Finding virtual help for your business to scale beyond your dreams
The Nextfem Podcast
Want the transcript? Download it here.
Episode breakdown
Having a support assistant is almost a necessity for today’s budding entrepreneur. You know that you simply cannot do it all alone, but you may not be profitable enough in the beginning to hire more staff members. A support assistant could be the perfect answer, but the process is not without its challenges. How do you find the right person? How do you train them for what you need them to do? How do you know what to delegate and what to handle yourself? We’re covering all these questions and more in today’s show!
Barbara Turley is an inventor, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, a business she started mostly by happenstance. Her business exploded in the space of 12 months to become one of the leading companies to recruit, train, and manage virtual assistants in digital marketing and social media space for businesses. If you have a business where you need to free up your time and energy so you can go to the next level, then this is the episode for you! Getting the right support as an entrepreneur is critical, and Barbara is on a mission to eradicate small business overwhelm with a new virtual assistant model. In this episode, Barbara shares the art and science of using Support Assistants to scale your business, why outsourcing with Support Assistants is the new lean business model, when you should fire your support assistant, and the top 5 reasons someone can fail with a support assistant, and how to fix it.
- How Barbara came into the Support Assistant business by accident
- Barbara’s path to The Virtual Hub
- How Barbara helps her clients with their first, second and third problem
- How to know if you’re ready for a Support Assistant
- Why a Support Assistant and a project manager are not the same
- Using a Support Assistant to scale your business
- The new lean business model
- The driving force in Barbara’s work
- The new superwoman
- Learning to lead teams
- Advice on handling conflict
- How to fire someone
- Negative feedback
- Fem Five
Freedom for me is choice—and building systems, delegating well, and making money are the tools that unlock it.
In this episode
00:00 - Introduction and Guest Background
Tara Padua introduces the Next Fem podcast and today’s guest, Barbara Turley — an investor, entrepreneur, and founder of The Virtual Hub. Tara highlights Barbara’s mission to tackle small business overwhelm through support assistant solutions. Barbara then shares her career trajectory, starting in financial services as an equity trader, moving into asset management, and eventually embarking on entrepreneurial ventures in Australia.
04:08 - Transition from Finance to Entrepreneurship
Barbara details how she moved from asset management into business coaching, launching a platform called Energize Wealth aimed at encouraging women to build financial literacy and wealth. This period served as a foundation for her digital marketing and webinar skills, even though monetizing the coaching model proved difficult.
06:27 - Accidental Discovery of the Support Assistant Business
Barbara describes how she inadvertently discovered the market demand for support assistants while trying to support her coaching clients. What started as a side favor for clients quickly snowballed into a business opportunity when she realized the immediate need and demand outweighed her coaching services.
08:06 - Launching The Virtual Hub
She recounts the spontaneous launch of The Virtual Hub through an impromptu webinar that outperformed previous efforts in both attendance and sales. Despite lacking a website or business plan, she capitalized on clear market demand and rapidly built a client base for support assistant services.
09:59 - Recognizing Immediate vs. Long-Term Problems
Barbara reflects on an important entrepreneurial lesson: success often comes from solving urgent, immediate problems people are willing to pay for today, rather than aspirational ones. She emphasizes how addressing clients’ operational overwhelm created a more viable business model and remained true to her broader mission of empowering others.
11:58 - Building a Business with a Dual Impact
The conversation highlights the ripple effect of The Virtual Hub — not only freeing entrepreneurs from operational overload but also transforming the lives of Filipino support assistants by offering more humane, growth-oriented job opportunities outside the country’s challenging call center industry.
13:07 - Challenges and Pain Points in Scaling
Barbara candidly shares the operational nightmares that surfaced after her initial business boom, including client frustrations, delegation issues, and support assistant underperformance. She describes how these problems exposed deficiencies in both client readiness and support assistant reliability, prompting a deep overhaul of her business model.
16:52 - Rebuilding the Virtual Hub Model
She outlines how she restructured The Virtual Hub to implement a rigorous recruitment and training process, extending to six weeks, with a full-time, three-week training phase to properly vet and prepare support assistants before assigning them to clients. This overhaul significantly improved client satisfaction and business performance, albeit with longer lead times.
18:06 - Determining Readiness for a Support Assistant
The discussion shifts to identifying whether a business owner is ready for a support assistant. Barbara explains that readiness hinges on having systems, processes, and project management tools in place. She emphasizes that detail orientation can be an asset, countering the myth that delegation success relies on letting go entirely, and instead advocating for structured collaboration.
19:21 - Determining Readiness for a Support Assistant
The conversation opens with advice on how to know if you’re ready to hire a support assistant. It stresses having clarity on your business operations, recurring tasks, processes, and specific projects you intend to delegate. The importance of gradually onboarding a support assistant and ensuring they can follow processes effectively is emphasized, along with evaluating their character and work ethic before making decisions on fit.
21:14 - Difference Between a Support Assistant and a Project Manager
Tara and Barbara discuss common misconceptions between support assistants and project managers. Barbara clarifies that while a support assistant operates within established systems, a project manager is responsible for planning, structuring, and overseeing project execution. She stresses the importance of being clear about the role you’re hiring for and managing expectations realistically.
24:17 - Scaling a Business with Support Assistants
Barbara outlines the stages of scaling a business with support assistants—from hiring the first support assistant, building processes, to managing a growing team. She highlights common pain points such as communication breakdowns and the need for structure as teams expand. The conversation includes advice on recognizing team members’ strengths and identifying future leaders internally.
29:17 - Support Assistants as a Lean Business Model Strategy
Barbara explains why outsourcing with support assistants is an effective lean business model. She emphasizes cost-effectiveness and reallocating resources to higher-impact activities while providing meaningful career opportunities offshore. The strategy aims to maximize profitability and personal freedom without overworking business owners.
31:11 - Personal Motivation Behind Business Design
The conversation turns personal as both women reflect on their motivations. Barbara shares her guiding principle of building a business to support personal freedom, family life, and flexibility. She talks about designing a virtual business that enables her to live and work wherever she chooses while raising a family and investing in social impact initiatives.
35:49 - Integrating Family Life with Business Growth
Barbara addresses balancing motherhood with business leadership, rejecting the superwoman trope in favor of strategic delegation. She discusses proving that it’s possible to lead a business and nurture a family without burnout, framing success around leadership, team-building, and financial freedom to support personal and professional aspirations.
38:14 - Balancing Entrepreneurship and Family
Barbara shares how being married to a supportive partner has helped, but emphasizes that single parents can successfully build businesses too by mastering delegation and building systems. She references a podcast episode she recorded about preparing her business to manage the arrival of her first baby.
39:39 - Learning Leadership and Team Management
Barbara discusses how she learned leadership skills through trial and error, especially when it came to leading a remote team. She introduces the concept of a daily huddle to improve team communication and describes the importance of clear handoffs between departments — likening it to passing a baton in a relay race.
43:37 - When to Fire and How to Set Expectations
They explore setting clear expectations early to avoid later issues with employees. Barbara highlights how defining communication preferences and standards for work performance helps prevent misunderstandings and poor fit situations.
46:48 - Managing Cultural Differences and Praise
Barbara talks about how different people and cultures have varying needs for recognition and praise. She prefers spontaneous, occasional acknowledgments rather than constant validation and advises leaders to understand their personal management style and hire accordingly.
48:43 - Handling Conflict and Constructive Feedback
They address the challenge of giving feedback, moving away from the traditional ‘negative feedback sandwich’ to a more collaborative, self-reflective discussion. Barbara shares her method of asking employees to self-rate before discussing improvements and recommends being direct but empathetic.
50:50 - Femme 5: Favorite Book, Self-Care Hack, and Wisdom
Barbara recommends Built to Sell as a life-changing book for entrepreneurs. Her go-to self-care hack is taking a shower when overwhelmed. She shares valuable advice from a mentor — “the dogs may be barking, but the caravan still passes” — reminding her to stay focused amidst distractions.
54:56 - Admiring Dr. Pippa Malmgren
Barbara names Dr. Pippa Malmgren as her top female thought leader, praising her expertise in economic trends and small societal signals. She appreciates how Pippa balances a high-powered career with motherhood, offering relatable inspiration.
56:36 - Advice to Her Younger Self
Barbara reflects on her earlier entrepreneurial journey, wishing she had understood leadership, scalable systems, and resilience more deeply at the start. She underscores that much of what she now teaches was learned through firsthand experience in difficult early years.
