Barbara Turley: It didn’t matter what the business was—online, offline, brick and mortar, product, service. They all had the same fundamental problem: that if they didn’t grow, if they didn’t hire staff, they were never going to grow. And if they didn’t grow, they were never going to be able to hire staff. And they were stuck in this constant cycle of doing everything themselves, not really getting anywhere, but not feeling like they could actually hire anyone.

Brad Friedman: Hello, friends, and welcome to Episode 97 of the Digital Slice Podcast, brought to you by the Friedman Group, LLC. I’m Brad Friedman. The Digital Slice Podcast is the podcast that brings you a slice of the digital marketing news, tools, and tactics you need to succeed. And we occasionally throw in some advice to help you grow your business in other ways, too.

Today’s episode is powered by StreamYard, the tool I use to stream to all major social platforms simultaneously directly from my browser. And I also use StreamYard to record today’s podcast, and by Libsyn, the podcast host we use for the Digital Slice Podcast. You’ll find links to StreamYard and Libsyn in the show notes. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Barbara Turley.

Barbara is an investor, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, a business she started by accident that scaled quickly to become one of the leading companies that integrates in-house trained virtual assistants into clients’ businesses. Barbara’s mission is to eradicate business overwhelm and remove the friction that stunts growth by helping clients to optimize their operations using offshore teams of virtual assistants, clever automations, and streamlined processes.

I am really excited to have Barbara Turley here with me today.

Brad Friedman: Hi Barbara, welcome to the Digital Slice Podcast. How are you today?

Barbara Turley: Great, Brad. Very excited to be here with you, have a good chat with you today.

Leveraging Support Assistants to Take Your Business to the Next Level

Brad Friedman: Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to it. The topic of virtual assistance is close to my heart. I’ve had a few over the years, and I can’t wait to chat with you about it. But before we get into that, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Barbara Turley: Sure. In case anyone hasn’t picked it up yet from my accent, I am Irish. So Irish-born, but very much a global citizen. I spent a lot of my 20s and 30s living in sunny Sydney, Australia. And at the moment, I am back in Europe. I’m actually in France right now. So I split my time at the moment between France and Australia, which is great. It’s tiring, but great. I have two young children. So I always say I have three children.

I have an eight-year-old business, a six-year-old daughter, and a three-year-old son. So I definitely took on a lot in what I’ve done. But my early career—I actually spent my early career not in an entrepreneurial pursuit at all, nowhere near marketing or recruiting or HR or any of the things that I’m actually doing now. So I spent the bulk of my career actually in the financial industry. I spent 10 years as an equity trader.

And then I worked in asset management sales, and I got involved in a couple of startups in the fintech sort of world. And then gradually found myself wanting to build my own company, having learned a lot about how others are building companies. And I set on the path of building The Virtual Hub, which today is eight years old. Like I said, we have 300 employees in the Philippines, and we are servicing clients all over the world at the moment. So doing well.

But of course, that’s the easy journey. That’s the nice version.

Brad Friedman: Yeah, for sure. That’s so interesting. A majority of my clients are financial services providers. I love working with them because they have so many challenges taking advantage of the internet because of the… Here in the United States, we have the SEC and FINRA regulations that…

Barbara Turley: In Australia, that’s big as well. Yeah, it’s hard to get around the regulations, the compliance, the paperwork. There’s a lot of roadblocks in the way of the financial people who are trying to do great work and are really roadblocked in so many ways. So yeah, we actually work with quite a lot of financial companies, actually, funnily enough. We have ways of helping them nonetheless.

Brad Friedman: Sure. Yeah, yeah, that’s great. That’s great. So I read that your business, your current business, you started that kind of accidentally. How does that happen?

Barbara Turley: Yes. Like I said, no background in marketing, recruiting. I’d never even been to the Philippines—that’s the honest truth. But when I first left corporate and decided I wanted to do my own thing, like many who leave corporate, I started consulting and advising, and I was doing some business coaching with some small businesses. And what I did—I mean, it didn’t matter what the business was: online, offline, brick and mortar, product, service—they all had the same fundamental problem: that if they didn’t grow, if they didn’t hire staff, they were never going to grow. And if they didn’t grow, they were never going to be able to hire staff. And they were stuck in this constant cycle of doing everything themselves, not really getting anywhere, but not feeling like they could actually hire anyone.

And I mean, I had gotten a VA myself in the Philippines to help me with some of my stuff. So I just thought, well, how about we get some of these VAs? And long story short, before I knew it, I literally was getting asked more, “Can you get me one of those VAs?” than I was for business coaching. So I had transformed a few businesses by doing this and helping them to get out of the weeds. And I just found myself accidentally stumbling into it. And within a month, I was kind of in a VA business and sort of woke up one day going, I’m doing something totally different. And I was quite enjoying it.

So I went from, you know, zero to hero in a month, and then crash-burned after about a year—but that’s a whole other story.

Brad Friedman: So what kinds of things does a business like yours do to market itself?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, a whole heap of things. I mean, in the early days, you know, like I said, it was very accidental. And it was very organic for me in those early days in that I had built a small list of people online. I think I had done some lead gen with webinars and stuff like that. And the early days for me were very much about doing webinars online. And word of mouth, of course, was huge.

Podcasting then became—like what I’m doing right now—became a really big strategy that I do find that this is actually quite a great way to not just get your message out there, but to have open discussions and open conversations about what you’re doing, what your vision is, that sort of thing. We’ve dabbled in things like SEO, organic, paid search, all these kinds of things. I’m sure you have some great views on how those things work. But what I do find is, particularly with this industry and this stuff that I’m doing at The Virtual Hub, because there’s a lot of know-me, like-me, trust-me factor involved, you actually need to do marketing that is quite personal brand-based. You’ve got to have somebody behind it. You’ve got to be a thought leader. This kind of thing really, really works more than anything in this space.

Brad Friedman: Right. Right. So in addition to financial services providers, I get a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners—small business owners—listening to the podcast. How do those people take advantage of a virtual assistant?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so, you know, I mean, the first thing I say to any business is—and I’ve been talking about this particular concept for years—I feel really passionately that what people need to realize is it doesn’t matter whether you’re a billion-dollar company or like a mom at home making stuff to sell on Etsy, like a solopreneur doing your own thing, a hobby business. Every business has departments. And every department has a set of kind of tasks or projects or things that need to be done on a daily, weekly, monthly basis to keep the engine of a business moving forward, and then maybe some projects that drive the business forward.

And what you find is it doesn’t matter whether you’re a solopreneur, a small business, medium business, or larger business—that actually applies in general across any business. And when people start to see it that way, you start to bucket out those departments and think, well, what are the things that need to be done daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.? And do I need to be the one that does all of those things? And what you find is studies have been done on this—something like between 40 to 60% of a knowledge worker’s day is taken up doing recurring tasks that are quite process-driven, that can be trained and are easy to delegate.

So I would encourage any business owner to first sit down and think about all the things that are happening, and do you really need to be the person to do those things? And should you be the person to do those things? Even if you feel you’re great at them, you enjoy doing them, is it the best use of your time? If you want to grow the business—and/or some people will say, well, I’m happy with a lifestyle business—and I would argue that you can have a lifestyle business that is also large. It doesn’t have to be necessarily small. But even if you want to stay at the size you want, you want to have time out for yourself. That’s the whole reason we started business. You don’t really want to be working 15 hours a day, seven days a week. Wasn’t why anybody started a business.

Brad Friedman: Boy, that’s for sure. Sometimes I think there’s probably people like me who feel like there’s so much work involved in delegating that I might as well just do the work myself.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, very, very common and true statement. It is a lot of work, right? But the way I tackle that is—it is, you know, because you’ve got to develop processes and talk somebody through and train them properly and onboard them—but that is quite short-sighted thinking. What you really need to start thinking about is return on time invested.

So time—and, you know, like, I mean, your financial people on this podcast will understand the compound effect of interest on money. It’s the same, really, applies to time. And time is the most valuable resource. And time you spend today with this really painful task of writing down processes, training somebody, and bringing someone on a journey with you so that you can delegate more effectively—it pays so many dividends in the years to come that otherwise, like in 12 months’ time, you’re going to be exactly where you are today, doing the same thing, doing it all yourself. And that’s the way to think about it.

There are still obstacles—getting the right person, training them properly, all of these things—but it is worth really thinking about the return on time invested and the impact of that on your future.

Brad Friedman: Right. Okay. All right. So how do I deal with the kind of nagging thought that maybe a person in the Philippines might not be qualified or really capable of doing the work that I need done?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, you know, again, it’s a fear that people have. They feel bad talking about it. But the reality is, it is a true fear. It happens, right? You know, especially in places like the Philippines—I would argue that it kind of happens anywhere—but, you know, you get this sort of thing happening.

So a few things: if you’re going to go the route of getting someone direct yourself—so let’s say you’re going on finding a freelancer on Upwork or whatever, you’re sifting through all these resumes—the only way that you’re ever going to know, because anybody can put anything on a resume, the only way that you’re really going to know is to give people work to do and see what they return to you.

Now, the complexity with that is they can take the work and give it to someone else and get it done and still return it to you perfectly. Maybe they didn’t do it, right? The sort of—maybe it’s not very nice—but the way to get around that is you could watch somebody do something, which feels like you’re micromanaging or whatever. But if somebody’s really upset about that concept, maybe you can either ask them to video themselves doing it—you can do that with Loom—or give them a whole series of tasks at different stages to do and actually see the work.

And now with what we’re doing at The Virtual Hub, we sort of do the same thing because we actually don’t recruit for clients; we recruit for ourselves. And what I realized many years ago is that recruiting is quite hard, right? You’ve got to—it’s hard to get it right.

So I actually built an entire company where we train our own VAs, and we have them training with us on our time long before we ever put them into a client account. So we get to sort of sit with them for a long time, and we tend to weed out a lot of the crap in the early days of things that kind of happen. And we do that on our time and not on the client’s time. So that’s been very helpful for me to get over that hurdle that happens. I’ll be honest with you, it does happen.

Like I said, you just got a top-down approach: map out what are all the little departments within this business, what are all the recurring tasks that happen within each department—even if it’s answering the phone, like write it down. It’s all these little steps.

And then what I would do is each one of those—it’d be nice if you had a process for each one of those. And that’s kind of painful, but again, don’t make it complicated. You don’t need lucid charts and all sorts of things. You just need bullet points—know, answer phone, say hello. You know, I’m making it very basic here.

But the point is that then, once you get to that point, then you know what you’re delegating. Then you can bring in an assistant. And then you and the assistant can work together to evolve your processes and to make them more—you can iterate them and make them deeper, start to document them differently. But a starting point is better—to at least have written down a bit of a map of the business and what’s the bits that are going to be delegated and what bits are you going to keep initially. And you go from there. Yeah.

Brad Friedman: Okay. So what happens if we’re going along and I need to give the assistant some constructive criticism? Are there cultural things I need to know, or how do I go about doing that?

Barbara Turley: You know what’s interesting, actually? What has amazed me working in the Philippines is that they have a thirst for feedback. They will invite feedback. Like they’ll say, “I want to know, I want feedback.” Even in my old career, I don’t know if I would have been quite as keen to hear… They are very open to feedback. I think, well, like anyone—I mean, anyone’s human—I think it’s how you deliver it.

What I find is—and I’m not very good at it, I’ll be honest with you. I mean, you would think I’d be great at it—I tend to show I don’t like doing it because I just want to see the best in everyone. But I think when something’s not going right—well, sorry, I’ll take a step back.

A very good method to set you up for success prior, so that it doesn’t happen, is when you have a task and you want to give it to a VA. A great thing is to show them what does absolute success look like from my perspective with achieving this task. Let’s say it’s social media—like show them a whole list of stuff that looks amazing to you.

Show them what mediocre, kind of just getting there, looks like, and show them kind of what an outright fail looks like. And that makes the conversation much easier thereafter.

And I would also suggest, when you do that, and then say in six weeks’ time, we’re going to book a meeting now and set the agenda of that meeting and say, in that meeting, we’re going to go through kind of how’s it going for you, how’s it going for me, and then we’re going to do some training thereafter. And you kind of give it a chance for a while. Now, if you have to do that a lot, either the person isn’t right for you or maybe they’re in the wrong role or whatever, whatever. But you kind of can get there pretty quickly if you do it that way. And you kind of set them up that this is going to be part of the role—that you’re going to discuss how they’re doing.

The final thing I think I would say on that is you’ve got to establish—let’s say it’s not going well and you’ve tried all these things—then you’ve got to figure out: is this a skill issue or a will issue? Now, a skill issue means it could be trainable, could be, may not be, could be outside of their skill set. Is it trainable? Right, that’s another question. If it’s a will issue—the person doesn’t want to do it, right, or is lying or there’s something going on—that’s a whole other discussion, right? That’s kind of an HR issue. So you’re going into a whole different level of deep water there. But you first got to answer the question: is it a skill issue or a will issue?

Brad Friedman: Right. Okay. When we’re getting involved in this, is this somebody that we bring on full-time? Do they do part-time? Does it make a difference, as far as loyalty and that will issue, whether they’re full-time or part-time? Or how’s all that get started?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. If you’re using—so a big mistake I do see a lot of business owners make is they think—they really, really convince themselves, “Look, I only need a little bit of help, so I’d like someone five hours a week,” right? Now that is a disaster, right? Because there’d be people listening who say, “I have a VA and she does five hours a week and it’s amazing.” That’s great. But realistically, you’re not going to be the priority if somebody comes along and offers 40, 50 hours a week, or they’re going to have 10 of you and you’re really not—you’re going to see slippage over time.

So that’s number one. I would just say that if you’re running a business and you can’t find—I mean, I wouldn’t even worry if it’s not 20 hours a week—just bring someone on at least part-time and start to get them doing training, research, help you with all sorts of things. Just don’t get fixated on this “but I only need five hours a week.” Like, you know, really, really sort of commit to it. I would say really commit—at least part-time.

But if you bring someone in full-time, I think that’s the winner for me because it’s not that they won’t have any other clients. If you have a freelancer, they may have other people and you got to watch that. You can kind of get more deep into the loyalty bed, can forge if you bring them into your vision and bring them on the journey with you. I think that’s a bit better. Yeah. But you don’t have to do full-time if it’s not quite for you, but you can go part-time.

Brad Friedman: Right. So what are the benefits of working with a kind of an agency like yours as opposed to doing work with the freelancers?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. With—both models are great, right? It depends how much time you have. That’s the honest truth. So if you’re working with—if you want to go and work with freelancers and stuff, you’re going to get flooded with—you’ve got to look through resumes, you’ve got to interview people, do all the testing, you’ve got to do all that, right? So there’s recruiting.

Recruiting is something that you shouldn’t skim over. It is quite a lot of work in and of itself. Like even for us, we hire 1.5% of people who apply for a job with us every month. And that’s after an excruciating experience of recruiting. So just to give you an idea, that’s the amount of effort that we put in. But our success rate is very high. It’s super high because we’re focused on success rate, not churning through numbers.

So number one is you’re going to spend a lot of time in recruiting. Then when you bring them on, there can be training time, there can be onboarding time. Again, you might hit a home run and that can be really easy. It depends on the person that you get. If you’re coming to something—like typically clients, when they’re coming to The Virtual Hub, they’re coming to us because first of all, they don’t have the time or the energy or the interest in going looking themselves. They want some form of—not a guarantee—but they want some form of backup from us.

We also handle all the training. So we have our own training and learning and development team. We train VAs initially in being great VAs in certain areas. And then we work with a client account to figure out what are the personalized trainings for that account that this VA needs.

And we do that outside the client’s time—we do it in our time. And then we also take a team approach to client accounts. So we have what we call a pod. So we have three people that service every client account. The VA obviously is in the front, but we have results coaches and client success managers that are liaising with that client as well.

Things like, you know, let’s say a VA—let’s say you’ve got a great VA and she falls pregnant and she’s having a baby, right? We do seamless transitions. We transition out and in, do all the training in the middle. So we manage all of that. So we’re like a bolt-on ops and HR team that come in for clients. So that’s why clients would choose to work with us—where they want that kind of premium sort of approach, I guess.

Brad Friedman: I’m guessing it’s a little bit more expensive to work through you.

Barbara Turley: Well, it is and it isn’t. If you go to freelance websites, we start at about $9 an hour. So you were throwing out numbers like 10 and 11 there—that’s why I was saying, just be careful paying out those kinds of numbers. So we range from nine up to about 15 or 16 dollars an hour, depending on the level—like depending on what the VA is doing.

And we don’t do it by hour, by the way. We have a monthly subscription-type fee for part-time or full-time. We don’t do just a few hours. But the ones at the upper level are doing—they can build campaigns in HubSpot. They can work the tools—HubSpot or Ontraport or any of these things, these CRM tools—Zapier, do integrations, this kind of thing. So I would say pricing-wise, we’re middle of the pack. There’s agencies that are a lot more expensive than us, and then there’s some that are cheaper.

But it depends what you’re looking for. I think we’re in the sweet spot, to be honest. I think we’re in the sweet spot price-wise.

Brad Friedman: Do you find that many of your clients, once they take the dive and get involved, end up having multiple assistants because they find that their assistant has certain skills that they want to take advantage of, and then they come up with some different things that maybe require another person and they end up with more than one?

Barbara Turley: Yes, a lot of our clients do. We still have lots of clients, though, that started with a part-time VA five years ago and still have one. It depends on the type of business that you’re running and how much you’re scaling it and things like that.

So my philosophy—and the philosophy that I’ve infused into The Virtual Hub—is very much like this: it’s all about optimizing your people strategy, essentially. So if you think about—let’s say you’ve got a business that has 10 people all in the US or something like that, five people—it doesn’t really matter.

You’ll find that about 30% of their time—could be 60%—like between 30 and 60% of their time is being used for these process-driven daily sort of tasks. So if you start to think about it, the big wolf cry over the last couple of years is “we can’t find staff, we can’t find staff.” You know, this has been going on. It’s like, you should just optimize the staff you already have—like just go through what they’re doing every day, take the 30% and get it to an offshore team quickly, rearrange the chessboard, and voila—you have just optimized your people strategy doing that.

And what I find happens there is—this is really my philosophy—I’m saying if you can delegate down, get the offshore team strategy working, especially with a partner like us, we’re going to take care of all of the employee headaches, training, all that sort of thing. What you essentially do is, if you free up 30% of the time with three of your key people onshore, you’ve cloned another one of them.

So the price you’re paying us—what could you do with one more of them? Like if you got them working on the stuff that moves the needle. Like, do the math on that. It’s not good—we actually don’t cost you anything in that context. We’re going to make you money in that context. It depends what you do with the time that you free up. Yeah.

Brad Friedman: Wow, that’s so interesting. Okay, well, you might have me convinced.

Barbara Turley: What’s the objection? I’m dying to know. Come on, Brad.

Brad Friedman: The biggest thing is sort of what I kind of led with—is that it just seems like it’s so much work to delegate that. I mean, I realize that you probably only have to do that once.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, you do. You only have to do it once.

Brad Friedman: You have to show them present once, and yeah, so yeah.

Barbara Turley: It is a bit of work. I won’t lie. It is work. Delegating is work. But I mean, everything is work. You know, some people would say marketing is work. Marketing is hard work—I would say that. Yeah.

Growing a business is hard work. Everything’s hard work. But I would challenge anyone and say the work that you put into it, though, today—the return on that investment of time, if you get it right and you focus, you commit to getting it right—is enormous thereafter because of your own time freedom.

Yeah, so that is really what you focus on. Yeah.

Brad Friedman: That makes the most sense to me. All right. Give me one or two takeaways you want people to take away from our discussion.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I mean, the key thing, like I said, is if you are growing a business, really think about—I feel like the final frontier of optimization is the people strategy. Businesses are not thinking very strategically about what everyone’s doing and the cost of all of that. So just really think about that—like what I was saying about working out what people do you have and what are they spending their time on.

And then obviously offshore team strategy is one, but the second thing that you want to be putting in there is things like automation—making sure that you’re using tools like Asana, like project management tools, and you’re using them properly and you’re tying teams together correctly. And basically, a topic I’m going to be coming out and talking a lot about over the next couple of years is optimizing for the three P’s of operational efficiency, which is platforms, processes, and people. And if you do those three things and you optimize them correctly, then that’s how you scale a business—as long as you have great marketing.

Brad Friedman: Right. Yeah, exactly. All right. Where can people find you online?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So if you want to follow me personally, LinkedIn is where I do a lot of my thought leadership pieces, and I hang out there quite a bit. And if you want to come and talk to us about what we can do at The Virtual Hub, just thevirtualhub.com.

Come and book a call with us. We have tons of content on our website, so plenty of stuff to get your teeth into if you’re not ready to book a call or chat with us yet. And if you do come and chat with us, we’ll be very helpful to you in figuring out if we are a fit or if we’re what you need and where to start.

Brad Friedman: Great. I will put all of that in the show notes, and I hope people will reach out to you because we all probably need to have some kind of assistance if we want to grow and optimize what we’re doing—even our marketing.

Barbara Turley: Definitely in marketing. You know, the stuff that needs to be done in marketing—there’s a lot of doing that needs to be done in marketing. It’s not just—the strategy is key, the doing is intense. Yeah, for sure.

Brad Friedman: Well, thank you very much. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today. Thank you so much.

Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me.

Brad Friedman: Thank you so much for listening to this week’s podcast. I am incredibly grateful you were here and would be very appreciative if you would take a moment to subscribe and leave a review.

Be sure to read the show notes so you know how to connect with Barbara Turley. Those show notes, along with all our other episodes, can be found at thedigitalslicepodcast.com. I’ll be back soon with Episode 98 of the Digital Slice Podcast.

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