Mark Bouris: This is The Mentor with Mark Bouris.

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of The Mentor. One of the trends we’re seeing a lot of with business at the moment is the increase in outsourcing work, hiring people to do things we used to do for ourselves—from cooking, cleaning, gardening—and I know I’m one of them.

Everything can now be done with someone else doing it for you. So today, our guests come from two ends of the outsourcing spectrum to talk about their businesses. First up is Brendan Green, CEO and Owner of Hire a Hubby, which provides all kinds of handyman services, renovations, and commercial fitouts.

They’ve been around for about 20 years now, and I’ve heard of ’em, actually. I’ve often wondered what they did, so I’m actually very keen today to find out what’s changed over that time, over that 20-year period since Hire A Hubby started.

Then later on, I’ll be talking to Barbara Turley, who founded The Virtual Hub. They provide virtual assistance to any business that needs it—staff that work either full-time or part-time, helping you with admin, HR, marketing, and any kind of assistance your business needs. I’m looking forward to talking to her today as well.

Okay, let’s get into it.

Okay, Hire a Hubby. I love the name. I often wonder what it does, but it has 352 franchises around Australia, and joining me in the studio is the owner and CEO, Brendan Green. Welcome to The Mentor, Brendan.

Brendan Green: Thanks for having me, Mark.

Mark Bouris: You’re welcome, mate. Hire a Hubby—I sort of remember when it was first set up. I mean, it’d be a long time ago, and I thought to myself, it’s a clever name, very clever name. I guess you probably got lots of jobs and people making funny jokes about what the Hire a Hubby’s actually gonna do when he goes around there. But what was the original concept?

Brendan Green: Look, back in time when it was first created, it was a guy in Melbourne who came up with a concept. I actually bought it off him a year in. But what was happening back in the time was people were outsourcing things like lawns and gardens, and that was about it.

What he did was take that concept and just add another little piece to it, which was providing general, simple handyman services. And it was his wife having coffee with one of her girlfriends, and she said that Richard, the founder, was quite handy. “Can I hire your hubby one weekend?” They saw the name, the opportunity, and put the two together—and that’s how the name was born.

Mark Bouris: Just as simple as that.

Brendan Green: It was as simple as that.

Mark Bouris: And the concept being is hubby’s a good handyman?

Brendan Green: Yeah, well, that was probably the notion back a couple of generations ago. Mark, I think right now—we were just talking outside—everyone’s so time-poor. There’s been a lot of emphasis on kids going through and finishing Year 12, going into university.

Therefore, there’s been a massive drop-off in those doing trades. Consequently, the lack of people out there with the ability to do this work now is growing, and we’ve just tapped into a market that’s flourishing for us every other day, week, and month.

Mark Bouris: So it is a franchise business. So let’s say I decide I want to go into this—can anyone do it?

Brendan Green: Look, you’ve gotta have the basic skill set to be a handyman. So you couldn’t come in and be trained up from scratch. It’s for people that have obviously had somewhere along their lives—yeah.

We’ve had guys that have grown up; they might have been in farming environments. They’ve moved to the big smoke, they’ve changed careers, and ended up wearing the white collar. Something changes in their life—it’s time to do something for them and the family.

So they get out of the big city again and the long hours, buy themself a franchise, and then they revert back to that old skillset that they had from yesterday.

We then put them through a training course. We bring them out of a training course—they have a Cert I in Construction to back them up from that point. Then they can career path from there into Cert II Construction, Cert III Carpentry, kitchen, bathroom, laundry renovations, and that sort of tops out our offer.

We don’t wanna go and build a house for you or an extension, but we’ll do anything from putting up a picture hook to remodeling your bathroom, kitchen, building a deck, or a pergola.

Mark Bouris: Okay, so that’s sort of interesting—it’s not very interesting, actually. I mean, I get the outsourcing demand there is. So you guys have recognized there’s massive demand out there in Australia for a whole lot of reasons for what ordinarily would happen in the household, where the man or the woman would be doing the putting the nail on the wall or fixing up the kitchen.

It’s ’cause everyone’s too busy working. There’s a demand now to get someone outside to come and do that. I’ve got that. And it’s gone beyond now just putting a nail on the wall. As you say, it’s now renovating kitchens, bathrooms, and a few of those sorts of things—but it probably doesn’t go beyond that, not typically. Does it do backyard stuff?

Brendan Green: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, lawns and gardens are sort of—yeah, if they’re big jobs, more one-offs, our guys will step into that.

The sort of rates that our guys are earning aren’t in line with what you’re gonna get paid to do lawns and gardens, so we steered clear of it. When I took over the business back in ’97, I saw that there were so many people competing in that space, so price was the obvious thing to compete on.

We saw more and more people wanting more of the handyman and beyond, so we cut the lawns and gardens out of the offer and stepped into that repairs, maintenance, handyman, renovation space.

That was probably the best thing we did because it clearly differentiated us from the rest. And as a consequence, we’ve pretty much owned the market for the last 15, 20 years.

Mark Bouris: Because I remember many years ago, Rodney Adler had a business called Skilled. It was a franchise business, and actually I think it was listed, or was in a listed entity at one stage on the stock exchange—that would’ve been in the late eighties, early nineties.

And Skilled—opposed to the skill that exists today—Skilled then were people, like you were just saying, mostly tradesmen. I’m not sure if it was a franchise system, but it was maybe slightly ahead of its time.

But I would like you to explain to people who are listening to us, who are maybe thinking about having an idea that they have franchised, like you are doing—how does it work?

Let’s say I want to get something nailed into my wall or I want a new kitchen. Do I email your organization, the head office, and you then push the inquiry out to the person who has the franchise in the particular postcode? How does it actually work? How does it go from inquiry to being executed?

Brendan Green: Yeah, exactly as you described, Mark. We have primarily two points of contact for new customers. What’s becoming old school now, I guess, is the call center, because mostly everything’s done online.

All of the lead generation is typically done online. That filters through the website. Our backend allocation engine allocates the lead to either the owner of the territory or a series of franchisees who are closest if the territory’s not yet owned by a franchisee.

So it might bounce around a couple of times before it gets to the person who says yes. From the moment they accept the job, it then drops into—we’ve got an IT solution that runs on the Salesforce platform—and they capture every bit of activity from that point forward with the customer.

So if Mark’s my customer, I’ll initially create a quote for you on the first job you want me to look at. That’ll be forwarded out to you via email. There’s an auto follow-up process to see if you’re interested in going ahead, booked into an online work calendar, work order sent to either the franchisee or worker that he assigns to the job, and they just continue to trade with you directly.

So second time, the third time round, you’ll just call him back on mobile direct via email to log your next job, and the relationship is then built between franchisee and customer.

Mark Bouris: And I don’t know if this is the case, but do you get a clip of every job, or do you just get a franchise fee?

Brendan Green: We’ve gone with the franchise fee model—a monthly fee.

Mark Bouris: Hard to manage the clip, isn’t it?

Brendan Green: Well, in certain industry spaces, you might say it is. So we’ve accepted that probably for us, the easiest way to run this business and encourage our guys to work harder if they want to—the harder they work, in our case, the more they earn.

So with our flat fee system—to give you an example—end of May, one of our franchisees in Cairns turned over a million dollars for the year, and he’s gonna pay the same management fee to us every month as a guy who might turn over half a million in the year.

So the incentive for him is absolute. For us, we’ve got a guaranteed baseline that we know we’re going to earn. It’s not our only revenue stream, but that’s a banker for us who’s there every month.

Mark Bouris: Okay, so for those people listening, what we’re talking about here is how do you make money out of a franchisee. In the case of Hire a Hubby, it’s because there’s probably, dare I say, cash involved—and how do you monitor whether they’ve done a job?

And of course, if you send a job out to somebody and that person wants to deal with that individual privately, like without going through the head office, you’ve got no way of monitoring that stuff—it’s too hard.

So you’re better off just taking what you call a platform fee—or a management fee—for them using your platform, being on your platform, operating under your license or your brand, and being part of your system.

Brendan Green: Correct.

Mark Bouris: And being part of the greater system.

Brendan Green: There’s no reason for them not to put everything through the Hire a Hubby books. There’s no need to have a second set because they’re not dodging a fee by doing it that way.

So what happens then is inherently they build value into their business because everything goes through everything. I mean, there are two key dates in your business—as you know—the day you start and the day you end.

And the day you end, you wanna maximize your return. The only way you’re going to do that is to show the true value that’s occurred along the way.

Mark Bouris: And what you’re talking about here is how you maximize the value. One of the great things about being a franchisee is that you’re running your own business, so you have a bit of freedom—but by the way, we will say you do not have any more freedom. You actually work harder and longer.

But it doesn’t matter—you work for yourself, and that’s a great thing. But you actually own the goodwill. So when the day comes that you wanna retire or you just don’t wanna be involved in this business anymore, you can sell it.

So you endorse that sale?

Brendan Green: Oh, absolutely.

Mark Bouris: Do you agree to buy back, or—

Brendan Green: No, we typically actually act as a broker. What we found is, on day one of a franchise business, you’re nowhere near the value 20 years in.

So I think our initial offer was $16,000 to buy a franchise, and we were basically giving them away. The average price now is probably closer to $80,000–$500,000 to get into the business.

So somebody who got in 10 years ago, who’s been on that journey north—their new benchmark for value is what we set the new franchise territories at. So add that goodwill component that you mentioned before, and it’s our price plus.

So the better they do, the better their books look. Obviously, you’ve got all our time because you can’t just sell the business tomorrow—you’ve gotta find the right buyer. You’ve gotta find that buyer with the right investment capacity as well.

So that’s the combination of those things that will get you the outcome moving forward.

Mark Bouris: So again, what you’re saying is the way someone works out what the value of his or her business is after being a franchisee for a number of years and they decide they want to get out is—one, the starting point is the $85,000 you just gave as an example.

That’s the first amount of money someone’s gonna pay to buy their business because that’s the cost of getting into a franchise—any new franchise—plus the valuation of the business that this particular individual has built up in that particular area.

Brendan Green: That’s certainly how we do it, Mark. Yes.

Mark Bouris: Yeah, and that makes sense. Therefore, there’s an incentive for the franchisee to work really hard to build up value.

Brendan Green: Yeah, absolutely. And look, probably taking that word “work hard”—obviously early days, we all know as business owners, you’ve gotta roll the sleeves up and put in.

We’ve certainly tried to develop a culture because we’ve seen a burnout factor in the business. The guys who win the Franchisee of the Year in the second and third years are falling on their feet fourth and fifth year because they’ve burned out if they don’t put the right support structures in.

We’ve got some admin service relief that we provide the guys. We’ve got an HR service to help them build up and put some staff in underneath them.

And the guy I mentioned, just by example in Cairns, who’s turned over a million bucks, took a seven-week holiday in the US in the middle of that—and he’s three years into the business.

So work hard, but work smart is certainly something we’re trying to encourage the guys to do, because you lose too many good guys to burnout if you don’t have that.

Certainly from a support team perspective, we’re pushing our guys to push the franchisees to think about beginning the year by booking out the holidays you’re going to take. Work your budget out around how many weeks you’ve got left to achieve the financial outcome you’re after, so you at least get the balance of some time off with family, friends, et cetera.

Work hard for the remaining weeks that you’re around to earn the quid.

Mark Bouris: And do you have—well, in my case, not a big road—we’re a franchise business. We have what is called Business Development BDMs who basically go around, and they’re in charge of maybe 20 or 30—in our case, 35—franchises each or something like that.

They’re basically relationship people—go around to each of the franchise owners, sitting down, talking to them, seeing how they’re going. We go through budgets with them, helping prepare business plans and that sort of stuff.

We have our end-of-year conferences where everyone gets prizes, and we get everyone together, and they have a good time together. I guess you’re running all those sorts of typical programs.

Brendan Green: Same process, different badge. We put the guys through their induction training course like you would with Yellow Brick. They come out, we put them into a program we call Forming Good Habits for 12 weeks, which is just to get them into the routine things that they should do every week and understand the operational benchmarks.

We’re in a business where you provide quotes, and the number of guys who will do a quote and wipe the brow and say, “Fantastic, that job’s done,” forgetting the follow-up that goes with actually winning the quote that you put the effort into in the first place.

So getting them to do that sort of stuff—and do it quickly enough—we know there’s a 20% higher close rate on those that have followed up in the first week than those that let it go after that.

Because first up, customers with us—they want something done, they want it done quickly. Those who respond with a reasonable price in a short timeframe—they win the business. So get them into that habit.

Because of the nature of what we do, people are leaving an industry that they’ve been comfortable in, moving to something completely different. So all they’re focused on in training—as much as we try to train them in a wide range of things—they want to get the quote right so they win the business and make some money.

So we get them after 12 weeks and put them into a Business 101. It brings them back to the basics of running the business and then looking at the financial numbers rather than the operational numbers.

Put them into a support group at week 16 so they sit around the table once a quarter with seven or eight mates that are of a similar sort of stage in business or style of business. They’ve got a field manager, much like what you talked about with your BDM.

Those guys are responsible for chairing the meeting, recording the notes and takeaways, and then each of the individuals has a plan for the next three months, which gets followed up with an individual phone call monthly.

The quarterly catch-up is a support group.

Mark Bouris: So, and this is stuff they pay for. I mean, that’s—that’s—that’s your management fee’s paying for, that’s what the monthly fee’s for. Yeah, yeah—and conference.

Brendan Green: As well, like you said, just to celebrate the successes of those who were the best of the best.

Mark Bouris: Yeah. I’ve just come from one of those over in Indonesia. You’ve gotta do this sort of stuff. It’s the whole franchise system—it’s very collegiate. The head franchisor, you’ve gotta build the collegiate view. You’ve gotta just keep espousing why it’s important to be all together, hanging together.

And do you have any competition? Is there a competitor out there that you are looking over your shoulder at?

Brendan Green: You are always looking over your shoulder. There have been a few that have come. Some have adopted models that are not dissimilar to some established brands out there that started off in the lawn and garden space and then tried to move into multi-industry types.

So we’ve had our eye on one or two there. I’ve actually had a couple of my former staff decide that they might do it a bit better, so they’ve gone out and had a crack. Thankfully, at this stage, we’ve still got a reasonable lead in the marketplace, but we’re not conceited in terms of where we sit at the moment.

I mean, it’s a very innovative business that we run. Technology’s been at the forefront. Support services for the franchisees to reduce that burnout and give them their life back have been a real key play. So we’re gonna keep pushing that way.

We’re like you—we’ve got our conference coming. We’ve got about 400 people going to Hobart in a couple of months. So we have one in Hobart in February—yeah, that’s great.

Mark Bouris: Actually, we had our conference in Hobart—we had 500 people in Hobart in February. It was a great venue.

Brendan Green: Yeah, we thought we’d try and mix it up. We were in Vietnam last year, and Uluru the year before, and we’ve been to Bali and a couple of other places. So I think we’ve got it into the culture now where it’s part of the vernacular.

Yeah, we’ll do that after the conference. So it’s now that annual thing that the guy in Cairns and the guy in Hobart, the guy in Broome and the guy in Bunbury—they’re all talking about the fact that that’s where we all congregate once a year. And it’s just part of what we do now.

Mark Bouris: And can you—what do you, I mean, obviously you’ve been a student of the outsourcing concept—what do you think is driving it? What are your observations?

Brendan Green: Probably going back to what I said before about the lack of trade skills that exist in blokes these days—and I hate to be sexist there—but the stereotypical thing that we saw early days was that it is the thing that most young blokes were grabbed by the dad by the ear, down the back shed, and you were taught to do all that stuff around the home.

Just doesn’t seem to be happening there. There are obviously within our back sheds—well, there’s a bit of that—but I think there’s also this whole… it’s such a fast-paced world that we live in now. Everything’s instant. The smartphone gives you every bit of information you want right here, right now, and people now want whatever they want fixed, in our case, done right here, right now.

Mark Bouris: And is it price— is it price sensitive or not as price sensitive? Is it more about instantaneous?

Brendan Green: Look, I think you’d be surprised. We were in a situation—we knocked back 300 jobs in one month in Sydney. A couple of key pockets—Eastern suburbs being one of those.

Rather than saying no to these customers, we usually send our franchisees out to give a quote. So we started quoting a call-out over the phone just to see if we could maintain the customer base. We were getting twice what our franchisees’ average first-hour rate was by quoting over the phone just to test the market.

So price is not a real issue—it’s speed. I think it’s comfort as well. Our brand’s been around for 20 years, so if they’re coming to us, they know that it’s not the cheapest product in the market, but it is probably more premium on the basis that our work is guaranteed by us as the franchisor.

So if you are the franchisee going out there, if something happens where the job’s not done to the satisfaction of the customer, we’re gonna stand behind and warrant that work.

Mark Bouris: Yeah, that’s very important.

Brendan Green: So police checks, photo ID, the fact that our guys are licensed, they’ve got white cards—they tick a lot of boxes for those who are discerning in their purchase decisions.

Mark Bouris: So you’re not thinking to yourself, “Oh, I’ve just let someone do a whole lot of work and there’s been a case in the joint.” Well, you’ve got a copy. And if they do, I can always ring Brendan up.

Brendan Green: Yeah, well, you’ve got a copy of his photo on his ID card. So we’re fairly comfortable that that’s ticking boxes for the customers that we wanna service.

Mark Bouris: I’m lucky—I’ve got a sort of roustabout bloke that does a lot of those things for me here in Sydney. But I know that often friends of mine say, “Do you know someone who could come in and put some paintings up on the wall?”

It sounds like a pretty simple thing, but you don’t wanna ruin the wall, and you’ve gotta hang them right. You’ve got two—you want them all lined up. It’d be nice if you had one of those laser measures and all that sort of stuff.

Not all of us have one of those in our top drawer. Quite frankly, outside of the guy that works for me—his name’s Nick—I wouldn’t even know how to look a handyman up. Maybe you look on the internet, but then how’s this guy better than that one?

Just in an anonymous sense—are you getting more women applying to become franchisees?

Brendan Green: Yeah, we’ve got a lot of women involved in the business. Again, not to be sexist, a lot of them have been becoming involved in the admin side. There are a few who will go out on the tools in various sorts of skill sets.

It’s not the typical environment—I’d say 99% of our inquiries are from males. But one of the key things we’ve done since 2013 was increase the admin service support for the guys so they can dictate a quote into a voice app and send that as a message back to an admin person.

That person plugs the earphones in, taps it into the computer system for them, sends the quote to the customer, then follows that quote up, schedules the work for the franchisee, invoices that after it’s done, puts the receipt information in.

They become more hands-on—get the job done—and reduce the time in the back office. So you get to summer, you’ve got daylight saving and plenty of hours to be outside doing this sort of work.

What we didn’t want our guys to do was come home at seven, eight o’clock and sit down after a quick bite to eat and have two hours’ worth of paperwork to do—because it just kills them.

Mark Bouris: Yeah, a hundred percent. So do you charge extra for that, or is it—

Brendan Green: Yeah, look, it’s outsourcing again, funny enough. So it started off with one wife of a franchisee doing it for her husband, and now she’s got seven staff and 25 franchisee customers, plus a bunch of other trades doing it.

So we’ve actually developed an IT business that sits beside Hire a Hubby now, which is an end-to-end franchise solution with a trade app as well. So not only will we provide that type of service to our own network, but it’s gonna extend now out to the greater trade network.

Mark Bouris: And do you do all the buying, Brendan? I mean, let’s say the trades need to buy timber, blah, blah—or do you just say, “Look, you go and find it yourself”?

Brendan Green: We’ve got preferred relationships. Bunnings is the biggest player in Australia in that space, so we’ve got a very tight relationship with those guys. When you join the business, you’re given a bunch of discount structures that you tap into immediately just by virtue of being part of the brand.

Mark Bouris: And that’s certainly one of the key strategic partnerships you’ve got with Hire a Hubby. For those people who are listening—how many years is this? Twenty years.

I think a really important point that comes out of this—it sounds like a very polished business, and you know exactly all these things about your business—but if you go back 19 years, that wasn’t the case.

Listeners are gonna understand: if you’re a budding entrepreneur and you wanna get into a business like this, or any startup, I don’t think it’s gonna be an overnight success. Generally speaking, these things take years and years and years to get right.

There are very few people who create things overnight and are an overnight success—even in three, four, or five years. It’s rare—extremely rare. And the business evolves. It probably bears very little resemblance today compared to what it was 20 years ago.

Brendan Green: It’s nothing like it. I mean, start with my meals—baked beans on toast is something that’s a rarity now rather than a staple diet. So echoing your point about overnight success.

We were a triplicate invoice pad and a pink trailer driving around. Technology’s changed. We’ve grown as a business. We’ve brought good people into the business as franchisees, good people into staff.

Encouraging those guys to take an active role in developing parts of the business—if you try to do it all by yourself, you’re limited to that one person’s effort. So we’ve got a staff of about 40–45 and some really good minds in there.

They’re encouraged to take a lead, and they’re as responsible as me these days for growing it to bigger and better levels.

Mark Bouris: Well, congratulations. It’s a great brand. It’s a great business, and it’s on the cusp of a big change in our social environment—the way we operate.

And thank you—as I usually do, I offer everybody an opportunity to ask me a question if they’ve got one.

Brendan Green: Thank you, mate. I mentioned I’ve got an IT startup at the moment, and whilst it’s underpinned by the use that we have at Hire a Hubby, we’re looking to get out. It is one of those spaces where you need to develop quickly.

We’re trying to find some partners in the marketplace to bring some money in to build that up so we don’t get overrun by someone with deeper pockets than us.

Just curious about where to go, or your advice on who the right people are to talk to to raise some funds for a startup—because obviously it doesn’t have the traction of a 20-year business. It’s got some big plans, and we’re just looking to find the best way to—

Mark Bouris: Is it in the same space?

Brendan Green: Yeah, so it’s a cloud-based franchise end-to-end management solution.

Mark Bouris: For managing franchises? Of any type?

Brendan Green: Yep, absolutely. It also has a component on the end where you can conduct the trading piece—which, in our case, the Hire a Hubby guys go out and provide you with a quote and an invoice. But you could do that in the printing industry, the signage industry, or anything else that prepares a quote.

So it’s an IT solution.

Mark Bouris: IT solution for franchising businesses that want to outsource all those administrative tasks—things they would ordinarily do—so they can just do the real business.

Brendan Green: Well, manage it end-to-end. From recruiting the franchisee in the first instance, managing compliance with the code of conduct, all the way through to onboarding, training, and having records.

We keep all of that contained in one spot. So it’s a single source of truth from the time the guy first inquires about a franchise to the day he leaves.

Mark Bouris: Well, I think the two organizations I would recommend—the first one would be Blackbird, and the second one is AirTree Ventures.

Daniel Petre—he’s an ex-Microsoft executive, brilliant guy, great person. Recently raised another $200 million for venture capital and is a big investor in very early-stage ventures.

He likes to invest in people who have proven track records—someone who can lean on your 20-year track record at Hire a Hubby. Your expertise is clearly in this franchise support business.

You’re taking that backend and bringing it into the marketplace—the multiplier effect. Good on you.

So I would recommend someone like Daniel Petre from AirTree Ventures. If he likes your deal, he’ll support you early, and importantly, in the second investment round. Investors like to know the first investors are still in.

So my experience is he’s one of the best out there.

Brendan Green: Fantastic. Thank you.

Mark Bouris: Good on you. Thanks, Brendan.

Brendan Green: Thanks for having me.

Mark Bouris: Coming up next on The Mentor, I’ll chat with the founder of a virtual assistant business—that provides remote staff to help businesses with all kinds of admin. Stay tuned.

Okay, Barbara Turley, a young Irish lass sitting here in front of me, founded The Virtual Hub in 2015 after realizing lots of businesses she was working with didn’t have the time to do the admin to support their strategies to grow the business.

Really important point—to grow the business—and I now wanna know all about this. Barbara, welcome to The Mentor.

Barbara Turley: Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be on the show now.

Mark Bouris: Just tell me—or tell everyone who’s listening—exactly what is a virtual assistant?

Barbara Turley: Do you know, that is like the number one question that everybody wants answered?

Interestingly, a virtual assistant is a very broad term. There’s actually something—I mean, there’s like a hundred different definitions of what a virtual assistant is. So the first thing to know is that it spans across a lot of different sectors. It depends on what industry you’re actually in.

So you can have virtual—it really only means that they’re not in the same office as you. So this person could be a bookkeeper, it could be somebody who’s doing legal services for you, and they just happen to be in a different location.

Now, in terms of what we do—virtual assistants in terms of The Virtual Hub—is we help mainly small to medium businesses with their general admin in the office. Now they are virtual, but we also do social media, content management, managing WordPress blogs and stuff like that, and we do marketing automation systems.

So we play quite heavily in the digital marketing implementation space.

Mark Bouris: So let’s say I’m a plumber in Penrith and I’ve got a business—I’ve got three or four plumbers working for me. I’d like to market, but I’ve got no idea about social media. I’m no good at making sure all my appointments are done properly, et cetera.

Is that something—would you be able to help me?

Barbara Turley: Yes, so we would help. And I’m really glad that you brought up the “I don’t know anything about social media” part, ’cause often we do find clients coming to us saying exactly what you’ve just said.

The trick with a virtual assistant—and here’s the biggest tip of the day—is to remember that they are an assistant. So if you don’t know what you’re doing yourself, they’re sort of waiting for you to tell them what you need done, and then they’re going to implement it for you.

So somebody who really doesn’t know what they want done can find it very hard to work with a virtual assistant. So we always recommend it’s probably a good idea to have a strategist or a coach and then an assistant to implement.

‘Cause when you work with a business coach, often they give you a whole list of stuff that needs to be done, and you just don’t have the time—you know, you’re running your business. It’s a great idea then to have a virtual assistant that can actually implement all this stuff that needs to be done.

Mark Bouris: So where do they—where do I—so I’m the plumber.

Barbara Turley: Mm-hmm.

Mark Bouris: Do you have people you recommend for me to go and talk to—who’s gonna build my strategy or my business coach? Someone who’s gonna actually give me the structure, which I then hand over to you guys to implement?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so we do. We’ve got a couple of referral partners that we would refer people to. I mean, there are lots of people out there, but we are the touch people, definitely.

There’s online strategists, we’ve got product launch strategists, we’ve got digital marketing strategists, and more traditional-type business coaches that we can help people to work with. They’re not part of Virtual Angel Hub, but we know that this is an area our clients typically will need help with, so we refer them to other people.

Now, the other thing we do at Virtual Angel Hub that is quite different from a lot of our competitors is—we saw this problem obviously coming. We saw clients having this problem. So what we’ve done is actually built an entire library of processes, step-by-step maps, and we train all of our VAs on our specific processes, and then we give those to the client.

So with social media, for example, we have a full process already built that all of our VAs are trained on. So that helps massively to bridge the gap. If you don’t really know what you’re doing, we can just say, “Well, you could just use our strategy.” Now, we’d still think it’s probably a good idea to know something or get a strategist, but okay.

Mark Bouris: Yeah, we do that. Because I think every small business today should have a website, and I think every small business today—even if it’s just to get people giving their recommendations and say the service was good or bad—that personal recommendation process is pretty powerful.

And I think, therefore, if they’re gonna have a website, they might as well do a bit of marketing—particularly if they’re a retailer or they’ve got products with a bit of color that they can put on Instagram, things that look interesting.

But most of these people not only don’t have the skill to implement—they don’t have the time.

Barbara Turley: They don’t have the time. Because I was actually just saying to someone earlier today—we actually don’t sell virtual assistants, we sell time. Because the big thing that people actually want is time.

And you know how I actually started this business—I was a business coach, and the one problem I saw every client I worked with had—I kept saying to them, “You sort of know what you wanna do here, but you’ve got no time.” That’s the big problem.

So I started recruiting virtual assistants in the Philippines to help them out, and before I knew it, I was just getting flooded with people asking for more virtual assistants than business coaching. So I just decided, “Well, I’m just gonna build this business called Virtual Angel Hub.” And that’s how it started.

Mark Bouris: And so how many years have you been going?

Barbara Turley: We’re just into three years in March. But really, if I’m honest, the first year was kind of a disaster, so I would say we’re more like two years in business now.

Mark Bouris: Yeah—and disaster meaning what?

Barbara Turley: Look, I know people running small businesses will love to hear the war stories. But I started out, and I was recruiting VAs.

Like I said, the first problem that I unearthed—and as they say in business, you’ve gotta find a problem that people are having that they’ll literally fall over themselves to pay you money to fix today—so I found that problem, and it was that people had no time.

So I would recruit VAs for them, and then I unearthed the second problem that came with that, which was much bigger. The problem really was that once they got the VA, they had no idea how to delegate, or how to run a team, or how to actually communicate effectively with somebody in a virtual environment.

The third problem was that a lot of the VAs coming in had the same problem on their side—they weren’t trained enough. They sort of said they knew how to do stuff, but really they needed more training, and they needed help to communicate with the client more effectively for both to get success.

So from that, after six months of constant problems—complaints, HR issues, et cetera—apart from nearly having a nervous breakdown, I decided that I was either gonna have to close this business or totally reinvent it.

So we literally sacked about 70% of the VAs, we got rid of a lot of the clients—no offense to any of the clients—but we had to figure out who the client really was that was perfect for us. Then we rebuilt our HR and recruiting process in the Philippines, and we built a rock-solid training program for the VAs and for the client that we make everybody go through so that we can match them properly and get proper success.

Mark Bouris: So you’ve built a marketplace for VAs and small business owners. That’s pretty typical of the way things are today.

And I often say this—the way the world is, is that we are deconstructing traditional businesses into all its various parts—marketing, product, service, and administration—and we are taking the product and service pieces out, leaving that with the traditional business owner.

And all those other parts—we’re actually farming out to other people who are experts at it, who can also build an economy of scale such that they can provide a better service.

So in your case, let’s say I’m the plumber guy and I have to go and hire somebody to do what you offer. I’m gonna have to pay someone maybe $80,000 a year—or maybe two people—and my business doesn’t justify that.

But I can go to you—you can employ those people, and the reason you can is because you’ve got three of me pushing against that one cost. So this creates enormous efficiency—monetary efficiencies—which is what you’ve tapped into.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and also what I’ve really enjoyed about this business is that because I was a business coach before, and I also came from corporate—I came out of investment banking—I had a lot of experience with big systems, big teams, virtual teams.

We had a lot of virtual teams in global banking systems. But I really enjoy now being able to push a lot of ideas to a lot of clients without being a personal coach for all of them.

So we push ideas down through the teams of VAs—new stuff that’s happening—and we get them to go to the client and say, “Do you want us to implement this?”

We also have a help desk and a support team that help. So sometimes you might get one VA with us, but there are four people in the background on the help desk collaborating with them on something you’re trying to implement in your business.

Mark Bouris: Do you get a dedicated VA?

Barbara Turley: We do have dedicated staff, yeah.

Mark Bouris: So I get to know the person?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Usually. And the great thing for us at the moment is what we are seeing—and this is great for Australia—because sometimes there’s backlash against outsourcing, especially offshore, because local people are saying we’re taking jobs.

But what we’ve really seen is that the businesses that have come to us would maybe have failed had they not come to us in the first place. Or at the very least, the business owner would’ve had a crash.

And then what we’ve seen is they’ve grown with us, and now they’re hiring salespeople in Australia or hiring more high-value staff here and creating jobs—which has been amazing for me to be part of.

Mark Bouris: And how do you charge? How does it work?

Barbara Turley: We make it nice and easy. We deal with dedicated staff, so we do part-time or full-time staff—20 hours a week minimum or 40 hours a week.

We charge monthly in advance, and everything’s built in—holidays, paid leave, public holidays, tax, super—everything in the Philippines. You don’t have to worry about any of that.

It’s one fee every month, we auto-bill it, so you don’t even need to think about it. There are no lock-in contracts—it’s a 30-day notice to cancel.

We do that because we want people to stay because they’re loving it and getting success—not because they’re forced into a contract.

Mark Bouris: That’s pretty cool. Where do you go from here?

Barbara Turley: So now we’ve built a platform that is highly scalable. One of the biggest challenges is matching supply and demand, because we don’t recruit to brief—we constantly fill our training programs in the Philippines.

Now we’ve got something where we know we can deliver on the brand promise—which is that you won’t just get a VA, you’ll actually get success with a VA, and you’ll get a team behind your VA that’s trained and focused on the longevity of the client.

From here, we feel like we’ve got a really scalable model. Our recruiting systems are working great, our lead gen is working great, and we’re expanding.

We’ve brought someone on in Ireland to manage European sales, and we’ve got someone in Australia doing sales here.

Mark Bouris: What is it about Ireland? They produce such good IT platform people and financial services people.

Barbara Turley: That’s a great question. One of the key moves that happened was the government recognized we had a very young population, English-speaking, and positioned Ireland as a gateway to Europe.

They dropped the corporate tax rate to attract multinationals, and massive tech companies started arriving. Then we had the tech boom—that’s how we became the Celtic Tiger.

Mark Bouris: And now a lot of those people are exported around the world.

Barbara Turley: Yeah—and a lot come back as well. But the Irish diaspora is huge—there are about 30 million Irish people globally and only about 4 million in Ireland.

Mark Bouris: And what’s interesting is people are getting skilled up in places like Ireland, then coming somewhere like Australia and becoming entrepreneurs—building platforms and matching parties.

I think outsourcing—the deconstruction of everything—is really important. It creates efficiency and opportunity.

If you have a skill, you can multiply it—turn it into a business instead of just a job.

Barbara Turley: Exactly. That’s the difference between creating a job for yourself and actually building a business.

A lot of people build glorified jobs that tie them down. But really, you’ve gotta think, “I want to build a business,” which is a different thing.

Mark Bouris: You’re in the business of EAs, as opposed to being an EA.

Barbara Turley: Exactly.

Mark Bouris: And for those listening—what does it take, in a personal sense, to make that leap? Leave the cozy, comfortable job?

Barbara Turley: Yep. I worked in corporate for 15 years. I was in asset management. I had a big salary. You know, I was in, I was a trader for 10 years, so you know I had a wish to do my own thing.

I always thought, I want to build something, I wanna create something. My first business that I started after leaving corporate—look, I, to be honest, as well, I was doing a lot of investing as well. So I do that sort of thing on the side, which is also a business in itself. You gotta think about it that way. Um, but I started a platform again online, ’cause I was very interested in digital, called Energise Wealth.

And it was designed—it’s a platform. It’s supposed to be a spa, a beautiful space that looks like a Marie Claire magazine for women that meets women at whatever stage they’re at in their wealth journey, ’cause I wanted to make money more of a feminine topic, ’cause it’s a bit of a masculine topic, so that’s still there.

I did an online TV show. I did lots of things right, but I did a product launch online. So I launched a course. Now, anyone who’s done this knows that it’s extraordinarily difficult to get that right. It can cost a lot of money, and it’s a bit, you know, it’s an emotional rollercoaster, and it went okay, but I lost money on it, that’s the truth.

And I went into a hole of depression for about three months after that, ’cause I just thought, you know, it was just the whole shame of not doing well and all of these things. And it was really out of the depths of that that I kind of had to do something. So a few people asked me—that’s when I got into business coaching—and I thought, well, I’ll just start doing this.

Mark Bouris: You know, just while I think about what the hell I’m gonna do, people pay me per hour.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And I thought, I don’t, I dunno what I want to do. I don’t really wanna be a business coach, but people are asking me to do this. But from that journey, I discovered the problem. So the one thing about doing—you’ve gotta try to know that whatever you start doing, you have to become a bit of a hunter, and you’ve gotta hunt out where the real problem is, and what are people going to pay me money to do.

Um, what problem can I solve for people right now? And often that problem is very different to what you think it’s gonna be yourself, and you’ve gotta find that out. So I think it’s a commitment to just keep going—you’ve gotta try stuff.

Mark Bouris: Where do you get the resilience from?

Barbara Turley: Look, I’m a natural—you know, I’m very lucky. I came from a family, I’ve got a strong family background. I remember my mom always telling me, “You can do anything you wanna do.” So I have a very strong inherent belief in myself. It’s not an ego thing, it’s more just a, “I’ll keep fighting until I find the answer.”

Um, and there has to be a moment where you’re going to give up and change tack as well.

I think, yeah, the resilience comes from being a bit of a hunter. I know that’s my personality type. For people who don’t have that, I think you know it in your heart, and if you’re not like that and you’re not willing to turn every stone to find the answer, then maybe this entrepreneurial thing might not be for you, because it’s not an easy game, right? It’s not like you just come up with something and bang, you’ve got a massive business. Entrepreneurship is a tough game, and anyone that’s been successful will tell you that—you’ve gotta turn every stone and try a lot of stuff.

Mark Bouris: And there’s nothing wrong with not being an entrepreneur.

Barbara Turley: Nothing wrong with that at all. And sometimes I think to myself, what have I done? Would it not have been easier?

Mark Bouris: Well, that’s funny. Sometimes you think to yourself—I think to myself—what would have happened if I hadn’t gone and done the things I’ve done? Or would I have sort of maybe been running a bank perhaps now and earning probably the same sort of money, you know?

Yeah. And maybe a lot more holidays along the way. Correct. And without any of the—there’s not as much personal stress. You still would worry about the business because you have a job to do, but it’s different. But it’s not your money.

Barbara Turley: It’s totally different. I mean, it’s not your reputation, the sleepless nights. I mean, I have struggled with this. This is one of the things I know that you’d be talking to listeners about. I mean, there are the sleepless nights. No matter how resilient you are, you wake up at two o’clock in the morning, and you just have the fear.

Yeah. And it doesn’t matter how strong you are, but it’s about—one of the things that has helped me is that I’ve surrounded myself with a few others, mostly female. I’ve got a couple of males. They’re not coaches, they’re not mentors—they’re just people who are mates going at the same rate that I am, and I know that they’re suffering the same things we are.

We talk—you have to talk to someone, because it’s a lonely game.

Mark Bouris: Yeah. Well, that’s—I think that’s the best description of it. It’s very lonely. Not alone—you are alone.

Barbara Turley: Mm.

Mark Bouris: It’s all your problem.

Barbara Turley: And social media doesn’t help, because everyone’s going, “Oh, I just won this big contract,” and there’s all this stuff on social media. One of the things that I’ve actually committed to this year for myself is to be really real on social media.

I’ve decided to come out and be really real about what’s actually happening, because a lot of people just see the exterior of what I’m doing, and it looks like success—and it is—but there are the challenges, you know?

So I actually come out and make posts on social media. I did one yesterday saying, you know, after about two months—I’ve had to make some really big decisions in the Philippines around legal employment law and stuff over there that I just never thought I’d be doing. And I’ve been literally, like, furrowed brow and tight face for about two months trying to deal with it.

And now we’ve made the decisions and I feel lighter again, but it was a two-month journey with that. So I thought, you know, I’m just gonna tell people that’s what I—that’s why I haven’t been on social media for two months.

Mark Bouris: Sometimes you feel like the sword of Damocles is hanging over your neck the whole time. And that’s what you just said—that’s probably a way of expressing what the Mentor show’s about.

It’s actually about getting the fabric of small business owners—what is actually going on—as opposed to all the stuff where they’re saying, “Oh wow, we did this, we’re growing great.” Everybody who’s been a guest on this show—from Luke Mangan to all sorts of people—they put you up on a pedestal, including me.

But I’m happy, and these other guests have all been happy, including you today, to say to people listening to the show: it is very, very tough to be an entrepreneur, and it is probably 2% success and the other 98% is doing it tough.

Barbara Turley: And it’s anxiety. The anxiety is just—and I’m a strong person. I know myself. I haven’t suffered from depression and these things, but I certainly have since I started my own business, you know, and I had a baby at the same time.

So for women out there who may be thinking—you know, I’m very passionate about teaching women in particular how to say, you know, you don’t have to work yourself into the bone. You can run a successful business and be a successful mother as well. There’s no reason why we can’t do this together and enjoy it at the same time.

Now, okay, there’s the anxiety of entrepreneurship. But I’ll give you an example—I delegate a lot, clearly, ’cause that’s my business model. Because the big job I wanna do right now is to be a mom. That’s the big job I wanna do.

So I have a nanny who comes in the afternoon to help me out for a few hours, and that’s when I work. But my morning’s usually—apart from when I’m in here chatting with you—with my daughter.

Mark Bouris: You should have brought your daughter in. How old is she?

Barbara Turley: She’s nine months.

Mark Bouris: What’s her name?

Barbara Turley: Ruby.

Mark Bouris: Oh, great name. It would’ve made our day.

Barbara Turley: Well, she was still asleep when I left.

Mark Bouris: I always give everyone an opportunity to ask me one question. Barbara, do you have a question you’d like to ask?

Barbara Turley: I do, actually. So one of the things I’ve been struggling with is—now we’re at this time when I want to scale this business, but I know in my heart, I don’t think I’m thinking big enough.

We can, you know—we’ve got competitors that have thousands of people, and our goal is to have a thousand people by year five. We’re on track for that, but part of me wonders—there’s always a question in my mind about, “When you get really big, my life is just gonna be over.”

And that doesn’t necessarily—I think it’s because I haven’t done that yet, so I have a fear about that.

Mark Bouris: When you say your life is over, what do you mean?

Barbara Turley: It feels like it’s just gonna be so much—a huge business is gonna be a massive headache.

Mark Bouris: Is it risk?

Barbara Turley: No, I don’t mind risk. It’s more the people demanding of me. Maybe I’ll be working to the bone.

Mark Bouris: You won’t be able to grow the big business unless you take on that part.

Barbara Turley: Yeah.

Mark Bouris: There are a lot of sacrifices to be made in growing a big business. I’ve been divorced twice—my business played a role. Sometimes you gotta make the right decisions for yourself.

Maybe instead of trying to grow it fast, you grow it more slowly. You’ve got a young baby, a family—there’s a lot to manage. A big business will draw you in.

Barbara Turley: That’s really helpful. I think a lot of it is ego. I wanna have that massive business, but what I really want is a certain lifestyle. I don’t want to go back to something that’s so demanding.

Mark Bouris: Maybe push the horizon out further. There’s nothing wrong with growing slower if it gives you a good life.

Barbara Turley: Totally. Grow consistently rather than in massive bursts.

Mark Bouris: The only risk is someone overtakes you. You just have to stay vigilant.

Barbara Turley: There’s so much opportunity in this space. And honestly, I’d challenge anyone to try this business—it’s a people business, and that comes with headaches.

Mark Bouris: You’ve answered your own question. Slow the pace, push the horizon out. You can still build something big and have a good life.

Barbara Turley: Thank you very much.

Mark Bouris: You look like you’re on top of it.

Barbara Turley: I am right now. The business is firing, and I don’t wanna lose that.

Mark Bouris: Nice to meet you, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: You too. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Mark Bouris: You’re welcome. This has been the Mentor with Mark Bouris. You can follow Mark on LinkedIn.