Lori Brooks: Welcome back to the Small Business Show. I’m your host, Lori Brooks. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you’re enjoying the show, don’t forget to subscribe, like, and share. It truly does help the show, and it helps other budding entrepreneurs find the information and the inspiration that they need to continue or even start on this journey.

This week, I am super excited to introduce you to Barbara Turley, investor, entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of the Virtual Hub, a business she started entirely by accident. It happens, guys, and I can’t wait to dive into this episode and this story. This episode is jam-packed with information and inspiration, so grab your paper and pen. Barbara has quickly scaled her business to become one of the industry leaders in integrating in-house virtual assistants into her clients’ businesses. Barbara, welcome, and thank you so much for joining me.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much for having me, Lori. I’m really excited to be on the show.

Lori Brooks: Certainly, and I’m super excited to have you. I’m super excited about your journey with the Virtual Hub and everything that you’ve accomplished. I’m not just excited, but truly personally inspired, as I mentioned to you before we actually started the recording. So I really am excited to hear about your journey. But before we get there, I want to rewind the clock just a bit. I want to go back to the days of, say, junior high or high school. When an aunt or an uncle or even a mentor in school would have asked you what it is you want to be when you grow up, Barbara, what was your answer to that question back then?

Barbara Turley: I wanted to be a doctor, and I wanted to be a doctor in the big hospitals where all the action was taking place. So there were no lemonade stands or entrepreneurial wishes in my bones at the time. I wanted to be a doctor. And clearly that didn’t pan out, but I always think that was actually for the best. But I was fascinated by the nervous system, biology, that kind of thing. Yeah, I was attracted to that area.

Lori Brooks: That’s so funny and unfamiliar with that thought process. Back in the day, I wanted to be a pediatrician myself. I’d run around the house and give everybody their personal checkups and physicals.

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Barbara Turley: Oh, yes. I did quite hard to do it, actually. I did. And I didn’t get, just didn’t get enough of the points in my final year to study medicine. And I had actually felt like I had given it my all. And I made a decision very young—I mean, I was only 17—and it was quite an adult decision to make, that I decided that I wanted to maybe try a different path and that I felt I had given it my all, and I didn’t think I was going to win that race. Now, maybe that was me subconsciously going, yeah, maybe that’s not for me. But I ended up doing a completely different thing. I ended up in English and economics, actually, at university, and that led me on a great path. Totally different from medicine. Yeah, totally different.

Lori Brooks: I love that, and I thank you so much for bringing that up, because it’s one of those things that I try to lend credit to and bring the audience’s attention to, is your gut—your gut feeling on this journey—how important it is to fully listen to it, not just on the entrepreneurial journey, but in life overall. If you don’t listen to your gut, you find yourself in some perilous situations.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, 100%.

Lori Brooks: Seriously, so it’s so awesome of you to have had that insight and that recognition, even at the age of 17.

Barbara Turley: And you know, Lori, here’s a really interesting thing, right? I think in the end—this is a very short version—I ended up working as an equity trader in investment banking. And when I was on the trading floor, I realized that, I mean, it’s not life or death, right? Let’s be honest. It’s not like working in the ER. However, the fast, dynamic nature of it, the decision-making was really quick. It’s kind of like an emergency room. It can be chaotic, and there are lots of things moving. And I realized that actually maybe what I was looking for was the dynamic environment, because I felt the feeling for me was kind of the adrenaline rush.

And weirdly, years later, in the business that I’m in now, at its core, I’m actually in the business of matching supply and demand. We have demand for VAs, we’ve got supply of people. Business is all about actually matching supply and demand, which is actually the core of what being a trader is. It’s the same thing, right? So yeah, you can end up on different paths. So anyone listening to this thinking it’s the wrong path—sometimes it’s the feeling you’re after or the type of environment you’re after, and you can actually achieve that in different ways. It doesn’t have to be this career.

Lori Brooks: Thank you, thank you. You are giving so many tidbits this episode.

Barbara Turley: The gray hairs—you can’t see them—from the learning. Funny, yeah, hilarious.

Lori Brooks: No, I absolutely appreciate you bringing that up, because the journey can definitely ebb and flow in different ways, and you can find that itch. You can find what you’re looking for and satisfy that itch in different ways. And it really takes a moment of taking a step back, evaluating yourself, recognizing what you’re truly looking for, what that itch really is, and what it is you’re truly after, and then going and finding what that is to satisfy it, regardless of what the industry is. Because you can always flex and figure out how to make your way into that industry. But first and foremost, you’ve got to figure out you.

Barbara Turley: Yes, 100%. Yes.

Lori Brooks: So I think that was one of your first steps, obviously, to making this decision and taking that—

Barbara Turley: Trying it, isn’t it? Pivoting—my first pivot.

Lori Brooks: So tell us about how it is you actually started the journey with The Virtual Hub. Where were you in your journey, and what was it that kind of sparked that thought process for you?

Barbara Turley: Oh, listen, this is the next—if I could say this was like the next—I’ve had many pivots in my life, but there are a couple of big ones, and this was the biggest pivot ever. So I had spent 15 years in the financial industry, in corporate, like finance, all that sort of thing. No entrepreneurial stuff going on whatsoever. But I knew in my heart that I didn’t want to be a corporate mom. And high five to all the corporate women out there who are doing amazing work and trying to be mothers at the same time. I think it’s the hardest thing in the world to do.

Now, being an entrepreneur and being a mother is hard too, but at least I kind of call my own shots a bit. So I left my corporate career. I had invested in some companies, though, so I kind of had an income stream, and I was okay to leave—put it that way. And I launched a business. And the short story is, I had a stunning website, I had paid ad campaigns, I did Product Launch Formula, I was on fire—and it totally failed. Totally failed.

And I went through a couple of months of utter depression. Look, had I kept going, I think it would have taken off. But the energy to push it was a bit hard to write. And at the time, I was doing some business coaching on the side, just some consulting. And I noticed that all the businesses I was working with, they were all smaller businesses—some of them solopreneurs—and the issue they were all facing, regardless of industry or—

They weren’t able to grow. This is 12 years ago now. And if they didn’t grow, they weren’t going to be able to hire staff because they couldn’t afford it. So they were just in this vicious cycle—the vortex of busy work, basically—and wanting to get out of it, but not knowing how. I had read Tim Ferriss’ book, The Four Hour Workweek, and I was like, I have a VA in the Philippines. Why don’t I get you some of her friends?

We can see if we can free up your time, basically. And before I knew it—no joke—I was getting more calls for VAs than I was for business coaching. And one day I just thought, is there a business in this? I had never even heard of anyone doing this. And within about a month, I found myself in the ultimate pivot into a business with no website, no business plan, no offer, no nothing. And I was in business after about a month, and I was enjoying it. And I thought, gosh, I’m in a totally different business.

I shut the other one, and eight years later, we’re 300 employees. And the rest is sort of history, really. Not easy, but yeah, that was a huge pivot that happened very much by accident, very organically. And again, my gut was like, I think there’s something in this. So that’s where I went. Yeah.

Lori Brooks: That is outstanding. I first of all want to commend you on finding the business that validated itself prior to your even launching. You do not need to have the website up. You don’t need to have the business registered. You don’t need to have all your licenses in place. You don’t need—no. What you need—

Barbara Turley: Nobody ever said to me, what’s your website? They were like, can you get me one of those VAs? Sure. It was as simple as that. There was a need, and it wasn’t the sexiest need ever. I wanted to be—I was doing this financial education platform for women. I wanted to be an influencer and all this stuff. And at the end of the day, it was the picks and shovels that started the game.

And it’s funny because I’ve kind of come full circle now, where at the time one of my visions was—because a friend of mine said to me, are you not getting away from your vision, though? Your vision was that you really wanted to have impact in businesses and help more women to see that money is the tool that you can change the world with. That was kind of my thing. And I’ve come full circle now, and now I’m like, hold on a second. Now I’m actually helping businesses all over the world.

Lori Brooks: Congratulations, because that is an important moment—to recognize when those moments occur, to take stock of that, to not just recognize but celebrate those moments. Because if you don’t take the time to celebrate, it just becomes another thing, just another moment in a journey that can be very trying, very tiresome, and difficult to motivate yourself on. So congratulations.

Barbara Turley: And I have felt all of those things, for anyone thinking, how did she—people say to me, how did you do it? You were like—no. There have been a lot of sleepless nights. Nothing’s easy. And you see people—I mean, what you see now is 10 years later. So the first few years were pretty tough.

Lori Brooks: I understand. And it’s funny you’ve brought it up. I’m sure my audience is so tired of hearing me say this, but you’re such a woman after my own heart. I have to share with you—what I call that mode is “whino mode,” where we’re too busy working in, not on, our business. Yeah.

And so I work with financial advisors, and we move them into what I call “boss mode,” where we’re building out the operation to support their success.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. Financial advice businesses—I actually spent five years in asset management talking to financial advice businesses. At that time, I was talking more about portfolio construction, or the advisors listening will know what I mean. But there’s paraplanning and admin and all the compliance and all this sort of stuff. And it’s really difficult for financial advice businesses to get out of the weeds, because you’re kind of bogged down with a lot of compliance and stuff. There are ways, though—of course there are ways. But I commend you for helping that industry, because their clients are in bad need of help.

Lori Brooks: Right, right, right. That’s how my journey was launched. It was 2009. I was in the financial services industry. I was licensed, and then I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. And at that point, I was not interested in the corporate umbrella over my head. It was such a burden at that point with the illness that launching on my own and filling the need that I could see already existed and knew was apparent in the industry was the best way for me.

But I’m guilty of it myself. There are definitely moments when I go into “whino mode.” I’m familiar with it still.

Barbara Turley: Even I do that too. You have to do it for a while yourself. And then my philosophy is actually the more of it you can do yourself for a while, and then you create a system and then you delegate that system—that’s powerful. That’s what I recommend. Then you have control.

Lori Brooks: There you go. Personal knowledge before payment for service is definitely the most important on this journey. Because if you don’t have the personal knowledge on the journey, it’s so easy to be taken advantage of. You won’t have a clue what you’re paying for in service. You won’t have a clue why you’re paying for something. You won’t understand what the service provider is attempting to explain to you—especially when it comes to things such as web development, SEO, the backend of your website.

I mean, as annoying as it is to get through and understand, it’s so important to have that personal knowledge before you make payments for the service.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And it is hard. I mean, it’s hard because if you’re dealing with developers and coders and stuff—that is quite difficult, right? Because you think, I don’t know what I’m talking about. But it’s better to get educated a bit. Because otherwise your gut will be screaming, I don’t want to be in this field, I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what the person’s doing. And then you get scared.

Lori Brooks: Yeah. You’re scared of making the payments because you have no idea what you’re paying for. Right, exactly. So no, definitely. So I’d love for you to tell us all about The Virtual Hub—where you are now with your journey—and share.

Barbara Turley: Sure. So The Virtual Hub are a Philippine-based—I mean, I’m based in Europe, and we have some people around the world—but the operations are all based in the Philippines. We have 300 employees now, and we are supporting businesses everywhere from Australia, lots in the US, Canada, New Zealand—we’re global, really—but I mean the big hubs, and some in Europe, not as much as I’d like in Europe, but mainly US, Canada, Australia—huge markets for us.

We’re supporting lots of financial advisors, actually, and you know that industry is close to my heart, so we do quite a lot of work there. The main thing about The Virtual Hub, I noticed—and again, this was the thing I saw, probably being a newbie in an industry is not a bad idea sometimes, because you see how other players are doing it and how you think that’s broken—and you’re like, I think I’m just going to build it differently, which is what I did.

Well, I very early on was—I mean, I think we’re one of the only businesses that was like, the need here: VAs need to be trained. You can’t—we have an entire learning and organization department that’s very large now. And we don’t recruit for clients, so that’s a big thing. We’re not a recruiter. We actually recruit for ourselves. We go out and we know exactly the types of people we’re looking to find. We don’t actually care about their experience for being assistants.

And we have our own training platform. We put everyone on full salaries and benefits from day one, and we put them through our training programs. And only when we feel we have produced the quality VA that we know our clients are looking for do we even attempt to start to try to pair with the client demand coming in. So like I said, it’s this matching of supply and demand. I think I had the innate ability to do that from my trading days and to take more risk on. So I will take forward risks like that that other companies wouldn’t be prepared to do. We invest upfront heavily and take the risk that we can sell on or we can place people.

So that’s why our client success scores are very high. Our NPS score at the moment is 89, 90 with clients. When clients come to us, they get an assistant. It’s usually on the first round of meeting a selection of our people that they go, my gosh, I don’t know who to choose—they’re all great. So that is the success metric for me rather than just bums on seats, because I sort of feel we should have a thousand staff and not 300, but the success metrics are very important to longevity of employees and longevity of clients. And that’s the stuff we do very well.

We do cover a large breadth of industries. So we have everything from Facebook ad agencies to consultants and solopreneurs—we’ve got lots of those. And then we have some really big companies. At the moment, we have a huge client in Australia that’s a hundred million dollar asset management company. So we work across a large breadth of clients.

And I’m very excited at the moment because we launched, about a year ago, a new part of The Virtual Hub. So obviously we do people as a major part of what we do at the moment. But we realized early on that platforms and processes can be the bugbear as well. And if you don’t optimize your operations—it’s all about optimizing platforms, processes, and people—and that includes your onshore people optimizing their time by using offshore teams and things like that.

So we’ve launched the consulting and implementation arm of The Virtual Hub. We do platforms like Asana, etc. We’re huge Asana users—Zapier, LastPass, all these things—and process optimization as well. And that, I feel, I want to kind of develop us into a scaling solution for businesses and not just a VA company. So that’s a lot of the stuff that I’m out talking about on social media and stuff at the moment. I’m very passionate about helping businesses to really move the needle at the end of the day.

Lori Brooks: Sounds like you are really filling a need that a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners need right now. The turnover that different industries have experienced based off of the pandemic alone—there are so many people who are just stuck in whino mode, and it’s so difficult to get out of it without some sort of assistance. It’s almost impossible at times.

Kudos to you for taking that on. Kudos to you for the very specific way that you’re going about training from the inside out. I adore that idea. And I only wish I had met you a couple of years ago.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I know. People listening might say, I tried that, it didn’t work for me. And that is a big problem. I will say to anyone listening, I am here to tell you that it is not easy. It’s simple—the strategy is simple—but getting it right is not easy. So anyone who’s like, I tried that, it nearly killed me, because it can be quite difficult. Delegation in itself is a really difficult thing, and having offshore team members can be quite hard. So I hear you, and it’s not an easy thing to get right. But if you do get it right, the dividend it’s paying—it’s going to pay you for years in the future. And the financial people understand the compound effect of that. It just pays dividends in your business for years to come if you get it right.

Lori Brooks: It’s truly important to get it right when it comes to onboarding those team members and making sure everyone fits. And for those who have attempted to onboard a VA in the past and maybe haven’t found success, what’s maybe one gold nugget you might suggest to them in terms of attempting to implement a VA in the future? One or two gold nuggets. Of course, they need to turn to you for assistance with implementing that VA, but what’s one or two things that you do?

Barbara Turley: There’s a couple of key things to getting it right. Number one, people tend to go, I need a VA, and I need them yesterday, which is fine—we all do that. But it’s really important to slow down for a minute, even though you don’t want to. You’re gonna slow down now to speed up later. So that’s the tip about anything: slow down now so that you can speed up later, and then you can gather momentum and get flywheels moving and all that sort of thing.

With VAs, when you’re recruiting them, people will say hire slowly. I’m like, listen, just give them a load of testing, give them some work to do, pay them for it, pay them for it, and see what the work is like, right? And then bring them in, and you’ve got to set some specific—I’m a big believer in objectives and key results, which those of you who maybe haven’t heard of that yet, please do Google this. There’s a whole movement around it where you set the objective for bringing this person in. So what is this objective? If it’s to free your time by 30%, then you would set up what would be the key results to show you, both of you, that this is working over time.

And you want to connect those goals and key results to the actual work being done, so the VA themselves knows: is the work that I’m doing here actually driving the result? And they know where we’re trying to get together. And it’s the collaboration. It’s still not going to be perfect, but that in itself helps everyone to be aligned and on the same page. And after that, you’re talking about using proper SOPs and Asana or project management tools. Those are all the tactics, but really getting it right and being aligned is very, very important. And that goes for anyone you bring on, not just VAs, to be honest.

Lori Brooks: No, that’s very true. That is an excellent, excellent tip. Really taking the time to set that goal for yourself prior to bringing the person on—make sure you know what those roles are, what hats they’re going to wear, how they’re going to fit into your practice, and what you’re truly hiring them for. Blindly hiring a team member is a waste of your time as well as theirs. It’s not just your time and your money that you’re wasting—you’re wasting somebody else’s time and energy too on having that confusing moment of, how am I supposed to help this person? What am I being paid for again?

When there’s a lack of clarity for them, it makes it that much more difficult. And then it becomes a struggle amongst the energy overall. So no, I definitely agree—that is a really key piece. Thank you for sharing that. Really make sure to align your goals for yourself prior to onboarding so that the two of you can have that aligned goal and set those tactics out as you’re moving.

Barbara Turley: I would just add a final point to that, actually. It becomes very easy when you do it that way. Now there’s a bit of work to it, but it becomes very easy. And one of the bugbears a lot of entrepreneurs have is this “I don’t know what they’re doing” problem. It becomes very easy if you structure your OKRs properly and the work is connected to the work being done. The two of you together—it becomes quite obvious then whether you have a person issue or a skill issue or a training issue or an attitude issue. You know what I mean? So you kind of get to the truth quicker.

And sometimes you find out you’ve got a great person, but maybe they just don’t have the right training, or maybe their skill set is not quite what you—it’s very easy to figure that out.

Lori Brooks: Exactly. And then once you understand what the issue is, it’s super simple to go ahead and resolve it—super, super simple to figure out what those steps are that you need in order to move forward. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that with us—we appreciate it.

So I would love to know if, in fact, you were able to borrow this magic wand that we have over here and share with our guests every now and then, and you could wave it and change anything at all in the industry of virtual assistants—what would that be for you? And how do you feel it would truly affect the industry of virtual assistants overall?

Barbara Turley: Oh, wow. So much I could unpack there. I’m going to try and pick one. The industry, like every industry, has toxicity, and there is major toxicity in the virtual assistant industry. There are clients screwing VAs over and VAs screwing clients over, if I could just put it in those simple terms. That’s happening everywhere.

So if I had a magic wand, one of the things that I focused on heavily at The Virtual Hub—and I learned this from a Verne Harnish Scaling Up program, which I recommend anyone do, it’s fantastic for anyone who wants to scale a company—the focus on the people piece. And I realized that the business that we’re in, there’s two heads of the beast, so to speak. There’s the client experience, and there’s the employee experience.

And if you focus your attention on getting both of those two things right—obviously there’s all the bottom-up work that it takes to get those two things right—then you will have a great business. And I think the industry is too short-term focused on getting the work done, and there isn’t clear alignment. There isn’t clear task instruction. There’s misaligned expectations and all sorts of things that lead to really unhappy experiences across the board, both on the VA side and on the client side.

So yeah, I think—but again, that’s slowing down to speed up. You have to slow down to do that.

Lori Brooks: Goes back to lending credit to what you were saying before—really making sure that those goals are aligned, that you’re really there with what it is you’re looking for when you’re onboarding. So if you had the opportunity to go back, say, 10, 15 years and tell yourself just one thing, what do you feel like that would be?

Barbara Turley: I’ve been asked this question a lot, and it is actually—we talked about intuition. I think I’m older now, like we all are, with a lot of life experience. And I always knew, even as a teenager—back to how we started when I was 17—I always knew exactly what I wanted. I’m a very self-directed person, and I now have a six-year-old who’s the same. So I’m like, okay, okay, she knows what she wants, right? It’s a good trait to have.

But it’s taken me too long to kind of trust my intuition. And I’ve done jumps and made pivots and things, but if I could go back, I would say, yeah, you’ve got to listen and not push it away and go, maybe that’s rubbish. Actually, it is very powerful. And I think it takes women in particular—I don’t know how men feel about this—but I think as women, we have this really deep intuition, and our society, or whatever is going on these days, we’ve been taught to push it away and not listen to it.

And it’s taken me a long time to go, you know what? I knew that was going to happen. I knew it. And to trust me more. So that was my advice.

Lori Brooks: Thank you, thank you. No, I agree with you 100%. Intuition is super important in life, not just in business. You’ve got to listen to that inner voice, you’ve got to have clarity with it, because without it, there’s just turmoil overall, and you can’t be at ease. So no, thank you, thank you. I truly agree with that.

So I really enjoyed having you on today and chatting all about your business, The Virtual Hub, and chatting all about your journey. Please share the best way for our listeners—or our viewers, I should say at this point, swapping over from the podcast to television—it’s still a transition in my own head. So definitely share with our viewers the best way to find you.

Barbara Turley: Sure. At the moment, over the last few years, I have been very absent on social media because I was too busy building a business. But more recently, I really started coming out, and I’m very much enjoying entering the conversation on LinkedIn. And I’m probably going to maybe delve into Twitter.

But on LinkedIn, I share a lot of my philosophies, and I’m posting several times a week there. And I would love to hear from any of your viewers there—comment on what I’m saying. I’m talking about deeper versions of all the stuff I’m sharing here.

And I’d love if you entered the conversation with me. So on LinkedIn, just look up Barbara Turley. And I didn’t mean to do this, but I’m wearing yellow, and I’ve got a yellow background on my LinkedIn. So it’s just Barbara Turley. And of course, if you want to come and chat with us about VAs or read more about what we’re doing, thevirtualhub.com is where you can come.

I have a podcast over there as well. It’s not a podcast that’s continuing at the moment, but there’s about 50 shows there, all about every sort of problem you can imagine with VAs. If you have—like you’re wondering something—there’s probably a show there on that. And we have tons of content on our site to help you with navigation, et cetera. So, and of course, you can come and talk to us there as well.

Lori Brooks: Excellent. Well, The Virtual Hub—go check out all of the episodes there. Join her on LinkedIn, enter the conversation. Barbara, I will definitely be joining you over there in the conversation on LinkedIn. I look forward to it. And I thank you so much for sharing your journey and for joining me today.

Barbara Turley: Thank you for having me. It’s been great sharing.