Barbara Turley is Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub – a business that recruits, trains, and manages virtual assistants for businesses who need to free up time and energy so they can go to the next level. With a strong focus on training and ongoing development, The Virtual Hub ensures their team is trained in cutting-edge programs (like Hubspot, Ontraport, etc.) to best meet their clients’ needs. Barbara is also a mom (to her gorgeous daughter Ruby), wife to her best friend Eti and an adventure lover with a passion for horses, skiing, tennis, and spending time in nature.
Key Points in the Conversation with The Entrepreneur Way with Neil Ball:
- “If you are working for someone else right now and you are thinking about this, the first thing is that you have got to sort out your personal finances because there is going to be a period of time where you haven’t got money coming in. So you had better make sure you have sorted out where is your income supply going to come from. I would say try and shore yourself up for 12 months”
- “How do you make sure that the person actually has the skills? Because the problem with interviews and resumes is people can say anything. So I would probably suggest testing people as much as you can even before you interview so that you don’t have a bias. And be metrics driven before the interview and then if somebody looks like they’ve got the goods in terms of the skills then you go and meet them, interview, that sort of thing and then you have got to figure out okay so that’s all great now are we a cultural fit in terms of how we do work and our work ethic and our approach to how we approach our day, how we update each other. That sort of thing”
- “If you have somebody X number of hours per week it’s very important to know when our they doing that work within reason, for me anyway. And number two is to have an offer of a task list that it is within the time that you have got, that that should be done. The next stop is to have a process that you have laid out so that you know that within reason things are being done. The biggest one is reporting back… So you have got to have a communication rhythm and a clear way that you expect them to report results to you”
- “The worst thing is to get stuck in indecision… When you are stuck in indecision that’s a very uncomfortable place to be and it can be that you do not know which way to go yet so you might have to stay in that place for a while. But people get stuck in indecision for years and then avoidance and then pretending it’s not there. So I do feel a secret to success really is to have a sense of just make a decision. And you have to know that sometimes you make a decision and you don’t know if it’s the right or the wrong one but it’s better to make one than not because then you find out and then you can make another decision”
- “You have just got to keep your eye on the prize, keep your eye on the vision and keep moving forward”
- “Our mission really is to help to eradicate overwhelm”