Derek Gallimore: Welcome to the OutsourceAccelerator podcast. This is a short-format podcast where we explore business and outsourcing mastery. My name is Derek Gallimore, and I am really excited to bring you the leading podcast in outsourcing.

Derek Gallimore: Hi, and welcome to another episode of the OutsourceAccelerator podcast. So today, this is episode Noble 203. Of course, my name is Derek Gallimore, and we are joined by Barbara Turley of the Virtual Hub. So Barbara Turley is Irish, living in Sydney, and has an investment banking background. So how did she find herself now being the CEO and founder of the Virtual Hub, which employs over 100 VA’s now? So it’s a really interesting journey, and I’m happy to have Barbara on board to discuss her journey and discuss her own aha moments with outsourcing and how she found herself to be so deep into the outsourcing industry now. So I learnt a lot, and I’m sure you will enjoy this chat with Barbara Turley. If you want any of the contact details or anything we mentioned, go to our show notes, which is at outsourceaccelerator.com/203.

Derek Gallimore: Hi, and welcome back, everybody. Today, I am joined by Barbara Turley of the Virtual Hub. Hi, Barbara. How are you?

Barbara Turley: Great, Derek. Thank you so much for having me.

Derek Gallimore: Absolute pleasure. You’re an Irish expat living in Sydney, and I’ve spent some years in Sydney, so it’s certainly good to catch up with you, and we can compare notes on outsourcing. So you are the CEO and founder of the Virtual Hub, which is an outsourcing VA-specialized vertical, and I’m sure you can tell us more about that. But you’ve had a very interesting background, both in corporate and business life generally, and then turned to the outsourcing sector because of, I think, we have kind of shared enthusiasm for the sector. So really happy to have you on board and to explore that more fully with you. So I suppose initially, are you able just to introduce yourself and give a little bit of background?

Barbara Turley: Sure. Yeah, I’ve had, as you said, I’ve had a kind of a varied career. Initially, I obviously hail from Ireland, but I started out my career. I spent 15 years in corporate, mainly in the investment banking arena, the industry. I was in equity trading for 10 years and then over on the asset management sales side of that business. And to cut a long story short, look, I always had a vision of running my own company. I always wanted to kind of build my own company, as I think a lot of corporate people do have that kind of vision. And I got a chance to have a dabble at that in the corporate world, actually through the financial crisis, when I got involved in a fairly large management buyout of a business from Deutsche Bank about 10 years ago. And I got a chance through that experience to really learn about how scalable businesses are. I guess it was built from the ground up. It wasn’t totally a start-up, but it was a very difficult kind of journey in those first few years. And then eventually, I came to leave that and do my own thing. And as a lot of corporates do when they leave, they do some consulting. So I was doing a bit of business coaching for small businesses, and I noticed that they were all having the same problem. It didn’t matter what the business was, whether it was traditional offline, brick-and-mortar, or online coaches, none of them had any time, and they didn’t have enough money to hire people locally. So, of course, like everyone else, I had read Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Workweek, and I had actually got myself a VA at the time in the Philippines. So I started recruiting literally my VA’s friends just to help out the clients that I was working with. And honestly, before I knew it, I was getting way more demand for people going, “Can you get me one of those VA’s?” than I was for business coaching. And I just thought, “I wonder, is there a business in this?” And boom, four years later, here we are at the Virtual Hub with 100 staff in the Philippines. So that’s how it really happened. It was kind of accidental.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, incredible. It is amazing. People talk of the size of businesses over here, and it makes people in the West—I think it’s incredible to think that you have 100 employees, but it’s kind of more normalized. And of course, I suppose your commodity, what you’re trading in, is human resources. But it really is incredible, the kind of scale of companies and corporations over here. Yeah.

Barbara Turley: Oh, I mean, we’re small. I’m thinking of 100 people. There’s 5,000 people over there in the Philippines. They’re literally changing the landscape of the country in terms of the society and the impact that you can have. Not all of them are impacted in a good way, but you would sort of think that it does change the fabric of a society, the work we do.

Derek Gallimore: And the big guys—I mean, the big guys are sort of up to like 50,000 in the Philippines and maybe 200,000 worldwide. It really is, you know—

Barbara Turley: Really enormous.

Derek Gallimore: A massive kind of people industry, isn’t it?

Barbara Turley: So we’ve a long way to go from 100.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, well, I mean—

Barbara Turley: But we’ve come a long way, yeah. We’re very niche in what we do, yeah.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, it’s incredible, isn’t it? But no, I mean, the scale is absolutely fantastic. And I appreciate your background as well because I’ve always been in business myself, and I was actually listening to another podcast of another person in outsourcing. Previously, they were a children’s entertainer and a balloon twister. Now I think, wow, it’s far more reassuring to have a corporate background such as yourself and consulting because that’s where, you know, I think outsourcing, fundamentally, is quite technical.

Barbara Turley: It’s not as easy as people think. It is not as easy as people think. Yeah, everyone thinks, you know, “Oh, you just go and recruit people and farm them out to clients.” I’m like, that doesn’t work like that. It’s very strategic. You need to have a very strategic mind for it.

Derek Gallimore: So, you know, you and I—I just want to get more background really into outsourcing. When you turned to outsourcing—I started outsourcing in about 2011—I call it my biggest aha moment, really, in business because you just realize the incredible opportunity and power that outsourcing has for businesses if it’s properly harnessed. But what was it about your initial impression of outsourcing, and what were you thinking of outsourcing before you even started? Were you apprehensive? Were you sort of hesitant because of the typecasting that you’d heard previously?

Barbara Turley: No, I wasn’t. But then, OK, so a couple of things. I dived right in, and I went direct. So I didn’t use an agency or anything. I went direct, dived right in, and sort of hit a home run. I got a VA who’s still with me, by the way. She’s still with me, and she’s a big part of the Virtual Hub today. But a couple of things—I wasn’t scared because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So if I look back now and go, I was so naive going into it. I’d never even been to the Philippines. But I did know that when I read Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Workweek, I guess that was my moment of going, “Of course, that’s a fantastic idea.” And I realised that the way to get success with it, though, is to keep at it. And you can’t just be kind of in and out. I see people churning through VA’s and employees all the time, both in the Philippines and in Western countries, and I think that’s a lot of the reason why some people fail at it, to be honest. But like you, I guess when I started getting people asking me about it, the first couple of VA’s I placed were with smaller businesses, solopreneur-type businesses in Sydney, and it just unlocked them so massively. To even get rid of a couple of admin tasks, they naturally started telling their friends. And all small business owners are desperate for entrepreneurial freedom. You know, on weekends, can I at least take two days off? So when I saw the power of that, I remember sitting at my desk one day going, “Is nobody doing this? Or what? Is nobody providing this service?” And of course, lots of people are, but I think there’s a lot of people providing the service in a bad way. There’s lots of people doing it well, but my focus was more on the client at that stage and helping them. Recruiting is one thing, but you’ve got to help to try and get success on the client side and then on the side of the VA. So that’s been my evolution with this, is to not just recruit people. I actually kind of force success rates that are very high on both the client and the VA in terms of career development, wanting to be part of a culture, all that sort of stuff. So that’s where I think I’ve been successful, to be honest, because I’ve focused on the client’s success and the VA’s success as opposed to the numbers.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, and it sounds like a real partnership, isn’t it? This is what I tell people. I want people to try outsourcing. I want them to try it today, just dip their toe in. But also, it’s not that hard to get into it, but it is really almost like a marriage. It’s a long-term partnership and something that you need to invest time into upfront.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. You know, you’ll love this. Actually, I was listening to one of Gary Vee’s Facebook Lives recently, and he was talking about freelancers and trying to dip your toe and using contractors here, there, and everywhere. And he said, in his view, the reason people fail so much with it is because they’re hooking up and dating, when actually what they’re looking for is a strong marriage, which is kind of how I feel as well. Some people sort of want to try before they buy, that sort of thing, but then no one’s committing to anyone. So the energy is all wrong from day one. So it can be a big problem.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, and I’ve heard as well, because we’re actually writing a series of articles at the moment trying to educate people about the difference between the Upwork and Freelancer of the world versus proper professionalized outsourcing services. You know, and I think that Tim Ferris has done an incredible thing with the industry, but also people kind of want, you know, an incredible VA 5 hours a week paying $1.00 an hour that can post a whole website.

Barbara Turley: And they want them to be completely loyal to you. Yeah, yeah.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, and without training because you also, you know, you don’t want to invest time in them. And it’s not really there, is it? I think it needs to be sort of slightly swung back the other way where people again, like Gary Vee says, it’s more of a marriage. There’s a sort of mutual commitment and long term.

Barbara Turley: I also try to say to clients, but it obviously depends what stage of business that you’re at. Some people would say, well, in the early stages you only need a VA for a couple of hours a week. I would argue differently because from day one of me starting a business, I hired one full time. I was like, I’ll have her full time, thank you. And I think that’s people, they’re not looking at it as a long-term strategic decision in the growth of the business. They’re as I need an extra set of hands to help me to clean up things. That’s a major problem, people looking at it that way from a business perspective.

Derek Gallimore: And also, I think, you know, there is a bit of this kind of Gary Vee sort of hustle out there where people kind of want to get as much as they can for free or not necessarily get, you know, pay as they should do. So they’re kind of looking for 10 articles to be written on a trial basis before they pay anyone, you know. And it’s just not—I think it’s easy for people to forget that these are real people over here. These are people with aspirations like themselves, people that want a career ladder and people that are very loyal if given the opportunity. And you know, again, it’s just that differentiated between kind of the part-time freelancer thing versus professionalized outsourcing services.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, which is a partnership really. And you want to see like we want to see our clients grow. I’m like, if we get a client that has one VA and we see that grow, that client grows to four VA with us, I mean that’s a huge win for us and for the client and for the teams in the Philippines. It’s win, win, win, really.

Derek Gallimore: It is, it’s all positive, isn’t it, because you’re seeing good growth, you’re seeing good results for everyone in the mix. And so you had an early win, you got a fantastic VA. And I think, you know, you realise as well, like with any of your clients coming on board, there might be a bit of scepticism, there may be a little bit unsure, uneasy. And getting the quick win for people is so critical, isn’t it? Because they then kind of relax a bit and they believe in the process a bit. And also having a very successful pioneer, which is like the first person on the team, and you still have your first VA as an example. Do you have any examples of easy wins that if people are sort of hesitant or unsure, like how do you get people in and get them easy wins?

Barbara Turley: Look, I’ll be honest, it all comes down to having good people. Now, when you’re recruiting—and this is what a lot of people don’t get even when they come to us—we have to painstakingly spell this out several times over so people understand the difference between a pure recruiter and a professional managed outsourcing service provider is enormous, right? So a pure recruiter is going to just have a resume bank, and they’re going to have to look at resumes, and they’re going to do a couple of interviews, maybe a test or two. And then they’re going to show you a lineup of people. Doing that, you have no idea about the true character or the work ethic or the enthusiasm of that person. For us, I take a lot of risk upfront. I actually employ people as a Philippine entity. I employ people before I ever even show them to a client. And what we’re looking for—we actually know the character and the type of person we’re looking for. And how we find that is we put them through our intensive training programs for anywhere from a month to six, 7-8 weeks. Because the only way that you can really get the measure of someone is if you see the whites of their eyes every single day in your office under a training program. The ones that are not going to be successful eventually cave in and deselect themselves and leave before we’ve ever committed to a client. So by the time we show them to a client, the quick win happens. The client is almost—it happens in the interviews—they’re like, “Oh wow, I’m confused. I don’t know who to pick because I wasn’t expecting them to be that good.” And that’s kind of where we get the initial quick wins. We actually try to over-deliver. Now it doesn’t happen 100% of the time, but it happens a lot.

Derek Gallimore: So you have your VAs sort of sitting on the bench already pre-trained, and then you match clients to those people. Yeah.

Barbara Turley: Yes, yes. And that’s why, you know, so I was very specific about what we do. So we specialized—we’ve gone quite niche in that. We typically specialized in digital marketing implementation-type general virtual assistants. So what I mean by that is don’t come to us looking for a writer, even though that is part of digital marketing. Our guys do all the grunt work around link building, social media content calendars, posting, you know, posting your social media, putting blog posts up, you know, building your campaigns and fixing your rules in Infusionsoft, all that kind of stuff. That’s kind of where we play. And because of that, we can control the training much more effectively. And that’s kind of where we get a lot of quick wins for people. We can sort of get someone in there that can—I won’t say hit the ground running because that’s never true—but can get up to speed pretty quickly with a client.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah. And again, you know, if you’re hiring anyone anywhere, there’s always going to be a kind of maturation of the relationship, isn’t there? And getting used to the processes. So I mean, that’s incredible again, isn’t it? You know, we’re—myself, Outsourcing Accelerator—trying to again educate people the difference between outsourcing and freelancing. And you’re upfront investing 4 to 6 weeks before you take them out to clients. And then not only that, you know, they’re supervised within a professionalized environment, and then they get you thrown into the mix and your infrastructure, your systems to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And also, you know, from what I understand, you kind of dive into their operations a bit and make sure things are going well and maybe advise in terms of the best option.

Barbara Turley: We have a big onboarding process. We teach clients how to get ready before the VA arrives. We’ve got a very deep—kind of the first six weeks of a client working with us is quite a lot of engagement. And then after that, it obviously—like we do calls and we’re there. We’ve got ongoing help desks and team leaders and success coaches and everything internally. So we’re always looking at what tasks are being asked. We get client feedback all the time. We invite it every week in the first 8 weeks and then monthly thereafter. Because we’re like, if you don’t give us feedback, even if it’s bad, we can usually fix it if we find it early enough. So we’re in a very, very engaged relationship.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah. And it’s pretty technical stuff, isn’t it? Because assistants back 30 years ago, they would have just been kind of photocopying and manning the reception desk back in the old days. And now, you know, your people are not really assistants, but they’re actually kind of what—digital marketing administrators, really.

Barbara Turley: That’s exactly right. You know, one of the things I always say to people is the major issue out there is the word virtual assistant because it literally means someone with a heartbeat who can type right through to someone who can code a website. I mean, it’s—or do your accounting. The term itself is too broad. So we have to kind of narrow people in and go, virtual assistant is somebody who is virtual who’s there to assist you, but it can be in a broad range of areas. So you’ve got to get clear on that first.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah.

Barbara Turley: And they don’t do it all. They won’t do it all.

Derek Gallimore: No, no. And would your assistants then also be assistants? I mean, do you actually find a lot of efficiency in that, like in terms of booking flights and managing calendars? Is that kind of a common role that they are?

Barbara Turley: Do that, we do that. We typically don’t attract that kind of a client anymore because we’re mainly, you know, I’m out speaking on podcasts and at conferences and stuff that are mainly digital marketer-focused. So we tend to attract them. We do have a level 1 VA, though that’s more admin-focused, and they tend to be what we’re looking for in those VAs is somebody that is organised, kind of on to it. Like, you know, that office manager-type person. They may not be great at social media images, they may not be great at tech stuff like WordPress and all that, but they’re a master organiser. So we do have that as well. But typically we play more in the upper-level VAs that are doing more technical stuff.

Derek Gallimore: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Barbara. So I want to actually get you back so that we can deep dive into exactly the Virtual Hub and, you know, how it functions and the different tiers of VAs and services that you offer. But in the meantime, if people want to get in touch with you or learn more about you or the Virtual Hub, how can they do that?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So if you want to learn more about the Virtual Hub, we’ve actually got a couple of great sorts of resources for the listeners, for you guys. You can go to thevirtualhub.com/outsourceaccelerator, and there we’ve got a couple of guides. We’ve got a download of why people fail with VAs and how to fix it, which is very useful. We also have a seven-part scalable business success formula e-course, which you can dive into, which really helps you to get ready for outsourcing. And then you can also book a call with one of our strategy consultants on that page too. If you want to connect with me personally, LinkedIn is kind of where you find me. So over there, I sort of share some of my content, my own thoughts over on my LinkedIn profile. You can just find me at Barbara Turley.

Derek Gallimore: Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Barbara Turley: Thanks.

Derek Gallimore: OK. That was Barbara Turley of the Virtual Hub. If you want to get in touch with Barbara or learn any more about anything we mentioned in this podcast, go to outsourceaccelerator.com/two03. And of course, if you want to email us, if you want to ask us anything, then just drop some email to [email protected]. See you next time.