So it’s really hard, right?

Andrew: You know what, I actually feel like I get why you guys would be better than Upwork. I’ve never had good results with Upwork. Like you said, it’s a lot of work on my part to pay someone six bucks an hour instead of $16 an hour, and then they go—

Barbara: We don’t even charge $16 an hour. We’re still cheap. Our lowest level of VA is still only $8 US an hour. I want to make it—the point is that, look, we’ve got a really great business here. There’s no objection on pricing.

Andrew: Back then, I guess I didn’t realize there was that much of a demand, but you’re saying there is. You’re saying what you saw was people needed help, they didn’t know how to get it, you were reaching out to them. It wasn’t anything about your marketing back then. I know you’ve gotten better at it, you’ve got partnerships. It was just they needed this, it was that desperate.

Barbara: You find the problem, people need it.

Andrew: Okay, so you then said, all right, finding the people who need an assistant, who’s inexpensive and is good, is easy. Creating the good assistants is not easy. Creating the good relationships between the assistants and the people is not easy. So then you started training. When you trained, did you start training first or hiring? What’d you work on first?

Barbara: I started—well, I was putting people in clients’ businesses first, and then I started training kind of on the go. I mean, it was really, like I said, a bit messy. But then now these days we do—we actually hire them now and we train them. So I take a lot of risk on in the business that I have today in that I basically say to people, I’m going to back myself, that we’re going to go out and find the people that we want, because I know what our clients need. And then the client has to kind of trust that we’ve got their back and we’re going to put the right people in.

And we’re going to train them. And sometimes we take people with no experience and we bring them in. But if they’ve got the right enthusiasm, the right attitude, and what we know is going to work, we can train them to do anything. We’re looking for a personality type and a character, a work ethic and a character.

Andrew: How do you test to see if they have a work ethic and character?

Barbara: You put them in a training program with us for six weeks.

Andrew: To see if they can survive the training program.

Barbara: Yeah, look, the training program runs anything from about three weeks to six weeks, depending on the levels. Like if we’re going to go into HubSpot or Entroport or Infusionsoft, they spend a lot more time with us. But it’s very difficult to hide your character full time on an intensive program where you’re in the room with us over the course of even two weeks.

Andrew: Okay, so you’re them to do all this, and as they’re being trained, you’re paying for the training?

Barbara: Yeah.

Andrew: You test them beforehand to see if they have the ability to learn?

Barbara: Yeah.

Andrew: Do you also look for somebody who’s connected to the people who work with you because that helps?

Barbara: Yeah, we do. But funnily enough, sometimes the referrals—people refer their friends, and you would think that that would be where you’d find the gold. Often not really. Yeah, sometimes they apply and they don’t get through, and the friends are like, she didn’t make it. We try to be—we’ve got very clean metrics. So it’s not an opinion thing.

Andrew: I find that that’s a hard thing to have metrics on.

Barbara: Yeah, so we grade their testing when they come through. So the English tests that we have are the first test. There’s a whole raft of tests.

Andrew: And that’s pretty easy to come up with a number for. There’s enough tests out there that you can—what else are you testing throughout?

Barbara: We have a process that we make them do. So for example, we actually give them a podcast, and we ask them to create an infographic from it. So they’ve got to pick out the top five points that were made in the podcast. And then they’ve got to follow a process that we give them. So it’s testing around: can you follow instructions? Do you understand what we’re doing here? Can you decipher—have you got good smarts? That’s what you’re looking for.

Andrew: What about as they work with the client? Do you have a way of measuring that?

Barbara: Yep. So we have KPIs attached to everything, but we do need quite a lot of client involvement for that. The client—and actually, here’s the thing, another problem I discovered after we fixed all those other things—I found that clients were not—they would come to us and say, just, yeah, this problem. And we’d say, look, let’s jump on a call with you, your VA, and us, and we’ll go, I don’t want to tell them. And we’re like, but if you don’t—if we don’t give them the feedback—

Andrew: They don’t want to tell them that they didn’t do it.

Barbara: If we don’t discuss how to give constructive feedback in a way that everyone feels great, how are we going to solve this problem? Otherwise you’re just moaning, right? You just want to complain. So yeah, we do a lot.

Andrew: From what I heard, firing is a big issue for you too.

Barbara: Yes. I don’t fire people particularly easily. I try to hire them slower. I try to put them through—

Andrew: You were apparently at one point—you were so—it was a big issue for you.

Barbara: Yes, it was. Yeah. Yeah, I got—yeah, so learning to fire somebody has been probably my biggest weakness. I’d say is that I would hang on to people for a little bit too long, because I really believe in people, and I love mentoring people. And I definitely have hung on for too long with some people. But I’ve had to learn that myself, you know. I’ve had to learn to navigate that emotional part of myself, to learn to put more metrics in place and to—

Andrew: Because then it becomes clear to you and to them that this is not working. And—it’s so weird for me, by the way, to be sitting down during an interview. I’m getting antsy now, but I’ve got cracks in the heel bone because of running, and when it first happened, I had all this pain, and I said, I’m gonna run anyway, and then I can’t. And then people say, Andrew, if you’re feeling pain, you shouldn’t run. And I go, I have to run now to just prove to you that I am man enough, strong enough, whatever, to run.

Barbara: Running’s overrated. I’m not a runner, and I just look at runners and go, see, it’s painful.

Andrew: I love it. I love it. I’m now forced to sit, and I realized standing up in these interviews was an issue too. Until this heals up for the next six weeks, I’m going to try to sit. It’s hard. I’ve been standing most of the day. Two years it took you to fire your first person. Yeah, so they were just staying on, or you were cutting back their work time?

Barbara: Yes, it did.
No, they were there. Look, the first person that I eventually fired—look, people, sometimes people are—they do a great job. But this is the thing that I now don’t hire. I see it in the beginning. Yeah, just stand up. Why don’t you just stand up? I see it in the beginning. So we don’t hire people like this anymore, but when they’re slippery, right? So if a person online—and everyone listening who’s had a VA that was slippery will know what I mean—they’re there, then they’re not there. Then they say they’re there, then they sort of lie, and then all that crap, right?

It’s like when someone’s cheating on you. You can’t catch them, and it’s just slippery, and you keep blaming yourself. So I have gone through the pain of that, and I’ve also seen clients go through it, and we have now eradicated that problem. How? Well, with VAs that work with clients—look, one of the reasons I went away from work from home—

is I—look, you can’t grow that, right? So work from home is great, right? So if you’ve got a work-from-home VA, I’ve got lots of them. That’s great, right? If they’re good. I couldn’t grow it, though. You can’t go to 500 people on that model. So that was the reason. But also, I just felt I needed people who want to show up for work on time. They don’t want to do it whenever they feel like it, because that just doesn’t work, right?

Andrew: You’re saying that if they are in office, there’s not much room to be slippery, but if they’re doing at home, stuff comes up, it becomes—

Barbara: Kids—there’s—they’re working at three o’clock in the morning, and they tell you, no, I’m a night person. You’re like, nice, it’s not working, right? It’s just not working. So—

Andrew: They have to work their evenings because they have to be on US time? Is it US, Europe, or Australia?

Barbara: We run 24-7 now, so we have a night shift that runs in the office, but those are people that choose to work the night shift, and we pay more for that, and we’ve got lots of programs for that. But when you’re—yeah, it’s this whole thing of, if people are given too much flexibility, I sort of say you’re better off doing flexibility within a bit of a structure, because as humans, if you give yourself even too much flexibility, you won’t do anything. Nothing gets done, right?

I learned through my own experience of allowing too much freedom, allowing too much—like, you have to have some form of structure. So again, I was great with processes, and I needed to bring that process management sort of thing into how I manage people, because you’re managing people at the end of the day.

Andrew: All right, let me talk about my second sponsor and then come back here and find out how you grew beyond this, because the first batch was just people who knew your website, who came into the webinar, but you got better at getting clients. The second sponsor is a company called Active Campaign. You know them. What do you know about Active Campaign?

Barbara: ActiveCampaign are awesome. They just kind of burst onto the market a few years ago, and they’ve really—you know what? ActiveCampaign, I have to say, they took a problem and they massively solved for it. What’s the problem? I think the gap between MailChimp and Infusionsoft was too big. Ontraport came in and solved a lot of that problem in terms of their pricing. I’m a big Entroport user myself. But there was still a gap in that MailChimp to Ontraport place.

And I think initially ActiveCampaign came in and solved for that problem massively. And now they’re solving more problems in that. Like, they’re not just in that space. They have—they have really become a player, a contender in this particular CRM space.

Andrew: Yeah, because you know what, the problem with MailChimp was you couldn’t do marketing automation really. They could always say yes, you could, and yeah, if you like figure out these hacky ways of doing it, you could do it. But you really couldn’t say someone just hit this thing, did that thing, did that other, tag them in a certain way so when we have a new product that fits everyone who did all those steps, we can talk. You couldn’t do that really with MailChimp. Infusionsoft, you’re right—you could do it. The problem is you could do everything, and it gets so complicated and convoluted.

Barbara: So a really interesting thing happened. You would think that I’d be running a massive affiliate program. I don’t. I did initially. It was a nightmare to manage it. We were getting all the wrong clients. It was really difficult, right? So I stopped it. But what I found was that we were getting referrals from people I had never even heard of. So business coaches out there were referring clients to our business because people were talking about us in Facebook groups. So, you know, some of the big Facebook groups, somebody mentioned, hey, there’s this company called The Virtual Hub, and they train them really deeply. So I’ve got a really deep training program, and people started talking about it naturally. And what I found was business coaches—I have been a business coach, and I know that if you want to get success for your clients, you need to get them to take action. And the reason some of them don’t is because you leave them with a massive to-do list that they’ve no time to do. So business coaches figured out pretty quickly

that they—this was a place they could, they felt they could trust that they would get decent VAs. Number two, I know—

Andrew: Program with them?

It’s just—do you do anything to recruit them?

Barbara: I don’t think people even cared. None of them even approached me to ask about that, but they just felt that this was really important for their clients to get this right. So we did really well with that. I did a couple of speaking gigs just through people I knew at smaller events. I also have my own podcast. So I’ve got a podcast called The Virtual Success Show. Look, it’s—you know, I love doing it. I’ve got a cohost on there, but I wouldn’t say it’s a massive spinner for us at this point. We are going to ramp it up, but—

Getting on other people’s podcasts has also been great for me. Even small podcasts, we get a trickle of clients from every single one. So I was on the active page—yeah, we do.

Andrew: What’s the deal with EOFire? I was looking at SimilarWeb to see where you got your traffic. One of the top referring websites is EOFire.com. John Lee Dumas, his podcast. Do you have a partnership or anything with him?

Barbara: No, I was on his podcast, and I actually want to reach out to him and just thank him for the opportunity. He interviewed me. I did a masterclass for his listeners, and we honestly—we did get flooded after that. So one podcast for me is quite a—it is quite a good set. Look, I think it’s because it’s a topic that people really want to learn about. They really, really desperately want to know how to get success with it. And everybody’s asking themselves, why am I not successful with it?

And I’m here to tell people it’s because it’s not as simple as people are telling you. The market is saying, just get a VA, pay three bucks an hour. It’s really difficult, right? So you can do it, but we help you to do it.

Andrew: I get that. What I’m intrigued by is building the business behind it because the idea of saying I’m going to systemize or productize people makes sense. The execution is tough. It’s a nightmare. We have a mutual friend—what’s his name? Carl Taylor. Carl—you know Carl. In private, he told me how much of a nightmare it was for him to keep track of his people, to keep track. And what he does is he—

Barbara: Yes, correct.

Andrew: He doesn’t let his people do anything, and it’s all in his own project management software. And even then, when it’s limited scope, use his software and so on, it’s still a nightmare. So I’m curious about how you did it. And it looks like what you—here’s what I’m taking away from it: focus down on a handful of things that you can train people for and get good at, and then even have someone who’s even better internally to help them out.

Actually, that’s the biggest takeaway from this, right?

Barbara: I’m like the CEO, right? I’m naturally good at it. I’m a very good project manager. I know if I was to say what’s my greatest strength, I’m a master executor, right? So I will go in and take a vision and execute that. That’s just my natural strength. My natural weakness is not firing people fast enough, right? I’m too nice. But I would agree. And Carl and I talk about this all the time. We’re both in Sydney. It is a nightmare.

Right? Even if you are good at this, it is not easy because you’re dealing with people. Now, how I’ve managed to get over the hump of that is to try to strip the emotion out of everything. So I do not interview people anymore. I’m not allowed in the end. Actually, it was my team who said, Barb, we can’t have you in the interviews anymore. And I was like, why? Well, why? And they said, because you’re too nice, you want to give everyone a job. So it’s moving everything back to metrics, being unemotional, and—

Andrew: You put metrics on everything? Like, can someone send out an email? How could he put a metric on that? I’d love to—I want to put metrics on stuff.

Barbara: Okay, so emails—here’s the other trick. People think email is the first thing you would outsource. I’m telling you, it’s the last. It is very difficult to outsource your email.

Andrew: You mean my personal email?

Barbara: Any of it. Even your customer support is tricky, right? Because—

Andrew: No, I meant sending out email using whatever CRM people are using, whatever email service provider, right? So you said that—how do you put a metric on whether they do it right?

Barbara: Well, is the link correct? Were there any mistakes with it?

Andrew: So does that mean that the client has to come back and have a checklist of things to check out?

Barbara: I won’t check every email, but you’re going to figure out pretty quickly. Like, you’re on your own email list. If it comes out wrong, you’re—

Andrew: How many complaints there are? Because I’m a metric-driven person too, but I find that certain things are hard to put a metric around. Like, for example, how do I know whether Ari has done as good a job as possible? And actually, I know she does a great job. She just picked this stuff up. How do I know whether she’s improving between this month and next month? I couldn’t even come up with a metric. One of my past guests said for some things, you could just let the person put their own number on it, their own quality. If they know their stuff, they’ll know that when they haven’t done a good job or when things just suck. And Ari has been looking at it, and she said, you know what, the last few were not very well edited. And she said, I know why—Skype is not that great. We’re gonna shift you now to Zoom because Zoom is updated. They keep getting better at audio quality. I’m gonna figure out how to edit Zoom, and we’re gonna shift to that. But that was a tough time to come up with a metric for both of us to see how well she’s improving. How do you do it for something like that?

Barbara: There’s an idea that somebody else shared with me. So my cohost on my podcast is a fantastic business coach. And he said to me, so first of all, if you have people on your team, you have to accept that another job that you have to take on as a leader is that you have to actually review. You’ve got to do reviews, right? And you’ve got to have KPIs with people, right? So a great way to do this is to allow people to rate themselves. So let’s say you’re going to do a six-monthly review. You can set this up in your automation software.

Set an automation to send them their own evaluation sheet at month five, right? And ask them to rate themselves, and send the same sheet to you. Now, if it’s a podcast, what I would suggest doing—you don’t have to go through and listen to every podcast—randomly select a few and just quickly run through. You got to, because you’ve got to have oversight, right? At some point, you have to have oversight of what your people are doing. That’s not micromanaging. That’s purely just leadership. And then you will rate that person based on—

It could be things like how many ideas they came up with, how many times they wow you. Like, you know, are they coming up with ideas?

Andrew: It should be how many times you said no to people, because everyone wants to throw stuff at the developer. Well, who’s right metric? Sorry.

Barbara: That’s a great one. You know, how many times—are they overwhelmed with the job? So you got to really sit down and think this out. But when you look at how they scored themselves and their own comments, and then—you don’t look at that while you score them—and then you guys come together and have a meeting and look at what the scores were. And it makes the conversation much more open, because there’s no dancing around.

Andrew: What do you do to keep—give a spreadsheet where everyone puts their numbers in? Do you use different software for that?

Barbara: You can just use a JotForm and just have it show up in a Google Sheet or something like that. We’ve got an internal HR management system now that does that.

Andrew: What are you using for that?

Barbara: Well, we’re using a tool called Zoho People, but we’re kind of moving away from that at the moment. We’ve actually built our own internal one. So we’ve got an internal app for that now. Zoho People is pretty good. There’s trackers in there. But I was just using a JotForm, though, and people were just—they would just update their own JotForm.

Andrew: It’s that big spreadsheet that I want with the key ideas, the key numbers.

Barbara: You could use ActiveCampaign for this. You could have a profile for your person. Okay, mine’s different because I’ve got loads of them, loads of people. But we would have profiles for them, contact records. And in the contact record, we could have custom fields for all these things where they rate themselves and my rating.

Andrew: And then you get to see it over time. ActiveCampaign is a CRM and email service provider. I hate that. I hate when we go into ESP, email service provider. I wish there was a better name for this stuff. All right, for anyone who wants to go check out your website—they—oh, look, here’s another thing. Like, what’s LifterLMS? They’re sending you a bunch of traffic. Why? What are you doing with them?

Barbara: LifterLMS—you know, I met somebody who I literally think I actually became friends with this person. So Chris Badgett, who’s the founder of LifterLMS—it is a learning management software tool. It’s a plugin for WordPress where you can create a learning experience for your course. So if you’re creating an online course and you want to have a learning management system that can give out certificates and do all this sort of fun stuff, LifterLMS is a great little tool for that. So he had me on his podcast, and he also had me do a webinar, full webinar, for his internal audience. So we’ve—and I had him on my podcast and stuff like that. Yeah. He’s run big teams before.

Andrew: So now I’m getting a sense of where you’re getting your clients, how you’re working. I don’t know how you’re not more exhausted. What time is it? You’re in Sydney.

Barbara: We also look at other strategy we are running right now, and just for people listening, this is a lot, okay? This is a marathon, long-game one, not a short-game strategy. We do a lot of organic content marketing. Now, this is one I’ve delegated really successfully. I have a full team that run this. So there’s everything from the long-tail keyword research right through to—we’re very specific about our topic maps, what we’re writing about. We have the writers. I’ve got somebody managing that. I’ve got another person who manages putting up the content on the blog, all the images, the social media distribution, blah, blah, blah. We’re getting traffic.

Andrew: You’re still not great at it from what I could see on—this is new.

Barbara: We’ve been doing it 12 months, and we’re getting there now.

Andrew: 12 months to get there. Look at this—your keywords are virtual agent hub, our systems, your success. You’re doing well with—All right, I’m glad that you’re on here.

There’s a guy who just wouldn’t stop with us until we had you on. He was right, because we made a mistake. I don’t know why we didn’t have you on sooner. Paul Higgins—he found me every freaking method online. And I appreciate it, because somehow our system broke down.

Barbara: That’s long-game strategy.

Andrew: We didn’t have you on, and you were in our system, but we lost you. And so I’m glad that he followed up and had we have you on here. Anyone who wants to go check you out should go check out thevirtualhub.com. And I’ve got no affiliate program, so you guys can just go sign up directly. If you want to check out my two sponsors there—I still don’t have an affiliate program—but I do get credit if you guys go to not just ActiveCampaign, but check out ActiveCampaign.com/Mixergy.

And if you’re raising money for your company, think about crowdsourcing through StartEngine. They are—no, it’s Mixergy.StartEngine.com. I hope I didn’t say it wrong previously. Mixergy.StartEngine.com. Let me confirm that. Mixergy—how are they ever going to buy another ad for me again? I did that to their founder. I basically said I didn’t trust them until I did all this research, and then I gave the wrong URL. I think—I think—I don’t even know. All right.

Barbara: I think that’s better. I think that you’ve given them—you know you’ve said it.

Andrew: It gives them some attention. There’s no way they’re buying another ad. There’s no way. I got a feeling. You know who’s going to buy a bunch more ads? It’s ActiveCampaign. We’ve turned a bunch of people onto them. It’s Toptal because they’re really good at converting people. Toptal and ActiveCampaign are basically in a fight with—can you give us more spots? But I’m proud of the relationship I have with all my sponsors. I see a lot of podcasters now—they’re playing music under their ads, let you know, this is not really me, I’m getting paid for this.

If we ever get to that point where I am—

Barbara: You’re in business. You’re running a business. People are always really funny about like, I get paid for this. I’m like, it’s a business, right? I mean, you have to get paid for things you do, right?

Andrew: That’s the most tangible experience that people are going to have in my business. If they sign up for StartEngine or ActiveCampaign, the experience they have there is more impactful on their business than the hour they spend with me here. And if it’s a crappy experience, they’re going to hate me. If it’s a great experience, they’re going to love me. So I can’t get 100%, but I got to get as close to 100% success for my audience as possible. All right, I better run. I’m running late to pick up my kid from school. I’m now a dad. Can you believe that, Barbara?

Barbara: I’m a mom. We have kids the same age.

Andrew: Yeah, I’m responsible now. All right. Thank you so much for being on here. Thank you all for listening. If you’ve got an Alexa or any other smart speaker, please shout out it and say, play Mixergy podcast. I think you’ll be excited. Bye, everyone.