The Boss Mom Podcast Host (Dana Malstaff): Hey there, welcome to the Boss Mom Podcast, where we believe that you could raise and nurture your business and your baby at the same time. I know it’s crazy, but you can, and we’re gonna help you do it.

We don’t want you to feel guilty and overwhelmed or any of those things. And when you do, we want to be there to support you with amazing interviews and great insights into how to raise and nurture your business right. We are a community. We are a movement, and I can’t wait for you to join. Welcome to episode 386 of the Boss Mom Podcast.

This is an important episode, ladies, because you should never be an island. At some point, sooner rather than later, you’re going to need to hire somebody in your business—somebody who can do the day-to-day things that you shouldn’t have to do, somebody who can help with social media, somebody who can really take things off your plate so you can do what you’re best at, because that’s where the money is—is doing what you’re best at. Not doing all the things, but really going where your gifts are.

Well, my guest is an investor, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub, a business she started by accident that exploded in the space of 12 months to become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants in the digital marketing and social media space for businesses who need to free up time and energy so they can go to the next level. She’s also a mum, right, to her gorgeous daughter, Ruby; wife to her best friend; and an adventure lover with a passion for horses, skiing, tennis, and time out in nature.

My guest is Barbara Turley. I had a really great time chatting with Barbara, and she has a lovely English accent but is living in Australia as of right now, although I think she mentioned she’s moving back home. And just learning how she started the business, how she grew it.

Dana Malstaff: How she brought on employees and really decided for herself how she was gonna run this business—what was important to her, what was important that she create, and how she wanted to create it, and how she serves her audience—is really, really valuable. Plus, at the end, we talk about how you actually know if you need a virtual assistant and what that looks like. This is a great episode for pretty much everybody. I think you’re going to enjoy it.

Why scaling is non-negotiable for success

And make sure that if you are looking for a virtual assistant in the digital marketing and social media space, that you check out Barbara and her business, the Virtual Hub, because I think you are going to love it. So let’s hop in and hang out with Barbara.

Welcome to the Boss Mom podcast. I’m so excited to have you on the show today.

Barbara Turley: I’m very excited to be here, Dana. Thank you so much.

Dana Malstaff: Yeah, so, okay, we are going to have so much fun. There’s so many things that every single one of my listeners is going to just eat up and love. Before we hop into that side, though, all of our boss moms have a unique journey to how they became moms and entrepreneurs, and yours is definitely fun. So…

Barbara Turley: Yes! It’s fun and adventurous.

Dana Malstaff: Tell us about your journey.

Barbara Turley: Sure, so look, I spent 15 years in corporate. Like so many women, we have these big corporate careers, and eventually you get to your 30s and you think, I don’t know about this. I don’t know about having a family. And I just made a decision, I think when I was about 30, that I didn’t want to be a corporate mother. And my hat goes off to the women out there that are corporate moms because, I mean, you guys just do such an epic job.

But I just realized I couldn’t really do it. So I wanted to launch my own business, but I had no idea what to do, what that would look like, or anything. And I got a kind of a stroke of luck. Well, it was sort of a bad situation that turned into a good situation back in the big financial crisis that happened in 2008. I was working in the financial industry in asset management and sales. And long story short, I got an opportunity to kind of piggyback on a management buyout that was happening during the depths of that whole financial meltdown from Deutsche Bank.

I was working there at the time in Australia, and there was a group of people doing a buyout. I got a chance to just kind of hop on the coattails of that. And I thought, yeah, I’m going to do this, right? Because it’ll teach me a thing or two about how a great company gets built. And I did that for the following five years. I was there both as an employee and as a shareholder. And that was a very unique journey where I learned a lot of things.

Barbara Turley: It sort of just kept the fire to do my own thing going even more. Didn’t have kids in that time still—you didn’t get there with that whole thing. And then left and decided, as many of us do, I wanted to do—I love digital, right? So I wanted to have an online TV show, and I wanted to do all this stuff. And I had a kind of a vision of inspiring more women to be more into money in a positive way rather than in the negative way that we sometimes feel about money.

And to understand that if you make a lot of money in business, you can have a lot of impact, right? You can have impact without making money, but you can have a damn slight more impact if you make a lot of money. So I launched a website called Energize Wealth, which is still up there for anyone who wants to have a look, but it’s kind of dormant. But it was my first kind of foray into my own thing. And while it was successful, it didn’t really make any money. It was kind of interesting that I sort of ended up in a slightly weird…

Dana Malstaff: It’s funny how successful and make money aren’t always…

Barbara Turley: Not always the same thing. It was very inspiring for a lot of people. I did do a lot of business coaching in that business. That was the main kind of income stream. I was coaching some small businesses in Sydney and other parts around the world. And what I noticed with all the businesses I was coaching—didn’t matter what industry they were in, because they were all diverse—it was like a lawyer and then a swim school owner and lots of different things. They all had the same problem, essentially.

They were all stretched, completely overwhelmed, and weren’t making enough money to hire anyone. But then if they didn’t hire people, they just were never going to get out of the trenches. They were just doing everything themselves. So I had a virtual assistant in the Philippines because I had, like Tim Ferriss’ book, The Four-Hour Workweek, I had read that. And I just started recruiting VAs on the side to help clients out.

And before I knew it, I was getting more demand for that. People were calling me going, “Can you get me one of those VAs?” And I was like, “Do you reckon there’s a business in this?” I remember saying it to my brother. And I put on a webinar to the list that I had about how to use VAs, and it was the most successful one I ever did. And I did an offer at the end, and people bought. So I was like, I just literally pivoted within about a week going, “I’m going to bin that and open this instead.”

Twelve months later, I was in this crazy business called the Virtual Hub, which is now five years old. And in that time, I had a baby as well.

Dana Malstaff: I love it. Well, and I think it’s so important. I mean, really entrepreneurship is just about finding problems and solving them. And I think a lot of people think that we have to always seek out the problems. And I think what more often happens is we start doing something, dabbling in something we like, we’re testing it out, and it reveals the actual…

Barbara Turley: Yes, that was my experience—or a more immediate problem. I think the wealth thing I was talking about, women were really interested in it. They wanted to build wealth, but it was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to build wealth, but at the moment I can’t breathe. So that was a more immediate problem for them that I was able to solve.

Dana Malstaff: I love it. Okay, so you had a daughter in there in that time. How did that all unravel? Because business owning and baby having seems to happen intertwined a lot, and it definitely…

Barbara Turley: Yeah! Look, you know, I was about to say the creativity must bring out something, but actually mine was a bit difficult journey as well. And I’m happy to share this for anyone going through this. I went through IVF, so it wasn’t an easy journey to have my daughter. But I was getting older, and it wasn’t happening for my husband and me. We just didn’t seem to be able to have children.

And so we went through the IVF experience while I was also building the business, which was also quite challenging. But I think the passion to run the business and the busyness of those early years helped me to get through that because I didn’t have time to really focus on the IVF so much. But it did work, thankfully, and we’re blessed with a gorgeous two-and-a-half-year-old now. So I always say I have a five-year-old business and a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. So it was all very simultaneous.

Dana Malstaff: Well, and you had mentioned when you were coming on that you’ve done—you know, you were doing what I often have to do in the morning, which is I’m rushing to get to the…

Barbara Turley: Bundle everyone out the door on top.

Dana Malstaff: Yeah, you’re right about to get out the door, and they’re like, “Well, I want a waffle.” You’re like, “Do I just tell them to be hungry, or do I go get them a waffle?” How has becoming a mother and having this family impacted how you’re running your business, and maybe your dreams for growing your business?

Barbara Turley: Interestingly—and I actually have my own podcast, shameless plug, called The Virtual Success Show, and I did a whole show on how I did this, right, so that I will share that link with you—but interestingly for me, it forced me, I guess because I had an investment banking-type background, I always wanted to build a bigger company. I didn’t want to just run a business. I want to build a company that has impact.

And I’ve always wanted to build something that is a saleable asset. And that’s not because I want to sell it. I’ve been honed through my corporate experience that that’s the more prudent way to do stuff because then you’re building an asset in your life. So having a baby for me forced me to actually focus very heavily on systems, processes, delegation, reporting lines, automation, teams, and making sure that I actually wasn’t doing any of the doing, or as little as I possibly can, so that I can be a mother.

So my first primary goal was I want to be a mother. I didn’t want my child in daycare five days a week. And there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s just for me, that was my personal passion. My drive was that I’m going to make this work. And because of that, these days, five years in—now the first three years were hard, right? I’ll be honest, it was 15 hours a day and that sort of thing—but these days, I have focused so heavily on that vision, that personal vision for my life as a mother, that my business is a powerhouse that runs largely without me, which is what I really wanted to do.

So I think it forced me actually to be more strategic about it. I think it would have taken longer had I not been having children, put it that way.

Dana Malstaff: Yeah, yeah, I agree. It’s just about you and the things you want, those dreams that you want but you can put off because you’re doing that thing. Now it’s this imminent—they’re getting older every day. There is no “do it next year.” They’re never going to be two again, you know?

Barbara Turley: Yes, and you want to kind of enjoy it. And I didn’t want to be on my phone all the time. Like in the first year, I was constantly with one phone in my hand, and I noticed the impact on my daughter. And I thought, God, I really… yeah, I have this virtual business that I can run from my phone, but it’s not working. I thought she’s actually being impacted by me being on this phone all the time.

So then I had to even refine it even more and be very strict about when I actually work. And that forced me again to just say, okay, well, how do I make sure that I don’t need to be there? And again, we can get into this later, but I use a lot of systems. And today the business is in such a way that I know exactly what’s going on at any particular time, but I don’t actually do any of the doing. But that’s what I do—this promotional stuff, like the stuff I enjoy.

Dana Malstaff: Well, and a question too. So now my kids are getting a little older. I have a three-and-a-half and a five-and-a-half-year-old. And on Saturday mornings, I like to work. One of my favorite things that I don’t do during the week—because I get up and just get ready and get going—is I like to get up, get a cup of coffee, ease into it, and then pull out my computer and do some of the strategy things that make me feel like I’m a productive person because I feel productive in business so that I can be fueled for the rest of the weekend.

It’s just a thing I like to do. And I like for my kids to see that because I want them to see what work is when it’s meant to be done—not something that takes away from them, but something that’s like, on Saturday mornings, you guys get these options to play, or you can watch a show, or we can do this thing at this time—and it’s mommy’s. And half the time, I’ve noticed now, they actually start working with me.

So they come in and—

Barbara Turley: My daughter does that, actually. There are times I do that, and I’ve got a little laptop in my office that’s kind of broken—it’s an old one—and she sits on the floor and she goes, “I’m working, Mummy.” So I do that as well. Just like you say, it’s not all the time, but we’ve got to be doing that. That’s a factor of how we have to do it, you know.

Dana Malstaff: Are there things you want to consciously do as your daughter—and if you have other kids—kind of grow up to instill that entrepreneurial spirit?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, I’m lucky in that I’ve got quite an adventurous and very independent spirit myself. I’m very driven in a good way. My mom would always say I never crawled—I just got up and wanted to run around straight away. My daughter has—I’ve seen this trait in her—she’s incredibly independent, and she wants to do everything herself.

So what I’m trying to do at the moment—I know she’s only two and a half—is help her to make good decisions for herself. So I’m not like, “No, be careful, don’t do that.” I’m sort of like, okay, you want to jump off the sofa? Well, it might be very ouchy. And then I sort of allow her, within a safe space, to try things. And I encourage her to try things, but being aware of what the consequences might be—and also obviously being there in case she does smash her face.

Dana Malstaff: No, I love it. Love it. My three-and-a-half-year-old knows what the word “decisive” means. [Oh! That’s good.] Yeah, like I’ll pull out two options and she’ll sit, and I’ll be like, “What do we do?” And she’s like, “We’re decisive. I will pick the purple one.” And I’m like, yes, when we wait to make decisions, then we don’t get to do the things we want. So…

Barbara Turley: It’s that sort of thing. It’s helping them to make their own decisions. Exactly—give them choices, not too many.

Dana Malstaff: I was going to say, our two favorite words are “decisive” and “obstinate.” My son calls my daughter obstinate whenever she’s being my daughter.

Barbara Turley: She’s going to be a leader. She’s a leader in the making. All our daughters, I think, are going to be leaders in the making.

Dana Malstaff: I love it. Well, we’ll take a quick note from our sponsor. And then, when we come back, we are going to be talking all about this idea of the overwhelm. How do we translate that into delegation? How do we create those systems you were talking about so that we can grow and scale our businesses so that we can maybe spend more time with our kids or do the things that we want? So we will be right back.

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Dana Malstaff: Okay, so your business is all about helping people find the right person. So first, I wanted to talk a little bit about why having an assistant and having a virtual assistant can be so important and powerful. And then I would love to talk a little bit about your process that you walk people through, because we had talked before we hit record that people will say, “Of course, I know I need one.”

But the process of getting one, getting the right one, and then getting them to do the right things sounds daunting. How have you seen virtual assistants, just as somebody that you hire in your business, really help businesses to grow and get things in order?

Barbara Turley: So one of the biggest problems, obviously, in business—in any business, particularly small business and particularly the startup sort of area—is there’s just, especially these days because of digital, because of social media, because of all the stuff that you need to do… Like, I mean, I know you’re a content strategist, which I was so interested in reading your background, but, you know, when there’s one thing about writing content or getting content out there, but then you’ve got to get it up on the websites, get it looking good, repurpose it into social media stuff, get it across the distribution channels. I mean, that is a full-time job in itself, right?

So for me, the idea that you would try to do all of that stuff yourself and be tinkering around in Canva and creating images at 11 o’clock at night while you have babies, instead of focusing on sales—right? Because in business, sales solve everything, right? All the problems that you have will be solved if you make more sales. [Right.] You know, so I think really we do shy away from wanting to do sales, et cetera.

But the idea that even in the early days, it’s really important for you to be strategic and go, okay, so there’s two parts of the business. There’s sales and marketing and all that stuff. And then there’s the engine—like, how do you deliver product? How do you do customer support? How do you do your website and all that stuff? And that gets forgotten about. You need people to do that stuff for you.

Barbara Turley: Now, it would be lovely to be able to hire someone who lives beside you for $100,000 a year, who can come in and just take it all over and know what they’re doing, right? In the early days, you’ve no choice, you’ve no money, right? You’re hustling. So it’s really important to be able to get cost-effective people. And offshore is where you can make this happen. And then you have a huge impact, of course, on people’s lives offshore because you’re creating jobs, etc. So there’s a knock-on effect.

But even when you get bigger, what I’ve noticed is a lot of our larger clients still have an offshore strategy for their team because it makes so much strategic profit margin, et cetera, sense to actually have an offshore team. So a lot of people see it as a startup thing, and then they start to realize, my God, I can have like five or ten people on my team offshore. It makes my business really powerful.

So it is, from a business perspective, it’s almost a no-brainer to get this right so that you can grow and that you can free yourself, I guess, as an entrepreneur to do the big things you want to do—even if that means more work, that’s fine—but it’s whatever you want to do.

Dana Malstaff: Well, yeah, and I a hundred percent agree. And so when people say, “Okay, great. You’ve convinced me,” right? Yes. Yeah. [Here comes the next problem.] One of the things that I love about what you do is, you know, there’s HR departments and companies for a reason. Like, there’s somebody else hiring, there’s recruiters, and that’s a real business for a reason. We don’t always know who we should hire or how to pick out the right person.

And sometimes we don’t even know exactly what we need them to do. And just the idea of the whole hiring process and finding somebody can be very scary. It’s like dating for your business.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, yes. It’s a whole other task. So I think, you know, look, there’s a couple of things. The best way to explain this is my own journey with building the company. Because, as you said in the beginning of this thing, I unearthed the first immediate problem that people were having, in that they had no time. Recruiting VAs—and then honestly, the first six months of the business were a disaster. Like, it was unbelievable how much of a disaster it was. I almost shut the business after six months from sheer overwhelm, stress.

I was flooded with complaints from clients. People couldn’t get results. The VAs were complaining about the clients. It was just awful. And every day I was just being badgered by people who were irate and annoyed. You can imagine all the politics going on. And I realized that the second problem had raised its ugly head.

And the second problem that I unearthed was people—it’s not just about recruiting someone. People don’t know how to delegate. They actually didn’t really know that’s a skill in itself. I think I’m naturally good at it, and I just assumed everyone knew what they were doing with creating processes, but people actually don’t—and the majority of people don’t.

And then I thought, okay, well, how about I build a program that when clients come in, we will help them to first of all figure out, are they ready? Second of all, figure out if we should work with them to try to build their processes. And thirdly, whether they should get a VA yet, because maybe they’re not ready for a VA, and they might waste their time and money, and maybe they need another three months before they’re ready for this.

So that started to really work. That actually helped a lot. And where it really helped was we started to turn some people away who realistically were just not ready yet. Getting a VA was actually going to make the problem worse initially because they didn’t know what to delegate or how to delegate.

So then after that, the third problem came along, which was, okay, so these VAs that we’re recruiting—they have resumes, and you can do background checks and you can interview and you can do all this stuff—but really, you don’t know whether they’re any good until you try them out.

And I decided then, you know what, we’re going to launch a training program for VAs, and we’ll train them before we ever introduce them to a client. And that caused the business to absolutely explode because we were able to separate the flowers from the weeds. We didn’t hire them until they were through our month-long training program.

When they went to clients, they were like, “I know what a lead magnet is. I know how to build one. I know what I can do, what I can’t do. I know how to communicate effectively with you. I know how to help you set up Asana or Trello,” or this sort of thing. So all of those things together—it’s not just hiring someone and throwing a body at the problem, shall we say. There’s a lot of business strategy.

There’s a lot of setup. There’s a lot of stuff you need to do as a business owner to get yourself ready. And then there’s the whole mindset piece, right? There’s a whole mindset you’ve got to get into to make this work. And all of that together means that a lot of people on the internet have had massive failures, and they feel the VA thing doesn’t work for their business. It actually does. It’s just that you haven’t nailed this bit yet, and it’s important to get that right.

Dana Malstaff: One thing that you do that I absolutely love, because I feel like the delegation issue—one, there’s a mental issue of letting go of control. Ultimately, it comes down to trust, and it’s hard to trust somebody you don’t know. But you know what you trust? You trust a referral. You trust somebody that was referred by somebody you trust. So you become the trusted person that then defers that trust onto somebody else because you’ve trained them, you’ve done that.

And all of a sudden, when they feel that trust—I’ve seen it before. Anytime I recommend somebody, it’s a more successful adventure for them than if they just went out and looked at a bunch of resumes. And I’ve seen both happen. It’s this interesting element of if you can make them feel like they can trust that this person can do what they’re supposed to do, delegation becomes so much easier. Otherwise, it’s so scary to hand off something you feel like you could do better.

Barbara Turley: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, on the “you can do it better” thing, there are loads of things—I mean, I have a team of loads of them, obviously. They do everything, including, like, on my podcast. All I do is show up and record. From that moment on, I’m not even involved. It just shows up everywhere that we need it to because we have a process, though.

I would add about the referral thing—referrals are great. They do create trust. But if you are a control freak, like I will openly admit that I am—and I would suggest that most entrepreneurs are—we love the baby that we built. My advice is don’t push away the control freak in you. Totally welcome that in.

And the way to feel comfortable is—if someone’s saying, “Trust me, trust me, it’s okay,” it just doesn’t mean anything to me these days because I’ve just been burned too many times with that. But the way to get around it is to nail your processes so that you can whip one person out and put another one in if they leave—no biggie.

Your process is so deep and so detailed, and your training on that process has evolved over time to the point where you just know that there’s nowhere to hide in that process. And if they’re making mistakes, well, it’s either a communication issue or maybe they’re just not doing the right thing. It makes your life a lot less stressful.

Dana Malstaff: So when somebody comes into your system, what’s the process you take with them to get them from they connect with you, say, “I need a VA,” to when they actually get a VA?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So first of all, I walk my own talk—nobody gets to connect with me. And I mean that in a good way because the more I connect with clients, the less I can build the company. And there’s a lot—we’ve got 120 staff—there’s a lot of operational stuff that happens in the Philippines that I need to be a part of.

So I have two amazing consultants who people have a free strategy call with, and they’re very good. They’ve been with me for years. One happens to be my brother, so he’s in Ireland, and he deals with a lot of the US clients. And their job is to help people when they come on those calls to really figure out, first of all, are you ready? Because if you’re not ready, you’ll waste money, right? And we will openly tell you that.

If people are ready, they help to figure out how do we operate? What’s the best way to interact with our VAs? For example, we’re big users of Asana. If somebody says, “I like to do my task stuff by email,” we’re like, look, we would advise against that because it’s not going to work with how we operate, because we’ve trained our VAs to be in project management tools and things like that.

So then we help the clients to figure out, well, okay, if I was going to move to Asana, how would you help me do that? And we have an entire client onboarding experience where we take them through how to do that. We give them a lot of process maps that we’ve already built, so they don’t have to build their own.

So we have a podcast management process map that the VAs are trained on. So if you’re really, really too busy to do this, we give you a lot of the tools and stuff along the way that you need. However, you still need to do some of the work yourself. That’s the most important point. We can only get you so far, you know, and give you a great person.

Barbara Turley: That helps to solve a lot of those problems. We really help clients along the way. And of course, our training programs—we’ve built them using digital marketers’ training programs. We’ve got training programs from all around the world, and I’ve built those programs specifically for our VAs, and they’re pre-trained before they go to you.

Dana Malstaff: I love it. How long does it take from when somebody comes and says, “I need a VA,” to when you can actually place them and get the process started?

Barbara Turley: So here’s a great—that’s a great question, actually, because you will go to other, like I say, competitors likely, because I don’t really have many competitors who train the way that we do, because we do a lot of it. It costs us a lot upfront—the money we invest in our people. So our lead times can be long. So minimum lead time would be two to three weeks.

Yeah, some people go, “That’s too…” told me they can get me someone like next week. I’m like, yeah, well, they’re gonna just recruit and throw a body at you, and they don’t really know what that person can do. So if people want our level 3 VAs to do things like CRM systems like HubSpot, Ontraport, Active Campaign, and Infusionsoft, we train on those platforms heavily. Those can take six, seven, eight weeks because we’ve got to train them right. So we pre-train before we show them to you.

[Mm-hmm.]

Barbara Turley: So, but usually our average lead time is about two to three weeks.

Dana Malstaff: Yeah, that’s super fast.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, because we have to recruit. If you can imagine, from my perspective, we have to recruit ahead of people signing up in order to deliver on that two-week, because our training program is three weeks long.

Dana Malstaff: Yeah, I was gonna say, you gotta kind of look at what trends are happening, too, for what people need to be able—

Barbara Turley: So that’s kind of where I focus my attention. I look—I was a trader in the financial markets for 10 years, so it’s a bit the same. I’m now trading supply demand all the time. That’s kind of what I do in this company. So, yeah, our lead times are a little bit longer than usual, but our success rate is extremely high. Our attrition rate on employees is so low—people never resign. So we have a good culture in the Philippines, and our clients only ever leave because, you know, they may have a business change or sometimes they pause and come back after six months and stuff like that.

Dana Malstaff: I love it. Well, now you mentioned you work maybe two times a week. You’re more into the side of helping to figure out how you’re growing and making the business even better, which is the right place to be when you’re the CEO visionary of the business. And before we hit record today, you and I had mentioned this idea that people come to us all the time, and they’re like, it must be so easy. You have all the things, and how is that possible? And that kind of thing.

You mentioned this idea that there’s a few things that help you be able to have it all. [Yes.] But the fact that you can’t do it all. So I wanted to talk for a minute about this idea of actually being able to create the life that you want if you build the right kind of business.

Barbara Turley: Yes. So something I actually started talking about when I built Energize Wealth, which was that first thing—the business I built—I used to talk a little bit about the fact that sometimes we create a business vision and we’re all into, what’s my business vision? And then that business vision starts to drive your personal life.

So your personal life—how you can live, where you live, the type of lifestyle you want—gets kind of formulated by how well the business vision goes. I turned that on its head and was like, how about you start first with what is your personal vision for your life? Like, where do you see yourself? Forget work, forget everything.

And for me, my personal vision was very much that I live in Australia now, but I always want the free option of moving back to Europe. I don’t want to be tied by a job or a business that causes me not to be able to do what I want to do. Same with having children, same with working from home or doing whatever I want to do. So I always had this sort of guiding light of my personal vision is to be mobile.

Barbara Turley: So I knew my business had to be virtual, had to be online. It had to be global. And those were the things that helped me to build this in that exact way. And it’s worked out really well for me because I’ve just been forced into that situation of having to build something scalable, global, allowed me to have children.

We are moving to Europe at the end of this year. We’re taking the whole family over there, and it will have zero impact on my work whatsoever, actually. Yeah, so it’s really—I think as women, we need to really stay focused on our personal vision for our life and then make sure that the business that you’re building fulfills that vision. And if it’s not, you’ve got to pivot, you’ve got to shift and move so that you can have it all.

But you don’t have to do it all. You definitely shouldn’t be doing any of the doing, preferably.

Dana Malstaff: Yeah, no, I love that you said that. I always say that I want to inspire and be inspired. So part of my business is that every week I have to have a conversation with somebody where I’m helping them, and I have to have a conversation with someone where they’re helping me.

So part of why I started the podcast is because it allows me to have conversations with people that are very inspiring to me. And then I have my intimate—one of my coaching programs that we have—just because I get that daily dose of helpfulness that I want to—

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and that’s something that’s really important for you personally, and that feeds that for you. Yeah. So for me, I was a terrible coach. I mean, I was a good coach, but I hated it. But I realized when I was doing it that there were parts of it I didn’t like for me personally.

I’m actually one of those introverted extroverts, you know what I mean? Yeah, people think I’m an extrovert, but I’m actually not. I love to be just on my own in my office, looking at data. I’m one of those people, you know.

Dana Malstaff: I’m a double extrovert, which means if I don’t talk to people, I start getting like an eye twitch and—

Barbara Turley: Whereas I’m the opposite. If I talk to people too much, I actually get irritable.

Dana Malstaff: Really? Yeah, a full day by myself, and I start feeling weird. I have to—

Barbara Turley: I love it. I crave that. I’m like, I’d have a whole day just to read—nobody talk to me. I love when my phone doesn’t ring for the whole day. Like, this is amazing for me. So it’s understanding yourself, though, and making sure that you build a business that actually feeds that part of your soul, you know.

Dana Malstaff: Yeah, I love it. Well, so for anybody who wants to see if this is the right fit for them, how do they go and get on one of those strategy calls? Like, where do they go to connect with your team?

Barbara Turley: So the good news is, for your listeners, I have a special page that we’ve set up with a couple of freebies that are really going to help. If you go to thevirtualhub.com forward slash boss mom, of course, for this podcast, you can—there’s a download there. You don’t even need to sign up for it—about why people fail with VAs. So they’re all the little things that you want to watch out for. And in that download, it’s just going to tell you, like, if you’re doing any of these things, you probably need to fix that before you get a VA.

The second thing we have is a course that I wrote, which is a more in-depth look and the strategies behind what we’ve just talked about. So it’s like a seven-part course there. It’s an e-course. It’s quick. You can sign up for that, and you can also book a call with one of our strategy consultants, hop on there, have a chat with them. They really help you to fit.

They’re not sales guys, put it that way. The mandate they have from me is you need to turn away more people than you accept because they have to be the right fit, and we have to be the right fit for them because we’re focused on getting success for clients and not just churning numbers.

Dana Malstaff: Yeah, and I love that you do training on the kinds of tools that are actually used out in the market, because that’s one of the biggest things—people are trying to do these tools on their own, and they’re wasting all of their time trying to be good at something they shouldn’t have to be good at. So to go to a place where you can place them with somebody who knows those tools and can recommend the right tools is amazing.

Barbara Turley: Look, even if you’re good at it—I mean, I’m a consultant with Ontraport. I don’t actually consult, but I love building funnels. I absolutely love it, but I don’t do it. I just map it out and give it to one of my VAs. And then he liaises with me. He builds it and goes, “What do you think of this? I hit this problem.” And I’ll just be like—or he’ll say, “I did this way,” and I’ll go, “No, that’s not going to work. Why don’t you change it to this?”

So I can still consult him. I’m not expecting him to be as good as me. But if he’s 80% of the way, well, whatever.

Dana Malstaff: I know. I’m telling you, though, one of the biggest strengths when you start building your business is recognizing that you have to move from a builder to an editor, right? So it’s like, it doesn’t matter if I build it better—it’s going to be way faster.

My dad used to always tell me—I would say, you know, I did some work for him right after college—and I would say, “Well, how do you want me to do this?” And he’s like, “Here’s my parameters. I don’t know what I want. I’ll know when I see it.” It used to frustrate the heck out of me.

And now I totally get it, which is like, you have to give a stab at it, and then I’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong with it.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, because you don’t know until you… That’s not gonna work.

Dana Malstaff: Yeah, I don’t want to waste the time building it. You build it, and then I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. And it used to frustrate—and now, being in that role, I totally get it.

Barbara Turley: Actually, I’m going to make a really—that’s a really important point that I just want to, if I can just interject there. It’s very important when you work with a VA that you give them permission to try something that might fail, right? Because a VA that comes back to you and is afraid it doesn’t work is going to be terrified that you’re going to blame them.

And you’re going to be like, “What is this? I didn’t ask you—this doesn’t work.” You can’t be like that. You’ve got to be exactly like your father was. Bring it to me, and I’m the expert. I will tell you whether that—and how to fix it. And that’s really important to understand.

Dana Malstaff: Yeah, so good, so good. Well, okay, so we end every episode, as we’re coming up to the end, with you telling us three things that are making you happy right now.

Barbara Turley: Wow, okay, so that’s a great one. So the first big thing—and I’ll circle back to business vision here—my vision originally was to inspire more women in the world to be more impactful and not to be afraid of money, et cetera. And then it looked like I changed my business vision.

But what I’ve realized five years later is that actually the business vision I had hasn’t really changed. I’m still impacting a lot of people and helping them to understand how to build greater businesses. But the vehicle has changed. And the knock-on effect that I didn’t know was going to happen is the impact that my company is now having, and all our clients are having, in the Philippines.

When some of our employees say to me, “I’m so grateful to this company because you’ve changed my life,” I go, that makes me tingle. That makes me very, very happy. And I’m very focused on hearing from our employees these days about what makes them happy and what’s a good culture. And they love their clients, they love our clients, and everything. So that’s number one.

Barbara Turley: The other second thing—I probably shouldn’t have put that first, but anyway—of course my hilarious two-and-a-half-year-old, who’s really starting to chatter now, makes me very happy. And the third thing is that I am having my second baby. I’m actually pregnant, yes, so we’ll be having a second baby later this year, and it’s a baby boy. So we’re very, very happy about that. So yeah, all of those things combined are making me very happy at the moment.

Dana Malstaff: Well, congratulations on your business, your first baby, and your soon-to-be second baby. That’s totally great. From all the boss moms that are listening, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to hang out with us and share your story. These are such important things that we talked about today.

And I think, too, what you’re doing—helping to instill people within people’s businesses that help them free up their time so they can grow their businesses—is doing exactly what your mission was as well. I mean, you’re giving them the tools to be successful and one of the most important tools, which is other people. So thank you for everything you do. We heart your face, and everybody that’s listening, make sure you go to—say the website again.

Barbara Turley: It’s thevirtualhub.com forward slash boss mom.

Dana Malstaff: Perfect! Everybody go—we’ll also have it in the show notes. Go get those free resources. Hop on a strategy call if that makes sense for you and where you’re at in your business. And thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us today.

Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me.

Dana Malstaff: Well, that wraps up this episode of the Boss Mom Podcast. I hope it has inspired you to hire somebody and get some help where you need it most. And that’s usually in the social media department because it can be overwhelming.

And if this is something that you’re looking for, make sure that you connect with Barbara. And even if you don’t necessarily go that route and you’re bringing on someone just for, like I did, two hours a week to do something like pitch you on podcasts or something like that, that can be a place where you start. And then you build up to actually having people that are on your team for more time, doing more things. You don’t have to start big—start small and build up from there.

I really, really have enjoyed just being in the Boss Mom Podcast, being able to be a host for this podcast. I’m so honored that you have been listening, and I don’t take that lightly. So thank you for being a listener.

Make sure you subscribe if you like listening to all of our episodes. Don’t forget, by the way, that we have the Boss Dad Podcast. We have amazing, amazing guests over on that side that you really want to check out—Pat Flynn, Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner. We’ve had Rich Brooks from the Agents of Change.

We’ve had so many really great episodes talking about really great—not only just great business tactics and things like that—but their journey as a father and how that’s impacted their business and their family. And it’s just a really wonderful alternative perspective. So make sure you’re going and checking that out as well.

All right, that is it for me. I hope you have an amazing rest of your week, and I will see you next time.