Barbara Turley: Systems run your business, and people run your systems.

Mike Vardy: I’d like to welcome Barbara Turley to the Productivities Podcast. Barbara, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks for having me, Mike. Excited to get chatting to you.

You know, I was approached to chat with you about this and about just being a guest on the show. The first thing that kind of showed up in my space, which is, I think no matter what time of year it is, this can happen: overwhelm. And as a small business owner, I face that, you know, from time to time. I’m pretty good at understanding how to gauge my productivity and when’s the best time to do certain things. And I definitely want to dive into that.

But the idea of what you can do to help small businesses overwhelm, I think, is compelling because I’ve struggled with the idea of bringing on virtual assistants in the past. I’ve had them. I’ve had them from the Philippines. I’ve had them from North America. And I wanted to talk to you about, right out of the gate, when someone is thinking, when they’re overwhelmed already, what are the steps that they can take to kind of put themselves in the best position to bring someone on so that they can help them with the overwhelm, instead of having in their head, I’m so overwhelmed, I don’t have time to put this thing together, I’m just going to keep going with the way things are going.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, the thing about overwhelm, if I could just start there, I think as entrepreneurs, like I’m great with my time as well. I’m really, like you probably, I’m good at productivity. I’m good at bursts of energy, but I still get, like, I think everybody, it’s the human condition to become overwhelmed. You know, you have a bad night’s sleep, something happens, the whole day goes to pot. And before you know it, you’re feeling overwhelmed because there’s a lot to do.

So, it is normal, and it is one of the things that kind of, it didn’t prompt me to start this business, but it was something that I saw a lot of entrepreneurs going through. And I thought, well, you need to delegate, right? That’s a massive part of trying to get rid of the overwhelm. You need help with all the stuff because you just can’t physically get all the stuff done that you need to do. But the problem then is that delegation in and of itself is very overwhelming. And that’s even before you get to hiring VA’s in the Philippines. So there’s like layers and layers to this sort of thing.

Hiring VA’s or hiring anybody is not as easy as people think. And it becomes more complex when you start going to places like the Philippines or offshore, and when you start adding more team members. I think the hardest jump, funnily enough, is one business owner with one VA, even if that VA is just part-time. That’s like the toughest, toughest hurdle to get over. And then you can kind of sail through okay until you get to about five VA’s, but after that, again, you run into, like, then you’re managing an entire team, and you become the roadblock again because everyone’s coming to you. And you know, they’re all doing their job, but you’re the project manager. So you become your own project manager then. And that’s when you get to the next hurdle.

So just going back to the beginning of the overwhelm, the first thing to think about is if you go and hire somebody, regardless of where they are, and you want to delegate to them from a position of overwhelm, it’s probably not going to work, and you’re probably going to waste time, energy, and money, and get really frustrated, and the other person probably will as well. So there is a process that you need to go through in your head that you can simplify. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

Barbara Turley: But what I always say to clients first is it’s really important to just carve out some time from the overwhelm. And very simply, before you go delegating or hiring anyone, think about what are the departments in your business. Now, it doesn’t matter whether your business is a billion dollar company or one person who has a lifestyle business, who’s a coach or whatever. Your business has departments. You have the marketing department, the sales department, you know, the invoicing, the product delivery, the creation, all of that stuff.

So you might be doing it all yourself, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t departments. Then underneath, so if you sort of list those down, and then underneath each of those departments, just simply start to write down what are the recurring tasks that need to be done in each of those departments every day, every week, every month, in order to keep the engine of the business running. So you don’t start getting into, want to create an ebook and I want webinars and I want, right? You purely start with the simplest stuff. Jot a few things down, even if it’s just answering the phone.

And then what you need to do is get a simple process, a few bullet points, to get started with each of those tasks. How do you like it done? Because it doesn’t matter if it seems obvious to you that of course it should be done this way. It’s still your business, your baby. Simply start to jot down what process you do in your head.

And then when you’re at that point, it’s safe enough at that point to say, okay, now I’m gonna hire a VA because you actually know what you’re gonna get them to do, rather than them coming into chaos and you going, every morning, this is what happens, people hire VA’s, and every morning they wake up and go, oh, what am gonna give the VA to do today? I have so much to do, now I have another task because I have to think about what I’m gonna give the VA to do. And you’ve just created another task for yourself. It’s an absolute nightmare.

So the first thing you wanna do is get your recurring task list ready, delegate that, train a VA properly on it, hand it over. This is like a training period and a handover period. And then you can work together with that VA to expand out the processes based on their experience of doing it and when mistakes happen. Because mistakes are kind of like a gift. They show you that there’s possibly holes in your process or holes in your person. You might hire the wrong person. And then, over time, you can work together to start to evolve your processes, build out that recurring task list, and do more work together.

Barbara Turley: People typically start, you know, I want a VA yesterday, and then they say after two weeks, I wish they could just hit the ground running. These are the things people say, when in reality delegation to anybody is a process that takes time, and it needs to percolate and evolve over, you know, eight, nine, 10, 12 weeks, even 12 months, depending on how much you’re going to get into it.

Mike Vardy: That’s one of the mistakes I’ve made when I’ve hired a VA, and I’ve had hired a few, but I always seem to come back to the general VA, you know, the one that can do all of these things, and that I go too big, which I think is what a lot of people do when they’re hiring somebody, is they’re like, I want someone that can do all this stuff. And then there’s a trusting, right, like, you know, like you said, of are they going to do the way I do it.

And I think this happens a lot when I work with people on their to-do list, is they say, you know, they write their to-do list down, and I’ll say, okay, I’ll look at their to-do list and say, I don’t know what this means. And they say, well, you don’t need to. Like, yeah, I do, because at some point you’re gonna look at your to-do list and you might not know what it means, or you might want to pass this off to somebody, and they won’t know what it means. So you need to break it down almost back to beginner’s mind.

And I think that’s the propensity, is I need help here, have everything, and I like the way you just broke that down. What was the impetus for you to kind of start The Virtual Hub? Obviously, you saw that there was a need for it for yourself. Was that the impetus, or was there much more to it than that?

Barbara Turley: There’s a lot. There’s actually a lot to it, and I’ll tell you the fast version of this story. And you know, even how I came to this whole, you know, how to map it out, how to get started. I didn’t naturally… I had read Tim Ferriss’s, you know, Four Hour Work Week and was like, wow, okay, VA’s, you know, I kind of got the idea like everybody else did. I did get my own VA, so I went off and did it myself. I got someone on Upwork and kind of hit a home run, to be honest, in the first round, and I kind of worked really well with that person.

Barbara Turley: And then over time, I was actually business coaching at the time. So I had a totally different business, and I had come out of corporate. So I’d spent about 15 years in the investment banking world, everything from equity trading through to asset management sales, like a world away from even small business or the Philippines.

I’d never even been to the Philippines or even leading teams and stuff, I wasn’t particularly experienced at it. I had done roles that were quite singular, focused, and part of a team, but running your own thing.

So when I left corporate, I wanted to kind of launch my own company. I was sort of a bit clueless, like most of us are when we leave corporate, we don’t know what we’re doing. And we ended up doing a lot of consulting because people will hire you because you’ve got this deep sort of corporate experience. And I found that all the clients I was coaching had the same problem. It didn’t matter what business they had, fundamentally they had the same problem. They had no time to work on the big stuff, which was strategic direction and moving their business forward, because they were caught up in the day to day, and then they weren’t making enough money to hire people. But if they didn’t hire people, they were never going to get out of the trenches and actually grow the business. And people end up in this kind of vicious cycle for 20 years running businesses.

So to solve it, I was like, well, maybe we can get some of these VAs in the Philippines. So I just got a couple of my VA’s friends to start working for clients I was coaching, but purely so that I could help them with the strategic stuff. And before I knew it, I was getting more demand for VA’s, and you know, I had also helped these clients to systemize their businesses and delegate effectively. So I was getting more demand for that than business coaching. And I literally started it by accident. I didn’t really mean to, but I thought, I wonder, is there a business in this? Like, why would people pay me to do this when you can go on Upwork?

But an interesting thing happened after that. I sort of launched it as a recruiting thing, and I thought I was solving the problem that was in the market, but actually, after six months, I realized the real problem was that people didn’t know how to delegate. That’s why they were coming to me to recruit VA’s, because they thought it was a recruitment problem. Actually, the problem was way deeper. They didn’t know how to delegate. They had no processes, no systems, no training. The VA’s on the other side had no training and didn’t really know how to manage the client. There were all these layers of problems that I kind of have unpacked over the years of doing The Virtual Hub, and I’ve built it into this kind of success model.

Barbara Turley: These days, we train clients, train VA’s, we’ve got very deep programs on the way in, and we onboard both sides really successfully. And then we have customer success teams that work with clients and VA’s to kind of force success, to be honest, as much as we can, and we’re going more into that now. At the moment, this year, that’s our big push.

Mike Vardy: You’re a mom, I’m a parent. During summer season or any season that kind of is, you know, there’s certain seasons where your kids are going to be around, and how old is your daughter?

Barbara Turley: I have a three and a half year old, and I also have a new addition. I have an eight month old son.

Mike Vardy: So yeah, I’m looking at the one sheet going, oh, there’s a new addition to this. So you’ve got two kids. So I’ve got two kids as well. Mine are older. My daughter is 15. My son is nine, going on 10. And one of the things that is fun about being a parent is watching the growth and the evolution, but there’s a level of patience that’s involved, that needs to be involved. And the reason I’m bringing this up is I think a lot of people, when they are starting something new, or bringing some, starting a new adventure, or adding a new layer to their business or to their lives, is what they want it now. They want the results now. I want to have this successful business, this lifestyle that I’ve been dreaming of now.

And I wanna talk to you about the importance of patience when you’re dealing with a virtual assistant and how that relationship works.

Mike Vardy: Or bringing some, starting a new adventure, or adding a new layer to their business or to their lives, is what they want it now. They want the results now. I want to have this successful business, this lifestyle that I’ve been dreaming of now. And I wanna talk to you about the importance of patience when you’re dealing with a virtual assistant and how that relationship exists, with also the idea of productivity in mind as well. What are your thoughts on that?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so I often hear, I mean there’s a few kind of statements that I hear all the time when people hear about VA’s or when I talk to clients and stuff, and invariably some people will say, you know, when I’d say something like, we do a lot of training, so we train our own VA’s at The Virtual Hub, but it’s still going into someone else’s business, so we can’t get it 100% of the way. So we’re like, well, we do the heavy lifting, but you’re still gonna have to train the VA on your business processes.

And we recommend that you’re looking at probably eight weeks, I think, minimum really, before somebody’s really fully part of the team, fully integrated. And people will invariably say, oh, I don’t have time for that. I may as well just do it myself. And I always say, well, that’s fine. But if you continue to think that way, then I can guarantee you one thing: in 12 months’ time, you’ll still be doing it yourself, and your business won’t have grown. I mean, that is the reality. People who have that mindset.

They don’t realize that you can actually grow very fast, right? Business-wise, you can scale really fast, but it’s kind of like there’s a slowness to it and a perfection to it that you have to give it time along the way while growing fast. So I don’t know whether that—it’s kind of like you have to slow down in order to speed up. So you’ve got to take a few steps back, and you have to slow down.

And you have to do this right because delegation—if I could just isolate one thing from a productivity perspective—if you want to be more productive, learn to delegate because then you will actually focus your time on the really high-value stuff. I mean, I’ve had two children while growing a company that has 150 employees, and I only work part time. So there you go. That’s, I mean, in a nutshell, you have to be a master delegator.

Mike Vardy: All right, now it’s time to take a break to talk about our sponsors. I’m teaching all over the place these days. No, seriously, I’m not all over the place, but one of the new places you can keep up with my work is on Fiverr’s new platform called Learn. You can take my course there called How to Prioritize Tasks to Boost Productivity. So if you’re interested in getting better at prioritization, there’s no better time than now to try to make that happen.

And this course, which has quizzes and several chapters, it’s pretty comprehensive. It’s going to help you do that. I’ve been studying productivity for well over a decade now, and I’m starting to put some of this stuff out there in the form of courses and classes, not just on my own platform, but on other platforms as well. And Learning from Fiverr is the latest to adopt and adapt to, I guess, one of my courses.

So now I’m going to put a link to this in the show notes so you can go directly to the course. But if you want to just listen and type right now, you can go to productivityist.com slash learnfromfiverr. When you go there, you’ll go directly to this course. So if you’re looking to prioritize and boost your productivity, there’s no better class than this. I encourage you to check it out, Learning from Fiverr, today.

Now, one of the tools you can use to prioritize isn’t so much your to-do list, but your calendar. Now, the calendar generally takes precedence over a lot of things in your life. I mean, after all, it’s kind of the directory for your days, right? Well, sometimes your calendar feels like it’s controlling you instead of the other way around. And I’m putting together a workshop called Control Your Calendar. It’s actually coming up on November 10th, 2020, and I’d love for you to be part of it. It’s $9 to be part of it.

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Now, this workshop is presented live on Tuesday, November 10th at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific. That’ll allow for questions, but there will be a recording that you’ll be able to access when you purchase Control Your Calendar. So all you need to do to take part in this workshop is go to productivityist.com slash calendar workshop and pay your nine dollars, and then you’ll be able to attend the session live. Plus, you’ll also get access to all the materials and resources that go along with it, and the recording of the workshop as well.

Nine dollars for an hour. Isn’t your time worth at least nine dollars? Isn’t your calendar worth nine dollars? Isn’t controlling your calendar worth nine dollars? Sure it is.

So I want you to check out Control Your Calendar. Again, take advantage of this offer while you can. It’s not going to last for long, and once the calendar workshop is done, it’s done. So I want you to take part in Control Your Calendar. Go to productivityist.com slash calendar workshop now and be part of Control Your Calendar on Tuesday, November 10th. I hope to see you there.

So we’ve talked about to-do lists, we’ve talked about your calendar, but now we’re going to take the calendar to a whole bird’s-eye view. You want to see your whole year all at once. You want to be able to take a look at your year and say, what does the shape of my year look like? Well, then Now Your Wall Calendar gives you that shape. You can see everything that’s coming your way over the next 12 months with this tall or wide wall calendar that I’ve partnered up, once again, with New Year, the team at New Year—that’s the French New, N-E-U-Y-E-A-R.

Once again this year, I’m really excited to put this together. We’ve redesigned it a little bit for this coming year. We’ve added a different bit of tracker in the corner of the days instead of the three words that we used to use to help you guide your year. Now we use what’s called the annual axiom, which is part of the time crafting methodology. And by the way, when you purchase the Now Your Wall Calendar, you’ll get instructions, directions, and guides on how to use it. Plus, if you take the Control Your Calendar workshop, it’s a nice companion piece for it.

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Now, this discount expires on December 1st, 2020, so you’re going to want to do this now. I want you to do it now because you’ve got the bandwidth and the time and the space to actually plan the year ahead. Once the holidays roll around, it’s kind of game over. You’ve got to wait through those holidays, and you’ve only got a small window to get ready for 2021. I want you to get ready for 2021 now. So pick up the Now Year Wall Calendar at a discount. Again, go to productivityist.com slash newyear. Enter the promo code podcast upon checkout. It’s all yours. Don’t delay. Pick up your wall calendar now.

And now let’s get back to my conversation with Barbara Turley here on the Productivityist podcast.

All right, so let’s talk about the biases that show up in these ideas. The idea of others—you know, it’s going to take too long, I might as well do it myself. My goodness, I need to have a ton of money before I do this, so therefore I have to earn that money first, and then I can hire. But then obviously, you know, there’s this endless cycle of you’ll never—I mean, you can’t get there, you know, at a level that you want to. And then the idea of trust: well, how do I know what they’re doing? They’re not in front of me. Things like that. How do you break those biases?

Because you’re right, delegation—and everyone struggles with this. One of the biggest lessons I learned about delegation was when someone said, hey, can I edit your podcast for you? And I thought, well, I’ve been doing it myself for a long time, so why do I need someone to do that? And then I thought, but that time is taking me away from some of the stuff that I can do to either A, make the podcast better, or B, do other things like the things that only I can do.

And once I delegated that to my previous producer, John, I mean, as soon as John and I parted ways amicably, the first thing I was trying to do was, when can I have somebody come back in and do this again? It wasn’t, well, that’s okay, I can do it again. It all of a sudden became, now I need someone to do this. So that lesson was taught there. So how do you help someone break through the biases of, you know, those different stories that they tell themselves?

Barbara Turley: If I could put them all together first, and then we might be able to unpack them after. But the big overarching thing is realizing that a business is an entity all by itself. It’s not you, right? The business—I mean, this might sound simplistic—you know, people—the business, a business is totally separate from you. It is there, it’s a machine, right? It’s a machine to do lots of things. It’s a machine to provide employment, career growth for people that might work for you. It’s a machine to serve your clients and customers and to serve a need. It’s a machine to serve you and your life and for you to make money out of that so that you can go on and do whatever it is that you want to do. It’s to leave a legacy, but it is a machine at the end of the day.

And people in any business—I mean, I’m a huge fan, I’m a massive fan of Michael Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited. I’m a huge fan of Verne Harnish’s Scaling Up book and methodology. So I’m all into this stuff.

Barbara Turley: Systems run your business, and people run your systems. So when you realize that, and you’re not one of the people, you’re the conductor of the orchestra and you’re the person who’s the architect and the conductor of the orchestra, you are the leader. But you’re not the person who should be doing it, because a business is there to—even if you don’t want to grow it, it doesn’t necessarily—if you enjoy doing it, I suppose that’s a different argument, but then, you know, some people have glorified jobs.

Everything’s a trade-off, though, right? That’s the thing. Everything’s a trade-off. That’s what Peter Drucker said.

You get sick—what happens if one day you happen to, unfortunately, get sick and you have no choice but to take six months off from the business? Most people’s businesses would go to the wall. That’s not really what the essence of having your own business is for. That’s actually a noose around your neck, to be totally honest. I mean, you know.

So just unpacking this thing of, you know, it’d be faster, I’m faster at doing it myself—well, let’s say you are. Let’s say you can only afford to hire a VA offshore, and you’re like, well, he or she, I mean, they do it, but I probably could do it better and faster myself. Well, if you’re only paying them whatever, a few bucks an hour, or even if you’re paying an agency like us, it’s still only 10 bucks an hour. Well, you know, it has to be a guess that your time is worth more than 10 bucks an hour. I mean, you know, what’s the worst thing that can happen?

They do—if you’ve got a deep process and you train them properly on the process and you’re very focused on processes—well, who cares if 20% of it, you have to polish it up at the end to put your own spin on it? Or, you know, I have writers who write stuff for me, and I get it, and I’m like, yeah, that’s okay, and then I just spend 15 minutes putting my own spin on it. Or I might—I don’t do that anymore, but, you know, these are the types of things I was doing in the early days, right?

So by getting out of this mindset of, you know, at the end of the day you’re here to grow a business. The job of the entrepreneur is to create the machine and grow the business, and that’s the job of the entrepreneur. The technician is different.

Mike Vardy: It’s funny because every time I have a conversation like this, whether it’s regarding virtual assistance, help, productivity practices, all of this stuff, it comes down to the idea of mindset. I mean, it’s the same thing. You know, when you think about making a movie, the idea of the actual making of the film takes less time than the pre-production and the post-production. So, I mean, to that end, Austin Kleon has talked about process, not product as well, right? The idea of putting that in place.

So let’s say that you—and this is there—I mean, I’m in a phase right now where I definitely need to do this. I definitely need to get back on this train of sorts because, you know, again, I fell prey to the no, we don’t have enough money to do this right now, therefore I must do this. And lo and behold, I’m like—and I’ve had Michael Gerber on my show, so now it’s not—and I’ve worked—

Barbara Turley: You know what? You’re procrastinating then because honestly, anybody who says, I don’t have enough money to do this, therefore I’m going to do it myself—it means the trade-off there is that you’re not spending your time doing sales and creating more revenue, and you’re tying up your time doing social media, Canva images, editing a podcast that maybe—I don’t know if it’s making you money. Maybe that is a sales strategy, but then you need to do more podcasts and not actually the editing. It’s just—it is the mindset.

Mike Vardy: And that’s the funny thing, is that what it is—the hard things about doing the hard things, right? It’s like the stuff that—and sometimes it’s fear. Sometimes it’s the big thing that—like I’ve got a book coming out, and that took a long time to write. This book has been in the works for several years, and I finally did it. And now all of a sudden it’s like, wow, I’m putting myself out there. And that—there’s a vulnerability there.

When you’re doing those higher-level things, it’s often a lot easier to say, well, if I make the Canva images and I do the editing and I do all these little things, then I’m still doing the work. But it’s the impact, I think.

Barbara Turley: It’s busy work. It’s busy work, it’s distracting. It’s not the job of the business owner or the entrepreneur, even if you like doing it. Because people say, find your genius zone and you stay in that zone. I’m like, well, what if your genius zone is creating Canva images? Business that does that or pace or get on with your own business. I sound a bit harsh, but it is the mindset, right?

So people—really you’re in business. Business is the backbone—well, let’s think about in uncertain times. At the moment we’re in slightly uncertain times. Small business is the backbone of every economy around the world. The entrepreneur, especially in uncertain times, has a responsibility to make sure that the business is secure, is growing, is providing tax revenues, hiring people, creating jobs, you know, there’s a bigger collective than just you, even if it’s your own business and you on your own. You are contributing to the global economy. You’re contributing to it.

So just think about this: small businesses in America that might be having an offshore team use an offshore team that provides jobs in places like the Philippines. And then those businesses use that strategy to go on and grow, and they pay tax revenue in their own country, and they go to hire accountants. They might hire a salesperson or a project manager in their own country or a digital strategist, or they might. So you’re going on—there’s a knock-on effect everywhere.

So you have a responsibility not to do busy work and actually to be productive. And I think the entrepreneurs of the world and the business owners—we’re the frontliners of the economy. And that’s the way I see it. We have a sort of responsibility to get out of our own way.

Mike Vardy: And I think one of the things that comes up for people too, and this I’ve come across with a few people, because I’ve talked about, like, you should, you know, get some help, hire VA. And some people are like, well, I want to keep it local, I want to keep it in—or I want to keep it in my own country or whatever. And I know I’ve had that knock before where I’ve hired somebody outside of Canada, and I’ve said, listen, I can’t necessarily afford to hire somebody inside of Canada right now.

But not only that, I think what it does is once you free that up, then maybe down the line you say, you know what, I am going to hire that right-hand person that is from—like it frees you up. And I think a lot of people get caught in that, well, I’m gonna wait till I can afford to do it with somebody that is in my country or my—and never will ever do, yeah. And truth be told, we live in a global economy now anyway. You just mentioned that, right? Like that’s the nature of the world that we live in.

Barbara Turley: The alternative is that either the business fails because you can’t get out of your own way, or you can’t grow. But let’s say it doesn’t fail and you just keep plodding along. Well, there’s so many business owners, like I talked about at the beginning of this. I just saw it when I was trying to coach people. I was working with an amazing naturopath in Sydney, and I remember just saying to her one day—she was really upset because she’s never really been able to pick her kids up from school.

And I was like, but you know that you can do that. That’s easy. I mean, that was how I essentially signed my first client. I wasn’t even trying. I just said, are you serious? Like, you run your own business. That’s easy. If you work in corporate, I could understand that attitude.

So I started working with her, and I basically showed her how to completely free up her time. The VA’s she had, to be honest, were rubbish in the beginning. I mean, you know—but they actually helped her to, it helped her to get going. And then she ended up hiring—she does still have a VA—but she ended up hiring another naturopath, and she grew her business, and she grew herself and her life, and she was more part of her children’s life, and she just was happier.

So there’s all of these knock-on effects, and you can sort of wait until you can hire somebody locally, but you probably never will. And if you do, you’ll probably only be able to give them a few hours, and you’ll always be scrounging around.

Barbara Turley: Unless you’ve got something that completely takes off. For me, offshoring is just a no-brainer strategy. I know I’m selling my own book, but it is. I mean, the dividends it pays when you get it right are enormous at the end of the day. And then it’s up to you to use those dividends and that business growth to go on and support your own economy by spending money and hiring people and growing.

Mike Vardy: Right. Now, you talked about virtual assistants that don’t necessarily work out or they’re not doing that—

Loads of them that don’t work out. It’s not easy. The vast majority of them don’t.

Right, so now let’s talk about that as we get close to our time together wrapping up. That’s happened to me before, too. I’ve had an assistant that I invested time, energy, attention in, and they didn’t work out, and it took just as long for me to get rid of them as it did for me to hire them. So how do you make that happen in a way that makes sense for you, the business, also doesn’t turn you off from then going back into dipping your toe back into the pool?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s difficult, right? Recruiting is a whole beast all by itself. But some of the things—like, let’s assume for a second that you get a good person. So let’s say you get a VA that genuinely has a good work ethic, is enthusiastic, and shows up and does all the stuff, and is smart, reasonably smart, right? So these are the things that you’re actually looking for.

I would say more than experience. Like, in my experience, the best VA’s that I’ve ever hired were ones where I hired for that and I trained for the skills, right? Soft skills first, hard skills second, right?

Yeah, you can’t teach enthusiasm, and you can’t teach work ethic and character. Now, you can recruit for it, but you don’t always get it right, but you get better at it. So you’ve got to recruit for these kinds of things.

And then, you know, then it’s about having—yes, you have deep processes, you can teach them—but there’s a couple of holes in it, right? Because people go, well, I had my task list, I had all my processes, I trained them, and it still didn’t work. So there’s a couple more steps, and I’ll just be quick with these. And these are things I’ve learned, to be honest, by not doing it.

So I have suffered all the pain that everybody else has suffered with this, but I have soldiered on because I have an unflinching knowledge that delegation is the key to entrepreneurial freedom. So I haven’t gone, that doesn’t work for my business. I’ve gone, no, that person wasn’t right, and I did that wrong. I need to refix that and go and delegate again. So I kept doing it and doing it, and I’ve grown a multimillion-dollar business this way.

Barbara Turley: You need to set strong expectations at the beginning of the relationship. That can be expectations about your working style, what’s acceptable, what’s not acceptable. So, for example, we talked about this off air. It’s not a good idea, in my experience, to say to somebody, look, I don’t really mind when you do the work, I just want the result, because you’re just—that is too open. And your idea of what that means and the other person’s idea of what that means can be so far apart.

And then frustration and resentment sets in, and you can’t have the conversation about it. I go through this—this happens to me even still to this day, right? It’s just you’ve got to be very clear on the expectations of the relationship at the beginning.

Set—if you want to offer flexibility, that’s fine, but within a structure. So, for example, you need to be online and we need to be communicating during these hours because I’d like to ping you or whatever, and you need to establish your communication rhythm and your meeting rhythm.

So let’s talk about communication rhythm first. Are you the type who likes a VA to ping you on Skype with every question as they come up? Or are you in meetings all day and that would drive you insane, and you’d prefer to have one daily huddle of 10 minutes where you address everything at one time? Or do you want to use, you know, something like Asana or Trello and address the questions in there as they come up and when you have time? So you’ve got to establish what works for both of you.

Because otherwise they’re pinging you all day and it’s driving you up the wall, but you haven’t established what your communication rhythm is—and your meeting rhythm. People hate meetings, I know that, but, you know, not all meetings are useless. You do need to have the huddle concept.

And what I mean by that is I recommend, with a VA, a 10-minute non-negotiable daily catch-up. It’s fast: what have you done, what are you doing next, and where are you stuck? And where you are stuck is where you are.

If something happens down the track and they’re like, well, I didn’t know how to do it, you’re like, well, why wasn’t that—so that’s where you catch the holes and you teach them how to. So that’s the kind of—you get in this flow.

Then you need to report back. So they do the task, but how are they reporting to you on the result of the task or whether it’s done or what happened? So I’ve got some VA’s—they do this so well. They sort of do it in Asana with me.

Barbara Turley: One guy in particular used to do this thing. He’d say “roadblocks,” and he’d list them out; “workarounds,” and he’d say what he did. So then I would go, that’s why it took two hours, I see now. Whereas before I’d be like, why did that task take two hours? Because I didn’t know that there were issues with the tech, with whatever—the things that I didn’t know came up during the task.

So it’s this reporting back—you’ve got to establish what that looks like for you. And then you need oversight. You’re not abdicating, you’re delegating. It’s a different thing. Delegation is kind of 80% and then 10% or 20% oversight.

So these are the sorts of things that people forget about. Now, like I said, that’s assuming you’ve got a good person. If you have a slippery VA who’s there and not there and says, I did do that, but I can’t find it, it’s in G Drive somewhere—you know all this—they’re lying. So you give them—you’ve got to be very clear.

Barbara Turley: That three strikes and you’re out kind of thing. Not in a bad way—you can say it in a good way—but you need to have the strength to have the kind of honest conversation. Don’t sugarcoat it. Go, you know, something’s not working. I feel like this is what happens. You do that, that annoys me. We either fix it or we call it quits. I’d be that direct.

Mike Vardy: What’s also interesting in that scenario, and this is something I’ve learned and I’m going to use going forward, is the tools help. You know, the idea of when someone says—yeah, they’re crucial—yeah, because you can’t see them. We talked about this before when we were on the air. It’s like there’s that trust factor, and yet you can create flexibility but within a framework, right?

So, for example, Asana. I use Asana, and I’ve been using it for years. I have other tools that I use as well. But what’s great about being a productivity practitioner is that if someone says—like I can—what I’ve done before, and I think this has been one of my Achilles’ heels, is I’ve said, well, what do you use? And they go, oh, I use Trello. I’m like, okay, well, we can use that for you. And I’m like, no—exactly—but that’s what’s happened before, right? If you try to kill them with kindness or try to be that—and you can’t do that.

But one of the things that you mentioned is like, I can’t find it in G Drive. If you use a tool like Asana—and we’ll just use Asana as an example—there is no shortage. You just attach the files to the task. I mean, it’s not hard to—but like you said, you set that expectation so that they say, I’m sorry, I forgot, I just left it in Dropbox. No, no, no, no, no—the task.

Barbara Turley: There’s a system, though. See, there’s a process. So if you think about it, what I’ve just unpacked there for you with the huddle, the communication rhythm, the meeting rhythm—that’s a system. And what happens then on a daily basis is the system’s flow. So the system is working every single day, and there’s this sense of—it’s like a dance that you do together, like a silent dance from across the world that you can do together.

And then you’ll know when there’s a step missed in the dance because it’s just this thing that you’ve established.

Barbara Turley: You know, for example, G Drive. I even have rules around how my team uses Asana, because what I found was we were all using Asana, but there were problems. And I was like, what is this? And I kind of dug into it, and it took me ages to figure it out. We were all using Asana differently, so we weren’t all on the same page. So I was like, well, now this is how we use that. I created a bit of flexibility within a structure for how we use Asana as a team.

How we communicate, how we dance together as a team during the huddles, how we use G Drive—I now have rules around how G Drive is used because we kept losing files, but we didn’t have a system. It’s processes, systems, teams, and then those three things working in synchronicity together works really well. So if you’ve got a VA and then you’re like, I haven’t heard from them for days, I don’t even know if they’ve got the work done—well, that’s your system.

It might not be them, it’s the system you set up.

Mike Vardy: Right. Hey, Barbara, this has been a fantastic conversation. One more thing before I let you go, because I want listeners to walk with one simple action that they can take today that’s going to set them forward on the right path when it comes to bringing learning delegation. Let’s go there. What’s one simple action or one action they can take to start to crack that nut a little bit?

Barbara Turley: Shift your mindset. It all starts with your mindset. Delegation is the path to freedom, and it is something that you need to—it’s a skill that you need to hone, and you need to master it. So the mindset shift first is key.

And then maybe listen to this podcast a few times and jot down all the things I said because it’s actually—there’s a process right there. And you just hone it, refine it, commit to it, keep trying, even when you fail, fix it.

Barbara Turley: Don’t run away and go, it’s just easier to do it myself, because then you’ll never grow.

Mike Vardy: Barbara, where can people keep up with you and your work?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So we have a special page for your listeners, actually. If you go to thevirtualhub.com forward slash productivityist for this podcast, and on there you can get a really cool little download. You don’t even need to sign up for it. It’s a mini guide called The Five Reasons People Fail with VA’s. Quick tip: the things I’ve been speaking about on this podcast are all in the downloadable.

There’s also a scalable business success formula e-course there that you can sign up for, or you can book a call if you feel you’re ready to get a VA with us. You can book a call to speak to one of our consultants about whether we’re a fit and whether you’re a fit for us. So thevirtualhub.com/productivityist.

And I also have a podcast which is very tactical, and it deals with—we’ve got shows on everything, even like how often I should speak to my VA, when is the time to fire my VA, all of these kinds of shows. It’s The Virtual Success Show on iTunes, and it’s also on our website under the “Our Content” tab.

Mike Vardy: Barbara, thanks again so much for taking the time to join me here on the Productivityist podcast.

Thanks for having me.