Jon Tromans: Hi, welcome to NotAnother Marketing Podcast where I’m talking to Barbara Turley, the CEO of The Virtual Hub who provides virtual assistance. So I’m going to be talking about how a VA can help a business optimize their operations, what questions should we ask a VA agency and should we integrate our VA into our team. Now can check out all the links in the show notes, give them a quick tap, subscribe if you enjoy the pod. Let’s get to it. Hey Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Hey John, how are you?

Jon Tromans: I’m good. You’re somewhere really nice at the moment, aren’t you, but I’m jealous because I’m looking out of my window and it’s like grey skies. There’s like that really fine misty drizzle that you only get in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s like it’s not raining but when you go out it just soaks you in two minutes.

Barbara Turley: Yes. Well, being Irish background, I grew up with that. So we call it soft rain. And I moved away from that about 20 years ago. And I went to the beautiful shores of Sydney and Bondi and lived there for a long time. And now I’m back living. I spend half the year in a beautiful place called Chamonix Mont Blanc in France, where it’s snowing and it’s a ski sort of ski town.

Jon Tromans: Totally jealous. We’re going to be talking about virtual assistants and kind of like how they can help marketing agencies and also other businesses as well, which is going to be quite interesting. But first of all, let me give you 30 seconds to tell everybody who you are, what you do, starting about now.

Barbara Turley: Sure. So I’m obviously an Irish background for those who didn’t pick that up. I would say I’m a recovering corporate career junkie. I spent 15 years in the financial industry, working on trading floors and I was in asset management sales and all sorts of high flying career jobs.

And then I decided that I wanted to build my own company about 10 years ago and I branched out, did some consulting. And this is the very short way of saying through doing some business coaching for a couple of years, I discovered that so many businesses were getting the support layer in their businesses wrong and they were spending too much money on execution. And I started The Virtual Hub, which is an offshore staffing business based out of the Philippines. And we have clients all over the world, US, Canada, Australia, the UK, even in Europe now we’re growing quite a lot in Europe and we provide support, virtual assistance to lots of types of businesses.

Jon Tromans: I was talking to somebody, I mentioned it just before we started, but I was talking to somebody about an hour ago on the phone and they kind of like run, they got about, I don’t know, 10, 15 staff or something like that. And they get their well-trained staff to actually do some of the marketing work and do some of the admin work on top of it. And I suppose, like you said, you end up paying a much higher wage for somebody just ticking boxes, filling in forms, sending stuff to the account and that sort of thing and that could be done somewhere else.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, absolutely. And look, I see this constantly. It doesn’t matter the type of business or the geographical location. I’ve gone into so many different industries, everything from retail to financial services to like yoga retreats, as you mentioned before, e-commerce businesses, you name it, I’ve pretty much done it. Even local brick and mortar businesses like a swim school or a tennis center, we’ve done those kinds of things as well. And what you find is you go in there and the most expensive asset that any business has outside of real estate, that used to be the biggest one. And then of course COVID changed a lot of things there, but your human capital, the resource that is your people is the greatest asset that any business has. And it is usually the most expensive one as well. It’s the bit that costs you the most. And yet it is the asset that I think most businesses do not optimize the way they do everything else. For example, many businesses are going around paying people $150,000 a year to spend anywhere from 20 to 60% of their day doing things that are process driven, therefore trainable, and therefore delegatable with a bit of work. And you can delegate that to an offshore team, amazing teams in the Philippines of support assistants, and making sure that you’re getting the support layer of any business, be it a marketing agency or like I said, any sort of business. Getting the support layer right and making sure that you’re constantly delegating down such that your key people, their time and energy is optimized and being spent on the things that move the needle. And that applies to any business.

Jon Tromans: It kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? Because if you are paying somebody, I don’t know, 80 to 100,000 pounds a year or something like that, and then you ask them to just do admin stuff, that is a waste of money because you’re paying them an awful lot of money to do something quite basic and they’re not doing their actual job, which you’ve hired them for. So why do you think a lot of companies look at hiring a virtual assistant as like an extra expense and not really as a saving?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a, I love this question because I think what happens in businesses, first of all, just tackling the first part of that question. What is the reason that we do this? We pay our key staff to do this admin work. Well, the reality is because who else is going to do it? Right. The problem is that if you go and try and hire an assistant locally or, you know, it’s hard to recruit, they’re not that cheap, you know, to try and get somebody good, it still costs quite a bit of money and it doesn’t make cost optimization sense, if I could put it that way. Until enter the whole world of offshore teams and virtual assistants and things like that, where you can get very cost effective teams offshore and actually integrate them inside your business. And now, boom, you do have somebody to delegate the work to and thereby you free up a whole pile of issues. So for example, you free up the time of your key person. What they actually want to be spending their time doing is the thing that moves the needle. They want their energy freed up, their time freed up so that they can do the job they were hired to do. But invariably we do find that a lot of people in businesses, just by the nature of the work that needs to get done, there’s so much of it, that they just get bogged down. And honestly, it doesn’t matter who I speak to at what level of an organization, anywhere from 20 to 60% of the day is spent trying to just keep the wheel moving. And that’s quite a cost. Yeah.

Jon Tromans: Yeah, yeah, I’ve just been sat dithering with email most of the morning and I had three days off. I had three days out of the office last week. I was up in Manchester and down Southampton and doing a few other things working. And then you get back to the office and you try and do as much as you can on the train and things like that, but you never do. But I mean, it’s just like yesterday, the first half of the day was just spent. I need a virtual assistant, don’t I?

Barbara Turley: Yes, I was just thinking, you know, I don’t really tend to do that these days. Now, obviously I have loads of them. I’ve got organizational structure. I mean, we’re at 350 people at the moment. So we have quite a big org chart, but it’s, it’s this. I think what I usually try to say to business owners is it’s a constant focus on delegation. I think delegation is underrated and also the skill of being able to delegate effectively is something that’s not talked about enough. It is like the gateway to scaling any business, because if you don’t know how to delegate and you don’t know how to do operations, which is systems, processes and delegation, it’s going to be very hard to scale a business. You’re going to do it in a way that is going to blow up a lot of money.

You might be able to do it, but you’ll still be spending more than you need to.

Jon Tromans: Do you think there’s a control thing going on? Yeah, do you think it’s all about control? Because I talk to a lot of people who just, I don’t know, don’t know whether it’s an old-fashioned attitude or something, they, and I speak to a lot of younger folk who believe this, that nobody else can do it as well as I do it. I’m the person who can do it. And you used to hear that from the older generations, but I’m hearing it now from folks in their 30s who are kind of like saying, well, I’m not going to get anybody else to do it because they won’t do it how I want it done.

Barbara Turley: So there’s a two prong answer to that question or conundrum. So the first thing is the concept of that I’m better at it than anybody else. And there’s this rule of delegation, it’s called the 70% rule or the 80% rule, doesn’t really matter, but it’s like if 70% people always think in absolutes, they’re like, well, this process that I do or this thing that I do can’t be delegated because there’s these two pieces that require my IP. But if you get really good at process development, you can break things down and go, well, 80% of it actually can be done by somebody else. And then I can do the 20% oversight if you really, or I can fix it or I can mold it. And the point about this is every time, every minute or hour that you free up is actually the time that you’re going to use to drive the business forward. So a lack of focus on delegation means that you’re not going to grow as fast as you could if you got after it yourself. Now, influencers in social media and stuff like that, there is an argument to say that some of their content obviously requires them. But for example, I’m on this podcast now. There is no way that I’m going to sit and listen to this podcast afterwards and pick out timestamps and cut the videos and figure out what bits are going to go on social media. That can be done by a team. And all I’ve got to do, literally all I did today was show up here and have this lovely conversation with you. The front end of it and the back end of it, the booking, the snippets, all the bits that are going to happen around this are going to be done by a team and they’re all assistants. There’s no specialists in there.

Jon Tromans: No, no, you’re absolutely right. So what sort of tasks are you finding people asking VAs to do? What’s the most important? Is it just basic admin or are we talking about a few, you know, big higher level things?

Barbara Turley: Yes. So the most basic layer is obviously admin and you know, admin can be anything from calendar management, email management. Now email management is a funny one, right? Because everyone thinks that’s easy. Even an experienced person can find it difficult to take over somebody else’s email. So my theory on email, I could talk about this for four hours. So I’ll only just drop this in, is that you first must think about how do you eradicate email and then delegate the rest. Examples very quickly would be making sure that your customers are not emailing you or emailing a help desk and there’s email overflow for support tickets or support. You need to push that into a support system where there’s process and all that sort of thing. And not using email for internal communication. If you can, using tools like Asana, you’ve got ClickUp, there’s loads of them these days that you should be running your internal systems on. So that’s just that. So the bottom layer is the admin, it can be expense management, it can be doing invoicing, all of these kinds of things that are at the lower end. Then you move up, marketing is an interesting one because anybody running an agency will know that 20% of marketing is strategy. And the strategy, without the strategy, you’re going to go nowhere. But 80% is doing, like anything from all this link building that goes on right through to creating content calendars and scheduling stuff in Hootsuite and creating Canva images and putting captions on videos. All of these things can be trained and done by VAs and you don’t need to have serious expertise to actually execute well on that if you have a solid process. And just on that, it actually brings me back to your previous question around control. I really do want to circle back on that because it’s a very important one that I didn’t touch on. The control element, people beat themselves up and say, or on podcasts like this, all sheepishly say, is it because we all want to control? There is actually nothing wrong with wanting to maintain control over how the business is run, how things are done. I think what people forget is they feel like delegation is handing over control. Delegation done well is giving somebody else the thing to do while maintaining the control over how it’s done yourself. That comes from process development and active management, not micromanagement, but active management of somebody and making sure that they’re doing the work. What you’ve agreed beforehand, you know, process mapping, how it’s going to be done, the reporting lines, the expectations, you know, what success looks like, what a fail looks like, and then meeting rhythms and things like that. So that’s very, very important.

Jon Tromans: Yeah, I think goals as well. I think looking at the goals on that is right. Because there’s always, I mean, one of the things that I learned it and I was probably in my mid thirties when I learned it, was like a revelation was that there’s more than one way to do something correctly. There’s not just one way of doing it. Right. So somebody might design a Canva image or a VA might do something completely differently to how you did it. But if you got the goal at the end of it, which is like if maybe you sold something or you got a lead or something like that, then it doesn’t really matter, it?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think it’s important to remember as well that when we’re talking about virtual assistants, I think this is a major problem too. There are layers of delegation and when you’re talking about a virtual assistant, unfortunately, the word has morphed from someone with a heartbeat who can type into somebody who can code an app. And that is fundamentally incorrect. And it is expectation creep of the role of an assistant. So when you were talking about virtual assistants, it is my honest view that an assistant is really supposed to stay in the support layer. They can be wildly successful and very, very talented, but really they’re there to assist in process execution. They can also assist in process development, but if they’re going to design a Canva image completely different to you and they have, you know, creative freedom to do that, I would call that a designer. And that’s going a layer above assistant and going into an expertise level. That’s okay. There’s lots of VAs that do that. But it’s being clear on what you’re hiring for, on what your expectation is versus what the role requires and what that person can do. Does that make sense? I think people fall on this all the time.

Jon Tromans: It does. Yeah. Yeah. Because there’s kind of like, there’s a fine line from being sort of like a virtual assistant and a freelancer.

Barbara Turley: Yes, totally. Yeah. Or being a designer and some amazing designers could be great, amazing designers, absolutely rubbish at everything else, like admin or trying to, you know, and I think when you’re when you’re particularly starting out, if you’ve got a small business or a medium business even, you kind of need all rounders and VAs that can fly alongside you and do all sorts of things to get the most value out of them. You might not need a designer 40 hours a week, you know.

Jon Tromans: Yeah. No, that’s true. And what about AI? How’s that impacting things? the VAs using AI to complete tasks quicker?

Barbara Turley: They are. So when AI, when ChatGPT launched, I will share that I almost had a nervous breakdown. I was like, oh my God, we’re dead. This is it. This is the end. I think a lot of people would have felt that way, but it has transpired over the last 18 months of it coming out or the year that it’s been around. Then it really is an, it’s like powering up our people. And I was thinking about it going, I don’t use AI myself, but I want my team using it. Like I’m not going to go in to ChatGPT and I don’t do any of that stuff, but I want my team using it. And they do things so fast now. So for example, the other day I was asked to write, I had to write a company profile for some, we were doing some financial thing and they wanted it. A really tedious document created. And I thought to myself, they’ve sent me the task that I have to write the damn thing. And then I thought, I’m just going to get on Loom. I’m going to talk. And I just did a four minute Loom video. I was like, here’s the sort of sequence of events. I said, just take it and you guys write it. They got the transcript, dropped it into ChatGPT, reformatted it, just fixed it up a bit and boom, we were done.

I just thought, yeah, that’s brilliant. Would have taken them a week to do it otherwise. You know, it took about a minute. It was really good.

Jon Tromans: So you’re not kind of worried that this is going to take away a lot of the admin stuff because I mean to be fair the ChatGPT is a little bit rubbish and you do need to check it.

Barbara Turley: Look, I think, I think, you know, we are, we are on a big project right now to power up our people with AI and to train them on that. And that’s actually the bigger job because the reality is, you would like anyone in marketing will know this, the amount of businesses out there that still have not got their heads around the marketing automation of a decade ago is a lot. So I just think we’re not every business is going to be able to catch up that fast and it’s better to have, you know, they’re not even on this support layer optimization of human capital budgets or anything. Millions of businesses out there still aren’t even there with that. So I think we have a long way to go with it and it’s exciting. That’s how we use it.

Jon Tromans: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s going to become, I think, suppose, a spell checker, that type of a tool. Not like spell checker. I mean, can spell checker, but it’s going to be a tool to help you.

Barbara Turley: It’s a tool to augment and speed up things. It’s going to be brilliant for global productivity, which is what we need right now in the world economy and stuff like that. So I think we just got to get on board and start using it and our people with it, you know.

Jon Tromans: Yeah, so what questions should we be asking, you reckon, a VA agency if we want to some, hire them? What do you hate being asked?

Barbara Turley: Look, we all get the same questions, really. It’s, you know, a lot of people are still confused as to what a VA can do. You sort of got to get clear on those things. I think it’s worth really thinking about this prior to even talking to an agency. You know, there are tons of agencies out there. I think the biggest pitfalls with agencies, it’s good to ask their attrition rate. You know, now they probably won’t tell you honestly, but attrition can be quite high. It’s a big problem. I know this because we had this problem several years ago and we’ve worked extremely hard on culture and everything to get our attrition rates down because what does the client want when they come to an agency? They want continuity. They want like they want to know that the person is in and that, you know, we have VAs that have worked on client accounts for five, six years.

Now they’re just longevity of and they’re showing up every day. And the other one is, is it a pool or a dedicated person? That’s a really important question because you may be okay with having a pool of VAs servicing in rotation, there are tons of cybersecurity risks and data privacy risks with that. Or is it dedicated to once you pick the person, are they working with you? You probably also want to ask about something people don’t think of actually is, you know, when you’re working in places like the Philippines, are they contractors or employees? And the reason you may want to ask that question is, you know, when ours are all employees, why is that? Because then they have access to all of the benefits inside that country. You know, we get way better health cover, we get all the corporate health cover, private health cover agreements, we’ve got all their benefits and mandatory statutory things sorted out. And that’s really powerful for people in the Philippines, that they may not fully understand when they’re contracting. So you cannot deliver those things if you’re only hiring contractors. And it’s a bit flimsy on the security and things like that. So I think those are the types of questions. And these days you may also want to ask about the data security and privacy setups and stuff like that to just, you know, make sure that you’re GDPR compliant, for example, like European have to make sure that they’re working with a company that the people are GDPR compliant.

Jon Tromans: Yeah, does anybody ask you about kind of like standard living payment? Because obviously, we don’t really know sometimes where the VA is. And it could be some Western organisation taking advantage of somebody and literally just paying no money for something.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, these days, look, that can and does happen. But these days, the market is quite competitive, you know, and I mean, even for us to hire people, companies in the Philippines, for example, can’t get away with that as much as they used to. You can always ask the people themselves, but there are rules around talking about financials. I think, look, there’s ratings, you know, we work really hard to make sure that, we have external auditors asking our employees to rate us anonymously. For example, Glassdoor is a great place. We’ve got anonymous ratings going on there and I actually invite them all the time. Good place to check people out and see what the employees say. We have a great place to work certification, which is a global certification where they go to all the employees and you get rated anonymously. Quite nerve wracking when you go into it, but they make comments and stuff like that. Yeah, I think transparency of the culture is handy. Our YouTube channel, we sort of showcase our people and do all that sort of thing. So…

Jon Tromans: Do folks kind of like pick a VA and stick with them and almost make them a part of their own team?

Barbara Turley: Yes, the way we operate, that’s what we encourage. So we only do part-time and full-time people. And although, and this is a key point for larger organizations, this is a key point. These people sit on our payroll and they are our head count, but they look and feel and act like they’re an integrated part of your business. So this is a way for you to get capacity, massive amounts of capacity without increasing the head count, which is a really big strategy that’s out there right now. And of course, when you free up the time of your key people, you asked earlier, do people see it as a cost? I always say like, you might think you’ve hired a VA with us and you might think that you’ve just spent, I don’t know, 20, 30, 40 grand, whatever it’s going to cost in the year. I would argue that if you free up the time of, if you free up 20 to 30% of the time of three of your key people, what have you actually done? You’ve actually cloned another one of them for free. What are they going to do with their time? So I would argue that this is going to make you money. It’s not going to cost you money in the end, but that’s up to you to figure out what you’re going to do with that time and energy.

Jon Tromans: Yeah. Do you find them companies kind of like, you know, those God awful zoom sessions where everybody gets together and they have like a zoom social or something which are keep me away from those, I can tell you. Do you find folks inviting the VA along to that?

Barbara Turley: Yes. Yep. So they do. They go to all the virtual events. So like we said, we encourage, and we work with our clients to ensure that this VA is going to be integrated inside that business as part of that team. They’re going to look and feel like that team. And even our clients, we will facilitate things like, you know, when the client Christmas party is happening in Sydney or in, you know, San Francisco or wherever it’s on, we will facilitate and run the team Christmas party in the Philippines at the same time so that they will have continuity. And then we also have huge culture. We’ve had a whole events committee and everything. We run events constantly, some in person, some virtual. We run gaming tournaments and all sorts of things that provides culture for smaller clients that may not be able to provide that for the VA. They get it from us anyway. So that’s it.

Jon Tromans: I think that’s important because it kind of like it leads to fulfillment, doesn’t it? You can always think of the VA as somebody who is just like over there. Right. And we don’t really involve them in what we do. And that person would then feel isolated from the rest of it, even though they’re doing all this work. And I think that leads to a lack of fulfillment and you get worse results.

Barbara Turley: Yes, you got to maintain relationship and stuff like that. We have result coaches, we have them all in teams, we have client success managers, so we’re always kind of working as a team on a client account, even though the VA is the one that’s integrated inside a client account.

Jon Tromans: Fantastic. I could chat for ages about this. But I would need a VA to edit the video if it was any longer. Thanks for your time Barbara. Where can we find you? Where’s your website? Social media bits?

Barbara Turley: Sure. Yeah. So we are thevirtualhub.com. And you can find us on all the socials, actually a great channel to go to is our YouTube channel. That’s The Virtual Hub limited LTD on YouTube. You can find us on Instagram or on Facebook. We’re on LinkedIn. And if you want to follow me, I post on LinkedIn. That’s where you can find me. So it’s just Barbara Turley on LinkedIn. And yeah, come and say hi there and you’ll probably see snippets of this podcast going around when we go live.

Jon Tromans: Fantastic. Brilliant. Thanks ever so much for your time, Barbara. Appreciate it.

Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me.

Jon Tromans: Thanks again to Barbara for her time, don’t forget to check out all the links in the show notes, give them a quick tap, if you’ve enjoyed the episode you can subscribe for more at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, it’s absolutely everywhere, just search for Not Another Marketing Podcast. Thanks for listening.