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Pat Yates: Hello again, and welcome to the Quite Life podcast. I’m Pat Yates, sitting in for Joe Valley. We have a great conversation today, man. One of the things that I hear a lot of sellers struggling with at times is how they structure their business, find enough time to be able to do the things they want to do. So virtual assistants are becoming really, really big in every industry, and actually people that are either overseas or not necessarily in your office. Really exciting situation, but sometimes I think there are barriers that have to be broken down on who you get, how you vet them, how you keep them focused, and how your systems are safe or whatever. Well, we’re going to talk today with Barbara Turley with The Virtual Hub, who really has a great way of doing this.

They bring in their own VA’s, they train them in house, and they actually are employees of that company, and they employ you via that company. So they’re vetting them. They’re working on the things that you need to understand from systems and processes, as well as culture. It’s really incredible. So Barbara is an investor and entrepreneur and founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub.

A business she started by accident that scaled quickly to become one of the leading companies that integrates in-house trained virtual assistants in the client’s businesses. This strategy frees up time and energy so the business can focus on optimizing their operations further to achieve their business growth goals. It’s something that I think every person is starting to really understand as an opportunity for you, not only from a saving standpoint, but from a consistency and system standpoint.

She also had some amazing points about systems that they can set up that will keep you leaner, not even having to live, to be able to lean on a VA. I’m really excited about this. And I think everyone’s really going to enjoy the conversation. Again, if you need to get in touch with me about your business, or you want to buy a business or list one, you can always reach out to me at [email protected] or go to quietlight.com. Really hyped about this conversation with Barbara today. So let’s get right to it.

Barbara, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. It’s great to have you here today.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here.

Pat Yates: I am too. I’m so excited for this conversation. I think that you have so many strengths in your business that I’m weak at. So I’m anxious to really dive into this and see what the people can learn about processes, VA’s, things like that. But why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, your background, where you’re from, the book on Barbara. What would that be?

Barbara Turley: Oh, sure.

In case anyone hasn’t picked it up yet, my accent is Irish. So I was born and bred Irish, purebred Irish, nothing else in my DNA, really. And obviously, I grew up there. You know, I had what I would describe as a blessed childhood. I lived in the country and all the beautiful things that we reminisce about in our own childhoods, you know, being brought up and running around forests and playing games in the country. But as I progressed through school, you know what, wanted to be, originally wanted to be an ER doctor. I wanted to work in the emergency rooms. And weirdly, I didn’t end up taking that path, right? I didn’t end up taking that path because, quite frankly, I didn’t get the points to actually get into that course at university. And I decided to take an economics degree, and that led me down such an interesting path. I just absolutely loved it. And to cut a long story short, I ended up working in a trading floor as an equity trader.

Now, if you think about this for a second, it’s not exactly life and death, but it’s quite fast and dynamic, like the way an ER might be, right? So I liked the kind of environment that it was. And I became an equity trader for like 10 years. I did that for 10 years. So there was no real entrepreneurial background there. People always ask me, did I have the lemonade stand? I did not. I always wanted to work in big corporate. I wanted to work in the city and the big offices. And I was really attracted to that for a very long time.

And after my trading days, I started at the end of that period to get a sense of wanting to maybe do something different. But I didn’t know what different was at the time. It’s those beginnings of kind of wanting to do something new. So I did change tack. I ended up in a sales role. So I spent five years in asset management sales, and I got an opportunity to invest in a company at that time that I worked in as well.

And it sort of took me on a journey of learning how great companies get built. And that was where my appetite got sort of wetted for the entrepreneurial journey, I guess. And it took me a long time to kind of make a jump and think about what I wanted to do. But I really wanted to kind of build. I wanted to have impact or create something. And that was really the essence of where that all started. And rolling forward today, I run a 350-employee, fully remote company.

I get to live on two different continents. I spent 20 years living in Australia. I forgot that bit. I went to Australia for 20 years. And these days, I live between Australia and Europe and thoroughly enjoy that. And I run the business completely remotely. Our team are all remote as well. So I have a lot of experience, a lot of war wounds in trying to do remote. But I think I’ve been doing it very well for a very long time, and long before the remote work debate that’s raging today sort of came along. So I have a lot to share on that topic too.

Pat Yates: That’s really amazing. You were sort of there before it was there. Like when people pivoted, they were moving right into your market. That’s really amazing.

And we actually have something in common that I didn’t realize. And we talked before that I’m very deep Irish as well. So I still have family actually in Sligo, Ireland. I just found out about three months ago, because the Irish side of my family was Patrick Francis Murphy, who was my grandfather, who died in World War Two. So we never really knew that side of our family, just recently reconnected. Found out there is a lot of people still in Sligo, Ireland. So I’m excited to get to Sligo, Ireland at sometime soon and meet some of my family as well. So that’s amazing. So let’s jump into your business. I think I’m really fascinated by this because I told you, you do everything that I really stink at, which is to be able to find someone that’s a VA to help me. Solopreneurs sometimes are very protected. Maybe give an overview of The Virtual Hub and tell us exactly what this is all about and what you try to achieve with your clients.

Barbara Turley: Sure. Just starting with today, The Virtual Hub, we are a virtual assistant company in the Philippines at our core. Right now, as I say at our core, because we do a lot more today than just that, but at our core, you know, we run virtual assistants in the Philippines. We have clients in the US, Australia, Canada, UK, all over the world. So we cut across all time zones.

But what I learned very early on when I first left corporate, I became a business coach, as many corporate people do. They start doing consulting when you first leave corporate. That’s the kind of natural fit for you. And I noticed that all of the businesses that I was working with at the time, they all thought they had different problems, but the real root problem that they all had was that they were doing everything themselves. They were the classic solopreneur. Even some of them had team members, but they weren’t delegating effectively enough. They were still, I guess, trying to hold on to a lot of things.

And the first things I started working with them on was trying to help them to systemize, get some processes moving. And also, I had read Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek like everybody else at the time 15 years ago, and I had gotten myself a VA in the Philippines to help me in my business, which was coaching at the time. So I started recruiting purely friends of my VA. Honestly, it was not a business, because I knew that if these businesses I was working with, if they didn’t start to delegate more effectively, and if they didn’t start to bring in systems and some form of platforms and processes and automation, they were never really going to get out of the plateau. They had already plateaued really badly.

And if they didn’t get out of the plateau, there was nothing really I could work with them on to get them out of the weeds because their time was so crunched. So step one was to free up their time so that then I could move on and work on strategy with them.

Now, that worked so well for a lot of the clients I was working with that I started getting phone calls from friends of theirs looking for, can you get me one of those VAs, and can you give me some of these systems? So I literally found myself in a VA business before I knew it. I was running kind of 10 VAs, going, this is weird. I’m kind of enjoying this. But I saw a lot of problems. So the first iteration of the business was very shaky. I had these VAs working for clients, and what transpired was, I realized one of the big fundamental problems is people don’t know how to delegate, which is what you just said. Like the things you suck at were things I found myself being naturally good at. So I’m very good at operations. I’m very good at systems, processes, and delegation to people, be they VAs or whoever.

And the other fundamental problem was that a lot of VAs, particularly in the Philippines, now this is rolling back 10 years ago, a lot of them had kind of picked up their experience from working with clients online, bits and pieces here and there, a couple of YouTube videos. They weren’t really trained in a way that was going to make them super successful. Even in the soft skills, they didn’t understand what we need. What do we need as entrepreneurs in order to be supported by a VA? They didn’t know how to communicate effectively and all of these problems, or report back on results or even focus on results.

So I took those two problems, and stage two of the business turned us from recruiting VAs into actually manufacturing our own VAs and really placing ourselves into the middle of the relationship. So today, we actually hire. We don’t recruit for clients at all. We actually hire for ourselves, which makes us very different from other companies. Every month, we are hiring from all walks of life. We know what we’re looking for and that we’re hiring them to come and work for The Virtual Hub.

And in the first month or two, they’re actually in our training programs on full salaries, full benefits. And we’re putting them through our training programs and training them in our way that we know our clients need. And only after that time are we starting to say, we think these two may be a fit on this account. Our hit rate is very high. Very rarely do we have clients say, I’d like to see two more people or three more. Usually it’s, I don’t know who to pick. And that’s because we fundamentally understand what the client wants and needs, and then we manufacture that in a VA that we then place into that account.

Pat Yates: It’s really incredible because I guess I didn’t envision that part. Let’s back up a step.

So you go through and you’re adding people every month. Let’s say this month you’re adding another person this week. You onboard that person, they train in your company.

When the client actually onboards, let’s say that you bring someone on a month later, they go to a client, are they still working for The Virtual Hub? Are they working directly to the client? How does this get billed? So is it through the actual VA or through you?

Barbara Turley: No, it’s through us. The engagement is ongoing thereafter. So we manage culture. We were talking off air about culture. Culture is really, really important. So we have built a massive culture in the Philippines. We have obviously a Philippine company where everyone is an employee of our local entity. They have all the benefits and all of the needs. We sort of cover all of the needs that they would have in the Philippines.

We also run ongoing training programs. So once we get a VA into a client account, we have a personalized training roadmap for that VA based on that client account needs, because you can’t train every VA on everything. There’s no point. You’ve got to train on certain tools, certain things that they’re doing. And then we also train clients. Some of our clients today don’t need much training, but others do.

Like we have process map libraries they can use. We help them to get better with delegation and the operational frameworks that are required to make that really successful.

And then everyone, you know, we stay in the middle of the relationship and partner with that client. We’re like a bolt-on solution for support.

Pat Yates: It’s actually really amazing because let’s do this. Let me ask you, because the first thing that jumps to my mind is when I’m thinking about hiring a VA. Let’s say that I don’t know Virtual Hub. I don’t know you, and I’m just going out and I’m going on Fiverr or something. I’m emailing people. There’s a lot of nervousness to that because some of these ecom entrepreneurs, and I’m going only from ecom, and I know that you could do different things, the systems are so important.

There’s so much sensitive information that when you allow someone to come in there, I think that, to me, is the biggest thing that I worry about. Who am I turning this information over to? Do I really know them? And how do I know that they’re not going to copy everything I have and then be a ghost? I think that some people probably have that barrier, but you obviously get them past that very quickly by being the company that’s responsible for this, not only training but managing, and then manage that culture. Is that the biggest thing that people worry about when they come in working with you, or what is it?

Barbara Turley: You know, a few years ago, that’s an interesting one. Several years ago, I think trust was something that came up a lot. But I think the pandemic era almost blew that out of the water because everybody went remote, and everyone just kind of got over it.

So on the trust thing, it doesn’t come up as an issue so much anymore. But I think that’s because we’ve built a sort of a platform that is slightly trustless. Now, that doesn’t mean that we don’t trust people. It means that we’ve built an operational framework in our business at The Virtual Hub where it’s sort of irrelevant, because we’ve built all the systems to make sure that we can hire the right people. But it’s still people, though. You could still get that wrong. You could think that you hired the right person, and then it could all go wrong, because it’s people, it’s not a widget.

But after that, it’s the framework that you put someone into in order to work successfully, and then tracking and monitoring and performance management, staying close to the client and hearing feedback, and then working. We’ve got a lot of coaching programs that go on and culture. I think the central point there is really culture. You want to hire people who burningly want to be part of your culture, and then they actually protect your culture, if that makes sense.

What we do for the smaller clients, in particular, is we have that cultural strength. We do team buildings, we run dinners, we have events, fun nights out, all that kind of thing we’re doing. And I feel like that bridges a lot of those gaps.

However, the number one thing I think people ask today more than trust, I think people are worried about the time to onboard. So, you know, am I going to spend four months training this person and bringing them in and trying to integrate them into my business? And how do I do all of that?

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Barbara Turley: That was a problem I saw early on, and we’ve built, like, we will get somebody literally 75% of the way there before they start on the client account. And that’s really valuable.

You know, between training, we do all of that outside the client’s time. We do it on our time, and the clients find that really valuable. Or if they’re having a problem and something’s not working, all they have to do is send the results coach an email. Like they just email us and say, you know, they can give us feedback.

They don’t even have to say it. They can just give a rating, and we will deal with it, and we will performance manage that situation for them.

Pat Yates: Let me ask this. So you deal pretty much in one kind of culture. Are there things that you can tell people? Like, I’m curious what the culture differences might be. Maybe they’re more thankful to have work in a certain industry, where maybe in the United States, they don’t care as much about the industry. What are the things that people need to be conscious of? Let’s say, for instance, that they aren’t working with The Virtual Hub. They just want to understand the type of culture there is to work with Filipino VAs. What would those top things be that United States people may need to understand?

Barbara Turley: That’s a great question. There are a few things, and it’s changing rapidly because, you know, the Philippines, the Philippine culture has been working with international clients for a long, well over a decade or two now. So, you know, the culture is expanding into this. But I think a few of the things, there is still a yes culture in the Philippines.

Now, what I mean about that is, and it is culturally ingrained, that they have a fear of saying, I don’t quite understand what you mean, or, you know, they might say yes to something and then scramble around trying to figure out how to do it so that they don’t have, they don’t want to, they want to save face.

Now, we have to hire people who are not afraid to use their voice, right? So we have built this into our recruiting system such, and we train as well on how to do this. And that’s one of the hardest cultural blocks to get over, people who cannot seem to be open and transparent, and transparency breeds trust, right? So lack of transparency breeds lack of trust. So you need to kind of hire for it. But understanding also that in the Philippines, this culture helps you as the entrepreneur to go, well, what kinds of questions could I ask my VA to help them to open up more, or how could I use my communication style to help them to open up more? And not everyone can do that. It can be tiring.

Pat Yates: You know what, we get a lot of clients that come into Quiet Light. I want to kind of pivot a little bit. And whenever we see someone coming in to sell their company, it’s interesting to see how it’s run, whether they’re a solopreneur, where they have three or four employees in a warehouse, where they have five virtual assistants, or they have a mixture of those things. I looked at, when I was looking at your information, your website, what you do, it’s really amazing because, like, I’m one of those guys that walks around and says, if I could just create myself for another hour, that’s really kind of your specialty, right?

I mean, I don’t have to recreate myself if I can delegate better, which is really a weakness of me, I’m going to be honest, because I wish that I had more ability to trust some of those things. But you also talk about processes you do. So not only do you have assistance that you feel like can really help you, you’re also putting processes in place that you might not need them even as much at the time that you bring in the assistance, I would assume. So tell us a little bit about how you analyze processes, maybe from an e-comm standpoint, that’s what most of our listeners are, or content or SaaS businesses.

Maybe give us an example of that, how you could make them leaner pre-assistant.

Barbara Turley: Yes, so it is important to have the right, I call it operational framework, in place. And of course, in an ideal world, you would like to have all of that in place before you bring on a VA so that they can hit the ground running. Usually, that’s not what happens. Usually, people sort of stumble around trying to get a VA, and then a VA can actually help you with a lot of that too, a lot of building of that sort of stuff. So initially, I think the mistakes, I guess, people make are first verbalizing what they want done. And that’s okay. But I think the way I always try to simplify things with operations and delegation is saying that in every business, there are departments. It doesn’t matter if you’re a solopreneur or you’re a hundred-person company, there are departments. There’s marketing and sales, and then there’s legal and product development and customer success and all these things.

And within each department, if you break down each department into what are the recurring tasks and what are the project tasks within these departments? Recurring ones tend to keep the engine of the business running day to day, week to week, month to month. They’re usually quite process-driven. They’re usually trainable, to be honest. Once something can be processed up, you can train it, you can develop it, and you can delegate, not always 100% of it, but this is where people get caught as well. If you can’t delegate 100% of it, 80 or 90% is pretty good too. Maybe you still only have to do the 10%. So you don’t have to think in absolutes.

And then the other bucket of tasks within every department are projects that will drive the business forward. So they’re usually things like, oh, we want to, you know, could be bringing on a new product. It could be a new tech tool build. It could be an outreach program or whatever. But within those projects, there are multiple tasks that need to be done to drive that forward, and you’ve got to figure out what are the ones that VA can do and what are the ones that somebody else needs to do. And when you break any business down into that simplicity, it’s actually quite easy to go, okay, now what are the things that we can now delegate? And anything that can be processed up is the first thing that you should delegate. Process and train, process mapping. So that’s the next layer down.

Within the recurring tasks, you do need process maps and you need processes for each thing. Now, in the days before AI came along, nobody was interested in process mapping. They’re all like, you know, I just want to have A-players that know what to do. But the reality is, if you want to build a scalable business, that the asset value of it is high, you want to have a machine. And part of a machine is having the right platform architecture, the right systems and processes there, and then being able to delegate to the most cost-effective people that you can possibly get, right? It doesn’t have to always be high payday players. You can have some of those and some of the offshore team strategy.

So with process mapping, the deeper the process, the better, because what we find when we do a process is that often we’re doing it from our own head. So the solopreneurs are doing things by rote because you know how to do it. And then you write a five-step process, and that’s okay. And then you delegate that to a VA, and it goes wrong. And usually, people blame the VA or blame their lack of delegation ability and run a mile and go back to doing it themselves. Really, what you want to see there is where did the mistakes occur?

And the mistakes are like gifts because they’re going to show you where there are holes in your process. Because sometimes a step is easy for you to do, but there’s thinking that happens in your head while you’re doing that step that you need to now teach somebody else, or you need to add a step that breaks that out. So you’ve got to iterate the process, and you’ve got to go deeper with processes and be as descriptive as possible. It is painful, but when you do it once, the dividends it pays later go on and on into perpetuity, right? Once you can delegate that. And I’m living proof of this because, I mean, we’ve only got about three people who are not Filipino, and I’ve grown an enormous company, and part of it is internal team.

So, you know, I do walk my own talk.

Pat Yates: I find it quite incredible because, like, do you think that, like, talking to a lot of entrepreneurs, I get to do that a whole lot, a lot of them sort of have predetermined ideas of what they should be doing or what business is like or how to run it, and they are very rigid in their beliefs.

Do you find that that’s one of the biggest problems to break down, is that they fight the virtual assistant and maybe don’t give them things as quickly? How do entrepreneurs break down their predetermined ideas of them being able to be the main thing in their business and still give this VA their due? Is that a struggle? Do you find that once they onboard, it’s harder to give away things and you have to sort of force that, or is it fairly easy, you think?

Barbara Turley: Okay, there’s two parts to that question.

The first part is about control. Everybody always says to me, well, it’s the people who are able to give up control and aren’t control freaks. I go completely against that and go all entrepreneurs are control freaks. That’s why we’re really good at what it is that we do, right? Because we want to control the outcomes. You know, we’re very good at this kind of thing.

So I have a philosophy that the deeper your processes are and the better your systems are and the better that you do your operational frameworks and reporting lines and all this sort of thing that I’m talking about, the easier it is for you to delegate to somebody else without losing any control.

So I don’t actually do any processes in my business, but yet I have my finger on the pulse of everything. People always say to me, how do you know everything? You know everything that’s going on. It’s because I’ve actually built it that way.

And I know when a process is not working or when something’s not working, I can tell immediately. So I don’t really give up control. Control doesn’t mean you have to be the person doing the task or doing the process. Control means that you need to delegate that process and have full oversight and an ability to get reporting back on results to know what’s happening. So for example, I’m a big fan of Asana as a platform. I treat Asana like a central, it’s almost like what the office is in the physical world. For me, in the virtual world, a place like Asana is where everyone shows up to work, shows up to do work, collaborates on work, and reports on work. That’s how we operate it, and that maintains your control.

Now, the second part of the question is how do you decide every day what to give? One of the biggest problems I see is people getting a VA and then waking up with the anxiety every morning of going, now, anyone listening is going to recognize this. You wake up every morning and you think, what am I going to give the VA to do today? And then you panic and you’re like, I don’t have time to do this.

So the problem there is that you have not done the step I just spoke about previously, which is breaking down the company into departments, into recurring tasks, into processes, and then delegating which processes daily, weekly, monthly this VA is going to be doing so that you don’t have to wake up every morning and be like, what am I going to give them to do today?

So that’s key, you know, and then using a tool like Asana to map that out and make sure that you know what this VA is doing every day without having to look at it every day.

Pat Yates: Again, folks, we’re talking with Barbara Turley with The Virtual Hub. This is really kind of an amazing conversation. Not only am I getting a lot of information out, it’s making me feel really dumb. Like, I realize that I even need this. Like, I am so unprepared as far as processes.

So let me ask this question about processes, because when you find, let’s say you use me as an example and I have an ecom business, I’m obviously an advisor at Quiet Light. I carry a couple of hats, really, really busy. A lot of Zoom meetings, a lot of stuff online.

Would you rather come in and say, Pat, let me look at your business from the 30,000-foot view and tell you what you need versus you telling me? How do you go about the process of figuring out how you help someone? Because I’ll be honest, I don’t know what I don’t know. So that means that even telling you what processes I might need may not be right. So how do you get to the bottom of what the client really needs?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, well, I mean, usually clients come to us looking for a VA, but that’s kind of the doorway into us. A client comes looking for a VA, may have heard this podcast or whatever, and that’s great. And usually, at the point they arrive at our doorstep, they usually kind of need a VA yesterday. That’s a problem, but that’s okay, and they need help. So they’re now overloaded.

And usually, the quickest thing that we can do for that business or that business owner is to say, let’s get rid of the low-hanging fruit. And on the discovery calls, the team are great. They’re running through, like, tell me about this bit, tell me about this, tell me about this. And we’re actually isolating. We already know the tasks we can take off your list, and we can create a sort of a base task list to get started with.

Now, once a client comes into us, this is the current way we operate. Usually they come in, they get a VA, we get the VA up and running, get their time freed up a bit, and then we offer them an operational efficiency call, which is free. And it is literally like a 90-minute session with our operational efficiency consultant, who’s in Australia, actually. And he’s amazing. He’s an ex-e-commerce guy. Interestingly, he ran a big e-commerce business for a long time. He’s really good at this. He had VAs with us, and then he came and joined our team.

And essentially, then what we’re trying to do is go, okay, now that you’ve freed up some time, now let’s look at your platforms, your processes. Let’s talk about where the weeds are, and then we can create a sort of roadmap of what we think, where we think we can rip out for you. And you can either go and implement that yourself. You can use us to implement it, and invariably, we will find more places to put VAs, more places to free up time. But that engagement requires consulting, to be honest. That needs us to go in, and that stays too. So we do offer that for all of our clients. We only offer that for clients right now.

Pat Yates: So that’s really amazing. So to understand, if I come in and I’m looking for a VA and we talk about the processes I need, you may be able to scratch off four or five of them prior to getting a VA just by the right operational practices you’re saying, correct?

Barbara Turley: Yes. Yeah.

Pat Yates: And it might be that the VA enhances that going forward, which is really incredible because I think when people are, you know, like, I think the people, especially solopreneurs running their business, are always very reluctant to turn over the keys, whether it’s just creatively or in any processes.

I think that’s a great way to go about it. So let me ask this: when you’re working with The Virtual Hub, obviously some people think, well, is it going to cost me a lot? How do you do your fees? How do you work with clients, and how is all that structured?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So obviously, there’s a range of pricing in the market. You know, the cheapest way to get a VA is to jump on Upwork and hire one, right? Obviously, that is the cheapest way to do it. Then there are, you know, they go the whole way up the chain. Our pricing is somewhere in the middle. We’re sort of middle of the pack, maybe a little bit more. And we have a more, what I would call, a more premium model.

So for example, like I said, we already hire people, we take a lot of risk upfront. So often, we’re carrying 20, 30, 40 VAs on the bench at any one time between the training. So that’s a huge financial outlay for us. But that’s the risk that we take on. So our pricing ranges, US dollars, we start at 750 US dollars per month for a part-time admin VA. Now, I wouldn’t say a lower-level VA, it depends what you need done. But we run anywhere from 750 a month up to 2,200 US a month for a full-time, more systems-like someone who can do some Zapier integrations, maybe run your CRM, build some automations in there type VA. So social media falls in the middle, put it that way. So from 750 for part-time right up to 2200 for a full-time VA. So that’s our pricing per month.

We do charge, it’s like, look, you’ve got some SaaS listeners here. I’m a big fan of the SaaS model, and we do run it like that. It is like a subscription model where it’s one fee per month. But you can scale us up and scale us down, same sort of thing, 30 days notice. We’ve no lock-in contracts. And the reason we do that is because we kind of want people to stay because they’re getting success with us and not because they’re tied into some big annual contract. You know, I don’t like those big models that do that. So we like to back ourselves.

Some businesses might cancel because, you know, it’s nothing to do with us, so they just need to have that ability to be nimble. You can’t do that if you hire someone directly. It’s very difficult to do that. And that person, the other thing is that that person also, clients love this bit, if you cancel on us, that person does not lose their job because they’re already there. We don’t pair their employment, their employment is not linked to the client account. The client accounts ebb and flow. When we employ them, it’s up to us again. We take risk on it’s our job to try to bring in client flow to push that VA onto another account. And we do that. We match supply and demand that way.

Pat Yates: That’s really great. So the funny thing about it is I think once people get into the situation, they probably realize, hey, here’s another process I didn’t even realize I need because you’re training these VAs to know things we already don’t know. So while we’re giving them processes, they’re probably analyzing and say, hey, by the way, Pat, we’re doing this with another company. Here’s something that might really help you. To me, that training portion is really incredible. And plus, you’re not talking a price that’s super expensive for anything. Even your top-end price is a very inexpensive full-time employee for a United States situation. Plus, you’re vetting them, you’re handling them, and it’s a very clean situation. It’s really amazing.

When I read your sheet, there was one thing on there that I was curious about, and it may be too long-winded to go into, but you had the three-step operational efficiency blueprint for a scalable business success. I found that to be an amazing thing to say. What are the three things, if you can give us a synopsis? I’m very curious.

Barbara Turley: I’ll give you as quick a synopsis as I can. So I believe in having a platform architecture in any company where you have a central place, like in Asana, for example. And this is how I run the company: the central place where everyone comes to work, shows up to work, collaborates on work. Even process, I put process maps and everything in there. I don’t think they should be over on Google Drive. I think they should be living, breathing inside the virtual office space.

And then you have other tools that come in from the outside. You may have Slack, for example, but Slack is for chat. It’s not for project management. It’s not for collaboration. Really, it’s for chit chat back and forth. It feeds in. You might have a CRM tool that’s used for marketing automation, but if you can imagine a central, I’m on video here just showing a central platform, and then the other platforms, you want to have, keep it simple. They need to feed into the central place. And there’s ways of doing that with API integrations and Zapier and stuff like that. But I won’t get into that, but right platform architecture. Then what you need is the process. The first big process in any company is the process around how we as a company use the platform architecture. For example, use Slack for chit chat. We do not use Slack for instructions. Once this is in our company, for example, once we decide something, the instruction goes into Asana at the site of where the work is happening. That’s just an example of how a process across a company might work. For example, we run objectives and key results from top down and connect all the bottom up work moving into where we’re going as a company. Again, that is a big process. I could unpack that, but we won’t here. And then the third piece is continuously systemizing. And a system, of course, is your platforms and your processes and working out how are we going to systemize this, and then constantly taking your big A player, maybe your onshore people or your A players, and consistently going, what part of their workflow can we take off them and delegate to our offshore teams so that we optimize our human capital budgets within a company? Because one of the most expensive assets that you have is your people, now that we’re not doing real estate anymore and office space. So those three things are platform, process, people, and it’s the integration of those three things together and how we optimize them holistically and working together that I think raises the asset value of any company dramatically.

Pat Yates: I don’t disagree with that. I think it’s amazing because, you know, I look at this and it’s weird because until we really talked, I sort of thought the VA thing was something I have to go directly on. You have to learn it yourself. And I think even entrepreneurs find that process as difficult. You know, one other thing is we’re talking about this. I’m thinking in M&A. So a lot of the people that listen to Quiet Light podcasts are either buyers who are going to buy a business or sellers who are going to clearly sell one. Coming into work with you, we always talk about them building SOPs and having processes.

So when they hand over and sell the business, it’s much easier from a standpoint of understanding of the business. Do you see this as an advantage in that to where, let’s say, just like you said, if a VA is moved out of a thing, you have another one? Is it an opportunity here where, if you have someone that’s buying, having the consistency of a good VA and those processes already set up gives strength to buyers in their minds because it’s there? Is that something you think would be an asset to a seller?

Barbara Turley: Here’s two things. It depends whether you are the buyer or not. If you’re the seller and you want the highest amount of money that you possibly can get for your company, you want to have it as a machine so that buyer just walks in and the machine is running. The machine is not really that connected to you, right? And that they can go, wow, here’s the map of this thing. It just works, right?

If you are, sorry, that’s for the seller. If you’re the buyer, and you’re good at ops, like I would probably go and buy a business that, if it was me the buyer, I would want to buy a business that was a mess, that had a good product that people want to buy, but I can see the ops as a mess, because then I can pay less for it and I can clean it up. So that’s interesting. If you’re a buyer that is not very good at ops, then you will have to pay more for a highly optimized, operationally fit business, but it will run, it’s better, it’s lean, and it’s running as optimized as possible. I hope that makes sense. You know, yeah, if you want to get a cheap purchase of a great business, you want to buy one that’s a mess and then fix it. And if you do that, by the way, call us, we’ll come in and partner with you, and we’ll fix the ops for you.

Pat Yates: I think this is even a bigger point for sellers because I look at businesses and sometimes I think that when I look at businesses, say, that are purchased and a year later, they’re struggling, for instance. Like we’ve gone through the time when aggregators, if you followed our industry, you know, bought up a ton of companies that had problems. You got consolidation, all these things now. And I think one of the things I look back on that was unfortunate for some of the aggregator buyers is they didn’t take sellers forward. They didn’t bring them into the company because they don’t know what that person knows.

And at times, you have to relearn that. So if you take nine months to a year to relearn it, you could lose the business in that period of time. I would tend to think that having a VA that touches everything, and you have the processes and the right systems, would be something that would be a springboard for a buyer. So they actually would get things better starting out than they would if they didn’t have this kind of system. Do you see that with relation to the processes? You’d already, my overlay analyzing that, that they’ll figure it out either way, or do you think that’s a huge advantage?

Barbara Turley: I want to think about that for a second. I do think it’s a huge, huge advantage, but here’s the thing. I think it’s, you know, I mean, look, I’m in the business of selling VAs, right? So of course I’m going to say that’s a huge advantage. But if I take my VA hat off for a second, I actually think the biggest advantage is having a business where even if the VA left, the process and systems are so slick that you could just slot another one in, and within a week, boom, they’re in, right?

You want to be able to move people in and out really quickly. So if somebody resigns or something happens or someone goes on maternity leave or whatever, it’s not such a destabilizing event because the machine is built. And I think it was Michael Gerber who maybe said, systems run your business, people run your systems, right? So you kind of want to have that. That’s my philosophy, really.

I guess the follow-on point from that is the stronger that your systems and your processes are, the more offshore team members and VAs, for example, you can put in to run it cheaply. You don’t always have to pay the big A players to do everything then. If you’re a solopreneur, it means you don’t have to use your time for everything. You can actually claw your life back a bit because none of us went into business to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week. But if you’re a solopreneur, it’s quite hard not to do that if you don’t have anyone.

Pat Yates: I think it’s really amazing. Again, we’re with Barbara Turley and The Virtual Hub talking about virtual assistance. I think, for me, a lot of times people that will come in and talk to you may not know how big of an advantage it would be to find someone. Some people look at it and say, well, I’m going to spend $1,500 a month and I’m going do all this. But, you know, the reality is your return on that is probably way higher. If you’re leaner, especially if you have something that you could take on one more project a year, you can do one more sale a year. It unquestionably pays for itself. Do you feel like it’s an investment in your business when you do something like this?

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. I mean, I talk about it in terms of dividends, right? So the pain that you take today, because let’s be honest, delegating is hard. It’s a skill that I think every business owner needs to master because even though it’s painful, everyone wants to master marketing and sales and all this stuff. I’m like, master delegation, because that is the gateway that is going to open your time and energy up, which is the most expensive time and energy that your company has, and your creative space.

And what I do every day, the minute I find myself doing something a few times, I think, I wonder, I process this up and give it to a VA so that I can move on and do the next thing and take on the next client, grow the next bit. Even if it’s I want to go and pick my kids up from school every day and not be sitting there doing my social media posts, for example. How do you process it up? And it does. It pays you dividends into perpetuity to get it right, but with the holistic thing of VA, like delegating properly, process maps, proper reporting lines, proper oversight, proper architecture.

Pat Yates: Yeah, I mean, this is just, there are so many sides of this that are amazing, Barbara. Obviously, you guys are doing a great job, and actually it’s interesting. I don’t know that I’ve talked to anyone, even including myself, that can’t use what you do. I just don’t think people have to, they have to break down the predetermined ideas, the old school way of doing business, that you had your secretary right outside your office, and that’s kind of how you have to operate, or you have to operate with someone in your city and wherever you are.

So, Barbara, any other things that you might mention about The Virtual Hub? I know there are so many sides to your business that entrepreneurs can learn from. I feel like we touched on a lot of them. Is there anything else that you would like the people to know about The Virtual Hub?

Barbara Turley: Well, I will share one little story. So one of our clients that we’re very proud of, to have this client, is a guy called Vern Harnish. Vern Harnish was one of the founders of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization globally. He wrote the book Scaling Up, which used to be the Rockefeller Habits. He is the mastermind behind the methodology of the Scaling Up methodology. And they’re working with companies all over the world. So they’re doing hundreds of millions and scaling up fast. You know, he’s one of our clients. He’s a huge advocate for what it is that we do. He has VAs with us. And I mean, if he’s doing it, like, he just thinks it’s a no brainer. Anyone he speaks to, he’s like, you have to have an offshore team strategy.

So, you know, if I can share him, and he’s the one, this is scaling up companies, right? So they have 280 scaling up coaches all around the world as part of their business model. And all of those coaches are talking to some of their clients about what it is that we do. There is no business that you can show me that I couldn’t put a VA in and systemize this thing, really, to be honest.

Pat Yates: It’s amazing. I was reading your one pager, and there was a quote there that sort of struck me from Sean van Dyck, the owner and CEO of Build to Build Academy, says there’s at least 60 hours a week of stuff that I don’t have time to do anymore. I get six hours of productivity out of one hour meeting. I feel like my time has been multiplied times five. What’s interesting when I read that is I think that’s a mental relaxation. I think that entrepreneurs are so stressed about everything that’s gone on since COVID, and then shipping things have gone up. It’s stressful to run a business now.

Is this something that, for your own personal mental health, is that important to make sure that you have someone else that’s helping you out and not grinding to where you have to work that 60, 80, 100 hours in different shifts? I mean, how does that affect you mentally? I would have to think greatly.

Barbara Turley: Incredibly. I mean, I will share another story. So Arnold Leruff, who’s our efficiency consultant in Sydney, he’s an ex-e-commerce guy. He first came, this is years ago when I first started, he first came to us, and one of the things he said to me was, I’m just so tired of staying up till midnight answering customer support tickets. And I was like, why would you do that yourself? Why would you not hire a VA to do that? Now he got to a team of six.

And he got to a point where he even had VAs in the Philippines hitting a button, and they had connected to the warehouse where the ticket, the actual docket that goes on the box, would print out for the guys in the warehouse to just pick it up off the printer and bang it on the box and send it out. So, you know, he became really good at it, but it was me saying, like, why would you do that? Why would you do that when you can, you know, why would you sit up on Canva creating social media images when you really don’t have to do that? I mean, it’s not a good use of your time. Does it have to be done? Yes. Is it a good use of your time? No. Even if you’re really good at it, to be honest, just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean you should do it, because you need to have the mental space as an entrepreneur.

Like I said to you, I think I said it to you off air, I actually have built this company working part time, and I put that in inverted commas because I kind of… The hours I put in every day on the computer actually working is low. But of course, we know I’m thinking about it all the time. But if I was eight, nine, 10 hours a day doing the work, I would have no space left to actually think about where am I going with this business and what do I want to achieve with this business, or what do I want to achieve in my personal life?

So even if you don’t want to grow a business and you just want a lifestyle business, a lifestyle business means that you shouldn’t be working all the time. So it’s a lot to think about, but yeah, the mental capacity. Being an entrepreneur is already very hard and very tiring, so I do think people need to really think this through and create space and emotional well-being for yourself.

Pat Yates: I don’t disagree. And it’s amazing. So what you’re basically saying is you’re not only an owner, you’re a customer. And that really makes your business even go bigger, that you can find these processes, then you find a new one, and all of a sudden there’s 10 clients that find out about it. Once you put it through your people, it’s really amazing, because there’s also a collaboration opportunity between all your VAs, since they work only at Virtual Hub, right? Because maybe if they find a new process and they say, hey, your client can use this, there may be things proactively throughout the company that they share, correct?

Barbara Turley: That is correct. We’d like to be better at that, if I could just share openly and honestly. That’s actually a hard nut to crack. We need a process for rolling that out across clients. They do collaborate a bit, but we’d like that to happen a bit more. But that’s actually a program we have internally at the moment as a project. And again, this is sharing. So we identified this as an opportunity. We identified there’s a challenge with it. So I was like, well, let’s create a system that makes it automatic for them to do that. Now we’re not there yet, I’ll be honest, but this year, hopefully we will nail that one.

Pat Yates: That’s right. Maybe you should do an interview with yourself and figure out what you need. No, I’m kidding. Barbara, this has been amazing because it’s odd to me, you know, the culture thing people get nervous about, having someone remote they don’t know. You guys have the ability to break all that down. So tell everyone, all the listeners, how they can get in touch with you in case they want to reach out to The Virtual Hub.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, for sure. Actually, sure. So first of all, if you’d like to delve deeper into some of the things I’ve been talking about today, I am on LinkedIn quite a lot these days, sharing some of my insights over there. So you can connect with me personally, Barbara Turley, on LinkedIn. I do have processes running over there, and I am the one writing the content, but I don’t do a lot of the other stuff. So just FYI, it is me, but there’s a lot of help there. Otherwise, I wouldn’t keep it going, to be honest.

And then if you feel ready to come and talk with us, please go to thevirtualhub.com. Come on over, book a call. There’s actually loads of content on our website as well, helping you with all of the topics that we’ve spoken about. If you want to peruse some podcasts, shows over there that I’ve done on everything to do with delegating and hiring VAs, or come and chat with our sales team. They’re really good at figuring out if you’re ready for us, if we’re the right fit for you. And if you are, if we are, then we can help, you know, and yeah, come and have a chat.

Pat Yates: That’s amazing. Barbara, it’s been great having you in today. I think this is really actionable for a lot of listeners. Please reach out to Barbara at The Virtual Hub if you need help with VAs, processes, and I can promise you, if you’re sitting in your car or sitting at home listening to this right now, you know you have one. So reach out to Barbara, see if The Virtual Hub can help you. And I just appreciate you being on the Quiet Life podcast today. Thanks a lot, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Thanks for having me.

VoiceActor: Today’s podcast was produced by Rise 25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast subject or guest, email us at podcast at quietlight.com. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.

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