Voice Actor: You’re listening to the Fearless Business Podcast. You’re in the best place to learn about how to grow a business, get more clients, and make more money without fears and limitations, all while having fun in the process. Robin Waite is the founder of Fearless Business, a business accelerator helping coaches, consultants, and freelancers double their income and more. Now here’s your host, Robin Waite.

Robin Waite: Welcome back, everybody. It’s the next episode of the Fearless Business Podcast. I’m your host, Robin Waite, the Fearless Business Coach. We’ve got an amazing guest with us today. I’m just going to hit record on my camera as well. We’ve got an amazing guest with us today in Barbara Turley, who is an investor, entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub, which is a business she started out by complete accident, exploded in the space of 12 months to become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants. So welcome to the show, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Thanks so much, Robin. Thanks for having me.

Robin Waite: It’s my absolute pleasure. You talk about something called a lean business model. I’m really curious to know a little bit more about that.

Barbara Turley: Sure. I mean, look, it’s a concept that’s been around for a very long time. It wasn’t me who coined the phrase. I’d love to say I wrote the book, but I didn’t. But one of the things I’ve been talking a lot about recently, which a lot of coaches like yourself or consultants, et cetera, should be talking to their own clients about and thinking about for their own business, is that in the last 10 years, I mean, we’ve had probably 15 years, amazing amounts of digital transformation. We’re all moving online. Digital has been huge, and then in the last year, in this pandemic that we’ve been in, we’ve had another 10 years of digital transformation happen in about six months flat. But one of the key areas that I feel is still something that’s not looked at enough is the resourcing around your human capital, so the asset that is your people.

Now, obviously, larger companies will try to look at this, but it also applies to, if you’re just a solopreneur working by yourself. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working on your own or whether you have a larger team. It’s thinking about how you and/or members of your team are actually spending their time. And what you find is that studies have been done on this by Harvard Business Review and various other studies where they found that 30 to 40 percent of any executive’s time, and on a hazard that any of us running businesses would class ourselves in the executive sort of category, 30 to 40% of your time is generally being taken up with stuff that is easily delegatable, is quite process-driven, and should be done by somebody else.

Now, the next layer down from that is saying, well, now that we’re all virtual anyway, and lots of the viewers today and the listeners have probably always been in a virtual or remote-type scenario, we’re working online, working from home, et cetera. But these days, everybody’s remote. So does it matter whether you’re in the next room, the next house, the next state, country, or across the world? Not really. We’ve all been trained now to work in a very remote environment. And therefore, it’s time to really start thinking about places like the Philippines, where our company is obviously based, and outsourcing to not just the Philippines, but finding talent that is lower cost than you or members of your team to do these types of—I’m not going to use the word low value because every task is valuable in any business—but tasks that you shouldn’t be spending your time doing.

And that is the next layer of this lean business model that is now a topic of conversation for every business, particularly as the economy starts to try to come out of the slump that we’re in. It’s going to be up to the business community to bring the global economy back once the pandemic finishes. So it’s a very important topic.

Robin Waite: So you heard it here first, people. One of the first things you need to be doing is doing a bit of a time audit and working out which tasks are systemizable and process-driven that you can potentially look to outsource and save yourself up to 30 to 40% of your time each and every day, each week.

You mentioned there about using virtual assistants from overseas. Obviously, a lot of people have some trepidation about this, but places like the Philippines speak better English probably than you or I can a lot of the time, so language isn’t necessarily a barrier. But what are some of the common sort of worries, concerns that people have, and how do you sort of encourage them to overcome those worries?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so the first thing to say, because there will be people listening and watching this going, “I tried that, it was a disaster.” It’s not simple, right? So it’s not an easy thing to get right. The fears that people have are not necessarily—some people who, in my position, will say, “You shouldn’t worry about any of these things.” Well, that’s not true because you should.

So let’s deal with the English one first. I have people on my team, seriously, who speak better English than me, right? Sometimes they come out with words. I’m like, “Wow, that’s a big word.” You know? So in the Philippines, there are people with extraordinarily good levels of English. However, there are a lot of people in a country with a hundred million people. You’ve got to be very careful because, yes, English is a concern. And one of the first things that we’re doing in our business when we’re hiring people is our English tests are so high, it’s almost painful to get through them because you have to have that as the first layer of checking before you check anything else, you know? How’s the grammar? How’s the written English, the verbal English, et cetera?

And the other concerns that people have, again, are things like trust. Like, what happens if this person, you know, runs away with all my data? Well, my answer to that typically is that you really, that’s a fear that you have regardless of where you go. So that’s not particularly associated with the Philippines or anywhere else. Somebody in the next room from you or living down the street working for you could do the same thing. So it’s about thinking about that in a more holistic business way.

And there are tools and strategies out there to help you to protect your data, your systems, even simple things like using LastPass, which is a password vault. So getting up to speed on the types of security measures that any business should have helps you to alleviate that problem. So while it’s not something you shouldn’t be concerned about, it’s not necessarily something that is just for the Philippines.

Then the big elephant in the room, when you’re working with offshore VAs, let’s be honest, we’ve all heard the stories about either they do the work and you have to do it all again yourself, or they say they did the work and actually the work wasn’t done, or the third big one is, well, they said they were working and then they disappeared and I never heard from them again. And so those stories are real. Those things definitely happen.

It’s unpacking all of that. One of the best ways, obviously, is to recruit the right people. It’s very important, and then manage them properly. But what I see happening is that when you’re dealing with a country, a culture like the Philippines, it’s a yes culture. And sometimes you bring on people, and they say they can do lots of things, and actually they can’t really. And then they become completely overwhelmed, and they might just run a mile rather than actually tell you they weren’t able to do it.

So this is the going AWOL thing, or finding out that the work actually didn’t get done because maybe they were trying to call friends to figure out how to do it in the first place because they said yes. So it’s being very, very aware of that. You’ve got to actually do some testing with people to make sure that they have the skills that they said they had. And again, that comes down to your recruitment strategy a lot.

And the final one is people making mistakes. That can be a skill issue or a will issue, or it can be a process issue. So, for example, a lot of people know how they do something themselves, but they’re not good at articulating to somebody else how they would like it done. And of course, when it’s your business, particularly if you’re a solopreneur, for example, you know how you like things done. You have a way of doing stuff, and it’s about being able to build systems and processes within your business that can be delegated to somebody else.

And rather than putting that accountability onto someone else, that actually is your responsibility as the business owner or as the leader of a team. It does require leadership. You have to remember that these people, at the end of the day, are assistants who are there to assist you, not necessarily to develop strategies for you or processes. And those are the big ones, really. They tend to be the big fails.

Robin Waite: The one I always take away from that and which I always encourage fearless crew to take on board is to make sure that when you’re delegating something, delegate responsibly. Don’t delegate responsibility because that’s often where things go wrong. If you don’t know how to systemize it and you don’t know what your process is servers, and it was causing a massive lag that we only, through testing, figured out was actually causing a time delay in how long it was taking them to do something. And that on earth is a major problem. But we had to go there next to see, like, is it internet? Is it tech? How do things perform in different locations?

And then finally, when you’re going through all of that, then you have to start looking at the people. But before you blame the person, you have to ask two questions: Is it a skill issue or is it a will issue?

Now, dealing with a skill issue first, if it’s a skill issue, can the person be trained on this? Or maybe this is above their level, right? So that’s kind of a call you have to make. You might want to try and train them first. And if they’re still struggling, I don’t want to use the word firing because that sounds like somebody’s done something wrong. Maybe it’s time to, you know, part company at that point. But only after you’ve ascertained that the skill issue is not, you can’t get over it, right?

And if it’s a will issue, that’s an attitude, right? Now, that can be somebody lying. And typically, if you’ve gone through this whole process and you still can’t really quite put your finger on it, it’s probably just a wrong fit, to be honest. There’s some reason why you guys are not fitting together. And if your intuition is saying there’s something wrong there, you probably should listen to that.

Robin Waite: I’ve got a personal story, actually, a personal experience, which I had recently in making a transition from working with a VA into actually taking on somebody full time, which explains exactly that.

So I had a VA who was actually, you know, processing the podcast for me and producing it and getting the blogs live and all that side of it. And we booked them for about sort of between 10 and 20 hours a month. And as we started to layer in more parts of the process into it, so obviously there’s things that we want to do in order to promote the podcast, we just reached a natural impasse. And I realized it wasn’t a skill issue at all. And it wasn’t even that, you know, we could have booked more hours and she could have done it, but it just reached a point whereby the number of steps in the process just became too much and overwhelming for her.

We tried to bring in an extra team member to then take it on, and that’s the point where skill then broke down. What I actually ended up doing was reaching out to one of the coaches on my team, a guy called Stefan. His specialty is finding people, training them up to be leaders, and setting them up with his sprint formula, basically, which is all based around Scrum and sprint techniques and using all of the great tools which you just said.

Anyway, initially, we were like, well, do we go down the VA route? He said, “Well, I’ll look at the traditional VA ports of call.” He went on places like Upwork and Fiverr and various other VA sort of websites. In actual fact, we lucked out because he managed to find somebody from Upwork who was based here in the UK. She had a job, but she graduated and done a marketing degree and just graduated, but was looking for something a bit more solid. And it was like the money was right. She was in the UK, so we didn’t have to worry about the time things, very enthusiastic, needed a job at that particular point. So everything kind of fell into place.

And I suppose my point here is that we kind of had to go through—and it didn’t get awkward or uncomfortable—but it just came to a natural end with the VA company I was using after about six months. And we needed to move things forward. And now it’s pretty much a full-time job for Jess to kind of manage the podcast. So I totally get it. It’s such valuable advice, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s true. I think, as well, the other thing people forget is that hiring people, managing people, and delegation is a skill that is not talked about enough in the business community. And it’s something that you have to master, just like you have to master marketing and sales and all these things. But there’s less importance placed on operations. And delegation is part of operations, as is automation and systems and all that kind of thing.

But if you don’t invest the time, energy, and money actually in trying to master that as a skill, even if it’s just you on your own in the business, you end up paying dearly for it. And you pay in frustration, and you pay in irritation.

And part of being great at delegation is accepting that when you start doing it first and you start in this game, there will be moments where the business will have to slow down for a second so that you can transition, or you can make a decision, or you pull someone out and put someone new in. And that’s just all part of the game, right? It’s not that you’re failing. It’s just that in order to do that, it’s going to take time. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Robin Waite: It’s all about finding a better way, isn’t it, at the end of the day? Let’s shift gears a little bit. So obviously, you run The Virtual Hub, and I want to understand a little bit more about that. But you also mentioned that you kind of built this business after having a baby as well, at the same time, and finding those high-quality sort of virtual assistants. So tell us a bit more about that story. How did that unfold?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, actually, I was a business coach. Look, I was in corporate for 15 years. Here’s the short version. I was in corporate for 15 years. And look, if you Google me, you can find out all about that in corporate.

I kind of wanted to dabble in my own business. So I left corporate and I started consulting, as we all do. And I was enjoying that. Looking back, I wasn’t really, but at the time I thought I was enjoying that enough. But I found that all the businesses I was working with, it didn’t matter what the business was—online, offline, product, service, anywhere in the world—they all fundamentally had the same problem. If they didn’t hire staff, they were never going to be able to grow. And if they didn’t grow, they were never going to be able to hire staff. It was like this crevice that they were all just in. Some were in it for 10 years, others were in it for a year.

And the only way I could really help to work on strategy with the clients was to try to get some staff and teach them to delegate. I had a VA in the Philippines myself because I had read The Four-Hour Workweek, no other reason. And I just started getting friends of my VA to sort of help out at the time. And before I knew it, I found I was getting phone calls from friends of clients saying, “Can you get me one of those VAs? I’m desperate.”

And I just remember thinking over a weekend once, “Is there a business in this?” It was just literally like that. And I put a webinar on to the small list that I had, and I found that people were desperate for help with this problem and that I was naturally good at operations. That’s kind of the whole thing.

Now, obviously, we’re six years later now. We’re coming up to 200 staff. The business has grown exponentially, but it was not simple. Nothing is ever linear, right? It looks amazing now, but those early days were very difficult. I made a lot of mistakes, and I almost got out of the business completely, to be honest, because it was so difficult. But yeah, I had two children at the same time. I’m completely mad. Please don’t do what I did. I always say I have three children…

Robin Waite: I think many entrepreneurs go through a similar sort of journey, though. It’s that kind of ups and downs, and you kind of just have to weather the storms and then look forward to the good times, basically. There is a certain makeup when you run your own business, the sort of person you have to be in order to kind of get through.

Barbara Turley: Always upleveling. Yeah. And you have to love what you do. And I ended up loving it, actually. I ended up really finding a lot of fulfillment in helping some of our team have grown great careers with us and just hearing people say how you changed their lives.

And even clients who say, “I didn’t know the freedom I have now because I learned to delegate.” And it’s not just the VA. It’s the upleveling of their mindset to say, “I could still be a solopreneur, for example, with lots of people who are consultants and coaches. And I don’t need to run a huge team, but I can free myself to grow the business more and do the things I really love to do by actually learning to delegate and then having a cost-effective team member that loves to.” And some of our VAs have been with our clients for four or five years.

Robin Waite: What are some of your favourite success stories that have come out of both your staff and also for your clients as well? What are some of your best wins?

Barbara Turley: Yes, lots of them. Let me think about this. You know what? There was one Christmas, I remember we did a sort of voice box thing at one of our Christmas parties. This is back before COVID, when you could do Christmas parties.

And a couple of the team had said that they had worked in call centers because we tend not to hire people with prior experience. We prefer to hire a type, and then we train them ourselves. That’s the way we do it.

But they had said that they had always worked in call centers their whole lives, and they had never been able to take Christmas off to go back to the province and spend it with their families. And they were like, “I’m taking two weeks off, and I’m so elated.” It was just like a dream for them. And I thought, wow, that’s just something we wouldn’t even think about in the West, that they all have been working on Christmas Day. And that really lit me up.

And I hear those stories all the time. I hear of how much I’ve changed somebody’s life from building the company that we have. We’re a very supportive culture.

And then, on the client side, there’s many stories. We’ve got our website. There’s actually testimonials all over the website of what people have said. But there was one in particular that sticks out in my mind. She was a solopreneur. She’s in Australia. And through working with her VA and learning to delegate, she managed to, I think she traveled around Australia in a camper van while she was still working. And she ran her business remotely and she managed to do this and to really enjoy. So that was very uplifting.

And then we have larger companies that have built teams with us, and they’ve been amazing to work with. For me, that’s been amazing, to work with some larger companies too.

Robin Waite: I’ve always been a slight sceptic of The Four-Hour Workweek, which you mentioned, but how realistic is it?

Barbara Turley: It’s not realistic at all. I mean, look, if you want to… It depends. If you’ve got a bit of a hobby business, maybe. Anyone who can run a business in four hours a week… Now, have I met people who could run a business part-time and a big business running at part-time? Yes, I’m one of them. I have two children. I’m quite hands-on with my own children. I work more than part-time at the moment. I work 20 or 25 hours a week and cope, you know?

But the four-hour workweek? No. I think that’s more of a hobby thing. I don’t know. Maybe you can get somebody on the show who can refute me on that, but I don’t think you can grow a business.

Robin Waite: I need Tim Ferriss to come on and refute it. But it’s funny, isn’t it? Tim Ferriss, who wrote the book, seems to be like the hardest-working guy out there. But again, it’s about the DNA makeup of an entrepreneur. We all just love what we do, and we can’t not work. That’s just the way it is.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I love what I do as well. I don’t think I would ever want to just retire and not do anything. I’d be bored.

Robin Waite: Yeah, it’s that fit. Well, the $10 million question: If you won the lottery and you won $10 million, what would you do? And my first answer is, I’d go straight to work the next day. Why would I not want to work?

Barbara Turley: I’d probably launch a foundation. I’d probably launch a foundation or something. I’d want to do something like that.

Robin Waite: It’s the same for me. I’ve always dreamt of wanting to run a little sort of—not like a co-working space—but an incubator for small business owners so that they can get access to free advice, good-quality free advice. Because I think that’s one of the things in this day and age. You literally can’t get any type of business education really without having to pay for it.

I mean, albeit, that said, Clubhouse has been an absolute revelation because you can log into there and if you get into the right room and with the right expert, you can get some really great free advice at the moment and jump up and ask questions and things like that. Even still, if you then want to go into depth with it and have some help with the accountability, coaching always costs you money. And I’d actually like to have an incubator whereby people kind of get the coaching, but without necessarily having to make the investment.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, yeah. I think as well, look, for anyone listening who’s thinking about this coaching thing as well, getting the right coach is key, that sort of works with your energy and your way of being.

But also these days, online, there’s so much stuff out there. It can be overwhelming. But if you can just… the power of singular focus is kind of, you know, a sense of urgency and the power of singular focus, not trying to do too many things, because people underestimate what you can do—sorry, they overestimate what you can do in a day or a week, but you underestimate what you can do in 12 months. If you just slowly take one thing at a time, just inch forward all the time with what you’re trying to build.

Robin Waite: So what are you working on next with The Virtual Hub? Where’s Barbara taking the business?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, we’re actually in a really exciting time. And like I said, we’re six years old now. And it’s a whole backstory on that, on the good times and the bad times. And I like to share that because I think, like what you said about coaching, it can be expensive, whatever. You can learn a lot from hearing the backstories of people who’ve actually built businesses and the painful times and all that kind of thing.

So we’re at a stage where it’s a compliment from our clients to us that they are constantly asking us—they seem to trust what it is that we’re doing. It’s hard to get it right. They ask us for stuff that’s outside of scope, for example. “Can you guys find me this? Can you guys do content? Can you guys do even podcasts and manage podcasts?” and all this kind of thing.

So my vision for The Virtual Hub was always to have loads of VAs that are really well trained, and this amazing collaborative culture, and then kind of in the middle have this, the hub, which was the expert-level stuff.

So we’re about to launch, for our clients only at this point, a service called the Content Machine. And it’s for people who need to churn out blog content and repurpose it all the time. There’s demand for that.

And the other thing we’re launching is that all of our clients now, we’ve launched this thing called the Pod Concept. And every client gets—we don’t just give you a VA, we give you like an entire operational framework plus an ecosystem of support. So every VA has a results coach, and every client also has the results coach. And their job is to help make sure that we know what your goals are, and then are we actually…

So the VA is there to do the work, but the results coach is there to make sure, like, do we have training needs? Where are the gaps? How long is this all going to take?

And then every client has a client success manager. So we’ve launched an entire client success team. And our whole forward strategy is about client success because that’s actually what brings you the business in the end. That’s really the key.

Robin Waite: When you made the jump to set the business up in the first place, how scary…

…more to educate myself even more. Maybe my ego needed to have a beating at the time. Maybe that’s why I knew more than I did.

Robin Waite: Well, I think that’s it. I think you do have to fail and struggle a little bit in order to turn out even better because what you have created is pretty remarkable. And you could argue that if you had listened to somebody and assumed that what they were talking about was actually the right piece of advice when, inadvertently, it wasn’t, it could have turned out very different. It could have just been a white-labelled version of somebody else’s idea. And that’s not what you’ve…

Barbara Turley: No, and this is very organic, actually. You’re right, actually. That’s a good point. Yeah, that’s a really good point. So thank you for sharing that because everything at The Virtual Hub actually has been built from every time we got negative feedback, we’d get angry, and then we’d be like, “What can we change in our process to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”

And we did that from the employee side and the client side. And if you do that week on week on week on week, you end up with a powerhouse that is built by feedback, which is the hardest thing to do. But if you take it and wear it and listen and believe what people are telling you, then that’s what we got.

Robin Waite: Well, it goes right back to the start in terms of the lean business approach. Lean Startup by Eric Reese is one of my favorite books. That was the second business self-development book which I ever read, the first one being Built to Sell, which you can see over my shoulder there.

Barbara Turley: That’s my favorite book.

Robin Waite: So I think there’s a lot which people can learn from that. Listen, Barbara, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. We’ll keep in touch, and I’d love to hear how your story is continuing over the years to come.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.