Jennifer Orechwa: Hey, Shakers, and welcome to Worth Your Salt, the podcast that shakes up your marketing game in the health and wellness industry. Worth Your Salt is brought to you every Thursday by Salt Marketing. Salt Marketing helps health and wellness practitioners build trust and authority to attract a steady stream of inbound wellness seekers. For more information, you can visit us online at saltmarketing.co. I’m Jennifer Orechwa, Story Brand Certified Guide, Marketing Strategist with Salt Marketing, and your host for today’s episode of Worth Your Salt.

My guest today is on a mission to eradicate overwhelm and remove the friction that stunts business growth by helping her clients, including health and wellness practitioners, optimize their operations through the use of virtual assistants, clever automations, and streamlined processes. With her operational efficiency and implementation teams, deep training, and ongoing career development, she’s transforming the way that professionals scale their practices.

Barbara Turley is the founder and CEO of The Virtual Hub. And if you’re thinking, I don’t even know what I’d have a virtual assistant do, well, we’re in this exploration together. Barbara’s going to show us how incorporating a virtual assistant can be a game changer. Welcome, Barbara.

Barbara Turley: Thank you, Jennifer. Great to be here.

Jennifer Orechwa: So I’d love to hear a little bit about your story and your journey of how The Virtual Hub not only got started, but how it’s grown to where you are today.

Barbara Turley: Sure. Yes, it’s a funny story. I’ll try and give you the short version. So, you know, I was never the lemonade stand entrepreneur as a child. I was in corporate for many, many years and that was what I wanted to do. I had a very successful corporate career in the investment banking arena. Actually, I was an equity trader for about eight years. My accent, in case nobody can pick it up, is Irish. So I’m originally from Ireland, but I did move to Australia in my early twenties and had where I am today and I had most of my career down here. And then, you know, rolling forward after, you know, 10, 12 years of industry experience, I got into my mid thirties, I kind of made the decision that I didn’t want to be a corporate mom. That was honestly the truth of the beginning of it. But I also was quite inspired by the idea of building a company. Now that was about as far as it got. I had no real plan for what that was going to look like, but I liked the idea of maybe creating something or working for myself like that. I did get an opportunity. An interesting opportunity came my way after the last big financial crisis, which was in 2008. In the industry, in the financial industry, was a real mess back then. And I got an opportunity to sort of hop on the coattails of a few very clever people that were about to take a business out of one of the investment banks and actually buy it out. And I got involved in that startup. It was a startup of sorts. And was brilliant from the perspective of firstly, I got to sort of see how a great company gets built. You know, I really was around some very clever people. And I also got to participate in that. So, you know, I became an early shareholder in that company and I’m still involved in the company today, but this is 15 years later. And through that journey, I spent five years there really, really learning so many skills around scaling a company, even things like distribution and sales and the large sort of the large end of how do you get a great concept and bring it to market and scale it bigger.

So then I decided, right, it’s time for me to do something. And again, I didn’t really have a plan. I had a bit of a vision for what I wanted to do, but I started out business coaching, which a lot of corporates will do when they leave corporate is to start doing consulting of some shape or format. And that is a good idea because it gives you, you get to talk to people and you find problems. And that’s exactly what happened for me. I was actually coaching some smaller businesses. One of them happened to be a naturopath, actually. She had a naturopathic business and I had all sorts of businesses that I was coaching. But I saw the same problem across all of them. I really saw that a lot of these businesses will plateau at a certain point. And I’m sure some of your listeners will resonate with this because you started it out. You’re usually the technician. You’re doing everything yourself or you may have one or two other staff or people helping. But in order for a business to grow, you need to step out of that technician mindset and you need to hire staff. And if you don’t hire staff and grow, you won’t really have the revenue to do anything. So it sort of becomes a circular problem.

So a lot of the businesses didn’t really have the resourcing at that point to hire local people. So I knew that you could get virtual assistance in the Philippines. And to be honest, the only reason I knew that was because like everyone I had read Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek at that stage. So I had gotten a virtual assistant myself to help me with some things. And I just started recruiting some of her friends really to help some clients. And before I knew it, I was getting asked for, can you get me one of those VAs more than I was for, can you be my business coach? And I kind of found myself accidentally in this new business overnight. It was very, very organic in that way. I didn’t have a website or a business plan or anything really at that stage. I just enjoyed, I was really enjoying seeing the change that putting in a good assistant would do in these businesses. Now, I was heavily involved though in the upside of those businesses. I’ll circle back to why that’s important in a minute. But rolling forward, we’re eight years old today.

I have had two children in that time as well. I always say I have three children. I have an eight-year-old business, a seven-year-old and a four-year-old. So, and we are 350 employees in the Philippines. We have clients in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand. And we are, you know, really at a scaling point now where I’m pretty excited about the future of this business and what we’re doing for the clients that we have. So that’s about as short as I can make that story.

Jennifer Orechwa: Yeah, that’s a great story. I love it. It’s amazing. So you were talking about the tendency to plateau and the need to hire in order to scale. So what indicators do you often see business owners facing at that point? So people call you up, what are they saying to you when they’re like, I need something?

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So smaller businesses, they find themselves at this point before they make the call, before they think about this. When you’re up answering emails, you know, at 11 o’clock at night because you’ve been working all day in the business and you’re trying to do marketing plans at two o’clock in the morning in your head, this is the sort of thing that is happening for people, particularly when they’re the technician in their business. So the naturopath, the yoga teacher, the dentist, even a doctor, these sorts of things. And they find that working on the business is the bit that doesn’t really happen. And they were able to do that in the early days themselves because they didn’t have as many clients or as many patients or whatever. So those early stages of working on the business work really well. And then the business gets full up. And then you realize that you can’t go any further because your time is maxed out. And then sometimes you can’t hire or you don’t have time to hire. It’s a whole gamut of things.

Jennifer Orechwa: So how can bringing on a virtual assistant help address those challenges?

Barbara Turley: Many businesses need staff of all types. There’s all sorts of staff that’s needed. But typically, and at the moment, you know, as the time we’re speaking, hiring is actually quite difficult in all of the countries that I mentioned. So even though we are sort of talking about recession times and things like that, employment, the employment markets are still quite tight in a lot of countries. So the easiest way to think about it is to say every person in a business, even if it’s just one person, even if you’re on your own in a business.

And this actually translates to larger organizations as well, because we also work with some very large organizations and you find the middle managers and all sorts of layers that have the same problem while they’re to unpack. A lot of people are spending anywhere from 20 to 50 % of their day doing recurring process driven and therefore trainable tasks that could be delegated, but maybe don’t make enough sense to delegate to somebody locally because of the cost of hiring somebody locally.

Offshore team strategy works like this. We’re based in the Philippines. So if you can isolate those types of processes and rather think about it as tasks and workflows rather than roles, and you say, if we were to take that layer off the people that we have currently in the business, and let’s say you have two or three people, what you’ve actually done is cloned an average of those three people.

So once you see this, it’s very hard to unsee it. If you’re the only person in the business and you free up 30 % of your time, you’ve created a third of yourself again. What would you use your time to do to grow the business? See what I mean?

Jennifer Orechwa: Absolutely. I love what you said about tasks and processes rather than thinking of roles. That’s really interesting.

Barbara Turley: Yes, a lot of people want to think I want to hire a content manager or I want to hire an X and while those things are great, they can come later. A great generalist virtual assistant that can cut across a lot of, not just admin, but even social media, you know, LinkedIn is a big thing these days, all gamut of sort of the process driven operational flow of things in the business. That’s a great way to free up time of the people in the business.

Jennifer Orechwa: And it’s so easy for us as entrepreneurs to just say, it’ll be faster, it’ll be easier, it’ll be better if I just do it myself. So what are some of the first things that you would recommend we consider enlisting a virtual assistant to do for us?

Barbara Turley: So first of all, the mindset of, it’ll just be faster to do it myself is true, because initially it may well be, because the process is in your head. That’s usually the problem. Or there’s a step or two or three in a process that does require the IP of somebody higher up than an assistant. So this is where we get to saying, you know, the first step is to say, that is true, but how do I get around that thinking?

Well, the way you get around that thinking is to say to yourself, I need to look at return on time invested. And it works a bit like money. So the compound effect of interest on money is the same as when you start to invest time in this, the return on time invested. So taking the time to say, if I slow down for a moment now, I will be able to speed up later. And the dividends that that pays in a business go into perpetuity.

So if you slow down for a second now, try and get a process out of your head, down onto paper, it doesn’t have to be fancy, it can just be a few bullet points and start the process of saying, how would I train somebody or do I think this is trainable? And invariably 80 % of most processes actually can be done by an assistant. And then you may have to do a few steps, but at least that would free up a lot of your time. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. And that’s usually the first step of just admitting that to grow the business, sometimes you have to slow down to speed up.

Jennifer Orechwa: That’s really good advice. So what sorts of things can be efficiently handled by a virtual assistant, like specific tasks and responsibilities that you might be able to hand off?

Barbara Turley: Sure. I’ve sort of turned the, I call it the support layer. So let’s talk about the problem in the virtual assistant industry is that it has exploded over the last 15 years, but the word virtual assistant has morphed from, you know, anybody from a heartbeat who can type to someone who can code an app. And that is fundamentally a flaw in that that’s not what an assistant is.

So I like to sort of say, look, a virtual assistant is really a support layer person. And that is not to demote the work that they do. It’s just to be clear that they do execution of process. They can help to build process as long as it’s in collaboration with other people. They’re not going to just come up and strategize some process all by themselves. And they need to be in collaboration with somebody. I mean, they can, but you don’t want to oversell that.

So the support layer, I’ve managed to sort of break that down into what I call three types of buckets. You have admin, and admin can be anything: formatting documents, email management, calendar management is a big one, particularly those who are struggling with appointment bookings changing, all that sort of thing, answering the phone, doing research. There’s all sorts of things within that admin area, and each person will be thinking of their own things right now of the stuff that needs to be done, but doesn’t necessarily need to be done by them. Somebody could do it.

And the second bucket falls into these days, we are all digital. You know, everyone is on social media, everyone needs to have a presence somewhere, even if they’re not doing it very well, you kind of need to have presence, be that with a website or, you know, here I am doing a podcast, for example, lots of people do podcasts as well. So in this middle one, I call it marketing assistance, really. And it’s everything.

For example, I show up to this podcast, all I actually do is show up to this podcast. I don’t even need to tell my team that I’m on this podcast today. When this podcast goes live, they have an entire process that they will pick up this podcast and they will roll out our process around taking snippets from it, spreading it across social media. It will show up on my LinkedIn, all this sort of thing. That’s a process I wouldn’t in a fit think of doing that myself, even though I did design the process actually, and I was quite involved in that. But then I delegated that process. Blog posts, formatting on websites, updating YouTube channels, all of this stuff that falls into this marketing type of bucket.

And then the third one that we have is people who are more, you know, these days, again, tech stacks and the tools, the digital tools are becoming more and more advanced. And people are using marketing automation tools like HubSpot, CRM, Ontraport, these sorts of things. We actually train VAs to manage the tools and that can go across Shopify, it could be all sorts of tools that they manage. They’re more technically minded types of VAs.

And within those buckets, there are always, you know, we work with businesses that don’t do any marketing with us, but there are back office operational processes that they have managed to map out and they have worked out that a VA could do parts of them, might be Excel stuff or whatever. So I hope that gives you a sense of kind of where we play. It’s that support layer. It’s what you want to think about.

Jennifer Orechwa: Yeah. It’s fascinating to think about all the possibilities. I feel like I’m already seeing the light.

Barbara Turley: It’s enormous, yes.

Jennifer Orechwa: I do have to take a quick sponsorship break. When we return, I want to talk more specifically about how to find the right virtual assistant team. Stay with us.

Voice Actor: The Worth Your Salt Podcast is grateful to our partners and sponsors, including the Wellness Pro Workshop.

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I’m back here on the Worth Your Salt podcast with Barbara Turley, owner of The Virtual Hub. And so, Barbara, let’s talk systems and processes. What role can virtual assistants play in managing and streamlining those administrative tasks specifically for health and wellness practitioners, and how could their role impact the efficiency of the entire practice?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So just starting off this concept of systems and processes, when you’re working with a virtual assistant, you will be vastly more successful if you have systems and processes. But that can become a real friction point for business owners listening, who think to themselves, well, I can’t get a virtual assistant because I don’t have systems and processes yet. Or I do have them, they are not really, you know, they’re in their head or this sort of thing.

A VA can also help you to map the systems and processes and get it out of your head and get the system moving. And the two of you can work together on that. And the best way to do that, the easiest way actually, is to quickly record yourself doing something. So next time you have to do it yourself, you can use a tool called Loom, L-O-O-M, very easy, or ScreenCaster does it as well.

Record yourself doing something, or simply just write bullet points down. It does not have to be fancy. It can be back of an envelope and take a photograph of it and start there. And the next step is to get, ask the VA to help you to make this into a process. They could watch the video and try to map the steps.

The next step after that is to get them to do it. And what you want in this part of the process is to watch for the mistakes, and the mistakes are going to show you where there’s a hole in the process of delegating that to somebody else. There could be a step where you have IP in your head as you’re doing the step that the next person doesn’t have, and you may need to train that, but that’s how you refine the process over time together.

And when you have a VA to kind of help you with that, they can take some of the heavy lifting off you and get to know you better. So that’s the hope that helps to kind of make it simple. Just keep it simple.

Jennifer Orechwa: Yeah, and I think a common misconception about VAs is that no one will be as dedicated to what I do as I am. I think that can be particularly true in health and wellness. So can you speak to that and any other myths that people have about hiring a VA?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So I think that problem usually arises when people try to get a VA for a few hours a week. So this is the problem. And maybe, you know, maybe you’ve sort of hired somebody full time. I mean, I’ll come to that in a minute. But usually the first problem is when someone says, well, I did get a VA and it was, you know, he or she was working for me five hours a week and they didn’t show up or the work wasn’t done on time.

And all of these problems exist. They are real. But with the problem of having somebody only a few hours a week, you’re not really committing to them and they’re not really committing to you. At the end of the day, you’re trying to do it cheap and they’re trying to make a bit of money. That’s usually the problem. And it’s a bit like the dating scene. You know, if you’re not really going to take it to the next level, who’s really committed.

I do feel that even though you may have to pay more and it may be more of an expense, I do find that it’s better if you decide to bring someone into your business and actually bring someone on. Bring them into the vision that you have for the business. Share with them the care, the parts they’re going to play, the role. Like if you were going to hire an employee and you wanted to onboard them fully and integrate them inside your business.

I think that’s far better. The issue with hiring people is hard, right? Let’s be honest. Recruiting is hard in general. Managing people is hard in general, no matter where you do it. But when you are dealing across countries in remote locations, you know, there’s another layer there that makes it a little bit more complex again.

And I know this because I run a company that does this. And even we have these issues that we see. You’ve got to have stronger controls. Now I hate the word controls, but what I mean by this is if you’ve got a great person, you bring them on, on the vision, on the journey with you, then you have to have an operational framework that is good to put them into. And you can build it together, but it comes to this systems and processes thing.

Because if you’re delegating processes to a VA, and it’s very clear what that VA needs to do every day, then it’s very easy for you to see whether that’s working or not. And if it’s not working, you can say to yourself, is this a skill issue or a will issue? And if it’s a skill issue, you can possibly train it, maybe not. If it’s a will issue and there’s behavioral issues, it’s very easy to see it when your operational framework is set up properly so that you’re not waking up every day saying, oh gosh, I don’t have anything to give my VA to do today.

That’s actually what I see a lot of people go, oh no, and stress of that becomes another task for you. So you don’t want that to happen because then what’s going to happen is the VA is going to sit there doing nothing all day because you haven’t had time to give them anything to do. Meanwhile, you’re overwhelmed. So you have to decide and look, every business has departments. It doesn’t matter how big or how small a business is. There is marketing, there’s legal, there’s product creation, there’s delivery, there’s customer support.

And within each of the departments, there will be recurring tasks that need to happen and recurring processes to keep the engine of the business alive every day, every week, every month. Those are probably the first things that you want to delegate so that you can process map them, get the VA trained on them and delegate them. And then you know that the VA has stuff to do every day because you’ve got the recurring thing moving.

Jennifer Orechwa: And I love that advice you gave about onboarding a VA the same way you would a full-time employee. But how do we find the right virtual assistant for our needs, our personality, our working style? How do you find that right person?

Barbara Turley: Oh, I have so much to unpack here. So, okay. So my philosophy, because I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and I’ve dabbled in different sort of ways of doing this. The model that I settled on, and at The Virtual Hub, this is how we do it. We actually don’t recruit for clients. So anyone who would come to us, we’re not a recruiter. We’re not going to take what it is you want, and then go out to the market and try and find it.

And here’s why. We prefer to hire for ourselves. So we actually have recruiting teams. We’re hiring, you know, anywhere from 10 to 20 to 30 people per month and we’re hiring them for ourselves. We know what we’re looking for because we train our own VAs and then we put them through our own training programs and only when they’re ready, we start to introduce them to clients. But our success rate is extremely high.

And I did wonder about this for years going, how is it that we’re so successful at this? Even though every client personality is different and the needs are shifting and different. It’s because we play in the support layer. And at the end of the day, I know what clients need in support teams. They need people who are going to show up and get the job done and actually take pressure off of the client.

Personality wise, we like to introduce, we get a sense of a client’s style from a lot of the onboarding calls, the sales calls. We do a lot of work in the front end to figure out the style that we think this client has. We ask them lots of questions and then we try to figure out who we got that kind of looks like they’re going to suit this account. And we don’t just introduce one of our people, we allow clients to meet a few.

And invariably on the first round meetup, our success rate on the first round is like 99%. It’s insane how people just go, oh yeah, Mary’s great. Let’s go with her. She was really engaging. So we do have to have, we designed the interview process. We call it a meetup because all you want to do in that section is actually get personality fit together. The rest of the stuff we’ve taken care of, the skills and things like that.

If you’re not using someone like us, it’s tricky. I think you’ve got to try, you’ve got to give people work to do. It’s very hard to know. Like anybody can say anything on an interview or on a resume. You’ve got to give people work to do within a timeframe and see how they go with it. And then you’ve got to, you know, interview in a way that you’re interviewing for cultural fit.

Jennifer Orechwa: That makes perfect sense and I love what you’ve set up. That model is almost like a consulting model where we’re going to find the right consultant that fits, but we’re hiring for VAs. I love that. I would absolutely love to hear some success stories or some results that your clients have achieved by incorporating your VAs into their businesses.

Barbara Turley: We’re very good at getting feedback. We’ve built… I mean, I’m a big fan of, as you can imagine, systems and processes, but I also love massive amounts of automation. And I like things to work like a streamlined machine because I do have the philosophy that it doesn’t actually matter what the business is. At the end of the day, a business is a machine and it can still be a beautiful machine with lots of heart and care and all these sorts of things. But the business itself, the vision is not, but the actual mechanics of the business is sort of a machine.

So we seek feedback all the time. And for example, yesterday, we get feedback daily from our clients. And yesterday we got one that is not uncommon at all, actually posted it on LinkedIn. It just said, great VA, it’s been a game changer.

And really what people report to us is that the time they’re freeing up, it’s what they’re using their time for. So they say that they’ll get a 10X return, not because of what the VA is doing, but because of what their time can do now that it’s or someone on their team is time. So time freedom is a big thing. Or you might just want a lifestyle business where you want to pick your kids up from school every day and you don’t necessarily want to grow it. That’s okay too. We actually don’t mind what it is your goal is for doing this.

The other one is people saying, it wasn’t my time freed. It was the things we weren’t doing that now we are doing. So the things we never got to do and now we’re doing it because this VA is doing it. That usually happens in the marketing realm. And look, one of our, you know, we’ve got some great client success stories on our website, but one of the proudest ones I have is Verne Harnish, who wrote the Scaling Up book and is the, he has 250 Scaling Up coaches all around the world. He was the founder of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization globally, which has 16,000 members.

He’s a very, very big leader in the business world, speaking about, you know, scaling companies. He actually became a client of ours and is one of our biggest advocates because he’s had such a successful, his testimonial is on our website actually. And he says that like, you know, the return he’s gotten from his time being freed up and from his team’s time has been like 10X with his VA. So that was a huge moment for us.

Jennifer Orechwa: Yeah, I love those stories. So much opportunity just opening up all over the place. All right, it’s time for another quick break. We’ll be right back after this.

You’re listening to the Worth Your Salt podcast. And today I’m talking with Barbara Turley of The Virtual Hub about how you can use virtual assistance to help you grow and scale your health and wellness business.

We’d love to hear your thoughts, so be sure to join Salt Marketing over on Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook and let us know what you’ve been able to accomplish with the help of virtual assistance.

So Barbara, what advice would you offer to practitioners who are hesitant about outsourcing tasks to virtual assistants, who might be concerned about the learning curve and essentially having to redo any of the work that a virtual assistant completed? What would you say?

Barbara Turley: So first thing I would say is those fears are real. And you know, you find you want to get over them. It’s good to sit for a second and acknowledge and be sort of take a deep breath and go, it’s okay to feel that way. Of course, you feel that way because your business, like all of us, anyone’s business is their baby. And particularly, think health and wellness practitioners who are practitioners. So they really are the one, you know, doing the work, they’re not necessarily just building a company necessarily.

So the training, yes, look, the training demands are real. Having to redo the work is real. If you go and look, this is going to sound like I’m selling my own book. Of course I am. But if you’re going to go and do this yourself, you are going to have to have very clear process maps, have very clear guidelines around expectations, results expected. But you are also going to have to think about training the person on your specific way of doing things.

And here’s the other thing. It’s a good idea to train the person, then be clear on your expectations for delivery, and then be clear on three things. What does success look like? So if it’s a social media image, show some amazing ones that are on brand, you know, on your brand, etc.

Barbara Turley: What does a mediocre rate look like? And what does a fail look like? You know, grammar misses and this kind of thing. And then you’re very clear. Now, if the person comes back and commits those issues, the likelihood is you have somebody who’s not focusing. Or, I mean, if their skill is not there, fine. But it means you’re going to have to start to decide is this person, is it a skill issue or a will issue? And to be honest, regardless of where you hire or what you do, you’re going to probably have to deal with that anyway.

So the problem is not outsourcing to a VA. The problem is getting over the mindset of letting, of getting somebody else to do the thing and for you to be okay with the fact that it could go wrong and you may have to hire again, because that’s all part of the game. But it’s the slow down now to speed up later thing. If you do want to grow the company or grow your business, you do need to free up your time and you need to stop doing all the things that you’re currently doing so that you can free up your time to do it.

So it’s a lot of it is mindset, but there’s also being not feeling like you’re a feather in the wind with this person either, being clear on your expectation.

Jennifer Orechwa: You have such a tight system that you’ve built. How does The Virtual Hub tailor its VAs to unique needs, like a health and wellness practitioner? Do you train for that, or is that something where marketing is marketing and it doesn’t matter the industry? How does that work?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, my view is that marketing is marketing. Most of the process maps are actually the same. It doesn’t matter whether you’re marketing for, you know, I mean, health and wellness, you might say that financial services is different. But marketing is marketing, to be honest, it’s you know, you just got to tailor the messaging is different and you know, the types of things that are going on, but a VA is not coming up with the strategy. A VA is just executing parts of process.

So this is where we come back to saying that do they need to like, who’s mapping the strategy and who’s deciding the brand Bible, the messaging, the target audience, all that sort of thing. A VA is not deciding any of that stuff.

Jennifer Orechwa: So, and you mentioned earlier the use of specific software, including CRMs like HubSpot, we use KEEP, you know, all of this is critical for many businesses. I’m wondering, you know, there’s a huge variety, everybody has their favorites, you know what software they choose to use. So how do you provide training and support in these areas?

Barbara Turley: Yes, that is challenging. So you can’t train every VA in everything. So here’s how we’ve morphed the model over the years to figure this out. So we have our base training program that every single VA that joins our company, and look, we hire people on full salaries and benefits from day one. So we already start to take risk on investing our people, because we know the types of people that are successful. We’ve done this a lot. So we know who’s going to be successful.

And our base training program is designed to figure out where people’s natural skills lie, regardless of experience. Because sometimes we’ve seen people actually weirdly, sometimes the people with the best experience apply to our company and they make the worst employees. I don’t know why.

So we train our own. We don’t mind where people come from. Most things are trainable in that support layer, but they will have natural skills. And our base training program is designed to say, is this person more of an admin person? They’re very good at organizing and, you know, Excel and documents and they like that kind of thing and they’re good at it. Or is this person more of a creative that actually produces quite great Canva images and actually has their own flair for this sort of thing. These days, so many people are brilliant on social media that aren’t even marketing people that they actually have a flair for this sort of thing. Or is this person more technically minded? They like, you know, making forms linked to things like HubSpot or whatever and making things work. You see engineering graduates and stuff are very good at that kind of thing.

And after that, we sort of classify them based on our own training. And then we start to think about the client side and go, who have we got in the pipeline? And only after a client, we sort of have to do a personalized training roadmap for every VA based on the client account once we settle on who they’re going to work with.

So we take them so far. And then once you decide who you’re going to work with and you choose one, we work on a personalized training roadmap for that VA and we do it alongside your time. So it’s outside your time, not, and we do the training. And then we sort of, where we’re liaising with the client, we’ve got results coaches that will be liaising with the client, the VA to make sure that we’re nailing all the goals set and that there aren’t any overwhelm points or issues. And if there are, deal with them along the way. And that’s really how we get success. We sort of force it.

Jennifer Orechwa: Yeah, that’s fascinating. I can see how you’ve been so successful. So tell me a little bit about The Virtual Hub’s operational efficiency consulting and implementation teams. How does that work in conjunction with your VAs?

Barbara Turley: Yes. So over the years, you know I noticed that you can put people in on the support layer, but the businesses that got the most success fastest are those that have the right operational framework and the right processes and systems, etc. And for years, I kept getting asked by clients that I would know, how do you guys do it? We do it quite well because I was into automation and frameworks and business systems and stuff like that.

And I got asked many times, would I consult and would I build and would I do all this thing? And I said no for a long time because I didn’t really want to deliver that. I’m more interested in building the company that I have rather than doing consulting, being very honest.

Then actually one of our initial clients, he got an opportunity. He had a team of six with us and eventually he sold his business and he used to always joke with me saying, I’d love to work with you guys if ever I wasn’t doing what I’m doing. And roll forward today, I did take him on a few years ago. He’s brilliant at systems. He’s actually really good at this stuff.

And I brought him on to build out a separate team that is, it really is an additional service that we offer our clients only at this point, where we say to them, look, if you have VAs, but you’d like to talk about, for example, you might be using Asana, but you’re not using it very well. We’re a certified partner of Asana now. So we do Asana builds, we do some CRM builds, we might solve for problems where a client might say, well, I have a VA, but here’s the system I’m using, but it’s clunky. We can go in and actually redesign the entire system.

It could be a tech tool shift, it could be a tweak, it could be a process map that we have to go in and refine. And it’s just the extra layer that a VA is not going to do because they’re support layer. And we can dive in and out of client accounts and do those things. So we have a team of system architects that do that.

Jennifer Orechwa: Brilliant. Yeah, I’m sold. So finally, if I want to learn more about you, if I want to learn about The Virtual Hub or even get started with my own virtual assistant, where can I go?

Barbara Turley: I am quite active on LinkedIn. So if you want to follow more of the things that I’m talking about today, you can just find me, Barbara Turley on LinkedIn. Of course, if you want to come and talk to us about how we can help you, or we’ve got loads of content on our website, you can peruse our site. It’s thevirtualhub.com. You can also book a call over there to speak with one of our strategy consultants, and they will help you to figure out how we can help you if we’re a good fit for you and what to expect, et cetera. So loads of information over there.

Jennifer Orechwa: Very nice. And of course, links to everything that Barbara mentioned will all be available on our website at saltmarketing.co. But right now it is time for our lightning round questions, Barbara. And those are a few questions that I like to ask of every guest. Are you ready?

Barbara Turley: I’m ready.

Jennifer Orechwa: All right. First question is, what’s the best book that you’ve read recently?

Barbara Turley: The best book I think I’ve read ever in terms of business is Verne Harnish’s Scaling Up, because not only does he end up becoming a client, but actually that was the moment early on in my business journey of realizing that a business is a system and what that methodology teaches is incredibly simple and makes a lot of sense. I’ve built my company based on that.

Jennifer Orechwa: Brilliant. Yeah, I’m sold. So finally, if I want to learn more about you, if I want to learn about The Virtual Hub or even get started with my own virtual assistant, where can I go?

Barbara Turley: I am quite active on LinkedIn. So if you want to follow more of the things that I’m talking about today, you can just find me, Barbara Turley on LinkedIn. Of course, if you want to come and talk to us about how we can help you, or we’ve got loads of content on our website, you can peruse our site. It’s thevirtualhub.com. You can also book a call over there to speak with one of our strategy consultants, and they will help you to figure out how we can help you if we’re a good fit for you and what to expect, et cetera. So loads of information over there.

Jennifer Orechwa: That’s a great recommendation. All right, next question. What is one thing about you that surprises people?

Barbara Turley: I’m a pretty good skier.

Jennifer Orechwa: Interesting for someone who’s Irish and moved to Australia.

Barbara Turley: I know. I’ve spent a lot of time. I actually spent the last few years living in beautiful Chamonix in Chamonix Mont Blanc in France. I’ve been skiing for 25 years. So I did learn as an adult, but I’ve done it. My husband happens to be, he was an ex-ski instructor. So I get to ski behind him all the time. So I’ve been skiing for years and years behind a coach really. So I’ve turned into quite the skier.

Jennifer Orechwa: What’s your favorite thing about the work that you do?

Barbara Turley: Mentoring people. I just love being able to delegate and then my job as a leader is to help them shine. And I love doing that. That really lights me up.

Jennifer Orechwa: All right, last question. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Barbara Turley: I mean, there are things like, you know, just follow your gut. Probably actually, my mum always said to me as a child, feel the fear and do it anyway. And that has been pivotal in my life. So that’s probably the best piece of advice I ever got.

Jennifer Orechwa: Yeah, that’s fantastic. All right, Barbara, thank you so much for joining me on this week’s episode of Worth Your Salt.

Barbara Turley: Thank you.

Jennifer Orechwa: I also want to thank our listeners and let you know that if you are ready for your Worth Your Salt debut, tell us about your expertise by emailing us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe on our website so you never miss an episode. Finally, leave us a review or give the show a handful of stars wherever you get your content.

That’s all for this episode of Worth Your Salt. Be sure to join me again next time. In the meantime, let’s get out there and shake things up.