Brett Ingram: Hey everybody, this is Brett Ingram, and this is the Optimize Podcast, the show that helps entrepreneurs build their dream business and dream life. Today we’re talking with Barbara Turley, founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, a leading virtual assistant company. She’s grown a 350-employee enterprise, so she’s on a mission to revolutionize the way businesses operate by helping clients to optimize their operations using offshore virtual assistance, process automation, and streamlined workflows. So the big question is, how are entrepreneurs like us who have too much to do in too little time able to build both the business and the life of our dreams? That’s the question. And on this podcast, we’ll explore the journey to the answer.

My name is Brett Ingram, entrepreneur and award-winning product creator. I chose to build a business and have time for a personal life, and I want to help you do the same. Welcome to Optimize. I’m a huge believer in outsourcing personally, and automation, so I’m excited to have her with us today because she’s going to share with us some amazing tips about getting more done in less time. So with that, welcome Barbara, and thanks for joining us.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me. I can imagine, I mean, I’m so into support layer assistance and automation as well that I’m sure we can have a great back and forth about this, about how to optimize ourselves even better.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, I’m excited about it because I’ll have a couple little stories to share along the way. I made a couple of big mistakes when I tried, and so I think anything we could share that helps, because if I knew then what I know now, it would have been a totally different ballgame. So I know you’re gonna be sharing with us some really amazing tips about how to optimize our businesses so we can scale easier, faster, and everything, and still have more free time.

Scale Your Business
by Outsourcing

But I wanna start out by asking you about your background. So what did you do to start your career? And what led you to focus on outsourcing and virtual assistants in particular?

Barbara Turley: Sure—it’s kind of an interesting story in itself because I was corporate. I wasn’t actually the entrepreneurial startup. I didn’t have 10 startups that didn’t go anywhere. I was fully in the corporate world. I was in the financial industry for a very long time, and I absolutely loved it. So all through my 20s, I was an equity trader for a long time. I also was in asset management sales. But where the kind of entrepreneurial thing, or the business growth thing, I suppose, kind of hit me was in the last big financial crisis, in the 2008 rumble—those of us who are old enough to remember that now—it was crazy, it was absolutely crazy.

I, after that time, got an opportunity to join a sort of a startup of sorts. There was a very clever bunch of people that I knew that got an opportunity to take a business out of one of the investment banks in Sydney, and I joined, and I decided to hop on the coattails of that, and I learned so much about how a great company gets built. It really kind of wetted my appetite to say, like, “Wow, I’d like to do that myself one day.” That was kind of the first start of that.

But it did take five years before I actually decided to make the jump. And I think the real job, honestly, for me then, was to say I actually wanted to have children. Now, you wouldn’t normally go, “Right, I should therefore start and launch a company,” right? In hindsight, that’s a really bad idea. But what I kind of pulled off, mainly because I suppose coming out of our conversation of optimizing our lives, I had to—the constraints were so intense for me because I decided to become the entrepreneurial mom and do children at the same time. But how I went from that to outsourcing is interesting.

There was no decision in that. It wasn’t like—there was no thought in it. It was completely by accident. I was a business coach, and I did notice that most of the businesses I was coaching, yes, they needed strategy and advice around certain things, but actually what they really needed was assistance in their business. They needed people to do the doing. They were doing too much themselves—a classic problem. And I had gotten a virtual assistant myself, and I just enrolled from there. I found myself doing it for clients, and before I knew it, I was kind of in a new business. I was like, wow, this is actually—so I’m doing something totally different here and getting asked for that more. So that’s the kind of very quick version of the story about how I ended up doing this and coming full circle there.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, that’s really cool. So obviously then once you started getting asked by other people, “Hey, can you do this for me? Can you find me somebody?” is that actually what spurred you to start The Virtual Hub itself?

Barbara Turley: Yes, totally. I realized what a game changer it was for certain clients I was working with and for me. I had done it for some close friends, had done it for clients, put virtual assistants into their businesses. Now I had also helped them, though, with operational frameworks to make that work better. So that was what I actually found myself being a specialist coach in. And then I thought, I wonder, is there a business in this VA thing? And I mean, there were people doing it back then, but I seemed to be getting business doing it, and I was quite enjoying it. Yeah, that kind of—I made the jump, and I wasn’t doing business coaching anymore after that, and I decided to go all in. Overnight, I was in a new business, really. That’s how—it was very accidental, very organic.

Brett Ingram: That’s funny, and it’s kind of cool because oftentimes it goes the opposite way. Somebody has an idea, and then they say, “You know what, I think I’ll build a business around this.” So starting something is one thing, but to be able to build something to a 350-person enterprise is a totally different ballgame, a different skill set. So how did it evolve from sort of the kindling that you had into the full-blown version of what you’re doing now?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so one of—look, I had a lot to learn, let’s be honest. And for any people who’ve done the entrepreneurial journey out there, they will know that it is fraught with risks and crevices and all sorts of gut-wrenching experiences, to be totally honest. And I had all of those. I had all of those experiences because I had no experience recruiting or hiring people either. I actually had never really led a team. I had always done quite solo work in all of my previous jobs. So that was a wild ride, shall we say.

But I think what happened—there are two things here in this that actually stood to me. Number one, I had been a trader for eight years on an equity trading floor. And when you’re doing that job, it’s very fast, it’s very dynamic. And what you’re actually doing is matching supply and demand really quickly and making decisions around that. And I felt in the early days, when it was quite fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, it was very much like just matching supply and demand. There were people that wanted stuff, and there were people looking for jobs, and I was able to kind of quickly figure out what both sides needed and create a match myself. So that kind of worked really in the early days. But after a while, you can’t do that at scale. It wasn’t really scalable. I had to build systems.

And the next thing that really stood to me was I discovered, again quite by accident, that my natural skill set—I’m very good at systems and processes, and I loved automation. I think it’s because I’m naturally lazy, and anytime I have to do something more than once, I’m like, I wonder, can we process this or give it to someone else? So I’m naturally good at that, and I was able to very quickly figure out that if you have the right operational framework and you actually build out your departments and your companies, you… I knew how to scale it up basically from an operational standpoint, and that was very, very useful for my journey. And I think operational frameworks are where a lot of companies actually stumble when they’re trying to scale. Yeah, they don’t get that right.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, I mean, doing something on an entrepreneurial level where you’re just sort of forcing your way or working your way through it, you can do on a small basis. But as you start to try to scale it or grow it, all of the cracks, all of the issues, and the problems start to reveal themselves, and they make it impossible to be able to scale if you aren’t doing things efficiently and well.

Barbara Turley: It makes it expensive to scale as well, if I could just add. What I’ve learned over the years of doing this is the operational framework is one thing—you need systems and processes. If you get it right, though, and if you really nail that and you master that, you’ll figure out pretty quickly what you can automate, what you can delegate, and then what you can actually have virtual assistants do. And you’ll find that you can have them doing a lot more than you think.

And I find a lot of businesses, what they’re actually doing now—I see this all the time—there’s nobody optimizing the human capital budget in a business, and they’re actually paying people, their top people, to spend anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of their day doing process-driven, admin-style stuff that could be trainable and actually could be given to an assistant, but they don’t believe that that’s possible. So I always sort of think the better the machine that you build, actually, the more cost-effective the staff you can put in to run the thing. And I’ve done that over and over and over again in The Virtual Hub and seen it done in client businesses, so I’m a big believer.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, no, I 100% agree with that. In fact, I have a little story I’ll share in a bit about that. But so what about outsourcing versus hiring? So what about the business owner, entrepreneur that says, “You know what, I’m sort of old school here. I don’t know about this whole virtual thing. I like to sit next to somebody.” What would you say to somebody in terms of the pros and cons of hiring versus going with the VA route?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, okay, that’s okay. Let me unpack that question. First, let’s talk about in-person versus remote, right? Because you can hire remote people and not have the outsourcing thing. So I think what—in the like COVID solved a lot of these issues because people were forced to go remote. But those who are very old school, who still think, “I just want the person sitting beside me,” I totally get that because as entrepreneurs, we have this sense of wanting to know what’s happening, right? Because we’re under the pump, right? And we’re like, is this person—are they going to deliver? Is this actually going to work? Every day we’re asking ourselves the question, is this going to work, or is this the day I’m going to collapse and die? That’s kind of how we feel, and I know all business owners can feel that to a certain extent.

And I think some people think that when the person is beside them, that they have a better sense of what’s going on. But actually, it doesn’t matter whether the person is beside you or whether they’re remote. The right operational framework and the right way of working is actually how you get over that problem. I could go on for four hours about how you’re going to achieve that, but it’s about setting objectives and key results, having projects linked to those things, making sure that outcomes and expectations are very, very clear. And sometimes we think we’re being clear, but actually we’re not clear enough. So I’ll park that one there.

But in terms of hiring versus outsourcing, this is another bugbear of mine. I actually hate the word outsourcing. I know I’m in the outsourcing industry—I hate that word. Because outsourcing implies that you’re going to take a piece of work and you’re going to give it into a black hole somewhere else to be taken care of, right? And it feels, again, like a loss of control.

So what I prefer to say is, with a virtual assistant and with the industry that we’re in, although we’re an agency, we’re a company that does this, we actually integrate the virtual assistants inside a client’s business. And we prefer to say we’re like a partner that bolts onto a business. So they’re going to look and feel like an employee, they’re going to look and feel like one of your team, but we’re going to handle all the heavy lifting of recruiting, training, culture, team building, liaising on any sorts of issues that might come up along the way, maternity leave, whatever it is—we actually take all of that.

And a lot of clients, when they want to do this support assistance or they want to get VAs in, they don’t really have the time to be burning, figuring all that stuff out. And really, that’s kind of how I see what we do anyway, what a lot of companies like us do. You want to have this sense of always having the person inside, whether they are employed directly by you or someone else does the employer-of-record type stuff—either way, you still want them integrated inside your business.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. I know when I was starting out, one of the challenges I had is I was trying to do everything myself. I had this feeling of self-reliance. I’m an entrepreneur, right? So I feel like I can do everything, and no one could do as well as I could with the things I need to do. So I was working a lot, but no matter how much I got done and how efficient I got, I realized there was always going to be more to do. So it took me a long time, to be honest, to actually get any sort of help—too long. And so how does an entrepreneur know when they need a VA and when they should get one?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so that’s a great question too. I mean, of course I’m going to argue that you need one straight away, but let me unpack this for a second. So if you’re an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, you’re starting out, you’re on your own—it’s just you, right? And you’re figuring out product-to-market fit. You’re figuring out who’s going to buy what, is what you’re going to sell going to sell, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a lot of things to be doing.

What you can do there—you still are going to be insanely busy, right, even in those early days. And I feel like then you need a sort of a generalist VA that can fly alongside you and do all sorts of things, right? You need someone who can post on social media, who can help you research something, who can book, do calendar bookings, reply to emails, can actually be literally like an executive assistant on steroids kind of thing. You might think that those are a unicorn that you can’t find, but you actually can find great virtual assistants like that.

The ones that like variety—what you want to find there is someone who likes to fly by the seat of their pants alongside you and gets thrown ad hoc tasks all the time, figuring stuff out. You wouldn’t put somebody in that role that actually likes to do more process-driven work, likes order, likes to come into work every day and know what’s happening. It’s a different personality type. So it’s important, I think, in the early days to realize that help is probably needed pretty quickly. And if you have someone in the Philippines, you could do that really cost-effectively, and I do think it is worth doing it because your time—what could you be spending your time on that would grow the company better?

So that’s the first step, is a mindset shift to go, you’re always going to need help. And as you get bigger, then you can start to scale out that. I mean, my opinion is that you should scale out that sort of support layer team first.

So every business, even if it’s only one person, has departments. Think about it—even if you’re a solopreneur, there’s marketing, sales, there’s product delivery, there’s legal—there’s departments. And if you break any company down, no matter how big or how small, every department has a set of tasks and processes. Some need to be done on a recurring basis, others are ad hoc, others are project-led. And if you actually break a company down like that, you can very quickly start to say, wow, I could maybe do the support layer first. I could actually build out assistance in each of these departments to help me so I can be the strategist across a lot of things until such time as the business is developed enough or I’m willing to step up and hire heads of departments in my own country or wherever you want to do that. You might be able to promote a VA to that as well.

So that’s my philosophy, really. That’s the most cost-effective way to do it without blowing your own time up, to grow a company. That’s how you scale a company, basically.

Brett Ingram: I think it’s great advice, and certainly we do all handle all those functions.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, you’re doing it anyway.

Brett Ingram: You might be able to do it, but it’s obviously harder. So one of the reasons that I didn’t try to hire a VA sooner, quite frankly—and it was probably a little ego, so it was probably bad—I didn’t know if I could find anybody who would be able to do exactly what I needed or do it to the level I… So what would you say to entrepreneurs out there that feel that way, that that’s sort of their resistance or the friction that they’ve got about doing it?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, process it up, get it out of your head, train someone the way you want it done. And don’t worry about being a control freak. That’s okay. It’s your business. It’s your process. You get a great VA that wants to execute that process, and you train them well. And that’s how you solve that problem. So people think, if I want it done as good as I want, I’m going to do it. It’s only me who can do it.

Now, there may be parts of a process that require your IP. Okay, let’s be honest, you know, there could be. But people have this sort of all-or-nothing thinking. They’re like, nobody can do this as well as me. Well, maybe it’s only 10% of the process that actually requires you. Maybe the rest of it is actually easy enough to process up. So again, it’s just changing the thinking and becoming more machine-like in the thinking and figuring out which part of this is really IP-driven, where it needs my expertise, and which part of it is not. And then you can always break up a process and collaborate with a VA that way.

And it’s OK to think that, you know, are they going to do it better than you? Probably not. So strip out the bit. If you’re going to get 80% of the way there, though, it’s still worth delegating it.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, especially if they’re in a…

Barbara Turley: It takes work. Nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to do it because it takes work. And like anyone listening to this is like, I don’t want to sit down and process map this thing. I get it, it’s terribly boring.

But if you don’t do it, I mean, I will openly share: I have a 350-person company. I’m a mum of two kids. I travel a lot. I work remotely, and I have done it all in exactly the way that I’m sharing. I started with one VA. I grew VAs in each department. It took a long time before I hired heads of departments, which was painful.

I should have done it earlier, but then I had the heads of the departments, and then some of the VAs got promoted up to manager level, and it took an extraordinarily long time before I hired anybody outside of the Philippines to be—and even now we’re tight, we’re small outside the Philippines. Yeah, okay, yeah.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, no, that makes sense. So what are some—give us an idea—what are some of the common tasks that we can delegate, or job functions, or whatever? And how long does it usually take for somebody to get up to speed on being able to actually start to be productive for you and do?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so the broadest answer I can give you to what types of tasks can a VA do: anything that you can write the steps down for and either record yourself doing—you’d be surprised. You’ve got to look across every single thing you’re doing and break the layer. I call it the support layer.

There’s like a support layer everywhere, and once you start to look, you kind of can’t unsee it. In every department, in every process, there’s all this support layer stuff that actually is weighing you down, is weighing your other key people in your business down, but it takes work to identify it.

So for example, I mean, marketing is a huge area where there’s so much—I mean, AI is taking over a lot now in that space, but it’s still not quite there, right, to do certain things. VAs can use AI and, you know, creating social media content calendars, scheduling social media, creating Canva images, repurposing podcasts.

So this podcast is a classic example. You know, my team will know when this goes live. I won’t even tell them. They’ll just pick it up. They’ll cut it, they’ll snip it, put captions on it, they’ll put it on LinkedIn, across all the social media channels, and I won’t be involved in that.

All I’ve had to do is show up here. So that’s a classic example, and you can do that across blog posts. You can, you know, if you’re speaking at an event or you have a book, there’s all sorts of things that you can repurpose, integrate content, and a VA can handle that for you.

Now, in terms of how long does it take to train someone? Well, that depends on the strength of the process or the strength of your system. A lot of people want a VA to come in just knowing exactly, automatically, what you want. That’s not going to happen.

One of the ways I bridged that gap, though, in the early days of The Virtual Hub—I realized that that was such a massive problem—but I was like, I wonder if I could sit down with all the VAs and work out what exactly they are doing for clients. And then we’ll go out and process map those things and train them.

So that’s what we do now. We actually manufacture our own VAs. We put them all through massive training programs, and we have dialed-in process maps for things like LinkedIn, podcast repurposing, all sorts of things that you might want VAs to do. And we train on that, and we sort of try to take that heavy lifting off the clients because it is so tiring to do that. But we can never do 100% because every business is different.

But if you think about it, every business is different, and yet everyone’s kind of doing the same stuff. When you have the view that we have across all the VAs, you’re like, everyone’s doing the same thing. There’s a lot of repetition here. Yeah, like there’s a lot of the same stuff happening.

Brett Ingram: Yeah. So it’s funny that you mentioned that particular example because I was just about to say one of the things that I—when I finally did take the leap and I started to hire—I think a huge mistake that I made is I got almost intoxicated by the idea that, wow, I can give all this away.

So I hired two or three people at the same time, and I just said, well, you know what, that’s their job. They know what they’re doing. So I’ll just give them all this stuff, and I’m good. Like now I can just go get to work, and I can do the things I really want. And as you can guess, it was an abysmal failure.

Barbara Turley: Absolute failure. I’m actually like—I have anxiety even listening to you, going, yeah, that doesn’t work.

Brett Ingram: It’s worse because at first my first reaction was, I don’t get it. I mean, did I hire bad people? Like they’re supposed to be able to—and then when I reflected, I realized, you know, it’s not an accident that if I’ve hired three or four people and they’ve all failed, I’m probably doing something wrong. And then I realized, well, if I didn’t invest in them, how are they supposed to know? They’re a thousand miles away or whatever. How are they supposed to know exactly what I’m expecting? You know, I can’t just give them a list of tasks and say, go for it.

And so I realized I didn’t invest in them enough to get them up to speed to figure out what they were doing. And so I guess the question that I have is, I can’t imagine I’m the only one who does that. Is that what you see as the common problem that most people have when they hire their first VA?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. I’ll tell you what the actual problem is, though. So you’ve unpacked the feeling and the manifest—that’s how it shows up—but the actual problem is a misalignment of expectations around the role. So you’re hiring people. The problem with the word virtual assistant—and I mean, I’m on podcasts saying this all the time—the problem with the word virtual assistant is people think it means all sorts of people who can do anything virtually, but they forget that the word assistant is in there, right?

So we’re talking about support layer, assistance. No matter what anyone tells you about VAs can do all this stuff, you’ve got to figure out, is this an assistant role, or is this a specialized role where I’m expecting that this person will come in with specialized knowledge in a certain area? So are they actually a graphic designer, or are they a VA that’s a bit nifty with Canva? Totally different thing, right? Would you agree?

Brett Ingram: Yeah, 100%.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so I think where people go wrong is they hire a VA, they love the cost-effectiveness of it, but their expectation—even if they don’t realize it—is they thought they were getting a content writer, or they thought they were getting—you know, they thought they were getting a digital marketing strategist, when actually what you’re getting is an assistant-level person who’s very skilled but who actually needs to be given, within reason, what the expectation is, what the processes are, what they’re going to be accountable for, if there is a process, or if they need to kind of make one up or go find one.

There’s a lot of assumptions made. So that’s the real problem, is the misalignment of expectations.

Brett Ingram: That makes sense. I know sometimes I would see a bullet point on someone’s CV or resume, and I would think, okay, they could do graphic design. So great. But you assume in your own mind that that means they’re an expert at it, or they’re going to create graphics the way you want them created because they said they can do it.

And I actually had this exact experience where I hired somebody who said that they were a graphic designer or whatever. And when I got some of the stuff back, I thought, okay, well, I mean, this is functional, right? It checks all the boxes for what I asked for, but I can’t use it.

Barbara Turley: No creativity.

Brett Ingram: And obviously I’ve evolved my own abilities in figuring out how to hire the right way. And as I did, then I—you know, okay, let me see examples of what you’ve done, and I can see if it aligns with what I want. And then I hire somebody, and you get people that are really good at it.

But there’s a learning curve with it. So one of the things, though—even early on—once I sort of decoded my own issues with it and started to figure out how to screen people, how to hire people, and everything else, I did still hire some people that, despite the fact that I was able to screen them okay, it just didn’t work out. They would just disappear.

They’re doing a job for me, and then four days later they’re not responding anymore on Skype. I’m like, are you still there?

Barbara Turley: You got ghosted. You got ghosted on the job. It happens.

Brett Ingram: And, you know, I hired some people that just weren’t a good fit or where I could tell that they were oversubscribed. They might’ve been doing like six jobs, and so they were charging us all, and it was taking them five times longer to get stuff done than even myself, as busy as I was, I could have knocked out a lot faster. So is that something that we can avoid by using The Virtual Hub because you guys have sort of done that versus hiring our own VAs?

Barbara Turley: So first of all, all those problems are real. They happen. They happen to lots of people, sadly. There’s loads of reasons why it happens.

I think certain cultures and certain parts of the world are not as developed yet mentally as we would like them to be. I mean no disrespect saying that—it’s just, you got a lot of people, right? You got a lot of people. And people think like, oh wow, there’s 100 million people in the Philippines. I’m like, yes, but you’re talking the top—you know, it’s very difficult to decipher who you’re going to pick there. So first of all, the problems are real.

Second of all, even a company like ours—our hit rate on actually hiring someone—we will hire 1.5% of applicants. It’s that difficult. 1.5%. And that’s after an excruciating journey. We have to interview so many of them to get five. It’s—and even that five or ten that you hire per month or whatever, it’s not like one or two of those might not work out.

So I very quickly realized this, and I got burnt in exactly the same way that you did, and I thought, this is not gonna work in this business. If we’re doing this business, we have to have an ability to be able to hand on heart say to clients, we don’t have this problem. And I was like, how are you gonna fix that, right?

So I turned the model on its head way back when I launched the business in the first place, and this is why we’re not a recruiter. So if somebody comes to us and says, here’s my brief, we’re like, doesn’t matter—we’re not a recruiter. What we actually do is we hire month on month for ourselves. We hire for The Virtual Hub. We’re looking for—we know what we’re looking for. We don’t mind about experience because we’re looking for smarts.

Because once we hire people and we choose people, we have our own training team, our own training platform, and we actually manufacture our own VAs, if I could put it that way. And very quickly, what we realized during that whole process—it takes a long time, and we put a lot of risk up front because we pay people full salaries and benefits, bring them in, the whole lot, before there’s any client involved.

And the reason we do that is because you’re actually looking for cultural fit, character, ethics. You want people to sit in front of you and see the whites of their eyes for a long time and see they’re real. And you get amazing people. But the odd time, you get one that you go, yep, that wasn’t a great character fit, you know—but at least it happened to me and not the client.

So I’m very proud to say that these days, our attrition rates are super low. Our churn rates are very low. We don’t really have people going AWOL—well, we’ve like one per year—but we’re pretty proud of that. So we try and protect the client from as much of that as possible because it does happen.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, I saw the video. I mean, obviously you’re doing something right when you have all these people that are working in a company, they’re rating it through the roof, they’re super excited to be there, they love what they do. You know that you’re doing something right and you’re onto something when you have people that are working in your organization and they’re thrilled to be there and excited to share their story. I figured you kind of decoded that part.

Barbara Turley: It is culture, actually. And people have often asked me, like, yeah, but what do you mean? It’s so multi-layered. I mean, I’ve put a lot of time and energy—my role really is kind of culture, you know? Yes, building the company, but you can only build it if the culture is fed from the top, you know. And it’s really important to me how every person feels—client or employee. There’s two experiences there: the employee experience and the client experience. And you have to get both those things right in order to really dial in culture.

And the only way to do that is to deeply listen and actually have people rip you to shreds half the time and tell you what’s wrong, you know, and then you do something about it. Yeah.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s how you improve, right? And that’s actually, you know, the next question I was going to ask is to say, you know, some people might worry that as a virtual assistant—okay, so I bring this person in, they’re competently trained, they know what they’re going to do—but how do I know they’re going to have the same kind of commitment or connection with my company, because they don’t actually really work for me?

So it sounds like through your vetting process, you find people that have that right alignment. But I would just ask you, what’s your take on that, or what would you say to an entrepreneur who feels that way or is concerned about that?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s an interesting one because any of the VAs that we have that work inside client accounts—because they’re actually in that client’s business all day long—they’re not actually in ours. I mean, yes, they’re employed by us, and we have parties and team buildings and all sorts of fun stuff going on.

But really, the day to day, they’re actually in your business day to day. We’re not the ones inside your business—they are. They’re connecting with you, they’re with your team, they’re having all of your huddles and meetings and being part of your vision, doing work for your company.

Barbara Turley: And what we find is the VAs that work on our client accounts, they’re actually very connected to the client account, and it’s more work for us to connect them somehow to us as well. So it’s almost the opposite problem, where we have to work really hard to make them feel like actually we provide an amazing part of the value for them in their own country, you know, where we have sort of like random dinners, and we do all sorts of fun gamification and fun sort of stuff, and where we see our role is, yes, HR, payroll, all of that sort of thing, but we also see our role as providing culture for the client, for that team member while you’re not in the Philippines.

So we have massive Christmas parties and all that kind of thing. We can arrange stuff for you guys, but it works pretty well. Most of the VAs feel very connected to the clients. I know some of them are devastated if the client cancels, even though—even if a client cancels, our VAs still stay on the payroll, they go onto the bench, there’s no sort of damage to their salary or anything, nothing changes. Because we’ve spent so long training them that we’re not going, you know, good people, want to keep them. But yeah, even with that, they still want to stay with the client, obviously, you know.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, no, and I think that that’s great. It’s funny because as you’re talking, there’s an amazing parallel that pops into my head. So in the late 90s, I was working for a tech consulting company in New York City, and their business model was very similar.

We hired people full time. We even sponsored visas, brought in people from internationally and everything else. And they were all full-time employees of our company, but they worked as consultants in the field. And so my job was Director of Professional Services. So my job was to be the glue that held them to the company. So we took them to baseball games, rented out the ESPN Zone, Christmas parties, all those kinds of things for that same reason. They were on the client site, so that’s what was really their sort of employer in that way. But we wanted them to all feel connected. We had all sorts of different things that we could do to make sure that they always felt bonded to us as well and that we cared about them because they didn’t see us on a day-to-day basis. So it’s a tricky thing, but that model really does work. I think it was super effective. Of course, we had the dot-com crash, which wasn’t great for our particular industry at the time, but it was a cool model, and I really loved it. It’s one of the favorite things I ever did too.

Barbara Turley: Thanks for sharing that because it does actually work, but sometimes you do question yourself. You’re like, is it enough? But then we’ve had VAs that will say to us, when they’ve had multiple clients—let’s say they’ve churned through a few clients, and through no fault of their own and through no fault of the clients. Sometimes smaller clients, some of them go out of business, things get rough, whatever. And we have always given another client and retrained them, or during that maybe there was no client, they still got paid. And you want to take the anxiety of payroll away. That’s the big one.

Now, there’s been times we’ve had a lot of people sitting on the bench, and I’m like, my gosh, this is like—but that’s the game that we’re in. That’s the model that we’ve built.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, no, I think it makes sense. So let me ask you about cost. I know another sort of hurdle that people have, especially if they’re an entrepreneur and they’re bootstrapping their way, is the first thing that they think about is, if I hire somebody, I have to pay. So that means it’s a cost. I know it was a concern for me too when I had a limited budget. Do you think ultimately that VAs are an added expense, or they actually generate more than they cost?

Barbara Turley: They won’t generate more than they cost, but you will. That’s another misconception. People say, you know—so really how you need to think about this in the very early days, I know I said get a VA straight away, get someone who can fly alongside you. But sometimes there aren’t the funds for that.

So if you’re at a stage where you can still handle doing it all yourself and grow the business—because a lot of people forget that you have to actually grow the business as well. I mean, I know that sounds elementary, but if you can do it all and grow, then okay, you can do that for a while.

But realistically, as a business grows, the person, the main driver or the key driver people of the business, need to very quickly free up their time so that they can go do more of that. Because otherwise, what’s it all for? I mean, if you can’t actually use your time to drive the company, then that’s a bigger problem. And what you want to be seeing the assistance as is, how am I going to free up more of my time so that I can go grow this company? You know what I mean?

So yes, they should create revenue for you in that sense, but sometimes people mistake—they’re not the ones who are going to drive the revenue. You are. You’ve got to free your time. So give them the stuff that’s bogging your time down so that you can free your time and go drive the revenue.

Brett Ingram: That makes perfect sense. So tell us what kind of VAs do you offer? If somebody wants to say, okay, you know, I want to bring in some VAs, I want to get this thing going, what kind do you offer, and what do you do to help clients feel like they’ll be successful when they hire your VAs?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, okay, so again, very early on, I discovered that it was much easier to give people a sort of an idea. I sort of productized it, to be honest. So we have three main broad categories of VA, if I could put it that way.

So we have sort of the admin category, which is very back office. I mean, lots of businesses have interesting admin functions going on in their operations. It’s just process-driven type stuff. Could be spreadsheets, it’s formatting documents, whatever’s going on there in that sort of admin function. Now you can add in someone there who can act sort of like a secretary, but you wouldn’t put an EA into that category. So for example, that’s not really an executive assistant—that’s a slightly different level—but admin is the first one.

The second bucket is quite a large one. We actually call it the marketing support. So anything like social media content calendars, blog post formatting on websites—because that takes forever as well—the actual formatting of a blog post on there, writing it is a whole other thing. And now also within there, you would have things like LinkedIn management, podcast management. You could also have things like—you probably put an EA into that category because they have a different sort of skill set. An EA who’s supporting a CEO needs to kind of be a level up from admin, you know, so that’s a different level in there.

And then our third category are more systems-type people, so people who might be able to do some Zapier integrations, actually hook Asana up to things like marketing automations, CRMs like HubSpot, Ontraport, this sort of thing. Now again, remember we’re talking assistance. So they’d be building workflows and campaigns in there, but not deciding what the campaign is, you know what I mean? But actually tinkering with the tool because a lot of people get these tools like HubSpot, et cetera, and they end up doing nothing with it because they’ve no time to actually get into the tool and work the thing. So those are the broad categories of things that we do.

You know, we don’t tend to do things like bookkeepers. We can, but again, if you think about bookkeeping, there’s a little layer in bookkeeping that is one step up from assistant, right? There’s a sort of a layer there that requires you to actually be a bookkeeper. So a VA can do a lot of what a bookkeeper might do, but there’s a little piece there that requires you to be a bookkeeper. So you see that little nuance there between support layer and actual. So we would do that as a specialized role, or we could do an accountant as a specialized role, but typically they’re not in that assistant sort of layer.

So then we train in those disciplines. I mean, our training program is enormous now, and we tend to split people early in the training program into where we see their natural skill sets lying, and then we take them down certain pathways, and then we get them ready for client accounts. So that’s basically the broad categories that we sell into.

Brett Ingram: Very cool. So what sets you apart? If I was going to go out and find my own VA or I was going to use Virtual Hub in terms of the operational efficiency side of things, implementation side of things—

Barbara Turley: Do you mean if you wanted to get somebody to help with operational efficiency?

Brett Ingram: Yeah, or yeah, just in terms of when I’m onboarding or whatever I’m trying to do, if I were to work with you and get an assistant through you.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, how do we make it easier, cheaper, faster, better—sort of thing—or easier? Okay, so the first way we make it easier is that you’re not going to sit through getting tons of resumes, interviewing tons of people, and being bogged down with constant phone calls before you actually get someone.

So typically a client comes in to us, we have people ready to go most of the time, and we look at your account quite deeply—like all your sales call notes, etc.—and we start to pick who we think we have in our account that we think is going to suit this particular support need.

Now you might think, how do we do that? But actually our clients, on the first meetup—we don’t even call it an interview because we’re like, you’re actually meeting some of our people—we like to have about three. We’ll present three of our people, and we have literally prepped them for this call, so they know how to go in and nail this. 97% of our clients will choose on the first round. So I’m talking, you go from sales call, right, you’ll have a quick kickoff call, then boom—meetup—and we’re one and done, and the VA is ready to start.

So we can do as short as a seven-day onboarding, to be honest. Then we have an onboarding call where there’s a results coach and a client success manager with you. They drive kind of the goals of what you’re trying to achieve. We make sure that we’re clear on that and any sort of training needs that happen thereafter. And you actually have a pod account system.

So that means that the VA is working in your client account, but you also have a results coach and a client success manager, and they work as a team to make sure that we’re actually delivering on your goals as a client. Because often the VA won’t know that sort of thing—they’re there to do the doing. We’re here to make sure that we actually do the doing the right way and that we fill training gaps or any sort of misses or, like, let’s say it just doesn’t work. Let’s say the VA is just a wrong fit—you know, you don’t have to worry about saying, hey, I just think it’s the wrong fit. That VA actually won’t lose their job. We’ll just put them on a different account, and we can transition really quickly for you. So we take the heavy lifting of that. So we like to think quicker, you know.

Brett Ingram: Well, that definitely is, because I’ve been through that process and it’s a headache. So you don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings—you don’t want to—yeah, so the whole thing. You have to do your business at the end of the day.

So can you share a success story with us? Do you have a particular client or a particular example of something where you can let us know exactly how this would look and feel for us?

Barbara Turley: Sure. I mean, on our website we have so many little client—we’ve got client case studies and success stories there—we’ve got so many of them now. But typically what people say—I mean, some of the one-person businesses will say things like, I went in and I hired a part-time VA, and that was the biggest mistake I made. I should have gone full time straight away, right? Because they don’t realize how useful this person is going to be and how it’s going to change their life, so that’s a big thing.

One of our sort of most high-profile clients is a guy called Vern Harnish. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him. Vern Harnish—he wrote a book called Scaling Up, and he was the founder of the Entrepreneurs’ Organisation globally. He’s a big business coach in the US. He’s got 250 coaches working for him on the scaling up methodology.

So I did the scaling up programme many years ago, and I met him, and he came and got a VA with us, and he’s one of our biggest sort of referrers. He just loves what we do. So he got an EA—actually, he got an EA.

And then we have all sorts of—like we have a big asset management firm that uses us. They’ve got a team of eight, so they’re cutting across all departments in all sorts of different things. And our largest client now has 22 VAs working on their account. They just keep putting more on because they just keep realizing—they’re very good at this support layer thing, though. They’re like, wow, yes, we can keep doing this. This is really powerful.

Brett Ingram: That’s great. And look, I mean, it’s obviously a testament to what you do when you have somebody whose business and expertise is scaling and you’re able to do it.

Barbara Turley: He sends us referrals all the time.

Brett Ingram: I’m sure, yeah. He does, yeah. So where can people find you? Where would they be able to get started with Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: Sure. If you go to thevirtualhub.com, you can head over there. We’ve loads of content on our site. You can book a call with one of our team there and have a chat with them about whether this might be a fit for you.

You can also follow me on LinkedIn. So I post a lot of content about what we’ve been talking about, some of the trials and tribulations of scaling a company myself. I’m over on LinkedIn—you can just find me, Barbara Turley, over there on LinkedIn.

Brett Ingram: And there’s a hyphen in between?

Barbara Turley: There’s a hyphen there, yeah—Barbara-Turley. Yeah, that bit’s important.

Brett Ingram: Yeah. All right. And so my last question that I always have to ask is, what’s your number one tip for success as a business owner or entrepreneur?

Barbara Turley: Yes, my number one tip—and I deeply, deeply mean this—is you have to continuously think, what can I stop doing? What can I delegate? I mean, otherwise you just—and do that for your team as well. So as your team grows, you want to be asking, should they still be doing this? Or should my head of marketing be spending their time creating Canva images? Probably not. Don’t do that.

Brett Ingram: Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, you can only get bigger and scale if you’re able to take care of everything and have enough bandwidth to keep going. Otherwise, you’re just treading water, right?

Barbara Turley: I mean, the name of this podcast is Optimize. I think if you think about—you’ve got to optimize the people. So if it’s just you, great, but as the business grows, you’re going to have more people. You want to make sure that you’re constantly optimizing every person in the business because people actually cost money, and your capital budgets are important on what you’re spending on your human capital. Make sure that you optimize that properly.

Brett Ingram: I want to thank you again, Barbara, for sharing all your insights and great tips with us. Again, you can go to thevirtualhub.com to get your own virtual assistant, and I promise you, you’ll be really happy you did. I know I was. Once I figured out the value in doing that, it makes a huge, huge difference. When I started using a VA, my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.

And you can also find Barbara on LinkedIn at Barbara-Turley. Thanks for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe so you get every episode and share it with a friend. And until next time, remember, no matter what you want for your business and your life, don’t compromise—optimize.