Voice Actor: Hey, it’s Gianni Dumas of EO Fire, and it’s The Entrepreneurial You, the show for dedicated and passionate Caribbean entrepreneurs seeking daily inspiration brought to you by author, speaker, and award-winning entrepreneur Henneka Watkis-Porter. You must be prepared to ignite.

Barbara Turley: You can be the best virtual assistant in the world and still fail at this, and not because you’re not great at what you do, but because you don’t know how to manage the client. And there’ll be VAs out there nodding their head as I say this.

Being clear on your boundaries, on your communication style versus the client’s style, and managing their expectations is key. And using something like Asana is like the number one tip. It’s non-negotiable—Trello, Asana, whatever they are—but to keep everybody organized.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Hi, this is Heneka. I’m so glad you took the time to stop by today. In Jamaican parlance, wagwan.

This episode is sponsored by HenekaWatkisPorter.com as well as the Jamaica Stock Exchange. Now on HenekaWatkisPorter.com, you can visit us for blogs, resources, books, online courses, podcasts, and more.

If you are new to The Entrepreneurial You podcast, be sure to check out past episodes with guests such as John Lee Dumas, Patrice Washington, Seth Godin, Richard Branson, Amy Porterfield, and a host of other game changers.

Voice Actor: We needed to raise capital, but our experience with local financial institutions was that they were cautious and slow to act, and interest rates were far too high. We had real concerns about financing our business through outside equity investors and the possibility of interference. Could we get a fair valuation for our business? We had our own ideas about the business and its value.

Should I go the traditional route of bank financing or should I try the Jamaica Stock Exchange? So we made a call and experienced a transformation of our business through conversations.

I’m John Mahfood, CEO of Jamaican Teas, and we’re listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange.

Give us a call today at 876-967-3271 to begin your transformation through conversation. We want your company to be listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Now here’s today’s episode.

If you’re serious about changing your life, you’ll find a way. If you’re not, you’ll find an excuse. — Jennifer Sincero.

My peak performer, I trust that you are staying safe. This is my wish for you, and you’re avoiding COVID-19 like the plague that it is.

Welcome to episode 189 of The Entrepreneurial You podcast. I’m your host, of course, Henneka Watkis-Porter.

Today’s episode is with Barbara Turley. Now, Barbara 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 for businesses who need to free up time and energy so that they can go on to the next level.

With a strong focus on customized training and ongoing career development, Barbara has built a company that ensures their team is trained in cutting-edge programs like HubSpot, Ontraport, etc., to best meet their clients’ unique needs in digital marketing, social media, personal assistant services, and administrative support.

So you know that we’re going to have a great conversation, as today we’re going to be looking at the 10 best productivity apps you and your virtual assistant can use to get more done. Welcome, welcome, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me, Heneka. It’s lovely to be here.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: It is my pleasure. Do you know any genre of Jamaican music?

Barbara Turley: Do I know any genre of Jamaican music apart from—my God, it’s gone out of my head. I was going to say, apart from just Jamaican music.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: So reggae…

Barbara Turley: Oh my God, the word’s gone out of my head. I have two children, I can claim baby brain over… reggae music.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: I figured that’s what you were trying to remember. So yeah, there we go—reggae. All right, all right, it’s okay. We won’t hold it against you. We love you still.

So the 10 best productivity apps you and your VAs can use to get more done. First, let’s start at the beginning, where you started your business by accident and in the space of 12 months it exploded. Tell us about that.

Barbara Turley: Yes, it’s such an interesting story because when you start a business, everyone tells you that you have to come up with some sort of business plan and find a product-market fit and then go out and create a lovely website and do all these things.

And I did it completely the wrong way around in that I wasn’t intending to start this business at all. I was actually a business coach and I was helping all the clients I was coaching at the time. This was about seven years ago.

I noticed that they all had the same problem regardless of the industry they were in or the delivery model—product, service, whatever it was, online, offline. They all pretty much had the same problem. They were small businesses that, if they didn’t hire staff, they were never going to be able to grow and get out of the gates. But if they didn’t grow, they were never going to have the money to hire staff. So it was like this vicious cycle they were all in.

And the only solution I could come up with was to get offshore virtual assistance in the Philippines. I had one myself at the time, and I started out by just literally getting some of my VA’s friends to help out some clients so that we could free up their time and they could go on to work on strategy with me.

And before I knew it, I was getting random calls from friends of clients—not asking me for business coaching—but asking me, could I get them one of those VAs? To which I thought, you can get them yourself, I mean they’re online.

But I rapidly realized that people didn’t have the time, energy, interest, know-how, or confidence to do it themselves. And literally overnight, I woke up one morning and I was in business, and I was like, this is actually a business all by itself. That’s why I call it my accidental business. I literally didn’t mean to.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: It’s a good accident to have. So where’s your business now, Barbara?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So today we’re six years old. We have 140 staff. I have a company in the Philippines, and all the staff are employees of our Philippine company there. And we have clients all over the world—US, Australia, Canada, all over Europe, even in parts of Asia.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Interesting. I mean, I’m still at the point where it’s an accidental business, you know?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and look, all’s well that ends well, right?

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Absolutely. So now we’re going to focus the rest of our attention on the 10 best productivity apps that you and your VA can use to get more done, because who doesn’t want more hours in the day, right?

Barbara Turley: I’ve learned a few things over the years from managing large teams and offshore staff and trying to help clients get more done. So I know a thing or two about this area.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Absolutely. So you are the best person to talk to right now. So let’s move into those. At least let’s start with the one you want to start with.

Barbara Turley: Sure. So my number one tool—and I started out using this tool, the free version, and I’m still on it today, I’m a premium customer—is Asana.

Now, Asana.com. It is a free project management app and tool. Now the thing with Asana though is that it doesn’t have to be Asana. There’s also Trello, and there’s Teamwork PM, and there’s a few other types of tools floating around the internet.

The main point is that if you’re working with VAs or any remote team for that matter—it doesn’t matter whether the VAs are just remote in your own country—it’s very important to have a project management tool so that everybody is collaborating on tasks and projects in the one place, and all of the comment flow and instructions are attached to specific tasks.

As opposed to people trying to find email threads and saying, “Where did you write that?” and all that stuff. You’re cutting down on mistakes, miscommunications, and missed ideas that happen when you’re trying to find threads of emails.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: And I actually interviewed the co-founder of Trello on this program here as well. I had a conversation with him, and that was an interesting story. So yes, we’ve looked at Asana. What’s next on your list?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so I think number two on my list is going to be LastPass.

Now again, it’s a password security cloud app, essentially. It’s a vault—a password vault. There are other ones like OnePassword and a few others out there. We are an enterprise customer of LastPass, so we love LastPass.

It stops all that back and forth: “Where was that password?” “What’s the password for this?” “I can’t log into that.” “Did you change the password?” All of that stuff that happens when you’ve got lots of team members or even just one VA.

You can cut all of that out by using LastPass. You invite your VA or team into your vault, and they can log into systems without ever seeing the password. You can change passwords without giving them out, and if you need to remove access, you can do it in a minute.

So LastPass for password security—especially these days online—definitely number two.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: That sounds really good. I just saw myself using that immediately after we had this conversation.

Barbara Turley: Big, big one. So Asana, LastPass together—amazing. Number three would be G Suite.

Now, I am a Google user. There’ll be people listening to this that are Microsoft users. It’s like Microsoft or Google sort of thing. You can use either. I’m a G Suite user. I love G Suite because it’s so cloud-based.

And when you’re working with remote teams, it has some clever stuff like G Drive, which means that you can have Google Docs, Google Sheets—these are the things that replace Word docs and Excel files. But you can actually work on these things collaboratively in real time together and see each other on the other side of the world updating cells.

So you don’t have to be sharing screens or anything. You can say, “See me there in that cell.” And if somebody changes a cell in a Google Sheet, it will change in real time on your side as well. So there’s no, “Which was that version of the Excel sheet that you had?”

Look, I’m sure Microsoft have fixed this problem these days, but I find G Suite amazing for real-time collaboration. Even Google Calendar is great for checking when team members are available. And then, of course, there’s the chat function, and now they have Google Meet. So plenty of stuff in there to really utilize that will speed up time.

My number four is a good CRM software tool. Okay. So there are obviously simple ones like Mailchimp. But Mailchimp is still a great email marketing tool. I don’t know if you’d describe it as a CRM tool, but there are also ones—I’m a big fan of Ontraport.

Anyone who hasn’t heard of Ontraport, they’re a reasonably small company, but they’re very interesting. A beautiful, very well-run and amazing software tool is Ontraport. It’s like Infusionsoft, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, even parts of ClickFunnels would be similar, or parts of that sort of software.

Now, the reason you want to be using these tools—you could cut out so much manual labor by using these tools, it’s not funny. People say to me, “But they’re a bit expensive.” So Ontraport is about $300 US a month, and for some businesses that’s just too much.

But in there, you can build funnels that personalize and completely automate your client experience, your lead experience, even your employee experience. We use it for employees as well. It’s phenomenal.

If I wasn’t using Ontraport, I’d probably have another 10 people on my internal team trying to manage everything we try to manage. So client onboarding experiences—we even have a membership site that works off the back of it, protects content that we only give to clients who join, all of the above.

I could go on about this for two hours, but that’s definitely right up there. And the four tools I’ve just mentioned are basically what I use to run a 140-staff business with clients all over the world. It is a seven-figure business, and those are the four key software tools and apps we use to run the entire company.

A few other ones around the edges: Asana is the motherboard, and Ontraport is the backend, and then G Suite and LastPass to back them up.

So number five—Zapier. Such a clever tool. For anyone who doesn’t know Zapier, go to zapier.com and have a look. Essentially, what it does in layman’s terms is it makes your systems talk to each other.

For example, let’s say that somebody signs up for something on your website. On our website, we’ve got people who sign up for calls to book a call with us. Zapier is so clever that we don’t need to look at that calendar or anything.

We can make it talk to Asana, and it will tell Asana that there’s a call and give us the full details so that our entire team just spends their day inside Asana instead of opening lots of other tools.

It can also make Ontraport talk to Asana, WooCommerce, and all these different systems talk to each other—even Xero, accounting software. There are hundreds of apps on there.

You can even make one app update a Google Sheet to give you live data all the time. And the cool thing about Zapier is they actually give you ideas of what you can do. So you’re not trying to come up with ideas yourself—they show you what’s possible.

Number six, I’m going to lump two together because they’re kind of the same but different: Loom and Zoom.

Zoom is obviously great for loads of things. Not just meetings—you can record calls, record meetings, and even run webinars. And Zapier makes it talk to lots of different systems.

You can also use Zoom for Facebook Lives and integrate it with tools like StreamYard to multi-stream across platforms. A lot of them integrate with each other, which makes things much more efficient.

Loom, on the other hand, is brilliant for VAs. If you want to record a process instead of writing documentation, you can record a Loom video and send a URL link. You can even embed it into Gmail or your CRM. It works really well for remote work.

Number seven—lots of tools do this, but my choice is Hootsuite.

So Hootsuite: social media management. Please just get VAs to do it—that’s what they know. Managing social media is a full job by itself.

Hootsuite gives dashboards and ways to manage multiple channels quickly and efficiently, and you can see data across them. It helps keep your social media active without posting everything individually.

Number eight has got to be Canva. How could we have lived without Canva?

Graphic design for dummies.

I don’t even know what to say about Canva. Congratulations to the Australian female graphic designer who thought, “Surely we can make this simpler.” And there you go—a billion-dollar company.

Everyone’s using Canva. I mean, is anyone not using Canva?

Heneka Watkis-Porter: We’re yet to identify that person.

Barbara Turley: Exactly.

So I think I’m on number nine. I am a fan, but you have to be careful with it.

Time tracking apps—something like Time Doctor. It depends how you use it. If you pitch it as a spying tool, you’ll polarize your team and make them feel untrusted.

But on the positive side, Time Doctor has time tracking, screen tracking, and productivity reporting. You can see when people are online, what they’re doing, and how they’re progressing.

It helps identify mistakes, coaching opportunities, and how people are using their time. Sometimes people aren’t doing anything wrong—they just need better guidance.

There are newer tools like Teramind, Clockify, Toggl, and Harvest, which also integrate with Asana.

My final one is Xero accounting software.

Xero has positioned itself as easy-to-use cloud accounting software—and it is. But you can also accidentally create Frankenstein if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Used properly, it saves a lot of time—especially for invoicing, expenses, and bookkeeping. But the mistake people make is trying to be their own accountant.

Don’t do that. Get a proper bookkeeper. Otherwise, you don’t save time—you tie yourself in knots. I say this from the heart because I’ve done it.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: And I’ve been there too—trying to be penny wise and pound foolish. You end up paying more to fix the mess.

Barbara Turley: Exactly. So Xero is great, just be careful with it.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: We made it through all 10!

Barbara Turley: We did!

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Before we close, share some encouraging words for anyone considering becoming a virtual assistant.

Barbara Turley: You can be the best virtual assistant in the world and still fail—not because you’re not great at what you do, but because you don’t know how to manage the client.

And I know VA’s will be nodding as I say this.

Being clear on your boundaries, your communication style versus the client’s, and managing expectations is key. And using something like Asana—non-negotiable. Trello, Asana, whatever it is—but keep everything organized.

That would be my number one tip.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Absolutely great. Barbara, please share your contact information and any goodies for our community.

Barbara Turley: The 10 productivity apps I mentioned are on our blog, so don’t worry if you didn’t write them down.

Go to thevirtualhub.com/blog/10-best-productivity-apps and you’ll find it there.

We also have a downloadable: “The 5 Reasons People Fail with VAs and How to Fix It.” We also have a scalable business success formula e-course.

And if you want to speak to us about getting a VA, you can book a call at thevirtualhub.com/EY.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Thank you so much, Barbara. It’s such a pleasure.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me.

Heneka Watkis-Porter: Thank you my people for tuning in. I look forward to connecting with you next week.

Today’s point of hope: “For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.” 

— 1 John 5:4