Voice Actor: Welcome to the Sharkpreneur podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world’s first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time Marketer of the Year nominee on the podcast. Kevin and Seth interview Sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

Seth Green: 49 faces look to him in triumph over the last 12 months. They had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year?

Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast, at 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatepodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatepodcastbook.com.

Welcome to the podcast. This is your co-host, Seth Green. Today I’ve got the good fortune to be joined by Barbara Turley from The Virtual Hub. Barbara, thanks so much for joining us.

Barbara Turley: Thank you for having me, Seth. Delighted to be here.

Seth Green: It’s our pleasure. So let’s go back in time a little bit. What is The Virtual Hub and how did you get started?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So The Virtual Hub today, we are a company who has clients all over the world, and we help teams and entrepreneurs free up their time and energy by using offshore team strategies. So we have offshore teams in the Philippines that are servicing clients all around the world.

And how I got into that is honestly quite by accident. I was in corporate for many, many years of my career—15 years in the corporate world in the financial industry—before I branched out to be a business coach, actually. I started doing some business consulting very early on.

And I noticed that all the clients I was coaching fundamentally had the same problem. And that problem was that if they didn’t hire staff, they weren’t really going to be able to implement the strategies that I was talking to them about because they couldn’t free up their time. But if they didn’t free up their time and get moving with the business, they weren’t going to be able to hire staff.

So I figured, well, let’s go offshore and see if we can get you some staff. I had a VA myself because I had read Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. Yeah, I had done that and I was like, well, so I got some friends of my VA working for some clients. And honestly, before I knew it, I was running about 10 VAs on behalf of clients.

And I thought, wow, I’m in a different business here. And I was quite enjoying it. So The Virtual Hub was born very much out of a need that I saw with many businesses.

And today we’re eight years old. We’re 350 employees in the Philippines, and we have clients all over the world—larger organizations, small businesses, everything right now.

Seth Green: Well, that is an absolutely incredible journey, and the longer version should probably be in a book somewhere if it isn’t already.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Not yet.

Seth Green: Not yet. Not yet.

Barbara Turley: It’s coming.

Seth Green: We’ll come back to that. I too read The 4-Hour Workweek when it first came out. I tried using whatever Brick House or whatever firm he mentioned in India. I used a couple of different firms in India, had no luck, wasn’t happy, and ended up that we do now have a number of virtual team members that are in the Philippines, which has worked out much better.

What do you think are the biggest misconceptions, the biggest myths around virtual outsourcing, virtual assistance type of stuff?

Barbara Turley: Yes, that it’s easy. That all you’ve got to do is hire someone offshore and then everything’s just going to magically fall into place. And that is a feeling. The odd time someone can get an assistant somewhere and hit a home run on the first go, and that’s great—but it’s difficult to scale it.

If you actually want to scale that and you’re a larger organization or you want to grow, the strategy required both on the client side, on your own side as a business owner and a business architect, and on the VA side in terms of training, onboarding, and how you treat them—there’s a lot to it.

And I learned that sort of the hard way over the years by building this myself. But today my philosophy is very much around: it is the structures that you put people into and the structures that you build in general that lead to the best businesses, whether it’s offshore teams or not.

Seth Green: That makes a lot of sense. I think you’re absolutely right. I think we as entrepreneurs expect that we’ll just pick someone and it’ll just be fabulous.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and I call that throwing a body at the problem.

Seth Green: We don’t expect—we would never expect that of a normal physical employee.

Barbara Turley: No, completely different.

Seth Green: We would expect we do a whole bunch of recruiting, interviewing, screening, and then a lot of training to get them up to speed. I wonder if it’s because we think, this is five bucks an hour, it’s 10 bucks an hour, and it’s easier tasks. They should just be good to go.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. And we also assume that the person doing the task knows what we want magically, you know, in our head, and that they should know what we want. And the reality is that communication is one of the biggest gaps. Communication is not a language problem.

Often it’s being able to delegate. A lot of people—most people I find actually—are very bad at delegating because it is a skill that you must master. And I’m quite good at it. Still to this day, I meet people in senior roles, and when I say to them, you know you could systemize that thing that you’re doing and delegate that, they go, no, no, no, I couldn’t possibly, that would never work.

And I go, well, no, the first step is to work on the process and the system, and then you can train it and delegate it. And people don’t want to do that.

Seth Green: So I have a couple theories. Why do you think they don’t want to do that?

Barbara Turley: First of all, I think they don’t believe it. They’re not even thinking about it. They’re like, I do this job and nobody else can do it.

Then there is a feeling that nobody else can do it as good as me. Of course that can be true. And then when people do get it and say, okay, I’ll create a process, and they give a half-baked process to someone and they go, see, it didn’t work.

Because process mapping and system creation and the oversight and reporting back and forth that is required to delegate effectively is a whole skill by itself.

When you do it right though, and you hand something over, I mean, the dividends it’s going to pay you as a business owner or as a leader of a team or whatever area you’re in an organization, it’s phenomenal. It’s for years to come.

Seth Green: Absolutely. So I think yes, you’re right. I think they’re not thinking it can be done. I think that there might be some small psychological block in terms of not wanting to relinquish control. And then there’s obviously the can somebody else do it good enough? It might not be as good as me, but is it good enough that nobody will know the difference?

Now you have 350 virtual outsourcers. I’m guessing you went through a lot more than 350 to get to 350.

Barbara Turley: Oh yeah. Recruiting is a whole other beast. We could do a four-hour podcast just on recruiting alone. It is very difficult. Recruiting is difficult. It’s an art. There’s an art and science, like anything, to recruiting anywhere in the world.

But when you’re dealing with support staff, it’s a tricky one. And this gets me onto the whole point of a virtual assistant. The other area people fail, I think, is their definition of what is a virtual assistant. People are describing anyone offshore that helps in any way as a virtual assistant, but the word assistant is very important.

We need to remember what an assistant role is. And people go down the wrong path with thinking what this person can do. And you mentioned relinquishing control—that’s a big thing. I’m not a fan of relinquishing control. You would think that I would love to relinquish control, but the way that you get over that is by focusing on process mapping and systemizing, and then you actually retain control while not doing the thing.

So yeah.

Seth Green: Now you’ve got—you’ve managed to get and keep over 350 team members. I would imagine the virtual outsourcing industry is probably quite a large bit of the Filipino economy at this point, right?

Barbara Turley: Yes it is.

Seth Green: You’re obviously not the only company. There are now a number of them, and there are now a number of—I don’t know how many—but I’ve got to believe there’s a number of them all employing hundreds of Filipino folks.

Barbara Turley: Thousands. There are companies who have thousands, tens of thousands of staff. There’s big ones. There are boutique ones like us.

You know, we’re actually—people do say to me, you’ve got 350 employees—we’re actually quite small considering. But we do more than that. We do our own training programs. We operate slightly differently from some of the others. We like to actually recruit for ourselves.

So that’s a big thing. And the reason we do that is there’s a few reasons, but we recruit for The Virtual Hub month on month on month. And then we have our own training programs that we put people through, and we start to identify which pathways they can go down in terms of their skills.

We train more, and only when we’re finished and think, yeah, we’ve got a good one here, do we start to look at the client side and start to pair them up.

Now, training is very, very important, and we like to take the heavy lifting of that off our clients. But also when you recruit, obviously if an employee has to sit in front of you for six weeks or our team or two months sometimes, then you start to see the behavioral issues that could topple a relationship later.

So that’s why our success rate is very high when it eventually turns into a client account pairing because of that.

Seth Green: I love that you’re recruiting for your own firm first as opposed to, as you said, throw a body at the problem, which would not be ideal, but I’m sure there are places that do that. Who is an ideal client for Virtual Hub? I know it ranges, but can you give us some categories and some sizes of folks you’ve been able to help a lot?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So we have a range. So we have gone from one-person businesses right through to hundred-million-dollar companies. So we have some very large organizations that use us, and then we have some smaller organizations.

The thread that ties everyone together though—and this is the important point—the thread that ties everyone together geographically, across industries, and across size, is a focus on moving into the digital realm.

Now I say that not just because these are offshore teams. COVID helped a lot because everyone started moving online and having to be remote. But it is really important that a company has a focus on how everybody is working together, where processes are stored, and how workflows are being managed.

Are we using tools like Asana, for example, LastPass for security? We can take a client on that journey. But recently I was talking to a large organization that literally admitted that they don’t actually have process maps. They’re quite old school in the way they operate.

That sort of company can be very difficult for us to work with because it sets them on a footing that’s further back from the others. So being a digitally enabled, or focusing on digitization as a company in general, helps us to help them as a client.

Seth Green: Are there any particular industries that you work better in? I mean, I know you mentioned you could go from the one person to the hundred million. What’s a normal bread-and-butter type of client?

Barbara Turley: Look, we do a lot of marketing departments and marketing teams. Marketing assistance is a great area because marketing—anyone who knows a bit about marketing will know that 80% of marketing is doing. There’s strategy, you’ve got to get strategy right, but there’s a lot of grunt work that has to be done and a lot that can be done by assistants.

So marketing is a big area that we actually started off quite strong in. It’s interesting now though, we’ve sort of moved across so many different industries. It’s almost easier to say the industries that we don’t tend to do well in.

Seth Green: Like with medical. Let’s do that.

Barbara Turley: Medical—we tend not to play there. There are specialists that do those industries because the compliance rules and the legalities around some industries are more difficult than others.

So we do quite a bit in the financial industry, but it depends where you’re stretching to. Like if we’re dealing with the SEC compliance rules in the U.S., for example, that’s something I sort of have to get involved in those conversations because we may not be able to serve those kinds of clients.

Seth Green: That makes sense. Yeah.

Barbara Turley: Aside from that, we’ve done so many things. Even, to be honest, businesses you wouldn’t imagine that have large logistical operations or localized operations—we’ve been able to even help those with factories and all sorts of things.

Seth Green: How do your contracts work? Is it I buy a certain number of hours? Is it I commit to a certain amount of months? How do we hire you?

Barbara Turley: Sure, yes. So we keep the model really simple. So we do part-time or full-time placements, and we want them to look and feel like an employee in your business. So we want them to be integrated, feel like they’re totally part of your team.

But it’s a minimum of 20 hours a week, which is a part-time resource. And then we build a month-to-month type subscription contract.

The beauty about it is you can scale us up in 30 days or also scale us down. We deliberately make the contracts easy to get into and get out of because we actually want people to stay because they’re getting success with us, and not because they’re tied into a contract.

And typically, you know, we’re more long clients looking for VAs than we are of great VAs. It’s hard to find them and train them. So we’re always moving people on.

If cancellation occurs, I mean, businesses are turning over at the moment because of the way the economies are globally and things like that—and AI, of course, AI is coming in.

Seth Green: I was going to—segues perfectly into what was going to be my next question, which was how has AI affected your business? Has it made you more productive? Has it made your VAs able to, have you trained them all on how to use it? Talk a little bit about that.

Barbara Turley: Yes. So when ChatGPT first launched, I will say that I had about three weeks of just thinking that’s it—we’re dead, existential threat. But I think everyone has realized that that’s actually not the case. It’s there to augment people.

There is a lot of churn happening in all businesses right now as businesses try to grapple with how to use AI. Typically you will see there are areas they’re using AI, but most of the businesses that we’re working with, to be honest, a lot of them haven’t even gotten their heads around it yet.

The sort of marketing automation or the automation that we’ve been doing a decade ago—people are still moving into that field and still trying to catch up. So VAs are still very, very important for many businesses that just are going to take a while to catch up with this sort of thing.

In addition, what we found is of course we can increase the productivity and the results that VAs are getting by training them on AI. But we are only starting to train now because sometimes—I was a trader for 10 years in the equity markets—and I always knew that when something newfangled comes out, there’s always a moment where you have to not hold back, but you’ve got to watch the landscape for a while and wait.

Now it’s not plateauing, but you’ve got to wait for a time when something has a plateau to see where it’s actually going and what you’re going to do with it. Because if you jump too early, you can train on all the wrong things and then, of course, it changes.

So I have been deliberately slow with figuring out where we’re going to go with this. Training VAs on it, yes, but it’s moving fast and there’s a lot of tools and a lot of different things and moving parts.

So you could blow up a ton of money training people on the wrong stuff. So we’re trying to be very targeted about how we do that.

Seth Green: That makes a lot of sense. Your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you’re doing?

Barbara Turley: The people, the culture. I love to build. I love the whole concept of culture building and people and culture. And I work really, really hard on making sure that every single person in the company has a voice and the voice is heard.

And we actually formulate strategy and everything from the voice of the people. So I’m really into that.

I think a lot of organizations focus very much on the client voice and even, you know, their board and things like that. When actually the real gold can sometimes come from the employees, no matter what level they’re at.

People have great ideas and feedback and suggestions. And sometimes it can be painful to hear it, but that’s where the gold is. And I’m really passionate about that—the people.

Seth Green: Awesome. Well, we greatly appreciate your time. We know it’s incredibly valuable. For our folks watching and listening who want to learn more, where is the best place for them to go to learn more about you and all things Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So if you want to follow me, connect with me on LinkedIn—so just Barbara Turley on LinkedIn. And I often talk on LinkedIn about a lot of the things we’ve been talking about today and more, in much more depth, of course.

And if you want to find out more about The Virtual Hub, go to thevirtualhub.com. We have tons of content on our site over there that can help you get ready for a VA, figure out what you need to do.

And come and chat with our team and we can help you figure out whether we’re the right fit for you and how we can help you.

Seth Green: Well, we greatly appreciate your time. We know it’s incredibly valuable. This has been Seth Green with Barbara Turley from The Virtual Hub. Barbara, thanks again for joining us.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me.

Seth Green: Thanks everybody for watching or listening. We will talk to you or see you next time.

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