The Virtual Success Show

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02:11  How to create an online course for free

06:22  SCIDL Method

09:58  How to avoid getting stuck with the Tech Stack

13:13  Taking advantage of the current crisis

17:20  What does it mean to Pivot your Business

18:30  Having the right Business Mindset this crisis

19:44  Wrapping things up 

Intro: Do you find yourself running out of time to accomplish your work? Are you spending time doing things that you’re not that good at? There are effective ways to outsource these tasks so you can focus on your business. This is the Virtual Success Show. We bring the inside scoop on outsourcing success for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. And now, here are your hosts, Matt Malouf, and Barbara Turley.

Barbara Turley: Welcome everyone to today’s episode of the Virtual Success Show podcast where today I am joined by Chris Badgett, who I’ve had on the podcast before, who’s the founder of the LifterLMS membership site plugin. And we’re here today to talk all about membership sites and why now is the best time ever for you to get your course out of your head onto a learning management system. Like something like Lifter and get it out to the world so obviously, I’m Barbara Turley, your host of the Virtual Success Show podcast and founder of The Virtual Hub. Chris, welcome to today’s show.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for having me, Barbara. I’m really excited to get into it with you today.

Barbara Turley: Yes, so look, you know, I know loads of people over time have always wanted to create membership sites, online courses and you know as well as I do that people get stuck not just with getting the course out of their heads but getting it onto the platforms, the tech stops people and usually business stops people in that you’re running the day to day running of your business stops you, so now is the best time I think, for a lot of businesses to try to pivot fast and go this route. We’ll talk about kind of the best businesses that can do that in a minute but I was really inspired by your- recently you did a four day course creation boot camp, I think you’d call it online and with the idea of to help people to get a course out of their heads, get out of the weeds and actually get the course created. Can you give us the short and dirty version of how do we do that? And how do we make it less overwhelming? Because it’s quite overwhelming to do it.

Chris Badgett:  Yeah, well, first, I just want to acknowledge the huge problem and this isn’t a new problem because if you think about it, if you’re watching this right now, just raise your hand or smash the like button or whatever, if you have ever thought about writing a book, but you never actually wrote the book. This kind of- this is an age old problem right here too, with creative entrepreneurs and people who want to innovate and are really passionate about a topic or helping a certain type of person. So I see unfortunately, a lot of people get stuck in the weeds of like they’re looking at the mechanism, they’re looking at the course or the membership site, or the coaching program that they’re going to put on the internet and they’re really focused on it. But then there’s this giant gap between, “Alright, I gotta get these tools and I got to do some marketing, I got to do some sales”, But first things first. I need to figure out which course to make, how to make it, how to structure it.

So we ran that four day, we call it a course design sprint challenge. I brought in a professional instructional designer from Europe to actually facilitate and lead the process. And really, the worst thing you can do is what I call going into the course creators cave. This is where we go into our home office and work on a course for months and for most people, it actually turns into years, and then it never actually launches or even if it gets built, it never gets like kind of publicly just done, it’s just kind of in, like that screenplay sitting in a box somewhere in your office. So the key to getting out of your head is to start with who, who are you going to help? Like a lot of times, with what I find to get people moving in unstuck is getting outside of the desire of making money online or having an online business. This is all good stuff, I’m not against it. But if we switch our mindset from this is what I need to I’m going to help this specific type of person achieve this specific type of results. It’s not about me and my expertise, it’s about you know, this target market and the result that I can dependably get them even in challenging circumstances, through content coaching and, you know, other resources.

Once we have that mindset, we can start reverse engineering from the result, the various milestones that this target customer needs to go through, that we’re going to help them achieve through courses, content, exercises, tools, resources, group coaching, private coaching community, all these things. We put our customer at the center of our education business and not ourselves as a guru or expert and then we guide them on that path. So, and the key to that which we did in the four-day design sprint challenge was doing it out in the open with real people part of the problem with the course creator cave is you don’t have a feedback loop open. So you got to get your target market involved you got to get their feedback, you got to you know, I love this idea of co-creating with the market. You might even adapt the curriculum as you go because you’re finding like there’s other gaps and things they need before they can move on to the next milestone you thought they needed. Well, I could keep going on and on like guide me Barbara. 

Barbara Turley:  I was about to say, like, you know, this sort of idea of creating it and actually it requires a lot of ready, fire, aim kind of approach a little bit beginning and for it not to be perfect and for you to be totally fine with that because you may need to go like, you might decide on module four is going to be this and then when people are going through it, you’re like, “Oh, we need to change that”. So I guess, maybe creating a live, I’ve often thought actually, should you just create like, you know, get 10 people who are interested in something and then get them together on a live Skype thing that’s just live and just do the initial course, sort of a live version of it, and then turn it into a course thereafter. It sounds to me like you should just do it on the fly.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, there’s actually a name for that. I’ve heard it called the Scidl Method, which stands for “Screw it, Do it live”, and what you do is you just figure out a way to get paid from- it’s not about getting a lot of people like you said, 10 people, 5 people, 3 people, it’s more about validating the idea. You could go and Skype, you go in Zoom, whatever you record it, that becomes the first version of your course and then you just keep improving it. I know course creators like, who have been launching the same course every year, twice a year for like 10 years and it gets better and better and better. I like to say that the course launch it’s not the finish line, it’s actually the starting line. And when we have that mindset, running that first version live like you’re talking about is a great way to get moving and get started with real people with a feedback loop open so that the course creators not in the cave, in a vacuum, you know, where all the dragons are that like, sabotage the project.

Barbara Turley:  So this is this whole concept that you’ve been talking about actually, it’s like a collaborative approach with your ideal client or customer who you may already have, because that person might need or that company might need more help or whatever. So it’s about listening to the market, collaborating with them on creating what they need. And then being okay with the fact that the first iteration of that course might not be as slick and perfect as you want, but you’re getting feedback and you’re probably still creating a huge amount of value for people who actually take you up on the course offer. Guess that’s kind of where we’re going with it.

Chris Badgett:  Totally, totally. My friend Danny says, “If you put some time constraints on it like you don’t have to create the transformational program, your life’s legacy, all your expertise in one”, that’s very dangerous. Imagine you’re on a plane from, Sydney to Los Angeles and that’s all the time you’ve got, maybe a shorter ride, maybe like a 2 to 4 hour ride, and your target market sits down, that person sits down in the seat next to you. And you’re going to help them get that result and you have four hours to do it by giving yourself that constraint that can also help you with not putting, trying to put cram too much into the program, especially the first version. 

Barbara Turley:  Well, I guess the way to do that then is to have a launch date and to announce it, we’re starting in two weeks time. 

Chris Badgett: That’s all we did with a four day boot camp we had we had nothing and we just set a date, a month before and we got ready and launched it and did it live.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and as you were saying to me off air just before we did this is that you would change a lot of things in the second iteration, you learn a lot from it but that’s the whole point. I guess it’s like starting a business. I mean, you know, we all start businesses and years into it, you’re like, “Oh, it looks so different now than what it was when we first started it”, it’s so much better, some might be worse. But typically you sort of collaborate with your clients and get feedback and, iterate as you go. So I guess it’s the same with a course.

Now the second thing, so getting out of your head, I always think is the first problem people face that go overwhelmed with that, they don’t just start, the next thing people get overwhelmed with is the tech. So let’s talk about the tech stack. Because people think that to have a course you have to have like all the bells and whistles, you have to have all the password-protected sites. And as you’ve said, for the initial iteration, maybe all you need is a Skype group. But eventually, you do want to put that course into somewhere that you can start to refine it to make it look a bit more slick. So talk to me about, How do we not let the tech stack stop us? Because a lot of people do get stuck with that, part from getting a VA to build it but let’s get into that after.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a great question, I do see a lot of people get into tech weeds. And I’ve seen millionaire course creators who have nothing but a Dropbox file with a bunch of videos in it. Like when people buy the course they just get access to that Dropbox folder. And I bet if you’re watching this now, you could do that. If you deliver a lot like we talked about, all you need is like a Zoom account or a Skype account and a PayPal account or whatever, like it can be very, very miniature and having a mindset of minimalism is really important. You know, if we get into WordPress as an example, if you already have a WordPress website, I see people sometimes get into, especially if they’re newer to WordPress, there’s all these like page builders and fancy layouts and all this stuff that like, let’s go back and just remember that the person is buying our course. They want the content, they want the transformation, they need the information, they might need you to kind of lay out steps of what to do like assignments or supporting resources to like, help facilitate the learning, the fancy layout is not worth getting sidetracked on. So minimalism is super key especially for the first iteration.

I love that you said outsourcing it, this was this was such a problem in our community at LifterLMS that we created, what we call LifterLMS Experts Program so that like people could be like, you know, there are other people who like build WordPress sites all day long, it can do it for you or like in your world, Barbara with the virtual assistants. I’ve had a virtual assistant for the same one for like six years, and I have no idea where I would be without Kathy. And it’s just like, where do you want to spend your time, it’s hard to not- like think about this whole thing of writing a book, like you know, guilty I tried to write a book. You just needed a computer and a word processor course creation. We’re getting into videos, we’re getting into audio, we’re getting into website, like there’s more tech than the book author thing.

So if you thought writing a book was hard, courses, go minimal, use the the camera that’s already in your laptop and the audio stuff that’s already in your laptop. If you already have a WordPress site for marketing drop it in the free version of LifterLMS build out the outline based on the tips we just described of helping a specific customer get a specific result even if you haven’t created the content yet and get moving hook it up with Stripe or PayPal. Like this is the minimum tech stack and that’s it. That’s how you start.

Barbara Turley: There’s a free version of the lifter plugin for WordPress, which is great.

Chris Badgett:  Yeah, so that’s the thing I learned in this four day bootcamp is, this instructional designer dude was like, we weren’t even halfway through it. We already had the prototype built inside of a WordPress site with lifter, it was done, it was like, so you can actually prototype your course idea for free. You don’t have to invest a ton of money, you can get a free paypal account, you know, free lifter. And you know, you have to pay a little bit for your domain name and your website, but you probably already have that anyways. So the money doesn’t need to get in the way to start. 

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and look at the moment. I mean everything. I keep saying this and all these lives we’re doing I mean, the reality is yes, we are going through a crisis time, yes, a lot of businesses have been smashed. But I can tell you one thing we know for sure, everybody’s online, everybody’s on Facebook, everybody’s listening to podcasts. Everybody is online because we’re all at home right and it’s probably the best time ever to actually think about if you’re not online, you know, there’s lots of strategies, you can just start a podcast, you can start a membership site, you can get your online course created, you can get your business digitalized pretty easily. And capitalizing on this moment in time, it’s a moment in time and it may not happen again, so you just kind of try to get out of your own way and get this stuff up and it actually is not difficult. You can get VAs to help, you can hire people online to help but you can also do it yourself if that’s what you really wanna do, but it’s time to sort of get there.

So that brings me to something I want to discuss about pivoting. So some businesses are now going to have to pivot. You know, I’ve seen amazing stories out there like there’s even a shop in Sydney. I heard the story of a shop in Sydney, Australia, that is a chocolate shop, right? They sell chocolates and they very quickly pivoted and got their shop up online. And they did more sales than they normally- now it was Easter, so let’s be honest, that was convenient at the time but they managed to do like explosive sales, even though the shop was closed during a time of crisis time because they got fast and pivoted and got their shop up online. So let’s talk pivot stories, you put out an article, I think it should be today about a SaaS company that got their online course using LifterLMS but got their online course up fast and the idea was to stop churn, stop cancellations and help their customers to get more success and to create more sales. So talk about how can we use this as a pivot story. This is a pivot opportunity.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, there’s a lot of lessons in what Adrian Toby of groundhog did with his pivot to having a, adding an academy to his business. So, um, the first thing is, he was able to move extremely fast because he was already a techie. So he already knew WordPress, but you could experience the same results just by outsourcing to a VA, like the WordPress part like he had his Academy up, it looked great in like a day or a week or something. And then he went about creating the course, he actually created three courses. One was a quickstart course and how to use the software.

Another was how to use his software for his most popular use case customer which funny enough is actually a course creator. And number three, he created a partner program that people could join the, where he trains them on how to sell basically to become power affiliates and promotional partners with his company. He had all that up and running like in less than a month. And you know, it reduces churn, it helped people activate into a software. And you know, it just added value to his community, so he didn’t have to hire more people to manually deliver those, you know, activities. He did it through education in a scalable way. But the pivot is everything.

I mean, just to go on one small tangent, I remember when I was new kind of getting started an online business later in life, I was 30 at the time, I was at a chamber of commerce meeting and I heard- I was really passionate about video marketing, and I heard the woman on stage leading this thing like hundreds of people in the room and she introduced me, the new member. And I heard her say the name of the business that I named, which was Business Showcaser and I was like, Oh, that sounds terrible, that sounds terrible. And I just pivoted, I mean, here I am as an LMS software entrepreneur. I’ve been through like, hundreds of pivots. It’s literally the key to success.

Barbara Turley: Actually, I want to just add there, you know, the pivot doesn’t have to be changing business like so everyone thinks pivoting, is changing what you’re doing. But there are different ways of pivoting in this type of crisis. I mean, you can pivot anytime but sometimes you just add on something. Sometimes it’s a change in how you deliver something. So maybe you’re used to delivering something in person, and now you have to do it online. Well, that’s pivot, it can be the same thing, just a different version, how you deliver, but also it can be [inaudible]

Chris Badgett: A couple ideas just to throw out there, like I’m an entrepreneur, so I can’t turn it off. I have this like, problem solving personality type. So like restaurants, I’m like, you know what, why don’t you create courses on how people can make your signature dish? Have your chef make a course on how to make the thing people buy the most of your restaurant so that people can make it at home while everybody’s on quarantine. I’m literally like, if you’re a gym owner or personal trainer, like this is not new, like yoga DVDs and at home fitness and P90X and all this stuff, like anybody can do that. Like and it can be even better than like a DVD experience now with, that gym owner needs to like come online, just keep doing what you’re already doing. Just mix up the delivery mechanism a little bit.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, yeah. I think it’s just you know, I think it’s a mindset thing too, though. Some people just go straight into the negativity of the whole thing. Business is gone, everything’s decimated, I’m terrible and you know, that might be the case for some businesses, but there are businesses out there that are, you have no choice but to just, you know, find the opportunity wherever you can and that’s kind of what we’re talking about here is that don’t let- you know, if you’ve got an online course you’ve been thinking about it, whatever, just get it up there and just get it out to the world. This is the best time ever to do it and don’t worry about- I mean I don’t even worry about who’s watching these Facebook Lives, doesn’t really matter actually. Because as you keep consistently doing things and you keep putting stuff out there especially in a time like this it will stick and consistency is key of course so that’s the thing. So Chris where can they find out more about you? About LifterLMS? I know you’ve got a great a very very vibrant Facebook group that I’m a part of too and lots of other course creators are in there. Where can they find out more?

Chris Badgett: Oh, you can find me at lifterlms.com. I have a podcast for course creators called LMScast and if you just look for LifterLMS on Facebook, you’ll find our Facebook group. So if you’ve thought about making a course go check that out as well.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, absolutely. There’s great tips in there and actually you’ve got your, the 2 hour synopsis of your four day, so that’s today of the four day course creators extravaganza that you just did. So that was that’s really insightful information for anyone to get going. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Chris today on the Facebook Live podcast and if anyone can hear this pitter patter of rain going on my roof at the moment, so that’s great for a podcast but anyway and these times we have to do what we have to do. And everyone if you’re enjoying the podcast, you can catch this on iTunes, on our website, as well as thevirtualhub.com. Give us a rating give us a thumbs up, let us know what you’d like us to talk about. And until next time. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everyone. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks, Barbara.

Outro: Thank you for listening to the Virtual Success Show. If you found this show helpful. Take a moment to share it with a friend so that we can all grow together.

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing and systems automation space.

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02:02 Roadblocks when setting up Cloud Based System

04:30 Important G Suite features

07:40 Task Management, Systems and Processes 

11:58 Working in a Virtual Environment

15:22 Why Task Management by Email never works

19:21 Tips in getting through this remote setup successfully

26:28 Remote Business Playbook

28:09 Wrapping Things Up

Asana

Trello

Podio

G Suite

Dropbox

Zoom

Skype

Slack

Zapier

Ontraport

Active Campaign

Intro: Do you find yourself running out of time to accomplish your work, are you spending time doing things that you’re not that good at? There are effective ways to outsource these tasks so you can focus on your business. This is the Virtual Success Show, we bring the inside scoop on outsourcing success for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. And now, here are your hosts Matt Malouf and Barbara Turley.

Barbara Turley: Hey, everyone, welcome back to another special edition episode of the Virtual Success podcast where we’re now taking it live online to cope with this COVID-19 crisis that we’re currently all in right now. Today’s guest, I’m talking to Peter Moriarty from itGenius and he’s given me so many tips already before we’ve even started this show. But really what I want to talk about is so many companies have been scrambling to try to move people into a remote or work from home situation over the last few weeks. Me included, I at The Virtual Hub had to move 110 staff very quickly into work from home situations and it was something apart from the issue of not having computers, the actual online or the systems, part of it was very easy because I had actually set it up that way. But I know a lot of companies have been scrambling trying to do this and not really getting it right. So, Peter’s here with us today to talk specifically about how to set your company up to make sure that the next time, hopefully, we never have to do this again. But if you do, you can move fast and that your systems are portable. So Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us.

Peter Moriarty: Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be here. 

Barbara Turley: So to kick off, can you tell me, I’m sure you see this all the time in your experience with working with companies. A company who comes to you and wants to be more cloud-based or wants to be more nimble in terms of moving people around, what are the major roadblocks and problems that you see in their setup? To kick off.

Peter Moriarty: Yeah, I’d say it’s always people. But people are always the roadblocks. It’s either processes that are in place, or ways of thinking they’re in place, which are the biggest blockers. And technology change requires people change. And so when you’re going through a process of you know, everyone’s been through a bad technology change at one point in their life, whether that was you know, working in corporate and having someone implementing your system without training people properly, or just, you know, switching from a PC to a Mac, and the first couple of days, kind of not knowing where the buttons are, you know, the frustration and the the fear, it’s not just a fear of change for stop, but it’s certainly, you know, fear of something new and in some ways, maybe to take baby steps. And so, whenever we’re leading any technology change for any business, we always go back to, you know, what are the people, who are the people that are involved, and what are the steps that they need to go through as humans to be ready and okay with that change. So it’s all a change management process, the technology is just the tool or the strategy that’s being implemented. 

Barbara Turley: So you find it at the moment, I think what would have happened then with a lot of companies is that people have just been sent to work from home and told, like, here’s zoom, here’s a couple of tools, show up for the meeting tomorrow. I could just imagine how it would work and then people are thinking, “Do I need to download something?”, “How do I get on the meeting?”. 

Peter Moriarty: Yeah, I’m expecting the first couple of weeks will be fine. because it’d be like, “Yeah, I’m on zoom, and I’m working from the kitchen table, and isn’t this fun and great!”. And then after then, the poor work boundary sets in or you know, the instant messaging overwhelm sets in, all the burnout sets in when people aren’t working well, or, you know, maybe they haven’t set up their workspace properly. And so they’ll literally have physical fatigue in their body or maybe they’re not getting outside the house for 15 minutes every day and they start getting the cabin fever settling in. So, I worry for the challenges that will come in the coming weeks and months. 

Barbara Turley: Yeah, right, okay. So talk about, let’s talk about G Suite. I mean, that is the kind of, you know, I know you do lots of change management, you do a lot of consulting and we’re a G Suite user, we are client of yours. Talk to me about, I mean, G Suite, I already know, like, we’re not using it to the level that we should be, right? So talk me through some of the major features that you see people not using effectively enough within let’s say, G Suite. I’m still asking this for my own benefit as well. And, you know, how can we quickly sort of turn some of that stuff on and figure out how to roll it out?

Peter Moriarty: Yeah, for starters, anyone who’s considering adopting G Suite, the easiest way to explain like what G Suite is and why you might consider using Google Cloud over the Microsoft ecosystem, or you know, any kind of hodgepodge of other things is that you know, G Suite is like the Tesla you know, Tesla doesn’t have a drive train. It doesn’t have a million moving parts cooling system, all these electrical systems and the energy and all those different bits to make a gasoline car work, you know, petrol fuel injection, all those things, Tesla just has a couple of moving parts, I think there’s only five or 10 moving parts in the whole car. And that’s about it. So G Suite is simpler. It’s a bit like moving from a Windows machine to a Mac, it’s simpler but all the things that you need are there. And what I love about that is it means that you get out of your own way, and you’re able to just get work done.

So most businesses will have Dropbox for their files, they’ll be using Zoom for their video conferencing, they’ll be maybe using Skype for chat, or Microsoft Teams, or whatever and they’ll be using Office for documents. And they’ve got to kind of like try and put all those things together, whereas the Google ecosystem is simpler. But if you just kind of do everything the Google way, then everything works nicely in there. So what works really really great is using Hangouts chat, which is a bit like Slack, right? And many people are using slack as well. Hangouts chat is a bit like slack but it’s got really great integration with your calendar and integration with Hangouts for video calls as well. Google rebranded that is as Meet and so you can be chatting to someone to chat back and forward and you realize, “Hey, you know what, actually, we need to jump on a video call and have a quick call about this”, you click one button, and then bang, both of you are in a video call. Or maybe you’re working on a Google document and you want to share that with a colleague, if you drop the URL into the document, it’ll automatically share that document with the person that you just sent it to in chat. So you don’t have to, you know, do the double sharing type thing. So there are a couple of things that are built in.

The other things just broadly with Google is all of the AI integration. So you know, they’re auto composing emails, now. They’re giving you suggested replies in your email inbox, and even in the Gmail app, Google now say that, over 30% of all emails, over 30% of all emails through Gmail, are actually using the AI suggested replies, which is just crazy, you know, it’s only been out for six months now. And now 30% of emails are being written by at least in part by AI. So those little bits and pieces that make your day easier. That’s what I really love about the Google ecosystem and I think even using a Google spreadsheet instead of an Excel sheet sitting in Dropbox and waiting for it to synchronize back and forth, you know, many businesses, not even using something like a live document to share information together. 

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I mean, I know, look, we’re not, I got some tips of things we should be using G Suite. But I know that one of the reasons we were able to move very quickly, and work from home was because we are G Suite user. And we do heavily use the drive and the live document sharing and you can just do that from anywhere, I mean, it’s, you know, we don’t have servers, we don’t have-, everything that we do is in the cloud. So I realized in this move that, so the people said to me, how did you move that many people that quickly? And I was like, I don’t know, like, we just got them home and the next day, we were all doing the same thing again, the next day anyway. So it was actually easy. 

Peter Moriarty: Yeah, I think for a lot of businesses they’re still in the mindset, you know, even if they may be using Dropbox for their storage, they’re still in the mindset of, “I work on this document and then I put this document on the server”, and then the next person, you know, this ever might just be Dropbox, then the next person works on it. Whereas when you really embrace the Google way of working, which you guys obviously have, then you have the opportunity to say, “Okay, well, we’re going to co-create a document together”. Think about when you sit on a meeting, and you’ve got three or four different people, right? And task management comes into this as well, so we start talking about Asana and other task management apps.

But think about when you’re sitting on a meeting, and you’ve got three or four people in the meeting. Now each person takes their own version of the notes of what was said in the meeting, and their own version of what the action items were, that is worrying, right? No matter who’s running the meeting, you’ve got different people with different versions of what they should be doing. Whereas if you were on a meeting, and you opened up one Google document and you had action items there, or you had, shared common notes there. Then you’ve got all one common set of information and data from that meeting, even better if you’re using something like Asana, then you’ve got one thread or one task for whatever that objective or strategy or task is and then everyone is able to drop their notes in there. And so we’re really big on actually flipping the switch to collaborating and being remote, you have to do that.

What a lot of businesses are probably doing is sitting on Zoom, and everyone’s got a pen and paper, and they’re writing their notes on pen and paper. But those four people are doing four completely different things and so, if you were a business who resisted setting up a cloud based task management system, I know you guys are big fans of Asana as well, or using something like a Google Doc to share together, if you’re not forced to do that now, then in a couple of weeks time, you’re going to be really hurting when that project dropped off, or that staff member didn’t do what you wanted them to do, or someone promised that do something on a meet three weeks ago, and you’re pretty sure that you said that, you know, you told them to do it, but they didn’t actually do it. And now you don’t know because it wasn’t documented anywhere. 

Barbara Turley: Do you know what I love about this, the direction this is taking is that you know everyone thinks that you know, getting the right people solves your problem or getting the right systems solves your problem or having deep process solves your problem. And I’ve found that I’m sure you’ve heard through the journey of building collaborative type businesses that are virtual and all that sort of thing, that those three things need to work in synchronicity together very much so. Because I went through a terribly painful experience a few years ago where I was like we have Asana, we have deep processes. You know, we have our communication flow, we’ve got rules around how we use these things.

And we were still seeing mistakes, until we introduce the huddle and the huddle was where we came together every day. And then we had rules around if somebody says something in the huddle, then you have to update and tag the person who you passing the baton to next, and all this kind of, so it almost feels like the crux of the remote working or the virtual business is actually centering around the word collaboration, where all these tools and systems are in come into it. As opposed to you know, have we got Zoom, have we got G Suite. It’s how you use it and how the team interacts. 

Peter Moriarty: I really believe the tools are there to facilitate the humans working as a team. And so as you say, when you’re on a huddle, and someone says, I’m going to do this, then someone that you may have chosen one person to be your scribe for the meeting, and we often do that, one person will be the scribe. And in our Asana threads, and we use the I think it’s called the progress or the update feature in Asana. But we’re always doing an update there, and we have a list of notes, so that’s minutes and then we have actions and we tag each person against that actions. And then it’s their responsibility if they want to create an individual task or whatever, but this is what you’ve committed to.

And, you’ve used the example of huddles, which is a repeating, I presume, daily meeting. There may be a weekly meeting, there might be a weekly all hands, there might be a monthly all hands, whatever your cadences of the meetings inside the business. The technology tools here are used to facilitate accountability of the people who are promising what they’re going to get done.

Barbara Turley: You know what I found as well. A lot of people have asked me in the past, you know, how on earth have you built this company from afar? Have you done it virtually? Have you done it by not being in the Philippines? I’m not based in the Philippines. And I’ve always said, I think because I was the remote person building it. I mean, I have an office based operation, but it did start out work from home, so we were all remote. It actually forced me to create a virtual environment, a very very successful virtual thing. Because you don’t have the chance to tap someone on the shoulder and just, you know, over the watercooler and actually- well you kind of do because you can chat message them or Skype message them or whatever you’re using.

But what I found the danger with that and the same thing happens in an office environment is that because you can do that, and if you’re doing that, you got to be careful how instructions are being passed over because one day it’s a Skype message, the next day it’s a phone call, the next day it’s a Zoom meeting, and then you have, like it gets missed because people are like, but I told you that and you go “When? Oh, you sent me a Skype message. Oh, well, it wasn’t in the flow”. So I’ve had to clean all those things up by being in a virtual environment as well, because somebody will say, I Skype messaged you, and I’m like, but it wasn’t in the task in Asana, so therefore you’re expecting people to remember what to do. And in a virtual environment that’s heightened even more, because people are not actually, you know, they’re not listening across the floor from each other and you know, reminding themselves of conversations. 

Peter Moriarty: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of challenges there. One is in an office setting, you’ll have you know, a whiteboard and the top five strategy or top projects or top, you know, customers that you’re chasing, or whatever, there and everyone sees that, and that’s really easy. Having that shared line of sight for the whole company is challenging to do remotely, it’s something that you’ve got to, you know, be reminding and reminding and reminding about. Yes, having tools or tasks is the, you know, the easiest way to do that. But you’ve got to have some way of doing that. I’m pretty disciplined, the second issue that you’ve raised there is like, you know, the different channels of communication. I’m pretty disciplined that we have two ways of basically contacting each other.

We have chat if it is urgent, that’s only if it is urgent, and we have Asana for everything else. We don’t do emails, don’t do emails. Don’t do Facebook chats, don’t do Instagram, nothing else. And if someone messages me in chat and I can say it’s not urgent. I say, “Thanks. Asana this to me”, that’s it. It’s, “Hey, Asana me.”, Great, I’ve seen it and received it, but Asana me. And that discipline or policy effectively of saying, this is what we’re going to use these tools for. If you’re strict with them, and you’ve got to lead it being the you know, if you’re the organization owner and manager, then that will keep things nice and tight. And works every time because it doesn’t work unless you do that. 

Barbara Turley: Let’s dive into email. So I have so many things I want to unpack there because you’re like, I mean, we sing from the same hymn sheet, but that’s the reason we’ve been successful. We’re not new to remote working. So we’ve been doing this for years, and email, the amount of clients that come in and we actually try these days now to take on a client that is saying they want to do instructions to VAs by email, because we’re just like, I can’t really explain why. But in my experience, it just never ever, ever, ever, ever works, doing instruction and task management by email. Talk to me about your experience with that and whether you’re echoing the same, like why did you move away from email for instructions?

Peter Moriarty: Oh my god. So I mean, I’ve run an IT help desk for over 10 years. So we live in and breathe, you know, productively communicating with 20,000 employees and the customers that we support, but 1500 businesses 20,000 employees across them. Email, business owners receive hundreds of emails per day, we all know that as a fact.

The simple analogy that I have on why you should get out of your inbox is that if you were to go out to the street and open your letterbox every day, and flick through what was in your letterbox and take out the ones that were important, but leave everything in there and never pick up the bunch of letters and put them on your kitchen table for sorting. If you just left them in the mailbox on the street all the time, it would get so overflowing that you would start to miss the important ones and that’s what happens with our inbox. And so when you have a mix of staff emails, supplier emails, customer emails, and then the 80% of junk and marketing and newsletters and everything else, then you so quickly becoming overwhelmed, you miss what’s important, and that’s the most critical thing.

So email is just, it is also a slow and a kind of crappy communication medium because it’s a formal medium. You have to say, dear so and so here’s my email instructions, kind regards, hope you had a lovely day, blah, blah, blah, here’s my signature, right? Whereas sometimes you just need to actually say something quickly, or say yes or no or that’s great, or that’s not great. Which is why Google is trying to bring in their AI to you know, to stop the beast of email.

But the the most important one is if you have your tasks and your communication threads with your team, in something that’s not email, instant messaging is not the be all and end all, something like Asana or Trello, or whatever is the best, because it’s non urgent, but it’s still structured threads of conversations. What that does, is that allows you to have the work time, which is you communicating with your team, and the other people time, and the other people time should be scheduled, it shouldn’t be all the time. If you’re the kind of person who has emails popping up on your desktop, switch them off, switch off the email notifications on your phone, and do it when you schedule, when you choose to engage in working with those.

Don’t be a slave to those emails because like I checked mine once a day or even sometimes every second day, it’s just not important for me to get in touch with us. But for many business owners, and I won’t do want to talk about one tool here. If we have a moment, many business owners if you are the person that everyone is coming to, then it’s going to be hard for you to remove yourself from that and that is a process that you will need to go through overtime. 

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I was gonna just touch on that for a second. So if someone out there is listening and you’re thinking, “Oh, we use email”, it’s not going to be simple, you’re not going to turn that off tomorrow. But when clients come to me and they say, “I really want a VA to run my email”, and I love digging into that question and going, “Okay, let’s look at that, like is that really?” Because my theory is, well, why don’t you eradicate email first. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t need a VA because you may need them to deal with customer support tickets or whatever way it is coming in.

But you’ve got to try and eradicate email so that the only emails coming to you, as the owner are like, I mean, I only get things like someone wants to interview you on the podcast or very minimal sort of things come to me directly and everything else needs to be funneled into, is it supplier support, customer support, is it staffing like all our staff stuff is like you it’s inside of Asana and chat is only for very quick, urgent things the same as you so it is a process you need to set up but I would encourage anyone and look on this podcast on our website, the Virtual Success Show podcast, I’ve done many shows on this with my co-host Matt Malouf, we’ve talked about this ad nauseum. There are so many shows in there on how to do this on a deeper level. So go check those out. What are your final tips, Peter? For people, you know, currently in this remote scenario, they maybe have a mishmash of systems going, what’s your sort of top two or three tips for people to get through this time successfully?

Peter Moriarty: Yeah, look, I’ll simplify it. But I want to make the point on the email and managing your inbox, I think, Barbara, you’re in the comfortable position of having transcended to a leadership position of a CEO of a business. And that, it’s just not appropriate for anyone to be emailing you, for anyone, anyone whose earlier stage in the business there is a business shift that you need to go through to remove yourself from being that primary point of contact. And you know, perhaps that’s what you’re referring to in the other shows that shift has to happen and that’s a common mail. Let’s get really simple, it’s a common mailbox. It’s help@ or support@ or info@ or sales@ or whatever@ your domain.com that your customers are trained to email that is no longer going to you anymore. And that is a journey that you have to take. But when you take that journey, not only is that going to help you on a day to day basis, because it means that you and your team will provide better support to your customers. That’s a mindset shift as well and that mindset shift is this business is not me, this business is a service. 

Barbara Turley: And that is a shift that a lot of business owners never get to and it doesn’t just apply to your email that applies to everything, it’s the brand. I mean, I know we’re on doing these podcasts, but I’ve been you know, we’re the leaders of these businesses, but you’re very much promoting I mean, The Virtual Hub, which is my business, has very much its own brand, it stands up by itself. Same for you with itGenius and the stuff that you’re doing. I mean, it’s still a journey, it’s still a journey. 

Peter Moriarty: It absolutely is and look, I love for anyone to email me, I don’t mind getting emails at all, but you know, don’t email me or call me when your emails are down, that’s what my support team are for but I want to simplify the tech stack. So we’ve got this concept of you know, what’s the remote work tech stack? What do you need? I simplified it down to three C’s, really simple, Connect, Coordinate, Communicate.

So Connect is how do you get the basics done with your team? And that’s, in our case, Google Hangouts, Google Meet, Google Drive, the Google ecosystem, right? That’s the foundation of how do you actually get work done when you’re not sitting in the same office, and you don’t have a service sitting there, or you don’t have people to yell at across the room. And Google’s G Suite tools make it really easy to get done. Most people know what those tools are, so I don’t need to delve into it.

Coordinate is the next one. How do you coordinate your internal work? So a task management system and we’re talking Asana or Trello or Podio, or whatever. Our pick is Asana, we happen to be an Asana partner as well. But that’s really easy to get started with great interface, free for up to 15 people which is awesome, really great app been using it long, long time, you guys love it as well, which is great. I would also say in coordinate as well is how do you coordinate delivery to your customers? So you’re going to need some kind of customer database. That would be a CRM system, like maybe an online marketing system like an Ontraport, or Active Campaign or it might be something that you use more internally for relationship management. So we happen to resell Copper CRM, talks to G Suite, of course, and everything else that we do. But that’s for sales team who want to do relational sales. Now, if you’re sitting in an office, and you’ve got three people there, you can say, “Hey, how’s that customer going?” Or “How’s this customer going?” Or, “Hey, you know, that deal? I haven’t heard you pick up the phone and call that customer in a couple of weeks”, right? All that stuff just happens kind of naturally. But for our sales manager who has sales people all over the place, we need to have a programmatic system to actually see, okay, which customer has gone stale?, which deal needs some help? You know, what are the higher, more important deals that I want to filter up and bubble up to the top and jump into, so you’ve got to use something there. A spreadsheet might be if you have no CRM system or no sales tracking right now, a spreadsheet, a Google Sheet might be where you start, that might be enough, but you really got to have that down.

Number three is Communicate. And so we already talked about communicating by email switching to a common mailbox rather than using individual personal mailboxes to interface with the customers, that’s super important. Phone system is the next one. You know, most people, many people have just kind of picked up and gone back to using their mobile to do business. Now, the problem with that is it’s the same as using your personal email, you really need to have a business line if you’re a business and be able to work from there. So we have a cloud based phone system that happens to be called Dialpad. There’s plenty of other competitors out there as well but that works on your computer works on your phone, but when you dial out, use the internet, dial out from a Sydney or a Queensland or a Victoria number, wherever you need your business to look like it’s calling from. And so that would be number three, is communicating with your customers but not allowing them to, you know, text you at 11 o’clock at night and say “Hey, is that project done?”, which is just so so common. And so if you can set up these tools correctly, and go through that mindset shift, if I’m building a business, or a product or a service that is not me, tied to me intrinsically, individually, then these tools will help facilitate you having a business that you actually love that doesn’t actually control you and control your life. And so, in the rush of, “Oh, I have to work from home now”, you know, don’t slip into the, the old poor habits of allowing others to dictate your boundaries around time, because that’s a pretty slippery slope. 

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. You know, and I see so many people that, you know, they’re, they’re slammed because they’re on the phone all day with clients, and they’re trying to refer stuff back to their team. And, like, in my business, I noticed [inaudible], like, nobody would ever contact me. I mean, the team would only come to me, I mean, I actually see everything that’s coming in. So I know everything that’s going on, but it doesn’t go to me and we have all help at thevirtualhub.com and all those email addresses, but there’s really cool things you can do, just get people who are a bit more into the tech stack, a little tip and we’ve put a little integration in with Zapier to make all of the emails that come into help, they all drop into our customer support project in Asana.

So people say to me, like every morning I can get a picture of pretty much everything that’s going on in the business by just going to Asana in the inbox in Asana because we have lots of zaps, actually through Zapier, that make like our calls dropping, we can see like in all of our pipelines in Asana, we can see how many calls came in, how many converted and it all drops into Asana, and it’s pretty easy, it sounds complex when talking about it, but zapier.com can do so many things with that to tie systems together. 

Peter Moriarty: Yeah, our team can help with that as well if you need help putting that together, but I think, you know, like the most important thing that you’ve highlighted there is that the business owner shouldn’t be the bottleneck. If right now to the listener or the watcher, if you are the person that is the conduit between business coming in, or jobs or work or projects coming in, and then it being funneled out to your team, No.

Now, yes, it is important that you are the master delegator and that you are coordinating the machine and making it work. But it is not your job to be the conduit and the glue between everything. And so as much as possible, if you can have the work bypass, your job is to design the system, so that the work, the stuff, the things that need to be done, go past you, and go to the team and get done. And then your job is to tweak that machine and make sure that delivery is effective.

Barbara Turley: We are literally cuff from the same cloth. I absolutely 100% agree. And you’re running at the moment, tell me about your running a remote business playbook at the moment. Tell me more about that, where can people find out about that if they want to delve deeper. 

Peter Moriarty: Thank you so much for asking. We’ve been running a remote business for over five years now and successfully, the business has grown, exploded and done really well. We are taking everything that we know about running a remote team and we’ve put it into a series of eight webinars. We’re giving that away complimentary to our concierge members. And so if you’re not yet a member, have a chat to our team about getting in touch and have access to that. But that is effectively covering how to hire and build your team in the Philippines, how to, if you’re interested in that, but you know, mostly, How to build an international team? How to get the culture right? How to make sure everyone can actually get their work done remotely? How to do all of the tasks and the huddles? How often do we do things?

And, you know, effectively, we’re not, we’re not business coaches, I’m trying not to be too prescriptive about how you should run your business. But what I do know is that we’re running a multi-million dollar business with 35 employees all working from home, and we’ve been doing that successfully for five years. And we’re just sharing what’s working for us and our customers are already telling us because we’re a couple of weeks in that they’re getting a hell of a lot of value from it. And so if you’re interested in that, please go ahead and reach out. If you’re interested in just checking out what we do, petermoriarty.tv, or head to itgenius.com. We’re streaming heaps of stuff on our Facebook Live and heaps of stuff on our YouTube channel as well, which will give you a bit of a taste of the stuff that we’ve got going on in the course too.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. And look, if I could just share I mean, you know, we’ve been a client by teaching us for quite a long time now and there’ve been many situations that your team have helped us out. So yeah, just an amazing team to deal with. Really spot on team, really well oiled machine. So thanks, everyone for joining. We’re going to be talking next week live again, all about membership sites, and how to get a quick membership site up and why now is the best time given you might have some time up your sleeves to be thinking about getting that digital course out there and getting you know more digital into the business that you already have. So Peter, thank you for joining us today. And everyone, we will see you next week. 

Outro:  Thank you for listening to the Virtual Success Show. If you found this show helpful. Take a moment to share it with a friend so that we can all grow together.

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author, and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training, and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing, and systems automation space.

Want the transcript? Download it here.

02:18  Aqua-Guard Spill Response

05:52  Business Owner Burnout

11:38   How to Delegate more effectively

18:38  Organic Growth in your Business

19:58   Processes and Systems 

21:12   The importance of Life Rhythm in your Business

27:35  Who should manage the people and the teams in your Business

28:38  Keeping in touch with your team during this pandemic

32:19   Nigel’s experience with Burnout Business Owners

37:19   Fight, Flight, or Freeze

40:34  Final thoughts

42:23  Wrapping things Up

Intro: Do you find yourself running out of time to accomplish your work, are you spending time doing things that you’re not that good at? There are effective ways to outsource these tasks so you can focus on your business. This is the Virtual Success Show, we bring the inside scoop on outsourcing success for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. And now, here are your hosts Matt Malouf and Barbara Turley.

Barbara Turley: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Virtual Success Show podcast where I’m your host as always Barbara Turley. I do co-host this show with my co-host, Matt Malouf, who’s not with us today. But my guest today, I’m joined by Nigel Bennett, who is the co-founder and owner of Aqua-Guard Spill Response. And also because I want to mention your book, also author of the book, “Take that leap, risking it all for what really matters” and he’s also the founder of TruBeach. He’s been a member of the entrepreneurs organization for 15 years, has won a whole pile of awards and not even gonna go into how many they are but I met Nigel on a mastermind call that I had the pleasure to be on a few weeks ago, when I heard his story about, how he has managed to not just delegate effectively, but has actually managed to remove himself pretty much completely from the day to day operations of his business. So Nigel, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining me.

Nigel Bennett: Hi, Barbara. Thank you so much. It’s, it’s the pleasure. Pleasure to be on your show. I’m in. I’m in Whistler here in British Columbia, and you’re in Chamonix, I guess. And

Barbara Turley: Yeah, we’re both in the ski slopes but there’s no snow, we’re not allowed to ski

Nigel Bennett: No snow and we can’t go out, Yeah, I know.

Barbara Turley: During this crisis time and you know, like it’s been really great connecting with so many entrepreneurs at the moment during this crisis time that we’re currently in. But Nigel, to kick off just give us the quick you know, Aqua-Guard Spill Response and what I love about this company and about me finally interviewing you, is that it’s different from most of the types of businesses that we’ve had on the podcast or that I’ve been talking to in that it’s kind of, it’s way off the charts from what I would normally be doing in the digital world or whatever. So give us the quick synopsis of what it is.

Nigel Bennett: Yeah, we’re an emergency response company. If you go way back, right out of high school, I was working for my father’s environmental mapping company. And next day after high school I was I was on a plane down to Venezuela. And I live in Vancouver, and I’d never really been out of the country very much. So I was. I was doing overflights over Lake Maracaibo taking photographs of the coastline for environmental mapping. And within the first couple of days of my arrival there, I was being shot up by the FARC guerrillas that are on that Colombian Venezuelan border. So that was a real wake up call for an 18 year old kid. But I spent 10 years doing that type of work around the globe. I was in 10 different countries and I had a long stint in Egypt and there was a helicopter flight that I had over the Sinai Peninsula with an American ex Vietnam pilot. And I flew over and there was people in the back and he told me, you know, not to show them my camera, because if they saw my camera, we could be thrown in jail as spies, so I was terrified that was probably 22 by now.

And so we were flying over this area, and all I saw was pipeline after pipeline after pipeline that had been ruptured, and it was flowing into the Red Sea. So I was taking photographs of this stuff, and I landed back at the helicopter base, and he said to me, he said, “I know why I took you up here and I took you into some areas I’m not supposed to take you, make sure that these photographs get back to the right people and that they see them”. And he said, “I know what you’re doing”, But he looked at me. He said, “Do you really think you can make a difference?” And I was like I was a young kid and of course I’m gonna make a difference. So that really, really resonated me for the rest of my life. It’s a long story, I wrote this, my experiences in my book.

But I was there for about five years on and off in Egypt, looking at these oil spills that were just horrific. And unfortunately, my father was incarcerated because I was working for my father’s company he came to, he came to visit at the end of our project, and he was thrown in jail and I had to escape out of the country and it was a crazy story. But I ended up coming back to Vancouver and I broke off my father’s company, because I had so many clients around the world that I had met that needed help.

And I was going to a technical college at the time, British Columbia Institute of Technology and I was in a Mechanical Engineering program. And I got another guy from that company and he was working for my father as well and we broke off and formed Aqua-Guards Spill Response and what we do is we design and we manufacture, spill response equipment to contain and to recover marine oil spills. So everything from like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska In 1989, all the way to the BP horizon down in the Gulf of Mexico, and we’ve been involved in business about 104 countries around the world, we have about 3000 clients. Yeah, so that’s a bit of a, I don’t know if I went on a bit too long there but that’s a bit of a long and short of it.

Barbara Turley: Well the thing from that is, that is a huge operation to run. And that sort of brings us into kind of what we’re going to talk about today. So when you were saying that, I think I remember you saying when we were chatting that I’ve read some of your articles about this that you literally wanted to give up where you got to the point where you were just so burnt out from doing everything. And the ops and the whole thing that you just wanted to get out. Let’s start there, a lot of people that are being burned out now, right now. You want to get out, right?

Nigel Bennett: I know, I know. Absolutely. And I I totally feel for them. We’ve gone through this, I don’t know four or five major times in my Career life. There’s that whole period. You know, when you’re a start up, you get out and you start your own thing. Like when I did with my father, I broke off, I had no money, complete debt. My wife had more money than I had. And we bought a little house and we basically rented everything out. And so, I was building up this company called Aqua-Guard, and we had a little bit of business, we had everything leveraged. And then, we hit a couple of home runs, because after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, they had to redo all of the equipment in Alaska. And we just happened to nail a really nice contract at that time. And it went from being a startup to the phase of absolute chaos, and I call it a doorknob effect. So I would get to the office every morning and I’d put my hand out and I would touch the doorknob, and it would almost vibrate because I knew what was going on inside the office. I knew there was absolute chaos. I would take a deep breath, you know, and I would open the door and I’d step in into an absolute bees nest and it went on for 20 years like that.

In the shower every morning not knowing if I could make payroll or if I have to lay people off or if I could hire people, you know, it was just this up and down roller coaster, and a friend of mine, he was a football player in the Canadian Football League. It was a 320 pound lineman, big, big boy. He had just retired out of professional football and he saw what I was going through and he literally grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and he said, Nigel, I’ve joined this organization, it’s called the Young Entrepreneurs Organization. It was called the Young Entrepreneurs Organization at the time, it’s now called EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization. And he says, “You have to come to a meeting with me”, and I just thought there’s no way, I don’t have time. I’ve got three little kids, my business is out of control, I have not got time to go and even step put my big toe in anything like that and he literally grabbed me and he took me there.

So I went to my first meeting and I actually got recruited into what they call a forum group, a focus group of nine people. And my wife and I talked about this to this day. I mean, this was 20 years ago that I joined. And we talked about is that if we had not joined or been dragged into the Entrepreneurs Organization at that time, I don’t know where we would be, we’d probably be divorced, we’d probably lost everything. And so I really hold a lot of respect for that. And for Trevor for dragging me in. And as the years kind of went by, I was still having a tough time and I hired a coach and this coaches Kevin Lawrence, and he’s a Gazelles Scaling Coach.

I’ve been working with Kevin for 15 years. And Kevin really helped me look at the perspective of everything because we sat down, we had a one page plan and the only things that went on this plan were things that Nigel wanted. What does Nigel want with the business? What does Nigel want with his life? And these were my goals. He weren’t anybody else’s goals. These were my goals. And every time I would veer, because we veer, entrepreneurs, veer all over the place, he would come back to me and slap me back on track because this isn’t on your list. This isn’t what you wanted. And what I found is, after being smacked so many times, out, and then back, I kind of got it, I got into this rhythm, and I call it a life rhythm. I don’t call it a life balance. Because I think, with a life balance, you have to give up one to get the other. It’s a life rhythm. It’s like you live your rhythm, like a dance and a life and I once I got into this rhythm, things really, really started to happen quickly for me, and I can talk about how I eventually set up my business. 

Barbara Turley: What I’d love to just sort of pause there for a second because I think what you’ve just said, you know, a lot of people aren’t going through that, anyway. And I think right now, you know, as we’re recording this, we’re in the middle of this COVID-19 situation globally where people are feeling like even worse than that doorknob thing that you talked about people are great to get up in the morning, not everyone. I mean, some businesses are flying and some businesses are well, but they’re definitely you know, I’m lucky in the camp right now that the business is going, The Virtual Hub that I run is going okay, but it definitely there was a month of just absolute chaos there.

So I have had moments, a lot of moments, like what you’ve spoken about, and I got lucky in that I stumbled upon this Scaling Up book by Verne Harnish a few years ago, that it was like, that’s it, I’m building this company this way. And what I want to know now, what I want to deal with now and also a few people who have listened to me on this podcast, before also know that I seem to have a- I’ve always had a bit of a bent towards systems, processes, teams, delegation, I’m actually quite good at it. And otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to have two children while growing a company, which I’ve kind of done successfully. And, but, so talk to me about those early days of like, maybe I mean, it was years, obviously, but if we could distill it down into kind of what do you think are the top 2, 3, 4 things that a business owner needs to do and get a handle on in order to start to free themselves up from the day to day or from the ops or delegate more effectively?

Nigel Bennett: Yeah, yeah. I mean for me, and we just talked about peer groups. For me, peer group was huge, which happens to be the Entrepreneurs Organization for me. And then there was an offshoot of the Entrepreneurs Organization, which was at MIT in Boston, which I went to and I and I went to my very first meeting, and I was terrified. I have this, like, is almost an imposter syndrome. I felt I didn’t belong there, everybody was smarter than me. I’m dyslexic, I’ve got, ADD and I have a business but these guys are geniuses. I was almost throwing up as I drove up the driveway to this place at MIT. And I go in and the first speaker is you just mentioned them. The very first speaker was Verne Harnish and Verne stood in front of the whole of 75 entrepreneurs.

And I had hired a coach because I had hired a coach just before this. And he looked out at everybody and he said, I’ve got a question for you. How many of you have coaches? How many of you in this class currently have coaches? And I thought, Oh, you know, everybody, they’re all geniuses in this room. I mean they’re all smart business guy. So I have my head down on my desk. And I put my hand up and I put my hand up like this, you know, like, and the all I heard him say was only three of you of 75. Three of you and I looked around and this is unbelievable. These geniuses, these business people, they don’t have coaches. And Verne said let me tell you guys, he said that, “You can’t do life alone”. He said, “The top business people on the planet”, and at that time he was talking about Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell. He said, “Those three guys have multiple coaches. They can’t do what they do alone”. He says, “You need a coach”. And I sat back and I say, Wow, that’s really powerful stuff. And I’ve really lived through that for so many years.

And the one thing that my coach helped me to do, I was also at the point where I was hiking one day, Kevin, and I do a lot of hiking together. I walk and talk stuff, and I was having a really hard time with the business. And Kevin said to me, “Nigel, if somebody offered you something for your business right now, what would you sell it for? Like, what would you sell your business for today?” And I said, $1. I said, “I want my freedom back. I just want to get out”. And he said, “That’s not good”. He said, “That’s not good, let’s work with this and see what we can do”. Because at that time what I was doing, is I was parachuting in C Suite, CEOs and leaders, I would go out and I would poach them from competitors. And I would change the name every time I’d be a CEO one time and then General Manager the next time or Managing Director the next.

And I did that over 10 years and all that did was totally disrupt the culture of my business. And the one thing that I didn’t realize that I had been growing organically from inside my business, people that knew everything about the business. This one young guy, he was with us since he was 18. He started sweeping the floor when he was young, and he worked his way up into estimating and sales and then design and he was going to night school while he was working for us. And little did I know that he was doing most of the behind the scenes of running the business, not these other guys and now he’s now my partner. I bought my partner out of 30 years.

I had another gentleman that I mentioned earlier, bought him out in 2012 and what I did is I said, “I really want you to be my partner but here’s a one page deal, just one page. These are the things that Nigel will do. And these are the things Nigel will not do from now on. Nigel is not going to fly down to Mexico and be a collection agency for overpaid bills. Nigel’s not gonna do this thing anymore because that’s what I was doing. But Nigel’s gonna do this, Nigel is going to be involved”. For me, it was meeting with high level clients, trade shows, you know, things like that. Things that I really, really enjoyed. And we signed it and so we set deal the up so he did a earn out like he bought my other partner out actually over through dividends. We’re lucky we’re profitable. So it was a dividend, a dividend deal over seven years. And so he’s been running the company ever since, I’ve been able to step back. And I was there for about a year after we signed this deal.

And then I was actually able to leave with my family and I traveled the world for a year. And I traveled, we went to 17 different countries off the grid, one small bag each three t-shirts, one pair of shorts, a pair of flip flops for a year with my kids, and they were a little bit older.  We homeschool my daughter in grade nine. My son had just graduated from high school and my other son was in university so he would come in and out. It was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. And I thought, with my ego.

My ego was I can’t leave the business. And Kevin Lawrence said to me, I will never forget this. We’d set everything up in the business. Everything was running great. We had Cameron Janz, he’s an amazing guy running the business. and Kevin said to me “Nigel, you have this list of all these things you wanted to do in your life, this is your list, this is your life. This is your life dream. There’s one thing left on this list that you haven’t accomplished”. And I said, “Okay, what is it?” He goes, “It is to take off with your family for a year”. And I said, “Oh, come on, there’s no way, I can’t do this because of this. I can’t. I can’t, can’t can’t can’t.” He said, “Stop, it’s your wife.” My wife’s name is Reiko, she’s Japanese and she was in the kitchen of the house and he says she’s there and I said, “She’s here” he said ask her, I said, okay, so he yells, “Hey Reiko, you know the thing on the list you wanna, can you go?”, thinking she was gonna say absolutely no way and she said, let’s go and we set it up in about three months.

We made no plans. We did not plan this trip. We left, we ended up going to London first and then we just let it evolve from there, wherever our kids wanted to go. And it was the most incredible thing and I would not been able to do that without my coach, I would not been able to do that with having this organically grown, great person inside my business or one page plan that we’ve set up to make the business run. That was in 2012, I set it up 20 you know, we took off for a year. And now, so many years later, 2020 and, yeah, and I spend maybe half a day a week with my business because I’m financially connected. I’m 60% owner and Cameron is 40% owner. So yeah, yeah.

Barbara Turley: I want to like rewind completely and dig right into that because it’s like, so you got the coach and I’ll dig for you because I know what our listeners [inaudible]. So because lots of people have coaches, right, so you’ve got a coach and like, big shout out to Matt Malouf, who co hosts this show with me normally, he’s in Australia right now he’s up to his eyes with his own clients. He’s a fantastic coach that I started out with and he was there when I started The Virtual Hub and came up with this idea so big high five to Matt and but so you got the coach but and then the organic I 100% agree with you the organic growth, people inside your business, don’t ignore that because I’ve done that really successfully in the Philippines. Now, I have brought in a couple of people that needed more experience in certain functions like HR and head of that sort of thing but I have grown, my master trainers were original VAs with me that had no experience being VAs and I grew them up in there with me years. So I’m a big fan of that strategy and I think a lot of people don’t invest the time, energy, and training in doing that or the interest. But I want to dig in deeper into what the coach worked with you on. So let’s talk about operational, like the boring stuff, the processes, the systems, the meeting rhythms, how did you bring it all in? And did you have any of that before?

Nigel Bennett: Yeah, I mean, from the Entrepreneurs Organization too when I joined, our Bible at the time was a book called the E myth which is Michael Gerber’s E myth and that was the E myth revisited. And all that talks about is you know, the reason you start a business is you set it up and then you set up the systems in order the system, so then you can actually step out one day or patch it up and sell it or whatever. And so that was really kind of the Bible of why we need to, so yeah, in our business just having the people in the departments in the in the systems and it’s just, I’m not saying it happened organically but it you know, absolute key, absolute key,

Barbara Turley: Was it painful though? Was it when you realize it like sometimes when you read Michael Gerber’s book, you go totally getters. Oh, but oh my god, that’s such an uphill battle. Like I just have been staring at Mount Everest to try and we see clients coming to us at The Virtual Hub like this, where they feel they know why they need to do it, they know what they need to do but you’re staring at Mount Everest when you’re when you’ve got nothing really built and everything’s kind of in your own head, or in the heads of the people who work. Can you give any advice?

Nigel Bennett: Again, like I mentioned earlier, Life rhythm, like it’s a life rhythm in your business as well, you create this rhythm and at the beginning, it’s really painful. Like I mentioned, I kept getting smacked out to the side, you have to get smacked so many times to get onto a flow and your brain and your organization actually does get rewired to get into this rhythm. And once you start doing it, it actually does and it’s a commitment. So I mean, our commitments, you know, there’s a friend of mine, Brian Scudamore, that has a company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK and he was in my class at MIT as well, but his morning huddles, you know, his morning huddle are just key and that’s we do, you know, when all our guys or people were together, we could do but now they’re all over the place. So now we do them virtually, we do the virtual huddles and you know, you’re gone and you’re just checking in and checking the pulse of what’s going on. They’re not meetings, they’re huddles, they’re quick. They’re like seven minutes at the most, and you’re off, you know, and then-

Barbara Turley: We do them as well. It’s a game-changer for us at The Virtual Hub. 

Nigel Bennett: Yeah, yeah. And then your search and then we have a one page plan with my business partner, we have a one page plan with the company, which actually came out of the Rockefeller habits book, which is a Verne Harnish book as well. Yeah. And our quarterly meetings and our quarterly updates. And, yeah, it’s getting into the flow.

Barbara Turley: So one of the things that I hear, not a lot these days but I used to hear a lot in the beginning, when I started The Virtual Hub from clients that would come in. The number one thing and normally it was smaller businesses solopreneurs, this kind of thing. And they would say to me on these sales calls that I used to do, I would invariably hear the, “Well I just don’t want to micromanage someone and if it takes too long, I may as well do it myself”. And I used to say, “Well, that’s all fine, right?”. But you’re getting a virtual assistant, that’s what we do here. right? So, if you have that mindset, in a year’s time, I can guarantee you one thing, you’ll still be doing it yourself if you’re not willing to invest the time.

Nigel Bennett: Absolutely. What I found is when I originally broke off of my father’s company, I took my sister with me and there was this other guy, Lawrence. He was our, I call him the mad scientist. He was the guy, incredible brain, engineering brain. But what my sister and I were big into adventure. We’re into backcountry skiing, mountain climbing and mountaineering. And what we would do in those times is we would toggle off the company, because I knew she was off to climb Mount Logan and I was off to go to Nepal or whatever we were doing. And so I would leave, I would leave and she would run, you know, look after the business and we would kind of trade off like that for many years. We did that. I would come back just totally, rejuvenated, but my sister only stayed with me for four years. And then she left, we ended up buying her out.

But I kept that rhythm going. I kept that rhythm going. And I know again at my class in Boston, another thing that Verne said, it’s always Verne stuff. Verne said, “You know, if you’ve been an owner of a business or startup or whatnot for I can’t remember four or five years, you need to take like, one two or three months away”. And I thought, that’s not possible. Like I do my little John’s. And he said, “Because you just need to get away you need to get clear. All your best thinking happens in that space”. And I really find that now with all of us in this lockdown, the quiet. The quiet is where really cool stuff happens. And it’s been happening for me, it’s been happening for our people, all these great new ideas are coming out. And so I would keep doing that, I got into this life rhythm. I had a hard time at first with my ego, because if I go away, oh, I don’t know, nobody can do my business as well as I can, you know, I need to be involved. But then I would leave for a week, and then I go for two weeks, and I go for a month, and I come back and everything’s fine. Well, I went for a year, I went for a year, and I would check in.

So the beginning, the difficult part is the first part because your ego is still connected to you. I can’t go for a year this is ridiculous. But I would check in I would Skype in at that time. And everything was fine. And then the longer I was away, the less I checked in. So it firstly would be I check it every two weeks, and it was every month and it was like every six weeks. And then by the time I came back, you know I thought “Oh, Has our company burned down, what’s happened?” I walk in, and the most the weirdest thing for me was I’ve been away for a year, I’ve had so many life experiences myself and my family, just mind boggling. We’re high in the Himalayas, to offshore Brazil, to surfing on every coastline you can admit, it was absolutely amazing. I walked into my office and we did a huddle, everybody huddles around and like hey, Nigel, how is it? What was your favorite place? You know, blah, five minutes. And then everybody scampered off and everybody was doing their thing they hadn’t missed me at all. It was unbelievable for me. I was sad because they had missed me but I’m like, this is actually Nigel what you wanted to set up. This was your dream and it actually worked.

Barbara Turley: Can I ask you Nigel then for the team then, so obviously you know, I love the E Myth Michael Gerber I mean, if anyone’s listening to this, the only two books I think I read personally are the E Myth Revisited with Michael Gerber and Scaling Up by Verne Harnish, just read both those books. 

Nigel Bennett: Good to Great is good too by Jim Collins. 

Barbara Turley: Good to Great is good too. Yeah. But so the roles then, so obviously you grew organically, your person that is became the partner in the business and took over the running so they were The ones that the CEO they became kind of acting,. 

Nigel Bennett: Yes, CEO. he’s the CEO. I’m not the CEO anymore. 

Barbara Turley: So you’re not the CEO anymore? 

Nigel Bennett: No, I’m called co-founder. 

Barbara Turley: Yeah. What are the other roles that, you know, when we’re thinking about getting to this level? I mean, growing a CEO from inside, I think is a great idea, although potentially difficult, like takes a long time.

Nigel Bennett: Yeah, it took a long time. It took a long time.

Barbara Turley: What about things like the COO role, the ops like somebody running the implementation because the CEO is a great role, but then there’s the implementation. And who’s gonna run the people and the teams and the integrator? 

Nigel Bennett: Yeah, all the people that we have that are doing that, were all brought in by Cam, which is the CEO. They were all brought in over time. I mean, it’s been quite a long time now. Brought in and they just work like a well oiled machine. I only go in and I screw things up if I stick my nose in there. And they’re younger. I mean, I’m 58 now, and he’s 40 and so we have this you know, he’s full of vim and vigor. He’s got a young family, and he’s extremely driven. And I was just very fortunate to have him with us since he was a young man. And the rest of our team too, they’ve been with us. I mean, we have very little turnover. We just have just a great team and he is just a fantastic leader. And I don’t know if I lucked out or I just failed so many times, trying to parachute in people. And organically we were growing these people and it just kind of happened. It was just- 

Barbara Turley: Then becomes a family. That’s actually like a family.

Nigel Bennett: Yeah, it’s like a family. It is like a family. And we have regional managers that operate remotely. We have a gentleman, Francisco Jimenez, he’s a Venezuelan, that got out of Venezuela, mid 20 years ago, and was in Miami and I hired him out of Miami. And he was managing Latin America for me and he was in Miami, then he moved to Vancouver but it was tough for him to manage Latin America, Vancouver. So we have a place in Panama now, which he manages all of Latin America, but he lives in Vancouver. He spends three months in Panama remotely, and we zoom in and zoom out through our zoom calls, and we keep in touch and he reports; it just works great. I mean, it’s been working really, really well. 

Barbara Turley: So there’s been no break. So because you kind of ran, I mean, you’re running it virtually at the moment because you’re in Whistler, you’re sort of doing it remotely but has there been any break or any issues with moving because what I was thinking here is I’m always talking about virtual teams, remote, how you do stuff with virtual assistants or offshore teams or anything like that. But what I’m sort of hearing is that if your company’s actually set up in the right way, it doesn’t really matter, if you got the right setup, you can go virtual or go remote or come back to the office and the same thing happens. That’s what you’re finding. 

Nigel Bennett: Yeah, in my contribution to my company is more on the not this kind of a higher level sales keeping connected with our higher level customers, it was trade shows which have all been canceled now. So now I’m keeping in touch with everybody virtually. So that’s kind of I mean, it’s not that difficult to do virtually at all you know, to keep in contact, but I’m in contact more now virtually than I was before, because it’s become the new norm, it is the new norm just to zoom somebody, pick up the phone or zoom it?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I mean, I have a situation I was just thinking about it today where you know, I mean, I’ve always run my company remotely because it’s in the Philippines and I don’t live in the Philippines, so it’s always been that way. Now they are all in an office but at the moment they’re all remote but always had a Facebook group for our employees, right. So we’re all in a Facebook group and with Facebook Lives these days, it’s like I can just pop in at any time.

Nigel Bennett: I know. Yeah, we use WhatsApp whether we have different groups in our company. We have different WhatsApp groups in our company. And then my CEO and I have our own little WhatsApp just back and forth and there’s we have different groups with our WhatsApp which works really and I’m also involved in a group called 3ceos.com and what we’re doing is we’re doing speaking, we’re helping entrepreneurs around the globe with issues during the COVID-19 outbreak here, so I’ve got one of them is Todd Palmer. He’s in Detroit. Andy biting is in New Brunswick. And we run that out of New Brunswick, virtually everything is virtually, his assistant, they’re all there and everything that we do, I’m on it. I’m on a zoom call with him every day. And we never meet in person and we were doing talks for all the entrepreneurs. So we did, Winnipeg last week, we’re doing Toronto on Friday, we’re doing Malaysia next week. And we’re doing these webinars and everything is virtual.

Barbara Turley: So I’m keen to know then, in this COVID situation, this is kind of circling back to where we started this conversation around when you were in that moment of total burnout, you were almost willing to pay someone to take the company off to you, or just sell it for $1. And, you know, you’re obviously coming across people who might be feeling that way now and what are you hearing from those webinars you’re doing from the people in those chapters of the EO

Nigel Bennett: Yeah, I’m hearing all different types of things. I had a really nice comment from somebody in Winnipeg, and she was having a really hard time. And when I mentioned the point about selling my business for $1, she said she broke down in tears because she was in that same place. And I’ve been in that that place so many times. And what I’ve really noticed for me anyway, is the optics. So back in 2008, was tough. It was a tough time for a lot of people and I had a fraud case inside my business at the same time, or CFO. We had a big fraud, he’s actually ended up doing a few years in prison because of it.

So our company was going bankrupt. But at that time, the stock market crashed, I mean, I’m an environmental company but really everything’s dictated by the oil industry because we clean up the mess of the oil industry makes. So the old prices were really low and we were going bankrupt. But we were doing everything for everybody. And I sat back and I thought, okay, you got to look at this a different way. We got to turn this on its head What? What can we do? What can we do different and I thought, okay. Oil, the sweet oil on the surface of Texas is gone, nearshore stuff is tough to get; this is before fracking. Where’s the big market? Where’s the big market coming from? And I thought it’s offshore, its offshore.

So we focus, we actually basically took all our eggs in one basket, put them into another and focused on niche, high margin, and it was offshore for us. And so we were going bankrupt and Cameron Janz at the time, this the guy that was coming up through our company. I was pretty much out in my head I was so messed up in my business partner was too. He said, “Let’s make a deal with the bank see if we can keep our business alive till Christmas”. This was in July and we said, do whatever we can. So we focused on the offshore, we were able to pick up some incredible contracts on some equipment we had never built before. We’d never built it before. And it kept us alive and then our whole business shifted. So we just couldn’t see, we just couldn’t see I guess the forest through the trees type thing.

We were so focused on the business, the way our business that always run, our business that always run like this. We did everything for everybody, which higher volume lower margins. we flipped everything we turned everything on its head and you know, we need to get high margin, it’s a lower volume, but much higher volumes, but much higher numbers. And we went into a completely different spot. And the only reason that that happened to us is because of the of the crisis because of 2008, because of the fraud case, if those two things didn’t happen, their blessings in disguise, if they didn’t happen, we would have been on the same path as we were and probably just died a slow death. And this has happened so many times to me.

So the only thing I can say to people out there that are having a really hard time is what are we seeing? Or what are the optics? What are we looking at? Are we just trying to do something, the way we’ve always done it? The world’s changed, the world has completely changed. And maybe what we were doing before isn’t gonna be something for the new world, but there’s a lot of opportunity out there. I mean, there’s so many things. I mean, you look at these businesses that are thriving, home, delivery, organic food home delivery. All these things that you would never have thought of before, you know Zoom. All these technologies that are being born out of this and the only way that these things come up, the only way that I have evolved personally, the only time that I’ve evolved, is if I’ve been pushed so far to the edge, almost falling off, but then had a big aha moment, when you’re almost about to fall. It’s a terrible thing to say but that’s where I operate the best. And that’s when my best ideas come is when I’m, you know-

Barbara Turley: I’m like that. I need a perpetual state of like, I like to be. I said to my husband one day, I was like, “Why is it that I need to be on the edge of the precipice before I like, first open a great idea or I come out strong, I need a deadline”. 

Nigel Bennett: I know, it’s like climbing like, I do a lot of climbing. I did a lot of climbing and it would always be on those crazy adventures where would be you know, in life, it’s life and death. You got a rope clipped and you got a carabin or you got got some ice coming down on you. I was doing some ice climbing on a mountain once and the whole glacier moved, everything shook, the ice was falling down and we thought we were all dead. And you come out of those moments, you know, you have these epiphanies and they’re great stories afterwards too. But you know if you live.

Barbara Turley: I think you’re right though, I think one of the challenges people and anyone listening to this. I think what happens to people, if you’re either fight, flight, or freeze you know, and I’m a fight. Like if someone like I’m sort of quite even keel until someone goes and attacks me and then I’m like I’ll fight to the death to win.

Nigel Bennett: I have ADD and actually my coach and I, Kevin Lawrence have formed a group called giftadd.com to prove that people with ADD aren’t freaks, we’re actually gifted. And the incredible thing, if you look at the statistics over time, so many entrepreneurs have ADD or dyslexic, but I find with me being ADD when I get that push, the adrenaline push, In my day to day life I’m all over the place but when I get that push, I can focus and I focus like an arrow and it’s a very common trait with people with ADD and maybe that’s why people with ADD, there are a lot of entrepreneurs have ADD? I don’t know.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s funny because like I don’t because I’m quite I don’t know, I’m quite systems minded and all that sort of thing. But the people who go into freeze, though, I mean, there’s one or two flight completely, but the ones that go into freeze, if you’re sort of listening to this and you’re thinking, “Oh, that’s me, I just go rabbit in the headlights”. I think, you know, what I’ve been saying to to our clients and to people is, never waste a good crisis. I mean, it’s a terrible thing to say, it’s terrible, but it’s true.

Nigel Bennett: All the best things that have ever happened inside my company. It’s crazy, have been formed during a crisis.

Barbara Turley: Yes. And I think you know, when we were talking on this mastermind, I don’t know whether you were on the first one that I was on with the group of people that we do that with and I was saying that I could feel the adrenaline in my fingertips of this coming, and I thought it’s a terrible crisis. But I remember the last one was horrific for me, the 08 thing. But I actually came out of it and ended up, long story, but I did sweat equity in a company that ended up going to you know, it’s worth $60-$70 million now, not my share but the company and it was born out of that time and me taking risk on and getting that adrenaline in my fingertips feeling and this is the time to not- now having said that, I also think it’s a time to maybe sit back and listen to your intuition a bit too, and you don’t have to rush into anything but it is the time to rise when you’re tired. Like you might be tired but you have to rise into it.

Nigel Bennett: Exactly. I have a good friend of mine, that’s a shaman, he’s a proven shaman. I’ve done a lot of stuff done in Peru and I was having a hard time several years ago with my father and he said to me, he said, “Nigel, like, you have to realize that all the difficult things that you’ve experienced in your life through your father, he’s actually been a coach to you”. And I said, “How is this possible?” How could this be a coach because you would not be the person that you are now unless those things happened. Some of them may be terrible. And, he nailed it, he nailed it. And it’s so true, I wouldn’t be the person I would not be sitting here in front of you now. Unless all this happened to me during my life, all these really difficult times and all the good stuff. So-

Barbara Turley: Well, listen, thank you so much for joining us on the show because when I heard the story. I really said to myself, you know, it’s that you’ve been on both, your now on the other side, and you’ve been on the first one I know most entrepreneurs have, but you were there for 20 years. I mean in that kind of horrible uphill battle feeling. And I know, there’s lots of business owners that are like that, and it’s just those those key things. I think, just review the things that you’ve said.

Nigel Bennett: There’s just one thing that I want to say that I really learned over the whole period, is that as an entrepreneur, we’re always in crisis. But I would say never sacrifice your family for business crisis. Because our family are the most important thing. And that’s what I found.

Barbara Turley: Yes, and that’s why I always say to people, it’s so worth like spending the time to you know, getting delegation right, getting it to [inaudible] actually even just delegating to a simple virtual assistant like what we do with The Virtual Hub. There’s so many businesses that come to us and that’s where they start their journey. And the ones that spend the time, the energy and they put the time into actually getting it right, it pays the largest dividends in the end. And that’s the best work you can do, is to learn how to delegate effectively. And then you start your journey towards building your systems, your teams and eventually getting to the stage where you can switch.

Nigel Bennett: And it started with me again with you know, joining the peer group, which was amazing and a focus group inside a peer group, which was the entrepreneurs organization, and then also the coach but a good coach and he’s a good coach as someone who is gonna hold you accountable to your life goals. And yeah, that’s what started it off.

Barbara Turley: Well, listen, thank you again for joining us and anyone who is listening to this show, please, you know, share it with your friends and colleagues. It will be up in iTunes soon. We’re on Facebook Live at the moment at night. And thank you so much for joining us today, everyone. Until next time, I will see you next time.

Nigel Bennett: Thanks, Barbara.

Outro: Thank you for listening to the Virtual Success Show. If you found this show helpful, take a moment to share it with a friend so that we can all grow together.

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author, and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training, and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing, and systems automation space.

Want the transcript? Download it here.

2:39 The Virtual Hub’s Recruitment Process

8:40 Recruitment Status in this Crisis

11:05 How to avoid bringing in the wrong people

14:20 Attitude vs Skill

17:48 Three key fundamentals in Recruiting

21:59 Wrapping things up

Intro: Do you find yourself running out of time to accomplish your work, are you spending time doing things that you’re not that good at? There are effective ways to outsource these tasks so you can focus on your business. This is the Virtual Success Show, we bring the inside scoop on outsourcing success for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. And now, here are your hosts Matt Malouf and Barbara Turley.

Matt Malouf: Hi, everyone and welcome to another episode of the Virtual Success Show where I’m joined by my co host, Barbara Turley. Hi, Barbara. How are you today?

Barbara Turley: I’m great Matt and you?

Matt Malouf: Yep, going really, really well… really well. Very excited to starting to see what we’re coming out of lockdown through this pandemic that we’ve been going through and life is starting to get back to some form of normality. How is it on the; I’m in Australia today and your in France. How’s it, how’s things over in your neck of the woods? 

Barbara Turley: Well, you know, I’m just excited too Matt because the restaurants are opening this week. So, you know, we’re slowly opening up, but we can finally have a glass of wine somewhere else other than our house. So that’s got to be a good thing. So but yeah, very slowly opening up, everyone wearing masks where we are. But I guess that’s the right thing to do for now. But good to see us all opening up again.

Matt Malouf: And today’s show, I wanted to actually spend some time interviewing Barbara, because we’ve been having a few conversations recently off air. And one of the most interesting things that we’ve been talking about is the recruitment process. And the hiring of VAs and how Barbara and her team are doing that process at the moment. But the, I guess, not just about the process, around, I guess the numbers behind how many VAs are the like you’ve got to go through or interview to get to a diamond and I wanted to share that with everybody today because I think it’s an area of business that so many business owners struggle with, which is hiring a little and hiring their VA. So I wanted to spend some time just getting Barbara’s insights and sharing that with you all today. So Barbara, I guess let’s start with regards to hiring VA’s and the like. What is the sort of process? Is it just a, do you just follow a traditional recruitment process? Or are you doing something a little bit different to test and find the right people?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, great question, Matt. Because, you know, a lot of people would have different definitions of what is the traditional recruitment process, I suppose in most people’s head, that is put out a job ad, get a load of applications, look at a few resumes, narrow them down, interview a few people and pick the one you like the most. Over the years, you know, you start off doing that. But really and I know we did a full show on this, you and I before where I dissected out our recruitment process, and it is a lengthy process that we go through that involves a lot of metrics.

And it is very, we only bring in the relationship piece at the very, very end of the process. So what I mean by that is, we don’t even interview people until they’ve jumped through about 10 different hoops, and we’ve tested them in certain areas. And only at that point, are we sort of saying we’re interested in meeting with them and having a chat. And interestingly, 50% of people still fail at that stage, even though like the majority have already fallen at the other hurdles that we’ve set along the way. And still, in that interview stage, 50% of people will fail right there. So it’s very difficult.

Matt Malouf: I mean, for many business owners, just even the thought of 10 steps before he gets to an interview. They’d be probably sitting there going, I don’t have the time for that. Why such a lengthy process, Barb?

Barbara Turley: Well, in my experience, if you want to get you know, everyone says they want to hire A-players. But in order to find a true A-player, it’s like you have to kiss a lot of frogs, right? Because you don’t know, the people applying for jobs, depending on the type of the level of role that you’re looking at. But you know, when we’re recruiting for VAs, for example, it’s not a lower level job, but I mean, it’s not a leadership position. It’s not at, the pool is large. So when you’re, when depends what rank you’re going for in a company. But when you’re looking for a kind of a rank and file sort of position, where the masses might come and apply, and especially if you’re saying that you offer training, like for example, the way we do, you’re going to get people who are switching industry and that sort of thing happening.

So in our experience to try to find the A-players, they don’t often walk through the door with the correct color coat on, if you know what I mean. So you have to kind of, you can often find diamonds in the rough. And you have to be able to look past certain things so that you might find the diamonds that you’re looking for. I hope that makes sense. It’s kind of a difficult thing. And really, metrics is the way to filter it fast, is to filter a lot of people down to the people you actually want to speak to.

Matt Malouf: Yeah, it’s so interesting. Like, you wouldn’t think something like recruitment would come back to metrics, but the numbers don’t lie in any area of business. And I think that’s the key. And once you, the only way to get a set of metrics, like what you’re talking about, is through spending a lot of time and having a large data set to be able to produce that.

Barbara Turley: Well, if you think about it, Matt as well, I was just thinking there, you know, the majority of people, the majority of businesses, spend little or no time or you know, scant time on recruiting. They might pay an agency, they might spend but really is it a folk? Is it a department within the business, usually not unless you’re a very large company. But if you think about it, the people that you’re bringing in and allowing to walk through the door of your business, if you put as little energy into your, you know, account your finance area, or your delivery of product or sales or your marketing area, as most businesses do in the recruitment area, your entire business would fail.

So, in The Virtual Hub, recruitment is like one of the linchpin departments where we say to ourselves, every time we see a problem within the company, even if it’s like, after two years of having the same employee, we actually look back and go, Hmm, we look back at all their recruitment, testing and all of the notes that we took through the entire process, and we try to figure out whether we should have seen that or whether we can recruit that out in future. That’s how much energy we put into it.

Matt Malouf: That’s brilliant. The number of people that will not do that, they’ll actually point the finger at the person versus taking responsibility and going back, right at the beginning of the process and going, how could we have changed things back here? Is there anything that we need to improve or change right at the beginning? Oh, that’s amazing, you know? I mean, that’s a really important point for everyone to take home. It’s taking the responsibility, and then understanding how we can make it better. That’s brilliant Barb.

Barbara Turley: Well, you know, when you’re talking about setting expectations Matt, we did a show on setting expectations with your team. And you know, when somebody doesn’t meet expectations, or somebody doesn’t, you know, perform on the job or whatever and you think you just have, how could they have been so confused? If that thought goes through your head for a moment, think about how they could have been so confused, potentially. It happened way back in the ad that you put out for the job. Potentially, not always.

But if you go right back to the source, you’ll think well, how did this person first walk through our door? It was the ad and how was that written? What were they told in the entire process that they came through? And then on the onboarding and the training and the coaching and the quarterly catch-ups and all this stuff going forward, either they were just a C-player that you hired, you thought they were an A-player, and or it was your process that caught the whole thing out, maybe, just worth asking those questions.

Matt Malouf: And so in the current climate, Barb, what are you, as you’re recruiting for VA, are you seeing anything different at the moment?

Barbara Turley: Yes, yes and no. Okay, so yes, in that we are seeing large numbers of people applying for jobs, which you know, is always great because once the pool gets bigger, then you can start to see great people are being released from other companies like so. For example, companies like Airbnb, who have a history of training their staff pretty well, and having a good culture and that sort of thing. You know, they’ve had to let some people go so that, you know, they happen to be in the same city as us in Cebu. And although we’re not in the same industry as the travel industry or Airbnb, we would be keen to see some of their potential stars that might actually be coming out of those places because we can retrain them, they’re still great, A-players are always A-players, right?

So that’s been very interesting. But the thing that hasn’t changed is the metrics, I still can’t believe we were talking about this off air. We’re still, I’m still seeing the same number of people, the same percentage of people pass, fail, succeed, wow us, that percentage just has not changed, which is fascinating to me. It feels like that it doesn’t matter what happens, there still only 2% to 5% or, you know, maybe 5% to 10% of people are exceptional regardless of the skill set or regardless of industry,

Matt Malouf: And that’s one of the things I love about the standard that you set in this industry, Barb is that, you know, here the pool is bigger, you’re getting more applications and you’ve had probably in a long time, yet you don’t drop the standard and the stats don’t lie. So it’s the law of averages right working here. And I think what’s really, really important is that last statement that you made that are in sort of between 2% and 10% cut it.

And my thought is, the only reason you can say that with confidence is because of the number of people and the experience you’ve had over the years. And so many business owners would react in a hiring scenario, and bring the A-players on in the hope that they get to make them As. Have you had experience in that before, where you’ve seen, you’ve probably gone against your metrics or your process, and then you brought on the wrong person.

Barbara Turley: So many things I want to unpack in that. I just want to make sure I get the whole picture for you. So yes, 100% I have. So number one, we ran a test last year about a year ago. So just it wasn’t in a crisis situation or anything where we’ve done this twice where we dropped our metrics and we decided not dropped it, but we lowered the standard. And we decided are we, have we set the bar so high that literally nobody can get through it. So we lowered it and what we noticed was that the difference was night and day between if we lowered it. And it just, the quality of an ability of people coming through was just, was way lower. We weren’t finding amazing people that accidentally just didn’t do well in the particular tests that we had. So that was number one.

And number two, the other thing I wanted to say about recruiting, usually the reason people end up hiring B and C-players is because they are in a panic. They don’t hire strategically thinking forward, they hire when they need somebody. And that means that you go out and you got to get it done pretty fairly quickly. Recruiting and sort of employment branding is something that you need to have as part of, well, some companies are very small, so they don’t really need to have it all the time. But you need to be constantly scouting, and constantly looking for talent because sometimes talent comes along at the wrong time. And it doesn’t mean that you create space for them in your company. Not everyone can do that. But sometimes it might be worth and trying to create space for the right A-player when they come along and not just when you’re desperate for that position.

And then dealing with B-players, so let’s say you do hire somebody that it depends what type of B-player they are, and I’ve experienced with this as well. So if they are a B-player where you have somebody that’s a great person, that is smart, has enthusiasm in their DNA right now that’s important because you cannot train for enthusiasm. They’re enthusiastic about what it is that they’re doing. And they have a sense of grit about them. So they are, have the ability to rise to a challenge. If you have somebody like that, that comes in, but let’s say they can’t do, they can’t, they haven’t got the skills yet. That’s a B-player that is coachable. You can coach and train that person because skills are teachable.

The other things I mentioned or not, you’ve got to hire for them. So if you find, if someone is a B-player, because they’re not performing on the job because of training, but they have all the other elements, that is someone that you can coach up into an A-player, in my opinion, if you have a B-player, because of things like low energy, lack of interest, generally kind of you know, fixed mindset instead of growth mindset, it doesn’t matter about their skills they’re not, they’re probably a C-player really that just did okay. Does that make sense? It’s because there’s a lot to unpack there in everything I’ve said.

Matt Malouf: And I think just to summarize, it’s attitude trumps skills every time. 

Barbara Turley: Every time, like every time.

Matt Malouf: And you said something that I think I want everyone to really hear, you said it earlier, which is an A-player is always an A-player, irrespective of what they’re doing. And that comes back to the attitude piece that we’re talking about here. And you just, you can’t train enthusiasm. You can’t fake enthusiasm, either. Like at the end of the day, someone will come in and yes, they might pull the wool over your eyes once but inevitably, it’s got to be part of their being. Otherwise very quickly, they’re going to be exposed and if you’ve got a thorough process that you’re taking people through, inevitably, you’ll identify that.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so I would encourage people to just think about the things in your business that you can train for. Now, training is a whole other thing, maybe you don’t have time for training and you need to hire someone that has the skills. But if you’re trying to hire somebody that is already, has all the skills and all the things I talked about, they’re probably going to be quite expensive.

So you’ve got to think about it’s a balancing act between where is your company at or your business and what can your business kind of afford right now and which side are you, I would always say I would go with the culture fit and the enthusiasm and all that first and then work on the training because you can really grow that person up into your business. You don’t always have to get all the things in the first hire or in the beginning and pay up for it.

Matt Malouf: And you know what’s been really interesting through this pandemic, Barb, what I’ve been seeing in the coaching I’ve been doing with clients, this attitude piece during tough times is amplified. So if you’ve got somebody that is exceptional when it comes to attitude, enthusiasm, their attitude, is amplified through this time and if you’ve got someone that’s on the wrong side of that line, it’s amplified through this time as well.

And it’s been really interesting watching the companies that are crushing it at the moment. It’s largely due to, they’ve got the right people with the right attitudes, who are just gunning for the business and wanting to see the business succeed. And the ones that are failing and not only because of lockdowns or shut downs or anything like that, they’re actually crumbling because as a unit, they’re not unified. They’re not sharing the common traits and goals and attitudes that are what winning requires. 

Barbara Turley: You can see it even in, you know, you would see it in clients you coach, you can read about it in newspapers, but all the businesses that, in general, forget about being in a crisis. The businesses that win in general, are usually led by leadership teams or leaders that will always look at themselves first and they tend to have a growth mindset. Well not tend to, you kind of have two growth mindsets, positive, generally positive attitude, and generally and then through a sort of a glass is half full approach, an ability to see opportunity when others can’t, and that is why people like that win. But it’s not everyone has that trait, so it’s difficult. You don’t have to have I mean, not everyone has to be a rock star on your team. But everyone needs to be a rock star in some way, shape, or form. So depending on the role, in my view 

Matt Malouf: So if we were to leave the listeners with three key fundamentals around this piece, Barb, what would your top three tips be?

Barbara Turley: Yep. So tip number one is very simply that people matter, right? So people matter in any business. And because of that, the energy that you put into things like recruitment, employment branding, employment opportunity for people will pay you dividends in the end. It’s something that you just need to think about. That’s on the front on the way in. The other thing that, you know, with people matter is thinking about the journey that somebody is taking with your company that matters to them. So, people matter, it’s important to have a people focus within any business. And it is time consuming, it’s a bit tiring, but it’s actually, people matter. So that’s the first thing I would say.

The second thing I would say is when, if you do have A-players or B-players that are coachable, open to A-players, those people tend to like working with other A-player’s or coachable B-players. And I’ve made this mistake in the past, if you are seen to be supporting C-players or the bludgers, right? It actually demotivates your A-players if they see you doing that. So if you’re favoring somebody or you’re allowing bad behavior to go on in your business, it actually demotivates and turns off those who are A-players and B-players. And I’ve learned that lesson the hard way, a couple of times. So take it from the horse’s mouth.

And my third point would be, people like generally to work in streamlined machines of businesses, because that makes it more fun. And Matt, you and I talk about this all the time, building a machine, making sure that everyone’s clear on their role, clear on what they’re, you know, accountable for. There’s a nice process running you know, people get to be creative, where they want to be creative and show initiative etc. But generally speaking, you want to have a well-oiled machine running that people want to be part of. I think those would be my three key things.

Matt Malouf: I’m going to add one little bit to your point too, because it’s such an important point. When you’ve got the A and B-players, they will help you select or deselect others within the team as well. And you’ve got to listen to them. So if you’re A or B-players are coming to you with feedback around other team players, that’s legitimate, so not we’re not talking about whinging and whining in that kind of rubbish. But legitimate feedback, constructive feedback.

You must listen to them in line with Barb’s point because these people are critical to the success or failure of your business. And, inevitably, if you don’t maintain the standard around the A’s and the B’s, you’ve got the right attitude that you can build into As, they will leave and you’ll be left with C-players, which you cannot build a great business on the back of.

Barbara Turley: I know you’d be putting out fires all day and driving yourself mad. And actually, if I could finish on a tip around that, you know, allow people through your recruiting and your general process, create ways for them to deselect themselves. And the best way for you to do that is to be extremely transparent about what they’re entering and almost make it not difficult, but you know, make them jump through some hoops because those that want to work for your company will jump through those hoops and they’re the ones you want to have. Because they’re inspired by what you’re doing. And they’re actually, it’s like inbound marketing kind of thing there. They are magnetically attracted to what it is that you guys do, and the others allow them to deselect themselves before you ever hire them. That’s what we tend to do at The Virtual Hub. We’ve had people drop out and we go well, it’s better they dropped out now, before we hire them, they give up in the process.

Matt Malouf: Barbara that has been amazing. I’ve got a page full of notes that I’ve feel like this has been for me this show. I’ve got so many great notes. I hope the listeners have taken a lot from this. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please we’d love your comments around the show, we’d love for you to give us a review. But more importantly is to share this with your community because our goal is to help as many business owners and entrepreneurs success with their virtual teams as possible because we believe it is paramount and critical to business success these days. But yeah, Barbara once again, love your input. Love your, what you’ve given to the community today. And thank you and we’ll join for another show soon.

Barbara Turley: Thanks very much, everyone.

Outro: Thank you for listening to the Virtual Success Show. If you found this show helpful. Take a moment to share it with a friend so that we can all grow together.

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training, and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing, and systems automation space.

Want the transcript? Download it here.

02:06  Cashflow Analysis and Forecasting

05:48  How to help business owners with their Cash flow statements

08:48  Reacting vs Responding

10:57   Importance of Cashflow analysis during this crisis

18:39   90daycashflow.com

22:03   Accountant vs CFO

26:56   Importance of numbers in the business

28:06   Wrapping things up

Intro: Do you find yourself running out of time to accomplish your work, are you spending time doing things that you’re not that good at? There are effective ways to outsource these tasks so you can focus on your business. This is the Virtual Success Show, we bring the inside scoop on outsourcing success for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. And now, here are your hosts Matt Malouf and Barbara Turley.

Barbara Turley: Hey, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Success Show where I’m finally rejoined again, I’ve managed to coax my co-host, Matt Malouf, back to join me on this show. I’m your co-host, Barbara Turley. Matt, thanks for coming back and joining us on the show again,

Matt Malouf: No worries and yeah. So sorry, I haven’t been, I’ve been so proud of all the episodes you’ve been doing and we should’ve been on there. It’s just been one of those crazy times at the moment.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely. I know if, we’re you know, as we’re recording this today. We’re sort of right in the middle of this Coronavirus situation that’s going on. But it’s a very interesting time for the show Matt. And you know, the concept of remote working and virtual teams. And we’ve actually seen a massive uplift in people interested in actually the podcast. And the stuff we’ve been talking about for the last three years on this podcast has all of a sudden become even more important than ever before.

So what I wanted to talk to, I’m getting Matt back on the show specifically to talk today about cash flow. It’s not really a virtual team kind of topic, but it’s important in the environment that we’re in right now. And Matt, you’ve been out talking a lot about cash burn, cash flow forecasting, managing your cash and being lean in this environment, but not so lean that you can’t come out strong. So I want to dig into this topic with you. First of all, let’s start with talking about cash flow analysis and forecasting and watching your cash. Can you start at the beginning and talk to us about what do we actually do to do that? Because lots of us don’t even know how to do that.

Matt Malouf: Let me start with I think the importance around cash flow is that it’s more than just looking at your bank account. And I was, I did a presentation this morning. I think one of the biggest mistakes so many smaller, medium business owners make is their key report that they rely on in their business is an ATM receipt, to tell them what’s going on in their business. And the reality is that cash in your business is like oxygen to a human, where you can only last a very short period of time without oxygen and in a business can only last a very short period of time without cash.

And so, in normal practices, in normal and I’m using very common, as in normal times, we should be managing our cash flow. What does that mean, that means we should be predicting based on our leads and conversion, cash coming in. And we need to factor in things like, if our business invoices, what’s our average collection period, and being very conservative on our predictions on cash in. And then the second part of that is in looking and having a deep understanding of cash leaving our business and that’s gonna be in the form of our fixed expenses.

So things like your rent, if you’ve got salaried employees, if you’ve got loan repayments that you may make, if you’ve got other kinds of subscription services or contractors that you pay regularly, if fixed expenses, their expenses that you are incurred, irrespective of whether you make a sale or not. And then you’ve got to factor in your variable expenses into this cash burn rate. And then 30 in this way, so many business owners, they get it wrong and they fix it. It’s the non p&l cash transactions. So things like taxes that you have to pay. It might be inventory, often, you know, inventory is not impacting your profit and loss statement. It’s impacting your balance sheet. And so that cash that’s coming out of your business, cash that you need to spend in order if you don’t have any stock, you can’t sell any goods, but it’s often not calculated. And this is where you need to get really clear and understand that a cash flow statement is very different to a profit and loss budget.

Barbara Turley: Our business is even doing a cash flow statement. No I’m not. Are we doing cash flow statements? Do you find clients are really doing this stuff?

Matt Malouf: They’re not, but that’s why they’re wondering why they don’t have cash in their account. It’s why they’re sitting there looking at their p&l is going “I’ve got a profitable business, but I’ve got no cash”. And that’s often the gap is they don’t understand the impact of these non p&l items that are impacting their cash.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I think this is a major problem. And I think at the moment when people are feeling in a crisis situation, like what we’re in right now, which is impacting business a lot and there’s handouts coming from governments, and there’s banks like deferring loans and stuff like that. It’s actually very difficult to get the headspace right to sit down and figure this out. So what, how are you helping clients with this? And how can we, how can we do this better for anyone listening?

Matt Malouf: So the first thing we’re getting everyone to do first, first of all, you’ve got to have clean data. And what I mean by that is that your accounts need to be up to date, they need to be reconciled. You can’t understand where things are at if you’ve got messy data or out of date data. The second thing is then going line by line through the last three months at a minimum of what cash has gone out of your business. And asking yourself, Is this still necessary for us to operate and move forward? And I guess it’s a bit like, you’ve got to cut the fat out of your business.

But what you don’t want to do, you don’t want to deplete muscle or bone. You just want to cut the fat out because the muscle and bone is essential for you to be able to not only survive through this, but then thrive on the other side of it. So you know, things like, a lot of the things that we’re seeing, their nice to have. So it may have been, yeah items that you had in your office, kitchen. It may have been subscriptions that you may have only use part of the time, but not all the time.

I had some clients that had, they had a Click Funnels account, a lead pages account, they had this, they had four things that could do the same thing. And so it was a case of actually going through line by line over the last three months and looking at all of that. The third thing then is understanding what is required for you to continue to operate your business and move forward. And so what happens is people just slash and burn and they cut and they cut and they cut and they cut and they cut. And then all of a sudden, they’re the person doing everything. And they’re like wondering why they’re not moving forward with any speed or not able to generate any revenue and cash. coming in.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, we saw with our clients just with The Virtual Hub exactly this was happening. Initially, people were like, “Ohh slash the VA, slash the team, slash everything. And then they came back couple of weeks later going, “Oh, we need to cancel the cancel”. Because they realize that actually if this, Yes, they were trying to cut costs, but then they were sitting up to two o’clock in the morning doing landing pages or doing stuff or do answering, you know, customer support tickets or whatever it was that they were cutting.

And then they’ve no time energy, they might have a bit of money left, but they’ve no time energy or anything left to actually drive the business forward and get out of this crisis. So we did see that happen and people kind of panicked and cancel the service and then try and then came back looking to uncancel it, and one client actually came back and grew, which was quite interesting.

Matt Malouf: Yeah, and we were the same with coaching. The first thing people’s reaction was to cut business coaching, but once they settle down their response was, “Hey, we need you more than ever”. And I think that’s an important point that I wanted to hear, it’s, are you reacting? Or are you responding? and reacting is very emotional. It’s very short term thinking. It’s not even often even tactical, it’s just, it’s that field. And not a lot of thought that’s gone into it versus responding is strategic. And you need to be being strategic through this time. Otherwise, you won’t have a business off the other side. And that’s not being dramatic. I just, that’s my, true to my belief right now.

Barbara Turley: I firmly believe this. And I, you know, it reminds me of a video I did actually for our clients back in the middle of the crisis, we were sort of being put, you know, we have office based VAs, as I was telling you about this Matt, where everyone’s in an office and we have clients who are saying, “I want my VA to work from home, I don’t see why my VA can’t work from home”, and I have to sort of push back and say to clients, and actually they understood once I explained it, I said, you know, we’ve got 125 staff in an office.

And it’s important to stay grounded in these times and to actually, as you say, respond rather than react because a reaction by me would have been, yeah, yeah, let’s do this. And then we cause a domino effect through the office of people who weren’t allowed to go home versus people who were and instead, what I did was I really pushed back. I tried to gain some, you know, composure and some time to really think this through, examine the data and then make a decision about our stages of response. And we were responding for all 125 people and not just one.

So it’s that yeah, reacting versus responding can actually be applied in loads of different areas, not just your decisions around the cash of the business, but in order to come out strong, you’re right we need to stay grounded as leaders during this time and respond as opposed to react. So I love that comment that you made.

Matt Malouf: I think coming back to cash burn rate then to, Barbara just to add to what I was saying before, is you need to go a little bit granular on this. And what I mean by granular is like, normally, we would be looking at probably weekly or monthly style cash flows for businesses. And the tool that we built for our clients, which is available for free also will give everyone a link later on. We actually built a daily cash flow. And for me, I remember when I read the E myth the first time and in every other time I’ve read it, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. And because everything was crashing so fast, business was drying up so quickly for so many companies.

We knew we had to look at this daily, not weekly, a week. I don’t know about you, but most of the people we were working with, a day felt like a week’s worth of work at the beginning of this. And it was like things within, things were changing so fast. I work with some gyms and I remember, on the, it was a Friday, I met with them, we put the new plan in place based on the restrictions that have been placed. And then Sunday night, the Prime Minister of Australia comes out and says, midday tomorrow, you’re gonna be closed. And so we had to move quickly. But also to, in order to move, in order to respond, we needed to know the impact that decisions were going to have. And so why we went daily was because this way we could actually understand what was happening in this time of crisis real quick, and it wasn’t getting paralysis by analysis. It was about having information on hand quickly.

And the metaphor I use for this, it’s like, it’s almost like we had to go from the dashboard that maybe a commercial airliner would have used, to a dashboard, now a fighter jet would use and we had to upgrade it and a fighter jet because it’s a precision high performance machine, it has a lot more dials and feedback mechanisms happening in order to perform at that level, versus a commercial airliner, which is still a high performance machine, but not to the same level as a fighter jet.

And so the more granular we went with people, the more certainty they had in their decisions because they had the data to support what was going on. And we knew that, okay, should we pay this supplier today, or next week, and then we look at how much cash came in yesterday. And then we looked at what our projection was, and then we go, look what we’re going to do, we’re going to go back to them and we’re going to say we’re going to pay them 50% today, we’re going to pay them 50% next Monday, and what we found by managing it that way, we were on the front foot, where we’re in control. And all these businesses are now in a position of strength where they’ve now been able to protect what they had and pivot with confidence, versus putting their hands in the air and hoping.

Barbara Turley: I love that. What I was thinking, as you were talking, is that the businesses that are just facing this head on and doing this work, because a lot of people are gonna run a mile from this because it’s, you know, it’s like the numbers, nobody likes to do it. It’s like making processes. It’s excruciating for some people. But it did, the work that you do on this pays dividends forever, because I was thinking, you know, I think the businesses that are gonna do this work with you and all this cash flow analysis and the stuff you’re talking about, are not only gonna come out stronger out of this when, I keep talking about, when the gun goes off, because it’s like a race right when the gun goes off, that’s when the tide will go out. And those who have prepared during this boot camp time will be the ones that will kind of come out strong out of this. But they’ll go on strong forever, because you’ll have learned this skill during this time. And it’s a skill that you’ll continue on in business and it’ll actually make a lot stronger business thereafter. As the saying goes, never waste a good crisis. So this work, doing this work now I think is gonna be pivotal for those businesses and for all businesses,

Matt Malouf: 100%. And you know, it’s interesting about you saying when the gun goes off, yeah, everything is disguised at the moment. And this is what everyone needs to understand because, economies have been propped up by government stimulus. We’re in a shutdown circumstance, governments are giving handouts. I know here in Australia, you know, you’re getting, whether it’s the job keeper payments, you’re getting cash flow boost, you’re getting a whole heap of incentives and payments, you’re getting rent reductions, you’re able to put home loans or other loans on hold. So you’ve given this false sense of security. But the reality is, once that all goes away, and this is what we’re doing with the cash flow forecasting we’re doing with our clients.

Well, while we’re looking at the next 90 days, we’re projecting out for them for the next 12 months, and we go okay, what happens when the job keeper stimulus finishes. What does your cash flow and your profitability look like then? What happens if your landlord reneges on what they’re saying, and he gives you half the period of time for rent relief? What if the banks turn around and change what’s happening, and we run all these different scenarios, and we can do it quite quickly once you’ve got everything set up. And I think that’s the key. The pain in anything is in the setup.

virt

One of the episodes we’ve done, Barbara, where we talk about slowing down to speed up, you know, it’s often in setting up your systems and processes we know it takes longer initially. And that’s why that mindset says, “Ah, that can wait till later” or “It’s quicker for me to do it myself”. Right now, you don’t have the luxury of waiting to do this, but the business owners that set this up, understand that now they can operate and make decisions with a higher degree of certainty, it’s not guaranteed that that’s gonna be the outcome, but at least they’ve got a visual and they can see what’s happening, versus having everything in their head and hoping.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, you were saying there about the, at the moment we’re in this kind of, it’s almost like a little golden period in the middle of the crisis where as you say, governments are handing out there’s money floating around, loans are on hold, and it can load people into a false sense of, you know, things are actually okay, I feel good. Except all that’s gonna stop and like unless you’re using, I actually heard somebody talk about this in a podcast recently. They were comparing like, they were saying, “Are you in summer camp? Or are you in boot camp right now?” Because anyone who’s sort of in summer camp, thinking you know, things are okay, I’m at home and money’s coming in and you’re just in this false sense of security. You’re not, you’re gonna be the one to not come out strong at the end of this.

The guys that are in boot camp going, I need to, you know, I’m working myself. Not that you want to work to the bone but you’ve gotta work really hard during this period of deferral and discount, so that when that tap turns off, your taps are on, and you’re actually able to come out and stand on your own two feet as a business again. I think that’s the important point, some people are just, yeah, like government handouts can make you feel safe. But if you’re not tackling this now, you won’t be able to tackle it when it turns off. That’s the issue because the race will have started and everything will speed up again. So Matt, you’ve got a great tool. You mentioned it in the middle of the show. I think it’s an amazing tool. It’s free. Tell us about it, 90daycashflow.com.

Matt Malouf: Yes. So when this hit, I sort of tried to think real quick, what could we put together that could help people? So we built this interact, right? It’s a dynamic kind of Excel sheet, where if you input your expenses, so you basically just need to p&l. You put your expenses in and then you put the date of when things are gonna be paid in the month and which day of the month, 1-31. And then you put the frequency that things are gonna be paid, it will then go through and build a cash flow forecast for you both weekly and daily. And then what it will also do is, you can put in your revenue predictions, and again, it will feed that through the spreadsheet and it’s designed so that you can do it and keep it rolling on a week on week basis.

So we’ve had a lot of clients use this and it takes a little bit to get set up. But once it’s set up, it gives you clarity and it enables you to quickly see what’s going on and particularly revenue cash. And then the only thing you really need to update on a daily basis, once you’ve done the setup base is what your cash balance at the end of each day is so that it can recalibrate based on you know, what’s happened. You making all these predictions, each day you can go in, you’re putting your new cash balance. And the spreadsheet will then update accordingly to see where you’re at. What is your clarity on is, the how much the length of time you’re going to stay in positive cash flow. And you can run some scenarios on this or you can like if I get zero income on one of the companies that we did this with, we went, “if we get zero income for the next 90 days, and these are the expenses that come out, where do we lead” and you can run different scenarios on that.

Barbara Turley: What, I’m going to put it into marketing speak in my, I’ve looked at this and from listening to you talk, it, for me. It takes a huge amount of the pain away from getting started with this. If you know if you’re listening to this and thinking I haven’t done any of this because it can be very overwhelming. It’s a bit like when you’re starting processes and systems. And this little tool map takes a huge amount of the pain away, gives people a road map to get started in the actual picture. And I just want to tie this back in. I mean, this podcast is all about Virtual Success, which can can take many forms, but usually we’re talking about virtual teams and but in the environment we’re in right now everyone, like business has become a virtual experience now, because everyone’s working at home.

And I think I just want to finish on the fact that, you know, people don’t need, you know, the whole concept of a CFO or a virtual input to your business that is like, say, a CFO, Matt, I know you’re doing a lot of work in this area right now, supporting businesses as a kind of a member of their team, but you don’t need to be an employee or full time person on the team in order to help in this area. You know, can we talk maybe a little bit about that just to finish by the fact that you don’t need somebody 40 hours a week in this CFO role. But you can have a virtual input to this.

Matt Malouf: Absolutely. I think that most companies, yeah, realistically until you’re getting to, to probably, you know, $10 to $15 million of turnover, you don’t really need a full time internal accountant. However, on the road to that, you do need someone that has the financial acumen to be able to give you the foresight, and what a CFO does, a CFO looks forward work versus an accountant looks through your rearview mirror. So you still need your accountant for your compliance and your tax planning and you structures, but a CFO is going to help you look forward a strategic scenario, plan, review, stress test your ideas from a financial perspective. Because at the end of the day, I mean, you know, if we’re really going to look at these business, the game of business is all about making some money, right? I don’t know, anyone that’s in business doesn’t want to make any money. And so if you don’t be a numbers, how can you win the game. And so it’s critical that you understand the financial impact that your ideas and your plans have, so that you can not only survive, but thrive and go beyond.

So CFO really does help you with all of that. And I think the other thing too, is, I know one of the things that say our point of difference in our services, we monitor at our end everything on a daily basis. So you’ve got another set of eyes. So we just were looking at yet your dashboards and your numbers, provided everything’s set up correctly. And so we set up triggers and alerts so that we can advise you, Hey, did you know this happened, you need to look at it. And here are the decisions you need to consider. You need to either do this, or you need to do that. And we look at it purely from a financial perspective. So I think- 

Barbara Turley: Do you think a lot of people are thinking that their accountant was doing that or are sort of thinking, Well, I have an account, I’ve got a great accountant. Talk to me a little bit, I just want to dig in here because the difference between an accountant and CFO I think people feel like, but I have a great accountant.

Matt Malouf:  Your accountant will help you structure, your accountant will help you pay the right amount of tax. A really great accountant will have this set up for you. And look, I’m a recovering accountant. As many of you know, I started my career at Ernst & Young. But most accountants don’t do this because they don’t have the time or it’s not what their focus is. And their focus is compliance. Their focus is tax structures. And they just don’t have the time to invest and also you’re probably not investing enough with them for it to be financially viable for them to do this. But more importantly is, most of them don’t want to do it. That’s my experience.

Barbara Turley: Well, it’s not their thing, accountants are not doing that. That’s kind of not the role of an accountant. This is the role of a CFO. And that, you know, we did that show before around the difference between a project manager and an operations director and the different boundaries around roles. This is kind of the same conversation actually, between the role of an accountant versus the role of the CFO, they can be the same person, but only when those roles are defined. And they are very different functions within the business.

Matt Malouf: I’ll send a chart that we can put in the show notes, Barb which actually have defined what a bookkeeper, an accountant and the CFO, what a job descriptions are like, just key item, 

Barbara Turley: That’d be great.

Matt Malouf: And it’s exactly what you said, it’s just wrong expectation. And so, the thing here is that you don’t need a full time CFO to do this. And if the structures and systems are set up properly, then you know, we meet with all of our clients monthly for 90 minutes to 2 hours, we often make half of that time with, its either just with the business owner or we do we split it which is half with the business owner and half of their team because it’s important that they understand the scoreboard as well. And when we say the team, it’s key people and what we do is we interpret the numbers into a language that the business owner can understand and act from and I think most business owners don’t actually understand the numbers like if I had to think of a few key phrases that a lot of business owners entrepreneurs came out with, one of them would be I’m not a numbers person, I’m a insert what I do,

Barbara Turley: I’m a great salesperson or I’m a great marketer or I’m a great whatever but I’m not a numbers per, yeah, loads people think they’re not numbers people

Matt Malouf: And if you want to succeed short and long term in business, you need to understand the numbers but also have someone interpret them. So so that you can then make decisions. It’s a bit like, if I went to Germany now to do a business deal, I don’t speak German. So I would have a translator there that could translate the German conversation into English so that I could then converse and make decisions and negotiate accordingly. And that’s what a CFO does, I really would say that,

Barbara Turley: Well, what’s great about that is then you don’t need to be a numbers person, because you brought someone into your team that will interpret those numbers for you. So that because you’re a business person at the end of the day, you still need to know. But doesn’t mean you have to be in spreadsheets all day long buried by yourself. That’s kind of more numbers from it doing that. Yeah. Well, Matt, listen, 90daycashflow.com. Guys, go there, download the tool, and that can, you know, give you more insight into your numbers and will, I know you can, you know, get in touch with Matt through that site as well. Matt, any finishing thoughts or have we covered it all from, any finishing thoughts?

Matt Malouf: I probably just say this, like, reach out and get help with this, if it’s not your thing, but don’t neglect it. And so important, you need to know your cash burn rate, you need to have a cash flow forecast. If you’re going to really survive through this. It is like the, I guess, like the vital signs in your business. And if you know, if I was in intensive care, they’d have a heart rate monitor on me, they’d be testing my breathing, your cash flow is like that. So don’t neglect it and hope that you’re gonna get through, reach out and get the help you need. Our team can help, is on that site. You can get the tool you can get a 45 minute session with one of our team to help you put it together. But get the help because that’s how you will survive through this, through this time.

Barbara Turley:  That’s great. Thanks so much Matt for diving into that with us because we know it’s really important. topic, all of the time, but in particularly right now when we’re in the middle of a crisis, and people are probably feeling like rabbit in the headlights with this. So guys, if you found this show useful, as usual, you know, share it around. This is something right now that a lot of business owners need to dive into. So please share the show around give us a rating and a thumbs up on iTunes. And as always, there’s the Virtual Success Show Facebook group, where you can you know, let us know any shows you’d like us to talk about. Sometimes we are streaming live in there today. We haven’t because Internet has let us down. But that’s okay. So until next time, thanks, everyone.

Outro: Thank you for listening to the Virtual Success Show. If you found this show helpful. Take a moment to share it with a friend so that we can all grow together.

Matt Malouf is a passionate business coach, speaker, author and entrepreneur on a mission to help entrepreneurs around the world break the shackles of mediocrity and reach new levels of personal and business success.

Barbara Turley is the Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub, a company that specializes in recruiting, training, and managing superstar ‘Virtual Assistants’ in the social media, digital marketing, and systems automation space.