September 3, 2019

The New Lean Business Model

Listen Now!

Are you stuck working too many hours on low level tasks?  Do you wish there was someone already trained and waiting to do this work for you?  Make sure to check out this podcast episode with Barbara Turley, Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub.  She knows how to help small business owners confidently utilize virtual assistants to scale their business.


Key Points in the Conversation with Work the System:
  • If you don’t have your own take ours and our VA’s are trained on those processes. We basically got a team of master trainers and myself, we take all the big trainings. We are into HubSpot Academy, digital marketer in the U.S. We use a lot of their trainings and we look at them and then we rebuilt those training programs for our VA and specifically turned them into SOPs.
  • We can definitely help with the grunt work, but you have to kind of lead the process and understand the bit that you need to do.
  • Start with the simplest things. So, you know, even calendar management or managing some parts of your email.
  • In the digital space, there’s just so much to do that if you have the right processes, V.A.s can do so much more for you. Google Analytics reporting, you know, all these kinds of things.
  • They might have the skill, but how do you trust them? So at the virtual hub, obviously we’ve dealt with that because we’re now completely office based. We are G D P R compliant, for example, which is the big data protection compliance stuff going on in Europe. And we make sure people show up on time. We’ve got time trackers, we’ve got team leaders and success coaches watching what’s actually happening and we’re coaching overtime. So we’re not policing people. We’re actually recruiting great people that are really enthusiastic about what it is we do.
  • My advice is fill their time and don’t allow too much flexibility, which is kind of going against the big H.R. stuff out there right now. But you can allow flexibility within the structure.
  • Last pass for your password protection. Never sharing your passwords openly, you can through last pass you can share access to tools without ever sharing the password. So it means if somebody goes rogue on you, all you do is cut them out of last pass and everything’s protected.
  • You will not build a scalable business unless you learn to delegates effectively build systems and automation and all this great stuff.
  • Leadership becomes the biggest thing that you have to work on. To be honest, because once you get over about seven people reporting to you or let’s say five, if you get five VA’s next, you become a project manager. Now you’re managing all these people. And then when you start to get bigger again, like, like I have one hundred and fifty employees. So I have to have a huge org chart of people that help me with that. So navigating all of their needs and becoming a mentor to all of them and growing them has been a huge lessons. Really, rewarding but challenging.
  • Processes and Systems need to evolve as you grow. Like the process you said a year ago is going to be rubbish today because your business has changed.

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