Steven Westner: This is Onward Nation episode 791.

Voice Actor: Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Steven Westner.

Steven Westner: Good morning. I’m Steven Wessner, CEO, Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation. But before we dive into today’s episode, I want to make sure that you heard about our new Alexa flash briefing and how you can get free access to it. So you can activate it with a very simple voice command to your Amazon Echo device by saying, “Alexa enable the onward nation flash briefing,” and then you’ll be all set to receive our daily, very short, about 60 to 90 seconds each, business building tips, strategies anytime you ask Alexa for your flash briefing. So give it a try and then drop me a line. Let me know what you think. You know, I always want your feedback, thumbs up or thumbs down. You help us get better every single day.

Now, let’s welcome today’s very special guest, Barbara Turley. Barbara is an investor, an entrepreneur, and she’s also the founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub, which is a business that she started by accident that exploded in the space of just 12 months. Onward Nation, you’ve become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants in the digital marketing and social media space for businesses who need to free up time and energy. Welcome to Onward Nation, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Thanks Steven. So exciting to be here today.

Steven Westner: Well, it’s exciting to have you here. Thank you for saying yes. And I’m really, really looking forward to our conversation. And Onward Nation, Barbara and I just had, in the green room, just an incredible conversation, like pre interview chat, all about the story and how she started her business and what the business is currently doing today. And so that’s actually where I’d love for us to start. Barbara, for Onward Nation’s sake, take us behind the curtain. Tell us more about you and your path and journey behind the Virtual Hub, and then we’ll dive in with the other questions that I want to make sure that I ask you.

Barbara Turley: Sure. Yeah. So it’s funny, when we were chatting before recording here, you know, we almost had a podcast interview on the story. It is a very interesting story. Even myself, I know it is because, like you said, it was an accidental business. I did not mean to start this business. I had no strategic plan or anything. It just fell out of a massive need that I unearthed in the market through doing some business coaching.

So look, today the business, we have 100 staff in the Philippines. We have a full company set up over there. We’ve got, you know, clients all over the world and we’re four years in, but obviously nothing ever starts that organised and that set up. So the back story is that I didn’t have a background in HR or even the Philippines or even digital marketing. I actually had a long banking career where I was in equity trading for about 10 years in the investment banking arena. And then I was also in, I spent five years in asset management sales. So a very great dynamic career.

But I always had a kind of a wish to start my own business and to build a company. I’ve always wanted to build a company. So in the depths of the financial crisis that I’m sure lots of people remember 10 years ago now in 2008, look, I got an opportunity to join a group of amazing people, really, that were trying to buy a business out of Deutsche Asset Management in Australia. And I just hopped on that train. The CEO at the time said to me, “Would you be interested in joining this?” And I said yes, didn’t really know how I was going to do it, but I said a resounding yes anyway. And I guess my trading background in equity trading meant I was pretty good at figuring out opportunities and taking them when they came my way.

So I did that, I got involved in that, and I spent five years working in that company. And just, I learned so much about, you know, how a business scales and how a business, you know, more than what I was learning in corporate. I think I got a chance to really see under the hood of how a great company is built.

So then after about five years of doing that, I realised it was time to kind of maybe do my own thing. So I started doing some business coaching. I did launch another platform called Energize Wealth, which was all about creating wealth and impact for women and teaching them more about money. And through that, I was doing a lot of business coaching of small businesses. And I noticed that they all had the same problem. I couldn’t get them to talk about strategy and ideas, but the issue a lot of small businesses were facing is that they had no time to get any strategy done because they were so bogged down in the day-to-day doing of the business.

And I know this will resonate with listeners, but they couldn’t afford to hire staff because of the business they’re in this vicious cycle of not being able to afford to hire staff because they can’t grow the business to the point, you know, where they can afford it. And therefore they can’t grow the business and make more money because they’re doing all the doing.

So I had a virtual assistant in the Philippines myself at the time because I had read Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Work Week like a lot of people. Yes. So I started recruiting VAS in the Philippines just to help clients out. It wasn’t even a side business. And look, basically before I knew it, I had more people asking me, “Can you get me one of those VAS?” than I had for business coaching. And I thought one weekend, I was like, I wonder is there a business in this? And I literally decided, you know, we’d know. There was no business, no website, no name, nothing. I decided to do a webinar to my existing list to see if anyone was interested in learning about how to use VAS. And I got flooded basically with demand. And within about a week, I decided, right, I’m starting this new business. And I just said to my VA, “Can I get 10 of your friends? Do they need jobs?” And it was very messy. And that was it. Then we were bang in business. So obviously it’s a lot more developed today, but that’s the back story of how you start an accidental business.

Steven Westner: Well, OK, so great back story and great way to really kind of test the demand before you, you know, put a big sort of operation into place. But let’s fast forward to today, because one of the things that I found impressive in our pre interview chat, we’re not talking about, you know, just administrative level, admin work, you know, somebody to manage your inbox and calendar. And I don’t mean to sound dismissive or whether that isn’t important because clearly it is. But we’re talking about some very sophisticated, you know, whether we’re talking about Ontraport campaigns or Infusionsoft campaigns, digital marketing at a very sophisticated level.

So, walk us through the different levels because that was surprising to me when you shared it with me, and I think Onward Nation business owners will find it interesting, too.

Barbara Turley: Sure. And I’ll just sort of do a little pre thing for you. I think one of the things that I, again, I think this was by accident, but maybe I intuitively learned this through my career. But one of the things that I’ve done quite well and has worked out very well for me, which is a great tip for the listeners, when people tell you in business, solve, find a problem that people will pay money for you to solve today. And that’s going to be a great business, right? So that’s what I did initially. I did find a problem that people were literally, you know, coming to me wanting to pay me to do it, and I wasn’t even offering it. So I was like, OK, that’s, you know, take #1.

But then as I went through doing this, what happens is you tend to unearth new problems that are secondary to the first problem. And if you continue to solve every problem that crops up along the way, you end up with quite a powerhouse business from listening to your clients.

So the second and third and fourth problems that I solved were things like I noticed that clients didn’t really know, people didn’t know how to delegate properly. So I built a training program for an onboarding program for clients to teach them how to do, how to manage staff and delegate and create processes and all that.

And then as I journeyed through this whole problem solving, I realized that one of the biggest areas that people were struggling with, because I was noticing it in Facebook groups and consultants were saying, and you’ll know this from the business you run, they were saying things like, “Do you find yourself only using 10% of Ontraport?” You know, because you’ve no time, right?

So and then another problem consultants were having, and I became an Ontraport consultant, so I also realized this myself, is that when you work with a client, you go in and you develop a map and a strategy for them that sometimes never gets implemented because they have no time. So it comes back to this whole problem. The consultant either has to charge it up very expensively to implement or they have to have their own team or the client has to have someone on staff that can do that.

So there was another roadblock that I saw happening, and I had a keen interest in digital myself. So I started thinking, well, maybe I mean my VA was great at it, but I had sort of told her to be great at it. So we started dabbling in that and just noticed that that demand exploded, and we’ve gotten much better at that over the years. And then the decision to niche into that was a few years ago where I realized that we were getting a lot more success in that area than other areas of virtual assistance because I could control the training. So that was my decision to niche into this area where we would train rather than recruiting bookkeepers and stuff like that because that’s a bit outside my field.

Steven Westner: Yeah. And, but this is also where it’s very challenging for agencies trying to scale a business, especially marketing organisations like I run and own at Predictive. You know, you take on several new clients, you might lose a client. And so then it’s like, wow. And where do you find that very specialized talent to either, you know, work for a bit of time before you can onboard a full time member of your team or whatever the case would be.

But I think what you’re offering is not just that kind of mezzanine sort of capacity. You’re offering full time people who are really trained up with a depth of expertise in specialized areas, if I’m tracking with you correctly, right?

Barbara Turley: Yes, we do. Now one of the areas, I think, you know, being very transparent because I’m a very authentic person on these podcasts, as I was saying to you, it’s very hard to find that in the market. So some people think, “Oh, great, I’m going to give my brief and she’s going to go out and find me one of those people that has all that experience.” They do sort of exist, but they’re very hard to find. And a lot of them are freelance and they’re working for you, then for someone else, and slippery and all this sort of thing. So it’s a tricky space to be in.

So I decided, I guess, to build my, create my own. So we hire, typically we go out and find people that we know are going to work out and then we make them into what the market needs. So sometimes you get someone that doesn’t really have that experience, but they’ve been through working with us or, you know, being through our programs and they’re typically quite successful.

Steven Westner: This is great. We chatted a little bit about delegation. Let me take that piece and move it back into a question about skills that business owners need. So I know I’m kind of framing this up sort of impossibly because I’m asking you to give us one, but in your opinion, Barbara, what is the most critical skill that you think business owners need to master in order to thrive today?

Barbara Turley: Look, you know, a lot of people will tell you, “Oh, the number one thing you need to do is,” I mean obviously the sales and marketing. I think it depends on what stage of business you’re at. If you are starting out, sales is everything. Like don’t be worried about, you know, people get caught up on logos and systems and all that sort of stuff in the early days. You just got to get out there and find something that people are willing to pay you to do or to sell. It’s that testing time.

But once you’re through that stage, I call the next stage the deep crevice between start up and growth where a lot of businesses fail or they just plateau, right? And some people listening, you can plateau there for 10 years for all you ever make is, you know, you might make an income, but you never make an extraordinary income. You might get stuck there.

And the reason people get stuck there is that they do not know how to create internal leverage in their business. They don’t know the value of boring stuff like systems, processes, and delegation. Because if you want to scale something, the only way that you can actually do that effectively without driving yourself into the ground and to create something that is a saleable asset in the market eventually is to nail building processes and having systems that work that your people can run and then learning how to delegate those systems to people effectively.

That does not mean that you abdicate responsibility for it. So you have to know how to have oversight without doing all the doing, being the conductor essentially of the orchestra. And a lot of people don’t know how to do that. In my experience, I would say one in five people, maybe one in 10 are able to do that effectively. So it’s a skill you have to learn.

Steven Westner: So, let me sort of flip that question. And so thinking about, you know, four or five years ago when the Virtual Hub was starting to, you know, gain some momentum, like what systems would you go back and put into place sooner rather than later and why?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a good one because I have so many systems now. I think from the early, look, I’m naturally good at this, right? So I’m one of the 10 people. So I discovered this again by accident, that I actually enjoy systems, processes, and delegation. I didn’t know I was good at that, but I just accidentally found out through this business that not everyone’s great at it. And that would probably be my greatest strength.

So I think one of the ones I would put in that I have today, I was very good at creating the processes and delegating it. And I was using project management tools. Like I’m a big Asana user. It’s like Trello or any of those project management tools. I was also a big Ontraport user, so I was big into automation.

So I was doing all that in the early days. Reporting back, I didn’t. I sort of made an assumption that my VA, I only had one VA at the time, and then I had two, that they would know to report back to me the way I wanted, and they weren’t. But the reality was that I didn’t actually set it up that way and I didn’t have a good reporting back structure. And I also didn’t have a daily huddle, which is the huddle meeting concept. If anyone wants to dive into that, I would Google that. It’s sort of from scrum technique, basically where you get together every day for 10 minutes.

And I think that was a bit of a game changer for me when I implemented that about two years ago. So everyday 10 minute meetings, 15 sometimes, where it’s a quick run through of, you know, where people are stuck and it means that people can get you and their questions answered very quickly without pinging you all day on Skype as the questions come up.

Steven Westner: Yeah, we love it here as well at Predictive. I think we started that, I want to say maybe 2 1/2 years ago. We do it at 9:30 central every single day.

Barbara Turley: And with a virtual team like yours, yeah, like, I mean, my team’s all virtual as well. So I think it’s even more important if your team is virtual.

Steven Westner: Oh, I couldn’t agree with you more. Absolutely. You know, and I get that question often, and my guess is you do too. It’s like, well, how do you keep everybody together? How do you make sure that everybody’s, you know, working on the right things? Is having the daily huddle, right?

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. And there’s nowhere to hide in there. It’s very quick to figure out if somebody’s not pulling their weight or if you’ve got a dud on your team.

Steven Westner: Tell us about the most influential lesson, Barbara, that you ever learned from one of your mentors, and how that lesson helped you become the business owner you are today.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Look, I’ve actually got 2. I did think about this question because you told me about this one. The most influential one, I think, is, and I was doing it. Somebody framed it up for me, and I realized that I was kind of doing it, but needed to do it better. So somebody said to me, and I think, look, a friend of mine who’s a coach said this to me, but I think it’s probably from Michael Gerber’s E Myth book: systems run your business, people run your systems. Now, what that means is that a business is a set of systems, not necessarily a set of people. And if people run your systems, it means that if a person leaves, your business doesn’t fall apart and all the IP doesn’t walk out the door. So for me, that was very pivotal in that it was created. I started making sure that things were documented properly and that we had a good system for transitioning when people are not. I’ve been very lucky that people haven’t really left my team. I’ve had them for a long time, but they do transition into other roles, they get promoted, and stuff like that. So that little lesson made me realise that what I was kind of doing, I needed to do better and make sure. So I have that as my mantra.

The other one, I just wanted to mention that a friend of mine who is sort of a mentor, because she has a huge business in the Philippines and she’s helped me navigate a lot of the Philippine law over there, she said to me one day, I was having quite an emotional ride of it because, you know, being in business is very emotional. And she said to me, she has a little saying, and it’s, I think it’s an Arabic proverb or something. And it says, “The dogs may be barking, but the caravan still passes.” And the point of that is to say that you just keep your eye on the prize and you just keep going because those dogs will be barking all the time as the caravan is passing. And it actually helped me a lot, that one, to control the emotional up and down.

Steven Westner: And so the dogs in the story would be what? Like critics or naysayers?

Barbara Turley: You know, whingy client, whingy VA, system broken, wrong e-mail went out. You know, this kind of like all the little fiddly crap that just upsets your day and gives you anxiety. A whingy client is probably because, you know, we all have these. We all have these things in business.

Steven Westner: That must be an Aussie thing. What I can assume is what a whingy is. That was funny about.

Barbara Turley: That actually, I think it’s more of an English Irish expression. But whinging is like moaning. You know, the complaining ones. Whining, whining. That’s kind of it.

Steven Westner: So, let’s chat a little bit about strategy here. Here again, I know that I’m kind of framing it, and possibly we’ll go a little bit deeper into strategy here in a few minutes. But so, like, what 1 strategy that, in your opinion, business owners and their teams could consistently apply every day? Do you think compounded the big wins for them?

Barbara Turley: People, business owners and their teams, right? Yeah. Look, I think, like I said, I guess there’s two, but the big one is the huddle for me. What I see business owners doing is they say, “Yeah, let’s do this huddle thing.” And then they’re the one not to show up. Or they’re the ones to say, “Oh, I can’t do it today,” or, “Oh, look, have a meeting.” The business owner needs to be the champion. You don’t have to be the organizer or the leader of the huddle, but you need to be there every day to demonstrate to your team that this is non-negotiable in everybody’s diary. And this one is the game changer. I see too many people because the minute you’re wishy washy about it, then you’ll have a team member going, “Oh, OK, can I skip today’s huddle because I’ve got this to do?” And then all of a sudden, it all falls apart and somebody missed the communication that was said on the huddle. Then it doesn’t go out to a client properly. Mistake happens, and it just cascades down the channel. So as the business owner, you need to make a commitment to the team coming together and lead that.

Steven Westner: I know that this happens, and I find it so hard to believe just because, and I know that it does. It’s not that I’m challenging you, but why does it happen? Like when I think about the daily huddle with our team, of course I love every single member of our team. I want our team to hit the ground running. I just want that. I just want our team. And that sort of implies that everybody doesn’t love team members on their teams. But, like, why does a business owner get wishy washy about that? Like I couldn’t imagine not doing that.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. You see, I can’t imagine not doing it either. But it’s like this, right? A lot of people, I find, not a lot, but some people even coming to us for VA’s, they just want to like, when I hear briefs coming through, client briefs, and I see where it’s like, “I just want them to take initiative. I just want that.” I think, yeah, you’re going to get someone on day one. You just want to hand it over like the laundry. You’re dirty. You just want to hand over a big basket full of dirty clothes and you don’t want to know about it after that. It’s this sense of not wanting to. A lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs are great at vision and they’re great at big picture ideas, but they don’t want to lead the team. And if you’re like that, that’s OK. But you may want to put someone in who will lead the team because if it’s not your natural strength, you will shy away from it and you won’t want to show up. You’ll make yourself busy during that time that the huddle is on.

Steven Westner: Yeah. It’s interesting as you’re saying that. I think you had said the word abdication earlier, essentially kind of abandoning their responsibility as opposed to using your word delegation in being very specific about what you want done. Accountability systems are in place in assuring that the right thing is done when you may not have done it, but that’s proper delegation. Would you agree?

Barbara Turley: Yes. And I think, definitely, I think the other point to make here is that there is a problem in that, look, entrepreneurship, if we were to look at the entrepreneur, majority of entrepreneurs are hunter, not farmer. Now, when it’s like that in a business, the thing about entrepreneurship is you’re, like I said, you’re going after the big ideas and the risk taking and all that stuff. It’s a different kind of a person that will be potentially successful at running the business. So it’s important to not beat yourself up about that. If you’re finding yourself not good at that, then maybe it’s not a natural strength and maybe you need a project manager or you need an operations manager or you need somebody really good that’s your two ICs to do that for you, unless you’re willing to do it yourself. You know, I mean, I just love doing it, so I like doing it myself, but not everyone likes doing it. And I think it’s something you can force yourself. I think it’s worth forcing yourself because it’s cheaper. But if you’re finding yourself not good at it, don’t just abdicate it. You need it to be done and somebody needs to do it, in the business.

Steven Westner: This is such and has been such a great conversation because I think it squarely addresses the dizzying tail chasing that you mentioned, the scenario of entrepreneurs, IT or business owners that, you know, our capacity is max. We need to hire people. There’s just not enough revenue in order to do that. And once we grow, then we can, but we can’t get there because we don’t have enough people. It’s just a dizzying cycle. And what I’m so grateful for in this conversation, I have one more question to ask you, but before I ask, I just want to say what I’m so grateful about this conversation is that I think for many business owners, you offered a path to scalability, like how to slice it apart, how to think about it, how to then properly delegate it and so forth. Daily huddle was a great strategy. That was fantastic. Barbara, thank you.

Barbara Turley: Oh, you’re very welcome. And that is actually one of, you’ve just nailed my mission. My mission is two-fold with this company. It is to eradicate overwhelm for business owners and to show them the path literally to cost effective scalability. But also the other side of my mission, I have to remember, I have another client. Those are the Philippine employees, and we want to attract talent. We have a brand in the Philippines as well where we want to create dynamic next level careers for the smartest Filipinos that want to work with international clients. So it is a two-fold mission that I’m, you know, we’ve a long way to go. We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way still to go. But all feedback and, you know, we’ve built this company basically around talking to our customers and talking to our VAS and listening to feedback from both sides and then constantly evolving our processes and refining things to get better and better and better. So that’s where we’re at.

Steven Westner: Well, like you said, you have come a long way, and thank you for sharing some of your path and journey with us. And so here’s my last question for you, Barbara. You imagine you’re standing in front of a room of brand new business owners, people just like you when you were starting out. And so maybe they’re battling their way through fear or worry or doubt or maybe they’re just struggling to try and find their footing. What would be two or three strategies you would recommend that they focus on the best to ensure success?

Barbara Turley: Yes. So number one, a lot of people will tell you, “Oh, you know, hustle, persistence,” all those things are very important. You do need to have hustle and persistence. But I think overall, the first thing I would say is that you need to have a sense of, your mindset is the most powerful thing that you can start to control when everything else is chaos. So, the mindset, you have to have the mindset that I will succeed, I will find a way. The difference between that and hustling or persistence is that sometimes you can be hustling and persistent in the wrong direction. You need to have a sense of, I will find the path and be persistent in finding the successful path. And sometimes that means you need to pivot. Like what I did in my early days, business coaching was going OK, but I wasn’t really enjoying it. It was a bit too much hustle and all that stuff, but I was like, I will find the thing that I’m going to do. So it’s that sense of your mindset is very important. I will make this work.

Number 2 is the strategies. Again, like I said in the beginning of this podcast, it depends on the stage of business that you’re in. If it’s an early stage, the worry and anxiety around am I going to sell anything? It is terrible. Keep in your head, sales solve everything, and stop tinkering around on Canva all day and making yourself busy with all the stuff that doesn’t matter. Get out and sell. Don’t build massive online programs and everything until you figure it out. Is somebody going to pay me money for this thing that I’m trying to sell? And just focus on sales.

Obviously then in the later stages of business, if you’ve got a product that’s selling or a service and you’re like, “OK, I’ve nailed that bit. It’s selling. Now I need to scale it.” The only way that you can scale it, you really got to think about it now, how do I lift myself out of the day-to-day doing of everything so that I can get out and talk to my customers about the next level? What’s the next, you know, where can we take this thing and start to think about it like I’m building a company, I’m not working for the company. So I hope that makes sense. But those are the three ways I would think about it.

Steven Westner: I think it does make sense. And here again are some additional ingredients to the scalability recipe, and I so appreciate, you know, talking about Canva and courses and all of that. Sales solve everything, and in having the litmus test of before you start, you know, spending dozens, if not hundreds of hours building a course, build a business first and build a core business first. That’ll make it a much better course when you do eventually have 1A more respectable thing and it’s based on your expertise then, right?

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. We get too caught up in the big, well, you know, the online world does this to us because it tells us. I mean, look, I did it. The reason I’m saying this, I fell into all these traps. I spent about 50 grand doing a massive product launch of an online course. And look, it was OK. I got massive branding out of it and I did sell a few and I sort of broke even, but it was very painful. I did it too early, you know. So I know all these problems. I built a massive website and did all these things. So I’m sharing my war wounds by saying those strategies to people.

Steven Westner: But also you’re calling out the carpet, rightly so, shining a light on it. There’s so much marketing hyperbole in that space, and there are a lot of people talking about numbers that don’t really exist. And then it’s just, it’s really kind of shameful. And it is not that some of it isn’t legitimate, because some of it totally is, but a lot of it is just the next evolution of snake oil.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, yeah. And, you know, I think you need to have, oh God, you need deep pockets as well. I mean, marketing is great and you can do a lot of it, but you need to, it’s a strategic thing. You need to do a lot of marketing. Another tape I heard, I can’t remember who said this. Somebody said to me once, I think I heard it on a podcast, stop expecting marketing to work because most of the time it won’t. You just have to keep testing new ideas. You got to keep, it’s a testing thing. You got to test and measure, test and measure, test and measure all the time. People don’t realize that. They think, “Oh, I’ll just do this Facebook ad campaign, it’ll explode and I’ll make $1,000,000.” It doesn’t work like that. It really doesn’t. Even when you’ve got something that sells, it’s, you know, the hustle.

Steven Westner: Indeed. Well, so Barbara, this has just been great, and I look forward to us hopefully having you back for an encore. I know that there’s more here to share and to be able to learn from you, and today was fantastic. Before we go, before we close out and say goodbye, tell us the best way to connect with you.

Barbara Turley: Sure, yes. So obviously if you want to talk about getting virtual assistants and look, you know, I take my own advice, you will be booking a call. We’ve got 2 outsourcing strategy consultants. So you can book a free call with them. And they’re great at just, you know, helping you to figure out what stage you’re at and whether we can actually help you or not. So we cover all time zones there. So if you want to talk to one of those guys, you can go to thevirtualhub.com and book a call there. Just hit the talk to us button.

If you want to connect with me myself, I’m good on LinkedIn. You can connect with me there. Typically, I ask people to, if you want to connect about VAS, go to thevirtualhub.com, and if you want to connect about other stuff or say hi, you can come over to LinkedIn and just find me at Barbara Turley over there.

Steven Westner: OK, onward nation. No matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and re-listen to Barbara’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do, the key is that you take it and apply it into your business right away and accelerate your results. And Barbara, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. And I’m grateful that you would take time out of your compressed schedule to come onto the show to be our mentor and guide to help us move our businesses onward to that next level of scalability. Thank you so much, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Thank you.

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