Barbara Turley: Yeah, I think there are 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. 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 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 are 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, 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 it is the relentless pursuit of time efficiency and effectiveness in scaling a business. Because, of course, there are loads of other things to do to scale a business, but that’s the gateway—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 Kayser 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—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 and 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.

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—Eti—and an adventure lover. She loves horses, skiing, tennis, and spending time in nature. She has also 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, man, this is great, but it’s also full of questions?”

Barbara Turley: You know, it’s funny—as you were asking the question, all these flashbacks were 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 being in leadership roles, really. I was sort of a solo contributor in lots of ways because I was a trader for 10 years.

And then I went into a sales role, which again—you’re out hunting, doing business development. You’re part of a team, but you’re 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. During the last big financial rumble—those of us old enough to remember the 2008 financial crisis—I was 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 collapsing—like all that sort of thing. I was in the middle of that whole situation.

And I took a role—again, not a leadership position—but a temporary role that I managed to find when there were no jobs around. Through that role, which was a sales role, that’s what led me into sales.

But through that, I ended up getting involved with a startup of sorts in the financial industry in Australia. I was with a very clever bunch of people and kind of hopped on the coattails of what they were doing.

Through that, while working there, I was an early shareholder as well. So I did take a position in that company. And I learned a lot about leadership and how great companies get built.

And I had this incredible sense one day—I was in my mid-thirties at this stage—where I thought I had done everything I wanted to do under the umbrella of that company or any company. What I wanted to do was step out and above.

I felt like I wanted to have things under me. 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 into my own power, I was going to hold myself back.

It was such a strong calling that I did it. It was scary, but I 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 feel like even as a kid and a teenager, I always knew where I was going and what I wanted. I think that’s the early forming of leadership—maybe in your personality. I was always a very strong leader of myself, and I always felt like the leader of my own life.

So I suppose that would be my early leadership feelings, but it didn’t really come 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 been an amazing journey over the last eight years.

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

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

Mary Lou Kayser: Yeah. And then, you obviously have a high level of self-awareness, which I think is one of the traits of a really effective leader—someone who can clearly draw those lines in the sand about what they want and what they don’t want. Yes to this, no to that.

And people who have trouble with yeses and nos tend not to pursue leadership roles. You were leading in the financial scene, but you weren’t leading a team. And I think that’s something I like to emphasize for listeners—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 of self. Whether they become leaders in other ways remains to be seen.

But there are some people who 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, I 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.

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 strong sense of what they want and a 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 sometimes you find yourself in a less visible 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 you’re technically responsible for in the sense that you’re 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, an inkling, or just some feeling that you have about, “I’ve got to do something different.”

You have to leave something that’s pretty good. A lot of stories say, “I walked away from something that, on the surface, was really good,” and people looked at them and thought, “What on earth are you doing?”

And 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 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 decided.

Sorry—at that stage, I had already been to Australia for a year with my friends. Then I came back, got this big job, and did it for two years. But I had an incredible pull to go back to Australia—this time to get a real job, not to backpack.

And I remember one day just waking up and saying, “I’m going to resign. I’m going to get a holiday visa, and I’m going to go down to Australia for three months. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll come back—but I’m going to go and make it happen.”

My boss at the time told me I was making the biggest mistake of my entire career. He said it very empathetically—like, “You realize you’re on a rocket ship here.”

And I said, “I don’t care.”

And I went. And 20 years later, it was the greatest experience I ever had in my life. Australia was very good to me and still continues to be good to me to this day. We still have loads of clients and business down there.

It was a pull that I felt I needed to follow—and it was right. My 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’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—a rocket ship to nowhere for me.” Knowing yourself well enough not to fall prey, because you were young.

And when we’re younger, and there’s an older mentor, perhaps, or a boss—somebody who is investing in us and sees our potential—it’s easy to think, “Well, maybe they’re right.”

Barbara Turley: Yeah. You have to be very brave. 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 who will try to pull you back. Because you 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.

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 left my job, and I had this big vision that I wanted to launch a company—which I did. I started out with this concept—I wouldn’t call it a company—called Energise Wealth.

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

So I thought, well, I find money quite exciting. I’ve been on trading floors, and I understood money at a very deep level. So I wanted to launch something.

I did launch a website. I wanted it to be like a Vogue magazine, but all about money—that was my concept back then. I had a YouTube TV show, and I did the whole thing.

And I will say, it tore all my energy out of me. I wouldn’t say it spectacularly failed, but the first iteration of a training course I launched looked spectacular from the outside, but it didn’t sell.

I was so drained after it. I thought I should have launched it again and all that, but I just didn’t have the energy.

Then I started doing some business coaching, which kind of came to me naturally. I thought, okay, I’ll do this for a while. Energise Wealth was still kind of going—the blog and all that.

And I noticed that all these businesses I was coaching were very diverse—yoga teachers, an e-commerce store, online, offline—but they all fundamentally had the same problem.

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 constant vicious cycle. Some of them had been in business for 10–15 years and 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.

I had a VA myself in the Philippines because I had read online that you could 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.

I was like, “Do you want a job?” And I taught them some things. The only idea was to put them into these businesses to free the owners up so I could work on strategy and get them 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 VAs? Because I’m so in the weeds—I just need help.”

Very quickly, I pivoted. I was like, I think I’m 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 to this. This had no name, no website, no concept, no business plan—nothing. But I had 10 people buying from me.

And I went, okay, we’re in business here.

So I put up a landing page—it was terrible, looking back—and did a quick webinar. I had a bit of a list built and got a few more buyers. Before we knew it, I was in a totally different business.

Energise Wealth was gone, and The Virtual Hub was born.

That was eight years ago. Now we are 300 staff in the Philippines, with clients all over the world. I’ve had two children in that time and only worked part-time.

I’m very passionate about why this is such an amazing philosophy—to learn delegation, systems, and processes.

Mary Lou Kayser: That is a fantastic story—and congratulations. Because out of one idea that you thought was “it” came what really is “it” at this point.

I love that story. I relate so closely to what you described—putting time and energy into building something, launching it, and on the outside it looks amazing… and then nothing happens.

And you’re exhausted. You’re so exhausted from the process. And the results you were hoping for—expecting—don’t come.

I think a lot of people can relate to that. And also to the need for help, but being in that Catch-22 that you described. And then not knowing…

Barbara Turley: Some people will say, “Well, I know I can go to the Philippines. I know I can get a VA,” but they’re terrified to do it. They don’t have time, 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 to go online and pick up a VA, right? It’s a whole other ball game to get success with delegation and setting up this sort of thing.

And anyone listening who thought, “I failed miserably—I had a VA and it was a disaster”—it’s not all your fault.

Recruiting, hiring, and training are all difficult things that I had to learn too. I had never done them.

I discovered, accidentally, what I was good at. I wouldn’t say leadership as such, but I was very good at building systems and processes, delegating, and structuring things so I didn’t lose control, while teaching someone else to do it.

So it’s about not expecting a VA to walk in and know how to do what you want, but actually training them to do it.

Mary Lou Kayser: So let’s talk about that, because I’m sure there are people 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, probably mostly because of what you just said: communication and expectations. We’re not trained to delegate—it’s like a course in itself.

And then the other group has never tried it and assumes, “I’ll just give them tasks and they’ll do them exactly as I expect.”

So could you give a kind of 30,000-foot view of how to work effectively with a VA?

Barbara Turley: Yes. I can give you a very high-level view that will 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 on Etsy. Every business has departments.

Those departments are buckets. Even if you’re doing everything yourself, you still have departments—marketing, sales, product delivery, legal, and so on.

Within each department, there are two types of tasks.

There are recurring tasks that keep the engine of the business moving every day, week, and month—ongoing operational work.

And then there are tasks that move the business forward—projects that transform or grow the business.

If you break it down that way, then take each task and write a simple process for it. People overcomplicate this—you can start with a few bullet points on the back of an envelope.

Then you delegate it and wait for the mistakes—because there will be mistakes.

Those mistakes are gifts. They show you where your process has gaps.

If someone makes a mistake, it’s often because you’re doing thinking in your head that they don’t have access to. So you need to redesign that step or teach that thinking.

That’s what people miss. They assume the person is the problem instead of the process.

So you start small—delegate small tasks, build from there, and keep iterating.

And the return on that time investment is enormous. I’ve built a business in eight years, had two children, worked part-time, lived across continents, and now have 300 people.

People ask how, and I say—it’s not that difficult when you build the right systems.

Now, you can still fail if you hire the wrong person—that’s a different bucket: recruiting, HR, training, performance.

But if you have a good person, with the right framework, you can gradually delegate more and more.

And over time, those small steps compound. We overestimate what we can do in a week, but underestimate what we can do in a year or a decade.

Mary Lou Kayser: You got that right.

Barbara Turley: Incremental steps—that’s the trick.

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 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? Let’s look at a small business, someone stuck in that Catch-22. Do you have a story that shows the relief and how that translated into more profit and less stress?

Barbara Turley: Yes, I’ve got a few. The first one I ever did actually started at a yoga class with a friend of mine—a beautiful naturopath in Sydney.

She had built a great practice over 10–12 years. Her clients loved her, she had a strong reputation—but she was exhausted.

One day after class, she was rushing off to pick up her kids and said, “I feel so guilty. My kids are always in after-school care and vacation care. I just wish I didn’t have to do that.”

And I said, “But you own your business.”

She was the classic technician—she was the business. There was nobody else.

So I said, “It doesn’t have to be that way. Would you like me to show you how?”

That was the start. I worked with her, brought in VAs, and helped her build systems.

I also had her map out her vision—where she wanted to live, how she wanted her life to look.

Ten years later, she has two locations, lives in the countryside, and has built the life she wanted.

She doesn’t use VAs anymore—she transitioned to local staff—but that first step broke her out of the plateau.

It was a combination of delegation, automation, systems, vision, strategy, and execution.

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 at 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 is 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 the idea is that we can help that company to grow technically using the same current resourcing, but just reorganize. So the same spend, the same position, but 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, 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 chatter going on, especially on LinkedIn and Twitter, and people are embracing it. There’s 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 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 that felt like people on the payroll going, what are we going to do with these people?

So I was really destabilized by it. Then I’ve been following it. Yes, it was quite, you know, there are moments in any business you’re running.

Then I thought to myself, when a new technology comes out or when something new happens, it’s like a big bang. And then 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—AutoGPT, 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, 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 else’s one, to be honest.

Mary Lou Kayser: Yes, it does.

Barbara Turley: You know, it does actually. And I thought, I can’t really see myself being bothered using it. 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 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, 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. 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—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 make them more efficient using that.

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 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 were 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. We’re done. And when social media showed up—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.

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 game show, but it’s actually our town hall three times a year. And I come on to present where the company’s going. And I openly admit, I 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 helps you figure out what’s being said. And that’s leadership really—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, it was so traumatic to their business or their personal life that they haven’t been able to find their way out of that particular point in time.

And 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 2010s, which was a massive rise of Silicon Valley and platforms and tools. And then the pandemic hit and the brakes went on to everything.

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

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 trudging along. They won’t wither, but they’re just going to keep trudging along. And 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. I mean, 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 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—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?