Derek Gallimore: Hi, and welcome back to the show. Today, I’m joined by Barbara Turley. She is the founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub. It is an outsourcing firm focusing specifically on virtual assistants. Barbara runs this firm quite differently from the rest of the pack. She has a different system for recruiting, onboarding, and training her virtual assistants before they are deployed to clients, so it’s a really fascinating conversation.

Barbara is also an operational and organizational wizard, so we talk in depth about that. It’s a really great, far-ranging conversation with Barbara.

As always, if you want any of the show notes, go to outsourceaccelerator.com/podcast. Enjoy.

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Barbara, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Barbara Turley: Great, Derek. Thanks so much for having me on. It’s good to come on again. I know I was on in the past a few years ago, so it’s nice to be back.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, and it’s always great to catch up with you, Barbara. I’m always fascinated by your journey, your personal circumstances, and your business, so it’s really fantastic to catch up.

Barbara, we were chatting just before the show, of course, and you said that you basically develop your own VAs from scratch. It’s probably a good place to start. Do you want to explain the process for you in generating your supply of qualified candidates?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, sure. So I think very early on, I mean, look, I didn’t have a background in recruiting or HR or outsourcing. I had actually never really even been to the Philippines when I accidentally started this business. And I say “accidentally” because I just started finding some VAs for some clients I was doing business coaching for many years ago now.

In the first year, I found myself recruiting VAs, and I found myself in this business. I thought, “I’m quite enjoying this. I think there’s a business in this, so I’ll keep going.”

And in that first year, it was very tumultuous. You would find that I would recruit, and maybe this was my lack of experience in recruiting, but you would find people with great resumes who sort of ticked all the boxes, but on the job, they just didn’t seem to perform, or there were issues. And then you had some people that, on the job, it was very apparent that they needed more training. Good people, you know, but they just needed more direction.

So early on, I started a very basic training program to try to help with these issues. And rolling forward eight years now, I mean, what I’ve learned very quickly is that sometimes the best people are those who actually have no experience, but they have the right smarts. We know what we’re now looking for. They have the right smarts, the right attitude, the energy. They can be trained, you know, and some of those things are things that you can’t teach. You have to hire for that.

All the other things about being a VA, to be honest, most of it is very trainable if you’ve got the right training programs.

So today, what we do is we hire people for ourselves. We’re not actually a recruiter, so we never say to a client, “Give us your brief and we’ll go out and find what it is you’re looking for.” Instead, what we do every month is go out looking for great people. Over the years, we have refined that to know what it is that we’re looking for.

We hire them on full salaries and benefits from day one, and we put them straight into our learning and development programs. They can be there from anywhere from one to three months before we start to look at our client pipeline and go, “Okay, so what sort of client demand do we have? And who are we going to position in front of this client to integrate them into that client account?”

And our success rate from that is very high. It’s very rare that a client will say, “Can you show me more people?”

Usually, they say, “Oh my God, those three were great.” And we prepare them well for the account. We do that, and then post client placement—because you can’t train every VA on every tool, and it wouldn’t be commercially viable to do that—we then work with that client account to figure out: what are the tools they’re using? What are the processes this VA is doing?

And we do personalized training roadmaps that we work on with that VA based on the client account thereafter. And that sort of continues on, basically, as we grow that person. So that’s been the model. It’s very successful for us.

Derek Gallimore: People have different views on recruitment, and some say it’s an art, some say it’s a science. I say it’s really just kind of potluck. I don’t think you ever really know who you’re getting until they’re kind of three months in the building and you really get to know each other and each other’s work capabilities and processes.

This is a really good way. What do you think about recruiting as you’ve gone over the years? Do you get better at it? Is there a sort of reduced failure rate? What I really like about your incubation period of one to three months is, I assume, you’re really getting to know that person and the work. So you’re not relying so much on the interview process or the recruitment process. You’re actually seeing them do the work before you deploy.

Barbara Turley: So I have a lot to share on this. In the early days, I figured out that I needed this training for VAs. And then I thought, well, this serves two purposes. I get to train them and I get to—you know, maybe I’m a control freak—I get to control the product that goes to the client. That was what I wanted to really do. I wanted our VAs to have a look and feel. It’s always the same experience for a client.

So that was number one. But then I also had all these character issues and, you know, the stuff that happens. I’m sure it happens everywhere in the world, but it’s pretty rife in the Philippines: people going AWOL, people saying they’re working and they’re not, people not showing up for work, all of the stories, the drama.

And I thought, well, if we sit them in our training programs and actually have them on our time for a while, you get to see. At this stage, we were office-based. You literally see the whites of people’s eyes for a month or two.

And it’s very easy to hide for a week, but very difficult to hide for two months. So we started to realize that we got to filter more. So it was like an extended recruiting process, really. So that was number one.

So yes, I agree. It gives us a chance to do that on our time and not mess up the client account. So we get to see problems before we move to client pairing.

The second thing I did—I like to flip things on their head—so I flipped the recruiting model on its head. I was like, anyone can say anything in interviews, and some people are great at interviewing. They’re really good at it and they can shine.

So instead of doing the interview first, that’s actually the last step in our recruiting process now. And we have a completely metrics-based, very faceless testing process. It’s actually quite excruciating to put people through it. But those who make it to the interview phase—and people still fail at that phase because we know how to pick for character traits and things we’re looking for.

But by doing it that way, we didn’t increase our hiring rate. So we still only hire 1.5% of applicants, but our failure rate post-hire is low. So the churn rate once they’re in is low. And usually the churn happens in the first two months on our time. That’s probably maybe 10%; maybe 7% or 8% of candidates will fail in the training program.

Derek Gallimore: And what do you get people to do in your organization before they’re sort of handed out to clients? Are you kind of creating work, you know, kind of like digging holes in the backyard kind of thing, or is it real work that you have ongoing?

Barbara Turley: It’s a lot of stuff. So initially, a lot of it is just training with practicing and doing quizzes, and we do workshops, and a lot of it’s very theory-based. Then what you want to have is obviously hands-on.

It has taken us years to build this, and we have a team of five in the Learning and Organizational Development department, which I’m very proud of. We’re like a Learning and Organizational Development company, really, that produces VAs, as opposed to a recruitment agency. So we are quite different.

But eventually, you know, we have built out massive amounts of practice tasks. Some of it’s real. So our marketing team often requires a lot of SEO and link-building and this sort of thing, and we put them in those teams. We rotate them around certain teams as well. So they may help out in the recruiting teams, they may help out in the ops teams, and we have developed areas within each department where we can slot people in and out really quickly to do work.

And that serves two functions. We get to get some work done from the people that we have on payroll, but also we get to see how they perform under pressure and on the job, on the real job, right? Because a lot of this work is VA work.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, it’s sort of picking up and running with new jobs, isn’t it? With little introduction, can they—

Barbara Turley: Yes, and they get feedback.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Barbara Turley: We give them a process: “There’s your training. There’s your process. Boom. We need this done by tomorrow.”

And it’s interesting, you know, because they’re reporting to Filipinos on my team, on our teams. Sometimes the Filipinos will be harder on them than the clients. So they’re harder markers because their expectations are that these guys—and we get—but they all perform well. I mean, we do well. I’m very proud of how we do, really.

Derek Gallimore: And you have the benefit of sort of giving that same task to 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 people over the months or years. Then it’s very easy for you to identify if people are struggling in picking it up.

Barbara Turley: We know who’s any good. And also, I suppose, when a client comes to us, typically—now, there are times when crunch happens where we have more demand than supply, but we try to keep this measured.

Now, this is the hardest task that I have, is to try to measure how to keep demand and supply balanced such that you don’t have 50 people sitting on the bench, which has happened, on the payroll. Or you have six- and eight-week waits for clients.

So we have developed—we’ve dialed in the systems around that internally quite heavily so that we can manage supply and demand. And we do it quite well. I have to say, there’s only about one time per year where we all go, “No, we’re in trouble here,” where there’s a glut of demand or a glut of supply.

And that can get a bit hairy. But I think where I developed that skill—you know, I spent 10 years on an equity trading floor where I was a market maker matching supply and demand. And I got very good at figuring out how do you actually trade supply and demand like that. So I think that’s probably where I got that skill from.

Derek Gallimore: It’s fascinating, isn’t it? And your little machine or engine—you’ve got the carry costs of too many people on the bench, but it is an asset sitting there, isn’t it?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s like product. It’s like product in a warehouse. You kind of have to go, “Right, we’ve got a bench,” but it means we can deploy people very quickly.

And as you know, and listeners will know, by the time somebody comes looking for a VA, unfortunately, you will say to them, “When do you need this VA?” and usually the answer is, “Yesterday.” So we’re like, “We can have someone done in a week. We can have them in your account, trained, ready to go, hit the ground running in about a week.” So that’s quite powerful.

Derek Gallimore: And I find, with Outsource Accelerator focusing on the sales aspect of the industry, I do find that a major flaw or weakness of the industry generally is that it’s a very long sales cycle. And when people do decide that they want to go ahead with offshoring, then it can be four to eight to 12 weeks before they actually find their candidates.

So if you can sidestep all of that with ready-made candidates, it’s really an exciting prospect, and you must certainly see the sales cycle compact a lot.

Barbara Turley: Ours is shorter, definitely. And I think, you know, for any of the listeners thinking about this, why is this model better? I believe—of course, I’m talking my own book—but I fundamentally believe this model is better because what I say to clients is, if you’re already stretched, we know that typically people need someone yesterday. I mean, it’s just the nature of it. We tend not to move forward until we actually need it, and then it’s too late.

But if you’re already busy, the last thing you want is to get rounds and rounds of resumes coming through, and then you have to sit through rounds of interviews. None of our clients do that. They will see two to three profiles. Those people will be prepped and ready and primed for that account before they ever meet that client.

We send them in—I always talk about it like the spa—we send them to the spa before they go to the client, and they arrive prepped for that client.

And typically, the feedback from the clients we get is, “Wow, those three were really, really great.” That’s really good for me. And literally about 2% of accounts will say, “Could I see another one or two people?” And then they’ll pick on the second round. But the success rate on round one is high.

It’s 90 minutes of a meetup. We don’t even call it an interview or call them candidates because they’re already hired.

So that’s number one of the model. It’s very quick for the client.

Number two, I guess what I would say is sometimes clients will feel guilty about canceling a VA contract because that person could end up with no income and lose their job because their income is tied to a client account in most of the other models. In our model, you can scale us up and scale us down with 30 days’ notice, and that person will not lose their job.

Now, that’s tricky to manage, but our job is to manage our supply of VAs. And we’ve now invested in that person. There’s no way we’re letting that person out into the market floating. We would rather put them back on the bench, maybe do some more training, maybe give them a project that we have going, and then get them onto another client account. So it’s like stock, you know, we have inventory.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, it’s fascinating, isn’t it? It’s a novel approach. Obviously, the outsourcing business model has a lot of different variations, but your approach to this is relatively unique. You are very contained, very managed, and I suppose you’re then able to manage the quality and presentation of your product so much better.

I suppose, by way of background introduction, you are the founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, and you specifically specialize in virtual assistants, don’t you? So this model doesn’t necessarily apply to an architect or accountant. It kind of gets hard, but you focus on one core service, and that enables you to do what you do in terms of building up supply and managing the quality.

Barbara Turley: Yes, and I guess I productized what it was we were doing very early on. I saw this. I think this is actually sometimes the benefit of coming into an industry with zero knowledge and zero experience. I mean, I have a lot of war wounds and learned things the hard way. But I think when you come in with a fresh pair of eyes, I looked at the industry and thought, “Yeah, there’s a lot of holes there. There’s a lot of problems. There’s a lot of churn going on.”

And the market that we service is—I was able to productize this and say, okay, most businesses—and I mean, I was a business coach prior, so I kind of had a knowledge of most businesses. Businesses are a machine, as we know. A lot of people don’t see it that way. But at the end of the day, every business, regardless of industry or what they’re doing, really, what are we doing? We’re creating a product or offer and shipping or delivering product or offer. Every single business in the world is doing that at its core function.

You can hire A-players in marketing and sales and all these things. My philosophy is, though, if you want to build a machine that is a business—and the asset value of that will be higher if you do it this way—build it as a machine and make sure that, yes, you have these A-players at the top, but you want to make sure that the most expensive time and energy that your company is paying for with these A-players is not being used on support roles and support functions. Those should be pushed offshore.

And we specialize in the support of businesses so that you allow your most expensive time and energy to push the business forward and not get bogged down in the weeds of busy work, which is what’s actually happening. I’m seeing this in companies all over the world. You’ve got frustrated and fed-up employees because they can’t move the needle because they’re tied up with—there have been studies done—that anywhere from 20% to 60% of their day is taken up with repeatable, recurring tasks that could and should be delegated.

Derek Gallimore: And what is the extent—have you ever been tempted to expand your machine to other roles? Because what happens when a client says, “These VAs are absolutely tremendous. Can you do accounting?” Is there then leakage where you say, “Well, we don’t offer that, but the bloke down the road does”? Inevitably, there’s sort of a leakage there. How do you manage that in terms of your mission and focus?

Barbara Turley: Okay, so yes. The answer is that we do do it for clients very selectively. So we have another team that is a specialized recruiting team. So yes, once a client is in and they’ve got VAs with us and they’re like, “Hey, I really need an accountant,” or whatever, we can go out and recruit that.

I will be honest, though: in looking at both models, I commend the other head-sourcing businesses because it is excruciating to do that specialized model. And we have found it to be very expensive to run it, to get success with it.

Once we get a good hit and we get a home run with it, that’s okay. To manage it ongoing is fine. But I have found that personally to be quite difficult. And there have been moments when I’ve said, “Do we want to do this?” So we only do it selectively if a client really wants it, but we would never advertise that we do that.

Derek Gallimore: It is a tough industry, isn’t it? Because it’s all based on recruitment and getting the right candidate through the door. And anyone in business generally knows it is a bit hit and miss, isn’t it? Part of the product outsourcing offers is successful recruitment, and you can only guarantee that as much as any employment is accurate or a good guarantee. So it is a bit hit and miss. You’re good to sidestep that.

What about then the next challenges? What about VA creep? You know, they start as an assistant and then they show promise and then all of a sudden—I assume this is a good thing, of course—but the client then has 20 VAs doing all of the marketing and all of the content and all of the sales, and they effectively become staff. Do you see that a lot in your business?

Barbara Turley: You know, it’s funny. You would think that would be a major problem, and it may become one. I have thought about this.

I think what clients like about our model, though, is that we sort of become a partner. And when they start to have large teams, they think they would want them all under their own banner until they start to realize that once you get a large team, we give you a results coach to manage that team as part of the deal. And you also have a client success manager that’s liaising with you.

So we’ve had clients who go, “I need another one. I need another one.” They just send an email to the client success manager and we’ve got it. We’ve got people ready to go, and we handle the training. So they like this, right? We can just—we’ve built training programs as well that are for specific client accounts so that we can onboard a VA very quickly for them. So we become very much a partner in the business.

The other thing they like is the scale-up, scale-down model, which can feel scary, but when they lose a client contract and they have to let go of two of the people, usually we’re short VAs, to be honest. Usually, the demand is higher than the supply. So we’re like, “Okay, stick those ones over on this other account,” and they’re already experienced then.

So look, it is dicey. It is a tricky business to be in. I don’t think clients really appreciate how difficult a business it is because you’re dealing with people, you know?

And I think the other thing our clients like is that we have a very strong focus on culture. Now, this is all driven by me. I’m a huge fan of the Vern Harnish Scaling Up methodology. If anyone has read that book, it’s a fantastic book. Vern actually became a client of ours through me doing those courses and following their methodology.

And a huge part of that methodology is about the people pillar of the business and measuring employee net promoter score. Every three or four months, we have massive town halls where we do huge surveys and we ask the people. Everything in the company has kind of been built from the people and from what they tell us, within reason. I mean, you’d like to pay more and you’d like to do all these things.

And I think clients like that too, because we do all the team building and all the dinners and the fun and the Christmas party. We invest a lot in that. Again, it’s cost, but it has to be done.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, that’s fascinating. And then the clients as well—how do you limit the expectations of clients that maybe want that unicorn VA that can do everything and really is more of an extension of the workplace as opposed to an assistant capable of doing existing processes? That sort of inevitable expectation that they can do this, it won’t be a problem until it is. How do you manage those expectations with clients?

Barbara Turley: First of all, we are brutally honest on the discovery call. We stop that right from the get-go. So we’re very deep on that discovery call in the beginning to dig into what they want to do, what their expectations are. And we’re like, “We can do this bit, but you might get a unicorn that could do that bit, but we wouldn’t advise it.”

So we prefer to undersell and over-deliver rather than oversell and under-deliver.

We’re brutally honest, and in podcasts like this, I’m brutally honest. I did a podcast myself for a long time where I’m very transparent about what’s possible and what’s not, and when you’re expecting too much.

At the end of the day, I do say this as well: a virtual assistant is an assistant. They’re not a specialist. And I think that’s where people are getting this wrong. An assistant is an assistant. They’re there to execute a process that has been designed and delivered by somebody else.

Now, can they work with you and the two of you collaborate together to create a process? Of course you can. Can they build a process for you? Maybe. It depends how good your instruction is, how good your delegation ability is, and how systemized your business is. A lot of it hinges on the actual operational framework that the business has. So it’s just being realistic.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, and I think it is critical, isn’t it, that you do set clear expectations from the beginning. And it takes a lot of—not wanting to be condescending—but it’s more about training the client, isn’t it, rather than the staff, because the staff are used to this. This is their gig. It’s really just about setting expectations for the client, for the onboarding, for the process, having all of the processes in place and having them clear, and then handing them over.

Barbara Turley: And that’s good business, right? I mean, forget VAs for a second. Forget the Philippines for a second. This is good business. Having systemized, properly structured operations and good operational frameworks where there is transparency and visibility not only means that you can now work in a remote environment successfully.

A lot of the reason companies are trying to run back to the office and not do this very successfully at the moment, in my view, is because they don’t have the right operational framework that allows the level of visibility and transparency that you need to work in a remote environment.

But when you do have it set up that way, then it’s very easy to integrate offshore teams.

And also, the other thing I would say: a lot of clients look at a process and they’re like, “Unless they can do 100% of the process, I’m not interested.” But what happens if a VA can do 90% of it and you only have to do 10%? I mean, that’s still your time freed up, or one of your key people’s time freed up. That is valuable—very, very valuable.

So it’s about breaking process down and saying, “Well, steps one to 10—eight of them can be done by a VA, and Mary over in sales has to do step one and two,” or whatever. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, I don’t think a lot of people realize it requires conscious engineering of the processes and, to some degree, the org chart in a business, doesn’t it? Like you’ve got your traditional org chart in a company when you hire locally and you’ve got people going into an office.

And if you tweak it, it doesn’t directly translate across. But if you just spend a little bit of time analyzing that org chart, tweaking it a bit, tweaking the processes, then you can really reap the benefits of global employment and, of course, the cost savings and access to wider pools of talent.

But it’s not a direct translation. That tweaking, that engineering—it’s not that hard, is it? But people sort of expect a direct translation, or it’s all off.

Barbara Turley: They do. And I think this is a problem, again, forgetting VAs for a second or even Philippines or global staff. I think one of the fundamental problems a lot of businesses face is that they do not want to—they don’t see value in—and they don’t want to spend the time on operational efficiency.

But what they don’t realize is the more time that you spend on operational efficiency, the higher the value of your business later, and it will pay dividends to you as the business owner into perpetuity, the more work you put into that in the early days.

I know this because I’ve done it. I built a business living across two continents, fully remote, having two children, and working part-time. And we have 350 staff. I know everything that’s going on on my phone.

I’m a big fan of tools like Asana, for example, and running top-down strategy into bottom-up execution and having it all show in one online platform where everyone is collaborating and doing work. Then it makes it very easy. You don’t need to be in the same place, and offshore team members can join in.

Derek Gallimore: That sounds a dream, doesn’t it? You know, I’m actually going through that phase again at the moment with my business. I’m just doing too much and spread too thin. I’ve read a lot of books. I applied Scaling Up to some degree in my last business. I haven’t in this business, but I’m about to get EAs to manage me effectively and manage the workflows to me.

But it’s hard, isn’t it? Again, it’s that conscious engineering of what you’re doing and what the organization is doing. But again, it’s essential.

Barbara Turley: I can give you an example. Recently, I decided to go into LinkedIn quite deeply. Initially, as you know with process, you sort of have to do it yourself first before you figure out how to delegate it. I think people try to delegate too early sometimes.

So I went into this, and probably over two or three months, I was like, “This is painful, every day doing this myself.” But then it took a while for me to figure out what the actual system was. How does this work? What system is here? What bits can VAs do?

And now I do very little of it. It’s all delegated out to VAs, and it’s done. The system is built. But it took time, and it was a little bit excruciating. But we got there. Now I’m not doing it anymore, so I can move on to the next thing. But LinkedIn is running.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah. I train—I tell this to my teams as well. There are, and as well with outsourcing, all of these principles of running a business apply to how to run an offshore team. But there’s three very different roles within a team. There’s the architect that actually has to build and design a process. Then there’s the manager, and then there’s the maker or the doer. And they’re three separate roles.

Now, of course, in the beginning in a startup, it’s the founder that has to do everything. But as the team grows, you still need that architect who builds and designs the system, does the first few iterations, tests it, makes sure it’s okay, and then you can pass it down to—depending on the scale—a manager that oversees it, and then the maker that actually does it.

And you can’t mix those up. If you just hand a task to a maker to create a task, it will never be done.

Barbara Turley: And they don’t have the expertise. They don’t have the expertise. That’s an over-expectation of the role.

In fact, the architecture piece is so important to get right, and I found accidentally that I was quite good at it. I didn’t realize that this was a skill I had.

And then I had a lot of clients asking, “Can you help us to build some of those systems that you’ve built?” And this was outside of the VAs.

So actually, two years ago, we launched another arm to the business where we only do it for clients at the moment, but we run them. We have an entire operational efficiency consulting and implementation team. And what they do is, if you’ve got VAs, then our consultant—who sits in Sydney, Australia, actually—gets on a call with you and deep-dives into what the pain points are and what you’re trying to do. We architect a system, even a platform process and how the people would interact with it. You can either go and implement that yourself, or we have the team that can build it for you, like putting in Asana builds and stuff like that.

And that’s been quite successful. We’ve seen the problems that businesses are having, and some of them are having problems with VAs that are not actually to do with the VAs. It’s to do with the operational framework. Then they get more success with VAs after the work is done, of course.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, that’s interesting, isn’t it? And that’s similar to Gino Wickman’s Traction, isn’t it? Where there are implementers and—I can’t remember the other one—the creators or whatever. You need both types here.

But do you find that if you rent out your architect capability, is that scalable? That’s really hard, isn’t it? You have that because you’re an entrepreneur through and through, but it’s then hard to scale that to teams.

Barbara Turley: Yes, it is.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah. It’s like management consulting.

Barbara Turley: Yes, it is. It is. Now, the clients that we’re doing it for, I will share, are larger, so it has been worthwhile for them. We’ve done it for some smaller clients, but usually the engagement will go anywhere from three months to—we’re in one that’s probably going to take 18 months at the moment.

So it’s almost like a subscription-type model, but it doesn’t go on for long. But we’re okay to do it because our core business is VAs, really. But this consulting around the side is also a nice revenue stream, and clients want it, and we can make a material difference.

So yes, we’re playing with how to position that, but it’s always going to be a side part of the model as opposed to the core. The core is people, VAs, and getting them working properly.

Derek Gallimore: Do you still use Scaling Up, and have you modified it, customized it a lot, or is it pretty much out of the box?

Barbara Turley: I think it’s pretty out of the box. I mean, I think if you follow the Scaling Up methodology, it’s something you can do once and then go back and revisit every year, and you’re going to find a new thing to do.

I read the book—this is the truth—my first time going to the Philippines, I sat on a flight and I brought the book with me, and I read the book for the entire flight. I came back after that trip and pretty much dissected the business and rebuilt it as best I could based on the book.

Then a couple of years later, I did the online course, and that was huge. I brought our head of ops and head of HR into the course with me from the Philippines. We all did it together, and we heavily focused on the people part. The people pillar was enormous, and it was a lot of work. It was like 18 months to two years of work, to be honest.

And then strategy, the other pillars—one of them I’m going back to now, the cash pillar. You know, there’s strategy, cash, execution. We did execution quite well, and people, but I revisit it every year and do another little bit. And then, of course, the next step up would be to get a coach. We haven’t gone that route yet, but I am a big follower of the methodology.

Derek Gallimore: Well done. It’s really good. It’s really good to have a clear operating system for a business, isn’t it? But it takes the discipline to actually do it.

Barbara Turley: Well, it’s freedom in a box, really. I mean, it provides you a lot of freedom. For me, the more I do it, the more I delegate, and the more I systemize things and structure them properly, the more freedom I get.

So recently, we implemented objectives and key results and put them all in Asana and did this whole waterfall technique with it. It has reduced the amount of meetings I have by 50%, which is material for my day.

I say we don’t have meetings anymore. We have love chats where we just catch up—not because the updates are all happening. The status updates are happening in relation to the results we’re trying to drive, and it’s happening inside of Asana.

Anyway, that’s just so that—and again, you can do that at a VA level. Yeah. I love it. I love all this stuff.

Derek Gallimore: That’s amazing. So you have evolved over the 10 years. You’ve got 350 staff, but of course nothing remains static. We’ve obviously had COVID. The whole world now is remote.

How have you seen the industry evolve over the 10 years? Also, I think to the credit of the industry, everyone—10 or 15 years ago, no one knew about offshoring and really how available it was or whether it was possible.

Now kind of everyone knows, but it’s more about the details and getting them over that line. How have you seen the industry evolve, and how has that impacted your business?

Barbara Turley: I’ve seen a lot more traditional industries now be open to it. They’re still not doing it, but they’re open to it.

I think years ago, you would have people on the call and their biggest fear would be things like trust. “How do I trust this person?” Then everyone went to work from home during COVID, and you realized, how do you trust anyone? I mean, it’s not just in the Philippines that this is an issue.

And then, of course, the systems have come up the ranks too—the tech stacks—to deal with these fears and these issues. I think people’s questions these days have changed from “How do I trust somebody?” to “How do I integrate them successfully into my business and know that they’re doing the work?” Things like that.

So I guess that’s our responsibility in the industry: to help more and more clients. I mean, I think it’s a no-brainer. I don’t know why any business would not have an offshore team strategy. And of course I’m talking my own book, but there’s no business I can think of that couldn’t use it. It’s mad. The cost savings are insane, and you’re providing amazing—

Derek Gallimore: Come to the whole sales thing. Yeah, no, it’s amazing. It’s a win-win.

Come back to the whole sales thing. I think everyone perceives it as a vitamin, and I’m really like, “This is a painkiller. This will transform your business and significantly cut costs. You need to start this today.”

Whereas I think everyone sort of puts it in the bucket of, “This is kind of polishing the org chart a little bit and we’ll get around to that next year.” Do you find that it’s never a priority, is it? Because I suppose it’s pushing into the dark a little bit, people just put it off for the next quarter or next half.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I think as well, people naturally want to hang on to their own turf. I think I’m naturally quite a lazy person. Now, you might think that’s hilarious given I’ve built this big business, but I actually think this is like a superpower of mine, and I wish more people were like this.

If I find myself working too much or if I find myself doing something more than once or twice, my immediate thought is, “How do I delegate this?” Whereas I think other people just tend to work more, work harder, work more, rather than thinking, “How do I become more efficient myself?”

Part of that is delegation, part of that is systems and tools and process mapping and finding the easiest pathway. I think people still seem to struggle with that. They still want to put in more hours and push harder. I just fundamentally don’t think you need to do that to get the results. I think you need to be more clever. And I think people need to change their mindset a bit about that.

Derek Gallimore: How have you seen—obviously we had COVID, things are moving more towards remote—have you seen a big difference in people’s tolerance, acceptance, appreciation for remote work?

Barbara Turley: Yes, I have. But I guess there’s a big swing in the other direction happening right now online. If you’re following on LinkedIn and Twitter, there are these huge debates going on around back-to-the-office and the calls to return.

I think people who are fighting it and saying, “What’s the point of going back to the office? We all proved during COVID we could do it,” are not listening to the—

Okay, I think the problem actually is not the remote work as such. Like you said earlier with the org chart and the old office, I think the way businesses operate didn’t move. Everyone just went to work from home and had to make it work. But the operational frameworks didn’t change. The tool stack, the way we work, didn’t change.

And in order for us to be fully remote and to make location irrelevant—whether you’re in an office or somewhere else doesn’t actually matter. Let’s forget remote. Let’s just call it location-irrelevant. The actual operational frameworks need to change.

And we’re not there yet. The world is not there yet. People are not there yet. I don’t think people realize, as well, the level of transparency that is needed for a remote setting to work.

So people will say, “But you should just trust your people.” Well, how about we forget trust, because that’s a bit emotional and a bit subjective. Why don’t we just build trustless environments where it is irrelevant?

That’s hard to unpack right now because we’ve only got a couple of minutes, but you want to make location irrelevant and trust irrelevant. The world is not there yet. Most businesses are not built that way.

Derek Gallimore: Is that progressively making the individual worker less relevant then? If you’re almost creating systems where it’s piecemeal and anyone can do it, does that ultimately make the individual contributor less relevant and they can just be productized?

Barbara Turley: No, I don’t think so. I think what I mean by saying that is, for example, let’s say you’ve got somebody running a sales function or whatever. And what you’ve got to do—and this is where objectives and key results are very powerful—if you set the correct objectives and key results within a company, within a department, and then for a role, and then you tie the work that’s getting done—projects or whatever the work is—that is driving those results.

If you connect that work to the result and you have a platform like Asana, for example—we’re big fans of Asana, we are an Asana partner—but I’ve built the entire company on this. Asana for me is like a central location in the cloud that replaces the office. It’s where everyone shows up to work. Everyone does work. Everyone collaborates on work. And everyone reports on work. And if you build it properly, it can replace the old office and what the office gave us, essentially.

And when people are doing their work, now you actually don’t care when they do it, how they do it, really—it depends on the role and the level they’re at. As long as you can see: is the result being driven? Are we on track or off track? And if we’re off track, what’s the roadblock?

So we can have a meeting now about the roadblock and not about you updating me on where you’re at. See what I mean? You reduce the number of meetings by doing that, and you reduce the need to know everything because you can see whether the result is moving in the right direction or not. And that’s where you have dashboards and metrics.

Now, maybe that is a bit too systems-minded for some people, but I just think at the end of the day in business, we have results we’re trying to achieve, and we’re either on track or off track on the results. And if we’re off track, we need to talk about what the roadblock is so that we can then, as a team, collaborate on how we deal with the roadblock.

And if the roadblock turns out to be that this person is not good enough for the role, then you ask: is it a skill issue or a will issue? Is it training? Is it the wrong person in the wrong seat? That’s how you expose the right questions to ask. And you don’t need to trust that they know what they’re doing, because maybe they think they know what they’re doing, but actually they don’t.

Derek Gallimore: Relying on the central system requires everyone to be 100% compliant with using and entering their activity in the system. Do you struggle with that? When you onboard new key people, critical people, that they have to learn this—is it kind of intuitive, or do you find you have to remind and force people to use it for the first three months until it becomes habitual?

Barbara Turley: I think this is part of culture. So, for example, how we do it is when somebody enters our culture, it’s very apparent how we operate, and we have rules. Now, that might sound a bit schoolyard-ish, but if you think about this for a second, if you want to be a high-performance team, somebody enters the team, they can’t just go off and play the game in their own way, or row the boat at a different speed from the other people. We all have to collaborate on the way that we do things, not just that we all might play a different role.

But how this company operates and how we as a team operate this company needs to be fully understood. And if that’s very clear from day one, you can even punch it into your recruiting on the front end. So people are very clear and aware that they’re entering something.

It means that you stop that feeling of, “Hold on a sec, I took this job and this isn’t what I thought it was going to be.” And you want to avoid that. You want people to be joining a culture and to resonate and to be magnetically attracted to the way that you do things in this company.

And I think most people, particularly A-players, like to join well-organized, well-run teams. They like to join things like that. People want to join the Ferrari. They don’t want to join the scooter. They want the Ferrari.

And it’s our job as business owners and visionaries and entrepreneurs to create the Ferrari that the A-players can then drive, if that makes sense.

Derek Gallimore: Yeah, very clear.

One of the biggest trends, of course, for 2023 is AI. So again, it’s just another tool, but it’s kind of an extension of all of these tools, isn’t it? How have you seen, I suppose, for your organization but also your clients’ staff, the adoption of these tools?

Now, of course, there are the specific tools like ChatGPT and whether people are adopting those. But then, of course, all of this technology is embedded in a lot of the existing tools, maybe like Asana and Notion and Grammarly and Docs and things like that.

So how have you seen the roles evolve over the last 12 months? Is it dramatic, or are you just seeing little optimizations here and there?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s an interesting one. When it first came out and ChatGPT launched, I will share that I think I had about three or four weeks of no sleep. I just thought, “We’re dead. The industry is gone. This is gone,” right? It really felt like an existential threat.

And then after a while—I mean, when new technologies come out, I have noticed this over the years—there’ll be a big flurry, and then at some point it plateaus for a bit and everyone takes a breath. I feel like everyone did that a few months ago, where it was moving very fast, and it’s still moving fast, but we’ve sort of plateaued a bit in where we’re at and in people understanding it.

And we’ve realized that this is a great tool to augment people, including VAs, right? So this is great. We can augment our VAs. However, there is a bit of a—it’s not a steep learning curve like coding, for example—but it’s a lot to take in.

And I think we’re training VAs slowly on it and figuring out what bits they can do. It takes a lot to sift through all of this. I think businesses—there are a lot of businesses that still haven’t even gotten their heads around the marketing automation of 10 years ago, to be honest. I see businesses still on spreadsheets, and I’m like, I mean, AI is here and we are all going to use it, but I think the adoption of it will be fast, but not as fast as people think in certain businesses.

So I think we’ve just got to allow the world to catch up a bit and move with it. I mean, it’s here, it’s not going away. So as business owners, we’ve got to figure out how to use it. We are using it internally, but that’s a big project that I’m on. It’s kind of the next future of where I spend my time right now: trying to figure out what we’re going to do with that.

Derek Gallimore: Well, Barbara, fascinating conversation. Are you optimistic for the future? Do you still see a lot of growth ahead and a lot of opportunity for the industry and The Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: I think so, yes. I think since the pandemic, it has blown open remote quite nicely. And like I said, I just think more and more businesses are very open to this conversation now where they may not have been in the past, and that’s a good thing. It’s good for business globally, and it’s good for the Philippines and all the other countries that are going to participate in this.

And I’m a naturally optimistic person. I think AI will create a massive boom in the world, productivity-wise, and I think that’ll be good for everyone. It’ll be a bit stressful in the transition phase while we figure out what we’re doing with it.

Derek Gallimore: And it’s an interesting time with this looming recession, isn’t it? Everyone’s having to pull in their belts a little bit and really take stock and really look at costs for the first time in about three or four years.

Barbara Turley: Well, they should be looking offshore because, I mean, why would you not look offshore then? For me, that just seems like a total no-brainer: to consider this as a strategy and to really think about it.

Derek Gallimore: That’s a good reality check. So Barbara, thank you so much. If anyone wants to get in touch—and of course, I always encourage people to pick up the phone and have a conversation and really see how this can transform their business—how can they get in touch? How can they learn more?

Barbara Turley: Sure, sure. So if you’re ready to have a chat with us, head over to thevirtualhub.com. I know it’ll be in the show notes. Book a call with us. We’ve got some great people you can chat with on the phone. Some of them have been VAs and grew up into great salespeople for us, so you get to actually speak directly to someone like you might actually work with.

Also, our site has so much content on it about what I’ve been speaking about. So you can dive into podcast episodes and everything over there.

And also, if you want to hear more, I am doing a lot on LinkedIn, as I shared earlier. So I am expanding all of these topics and talking more about this stuff over on LinkedIn. So please come and connect with me there: Barbara Turley on LinkedIn.

Derek Gallimore: That was Barbara Turley, the founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub. As always, if you want any of the show notes, go to outsourceaccelerator.com/podcast.

And if you want to send us an email, email us at [email protected]. See you next time.