Tersh Blissett: What’s up, everybody in podcast world? You’re listening to the Service Business Mastery Podcast. I’m your host, Tersh Blissett. Today’s episode is brought to you in part by My Easy Install. If you haven’t heard on previous episodes about My Easy Install, you gotta check it out. If you’re an HVAC company and you’re slightly curious about technology and how it’s going to affect the HVAC industry and people purchasing equipment online, go to www.my, the letter “e” “z”, install.com, slash installer dash sign dash up. I’ll have a link in the show notes.

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That’s a really, really cool program if you have questions about people purchasing equipment online and kind of going into that whole, well, I’m not going to make my money anymore type thing. My margins aren’t going to be there anymore. My Easy Install really kind of does away with that. They educate the consumer that, you know, they’re not going to be paying someone $500 to change out their system. You know, they’re still going to have to pay you your same margins. You should still make the same money with less of your cashflow, you know, running through your business. So it’s just kind of the way of the future, in my opinion. But I don’t know. Maybe you don’t agree with me. Maybe you do.

Another thing really, really cool. So thanks to nominations by several people. I’m sure my wife was like 12 or 15 of the nominations. Mom was probably 100 nominations. I was nominated and selected to be in the 40 under 40, The ACHR News publication, which is really cool. I’m honored that I was selected to do that. I know a lot of listeners also nominated me whenever it was time to do that. So thank you again for those nominations.

I’m going to tell you this before the episode, just so that you know, so that you’re prepared throughout the episode. If you find value in this episode, please take a screenshot of it and share it on Instagram Stories and tag me in it. That way your followers, your friends that are on Instagram, they’ll see it also. Facebook Stories work the same way. And then I’ll reshare it.

And if we’re not connected, we’ll make sure that we get connected on Instagram and Facebook. So it’s really cool. Since I’ve been asking for that, I’ve connected with a lot of listeners, new listeners and old-time listeners that have always followed and listened. Just we’ve never actually connected on social media, but cool.

With that being said, I really am excited about today’s episode where we’re going to talk about virtual assistants and how they can work in your business and how you can fail when you’re using them. So if you know how to fail, then you know how not to fail. It’s kind of the way that I see things.

On today’s episode, we’re going to talk to Barbara Turley, and she’s going to explain to us a little bit about the things that we can do to avoid failing whenever it comes to using a virtual assistant.

If you have any questions for Barbara, feel free to reach out to her at thevirtualhub.com/SBM for Service Business Mastery. And you’ll have this entire list of all five reasons why you’ll fail with a virtual assistant listed there on that page.

So also, if you have any questions, you know, you can reach out to me. My email address is tersh (@) icebound.us, and a lot of people use that. They’ll reach out to me even if they don’t have a question, just to test my autoresponder. We talk a little bit about automating our lives and speeding up things by making things automated. And that’s one of the things that I’ve done. It’s really helped out limiting the expectation of a client and vendors and anybody who really emailed me, letting them know that I only check my emails twice a day. So they’re not sitting there waiting for a response within five seconds. So that’s something that I’ve done that’s really helped out things, and it’s really made it so that I don’t have to check my email every time it chimes on my phone or on my desktop.

With that being said, I’d like to welcome Barbara to the show.

Tersh Blissett: Alright, welcome to the show, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me, Terrish. Great to be here.

Tersh Blissett: It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for staying up where you’re at. So I’m in Savannah, Georgia, as most of the listeners know, but you’re not. Normally, we’re fighting the East Coast, West Coast time transition, but today’s episode is a little bit different, and I’m super appreciative that you are staying awake for us.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I’m in Sydney, Australia. So I’m right down under. I’m on the other end of the road.

Tersh Blissett: But you’re not originally from Sydney, are you?

Barbara Turley: No. So I’ve lived here for 17 blissful years because it is an amazing place to live, but I’m originally from Ireland. I’m just outside Dublin in Ireland. So I grew up there and came to Australia, to be honest, as a backpacker many years ago and just fell in love with the whole beach lifestyle, surfy thing going on here and never left. Yeah. So that’s pretty much it.

Tersh Blissett: You know, that’s awesome. Whenever I hear about Australia, so I’m not a world traveler. I’m not as adventurous as you are, but everything that I hear about Australia is it’s amazing. As long as you don’t get killed by whatever’s there, like the world’s deadliest spiders, the snakes, and everything else. As a backpacker, I imagine that’s probably something that you had to worry about.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, you know, you see a lot. Yeah, you do. But honestly, in the 17 years I’ve lived here, I think I’ve encountered two large spiders, neither of which were deadly. They were just frightening. And I think I’ve never seen a snake in the city, although people do in the kind of walks and stuff, but I’ve never encountered that, and I’ve been here a long time. So that’s good.

So yeah, it’s not as dangerous as this. It’s not like Crocodile Dundee, really. There’s an area in Australia that’s like that, but it’s not the whole continent.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, totally cool. So on today’s episode, we’re going to talk about virtual assistants, and you kind of are the expert when it comes to virtual assistants. And as most of the listeners are service-based businesses, virtual assistants kind of freak people out.

Sometimes we have virtual assistants. We are 100% remote. All of our guys work remote. The entire team is remote.

So when it comes to dispatchers and CSRs, we all have virtual assistants when it comes to that aspect of it. But a lot of times I get asked questions like, “How do you do that? Like, how do you monitor these people when they’re not even there? Like, how do you look over their shoulders?” Traditionally, service companies, everybody’s sitting in one office, or we’re sitting where we can see each other, line of sight. We can hear if people aren’t making outbound phone calls and that type of stuff.

So today we’re going to talk about how to manage that and how to get rid of that overwhelming feeling of not being able to manage a virtual assistant.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s such a great question. It’s one question that is completely loaded, and there’s so much unpacking there. Honestly, it’s not just service-based businesses that feel this way. It’s actually a very common feeling, and it’s a natural feeling because the working world has changed a lot in the last sort of 5, 10 years, really. It’s really in the last sort of 10 years a lot of this stuff has really exploded.

And we’re all trying to navigate, “How do we now do business virtually?” That’s a big theme. And it’s not even just about virtual assistants. It’s about how do we maintain control without seeing people or without micromanaging people, giving flexibility without losing structure? All that sort of stuff plays into this question.

And it’s something I’m very passionate about, teaching people how you can do this and let go while still maintaining control. So I hope that gives you a bit of context of how we can approach it.

Tersh Blissett: So tell us a little bit about you, how you got into the virtual assistant world of things.

Barbara Turley: Sure. I mean, everyone loves this story because I didn’t intend to do it. Honestly, I have a background in the investment banking world, asset management sort of sales area. That’s where I spent 15 years in corporate, really.

And you would think that I had some crazy business idea. I’ve made a business plan and all of the usual stuff you’re supposed to do. None of the above happened. This was an accidental business that I totally didn’t mean to start, but accidentally found myself in it and having people asking me for this thing.

And look, to cut a long story short, I left corporate after many years of having a great career there but always kind of wanted to do my own thing. I wanted to build my own company. And I started doing some consulting, as a lot of corporates do when they first leave corporate.

And I was just coaching some smaller businesses, very diverse businesses, everything from a legal practice to a financial planning practice to a swim school. There was a tennis center, you know, a naturopath, all these kinds of businesses. Some of them had online presences, some of them didn’t. I had an online coach as well that was running online coaching programs. So very diverse sort of client base.

And I noticed that they all had the same problem. Realistically, none of them could actually afford to hire staff yet. But if they didn’t hire staff, they were never going to be able to grow. So a lot of people were going to get stuck in the crevice.

Now, some of these businesses were already running for 10 years, and they were stuck in that crevice sort of between startup and growth, and they could never really get out of it.

So I had read Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Workweek, like so many people, and I was like, “Hey, let’s get a VA.” So I had a VA myself that I found online.

And I started recruiting VAs, not as a business, just purely to help the people that I was coaching so that we could actually get on and do some strategic work together to free their time up.

And before I knew it, honestly, I just was getting more demand for VAs. People were calling me saying, “Hey, my friend is a client of yours, but can you get me one of those VAs?” And I was thinking, “Well, can’t you just jump online and get your own one?” I didn’t really think about a business.

But then the more people that asked me about it, I could hear the fear in their voice. They were sort of saying to me, “I know I can get one online, but I don’t know how. I just don’t feel confident. If you can get me one, that’d be great.”

And I thought, “I think there’s a business in this.” And really, that’s just kind of how it started. It was very demand-driven, which a lot of the best businesses are.

Tersh Blissett: Absolutely. Yeah. You kind of fall into it, but you’re good at what you did, and so people come to you for advice. And then you’re like, “Hey, maybe I can make a few bucks off of this,” or maybe it becomes one of those things where it’s like you just can’t say no anymore.

Barbara Turley: Yes, I think it was a little bit like that. And then through that experience, I discovered that one of the strengths that I have, and I don’t know whether this is just a natural thing that I’m good at or whether I got it developed in corporate, I think maybe it’s a natural bias that I have.

I am very good at delegating. I’m really good at building systems. I’m really good at doing something once and going, “Don’t need to do that. I’m going to give that to someone else.”

But I’m very good at making sure that that other person not only is trained enough to do it, but there’s a bulletproof process, and I have oversight and reporting back so that there’s kind of nowhere to hide. If anyone was going to try to hide, it’s very easy to.

And that gets to the heart of what we’re talking about here, which is maintaining, letting go while maintaining control.

Tersh Blissett: Let’s go into some of the reasons why it would fail and how we could kind of prevent that from happening, because that’s our biggest concern as business owners that are stuck in the traditional way of doing things. Like you said, not having that oversight and not having checks and balances in place because you assume that if they’re working remote, then they’re kind of goofing off all day or whatever the case may be. That’s kind of the opinion that we have sometimes.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. Yeah. One of the biggest reasons people can fail with, look, to be honest, there’s a lot of reasons people can fail with teams in general, even if they’re in your office, but let’s just focus on virtual assistants who are virtual for a minute.

The best thing when it comes to virtual assistants in particular, typically, now this is not all virtual assistants because, you know, the American VA listening or whatever, who I class as more like online business manager-type levels, will sort of go against what I’m saying here. But usually, a pure virtual assistant, their job is to execute a process that you have built or someone in your business has built. Their job is not to develop the process or to think out your strategy or to figure out what’s the best way to get more leads on LinkedIn or any of that. Their job is to execute on processes.

So the biggest problem is that people hire a VA and they just think, “I’ll just throw them a quick, I’ll just put them in this membership site that has these training videos, and I’ll just expect them to magically come up with my entire SEO strategy and get me traffic.” So that’s a major problem, right? So it’s the expectation issue on the way in.

So once you have measured expectations about the fact that your job as a business owner is to build the systems and then train your people to run the systems, that’s actually the basis of any great business.

But with virtual assistants, they do really well when there are developed task lists. So it’s very, very clear what tasks they’re actually being assigned to do, and then a process attached to each of those tasks, even if it’s just answering the phone because each business likes their phone to be answered differently. There is actually a process for that.

And then training, onboarding, reporting back is important, and that gives you kind of an oversight piece.

So if I was to kind of unpack those five areas, the easiest way to get started, because people, when they look at “How do I process map my business?” they get really overwhelmed and they’re like, “I just can’t figure out where to start or what to even give a VA to do.”

When you’re thinking about the control piece or “How do I know they’re not goofing off?” if you’re vague and you just say, “Hey, can you just come up with some ideas around social media?” Right? That’s just too vague, and somebody probably is going to goof off, even if they’re a great employee, because they just actually don’t know what to do. They don’t actually know what you’re asking or what the outcome is that you’re looking for.

So in that case, if you’re going to hire someone, a virtual assistant, you need two types of task lists to get going.

You need a recurring task list, which is the sort of recurring daily, weekly, monthly-type tasks that are the engine of the business that have to be done. They’re kind of non-negotiable, no excuses, easy processes, and they keep the business moving forward on a day-to-day operational kind of level.

Within your recurring task list, the easiest way to develop something like that is to simply sit down and look at the segments. Every business, regardless of how big or how small, even if it’s just one solopreneur, has departments. There’s your marketing department, there is your invoicing and finance area, there are all these little kind of departments.

And listing down within each of those departments, what are those daily, weekly, monthly kind of recurring things that need to be done in order to keep things moving? And those are the first things that you want to kind of get your lists down, get simple processes developed for them. Just step by step, here’s how to do it.

Barbara Turley: You can record a video of yourself doing it. That’s probably the most granular way to do it.

Tersh Blissett: That’s what I do. Or if I’m going through it. Yeah. So the other day I had an issue where I had to. It’s not something that we normally do, where we had to send out paperwork for financing, and normally it’s all electronic, it’s all automated through our CRM. And so it took me like 10 or 15 minutes to remember and figure out the process. And so immediately I just recorded myself doing it and then just saved it on YouTube as an unlisted video. So the next time that that happens, you know, six or eight months from now, it’s a five-minute video or three-minute video versus me wasting 20 or 30 minutes to try and figure out the process again.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. Yeah. And then you can maybe delegate that to a VA.

So it’s, first of all, getting into this. So let’s say you delegate this recurring task list or parts of it, because not all of it, a VA is not going to be able to do all of it because some of it might rely on your IP or whatever. But the more basic stuff, you can delegate that out first.

Now, if you hire someone full-time, let’s say you’ve got a full-time VA, 40 hours a week. The other trick with this is to sometimes people say, “Oh, because you’re virtual, I don’t mind when you do the work, as long as you just get it done.”

Yeah, I would strongly advise that that is probably the first thing I would not do. It’s not that you have to say you have to show up at nine and leave at five, but you want to have, if you want to offer flexibility, offer it within some form of a structure.

Because as human nature, human beings, we’re prone to procrastination and leaving things to the last minute. So don’t set your people up to fail from day one. Just try and put some structure around it.

Then have a task list that realistically is enough work to do in 40 hours. And then, you know, on that recurring task list, you have to use a project management tool. If you’re working virtually, you can’t be using email as your communication tool or your project management tool.

Tersh Blissett: So what kind of project management tool do you recommend? Is it something like Slack or something? Is that like—

Barbara Turley: Well, we’re a big fan of Asana. So asana.com. It’s free. It’s amazing. I’m only on the paid version about one year now, and it’s only because my team is too big. But Asana is an amazing tool. It literally will change your life. It has an app on the phone, and it’s just great, right? Easy to use.

Slack is another great one, but Slack has gotten there. But they sort of started out as a chat tool, I think, and they’ve kind of developed into a project management tool. So I’m still on the Asana.

But there’s Trello, there’s Teamwork PM, there’s a few of them. The main thing is to use a project management tool so that each task within the tool, the communication flow and the instructions and the updates, the reporting back from the VA is within the task structure so that it keeps things organized.

Yeah, you can just quickly jump in and be like, “Well, there’s no commentary or anything on this task, so what’s going on here?” You know?

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, that’s the problem that I had even with Slack because, like you said, it started out as a chat. Using it back when it first was developed, you would have conversations and then you’d have to scroll back through or do a quick search to try and find where you were talking about X, Y, and Z, and it could very easily lose what the actual instruction was.

Barbara Turley: That’s a disaster. So I’m not sold on Slack for that reason, but I can see it as a communication tool on the side to use alongside something like an Asana so that you keep Asana clean with just pure instructions around what to do as opposed to chatting. You know, chatting kind of complicates the whole thing.

So these little things are really important to get right. They sound like kind of, some people would be like, “Oh, I don’t really want to use that.”

Trust me, if you don’t do this, this is when you’ll start to lose control. And then you start to feel all those feelings around, “I don’t know what they’re doing.”

Like the biggest question we get is, “How do I know what my VA is doing all day?” If you set it up this way, I mean, you should know what they’re doing all day because you’ve delegated it.

So that’s sort of not losing, like, don’t give up your power by just going, “Hey, can you just kind of find stuff to do?” It happens all the time, right?

So that is really, really important.

The other task lists that I talked about, recurring task lists, I think, is the most key one for VAs, but there’s also, like, you’re going to have projects on. You might want to produce an ebook. You might have a lead magnet that you’re doing. You might have, I don’t know, whatever your project list is. And there are tasks within projects.

So, for example, “develop an ebook” is not a task. That’s a project to which there are a lot of tasks attached.

So it’s being realistic about what is a project versus what is a task as well, and then just delegating those things out effectively.

I mean, all of this is about being a leader, right? You’ve got to lead. You are the conductor of the orchestra, and the orchestra are looking to you to delegate, to let them know when their moment is or what to do.

And that’s really getting to the key one to sort of get rid of that angst around knowing what they’re doing.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, I like it. So, yeah, next off kind of. I like that. I like the whole creating those task lists because I’ve been guilty of that myself, and I’ve kind of said exactly like you said not to say, “Kind of just do what you got to do to stay busy until the next phone rings,” or something like that. And then when nothing happens and you’re like, “Well, what’d you do all day?” No.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a common thing.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah. So I guess let’s move on into the second little reason why people fail most of the time with the VA.

Barbara Turley: Sure. So just following on from that sort of task lists and process mapping, and I’m sort of just diving into each little piece here.

Often then what you find is someone says, “But I did all that, and it still didn’t work.” I go, “Okay, so let’s assume for a second that you have a good person,” right? Because HR and recruitment is hard on its own, but that’s a whole other thing, right?

So let’s say you’ve recruited well, you’ve got a genuinely good person who has the right skills, is trainable, all of these things, and wants to do the job, but he’s making mistakes.

The first thing is to look at your processes. And because you’ve done this, you might know what I’m talking about, but sometimes we develop a process that looks really good to us, but we’d forget that if a mistake keeps happening within a certain step or between steps, it’s important to look at, “Is there some IP or when I’m doing the process, is there a thinking process going on as well that is in my head that leads me to do it in a certain way?”

And it’s important to try and identify if that bit is missing for your VA and whether you can teach your VA to think like you do as you do the process.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, absolutely. Whenever we answer the phone, I specifically want someone to say “good morning” or “good afternoon” before they say, “Thank you for calling Icebound,” and then introduce themselves.

And that’s because traditionally you have that three-to-five seconds that somebody’s picking up their phone and putting it through their ear or it’s connecting.

Barbara Turley: That’s perfect.

Tersh Blissett: I don’t even think of it. I had that problem exactly like you said. It’s something that I just did second nature. And then I realized that I didn’t express to them like I should. Like, “This is the reason why you need to say good morning or good afternoon because you’re waiting for that delay.” So they may miss the name of the company. And then after the fact, you’re repeating yourself because they say, “Who is this again? Who am I calling?” And so—

Barbara Turley: What I absolutely love about that little story you’ve just told is there’s a tiny, simple little process, but it’s still a process. And there’s a task of answering the phone. There was a process attached to it.

But because you didn’t explain the why behind the process, the person thought, “Well, what does it matter? I forgot to say good morning. Big deal.” In their head, they might be thinking, “My God, he’s on about the good morning thing again.”

But actually, when you explain that, they’re like, “I see what you mean. Yes, that does happen.”

So that was that you decided, “Well, rather than shoot the person, let’s look at the process first and let’s see where the issue is.” So that’s a really important point.

And a lot of people don’t do that, and they’re not willing to do that. Or they’ll say, “I don’t have time for this.”

And I go, “Yeah, I understand that because we’re all overwhelmed and busy. I totally get it. It’s painful. But if you don’t do it and you keep firing people or keep churning through people and not looking at yourself and your process as well, in a year’s time you’ll still be even more frustrated than you are today.”

Hiring people is so expensive and such a drain on you. Just fix the issues you have within your business.

Yeah. And, of course, caveat, let’s assume you’ve hired well in the first place, but most people are good people. They want to do a good job. So that’s really important.

And then the next piece, again from that. So people will say, “I did all that. I’m still struggling.”

And this was something I learned the hard way myself. I couldn’t figure out why certain things were still falling over. I wasn’t really getting quite the results I wanted from certain task lists, or they were just ticking tasks off and not really, there was no results from what we were doing.

Again, there was an expectation problem there and who’s supposed to lead what the results are.

So the oversight piece. Again, lots of entrepreneurs in particular do not want to do this bit because they see it as taking up their time, but you do have to have a level of oversight.

And the best strategy I put in place was the daily huddle concept.

Now, for those that don’t know, that’s just sort of from scrum technique that a lot of the big project management and particularly developers and coders and stuff were using, this scrum technique. But the basic concept of a huddle meeting is a very short, very targeted meeting that just asks three questions:

What are you working on? What are you planning to work on next? And where are you stuck?

And the “where are you stuck” thing unearths all the issues. It can be a communication gap, understanding gap, whatever. It can be like, “Hey, I’m waiting for you to actually come back to me on where’s the content piece,” or something like that.

As business owners, often we’re the roadblock. We don’t actually know.

And it also means that your team have to arrive to that meeting prepared.

Now, if it was a traditional stand-up meeting that was in an office, loads of people today are doing them online. Some people I’ve heard have a Slack channel called stand-up where everyone has to comment every morning. Here’s the three things.

We do them every day with my team. We’ve got a massive pipeline huddle that happens every single day, and it’s virtual. We’re all over the world.

Tersh Blissett: So do you do, that’s a perfect segue into, when you’re doing it virtually, are you finding that people are doing it via Zoom or are they actually doing chat, like on Slack, like you said? Because I feel like—

Barbara Turley: I do it virtually on Zoom, for me. The chat thing, it’s too easy just to keep punching in just to say something.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking. As soon as you see each other face to face through a webcam, it’s almost like more of a sense of accountability, I feel like.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And you know what I think as well? It also gives your team a chance to finally have some of your time.

Now, the trick with this thing, though, is that you as the owner and the leader of the business, it has to be non-negotiable for you. So you can’t keep canceling it. You’ve got to show up, right? Because the minute you start canceling it, someone will message you going, “Um, you know, hey, Barb, today, look, I have this other meeting. Can I miss the huddle today?” And you’re going to get that, right?

So you sort of have to make this a bit of a non-negotiable, that it’s, “We have a huddle, there’s 10 people on this huddle, and it’s 30 minutes flat. It’s fast.”

Tersh Blissett: Are you allowing each person to talk throughout that 30 minutes? Like you’re saying, “Okay, each person has five minutes to talk.”

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I would even cut it to like three minutes. And then you take stuff offline.

So let’s say somebody’s really stuck. You’ll be like, “Let’s take that offline,” or you can have a quick answer. So it just focuses the whole thing. And that’s where you get your oversight piece, and you keep things moving.

Tersh Blissett: Yeah, so I was going to ask you, you are doing it as a large group. You’re not doing this individually with each person.

Barbara Turley: No, you wouldn’t have time.

Tersh Blissett: And also I was kind of thinking that, or I’ve found it for me personally in certain situations whenever I do something similar to this, I don’t call it my daily huddle, but whenever one person has a problem, somebody else can chime in and say, “Well, this is how I solved that problem.” And it’s not me answering every question.

Barbara Turley: Definitely. You want to encourage everyone to have a voice at the table. Initially, people won’t say anything, but you’ve got to encourage that.

And particularly with virtual assistants, particularly if you’re dealing in the Philippines and places like that, you’re facing a cultural barrier there where they don’t want to speak up. They’re a yes culture. You’re facing all those cultural barriers, but you as the leader, again, have to work with that person and encourage them to know that they have a voice, that you want to hear their voice. Their opinion matters to you.

And when you do that, it takes a bit of time, but you will get people to come out of their shell.

Tersh Blissett: Do you find that a particular time of day is better than others? Because if we’re on the East Coast of the U.S. and we have a lot of VAs that are in the Philippines, it’s not first thing in the morning for them.

Barbara Turley: Well, it is if you’re with us because we run 24 hours. I think it’s one client that has a VA outside of their time zone. Okay, doesn’t mean you can’t do it. I actually recently just did a podcast called “How to Work with a VA Successfully Who’s Not in Your Time Zone.”

But yeah, for clients, look, typically we like to say to U.S. clients they’ll work your business hours.

Okay, so with that being said, is it better for the morning or afternoons to have those huddle meetings?

Look, for me, that’s not something that matters. I think it depends on the rhythm within the business. So, for example, in our business, I’ll just give you a clue. For me, it happens at two o’clock in the afternoon. It’s midday in the Philippines. The reason for that is because we’ve got some people that only started midday because they’re running into the night shifts and stuff. So we kind of had the structure at that time to make it work. So, yeah.

Tersh Blissett: I like it. Yeah, because I know some people are like hardcore, “You have to be up at 4:30 in the morning to start your day” type people. And then other people are like, “No, I’ll work until two in the morning, but I’m not going to get up before nine o’clock,” you know?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So then you’ve got to work out, if you decide that everybody’s got to be there. Well, if you’re a truly global team like that, where you’ve got lots of different time zones, you may need to run two. You may need to go the Slack route. You may need to have, like, maybe everyone has to do a quick Loom video, but then you’ve got to watch them all. So, you know, look, it’s not easy, but I think most people are not running truly global across multiple time zones. So, yeah.

Tersh Blissett: That’s good. Cool. We kind of beat that dead horse. It’s really an interesting topic, and it’s something that most people who have never experienced a VA, they don’t really think about it. And then after the fact, they’re kind of like, “I wish this question was answered,” you know? And so that’s, you know, honestly, that’s the whole goal of this podcast is to answer those unasked questions. So—

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And look, I will openly admit that, like all entrepreneurs, I myself am a control freak, but yet I run a completely virtual business where nobody is in the same country as me. I’ve got people in Europe as well and sales guys and stuff like that. And we run 24 hours. So we have people working at night and all this sort of thing. But strong processes that are clearly defined, and everybody’s role is very clear on how they report back on their role, the results that they’re getting, and then the coming together as a team to keep working as one team, one dream. You do those things, you’ll get rid of the problem of feeling like you have no control. Because I feel like I’ve got the ultimate control, but I don’t actually do any of it.

Tersh Blissett: Absolutely. I love that. And that’s so perfect with exactly how we run our business. And so many people ask us how we’re able to work a service business remotely. And what you’ve described is the exact reason why we’re able to do that. So many times I can’t put into words the reasons why things work. It’s just stuff that I’ve listened to on podcasts and books and everything else over the years. And you’ve explained it, and your guide explains exactly how we’re able to do that.

So with that being said, I want to cut us off. I want people to come visit you to get the rest of the reasons. There are five of them here, and they’re on your website for a download, and they’re super interesting. If somebody wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way to get in touch with you, get connected with you, and start working with The Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So look, the first step is you can go to thevirtualhub.com/SBM for Service Business Mastery, SBM. And that’s where you can download—you don’t even need to sign up. It’s not even a lead magnet. We’re just giving it away—the five reasons people fail with VAs, right? So you’re going to get that kind of, you know, I only delved into kind of one or two of them there. There’s five in total.

Then, on there, there’s also a free—not a video course or an e-course—which delves a bit more into scaling using VAs to scale your business.

And finally, you can book a call with one of our strategy consultants there. It is free. I don’t call it a sales call because it’s more helping people to understand: are they ready for this yet? Because like I said, if you haven’t done all this stuff, then maybe there’s a bit of work to do before you get VAs because you don’t want to just throw a body at the problem kind of thing.

And then, look, I hang out on LinkedIn a little bit. I will confess that I’m about to have my second baby soon, so I’m not easy to—I’m also growing children at the same time as I’m growing a business. So there you go. I’ve got the ultimate delegator. That’s what I call myself. But on LinkedIn, you can find me personally on LinkedIn. You just look up Barbara Turley over there.

Tersh Blissett: Perfect. That’s so awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and thank you for staying up and sharing your knowledge with us.

Barbara Turley: You are very welcome.

Tersh Blissett: Great. So we’ll talk again soon. Have a great day.

Thank you for listening to another episode of the Service Business Mastery podcast, the podcast focused on service business owners, managers, and technicians who are considering becoming business owners themselves.

As most of you know, my goal with this podcast is to answer unasked questions. There’s a lot of times whenever we start a small business that we didn’t know to even ask that question when it was time to start the business. So hopefully this episode, and all episodes that you listen to with the Service Business Mastery, help answer one or two of those questions for you.

If at any time you have any other questions or if you have a topic that you’d like to hear about, feel free to reach out to me, tersh (@) icebound.us. That’s my personal email address, and we’ll see if we can get someone on the show who’s an expert in that field.

As most of you know, I’m not an expert in any of these things. I just like to ask the questions and share that information with you. So let me know if you have an expert in mind, and I’ll reach out to them and see if I can’t get them on the show.

As I said at the beginning of the episode, if you found value in this, please share it with your friends. Please share—take a screenshot of it if you’re listening to it on your phone—and share it in your Instagram stories. If you hated it, share it in your Instagram stories. Just tag me.

On Instagram, actually, I haven’t been super active with the Service Business Mastery Instagram page, but I’ve started getting a little bit more active with it. I do a lot with my personal page and also with Icebound’s page. We try and stay pretty active with both of those pages.

But we’re doing a lot more. Julie and I are doing coaching together as far as health and wellness coaching. And so I do a little bit more of that with my personal page. So I wanted to make sure that I don’t exclude any of the followers of the podcast. And so that’s why I want to ramp up the Service Business Mastery page again, so that there’s relevant content there and you’re not listening to us talk about health coaching and healthy mindsets and that type of thing—which is good if you like that kind of stuff.

But anyways, hope you have a great day. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns or just want to test out the autoresponder.

With that being said, we’ll talk again next week on the Service Business Mastery Podcast, the podcast focused on service business owners, managers, and technicians considering becoming business owners themselves.

Tersh Blissett: Have a great week.