Barbara Turley: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of businesses that are kind of in a zombie stage, and they could actually be really successful if we can just get them out of the weeds. Like I fundamentally believe that. And I think what’s going to happen to a lot of businesses is they’re just going to stay there and they’re just going to kind of keep, they won’t wither, but they’re just going to keep trudging along.

And the owner of those, the owner or the owners, are just going to be driven into the ground trying to keep it alive. And I think it doesn’t have to be that way. It just does not have to be that way. But there’s a lot of those businesses out there that could be made way more successful, even without AI. It’s just efficiency. And I call it the relentless pursuit of time efficiency and effectiveness. Moms are great at this because we have no choice. When you become a mom, have to be relentless in your time efficiency and effectiveness.

But you know, I actually wrote a post on LinkedIn about this today. It said, you know, it is the relentless pursuit of time efficiency and effectiveness in scaling a business. Because of course, there’s loads of other things to do to scale a business. But those, that’s the gateway is to have the relentless pursuit of time efficiency and effectiveness. Because without that, there’s no energy and there’s no space to do all the things that need to be done to scale a business. You know, it is the gateway.

Voice Actor: This is the Play Your Position Podcast, where we huddle up, call the plays, and inspire you to run your ball into the end zone. Are you ready to score more game-winning touchdowns in your life, business, and career? Then listen up, because it’s game time, baby. Now, here’s your host, Mary Lou Kayser.

Mary Lou Kayser: Hello, hello, Team PYP. Mary Lou Kaser here. Welcome to today’s episode of the Play Your Position podcast. I’m so happy you decided to join me today because it is game day here at PYP. And you know what that means. I have got a great guest who suited up, ready to take the field and take us into her leadership journey, the lessons that she’s learned, the work that she’s doing now and how what she’s doing now as a leader is helping others get their jobs done more effectively, more efficiently, and with some grace. Her name is Barbara Turley. Barbara, are you ready for kickoff?

Barbara Turley: I am, Mary Lou. Absolutely ready for kickoff. Let’s do it.

Mary Lou Kayser: Yes. So, team, one thing that’s interesting about Barbara is she’s coming to us from the mountains over in Europe. It’s some remote place, which I think is so awesome. And she’s going to talk about her global journey.

First, let me give you some context about her as a person. She is an investor, an entrepreneur, and the founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub, which is a business that she started by accident that scaled quickly to become one of the leading companies that integrates in-house trained virtual assistants into clients’ businesses.

This strategy frees up time and energy so that businesses can focus on optimizing their operations further to achieve business growth goals. With a strong focus on customized training and ongoing career development, The Virtual Hub ensures that her team is trained in cutting edge programs that many of us are familiar with, things like HubSpot, Ontraport, and the like, and having this up to date familiarity with these programs allows them to best meet their clients’ unique needs in digital marketing, social media, operational support, and admin services. And when she’s not working on her business, she is a mom to her gorgeous kids, Ruby and Alexander, wife to her best friend. Is it Etai? Eti. Eti. And yeah, it’s Eti and an adventure lover.

She loves horses, she loves skiing, tennis, and spending time in nature. She also, she’s lived in Australia and knows about surfing and Manly, which I did at one time in my life. And we’ll talk about that too. So Barbara, it’s great to have you here today. Welcome.

Barbara Turley: I’m excited, Mary Lou. Thank you for having me.

Mary Lou Kayser: Yeah. So tell us your story of becoming a leader. When did you get the call to leadership, Barbara? How old were you? Was there something specific going on in your life that led you into a role or was there just one day you woke up and said, wow, I’m really in a leadership role in my life. And you know, man, this is great, but it’s also full of questions.

Barbara Turley: You know, it’s funny, as you were saying the question, I was thinking all these flashbacks are coming into my head. And the first thing that came to mind was I think I came really late to leadership.

Mary Lou Kayser: Hmm.

Barbara Turley: I had a corporate career for a long time. I worked in the investment banking industry for like 10, 15 years and I had no interest in leading teams or I wasn’t in any leadership roles really. I was a sort of a solo contributor in lots of ways because I was a trader for 10 years.

And then I went into sales role, which again, you’re out hunting, doing business development, you’re part of a team, but you’re sort of still operating quite solo in bringing in your own leads. So that’s from a career perspective and the leadership calling, my adult leadership calling, I do remember when it happened. I had during the last big financial rumble, those of us old enough to remember the 2008 financial crisis, I was sort of deep in the financial industry at that time when that happened.

And to cut a very long story short, I kind of ended up in the washing machine of people being let go and Lehman Brothers collapsed, like all that sort of thing. I was in the middle of that whole thing. And I took a role, again, not a leadership position, but I took a sort of a temporary role that I managed to find when there was no jobs around. And through that role, it was a sales role. That’s what led me into sales.

But through that, ended up getting involved with a startup of sorts in the financial industry in Australia, actually. And through that, I was with a very clever bunch of people and I kind of hopped on the coattails of what they were doing. And through that, sort of started to, while working there, I was an early shareholder as well. So I did take a position in that company. But while working there, I learned a lot about leadership and I learned a lot about how great companies get built.

And I had this incredible sense one day, and I was in my mid thirties at this stage, where I thought, I really felt this incredible urge that I had sort of done everything I wanted to do under the umbrella of that company or any company. And what I wanted to do was I now wanted to step out and above. And I felt like I wanted to have things under me, like I was still a shareholder in that company. I wanted to invest in other companies. I wanted to build my own company.

Which wasn’t something I always wanted to do my whole life. It just came in my thirties. And I felt that if I didn’t leave that company as an employee and step out and above and into my own power, I suppose, or my own position, I felt that I was going to hold myself back in ways that it was such a calling that I did it. And it was scary, but I just felt an incredible need to do it. And I’ve never looked back.

However, in saying that, my daughter is six and a half and she’s a very self-directed kid. She knows exactly what she wants. And I know she gets that from me. So I just feel like even as a kid and a teenager, I always knew where I was going and what I wanted. So I think that’s the early formings of leadership, maybe in your personality. I was always a very strong leader of myself. And I always felt really the leader of my own life.

So I suppose that would be my early leadership feelings, but it didn’t come really to fruition in my work life until I was in my mid thirties. And now, I mean, I’m technically a leader of 300 people. It’s an amazing journey actually over the last eight years doing that.

Mary Lou Kayser: Yeah. It’s so fascinating to hear the iterations of a person’s life, like such as yourself, Barbara, with having an awareness when you were working in the financial scene that you didn’t want to lead. Like you knew, like you knew that was what you wanted, not to lead, right?

Barbara Turley: Yes, I didn’t. I no desire. No desire to lead a team. Yep, a solo operator of sorts. Yeah.

Mary Lou Kayser: Yeah. And then to be, you obviously have a high level of self-awareness, which I think is one of the traits of a really effective leader is someone who can clearly draw those lines in the sand about this is what I want, this is what I don’t, yes to this, no to that. And people who have trouble with yeses and nos tend not to either pursue leadership roles. I think you were leading in the financial scene, but you weren’t leading a team. And I think that’s something that I like to emphasize for listeners is that leadership isn’t necessarily defined by how many people you’re responsible for. You can lead yourself, you can lead your family, right?

Barbara Turley: I think leadership of self is the first place if I really think about that. And I do believe that some people are born strong leaders, you know, of self, like whether they become leaders in other ways remains to be seen. But there are some people that are quite self-directed. They know what they want, when they want it, and that’s a good trait to have. I mean, I look at my daughter now and I think, she’s quite defiant in some ways, but it’s a trait I would never break because I know she has that sense. And when I see it in her, think, yeah, I was like that. But I think it can be coached and mentored and taught, especially for people who don’t feel that they have that natural self-drive and self-learn.

Mary Lou Kayser: Yeah. And it’s a process of discovery.

Yes, there are people like your daughter. My daughter sounds very much like yours. Very, just very strong sense of this is what I want and strong sense of self. And I certainly have that trait as well. But at the same time, opportunities come in and out of our lives.

And, you know, sometimes you find yourself in a less, I would perhaps visual role. You’re just leading in your own little space and then fast forward to what you’re doing now where you have 300 people that technically you’re responsible for in the sense that you have a business, that you are running a business. And I think you said something really profound that I want to point out to listeners too. You said you had a really strong sense that you needed to leave. And I think that is being aware of that voice, whether it’s a voice or an inkling or just some feeling that you have about, I’ve got to do something different. I have to leave this thing, which is pretty good. You know, a lot of stories people say, I walked away from something that was on the surface really good. And people looked at me and thought, what on earth are you doing? And it’s, you can’t explain it. You just know that leaving is essential.

Barbara Turley: You know, it’s funny that you’ve just said that because it triggered a memory of mine in my first job, my first major job. I was a trader in Dublin and I did it for two years. I was junior and it was, you know, it was fun, but hard and all those things. And my friends were all going to Australia for a year. And I can remember the day I wasn’t. And I remember the day I decided.

Sorry, I had been to Australia. Sorry, at that stage, I had been to Australia for year with my friends. And then this was the big job I took when I got home after my year away. I did it for two years and I had an incredible pull to go back to Australia, but to go back and get a real job there. I didn’t want to go back and backpack. I wanted to go back and get a real job.

And I remember one day just waking up and going, I’m going to resign and I’m going to get a holiday visa and I’m going to go down to Australia for three months. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll come back, but I’m going to go down there and make it happen. And my boss at the time, I told him and he told me I was making the biggest mistake of my entire career.

And he said it very empathetically. Like he was like, I can’t, you realize you’re on a rocket ship here. This is, you know, all this stuff. And I said, I don’t care. And I went and 20 years later, I mean, it was the greatest experience I ever had in my entire life. Like it was just, Australia was very good to me and still continues to be good to me to this day, even though I don’t live there anymore. We still have loads of clients, loads of business down there, and it just, was a pull that I felt I needed to go back and that my future was there. It was. And it was. Career went from strength to strength there.

Mary Lou Kayser: It’s interesting how his language was, you’re on a rocket ship here. A rocket ship to where?

Barbara Turley: Well, hell as far as I was concerned, I wasn’t very happy there.

Mary Lou Kayser: In his mind, you know, he saw this as phenomenal. You know, you’re going to make loads of money, which is going to allow you to do all this stuff. But that’s a model that doesn’t work for everybody. And so I think we have to be, you know, kudos to you for saying, yeah, well, exactly the rocket ship to nowhere for me, you know, to knowing yourself well enough to not fall prey, because you were young. And when we’re younger, and there’s an older mentor, perhaps, or a boss or somebody who you know, is investing in us and sees our potential, it’s easy to think, well, maybe they have, maybe they’re right.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. You have to be very brave. You know, you almost have to be pigheaded. Let’s be honest.

Mary Lou Kayser: No, you do. You have to have a thick skin because there will be people who will judge you and there will be people that will try to pull you back because, you know, leaving, whatever it is you’re leaving is threatening their comfort zone and they don’t like that. Because now all of a sudden they have to relate to you differently. Oh, now she’s not or he’s not this. He or she is now that over here. Ooh, I don’t know that. It’s fascinating, you know? But you followed what needed to happen and here you are. So let’s talk about what you are doing today, Barbara. Tell us about this incredible company that you’ve built and how it helps people.

Barbara Turley: Yes, so that’s even a story in itself about leadership. Now that I think about it. I was in a, I left my, you know, my job and I was like, I’m going to, I had this big vision that I wanted to launch this company, which I did. And I started out this concept, I wouldn’t call it a company called Energise Wealth.

And I had this idea that I really, because I’d been in the financial industry for so long and I had lots of female friends used to say to me, they wanted to understand money more deeply. They were actually fascinated but terrified at the same time of money. This is we’re talking 10, 15 years ago.

So I thought, well, I find money quite exciting. And I’ve been in trading floors and I understood money at a very deep level. So I wanted to launch a… And I did launch a website that was… I wanted it to be like a Vogue magazine, but all about money. And that was my concept back then. And I did launch that and I had a YouTube TV show and I did the whole thing.

And I will say that it tore all my energy out of me. It’s, I wouldn’t say it’s spectacularly failed, but the first iteration of a training course I launched went spectacularly well from the outside, but didn’t sell. I was so drained after it. I thought like I should have launched it again and all that, but I just didn’t have the energy. And I started doing some business coaching. And I noticed that a lot of the smaller businesses I was coaching at the time, that kind of came to me naturally. And I thought, okay, I’ll do this for a while.

And Energise Wealth was still kind of going, the blog and all that stuff. And I noticed that all these businesses I was coaching, they were all very diverse, like yoga teachers and somewhere at one was an e-commerce store. They were online, offline, lots of different things. But they all fundamentally have the same problem. And the problem was that they weren’t big enough. They weren’t making enough money to hire staff. But if they didn’t hire staff, they were never going to make any money.

So there was this cycle like this, the constant vicious cycle that goes on. Some of them had been in business for 10, 15 years and they were burned out, exhausted, but so deep in it, they couldn’t get out. And I was like, okay, this doesn’t have to be this way. And I had a VA myself in the Philippines because I had read online that you can get one and she was helping me out. So in order to free my clients from the shackles of busy work, I got some friends of my VA. And I was like, do you want a job? And I sort of taught them some stuff.

And the only idea was to put them into these businesses to free so that I could work on strategy, and get these people out of the weeds. And honestly, before I knew it, after about a month or so, I was getting calls from friends of clients, not asking me for business coaching, but begging me to get them a VA. They were like, can you get me one of those VA’s because I’m so in the weeds. I just need help. And very quickly, I pivoted so fast. I was like, I think I was in business before I even realized.

Now to anyone listening, I had spent a fortune building websites, doing product launches, making everything look beautiful prior. This had no name, no website, no concept, no business plan, nothing. But I had 10 people buying off me. And I went, okay, we’re in business here. So I put up a landing page that was terrible. Now I look back and think that was terrible.

I did a quick webinar. I had a bit of a list of people built and I got a few more buyers and before we knew it, I was in a totally different business. Energise Wealth was gone and the Virtual Hub was born.

And that’s eight years ago. And now we are 300 staff in the Philippines and we have clients all over the world. And I’ve had two children in that time and only worked part time. I think that myself is, yeah, I’m very passionate about why this is so amazing as a philosophy to learn delegation and systems and processes and things like that.

Mary Lou Kayser: That is a fantastic story and congratulations because, you know, out of one idea that you thought was it, came what really is it at this point.

And I love that story. I love it. I love the, you know, I relate so closely to what you just described about building, you know, putting time and energy and building something and launching it. And on the outside, looked amazing. And then nothing happened with it. And then you’re so exhausted. You’re so exhausted from the process.

And then the results that you were hoping for, expecting, thinking might be, because you did a little bit of research at least, like yeah, there is this problem out there and still nothing happened.

And I think there are a lot of people that can relate to that. And I think there are a lot of people that can relate to the need for help, but being in that Catch-22 that you described.

Barbara Turley: Yes.

Mary Lou Kayser: And then not knowing, I mean, not knowing…

Barbara Turley: Some people will say, well, I know you can go to the field. I know I can get a VA, but they’re terrified to do it. They don’t have time to do it. And the big one is they know they don’t know how to get success with it. And I would say it’s very easy. Go online and pick up a VA, right? It’s a whole other ball game to get success with delegation to anyone and setting up, you know, so this sort of thing. And anyone out there who’s listening and thought I failed miserably and I had a VA and it was a disaster.

It’s not all your fault. I mean, there’s recruiting, hiring, training. They’re all difficult things as well that I had to learn because I had never done them. I found accidentally by doing things. Again, I discovered what I was good at. And actually, I didn’t realize I was really good. I wouldn’t say leadership as such, but I was very good at building systems processes and delegating and sort of processing something up so I didn’t lose control of it, but getting someone else, teaching somebody else to do it.

So that’s kind of, you know, not expecting a VA to walk in and know how to do what I wanted them to do, but actually training them to do what I wanted them to do.

Mary Lou Kayser: So let’s talk about that because I’m sure there are people who are listening who fall into a couple of camps. One is that they’ve tried a VA and it didn’t work for a number of reasons, but probably mostly because of what you just said, that just the communication about how this works.

We’re not trained to delegate. That’s just, it’s like a course all in itself, right? And then the other one is just, they never had it and they just assumed, okay, I’m going to give them some tasks and they’re going to do them exactly as I expect and da da, because they know that they know the program or whatnot. So what could you do a kind of a, I guess a 30,000 view education about how to work effectively with a VA?

Barbara Turley: Yes. I can do you a very, very high level that’s going to give you exactly what you need to do. I always say this, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a billion dollar company or a mom sitting at the table, making things and selling it on Etsy or one of these things or selling something by yourself. Every business has departments and those departments are buckets. And if you divide it out and say, well, what departments do I have? Even if you’re running everything yourself, you still have departments. There’s marketing, there’s sales, there’s product delivery, there’s legal, there’s all these things.

And then within each department, if you just think about it, there’s two types of tasks in each department. There are the recurring tasks that keep the engine of the business moving every day, every week, every month. They tend to be the ongoing business recurring type things. And then there’s another bucket, which are tasks that either move the business forward or transform it or take it to another level. So they can be project type things that have lots of tasks in them.

You might want to launch a course, that’s an entire project with lots of tasks in it, but that would move the business forward. And if you think about it that way, and you just break that down quite simply, and then each one of the tasks in those buckets, write a process down.

Now people get really, they overcomplicate this. I’m like, you can just get the back of an envelope and put a few bullet points on it to start with. And then you delegate that and you wait for the mistakes, because there’s going to be mistakes. And the mistakes are gifts that show you that you have a hole in your process somewhere.

Because if you have a process and you give it to somebody, and it depends, as long as there’s no like IP or expertise in it, it’s just a recurring trainable process. If you give it to somebody else and they make a mistake, you’re going to realize, I do some thinking in my head while I do that step that they don’t have the knowledge of. And therefore I need to redesign that step so that somebody who doesn’t think the way I do or teach that person to think the way I do while I’m doing this process.

That’s the kind of layer that people forget, don’t realize, and they just immediately think this person is stupid or this person can’t get what I want. So that’s sort of how you break it down and start to think about delegating. And it takes time, but the return on that time invested today, the dividends that’s going to pay you in 12 months time are enormous.

And I know this because I’ve grown a business in eight years and had two children work part time, lived across two continents, and I have 300 people. And people say, how do you do that?

And I say, well, it’s not very difficult. I mean, I don’t drive myself into the ground doing it.

So that’s the basic stuff. Now, sometimes you can still do all of that and still massively fail because you hired the wrong person who, you know, they said they were working, they weren’t. They said they did the work and it was half done. They sort of think that’s a different problem. We put that in a different bucket. That’s recruiting, HR, training, performance management.

Delegation is its own bucket, right? So let’s assume you have a great person with good smarts and a good attitude and wants to work with you then. If you have the right operational framework there and the right, what is it you want them to do? You can get start delegating slowly like small tasks first, then get more off your plate, then that person learns, then the person works with you longer, then they can take on more responsibility, etc.

And you just keep iterating step by step as opposed to big chunks at a time. And over time, we underestimate, you know, we overestimate what we can do in a week or a month, but we underestimate what we can do in a year or a decade by taking..

Mary Lou Kayser: You got that right.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, like just incremental steps forward is the trick with any of this stuff.

Mary Lou Kayser: Mm-hmm.

Voice Actor: It’s halftime here at the Play Your Position Podcast and we’ve got ourselves a great game. While you’re up grabbing another snack and topping off your favorite beverage, make sure to subscribe to the show so you never miss another play. PYP is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever great podcasts can be found. Now, let’s get back to the game.

Mary Lou Kayser: So what kinds of results can you give us a case study of let’s look at a small business, somebody like one of those people who’ve been entrenched in a business and they’re in that Catch-22. Do you have a story that you could share that illustrates the relief from lack of a word and then how that translated into a company actually seeing more profits and less stress?

Barbara Turley: Yes, I’ve got a few. So the first one I ever did and how this actually happened, I was at a yoga class with a friend of mine who I’d known for a long time. Beautiful naturopath. She’s a naturopath, quite well known in Sydney, and she had built a beautiful practice. I would call it a beautiful practice because she was high profile, she had amazing, her clients loved her, all of that stuff. And she’d been working in this practice. She’d built it over 10, 12 years at this stage.

But I said to her outside the yoga class one day, was racing off and she had to go and pick up her kids. And she said, I just wish that I feel so guilty because my kids are always in vacation care on the school holidays. And I just wish I didn’t always have them in after school care and vacation care. She worked so much. And I was kind like, but you’re on your own business. And she went, yeah, I know. But she was the classic technician. She was it. There was nobody else in the business, only her. And I just simply said to her, you know, it doesn’t have to be that way. Would you like me to show you how?

And I didn’t have a VA business at that stage, but that was the start of it. And I started working with her and we put VA’s in and the end result is, I mean, that’s 10 years ago now, but I did ask her things as well, to write down her vision for her personal life and where she wants, what she saw, what she would like to achieve. And this is important so that you get the motivation to delegate. And she wanted to live, you know, outside Sydney in a beautiful house in the country with vegetables in the garden. She mapped it all out. And 10 years later, her practice has two different locations now, lives in our… she basically realized the entire dream. She doesn’t have VA’s in the Philippines now, but she started out with that. There was three of them and she progressed onto hiring local staff and growing it. She has another naturopath. I think she has a few naturopaths now, but it kind of was the moment that broke it open for her. Where she broke out of the plateau. She was like, wow, that was the moment we broke it open. And it was a combination of delegation, automation, systems, processes, vision, strategy, execution, etc.

Mary Lou Kayser: So I feel like that’s a great sort of example of what it did for her and it freed her up completely, freed her time. On the other end of the spectrum, at the moment, we’re working with quite a large company. It’s an asset management business, $100 million in size. And you would think businesses like this are amazing at everything and they are amazing what it is they do. Very, very, very successful company.

But you’ve got frustrated and fed up employees, you’ve got people completely overworked, overwhelmed and stressed out. They’re desperate for more people. But actually what they need is kind of, and this what we’re working with them on, is a reorganization of the chess pieces to go right. Let’s look at all the key people you have and let’s look at what they’re doing every day. And invariably we’re going to find 20 to 50 % of their day is being taken up with stuff that shouldn’t be done by them, but nobody else can do it. This sort of thing.

So we’ve put offshore team members in, we’ve got a team of five or six in there now, taking the pressure off the key people so that we can work with the key people to optimize the systems they’re using, how they’re managing projects, their communication flow, and how the entire strategy to execution piece is working. So that the idea is that we can help that company to grow technically with using the same current resourcing, but just reorganize. So the same spend, the same position, but they have, we’re creating capacity and space for them to grow using the same team, right? We’re cloning people.

So if you think about it, if you’ve got three key people and you can free up 20 to 30 % of their time and put an offshore team member in to help them, effectively, what have you done?

You’ve hired an offshore team member, but 30 % of each of their time, you’ve created a clone that is the average of the three of those people, because they’re going to use that time to move the needle in the company.

Mary Lou Kayser: Right.

Barbara Turley: So I will say to big companies, you think we’re going to cost you money, we’re going to make you money by doing this. Because we’re going to give you the expense of energy and the expense of time back. And what you do with that time and energy is up to you. But I would suggest that you use that to grow the company.

Mary Lou Kayser: Wow.

Barbara Turley: So that’s sort of two ends of the spectrum. One woman who just was a mom who wanted to spend more time with her children, but had a vision for the beautiful practice she wanted to build. And another end of the spectrum is a huge company that needs to get more efficient and free its people so that they’re not so fed up and frustrated and overwhelmed.

Mary Lou Kayser: Yeah. So given the fact that your business is, you’re plugging people in to do things, what’s your take on this, on the rise of AI, Barbara, and some of these, like, you know, ChatGPT as of this recording has been getting the lion’s share of there’s a lot of chatter going on, especially on LinkedIn and Twitter and people are embracing it. There’s a frenetic energy around it. And I’m curious what your take on the evolution of artificial intelligence in terms of the kind of work that you provide businesses and how you see it playing a role moving forward.

Barbara Turley: So when it first launched, I will confess and admit that I had about three weeks of no sleep. I went, this is, that’s it, we’re dead. I was like, this is an existential threat to what we’re doing, to a certain part of what we’re doing, which is the people element in the Philippines. And I had these, and I’ll openly share that I literally was waking up in a cold sweat going, we could have like 50 cancellations in the morning and I would have 50 families and they felt like people on the payroll going, what are we going to do with these people?

You know, so I was really destabilized by it. Then I’ve been following. Yes, it was quite, you know, there are moments in any business you’re running this, you know, but there were those considerations. Then I thought to myself, when a new technology comes out or when something new happens, it’s like a big bang. And then, you know, it goes on and on and the hype and the hype and the hype. And I know that there will be a moment it will plateau, maybe only for a second, but it will plateau. And I feel that we’re in a moment like that just right now, as you and I are speaking.

There’s been a huge plethora of stuff come out. Everything’s out auto GPT. The whole stuff is there. And now what we’re seeing is a mild plateau where people are, you know, some of the issues are coming to the fore. I think this is going to transform and revolutionize the entire world. It is going to transform how we do business and it ultimately is going to be great for business. However, for the people in the Philippines, I think the roles that we’re doing.

A lot of it will end up getting automated by AI. But I feel, I’m trying to put a positive spin on this. I feel some of the people, a lot of the people that we’re hiring in the Philippines, I feel could actually do more higher value work anyway. And I think they’d like to. And I think we’re getting to a point where, for example, I don’t use ChatGPT myself and I don’t really want to go in there and write my own. I still write my own LinkedIn posts. I’ve tried putting it in there and getting it rewritten. And I think, yeah, it just makes it look like everyone’s else’s one, to be honest.

Mary Lou Kayser: Yes, it does.

Barbara Turley: You know, it does actually. And I thought, you know, I can’t really see myself being bothered using it because whatever, but I’d like my VAs to be using it though. So I’ve already said to them, see all that stuff you’ve been doing for the last two years, I want AI doing that. And then we’re going to get you to be doing something else, because I’ve already got a plan for them. So I’ve sort of realized that the opportunity for us at the Virtual Hub is to think about how do we augment our VAs with AI.

Mary Lou Kayser: Yeah.

Barbara Turley: So that we make them even better than they ever were before. That’s number one. Number two, I realized that a lot of the businesses we’re working with and a lot of businesses in the world can’t even yet get their head around the automation that came in a decade ago. People are still trying to get their heads around marketing automation, like deep marketing automation, deep Google Analytics and all that sort of thing. So I just feel that it will be revolutionizing and it is amazing.

But a lot of businesses are still in the weeds just trying to get their stuff done. And there will be an opportunity for us to help businesses to build the AI that they need as well. I always like to play in the picks and shovels when there’s a gold rush on.

I do think that that’s an area. Like we launched about two years ago, I launched a new arm of the business that I’ve always wanted to do, which is our system architecture consulting and implementation team.

And we now do this for clients because I got sick of clients saying, how do you guys automate all that stuff that you do? Can you do that for us? And I was like, well, VAs can’t do that. They’re not going to build you those systems, but I’ve got a team who can. So now we actually consult to our clients and we go in and build things like, you know, we connect Asana to various platforms that they have using Zapier or we might do some API integrations. And we try and systemize them better and we try to make them more efficient using.

Now the new thing is I’m saying, I want to make businesses more efficient across the three P’s of operational efficiency, which is platforms, processes, and people. And you want to optimize the three of those things together, holistically. And that’s when you create a really amazing business. And AI can play into that part of that philosophy. I think of saying, well, we can put AI in to do certain things. That’s a very long answer, but that’s kind of my stance on it right now. The strategy of that.

Mary Lou Kayser: Thank you for your transparency. Thank you for talking very candidly about being as a business owner, feeling that terror that I think a lot of people felt. I mean, I certainly saw it.

Barbara Turley: Yes. I did have terror. I did. Terror is the right word. And I hadn’t felt that for a good few years. In the first few years of the business, I had some terror, I will be honest. It wasn’t an easy business to start. It was a very easy business to start.

But after the first eight months, it was a disaster. There was just problems everywhere. The HR challenges, the bad hires, all that was very headachy. And I had a lot of sleepless nights back then, but I managed to figure that out after a few years and put something more robust. But this was the next big rumble. And I thought, okay, and I’m still a bit rattled by it, but I’m trying to move with it. It’s here. There’s nothing. I mean, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. That’s it.

Mary Lou Kayser: No, it’s like when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, that was it. That was it. We’re done. And when social media showed up, you know, YouTube and Facebook and all this.

Barbara Turley: Well, it’s even the pandemic showed up. I mean, people think we’re going back to the office. We’re not. Just get over it. We’re not. We need to figure out how we’re going to the new world and we’re not quite there yet, but we’re certainly not going back. Nobody wants to. So, no, that’s it. You know.

Mary Lou Kayser: I know. And you said it earlier that there again, there’s no, first of all, most people who went to school who are running businesses, when they went to school, they didn’t learn about the world in which we live now because it has changed so quickly. So part of being a leader is you’ve got to be constantly learning. You have to keep up with trends. You have to understand, okay, this thing has arrived now. I don’t know what it means for our business, but I’m going to at least keep tabs on it, or I’m going to assign people to keep tabs on it and not put my head in the sand or pretend like it’s not there. That’s a recipe for disaster, right?

Barbara Turley: And I think leadership as well is being okay with telling all your people that you don’t know the answer. Like I’ve done that many times. I don’t know what to do yet, but I’m thinking about it and I want to know. I’ve often said that we do these huge town halls three times a year where we do them online. This is why I believe in remote culture because we run like cabaret shows and raffles and we make it like a, it’s like a game show, but it’s actually our town hall three times a year. And I come on to present like where the company’s going. And I openly admit to be, say, look, I honestly don’t know what to do with this yet, but I’m thinking about it. And I’d love you to tell me what you think about it. And they all send in comments and ideas and that sort of helps you to figure out what’s being said. And that’s leadership really is inviting people to participate and collaborate with you. I think that’s very, I mean, at some point as a leader, you can do that, but you have to be able to then make a decision and go, right, the decision is this and that’s it. But yeah, collaboration with people is key.

Mary Lou Kayser: It absolutely is. And one thing we know is that you just said it, there are still lots of companies who haven’t figured out what happened right after the financial collapse. I mean, I know people who haven’t let go of what happened in 08, 09.

You know, that it was so traumatic to their business or their personal life that they couldn’t, they haven’t been able to find their way out of that particular point in time. For, you know, when you brought that up, I was like, wow, that seems like so long ago. And it really wasn’t. But what have we had since then? Well, we’ve had the whole 20 teens, which was a massive rise of, you know, Silicon Valley and platforms and one thing out tools and da da. And then the pandemic hit and the brakes went on to everything.

And now, now we’re dealing with the aftershocks. I call it post pandemic stress disorder. You know, people are trying to figure out, well, do I stay where I’m at? I don’t want to go to the office, but there may, you know, that maybe I should retire. Maybe I should start a business. I mean, there’s a lot of just unknowns right now in a way that collectively that wasn’t there before the pandemic. And it’s because that’s the state of the world, you know, time keeps marching forward, tasks still need to be done, you know.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of businesses that are kind of in a zombie state. They are. And they could actually be really successful if we can just get them out of the weeds. Like I fundamentally believe that.

And I think what’s going to happen to a lot of businesses is they’re just going to stay there and they’re just going to kind of keep trying. They won’t wither, but they’re just going to keep trudging along. And the owner of those, the owner or the owners are just going to be driven into the ground trying to keep it alive. And I think it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s, what I, it just does not have to be that way. But there’s a lot of those businesses out there that could be made way more successful even without AI.

Like, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s just efficiency and having a sort of, I call it the relentless pursuit of time efficiency and effectiveness. I mean, moms are great at this because we have no choice. When you become a mom, you have to be relentless in your time efficiency and effectiveness. But you know, I actually wrote a post on LinkedIn about this today. It said, you know, the relentless pursuit of time efficiency and effectiveness in scaling a business because of course there’s loads of other things to do to scale a business but that’s the gateway is to have the relentless pursuit of time efficiency and effectiveness because without that there’s no energy and there’s no space to do all the things that need to be done to scale a business. It is the gateway.

Mary Lou Kayser: It is. And you’ve got the finger on the pulse. As we come to… This went so quickly for me. It’s been so interesting.

Who is an ideal client for you, Barbara, if such a thing exists?

Barbara Turley: Look, our clients are so diverse. We’ve clients all over the world. Well, I mean, the main hubs that we have clients in really, we do Canada, the US, Australia. We’ve got the UK, we’ve got a smattering elsewhere. So we do them anywhere, really. But those are the big hubs where we have clients. We have clients in all different industries and all different shapes and sizes, I’ll be honest. But there’s one thread that ties them together.

One of them is a kind of a… When we get a client that has a fixed mindset about this and needs to be convinced of what I’m talking about, they’re probably not a great client for us. We love clients who come to us and are like, yeah, we’re on board. Yeah, we get it. We can see that we need to get support staff. This is a great strategy. We also would like to have like, we love Asana, but we’re not using it as effectively as we’d like to. And we’d like you guys to show us that.

It’s kind of this open attitude to digitization and sort of even if you’re not a remote company, but embracing the practices that make remote work successful, even if you never end up remote, because you’re going to end up with a remote team in the Philippines. So you have to kind of embrace the entire thing. And then we can work with it, you know, any sorts of businesses that do that.

Mary Lou Kayser: Okay. That’s great. It’s great for listeners to know. And where do you hang out online? Where can people learn more about the Virtual Hub and you?

Barbara Turley: Yes. So I hang out quite a bit these days on LinkedIn. I’ve really gotten on the LinkedIn thing. I did it reluctantly. I thought, you know, I’ve got to go be out there. And I started to thoroughly enjoy being involved in the conversation on LinkedIn and posting quite a lot. So if you want to engage with me or hear more about the things I’m talking about today, I talk about that on LinkedIn a lot.

And if you want to, if you’re ready and you’re thinking, I really want to talk to The Virtual Hub, then please come to thevirtualhub.com and you can book a call with some of our lovely team there and they can just have a chat with you about how we might be able to help you. And they’re very good. Like they won’t, they’re not there just to sell you a VA. They’re really there to help you to understand how we might help if we can help. And if we can’t, we’ll tell you and direct you as to where to go.

Mary Lou Kayser: Nice. That’s great. So team, you’ll know that links to connect with Barbara on her website, on LinkedIn will be on her show notes page at pyppodcast.com. And I definitely encourage you to either if you’re in, if you resonated with anything she said today about time efficiency, about having these systems, but nothing’s talking to each other, or you just heard some buzz from other people about freeing up some time with tasks that you should not be doing, give The Virtual Hub a real good look and also share it with people you know.

If you’re out and about and you hear somebody complaining, that’s usually the first thought. Hey, have you considered this? I heard this conversation on the Play Your Position podcast. This woman has her act together and just pass along the good word because listen, we do live in a digital world. Our businesses are running online, whether you like it or not, even if you just have email.

We’re all in tech to some degree and the number of tools, the number of platforms grow, it seems every day, but fundamentally our problems in business remain the same. And I love that you have that framework of optimizing for platforms, processes and people, because that’s what leads to profit. And there’s not one business on the planet that doesn’t like that word.

Barbara Turley: And those who want impact, profit lets you have impact. Trust me.

Mary Lou Kayser: Correct. Of course. You can be right. You can have, you can do social good and still be profitable. You don’t have to substitute one for the other. And I think more and more companies are adopting that mindset of what can we, how can we be giving back while also providing the life that we want as well. And that’s the future too. That’s its own category of conversation. And speaking of things that inspire and lead you to thinking bigger. What are a couple of books, Barbara, that have been instrumental on your leadership journey?

Barbara Turley: Sure. Well, because I have young children, I used to read a lot. And these days it’s like Peppa Pig and things like that. But you can learn a lot from Peppa Pig. Yes, you can. You can learn a lot from Peppa Pig. But a book, one book that has actually been probably the most pivotal in my journey, and it is not a fiction book.

I picked it up my first ever trip to the Philippines. I ran the business for three years before I ever set foot in the Philippines. That’s a whole other story. I hadn’t even been there. And I boarded a flight to the Philippines overnight. And I read this book the entire way on the plane. It’s Vern Harnish’s Scaling Up book.

And I came back from the Philippines that time and I rebuilt the entire company based on the book. And it was a game changer for me. And then two years later, three years later, I did the scaling up program, the live one in the US, online at the time. Again, just took us to a whole other level. Vern became a client. I’m just such a fan of the scaling up methodology. And I would encourage anyone to read that book. I suppose it was very aligned with my own philosophy as well about execution and people and strategy, those sorts of things. So that book has been great.

And podcasts, I mean, one of the podcasts that I listen to a lot, is the Second in Command podcast, Cameron Herald.

Mary Lou Kayser: Oh. Yes. I wrote, yeah, the vision.

Barbara Turley: Vivid Vision.

Mary Lou Kayser: Vivid Vision. Yeah, it’s a great book.

Barbara Turley: His podcast is great because there aren’t enough people. A lot of people talk to CEOs and they talk to marketing people and nobody’s talking to the COO, who’s actually the one who does the machines and builds the executes on the vision. And you learn a lot about how to scale a company from brilliant COOs. So I would encourage anyone to listen to that and you hear kind of how people scale companies that way. I find that really good.

Mary Lou Kayser: That’s great. It’s funny that you bring that up because I just saw that I’ve been I’ve read the Vivid Vision and done the work in that book. It’s been so helpful. And I follow him on LinkedIn and also on Instagram. And I just I think he must have posted something on Instagram about Second Command like, I didn’t know he had a podcast.

I was like, that is such a great concept for a podcast because you’re right.

Barbara Turley: It’s his best material because I follow all of his other stuff, but the podcast is kind of religiously the only thing I listen to now. I find it really, really useful.

Mary Lou Kayser: Yeah. Well, that’s fantastic. Thank you for that recommendation and also Scaling Up. Vern Harnish, isn’t he with EO? Entrepreneurs’ Organization.

Barbara Turley: He was the founder of EO. Yes. Amazing person. He has like this whole bunch of scaling up coaches all around the world, a lot of whom are clients of ours now. It’s an amazing journey. Yeah, just the methodology is fantastic.

Mary Lou Kayser: It is. I’ve interviewed several people over the years who’ve been directly involved in EO and have worked with him and speak so highly of what he has done. I was not familiar with that book, so thank you for recommending that. And again, team, there’ll be links to the podcast she recommends, Cameron Herald and then also Scaling Up by Vern Harnish, as well as connecting with Barbara directly, which is part of the point here is to build your network and build your team because we’re all in this together. Leadership is not solo guys. We need each other. And you know, Barbara has taken us inside a world that most of us don’t understand. She does. She has built a company that is clearly succeeding. If you check out our website, it’s very impressive and they’re here to help. So give her a go and Barbara, I just can’t thank you enough for your candor, your warmth. I can tell you’re just in a… Yeah. I mean, you’re..

Barbara Turley: I’m a very honest, transparent person, probably too transparent sometimes.

Mary Lou Kayser: No. In a world where there’s a lot of fakiness, it’s so nice when someone is so just openly candid about, well, this is how it worked for me. That’s what we need to hear. It’s not always easy and we make mistakes. You even said mistakes are gifts and I love that line, stealing it.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a good one.

And that’s anywhere in life. You know, that’s where you see the holes in the process of anything really. So I want to tell you one thing Cameron Herald always says, because if you don’t have an assistant, you are the assistant. Isn’t that good? If you’re running, if you don’t have an assistant, you are the assistant because you’re just doing everything. Yeah. So just I’ll leave you on that note. It’s a

It’s pivotal to grow.

Mary Lou Kayser: Hey, it’s Mary Lou here. Fashion trends come and go, same with musical taste, but leadership skills? They never go out of style. In fact, these days, leadership is an essential survival skill for a world that demands more from us than ever before. To succeed these days, you need to know how to show up, so that you can then do the work you love with people you like, the way you want, and The Play Your Position Leadership Playbook helps you do this and it’s free. Go to pyppodcast.com to download your copy today. If being more successful this year, next year in the 21st century is on your to-do list. Grab a copy of the Play Your Position Leadership Playbook now. pyppodcast.com. It’s at the top of the page. Can’t miss it. That’s pyppodcast.com and start being more of the leader you are meant to be today.

This podcast was produced by Daniel Romero’s show notes for this episode can be found over at pyppodcast.com. I’m Mary Lou Kayser. Thanks for listening.

Voice Actor: Here at the Play Your Position Podcast, we believe that the road to self mastery and a life well lived starts with answering the call to leadership. That’s when the fun really begins. Send this episode to any friends who might need to hear the inspiration and ideas you heard today. And feel free to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform.