VoiceActor: Welcome to the How of Business with Henry Lopez and David Begin, the podcast that helps you start, run, and grow your small business. And now, here are your hosts.

Henry Lopez: This is Henry Lopez. Welcome to this episode of The How of Business. My guest today is Barbara Turley. Barbara, welcome to the show.

Barbara Turley: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Henry Lopez: Great to have you all the way from Sydney, Australia. It’s morning there for her, so let me first of all, let’s talk about what we’re going to chat about in this episode.

Barbara is going to share her entrepreneurial journey from equity trader to investor to launching her own business. And then we’re going to dive into the topic of virtual assistance for small business owners and solopreneurs. So how virtual assistance, which is a topic we’ve talked about before, but it’s always so interesting and so important because it’s so critical for us as small business owners as to how we can not just grow our business, but, as Barbara will explain, get some sanity in our lives as we begin to delegate some of those things that we are currently responsible for.

If you want to receive more information about the How of Business, including links to the show notes page for this episode or other episodes, just text the word biz, B-I-Z, to 31996.

So Barbara is an investor, an entrepreneur, and the founder and CEO of the Virtual Hub, a business she started by accident, as she explained, or she will explain, that exploded in the space of just 12 months to become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants in the digital marketing and social media space. And she does that, they do that, for businesses who need to free up time and energy so that they can get to the next level of growth in their businesses.

During her 15-year financial markets career, she was a trader for some of the world’s largest investment banks. She successfully traded her own money, managed relationships with some of Australia’s largest wealth management businesses, and became an early-stage investor in a number of very successful disruptive financial services company. She’s also the founder of Energize Wealth, which is an online platform.

What is a
Support Assistant?

for ambitious women who want to create wealth and impact for whatever stage they are at in their wealth journey. As I mentioned, Barbara lives in Sydney, Australia. Barbara Turley, welcome to the show.

Barbara Turley: Thank you for having me, Henry. It’s so funny listening to your bio when people read it out, you start to think, “Yeah, you should change that bit. Maybe I should modify that bit.”

Henry Lopez: What needs to be updated?

Barbara Turley: Well, Energize Wealth is a funny one, and I will get into this as part of my entrepreneurial journey, actually, because it’s sort of like it’s turned into more of a passion project, and it’s mildly on pause at the moment because I’m so entrenched and engrossed in the growth of the Virtual Hub as a company. But we can get into that. That was an interesting part of my entrepreneurial journey, that bit.

Henry Lopez: So what was the first business you started that was your own business?

Barbara Turley: Energize Wealth. It was that one.

Henry Lopez: So let’s back up. I’m sorry, let’s back up before that. Tell me briefly about your career, and then I want to lead up to what brought you to launching Energize Wealth.

Barbara Turley: So I’ll give you the, you know, when you’re looking at a 20-year career or 15 years, I’ll try and condense it into a couple of sentences. I mean, the first 10 years of it, I was on the equity trading floors in my twenties. Absolutely loved that. It was very dynamic, fast-moving, all the things you kind of want from a career, I think, in your twenties: lots of partying, late nights, early mornings, all of the rest.

And then I kind of became jaded with that, as we do around 29. And I realized that there was sort of, from a personal perspective, I didn’t see a future in that particular career. So I shifted to a different part of the industry. I shifted into asset management sales. And I started working for Deutsche Asset Management here in Australia. I was in Australia for a good while prior to that.

And then I did that for probably the following five or six years. Really enjoyed it. But the big thing happened during that time when the shift happened. I realized early on in that piece that I kind of wanted to build my own company. I’d spent many years watching companies being built, watching IPOs come to market, watching companies fail, and seeing the whole life cycle of how things go from explosive growth to companies, big mature companies that made mistakes and failed due to bad decisions or bad management, and those sorts of things.

But I didn’t really know how to get started. You’re in the corporate world, and it’s hard to leave that because you’ve got big salaries and a great lifestyle and all that sort of thing that goes with it. But I got an opportunity during that time.

The financial crisis of 2008, the big housing meltdown that happened, sort of raised an opportunity for me that was, I guess, some people saw it as risky. I didn’t; I saw it as the greatest opportunity ever. I got an opportunity to sort of piggyback on a management buyout that was happening. A group of people from Deutsche in Australia were essentially buying a business out of Deutsche that was for sale at the time. And I sort of hopped on the coattails of that. I got an opportunity to…

Barbara Turley: I was sort of last in, was given an opportunity, and I said, “Yep, I’m going to buy into that.” So I did. And it gave me a chance, although I wasn’t running my own business, it was another level where I really got to see how great companies get built. But, you know, I’m still…

Henry Lopez: Did you do that at the same time while you kept your career, or were you in…

Barbara Turley: I had this interesting opportunity where I was both shareholder and employee of the same company. So I got to still be an employee, still with a salary, but I got an opportunity to be kind of more involved in the more entrepreneurial side of it. Not completely, because there were many people much greater than me that were actually running it. But, you know, I just really saw it as my opportunity to look at things differently.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, it was a good segue, obviously, to take that step into getting a better taste of that.

Barbara Turley: And that just whetted my appetite more. And then after five years of doing that, I just decided one day that it was time. And I just felt the pull to do it myself. And I also had set myself up financially at that point. It took about five years to kind of get myself in a position where I felt safe enough to step out and that I had some money to invest in my own business. I was going to be okay for income.

You know, I had actually financially planned it myself, which I think a lot of people don’t do. And I think it’s important to do that.

Henry Lopez: What drove you, do you think, really, to then have the financial security, quote unquote, and what actually, you think, drove you to now go do your own venture all by yourself?

Barbara Turley: I think you just, it’s like anything, the desire to do it becomes way stronger than the fear to stay.

Henry Lopez: But was it about going and creating your own thing, or was it about creating wealth for yourself? What do you think drove that decision?

Barbara Turley: That’s an interesting question because it’s about eight years ago now. It’s been a good while ago. But now that you’ve asked me that, I just remembered what it was. I didn’t really look; I didn’t have a business plan necessarily. I didn’t totally know what I was going to do. I had a bit of an idea that Energize Wealth was in my head. But it was more than that. I had this incredible feeling that I had been very successful within my career, within the corporate world. And I had this feeling that if I was to step out and put that as one of the, I guess, one of the branches underneath my name, elevate myself above that and do other things, that I would actually be… I just felt that there was going to be more success and more impact and more, just more. I was hungry to do something bigger, I guess. And that didn’t mean I wanted to be the CEO of a corporate financial institution. I didn’t want that, but I wanted something to create something.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, that makes sense. When you look back now, would you have liked to have done it sooner?

Barbara Turley: Part of me would say yes, but I think everything, now that I’m older, a bit more mature, I think it just was… I probably wasn’t ready. I think I would have failed at a lot of things had I done it earlier. There were a lot of things I had to learn, and I think some of it was maturity as well. A little bit of the ability to… Simple things like the ability… I had to pare my lifestyle back quite a lot in the few years before I left. I had to start to think strategically about the longer term, which my personality… I’m a short-term, instant gratification type person. I get bored quickly. You know, I like to just spontaneously go on holiday tomorrow if I feel like it, you know, this kind of personality.

So it was a lesson in planning and maturity that I think was good for me to learn before I left. I think it was better, actually, that I was forced to put in the hard work before. Yeah.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, I like to put it, you know, very simply as you’re not ready until you’re ready, right? As a simplification of, yes, everybody gets there at a different point in life, is what I have found.

On this idea of impulsiveness and jumping to the next thing, you mentioned somewhere on the website that you’re a self-confessed idea junkie. Yes, a lot of us suffer from that as entrepreneurs. How have you managed to not let that distract you from your focus and build a business before you jump to the next thing?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and I saw this question on your pre-interview notes, and I love this question because I actually, again, this maturity thing, I had to sort of learn the hard way in the early years of doing my own thing where a lot of opportunity will come your way, especially when you… I found the minute I left corporate, and I’ve said this to other friends of mine that have thought about leaving and then have subsequently left, and I’ve said to them, “The interesting thing is that once you start doing something new, you have no idea the opportunities that you would never have thought of that are going to come at you.”

And I went into the vortex of saying yes to a lot of things in the early days because you feel like you don’t want to run away from opportunity, and you feel like you should say yes and just squeeze it all into your time. And I ended up very overwhelmed and just kind of a bit chaotic.

And I think I started to pull back because I said to myself, “What did I want to achieve really with all of this?” I actually wanted to achieve a certain lifestyle. I wanted to be a mum. That was very important to me. I really wanted to have a baby. I really wanted to remain working from home. You know, I wanted to work not 15 hours a day. I actually wanted to work. I wanted to be a full-time mum, really, and only work a few hours a day.

And I rapidly started to realize that I was on the treadmill. And I thought, “I just got to change this. I have to change this.” And I started to use my personal vision for my own personal life as a sort of a guiding light for every decision that I made from a business perspective thereafter.

And then that became kind of compounded when I then fell pregnant and was having a baby. And I realized that, again, maturity was forced into this situation where I had to start pulling back massively.

But the very interesting thing is, the more I pulled back, the more my business grew because I became laser-focused on just providing one service and doing it, nailing it really, really, really well. Because people come to us all the time saying, “Why wouldn’t you offer, like, you could build an entire client coaching program, blah, blah, blah.” I’m like, “No, other people do that. We do VAs. That’s what we do. That’s what the company is. We can do other stuff maybe when it’s bigger.”

But right now, we just stay focused on our core mission, our core thing, and our core offer. And it’s been very successful to do that.

Henry Lopez: That’s such a huge takeaway, and thanks for sharing that insight. I mean, even beyond that, at least initially, I don’t know if it’s expanded, but not just virtual assistants, but virtual assistants for digital marketing, social media tasks, right? I mean, that lesson.

Barbara Turley: Yes, I went super niche. Yeah, super niche. I’ll tell you what happened there. I was getting, again, lots of opportunities coming my way. People wanted bookkeepers, and then someone wanted a coder. I was like, “Yeah, I can recruit that.” And then I realized, yeah, we can, but it was so difficult. And there are competitors that do that sort of thing. They’re pure recruiters, and that’s what they do.

I was having my most success in the area that I had an interest in, which was digital marketing. And particularly platforms like Ontraport and HubSpot, and these ones that I love. I love marketing funnels and that whole concept around digital marketing. And I found that the VAs we were training in that area were the most successful ones with the clients.

So I just decided, you know what, we don’t do any of that other stuff anymore. Here’s what we do, and we do it really well. And I went super niche and, again, exploded from there.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, that’s wonderful. I want to take a step back, though, as to what led to this focus on The Virtual Hub on virtual assistants. I’m suspecting it might have something to do with your need to adjust your lifestyle. But how did you get to this? “What I want to offer next is a virtual assistant service.”

Barbara Turley: Yeah, this is a great story. People love this one. Even I love this because it’s so weird how it happened. I didn’t intend… I mean, you would think someone with my background would have strategized this out. I’d have a business plan. I would have done my research and gone to the Philippines and checked out the market. I did none of that.

I actually started… I didn’t mean to launch this business at all. It sort of was something that came at me by accident. I was doing quite a bit of business coaching and consulting. But when people come out of corporate, that’s kind of the fastest path to cash. So through Energize Wealth, I was doing a lot of one-on-one coaching. I had an online TV show there. I had a podcast. I was doing the whole digital thing. But I was doing coaching as kind of my main cash thing at the time.

And I had a VA myself in the Philippines purely because I had read Tim Ferriss’ Four-Hour Work Week and was like, “That’s a no-brainer.” And I went online and got myself a VA.

And then I found clients, every business I was working with, didn’t matter whether they were… like I was working with businesses from a local swim school to an online coach, to a naturopath, to a lawyer. So, totally different industries, online, offline, and they all had the same problem. They were all trying to do everything themselves. The businesses weren’t big enough yet that they could afford to hire staff locally.

But unless they hired some sort of staff and got rid of some of the stuff they were doing, they were never going to be able to really grow. So they were in a major problem. So I found myself recruiting friends of my VA initially just to help them out.

And before I knew it, I was getting more demand for it. I had people calling me, saying, “My friend told me I could get one of these VAs. Can you get me one?” And I was like, “I wonder, is there a business in this?” And I just did a webinar.

Barbara Turley: I was like, “I’ll just teach people how to do it.” And then I made an offer at the end, “Do you want us to do it for you?” And I got… I mean, when I say I got flooded with buyers, I got about 10 buyers, and I was like, “Oh my God, we need VAs.” And we had no website, no name, no concept, nothing. It was just like, “Right, we’re in business, we’re open.” And that was it.

So I’ve kind of grown it. I’ve actually perfected it by accident with all the mistakes that happened after that. You can imagine it wasn’t…

Henry Lopez: That’s amazing.

Barbara Turley: The plan wasn’t there. I had to learn as I went.

Henry Lopez: But if you had laid it out, you wouldn’t have been able to necessarily get there. I mean, it’s such a great example of how we should go about building businesses nowadays, especially virtual or online businesses, not brick-and-mortar businesses that have a different challenge to it. But first, you tested, you saw that there was demand, and then you built the product, if you will.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I think this whole concept of being able to pivot as well. I know in the startup world, this whole concept of pivoting is a real theme and topic out there. And the way I look at that, I go, you’ve got to be… when we do massive business plans and we get very wedded to our vision and our thing that we want to offer in the market, we become very closed to what the market actually wants and needs.

I sort of did that with Energize Wealth a little bit. I built this big website, and I spent a lot of money on it. I was like, “Wow.” It was hard to get people to buy my online programs. Online is hard, right? And then this thing, I wasn’t even asking people did they want me to do this. And they were falling over themselves to ask me to do it for them.

And I thought, yeah, so within a month, I was like, “Forget Energize Wealth, let’s do this.” I was just in a whole new business overnight.

I left Energize Wealth there because there’s a lot of content there. But yeah, and it’s like my… I think I leave it there as my little stamp on the world to say that was how it started.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, that’s wonderful. All right. So, I mean, we all get as to why you’ve touched on it as you were working with your business coaching clients, where we are overwhelmed, especially as we get started. If we’re a solopreneur, there’s just too many things that we need to do that aren’t necessarily our thing that we’re best at or the thing that we add most value to.

In your observation then, and as you began teaching people how to bring on a VA, what are some of those common obstacles as to why we struggle with that so much, why we wait so long to take advantage of this kind of help that’s available to us now?

Barbara Turley: Yes, this is a great question too, because it’s actually… look, the internet is littered with stories of disaster when it comes to offshoring or outsourcing to VAs or hiring in general. It’s not easy, right?

So the first thing I would say is that, forgetting about the conversations I always have, start off talking about VAs, of course, because that’s the business that I’m in. But what invariably happens is we end up talking about building scalable businesses, and VAs are just like the thing you plug in when you have the structures right. And then you get success because of what you’ve done and not necessarily because of what the VA is doing.

So everybody wants to hire A players. You know this thing out there where you go hire A players and just put them in and let them do their thing. When it comes to virtual assistants, you have to remember that they are an assistant, right?

So a virtual assistant is not a business coach. They’re not going to come in and revamp your processes or anything. They’re not project managers either. Some of them can do that, of course. VAs in the US or in Australia, my personal belief is that some of them are so amazing that they’re not VAs. They are online business managers. They are on a different level, but they’re still selling themselves as VAs.

So any VAs listening to this who are, it might resonate with you that you’re going, “Wow, I kind of run my clients’ business for them.” You’re not a VA anymore. You’re an owner, and you should be pricing yourself that way.

So getting back to VAs, you know, VAs are great. They’re very cost-effective because you can go offshore. So you can get highly leveraged staff because of the cost of the activity. But the only way that you’re going to make it work is if you have a real commitment to building systems and processes in your business and becoming like the master delegator, which is like the conductor of the business.

So you can’t just say, “Well, I have systems and processes,” and then throw your hands in the air, hire someone, and never speak to them or have no reporting lines or no structure around how you’re going to get results reported to you. How are you going to tweak things? So, you know what I mean? People just think, “I’ll get a VA, and that solves everything,” but it doesn’t. You’ve got to do a lot of work first.

The dividends that it pays if you get this right are absolutely enormous. I just can’t stress how enormous they are, but only for those who put the work in.

Henry Lopez: But the challenge there then, and I’m curious as to how you help people, is that developing systems and processes is often one of the huge challenges for a small business owner. They don’t have the time to do so. They don’t know how. They don’t have the skills.

A lot of the clients I work with don’t have those systems in place. So is your recommendation that I don’t dabble or start with bringing in a VA if I don’t have that in place first?

Barbara Turley: Not necessarily, as long as you have an open mindset around what you’re doing. So you can bring a VA in, and you can work together to help build this sort of thing.

Again, it’s this whole abdication of responsibility. You know, as the business owner, you mentioned that most small business owners don’t have time to build the skills and expertise or know-how to build processes. Let’s look at the time issue for a second. I always say to clients:

“Okay, you say, ‘I don’t have time for that.’ I go, well, if you don’t have time for that today, I guarantee you that in 12 months’ time, your business is going to be in probably the same position that it is today. And you’re going to be as overwhelmed. Your business may have grown, but you’ll be in chaos because your backend and your infrastructure are not able to cope with the volume that you’re pumping into it.”

So we’ve seen this happen. They blow themselves up, right? So the time thing is like sometimes in business… I know we say this is a cliché, you know, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, but it is a marathon, right?

So, you know, everyone’s just looking at the next quarter. Well, how about you look five years out and go, “Well, how about I spend the next quarter just kind of not pausing, but just taking a momentary step back to focus on this so that I build a powerhouse machine that is a company and a business and an asset for the future?”

You know, you may need to hire someone first to help you with this. Maybe that’s a better investment than a VA. I don’t know. You just have to think about those things.

Henry Lopez: One of the approaches that I’ve taken, and I’m sure you recommend as well, is to use the person that you bring on to help you document it as you go. As an example, we’ve got an assistant that helps us with editing these podcast episodes. And so what I’ve had her do, we’ve worked together on it, is to document the process.

Even though I didn’t have that system in place to give her when she started and say, “Here, here’s the step-by-step process,” she has built it for me as we have worked together over time.

Barbara Turley: And the key point there is you’ve worked together. So VAs can be amazing if you work with them like that and you actually invest the time and the energy into this concept.

Because we invest so much time and energy in marketing and PR. I’m like, if you actually carved out some of that energy and put it into building what I call internal leverage… Internal leverage is building the platform, the machine that is the business. It is a machine, right?

And once you have a machine, you can plug anyone into the machine. And this concept that systems run your business, people run your systems. So I like to say to businesses, you know, we actually help a little bit. We help clients quite a bit with helping them get set up. And we also train VAs in how to kind of know that this is what’s coming.

But I always say to businesses, like, if you can get the machine going, I can give you the people. Like, we can plug the people in, and it’s very cost-effective people. That’s the trick.

Henry Lopez: Yeah. And so where it breaks down, in your observation, is on this point. I either don’t have a system in place, and I’m trying to hire somebody to read my mind, if you will. And I’m also then not investing the time to help that person if we’re going to create it together to do so. I’m expecting them to just figure this chaos out, and that’s where it falls apart. Is that fair?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And that’s a mindset thing on the owner’s part, really. If you think about it, that’s all mindset. It’s saying, “I just want someone to take this off me.” Then hire a strategist or hire an agent, a consultant that’s going to take it off you.

Otherwise, you’ve got to work with people. And, you know, if you’ve got lots of money to throw around, by all means hire a consultant. But if you don’t, as most startups and solopreneurs don’t, then this is your other avenue.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, the other thing I find, Barbara, is that I think sometimes people think when they hear the word systems, they think of this elaborate complex writing exercise. And often all I do is just, you know, step-by-step number checklist outline of things.

Barbara Turley: That’s all it is. Keep it simple. Absolutely keep it simple. I’ll give you an example of a process. Let’s say… let’s go to the most basic possible process: answering your phone.

What is the process for somebody in your business answering the phone? Do they just pick it up and go, “Hello?” Or do they pick it up and go, “Hi, you’re through to the Virtual Hub, it’s Barbara speaking, how can I help you?”

There’s a process, right? And then they’ve got to do… so step one is answer, step two is ask a certain question, step three is transfer the call or take the note, or, you know, bang, there’s a three-step process.

Like, we always overcomplicate these things. People ask me, like, “Where do you find it? Do you have like, do you use a process documentation system?” I’m like, “No, just put it in a Google doc,” or just use Asana or some of these small free tools. They don’t have to be complicated.

Henry Lopez: Agreed. We’re starting to use Zoom as an example, which we’re using to record this, where we’ll record the audio and the video. Well, I’ll walk somebody through how to do something, and now it’s a document. I’ll ask them, “OK, take this now and put that in a step-by-step document.”

Barbara Turley: And then the next step would be, and then come back to me, let’s have a meeting, let’s look through it in case they’ve missed something, or there was something that just didn’t translate well or a step that’s missed, or make them do the process and see if there’s a mistake. Because if there’s a mistake, it might mean there’s a step missing. The person is not a moron.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, great point. Now, the offshore component is because of cost. Is that right?

Barbara Turley: Yes, yeah, it is really. I mean, it’s very cost-effective to do it this way.

Henry Lopez: This is Henry Lopez. Let’s take a quick pause on this episode to chat about your small business dreams. Do you have a great business idea, but have just not been able to get it launched? Have you built a successful corporate career, but need some help making the transition to entrepreneurship? Are you ready to start building your own wealth instead of someone else’s?

I invite you to schedule a free business coaching consultation with me. Just text bizcoach, all together, bizcoach, to 31996 for more information. I welcome the opportunity to chat with you about your business dreams and goals and offer the guidance and accountability that we all need to launch our first business. As an experienced entrepreneur who also made the difficult transition from the corporate world, I understand the challenges you’re facing, and often it’s about helping you ask the right questions.

I can help you through your transition to becoming your own boss. To find out more or to schedule your free coaching session, just text bizcoach to 31996 now. That’s B-I-Z-C-O-A-C-H, bizcoach to 31996, or visit thehowabusiness.com.

All right, we’ve touched around it, but I want to talk a couple more examples. When a small business or a solopreneur is using a VA effectively, especially as they’re starting out, what does that look like? Give me some examples of how someone might start and what that looks like when it’s done well.

Barbara Turley: Yes, when it’s done well, you find people getting more of them. Like, we have a client at the moment we’re working with who started off very tentatively dipping the toe and was like, “I’ll just do part-time.” Now he has three team members with us in the space of a year. And the first one he took on that was part-time, he’s now devastated because the other client, who has the other part of her time, won’t let her go.

So yeah, look, first step, look, we know from the sales call. I’ll be honest with you, when somebody signs up for a sales call, we ask them a series of questions. And, you know, those questions give us some insight, but they also help us to, after doing it for years and years and years, you can almost see the mindset right from that first moment.

And your mindset is extremely important if you want to get this right because if you come in with a negative mindset, we would have to give you an absolute wow rock star in order to change your mindset.

So the people who do very well come in with a mindset of positivity. They’re excited and enthusiastic about it, but they also accept the level of responsibility that they have to work with this person and to get success with this. Hiring a VA in and of itself is not going to make your business successful. You are working with a VA and working together as a team to get this successful is what will make it successful.

Henry Lopez: And if I’m not willing, part of that mindset is if I’m coming into it not willing to make the investment of my time with this person, then it’s likely going to fail.

Barbara Turley: Yes, it will. You know, the second part of that, because I’ve seen some clients where they have failed, but they have failed, and they’re frustrated because they feel like they were spending so much time with the VA.

And what I’ve seen there, when we see that VA go on to the next client and be super successful, what you notice is, and that’s not to say it’s all on the client, by the way, because it’s not. It could just be a personality mismatch, you know, it could just be a wrong placement.

But it can be things like if you’re finding that you’re spending ages… usually, it’s because you’re giving tasks out ad hoc on a daily basis. It could be your communication style not being… what you think you’re saying and what’s being communicated is not the same.

And that’s hard to teach somebody because some people are better, more clear communicators than others. So a little tip I say to clients is the way to get around that: don’t write a massive task. Writing a task is a skill in itself. Don’t write a massive paragraph that’s like a stream of consciousness with no punctuation so that the person has to decipher first what it is that you actually want.

You know, stick to bullet points, clear instructions, no jargon. You know, don’t assume that somebody knows the little abbreviations in your industry. Just make it simple for both sides and be very clear in your instructions.

Henry Lopez: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. We’ve touched on it, but one of the pushbacks I always get is like, “I can’t afford a VA right now.” So what’s your answer to that? And in part, my thought is always that I can start with a small contract, right? X number of hours or a particular task, especially in this area of social media and digital marketing, where you all specialize. But what’s your answer to that if somebody says, “I can’t afford that?”

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s a tricky one because obviously when we start out, you’re trying… I mean, it’s just so hard to navigate all the costs, you know, involved in starting up.

What I do notice, though, is in the startup, in the solopreneur startup sort of phase, if we’re really honest with ourselves, we find ourselves buying a lot of online programs that we also can’t afford. And we’re all guilty of this. We buy a lot of programs, and we sign up for things that we may not finish or that we don’t even have time to get through.

I made a decision in the early days of when I was doing this that I was going, I put it into the, as part of the costs, I was like, “I want to have a monthly… I’m going to spend this much monthly on a VA so that I can actually get out.” I mean, it’s got to be focused on sales and marketing in the early days, but once you sort of get up and running, you’ve got to start budgeting that this is a cost that a business is going to need to have, right?

So let’s go back now with the Virtual Hub. I’ll be honest and say that we have a minimum of 20 hours per week, and a lot of early-stage businesses balk at that, and they feel like it’s too much, and I completely understand that.

I’ve done it from a business perspective because it’s notoriously difficult to manage the other end of the spectrum with just somebody who wants two hours a week, and I won’t get into why, but it’s like a whole other business.

But you can go online. You know, you can use someone like us if you want to come and really take this seriously and take on a staff member. They feel like a staff member. Or, you know, you go online, you can pick up someone for a few hours a week.

The only danger with that is that you have to remember the commitment level. So, you know, if you’re just… it’s like dating, right? If you’re just kind of showing up and sending the odd text looking for a coffee whenever you feel like it, well, the other person may not always be available. The work may get delayed because… and don’t expect somebody to show you the level of commitment they would to a full-time client if you’re only pitching in for two hours a week. So you may get frustrated with that.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, the clients that start with you at that 20 hours a week minimum, have they dabbled with VAs before? Have they gone to, you know, an online site and had somebody do one-off things?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, sometimes they have. A lot of them… look, some of them have never done offshore before. They’ve never even considered it. But those businesses that we tend… I mean, this is, you know, I have a strategy to go out and talk to those kinds of businesses as well.

But those ones, what I’m speaking to them about, and this is mainly online through webinars and things, is to discuss with them. I’m opening their eyes to this concept of the cost of activity, of looking at an offshore strategy.

And those ones would be, they’re typically bigger businesses. They may have been in business for a longer time. They’re already up and running.

The ones in the sort of more startup bucket that come to us, some of them have been badly burnt online, and they’re very fearful. And, you know, the stories are everywhere. You know, you get a VA and then they disappear, you know, this sort of thing. The work was sloppy.

We tend to eradicate 99% of those problems. So some people will come to us and be like, “Look, I’m willing to pay you guys to do it because I just can’t handle the HR end of it. I can’t handle the training. I can’t handle, you know, are they showing up every day for work?” We handle all of that.

So that’s kind of in that more level that they’re willing to pay up all of a sudden because they just don’t want…

Henry Lopez: Yeah. What are some of the questions I can ask myself after I have engaged with the VA, given that for some period of time they’re up and running? How do you measure, how do you help people measure whether it’s working out with that particular person or not?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, look, recruiting, dealing with people like recruiting and HR is kind of way more difficult than people think.

Like, I’ll give you our stats. Our stats are that if 200 people applied for a job with us, and usually we would get 200 to 300 applications every month easily, we might hire five to 7% of those, right?

So that’s how difficult it is for us, and our process is a six-week recruitment nightmare. So we put them through… like, they have to do a five-hour exam just to get through the first stage. So I won’t go into the rest of it, but people fail all along the way, and some of them just fail because of character. Some of them fail because they just don’t have the strong work ethic that we’re looking for.

So recruitment is hard. So don’t beat yourself up if you’ve had a bad experience and you’ve done it yourself. It’s actually not that easy.

But when you get a good person… so let’s say you’ve done the recruitment well, you’ve got a person who shows up on time, they do the work, they’re enthusiastic, they want to learn, all that stuff. Give them a process, get them up and running on that. Give them another one, get them up and running. Give them a suite of processes and get those working first.

And then what I always recommend is you want to give them milestones, right? So the worst thing you can do is kind of just make them feel like, “Well, those are your four processes. You’re just going to be doing those forever.”

Because what happens naturally, even if they don’t mean to, is that people become complacent. But you kind of have to give people, look, once you nail these four, what we’re going to do is I want you to… we’re going to up the level of it. And you want to kind of entice them that there’s growth here.

And that’s also because you want to see them. You want to see, are they able to grow? And hopefully they are.

So yeah, keep moving it up. Like yesterday, I had a meeting with our marketing team. They’re all in the Philippines. And I said to them, “Okay, guys, so now in the next quarter, I want to get to a point where we’re actually looking at conversions.”

We were talking about Google Analytics, and they were showing all the traffic and everything. I said, “You know, I want you… I want to see, are we getting results? So go away as a team.”

Now I can do this because they’re with me for a long time.

Barbara Turley: But we’re developing now our conversion process and looking at, are we getting sales from all this work they’re doing? And I said to them, “I want you to start thinking commercially. All these tasks you’re doing, are they turning into sales for us?” And they got all excited because they’re going to another level now. They got excited by the prospect of doing that.

Henry Lopez: Is this an approach that is somewhat specific to the types of VAs that we’re talking about, the people which are helping people with digital marketing, helping people with social media management? In other words, it’s a process that I’m delegating to them that has measurables associated with it, as opposed to a repetitive task that is harder to accomplish.

Barbara Turley: No, no, not necessarily. Though actually, just as you were talking there, I think one of the greatest measures is to say to yourself after three months, has this person taken weight off me?

You might still be very busy, but are you busy doing more high-value stuff? Has it alleviated a few pressure points for you? If after three months it hasn’t, well, you need to rethink your strategy there.

I think it takes about eight to 12 weeks to really, you know, get in the groove working with a new person. But after about three months, you should be seeing… you should feel the lift, you know.

A lot of our clients feel the lift within three weeks, but realistically, let’s say, you know, eight weeks, that you should be feeling like, “Wow, I don’t have to do that bit anymore. Great. I’m actually doing more phone calls, more sales, more client meetings,” whatever it is that could be your measure.

Just because they’re doing a recurring process that’s simple and they may not grow… well, are you growing? Have you created space and time for yourself to grow? And that’s a great measure as well.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, yeah, I love that. That’s great. All right, you’ve touched on it. The last specific question I wanted to ask again is this: this disruption that happens when I lose the VA that I’ve been working with for some time and has been great for me. I got to think that having developed the systems as part of alleviating that transition to somebody else. But I know you’ve spoken to this specifically in a recent podcast episode, but give me your thoughts on that.

Barbara Turley: Yes, a lot like one of the big… actually, I did a whole podcast on this called What Now? My Great VA Has Just Resigned. Like, you know, because people go, “Oh my God, what am I going to do if I lose this amazing person?” That is the worst feeling in the world, in the world for any business owner. And it doesn’t just apply to VAs. It applies to anybody that you hire.

And my view is, and maybe I’m just built this way, but you want to build a company. Build a business, even if it’s just a lifestyle income type business, always build it so that you’re safeguarding it against that nobody or not many people are indispensable.

Think about salespeople for a second. Sometimes you might feel, “If I lost my sales guy, oh my God.” But if you’ve got a solid lead gen funnel, if you’ve got a solid sales process with a proper sales script and a proper kind of flow of how does the client come through all this system, you can get another salesperson and plug them into that.

The same applies to the VAs. It’s all about how well you build the machine. Of course, there will still be a transition time, but you want to shorten the transition time and the fear of losing someone. And then nobody can ever hold you ransom.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, yeah, I love…

Barbara Turley: Now it’s not perfect, of course. You can’t get it perfect, but you can get close to perfect. For me, I’m like, if someone left, I’ll just slot a new one in.

Henry Lopez: That’s right. Well, and the point you made is so valid that it makes me think I’m not exposed to that with an employee, right? In fact, I could argue that I’m more exposed there. You’ve vetted these people, and this is what they want to do. And as long as we found the right match, I’m probably more likely to have an employee walk out than to lose an assistant.

Now I might have the challenge that I want more than 20 hours of their time and I can’t get that, but that, combined with the fact that the approach is to develop a system that’s repeatable through this, that in and of itself gives me that level of security that I can plug somebody else into the machine. Yeah, there’ll be some transition time, but it’s not the end of…

Barbara Turley: I think as well, remember that sometimes people leave for personal reasons. It may not be that they held you ransom and they could… you might have an amazing VA who’s going off to have a baby and decides she wants to take two years out. Or someone who just, you know, has a family issue that has to go and deal with that. So you can’t just say, “If I treat them well and they love me, they’re going to stay.” Sometimes people have to leave for different reasons. So that’s just life, you know.

Henry Lopez: All right, so we’ve touched on it, but summarize for me the service that you currently offer through The Virtual Hub.

Barbara Turley: Sure. We offer… obviously, we specialize in virtual assistance in the Philippines. We’ve picked that market for a number of reasons. Their English is exceptional. Not all of them, but we recruit for that. But we’ve got great English, a great education system, and are very close to Western culture. So the closest I’ve seen in the Asian region.

So you can actually really develop a great rapport, and they get on with your team and all that sort of thing. So it’s a great country to specialize in.

We also have full offices over there, so we run a 24-hour operation in Cebu, which is a beautiful beach location in the Philippines, and we service all time zones. So we have a lot of US clients, we’ve got Australian clients, and UK clients.

We specialize in three levels of VA: level 1, 2, and 3.

Level 1 is more your general admin VA, so if you need somebody to help manage your email, maybe help with some of that process documentation stuff, and answer your phone, calendar management, all that general admin area.

Level 2 is more if you want somebody who can, let’s say, write a blog or you’ve got a podcast and you want them to get it up on your website. So there’s WordPress involved, there’s probably some social media management. They tend to be more creative, so they can create your Canva images and all that on social media, use Hootsuite, you know, get your kind of… we’re getting more into digital, is what I mean.

And then our level 3 guys are the ones that specialize, and we train in this. It’s where we kind of really excel in CRM platforms like Ontraport, HubSpot, Infusion, and ActiveCampaign. They’re the big four that we do.

And basically, when you think about those platforms, a VA is not going to strategize your funnel for you. But if you can draw it out, if you can draw out what you want to happen on the back of an envelope and take a photograph of it, your VA can go in and build it inside that platform.

They can play around with Zapier integrations. They can make it talk to different systems. So those guys are way more techie and creative in a different way than the level two guys.

And that’s the suite of what we do, basically. That’s our offering to the market.

Henry Lopez: Fantastic. You mentioned The 4-Hour Workweek. Is there another book that comes to mind that you would recommend?

Barbara Turley: No, I actually wouldn’t recommend that one. I’ll tell you why. It is an interesting book, and it blew open the outsourcing and offshoring concepts. So it was great for the world in what it exposed, but the days of going online and getting a $2 an hour VA who’s going to transform your business honestly are gone. Like, it’s 10 years ago since that book came out, I think.

And the world has changed. The outsourcing industry has exploded, but it’s just developed a lot more from there. So he does make it sound a little bit too simple. You know, wow, you can just get a $2 an hour VA and you can spend your whole day on the beach. It’s not like that. It really isn’t like that.

So it is a great book to expose the idea. But in terms of what we’re talking about today, the books that I would recommend you read… there are two that changed my life: Built to Sell, which is a book… it’s the Rockefeller Habits, basically. And the other one is a book called Traction, which it’s all about building the machine.

And if you just read those two books, they’re not very long. They actually give you the process maps, they give you the whole blueprint. It’s unbelievable. And if you can plug people into those blueprints, honestly, it will change how you think about this.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, thank you for that. Thanks for the insights on The 4-Hour Workweek. I agree with you there.

The two books… I’ve read both of them. In fact, Traction is on my desk as I’m looking now because it’s one of those where you kind of use it on an ongoing basis. You reread sections of it. And I’ve got a client now, actually, who’s bought into the whole EOS approach. So great.

Barbara Turley: I’m a big fan. It’s absolutely… I mean, I’ve only read the books. I haven’t paid for any courses or anything. So it’s changed how I run business, even though I was good at this anyway. It’s just elevated what I’ve been doing massively. So I would definitely recommend you go there.

Henry Lopez: Wonderful. Barbara, what’s one thing you want us to take away from this conversation as it relates to VAs for small businesses or solopreneurs?

Barbara Turley: Yes. So the one big takeaway that I’d like anyone to think about is that in business, you know, nobody, no business, regardless of how much money it’s making, has money to throw around, okay?

And you need staff, you need people, you need systems, processes, and teams, but you need to do this cost-effectively because margin is everything, right?

And the more you can embrace the concept of having an offshore component in terms of your team to your business, and you embrace the virtual world, the dividends it will pay you from a business profitability perspective are enormous.

So it is worth investing time in researching this, thinking about this, reading those books, and building a machine and actually plugging an offshore team in.

And if you have onshore staff, let’s say you’ve got local staff, don’t let them worry about their jobs. Elevate them into doing more client-facing work or more sales work, or just take the grunt work off them and get your offshore team really working well.

And that’s not to say that the grunt work is the lower work. It just means it’s different work that’s process-driven that can be done offshore cheaply.

And you’re providing great careers, trust me, for people in the Philippines. We look after a lot of that. We’ve got culture. We give them private health cover. There’s all the stuff that we do there.

Henry Lopez: Sure.

Barbara Turley: And you’re helping the whole economy.

Henry Lopez: Yeah, wonderful. Where do you want us to go online to find out more?

Barbara Turley: Sure, so we’ve got a few freebies for the listeners. If you go to thevirtualhub.com forward slash thehow for this podcast, you can download… there’s a couple of things there that’ll take you through different levels.

So the first one is the quick kind of tasks the VA can do for you. Then I have a seven-part video. It’s short, but it’s a lot of what we’re talking about here. It takes you through a bit of a video course there.

Or you can book a free strategy call with one of our outsourcing strategy consultants to see, you know, are you ready for this yet? And if you’re not ready on that call, they’ll actually give you a strategy on how to get ready. Or, you know, you can come and talk to us about getting a VA.

Henry Lopez: Perfect. And if you didn’t get that link, we’ll have it on the show notes page for this episode at thehowofbusiness.com along with Barbara’s book recommendations. All of that will be there.

Barbara, this has been a great, insightful conversation. Thanks for sharing your interesting journey to becoming an entrepreneur and then these really great insights and really good takeaways, actionable takeaways for us on the topic of virtual assistance.

Barbara Turley: Right, thank you for having me.

Henry Lopez: This is Henry Lopez, and thanks for listening to this episode of The How of Business. My guest again today was Barbara Turley.

We release new episodes every Monday morning, and you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and at our website, thehowofbusiness.com.

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