The Virtual Success Show

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Today’s Gift for listeners:

Get ‘The Ultimate What to Outsource Guide’

In this episode:

01:36 – Keeping it simple – The recurring task list

06:46 – Delegating correctly

08:15 – “…but I can do it faster myself”

10:00 – You can be superhuman

15:11 – Gain more enjoyment, fulfillment and success in business

18:23 – The ultimate ‘What to outsource’ guide

19:24 – Wrapping things up

Barbara: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Virtual Success where I am joined with my fantastic co-host, Matt Malouf

Barbara: Matt how is it going?

Matt: Well, how about yourself?

Barbara: Fantastic, great this week. We’ve been punching out some amazing episodes this week and I have learnt so much myself, to be honest, from some of the people we’ve been interviewing and from you and the insights that we are sharing.

Matt: It’s always amazing! I love this time we spend together because even though we’re sharing our own insights on what we’ve already learned, I find we learn so much along the way as well. It’s a lot of fun, isn’t it?!

Barbara: Oh yeah, some of the insights that I have personally gained from some of the guests on the show and from you, have actually been shaping the business I am growing which is Virtual Angel Hub. You know, it’s really helped me a lot. So I can only imagine how much it’s helping those out there who are listening and maybe have just started with their first VA, you know just trying to get insights from people who’ve done it before. It’s a constantly evolving thing.

Matt: Absolutely, and lots of fun too.

Keeping it simple – The recurring task list

Barbara: Yes, I am excited about today’s show because we are going to be talking about something that is very close to my heart and that I have spent a lot of time teaching our clients how to do. It’s a concept called the ‘recurring task list’. It is something that is so pivotal that I feel, to get success with your virtual teams, it is something that I focus on a lot. It just alleviates a lot of the stress and pressure. The problem is though, that it is onerous to set up in the beginning and a lot of people avoid it. And when they avoid it, unfortunately, they can fall into massive holes later. So I always encourage people to really focus on this recurring task list as much as possible in the beginning, so you can have the freedom of using virtual teams later.

Matt: So, I agree with you. I think this is probably one of the most critical areas for success with your virtual teams. So Barb, let’s start with how did this evolve for you personally and then how it evolved with your clients.

Barbara: Yes, that is a great question actually Matt, because I didn’t wake up in the morning and decide, wow this is a great way to do it. It happened when I got my first VA a few years ago. I was very lucky because she was actually fantastic. She was very skilled, she was a lovely person, I got on great with her and she sort of helped me to understand the virtual world a lot. But what I found myself doing every day was, I had actually taken her on full time, so I had her every day. But I found myself waking up early in the morning with that anxiety feeling in my stomach going “Oh my God, I am so busy today and I don’t know what I am going to allocate for her to do.” What I found was, I was waking up every day with an extra job on top of everything else that I had to do. And the job was to figure out what was I am going to allocate her and overtime I was thinking, this is not working. It’s just not working for me because I am feeling stressed out, half of the time she had nothing to do because I was too busy to allocate anything. And then overtime I thought, ‘ok, I just need to figure out how do I get rid of this problem?’

And I think I just started to realize that there was a couple of things that were happening every day and I thought, I’ll just set that up as a recurring task, and it just evolved from there. Before I knew it, in a few months I had a list in Asana – which is the project management tool that I swear by – I had a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly list of tasks and from there, over time, I started to build out a process map for each one. This took, I’m talking six months by the time I really got this going. But when I did, it totally revolutionized my life because I didn’t have to speak the VA every day, she knew what she was doing, I could see the output coming through every day and it just changed everything for me. It was the game changer.

Matt: So what kind of tasks did you come up with for those lists?

Barbara: Well you know, there were very basic things. I think, when I speak to people about this now, they are trying to over complicate it and they try to think about all these complex tasks they can do, but the thing to do is start with the most simple thing. I sort of thought to myself, what are the things that happen in the business every day that need to keep the engine running. You know, answering the phone. This is something that is so basic.

You know, people are probably wondering how do you get a VA in the Philippines to do this? I actually set up a Skype number and I got her to start answering the phone and then from that came, well what are the answers to the questions that she is going to get on the phone. So we had to create a process for that around the type of questions she might get. And then another task was, what if there were follow-up things. So we created another task which is to very simply transcribe the phone messages or the messages and put them into a spreadsheet so I can just look at one document every day or few days and I could see the phones calls that were coming through and what the outcome of the call was. It was very easy for me to have oversight over that particular task, then I started doing the same with a Facebook group that we had. You know, there were people commenting on stuff that was in there, so I set up a little process for that. And the big one for this particular business we were working at that time was a Meetup group that we had.

Now, the business I am talking about is a tennis business that my husband runs. We had this Meetup group that had all these people in it but it was tripping us up every single day because nobody was watching it. Sometimes people would post messages there with questions and nobody got back to them. Sometimes people would book stuff through Meetup but because it doesn’t sync with our booking system, it didn’t show up in our calendar and then maybe the class might not have been on so we had people showing up on courts for classes that weren’t on. I mean, it was a total debacle. So, then I started thinking, maybe the VA can manage this. And then again, we set up a little process, it was a daily thing, and it just worked a dream. Absolutely took the pressure away. So there are just three small examples of how it started with that.

Matt: And the skills of the person that you are delegating this to, would you say they are a highly trained and skilled person or they are trained and versed in administration?

Delegating correctly

Barbara: No, in admin. She was a lovely girl, and she was just an admin assistant though. And the trick really is too, you know, a lot of people say to me that they are afraid to delegate because they will lose control. I think I’ve said this in a couple shows before, my feeling is if you delegate correctly, use processes and the proper format for delegating, you actually gain control. Because what I found was, when I set up a process for her, she loved it because she felt so confident, because she could execute the process, she knew I led the process and I had developed it so she felt confident in that. And then it was very easy for me because I had my stamp on the process and so it had our business stamp all over it. Her job is merely to execute the process. She didn’t need skills to do that.

Matt: Yeah I love that. If you recall back to the interview that we did with Siimon Reynolds about this, he was saying “Even if it’s a task that only takes you a minute, it’s well worth delegating it to somebody else because every minute that you save is dollars in the bank.”

Barbara: Absolutely, when I look at my daily recurring task list now all of those things probably only take a minute. But when there’s 50 of them, or you know 20 of them, that’s another hour of your day. You know, an hour of your day is a lot of time fiddling around with Facebook things and Meetup groups and all those things that are really admin tasks, when you should be spending that time on the things that drive your business forward, not just keep your engine running.

“…but I can do it faster myself”

Matt: That’s right. You know that is interesting, in the coaching that we do often the resistance we hear is, ‘I can do it faster’, ‘it’s easier for me to just do it myself’. Something even as simple as booking an appointment in my diary. But you know what, if you do the math on just saving a minute a day, 5 minutes a week, calculate that over a year, apply your hourly rate to it. And you then do that for ten, 1-minute tasks, it can add up to quite a substantial amount of money.

Barbara: Absolutely, and also I would say on that, you know it doesn’t matter if you can do it faster, you can get somebody a lot cheaper than you, if it takes them five minutes to do a tasks that takes you one minute and you’re paying $8-$9-$10 per hour. I can guarantee you if anyone is listening to this and you can’t make more than $10 an hour in the business you are in, then you are probably need to think about being in a different business. Because really your time should be worth more than that.

Matt: Minimum wage in Australia alone, and I know there are people all over the world listening to this, but we are talking about $20-25 an hour. You should go and get a job.

Barbara: Yeah, you are probably in the wrong business. And also, I know you will agree with this Matt, it’s a complete mindset problem. People who say, ‘well, I can do it faster myself’ immediately come into the delegation game with a resentment towards the other person. They come in with the wrong attitude, they see that person as a cost rather than an asset and that destroys the relationship from day one, as far as I can see it. It’s a very dangerous mindset and if anyone out there listening is knowing that they have that kind of mindset, I would really think about it and change your mindset around this because it will trip you up badly with delegating, whether that person is virtual or not.

You can be superhuman

Matt: Absolutely, just quickly what are some examples of daily, weekly monthly tasks that you can share with our listeners?

Barbara: Sure, yeah. Actually, our members that join Virtual Angel Hub, we actually give them a very extensive list of daily, weekly monthly and quarterly tasks that they can dip into and use and then we also have a project list just to give people ideas, as often people say to me ‘I just can’t think of what to outsource’. So you know, it’s basically things as simple as ‘re-tweet any mentions we get on Twitter’. You know we all have Twitter accounts, and there are loads going on there on a daily basis that we don’t even know. Another task that I get my VAs to do is to give me a daily update across our social media accounts. You know, what were the mentions, what were the likes, what happened. I find it amazing because in Asana, I just jump in there and I can see we got 25 new likes/new contacts on Twitter – we have someone re-tweet that. I can start to see traction very quickly at a glance and that’s a report my VA does for me. For example, if you have a business that has an online shop or you have inventory management or anything like that, that’s a job a VA can do for you providing you have a good process you can teach them. But updating inventory, managing stock, updating you on what’s happening in your shop, general reporting, payments coming in maybe on zero.

You know, a VAs are obviously not bookkeepers, but they can reconcile basic invoices for you on your Zero. Obviously managing your calendar and replying to emails for you. There is nothing professional than having someone reply to an email from you and their title is Personal Assistant. It makes your business look incredibly professional. Even if that email is just simply, ‘Hi Barbara, I just want to let you know we got your email. And I will be having a meeting with x later on today to discuss your question’. I mean, how professional does that sound? Makes your business sound very professional.

You know, I get my VA’s to follow up on documents that haven’t been signed. And social media. Your social media content calendars is a massive job, a much bigger job than people realize. And that is a weekly task and can be a monthly task that I get my VA’s to do, where they create our social media calendar for the week or for the month. And then we have a meeting about it and I approve it and then they schedule it all across social media. So then I never have to worry about keeping our social media train moving. So that’s a huge job for them. Researching things, optimizing content on your websites for traffic, for the right traffic. That is a massive job and I can guarantee you that most of the people out there who are trying to do content marketing are not even thinking about this area of it. Is your content actually getting any traffic? You know, is there any point in this content right now? There is a lot of that that VAs can do for you as well. Those are some ideas you know.

Matt: Yeah, there some ideas just off the top of your head. One thing that I teach the clients that I work with around when they started to delegate tasks to their virtual assistants is to put a little Post-It note on your computer screen that says “What could do for me right now?”, so in my case, ‘What could Vanessa do for me right now?’ And actually just have that staring you in the face, day in and day out. And if it’s there and you are looking at it, you’ll start to think about well, I’m about to do this, but hey, Vanessa could do that for me. It’s having this mindset that the task I’m doing somebody else can do. You made a really important point, Barb, that I want to reiterate, which is around ensuring that you’ve got both good systems and processes that your virtual teams can follow. And then, the last part, and that is why I am a huge fan of Asana as well, is having accountability around it to ensure that it gets done.

The only other thing that I’d probably add is there is a quote that I live by when it comes to people, which is “I can only expect what I inspect.” So, what have to do, particularly in the infancy of somebody else doing this task, is inspect their work. Not from the micromanagement perspective but just from a perspective of helping them to learn and to get it right. You know what I mean, you may not have done it right the first time you did it and you can’t expect them to either. So it’s there to support and help so they can get it right.

So then these things will run like a really well-oiled machine, without you having to think about it. So that email will come in, and your VA will know exactly what template to send, what tone it’s going to have, when it needs to go and it will get done. And you’ll be like WOW. And you were talking about making it look really professional. Having your VA doing these things makes you look superhuman.

Barbara: Yeah, you can do a lot. You can run multiple businesses this way, I run multiple businesses like this.

Gain more enjoyment, fulfillment and success in business

Matt: 100%, I think you know without these lists and without giving them the guidelines – you know, this is no different whether you’re using virtual teams or people in your offices. If you are not doing this, what Barbara has been sharing today, you are setting yourself up for failure in your business.

Barbara: 100% percent.

Matt: You know, you’ve only got to look at any great organization and they all run like well-oiled machines. They know business comes in, it goes through the machine and comes out the other end.

Barbara: You know the beauty of this as well Matt is I’ve changed VA’s in businesses several times. Not because I got rid of the VA but because I’ve promoted them. And do you know how easy it is to put a new VA into any of those businesses right now? I barely have to spend any time with them because I am like, here is the list, here is everything you need. It is so well set up now.

Matt: Yes.

Barbara: The VA’s love it because they come in and they feel so calm because they don’t feel this horrendous stress of not knowing what they are supposed to be doing. Anyone who is an employee and has that situation, it’s very stressful for them. Now the only point I do want to reiterate here is that I see a lot of people looking at this and they try it, and the reality is it is a lot of work. I am not going to lie to you, setting up this task list and process takes focus, it takes attention and you probably are going to take a step back in your business so you can make forward. A lot of people will tell me ‘I don’t have time for that’. My response to that is, if you don’t have time for that now, then you will never have time for anything because the investment you make in this right now pays so many dividends. I can’t explain how many dividends it pays to you later. I am living proof of that because I run multiple businesses. I mean the only way you can launch successful multiple businesses is by launching them, systemizing them, putting teams in to run them and then moving on. You know, making sure the oversight is there. It does take work, and it’s probably the most valuable work you can do for your business if you want to scale it.

Matt: Absolutely, and I’ll just add one other thing. Even if your goal is not to grow a massive business, for you to enjoy what you do in your business each day, if you could eliminate what I call those ‘energy vampire tasks’, those things that you just loathe doing and give them to somebody else who loves doing them, you are going to enjoy your business so much more. It’s going to bring you so much more fulfillment and happiness and joy in your life. Not everyone’s made or built to do admin, but there are people who love it. So the key is, allow them to do what they love so that you can do what you love.

Barbara: Absolutely, you can do fun stuff like what we’re doing with this podcast. I mean, when would we have time to do stuff like this if we were stuck, you know, creating images for our social media, answering the phone and emailing? I mean, you’d never have time. The only way you can do this sort of stuff is you actually have good system in the back and a good team running it for you.

Matt: I’ve got one last thing to wrap this up Barb, where should somebody start?

The ultimate ‘What to outsource’ guide

Barbara: Yes, that’s the great question, actually. So we have a little gift for the listeners today that will definitely help you to start with this process. I’ve got a very simple PDF and it’s just basically what to outsource. It’s not the big list, the daily, weekly, monthly thing because that can be quite overwhelming for people who are not ready yet. When people join Virtual Angel Hub they will get access to that full list only after they have this first more basic list. I break it down basically into five segments and in there we give you examples of things you can have your VA do. There are probably a hundred different things in there and it helps people to realize ‘oh yeah, I didn’t think about outsourcing this, I don’t think about outsourcing that’. There should be a link at the bottom of this show where you can download that from us.

Matt: Fantastic, and I’ll add to that on top of that list just think about five tasks you’ve done in the last week that you loath doing, and that’s where you want to start.

Barbara: Yes absolutely, absolutely.

Wrapping things up

Matt: Fantastic, Barb thank you for sharing your insights on that. I think that it’s going to be amazingly helpful for everybody who has listened to the show. Just remember to keep it simple and if you can eliminate something that saves you one minute, it’s going to help your company and have greater success with your virtual teams in the long run.

Barbara: I would just add to the Matt, if you can invest 1-2 hours now to eliminate that 1-minute task, you will get your time back tenfold down the track. You know, it’s not about investing a minute to outsource a minute-long task. It may take you an hour to teach that person or to develop a process but it’s so worth it. It’s worth the work.

Matt: Fantastic, Barb thanks again for another great show.

Barbara: Great I loved this one, because this one is very close to my heart. I really believe in this particular topic.

Matt: Yeah me too, it’s critically important for anyone growing for their company. So until next time, everyone please keep listening and keep sharing. We really want to encourage and grow this community of likeminded entrepreneurs to share their experiences. If you’ve got any thoughts or shows that you’d like for us to talk about, please feel free to share that in the comments below and we are happy to research and put that show together.

Barbara: Absolutely, yeah.

Matt: Thanks again, Barb.

Barbara: Thanks.

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.

Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

Matt: Hey everyone! Welcome to this week’s episode, we’re really looking forward to sharing some amazing content with you today and I’m joined by my co-host Barbara Turley, how are you Barb?

Barbara: Great Matt! How are you? How’s your week?

Matt: The weeks are just flying by at the moment, it’s like,

Barbara: We’re getting old Matt, we’re getting old!

Matt: Tell you what, we’re recording on the Thursday today and it’s like, we are the rest of the week go? So it’s just flying by!

Barbara: Yeah but it’s good fun, good fun!

Matt: You know Barb I’m more excited than I’m normally am about today’s episode because it certainly is the area that I’m extremely passionate about and I’d say talk about multiple times every single day in what I do. It’s part of the book that I’m writing at the moment and it’s all around the mindset that is critical to succeed with virtual teams. You know I think a lot of this is touched on but I don’t see many people really addressing this seriously enough and I really wanna make sure that today the way that I understand it, that what we’re talking about isn’t it nice to have, isn’t like something’s was suggesting we believe that this is critical to your success with your virtual teams.

Barbara: Absolutely Matt, you know I think like I’ve said before, sometimes this can be a bit of a woowoo topic when we’re talking about mindset and believing in yourself and all that when the reality is if you don’t get this bit right, all the strategies and tactics in the world will not work because this will get into people’s way and you see it every day the people that you’re coaching. I’m seeing it develop with client’s relationships with VAs and … either succeeding or failing and often it can come down to mindset, little mindset tweaks. Interestingly we’re not in the part of the client but I actually see on the part of the VAs. We’ve actually tweaked a couple of mindset issues with VAs and watched them soar afterwards you know so it’s a very interesting area. I’m keen to hear your … because you obviously, coach on this a lot.

Matt: I do and you know the biggest challenge I had while preparing today was trying to condensed, I think I can talk a 2-day weekend workshop to get just this one topic so I wanna make sure that we hear the, what we’ve come up with is, what I believe Barb as we discussed prior to the show what you believe as well, the 5 critical mindsets that you must adopt in order to succeed with your virtual teams so let’s get straight into it I think! So, mindset #1 – you need to adopt the mindset of letting go, you must let go – I see so many relationships to team virtual assistant and business owners fail because the owner has, their mantra is, they can’t do as good as me, they’ll never do as well as I can, they can’t do it as fast as I can, they’re making too many mistakes and they adopted this limiting belief that no matter how talented the people are, they’ll never do it as good as them and in my coaching whenever I hear that phrase, my response is it’s rubbish! That’s absolute rubbish because the reality is the first time you performed the task, you can do it as well as you can do it today. You probably practiced it time and time again, you’ve made multiple mistakes probably cost you loads of time and money and yet we have this expectation in a very short period of time, we should be able to train someone once or twice on something and they can do it as well as we can. I think having this understanding that when you’re inviting any team member for that matter and in that process of letting go, you need to have faith in your system, I mean you need to have faith in your ability to teach somebody how to become awesome at what you can do and often that’s where the failing lies, so the business owner doesn’t let go, they never give the virtual assistant the opportunity to succeed, they’re constantly undermining and hint holding themselves back and it’s all because the self-thought is they can never, they can never, they will never.

Barbara: Never is the key word there, yeah! And it keeps on reinforcing that. You know funny thing Matt what I tend to see as well is obviously step 1 is as we’ve talked about constantly on the show is having the right systems and processes that actually works, so that’s step #. What I haven’t see is even with clients that have that step, some of them just really nailed that step but then it’ll be like on day 2 I get an email so day 2 virtual assistant has started, email comes, support ticket comes, they’re not just getting it so this gonna be a frantic email comes in day 2 or 3.

Matt: Day 2!

Barbara: Yeah totally, day 1 even day 3 let’s say they’re just not getting it, this is not worth the money or this sort of stuff star jumbling out, I have a process, she wasn’t able to do it and I sort of think you know just because you got a process, the next step in that dense when you got a great process brilliant tick but then you can allow the person this space and time to get better at that process and to get their own way around that process and that may involve some feedback from you along the way but I asked people, people least spend 6-8 weeks not perfecting one process but getting comfortable together on working together, I think it’s at least 6-8 weeks process.

Matt: Absolutely and I think it comes back to it’s something we spoke about in the episode on the expectations around, it’s being realistic with your expectations of these people and it often not a lack of skill or ability, it’s just that they haven’t have the time to get a head around things and whether they’ve done it before doing it the way that you want them to do it takes time and you’ve got to be realistic. I think 6 weeks depending on what the task is but for most tasks, 6 weeks is a really good timeframe for you and your virtual assistant to find your feet on something, it’s a really good point that you made.

Barbara: So it’s sort of a dance that you’re doing not 6 weeks you’re just figuring out each other’s energy and you know at this whole point though ‘nobody can do it as good as me’ – I want to bring out the book and if the listeners haven’t read this book, you have to! Michael Gerber the E-myth, actually it’s called the E-myths you visited now, he talks a lot in there about being a technician vs. being an entrepreneur and if you’re constantly thinking ‘I’ll just do it myself!’ as well as ‘It’s faster if I’ll do it!’ then you’re sitting in a technician land and you’re not really an entrepreneur because as an entrepreneur, you’ve got to be, you’re taking your business to the next level, you’re not necessarily the one who is getting caught in the trenches getting all the work, you’re the person leading the you know leading the charge, leading your team on to the new open space, blue ocean if you like you know so it’s really important to remember that, that mindset is really holding not just your relationship with your VA back but your entire company.

Matt: Absolutely agree Barb! Like you know it’s a lot of what we teach on this podcast is not just related to virtual team success but business success in general and the point that you’re making most definitely will be holding somebody’s back not just individuals or key relationships. You know I think if we move to the next point. There are 5 keys I wanna focus on today around this mindset piece, I think #2 is this concept of investment vs. expense and it’s looking the investing or what your spending to have your virtual assistant is not an expense in investment, it will give you an amazing return but it starts with the mindset of that. When you view something as a cost, your energy around that is it’s, there’s no real return for you. The whole mindset around investment is that if I invest the dollar then I’m gonna get more than a dollar back. The mindset around expense is that, if I spend a dollar, I’ve got nothing back and with your virtual teams, when you adopt the mindset that investing in them, having there is an investment and it will return to you more than what you’re quite spending. It totally suits your energy around how you engage, how you train, how you communicate every aspect of the relationship with your virtual assistant.

Barbara: Yeah, you know it also changes your attitudes towards helping them to win because if you see that as an investment, you’re sort of incoherent together. You’re both in this together all of a sudden you’re investing so I feel that what I see people put more efforts into making sure that they win, the VA does that. The other thing I would say about investment as well is that, obviously with all the investment there is a risk, there is a risk that it won’t work but once you have the mindset that you are investing, it’s not that you’re investing with a virtual assistant or person or team, you’re investing on the future development or future direction or introductory of your company and it’s always risk is involved on that but it’s totally a different mindset on thinking, ‘Oh I spend money now just trying to get anywhere!’ that’s a different you’re making and it would even change how you run your business in reality!

Matt: Absolutely! I wanna share a little story as well. When I bought on my 2nd virtual assistant, so I had a full-time VA assisting me and I bought another one and it just happened that I tend to Vanessa my personal assistant that if ever anyone within your community, your friends, your family has the skills that you have and looking for a role please let me know and so we were talking and she said, ‘I’ve got a friend that is looking for some work.’ And just to be short, I just got from a 3-week holiday I know we’re gonna need someone in about 6 weeks that I’ll gonna be away, do I, don’t I, a bit a bullet and I bought this person on and at the time I was thinking to myself, ‘Ah am I wasting money?’, ‘Is it an expense?’ but because they fit the criteria on who are we looking for, they had the right profile, they had the right skillset, for that 6 weeks role on my return of investment was probably negative, moving forward it’s been amazingly positive and I made that decision because when good people are in front of you, you’ve got to grab them, you’ve got to take advantage on that and if I had an expense mindset, I would never accept or taken that opportunity and that person would find employment with somebody else but by adopting the investment mindset and having understanding that when you have great team and you have great people, you bring them on, they will return more than it quite cost. I bought that person on and what it enabled me to do was once I got from leave, on that 3 weeks, I leveraged the whole heap of tasks that I would be wanting to move forward and what I actually meant was that it enabled me to focusing on my genius and grow my company even faster.

Barbara: I love that so much I mean coz you know it’s, I was just thinking as you were talking about a similar story that I had. I have a VA currently on my team that he was actually working in my husband’s business and he sort of available because that wrapping the business up but I actually don’t really have anything for him to do to be honest and then natural tendency that bring to me to farm him to a client coz he’s very good and I know that we have clients who’d love to work with him and I’ve made the decision to keep them. And I’ve given him a mandate, I actually said to him, ‘I really don’t have a role for you right now.’ But I know I’m gonna need him in the company in the next 6 months so I’m actually happy to sit initially with him for the next 6 months and trained him like that so he’s been training, I’ve got him training in InfusionSoft, we’re doing Facebook Ads, we’re doing a ton of new trainings that I would really never have time to invest to someone to do that except this situation occurred and he’s that good and I’m gonna keep him but I’m not be paying for him for a while before our company realistically needs him but I just know that the introductory of this thing is going to a place where I’m gonna need someone like him so I’m hanging into him.

Matt: Absolutely! And one little thing just to add to it what you were saying, when I bought this second person on, I had posted note on my computer and the woman that we bought on named Shahani and I said, ‘What do I need to stop doing that Shahani could do right now?’ it staring at me all day, all day, all day and coz I was looking at it and answering the question before I knew it, she had a full workload.

Barbara: Well you know, I’ve, this is a real situation that happens to me as well. I find this one interesting. It often gets messes with clients or whenever saying. ‘I’m going on a holiday for 3-weeks, I don’t have anything for her to do can I not just,’ and obviously they don’t wanna pay for them in 3-weeks and I would say, you know really if you wanna take this to the next level, I mean this person needs to go to another level so you should be using that time to be upscaling your team and give them very clear mandates on what results you want when you get back, are from training that they’re doing or research or whatever. I could think million things for VAs could do while you’re away to further your business.

Matt: Absolutely, absolutely! So that brings us to our third point and around this mindset piece, Barbara I know you hear this all the time and I hear it day and day out which is there’s this fear mindset that because I can’t physically see my virtual assistant because they’re not in my office, because I don’t have access to their computer, that someone’s gonna cheat you or that the securities less, they’re gonna rip off your information or your data.

Barbara: I think all day, sit around on Facebook all day doing nothing coz you can’t see them.

Matt: Absolutely and the reality is whether your team member is on the other side of the world or sitting the desk next to you, the behavior that often people feel can happen in both scenarios.

Barbara: Absolutely, absolutely! Someone can rip you off regardless on where you are in terms of data security on these days you know as we’ve talked about it, you can do screenshots of things, you can upload things on the cloud I mean if someone’s gonna do that, that’s actually personality type as supposed to an issue with virtual or any staff member. It’s an issue with the personality type and if you’re unlucky enough to get one of those then I feel very sorry for you but most people, most people are good people and they just want to do good job in my experience as …

Matt: Yap and same with me! And this fear, it is a fear mindset, it really is. It’s a lead by creating good systems, it’s about employing experts to assist you with your data or security, making sure that, you know we’ve got IT support company, if any of our, if we really need to get rid of our virtual team, I literally make one phone call, 24/7 and I can switch off the log-ins to, the person can have 0 access within minutes of me making a phone call.

Barbara: We have that at Virtual Angel Hub as well, it can cancel straightaway. You have to have that!

Matt: Absolutely! And you know, the other thing is you can build systems these days which is enable people to see certain aspects of your company and the like but the reality is you know most of this fear, what would they do with half of the information that they have accessed to anyway?

Barbara: This fear while there’s slim chance that it’s a legitimate fear but the reality is this fear is holding the company back, it’s holding you back as a business owner because if you have this fear in one place, you probably have in lots of places too and you probably come in from natural skeptical mindset which leads to negative thing I guess and not an expansive mindset where few opportunities come your way, you’re gonna attract the right energy I guess in your own company.

Matt: Absolutely! So mindset #4 now point #4 here is what I call slowing down to speed up. In order to get your virtual team to be successful and work with you at your Angel Business, you have to understand that in the initial faces there was a slowing down process, there’s a slowing down because often many companies that I see haven’t documented their systems. They aren’t clear what their expectations are. They don’t know how to find the right person. If they find the right person and they have spent time training that person, there’s a whole host of things that has to happen in order to set somebody up to succeed and often it’s an investment of time and money and that can slow you down, you may need to redirect funds in order to invest in software and the like in order to make this work. You need to divert time from other quite important things to train your virtual team to become outstanding and I think we leave in such a way world of everyone wants everything yesterday that this whole concept of slowing down to speed up is a real paradigm shift but the entrepreneur is out there succeeding yet this mindset and understand that it’s critical to their success.

Barbara: Absolutely! I mean the amount of times I had phone calls with perspective clients coming in Virtual Angel Hub and I heard this one a lot and they just say, ‘I’m desperate for help. I just need help yesterday, I’m snowed under.’  And I’m … for myself, ‘Okay we need to have this conversation because I’ve tried … way. Coz I’ve said, ‘Are you willing to accept that you’re going to have to pause and make this work and some of them said, ‘I don’t have time for that and I’ve generally said to them, ‘Well really I don’t wanna send you a dream because it’s not gonna work! It’s actually not gonna work for you, it’s unlikely to work and I can give you a VA but it’s probably going to create a bigger mess for you than what you seem to already have because if you’re not willing to slow down, all you’ll gonna do is to create one more job for yourself which is unboarding to your team member. Which is initially a bit of a job coz there’s work involved and they’re not getting right. It will face so many dividends later that slow down for a month or two means that you can speed up in a few years!’ … to do that!

Matt: Absolutely! And not only that, I think often we’ve leveraging through virtual teams. You’re getting a lot of the lower value and tedious tasks to taking care of which gives you greater opportunity to focus on number 1 things that you love doing in your business, number 2 the things that have the biggest financial reward. So understanding that in that slowing down process, it’s gonna create more time for you to invest into the higher yielding, higher return tasks and projects.

Barbara: Here’s a mindset question for you Matt coz just something that popped into my head as you were saying that was you know some people I mean the biggest curse for any business owner is aside of being busy and sometimes we may meet ourselves very busy and we don’t have to face into the selling and bringing the income and there’s more higher value or tasks that probably pushes more inside our comfort zones so do you see that with people you’re coaching or sometimes they cling on to this mindset of busy so that maybe subconsciously they just don’t have to push to that they don’t have to go and do that sales calls or bringing the revenue like they’re gonna have to?

Matt: 100% you know I see people majoring in minor tasks day in and day out and you know one of my early business mentors in the coaching area was a … name of Taki Moore and when I first met Taki, he worked 12 hours a week, that was it! 4 days a week for 3 hours a day and not because he had this fantasy of having a business that enabling him to work 12 hours a week because of some health challenges that his wife and his child had, he was forced to, he had to attend to them and be there Kara and so what the amazing thing was in being mentored by Taki was that he taught me that if you focus in an important things and then you build things around you by locally and overseas, you can have an amazing company and work minimal hours and make an absolute fortune.

Barbara: 100%! And you know what I talked to, I mean you know I’m a big fan of the whole female entrepreneur and movement that is happening out there right now, in any women who are listening at the moment in particular have children. Anyone really particularly moms that are, lots and lots of moms that are running their own businesses and a lot of moms are playing very small because of this mindset of thinking that you know they have to control everything and they have a little time they create this busyness all the time but actually they can really create the freedom that we are all business to get if they start to get this stuff right you know really, really focused on this idea of teams, systems and processes and critical tasks vs. stuff that just needs to get done. We could go on a week where hundred things, you know have these topics and we delegate to those in the future shows.

Matt: We certainly can! And I guess coming to the last one, I think this point number 5 here really sum, wraps around everything that we’ve spoken about and it’s having mindset and asking the question, ‘How bad can it really be if they screw up?’ what’s the worst case scenario? You know if I’ve given this task and they make a mistake, will they screw it up? How bad things can really be? You know what I mean? I think it’s important that when you’re onboarding a new team member, you need to give them tasks that have a very little consequence, let them earn the right to work on higher value, higher returning tasks and projects and I think in our interview with Dan Norris that he talked about when they bring developers on, they give them you know the simple tasks first and they have to earn the right to work on more complex, more senior projects, I think that is very, very clever so that helps build the working relationship between you and your virtual assistant but also you know it puts your mind that is knowing that as you have things over, your exposure, your risk is minimal. Be careful not to go too conservative on this as I see too many business owners becoming really conservative but the reality is from most of the tasks that we tasked out to our virtual teams, it’s not like it’s a life or death or it’s gonna collapse out a business if they screw up, that’s the reality!

Barbara: Yeah I mean you know what, I’ve seen situations where you know particularly business is starting out wanting the help of their engagement for example you know social media is quite, you know it’s a tricky one for someone else to manage but in time our VAs get very, very good at this coz they start to understand their business and the client based target that sort of thing but initially it can be a real struggle because they don’t know the branding and we don’t know the … the images and all that stuff. We’ve had situations for businesses that started out, they don’t have a big following yet on social media, can be very upset in the first week again complains in first week or two that she does not get the brand and I think well, why not sort of use this time when you don’t have a big following yet to really nail that to this person and actually get this to where you need to be together so that when you do have a big following, you have someone who can hit the ground right, that’s what I’m seeing!

Matt: Absolutely, absolutely! And so if you can go back and reiterate for a second you know and both common in this podcast, we talked about this all day. This is really, this is to differentiate data between succeeding with virtual teams and failing in my opinion and if I just summarize, mindset #1 is the mindset of letting go and understanding and believing that your virtual teams can do it as well as you can if not, better! Mindset #2 is seeing the money that you’re spending having a virtual assistant or virtual team is an investment vs. the expense and when you adopt the investment mindset, you will reap in the long run. Mindset #3 is understanding that the exposure risk simply because you can’t physically see it is minimal and then if you have to have strong systems to minimize and medicate risk but the reality is that the very limited damage that somebody can do and it doesn’t differ whether they’re domestic or international or in your office or working from their home somewhere around the world. Mindset #4 is the concept of slowing down to speed up and understanding that we need to slow down, we need to train, we need to systemize, we need to allow people time to learn in order for us to speed up and enables us to focus on the higher value, higher returning tasks and projects and #5 is that getting clear on what is the actual risk, how can it really be if they screw up and adapting and abandon mindset as supposed to a fearful or a scarcity mindset around this. I think that we’ve covered a lot today and one thing I recommend is please make sure you go back in and re-listen to this episode, do this episode and I think you have to listen to multiple times and take a copy and some notes so that you understand and re-inforce it. Remember reputation is the mother skill and reinforces to adopt this new mindset and practice it. You’ll not gonna get it right the first time but be open, give it a go and just take it one step at a time.

Barbara: And you know Matt, one thing I want listeners to do as well is, guys if you’ve got questions that you’d love to address completely in this area, mindset area or you have stories that you know where you’ve cracked the code on yourself, put them in the comments below and let us know, we can do lots of future shows in different topics and concepts and let us know how you’re getting on in this whole area with your virtual teams, I think that would be really useful!

Matt: I agree!

Barbara: Yeah!

Matt: Barb listen, you have a wonderful week. Thanks again!

Barbara: … next week!

Matt: We’re looking forward to it! Have a great day.

Barbara: To Virtual Success!

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.

Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

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How To Use Trello and Zapier by Dan

02:13 – Where it all started

08:06 – Some of the early challenges

10:18 – Dealing with different work ethics

13:25 – The importance of systems, tools and processes

13:53 – Dan’s ‘must-have’ tools

17:04 – Creating processes is NOT boring

18:35 – Train your people to use your systems, your way

21:47 – Managing your staff

23:15 – Consider the costs of growing your business

24:13 – Your biggest mistake could be saying ‘Yes’

27:29 – You should be delegating everything

29:12 – Wrapping things up

Barbara: Hey everyone welcome to the show! And as always, I’m joined by my fabulous co-host, Matt Malouf. Matt, how’s it going?

Matt: I’m going well Barbara! How are you?

Barbara: I’m great, thanks! Good week?

Matt: It has been an amazing week and I’m really looking forward to today’s episode.

Barbara: Yeah, me too! I mean I’m super excited because someone I’ve been following from quite a long time, has been actually an inspiration to me in building Virtual Angel Hub and how to manage virtual teams, which is actually not as easy as people think, is our guest on the show today and that is Dan Norris, who is co-founder of WPCurve. And not only is Dan a very passionate entrepreneur with a huge obsession of content marketing and everything in digital, he’s also running a big virtual team and with 30 people at the moment in Philippines and a co-founder who lives in the US, so truly global virtual teams. Dan welcome to the show, we’re really excited to get chatting with you!

Dan: Well I’m excited too, thank you for having me!

Barbara: Yeah, it’s good! So, just to kick off, do you want to give us quick background into how you ended up with such a big team of virtual staff? Where did it all start for you?

Dan: Right, so two years ago I just sent an email to my list and asked them if they wanted ongoing WordPress support and I made the offer of unlimited small fixes each month for $70 a month and at the time I had one developer in the Philippines, Andrew, who was a really, really good developer and he’d worked on a lot of stuff with me and I really didn’t want to lose him. And actually the other thing I said was 24/7 too, so I had small jobs 24/7 and I only have one guy in the Philippines which is the same time zone as me and I had a bunch of people say yes to it and so I was like, doing it on my phone at night time. So I knew straightaway I was going to have to hire people. What ended up happening was I found a co-founder in the US to manage that side of the world, which made things a lot easier. And I’m also not a WordPress developer, so I was always going to hire people – it never would have worked without doing that, so that was probably a good position to be in. But since then I think we had 10 people sign up in the first week and we’ve had about that many every week since, in the 2 years since, and we’re up to, I don’t know, 800 or 900 hundred customers now and I think 40 people in 7 countries.

Barbara: That’s fantastic, yeah! Absolutely amazing! And when you started out, did you, I mean obviously this kind of came out of nowhere for you then – you sent an email to your list, there was demand and before you know it, you’re in business. Sounds a bit like that!

Dan: Yeah, but I had been in business for 9 years prior to that.

Barbara: I mean in this business!

Dan: Yeah, I mean my first book, ‘The 7 Day Startup’ was about the story of how I started WPCurve and how to give people a framework to sort of do the same thing because I learned that it was much more useful to launch something much quickly than it was to think about something for months and months and debate it before you actually learn what was going to happen after you launch. And a lot of people thought that it was going to be a bad idea to do the unlimited and how was it going to work 24/7, all those sort of things. But once I launched I figured those problems were relatively easy to solve and so it happened quite quickly. But the back story is it took me 7 years before that I was an entrepreneur who failed every single year before that.

Barbara: Oh okay! And what about the 24/7 thing, I mean, did you know how you were going to fulfill on that before you offered it?

Dan: Yeah, I knew I was going to go to bed with a live chat app next to my head, for as long as it took to find someone, somewhere overseas where I could afford to hire someone to manage that side of the world but as it turned out I met Alex who became a co-founder and managed that side of the world. So my job was a lot easier although I also had to give away a big chunk, like half of the company. But yeah, it worked out well because I’d really, I was just like, I’m just going to launch this thing. I was going to have to get a job, I was starting to look for a job, I was desperate so I really had no idea how any of it was going to work. But as it turned out most of the problems we had just kind of solved themselves or we figured out ways to solve them. And finding my co-founder in the US was definitely not something I planned but it was a big bonus at the time.

Barbara: How did you find him?

Dan: He found me through my blog, my content.

Barbara: Was he a WordPress guy? Was he a developer or was he just an entrepreneur?

Dan: Nope, he was just sort of someone who manages teams. He’s probably useful for you to talk to because he does more of the hands-on kind of managing the performance of the team kind of stuff, I don’t do a whole of that. I just got pretty good at hiring people, finding people and kind of threw them in the deep end and if they didn’t work, replace them! But, it’s not quite as simple as that, but he’s more hands-on and I’m more systems. I’m a glorified developer, I know how to code pretty badly and I can solve problems if I really have to but he’s not technical at all.

Barbara: What I’m interested to know, before we’re going to move in to some key tips from you in a second, but I’m really keen to know, you were a developer, you knew a bit of developing, you were an entrepreneur. But in terms of managing people, had you ever done that before?

Dan: I do have a HR degree and I started out, well it’s pretty much useless really, I don’t know if it taught me really anything about managing people. But I worked for the Government, I had couple of people working for me there. Andrew and the remote team of 3 or 4 people with my agency before that and I had a small team of local people, 3 or 4 people in my office. So yeah, I’d managed people before, I mean I don’t think I’m particularly good at it and it’s not something I really love doing, I like working with people but I like working with people who don’t need to be managed. I think Alex is someone who likes managing people, for me I just like getting shit done and it’s probably good that we have a balance of having Alex there who can do more touchy feely stuff and I can just sort of focus on the systems and getting the work done.

Barbara: Yeah right, okay and what about, did you bring Alex in, was he in pretty early in the piece or are there any issues like the early days – how big were the issues before you had him involved in managing people?

Dan: No, he was very early! I can’t remember how early but it was I think you know I’d launched it and written a blog post about the fact that this thing had sort of started to take off and I’d started to kind of tell that story about my last business failing and this one launching quickly and doing monthly report so I was getting a lot of attention and traction with that content and he was reading that and it was a matter of months I think after I launched, not even months maybe 5 or 6 weeks, I can’t exactly remember.

Barbara: Sorry Matt I have totally taken over the conversation.

Matt: Totally okay!

Barbara: I’m sure you’ve got a ton of questions for Dan too?!

Matt: I do! Dan, what I’d love for our listeners to understand is, what are some of the challenges that you experienced in the early days with growing a virtual team?

Dan: I mean there were a lot of challenges but no really insurmountable challenges early on, you know, it was pretty easy. We found it quite easy to find people. I’ve got a process up on my site where we document exactly what we do, I don’t how if you’ve seen that, but if you Google ‘WPCurve hiring developers’ then I had this process locked down, it was pretty solid for finding developers so it wasn’t hard for me to find people. I had a couple of good guys already and they were really good at referring other people to us and then we’d have a trial process where we’d pay people for a trial and we’d sort of weed out the ones that didn’t know what they were doing and get the ones that were good. All that’s public up on our site, that post and the process we use. So all of that I found pretty straight forward. The issues, like the challenges that had been the hard ones to solve came later, when we just had lots of clients and lots of people. Like 5 or 10 people, you know, we didn’t really need a team leader, we were just kind of chatting up in conditionally on Skype and eventually we moved to Slack, probably I don’t know, very early on when slack came out, probably a year and a half ago maybe and that helped things a lot. But eventually we got to the size where we needed team leaders so Alex had to employ someone in that role. We still don’t have one in Australia where the biggest team is, so that’s an ongoing issue and the team performance, you know, we’ve had some people really not perform very well. Some people act fraudulently and have to be removed. We’ve had those kind of issues happen since we started getting a lot bigger but for the first year or so I think we were probably only up to 10 people and all that was pretty manageable.

Barbara: Did you have, Dan, any because one of the issues and challenges that people, this is you know all over the internet on chatrooms and entrepreneurs talking about this issue, particularly with Filipino virtual teams, is the constant drama, you know the lack of attention to detail, the constant sort of personal issues that come in that impact work and stuff like that so you know parents are getting sick, going to hospital, everyone seems to be getting rushed to the hospital all the time. Like I have heard that millions of times but how did you deal with that sort of thing? I’m sure you were getting the same issues because this is something quite common.

Dan: Yeah I mean, there’s a few ways we deal with them. One is we have pretty high expectations. We have a trial process where people have to turn up on time, they have to do certain work and then they have to do it well and if they don’t do that, they will not get a second chance on that, so that weeds out a lot of people. We expect people for the most part to be online during normal work hours, to be live chatting with us via Slack when we need them, to be communicating with the rest of the team, if they don’t do that, if they kind of go disappearing, MIA all the time which has happened to some staff, then they’re not suitable for us. Like that’s the way I manage people, I need them there to chat with me when I need them. So if they don’t do that then the alarm bells are ringing and we sort of exit them eventually, I think, but at the same time we’re flexible, so I mean we have our best guys you know like Andrew’s just had something that he needs to be away from work for and you know that’s fine, that’s all completely normal and accepted and we give them benefits that they don’t get elsewhere and we’re flexible with you know with people obviously got family troubles or blackouts. You know we’ve got a bit of flexibility around that and we’ve also got processes for that, blackouts or brownouts, we have the capacity to give people back up free 3G dongles and we let them work from cafes, or we pay for their co-working or in some cases we’ve bought them generators, like Andrew’s got a generator because he’s a really important employee and he’s got a backup 3G, we pay for all of that. So there’s solutions to all these problems, I think, the team stuff got a lot trickier as we got up to sort of 30, 40 people and we had to build systems around, like, how good are these team members, how quickly are they doing the jobs, how do we actually measure how good they are, like is it from customer satisfaction, or the amount of the jobs they do or the amount of jobs they refer to other developers because they can’t do. These are all things that are ongoing challenges for us, that we’ve had to build our own systems to solve. So they’re not all solved yet but they are all solvable. The other part of it is, if you’re hiring people for a 5th or a 10th of what you’re paying someone in Australia or in the US then there’s a certain amount of flexibility you can have just from a pure financial basis where, you know, even if they do have a lot of public holidays or they do have a bit of time off work, it’s still financially more sensible as long as they’re not completely taking the piss! It’s a lot more sensible to hire those people than it is to hire someone locally. So if they’re doing the equivalent job and then with the equivalent attitudes, I think the combination of all those different things is probably how we manage it.

Barbara: And then just, you know, again something that a lot of I’m definitely my clients and a lot of the listeners will actually be suffering from is, an inability to accept, in some instances, that systems and tools are sort of vitally important to making this work. So I’m really interested to hear first of all your thoughts on systems, tools, processes and setting them up properly and maybe what are the sort of ones that you just couldn’t do without?

Dan: Well I mean if they’re thinking that then they’re either not an entrepreneur and they should go back to work or they’re not an entrepreneur yet and they should just learn to listen and do some research. So there’s not really any other scenario that I can think of you where you don’t think systems and processes and tools are important but you do want to run your own business or run your own team. There’s not really any room for any flexibility around that.

So what tools do we have? I’m pretty good at writing processes, I like doing it because I have been working with Filipinos for a long time and some of them are amazing. I mean they’re like any staff over here, some staff are amazing, some just need so much hand holding and you add in the language barrier on top of that and also a little bit of cultural differences about work ethic and the high quality attention to detail, you need to get really, really good at writing processes. So, my main go-to for this kind of thing is a combination between Google Docs, Trello and Zapia and so what I’ll do is, as an example, I’ve got a virtual assistant that manages my Instagram account. On Monday I’ll have an automated job from Zapia that creates a task in Trello, assigns him the task and the task is ‘Generate 50 ideas for the week for posting on Instagram’ and that task will link to a Google Doc where I’ve written out all the information in that Google Doc about what he has to do to generate the ideas and every time he asks me a question, I don’t answer it directly, I go into the Google Doc, update the Google Doc and ask him to read the Google Doc again and by the time he asks, or every time he makes a mistakes, same thing. So between that and the constant communication with Slack – Slack is the other absolutely crucial tool we use.

Barbara: Just for those people who don’t know what Slack is or are not familiar yet – Slack is a cloud chat system that you can use with your teams. Would that be right?

Dan: Yeah and it’s a lot more than that! You know we have, I don’t want to explain it just go and use it! If you’re using Skype to chat to your team, don’t use that. Get them on Slack – you can add docs in there, you can add files in there, you can – if you’re bored, you can put a word in and a random automated gif will pop up which could be funny or really rude, depending on which setting you have. It’s really cool, you can have channels, you can have groups, you can have automation in there so like when a customer’s signs up with us, it goes into a channel in Slack so every day we can just get a really simple list of, you know, who signed up the day before. So I mean, we can’t live without Slack, so that’s a huge one. So Zapia does the automation, Trello is the task list, Google Docs is for the process, where you can both manage docs at the same time. So in some refusing task on your computer, I’d swap it to Trello, if you’re using any kind of manual work to create tasks, swap it to Zapia, if you’re using Skype, swap to Slack, if you’re using words, swap to Google Docs.

Barbara: So what I’m hearing here two really loud messages here. The tools that are out there are you absolutely have to get onboard with them if you’re running virtual teams, and number two is if you know systems and processes are not your thing then probably you’re not going to succeed.

Dan: I already told you exactly how to do it and exactly what tools to use and all those tools are free so there’s no excuses!

Barbara: Yeah absolutely! There are so many people trying to get away, Matt I know you see this as well, people want to get away from creating processes because it is boring. I mean I like it but,

Dan: It’s not boring, what’s boring is doing the same thing twice. There’s nothing more boring that doing the same job twice, writing a process to prevent yourself from doing the same job twice is the opposite of boring.

Matt: Smart, it’s extremely smart! I’m so glad you said that Dan because certainly I know it’s one of the things I’m a big believer in and teach. Just a follow on from that, how much time do you spend training your teams to use the systems? Does it take long to get a new staff member up and running in the systems?

Dan: No! Sorry I just got a bit sidetrack, I just remembered I’ve got a blog post on this exact topic and I’ll paste it in the chat here, you guys if you want to link it up in the notes or whatever you can do that or maybe you’ve got content on it. But it just describes exactly how you use Zapia or Trello to automate tasks.

So, our systems are very simple, we’ve got our own help desk system. I mean, actually WPCurve has a guide to using Slack, I can give you the link to that as well, that’s on our blog. But Slack is so easy to use, I mean, unless you haven’t used software before it’s not going to, once you actually set it up it’s not that difficult for your team to figure how to use it. Here’s the guide to using Slack so one thing about me every time we talk about anything, I’ve got a blog post for it so, I should have warned you about that!

Matt: So not so much about the actual software but actually I understand doing it the way that you want it done. Because the software they can learn, but I’m sure the systems around that, that’s specific to your company?

Dan: Yeah so we have a combination of things. We teach them the software, we teach them our software which is specific to our company, we have a Google Doc which tells them how to use all that stuff and we associate a team member with them, team leader with them on their first day so that they can talk to someone about that and get up to speed. So, all of that stuff is done that way. In terms of expectations we have again mainly Google Docs, I think we’re playing around with the idea of having a Wiki or something at the moment but to me just having everything in Google is a really big benefit, like another piece of software would have to be really good to use instead but we have a doc that says, actually we have a bunch of docs, a bunch of docs that they have to read as the first thing they do on day one. One of them is like, expectations and you know what being a developer at WPCurve is all about and then the details of how we manage clients, how we do jobs, the procedures for doing specific types of jobs and how to use the system, all of that stuff. They don’t work on client jobs straightaway and they don’t work on difficult jobs for a couple of days or weeks and once they’ve done a few simple jobs like Slack reviews and once they are up to speed, they sort of pass through that onboarding process and become a proper team member. And then eventually they might become a senior developer if they achieve certain targets and get paid more and be allocated more exciting projects and sites that are more critical customers and more high-level customers.

Matt: Fantastic! I mean I think that, thank you for such a detailed summary because I think I love the whole having the induction phase and also escalating them as their experience or as they earn the ability to have more interesting work and the like, which I’m sure gives them something to strive for.

Dan: Yeah I mean at the end of the day like we don’t know these people when they’re signing up. They need to prove themselves. The two-hour trial is a good start and that proves themselves enough to be given a chance at a position but to give them access to client sites and to let them code on someone’s website not just review it, then they need to prove themselves that they know what they’re doing and that they’ve got the right standards and they’re available and all those things before they got that opportunity.

Barbara: Yeah and trustworthy as well, I suppose?

Dan: Well, we’ve got systems for that too like they don’t get full access. We’ve built our own system where if they’re working on one client’s website, they’ll get access to that one website but they won’t o get access to all websites. I build a technology around that we needed to build to make sure we’ve got the security in there.

Barbara: So just to sort of wrap things up because I think there’s a lot of really great tips there. What, if we were to sort of wrap this up into, what are your top, I guess, your top 3 tips in summary for getting success with virtual teams now that you’ve been through this whole process yourself.

Dan: Yeah well we really haven’t talked about the management of …which is I mean a whole other episode. Maybe I will get Alex back, if you can convince him to be in the podcast which is hard work.

Barbara: I think you could give us your insight quickly now, I mean managing I think is one of the hardest parts.

Dan: Yeah I mean processes is the answer really, we’ve got processes for absolutely everything now. You know, if a staff member isn’t performing, we got systems to use to document that. We’ve got a process, you know, with communication that we use to make sure that they’re up to speed. If they go below certain quality scores their stuff gets reviewed and we’ve got a process for that. If its looking like they’re not going to work out and we need to get rid of them, then we’ve got a process for that. We’ve got every week, we have an automated process for our admin teams and look at the quality score and their response time and go into the management channel in Slack and fill us all in on what’s going on. So between having a process, know that you need a process, having team leaders to actually be the first port of call for the staff to talk to rather than the co-founders, otherwise we’d never get any work done. And having the systems, all of which are free virtually, is more or less how we go about solving most of these problems.

Barbara: Yeah so I guess like what I’m hearing here is top 3 tips is obviously processes to within an inch of your life because you need a process for everything, you really, really do in depth processes. Use the tools, they are out there. And then, in terms of management, it’s an ongoing process there as well so it’s not just like get someone in, train them up and off they go. It actually never stops really, does it?!

Dan: Yeah and you need to factor these costs in as well. I mean if you’re a new business, and I don’t know what your audience is like, but one thing I have in my first book is just this idea of ‘What does your business look like at a certain scale?’ And if you look at your business, with say 200 monthly customers, how much is it going to cost to support all those customers and at that point, do you need team leaders to manage your team? How much do those team leaders cost you? Do those team leaders need to be US based or Australian based, in which case they’re going to cost you five times as much? Factor all those costs in because this could end up a lot more expensive than you originally thought, so that’s important if people in your audience are new businesses.

Barbara: Yeah some of them are, actually Matt, this is something that you’re a big on. Actually this is an exercise Matt got me to do, which was thinking about well what does this company look like in 2 years’ time and therefore what does the org chart look like and how do we move towards that, rather than this constant like ‘Oh, I need another person, Oh I need another person’. It’s thinking ahead!

Dan: One thing about that is the biggest mistake people make is they say ‘yes’ to too much, they do too many things. So in our case, even with a thousand customers, we still really employ only two types of people. We’ve got team leaders, we’ve got admin people, we’ve got developers and that’s all we’ve got because that’s all the work we do, we don’t do any other kind of work and if you’re starting a business and you’re like, ‘Oh I’m going to create or help people with their websites’, then before long, customers are going to ask you for SEO info, AdWords and for Social Media and for WordPress fixes and for design. At some point, you need to define what you’re going to do. If you say yes to all these things then you’re just going to end up employing all these people, the whole things going to be a mess, you’re not going to be making any money and this was exactly what I do in my first business, which is why I get people now to think about what’s one thing you can do and multiply that by a thousand rather than finding, you know, a thousand clients that want something different each time. And have to build that complexity in to the business somehow which doesn’t work and is extremely expensive, if it did work.

Barbara: Yeah that’s fantastic advice! Matt, anything just to finish before we finish up?

Matt: Dan look, I just want to thank you but most importantly because everything that you’ve said is amazing and simple and I really, I just want to reiterate everything that Dan’s talking about today is that the systems that you need, the processes, the management, this is the same whether you have a physical business or a virtual team and what Dan has done amazingly well is taken what happens in a bricks and mortar business and built this amazing virtual business with people all around the world but the end-of-line fundamentals are exactly the same. Would you agree Dan?

Dan: Yeah, most of my content that I put out there is for people that are trying to start a business or they’ve got a really new business and I think a lot of people struggle with this idea of, if I build this business in this way that is proceduralized and you know I’ve got systems for everything and it’s scalable and I’m going to build a really “big business”, then it’s going to be much harder for me to manage and I’m going to be stressed out and working all the time. In fact, I found the opposite is true. I found with my agency, I was working all the time and I was stressed out the whole time because it was fundamentally unprofitable. This business is 10 times the size but I do much, much, much less work on this business and I can leave for weeks and the thing keeps running and so if people have that mindset of, ‘I don’t want to build a big business’, I mean don’t even call it a big business, ‘I want to build a good business’ is what you should be saying. And if you tell yourself, ‘I don’t want to build a good business’, you’re a crazy person. So I think, think about, if you want to build something that is scalable and systemized then it’s going to be a better business, it’s going to be an easier business than it will be if you build something where you’re just saying ‘yes’ to everything and scrambling the whole time trying to make money.

Barbara: Yeah and not figuring how to delegate because obviously, you know, if you’re build something with lots of systems, that’s scalable, there is very, very few that would need no people to help run it.

Dan: What I say about delegation is you should be delegating everything even if you’re good at it. I hear a lot of people saying that delegate what you’re not good at, which I think is rubbish because the point of delegation is not to find people to do things that are better than you, the point is for you to build a business that can scale and you can’t build a business that scale where you do any of the work. So I think you should be delegating everything and whether or not you’re, I mean, there’s always going to be a period where you need to do stuff yourself, if you’re starting literally from zero but the goal should be to eventually delegate everything and for your work to be something you love doing that you probably don’t have to do. That’s ideal! That’s the situation I think I’m in, where I can do these things like these podcast interviews, we don’t really have to do but I love putting this content out. In the last year, I’ve written 2 books, I’ve presented around the world, I’ve started a brewery and a whole bunch of stuff but I would never been able to do if I didn’t have a business that was fundamentally, you know, I was able to scale and proceduralize. So I think people say like, sorry I’m going to rant here like it annoys me because people say, ‘I’m not very good at delegating.’ Well then, you’re not very good at being an entrepreneur and you either don’t be an entrepreneur or you just live your life not being good at something, or you get good at it, so you’ve got to stop saying things like that.

Barbara: I’m so glad that you said that because honestly I think it’s time that somebody actually comes out and says like it is. Because what you just said there, if you’re not willing to actually invest time in creating systems, training your teams and getting the right people in place to run the systems that you’ve created, then go work for someone else because that’s what being an entrepreneur is all about.

Dan: And if you’re a good employee then come and work for me!

Barbara: Well Dan, thank you so much because this topic honestly, I know Matt and I have talked about this a lot and people are struggling with this and we needed to, I actually need to get more people talking about this issue and talking about success, Matt and I talked about this to the nth degree. This actually shows people and for them to hear from multiple different people the same thing about how to get success with this, it’s actually not hard, it’s like you’re not listening!

Dan: Yeah! It’s also a bit of a mindset thing. I’ve been doing this for quite a while now, I’ve been following Chris Ducker and James Schramko, who I’ve become really good friends with over the years, I’ve been following those guys for years, learning about outsourcing in the Philippines. Dan Andrew is another guy I have been following, who started a multi-million dollar business building physical products, travelling around the world. So you start listening to a lot of this sort of content and enough of it – ‘The Four Hour Work Week is another one. You listen to enough of that type of content and it really starts to rub off, so definitely keep putting the content out there and eventually it’s going to have an impact, that kind of stuff has had a huge impact on me.

Barbara: Yeah, Dan thank you so much. This has been a really awesome interview!

Dan: Thanks for having me.

Matt: Thank you Dan

Barbara: And so guys, we will be back next week with more virtual success!

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.

Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

In this episode:

02:36 – Clearly defining your expectations

04:40 – No-one can read your mind

05:36 – How to define your expectations

07:26 – Clear communication is key

10:00 – Don’t just think it, write it down

13:02 – Help them, help you

14:06 – What does success look like?

15:24 – Communicate clearly, assume nothing

17:49 – Communicating your expectations

18:22 – Document your expectations

20:32 – The good and the not so good

21:24 – Being clear on what failure looks like

25:33 – Unrealistic expectations of your VA

26:36 – Help your VA grow

28:55 – Wrapping things up

Matt: Welcome everyone to today’s episode and I’m joined by my co-host Barbara Turley. Hey Barb, how are you doing today?

Barbara: Hey Matt! Good and how are you?

Matt: Excellent, excellent! I’m really, really looking forward to today’s show. I think there are so many amazing topics – I think I say that every week that I’m really looking forward to the show but I’m just thoroughly enjoying the conversation and the education that we’re providing to the community.

Barbara: Me too, you know and it’s funny because I know we chat off-air all the time, we talk about just the depth of stuff that we need to discuss because every show we do, we’re like, ‘Ah we need to do a whole show on that little piece, or this little piece’, and that’s how all these shows are coming together, so it’s fantastic.

Matt: Absolutely, absolutely! How’s your week been?

Barbara: Good! You know, busy as always but I’m starting to implement some of the things that we’re actually talking about on the show and I’m really starting to see great results with our virtual teams, so it’s really useful and would say to the listeners, you know, implement this stuff! Really listen to what we’re talking about here because we’re actively doing it every day in our businesses and its working. How about you Matt? What’s been happening for you?

Matt: You know it’s been great. We’re always adding to our team which is great. We’ve now got people literally all over the world and that amazes me how, like what you were talking about, through implementation of the strategies that we talked about, I can literally work from my home office and have people, we’ve got people in America, we’ve got people in the Philippines, New Zealand, all around Australia and we’ve got people in Europe as well. So it’s just, it’s exciting. Really, really exciting!

Barbara: And I think the other thing to note here is, it absolutely can be done and very simply because a lot of people think that sounds really complicated. But actually, I’m just loving having a big team you know, most of mine are in the Philippines at the moment but I’m loving having them all over the place, we’re all connected online. With the technology today you can really do it and it makes my life simpler rather than more complicated.

Matt: It sure does, it sure does. So today’s topic, we want to talk around expectations and what we want to focus in on in the theme of expectations is, have you clearly defined your expectations of your virtual team or virtual team members and do they understand how to fulfil and meet your expectations.

Barbara: You know Matt, this is such a great topic because it’s something I’ve seen a lot obviously in Virtual Angel Hub. I see this happen all the time, where often as we’ve talked about it before, we have the same VA working on different accounts and different outcomes, different experiences and feedback coming – some positive, some negative and often it comes down to expectations. When I look in to the account and actually had chat with the clients, the expectation management is key to get right! So I’m excited to talk about this too with you.

Matt: Absolutely and I just want to frame what we want to cover in today’s podcast, what we’re going to talk about is how to define your expectations. I think it’s unconscious to many people that they never articulate and clearly define what they expect. We also then want to understand how to measure success against expectations, or what does success look like? We are then going to talk about communicating expectations and how to clearly articulate that to your virtual team and then making sure that the expectations that you have are realistic for the roles that you’re employing your virtual team or inviting your virtual team members to join your team around. So they are the four topics I think we’re covering in today’s podcast. So why don’t we get straight into it Barb and let’s starting talking about how to define and articulate your expectations as an owner, leader or manager in a business?

Barbara: You know what I found interesting about this? You know as humans, it’s human nature to automatically assume that everybody thinks the same way you do. Of course this has been the downfall of many a marriage, many a business partnership, you know many relationships fall down with this that we don’t realize that how we all see the world is slightly different and so my expectations of a job well done compared to yours for your team or my team could be totally different. And similarly for the team member, they might have a different view of what success looks like or what they’re expectations of you are as a leader. So I think defining this is something we naturally don’t gravitate to doing but it is absolutely so vitally important to do but it’s very difficult to do. So, as a coach Matt, how do you get clients to define what their expectations are?

Matt: For me it falls under three umbrellas – the first is ‘what’s important to me?’ Me as the owner, me as the leader. What are the things that are important to me? And again, as you just mentioned, it is different to everybody. For some people it is important to have constant contact, constant communication, almost micro management. For others it’s about having the deadline met when they said it was going to be met. For others it’s about thinking outside the box and problem solving. But getting clear on what’s important to you and what’s important for your team to do, that’s number one.

I think number two in defining expectations is understanding what leads to success in a task or what leads to success in a role and defining the expectations around that so that you set your people up to succeed and to quote-on-quote, win.

And I think the third thing to consider when defining your expectations is what defines or equates to value for you when this person is performing their role at an outstanding level? What’s valuable to you? What’s going to give you the sense that you’ve got a positive return on investment and not just, you know, wasting cash?

Barbara: That’s a very good point actually! That is a really, really good one which I think a lot of people probably don’t think about. Well subconsciously we kind of know what our view on that is but we never really articulated it to our teams. So sometimes our teams are doing things that we don’t really value.

Matt: Absolutely! And I thought I would share a couple of examples of expectations that I have with our virtual teams. One of the core values that we have in our business is that we’re solutions focused so an expectation that I have is that, they can come to me with any challenge or any problem that they’re experiencing but they must come with at least one solution. So any of my team may come to me and they may go, ‘Hey Matt! This is where the problem is or this is what I’m experiencing’, and they know that the first question if they’re don’t already say it in that sentence is, ‘So what’s your solution?’.

Barbara: Yeah that’s a great one! So you’ve told them that that’s really important to you.

Matt: Absolutely! And particularly new team members, they learn this real fast that if they don’t have a solution, I’ll tell them to call me back once they’ve thought of one.

Barbara: Yeah that’s great! I’m going to start implementing that one, I love that idea.

Matt: Yeah. But for others it’s not as important. For others, I know business owners that want to solve every problem.

Barbara: Yeah, I don’t want you wasting time looking at solutions when I already have the solution and actually sometimes that’s what happens to me. I find some of my virtual team get, I call them the research vortex, when there’s a problem that comes up, they don’t know what to do and they go into the research vortex and then two hours later they emerge with a possible solution. That’s not really the best solution and in 5 minutes I could’ve given them the answer. So there’s a slight difference actually with my team, I often say to them, ‘Come to us first because we probably have the answer’.

Matt: Absolutely! And the amazing thing is, both work.

Barbara: Both do work, yeah! And it’s about communicating actually so one rule we have internally is, step one is you come straight to us and then, step two is if we don’t know the answer straight away then you have to go and find the solution. So they’re very clear on that. But I’ve noticed actually with some clients as well, you know that thing you were saying, some people love constant communication, others hate it and we’ve actually witnessed that with our clients. You know sometimes our VAs think that they are doing a great job because they’re in constant contact and communicating effectively and asking questions and the client is going nuts because they’re really busy, they’re in meetings all day and they just don’t want that, they just want the outcome at the end of the day as opposed to the constant communication all day, others love it.

Matt: And so it reinforces the point where, it’s not just thinking about these things, it’s actually writing it down and then going through it with your people so that they understand, we’re not mind readers so they need to be clear on what you expect.

Barbara: And I actually just have an add-on to that Matt, sorry I just thought of this. Not only being clear on what you expect, but why? So, for example, in the case of a client that is busy all day, running around the city doing meetings, if you say to your virtual team member, ‘Look! I just don’t want you contacting me all day long via Skype messages.’ It’s much better to say, ‘I’d rather you didn’t contact me all day long in Skype messages because I tend to be in and out of meetings so I’m generally unavailable. And it can be quite difficult for me if it’s pinging all the time.’ So I think for them to fully understand why you have this expectation, makes it easier for them first, to remember and second of all, to respect.

Matt: Absolutely!

Barbara: One I think is a great one as well is asking yourself and I asked myself this one, this is why I do this, ‘what stresses me out?’. So, for example, one of the expectations I have with my VAs is we use a project management system called Asana and in there I love creating systems, so I’ve got you know full recurring tasks lists, daily, weekly, monthly tasks and I say to them, ‘If a task is on a daily basis then my expectation is that if it goes off with no problems, I still want you to tick the task off so I can see it being completed. But if there’s an issue or anything that’s happened, I want you to document that in the comment section. Because I’m quite busy all day and what I like to do is at the end of the day, in the evening or on the weekend, I’ll often flick through the Asana lists and I want to get a quick update and I want to get a quick update without having to chase you for the answer’. So they all know why I want it done this way and that means that they don’t go, ‘Oh the task has been done, it doesn’t matter! I won’t tick it off’, or they know why this is important to me because it stresses me out otherwise, if they don’t do that.

Matt: Yeah I think what you said at the end that ‘it stresses you out’ and I think that is so many relationships between virtual team member or manager or owner because the owner is getting stressed out by the VA either doing something or not doing something. So a really and clear and easy way to define those expectations is think about what stresses you out and then communicate with your virtual assistant, what not to do as well as what to do.

Barbara: You know help them, help you! So if you say when I’m really busy, this is something that actually can stress me out, they might even say I might snap, I might be sharp. So in order to just get rid of this problem for you and for me, it would be great if you would do this every day.

Matt: We could show that little clip from Jerry Maguire on that one Barb, ‘Help me, help you!’

Barbara: Yes exactly! Yeah, yeah!

Matt: I think that gives everyone really simple framework now to start to identify what you expect and the only thing I will say to that is – write it down!

Barbara: I was going to say that, yeah! You have to write this down because if it’s in your head, it’s not communicated properly. If you even say it, it’s probably not communicated properly. It needs to be documented! And you can use it as a KPI, you know, one of the KPIs on the performance matrix that you then measure your staff with can be these KPIs.

Matt: Absolutely, which leads us into point two, which is ‘what does success look like?’, or ‘how do we measure it?’ How will your virtual assistant or virtual team understand whether they are meeting or not meeting your expectations, in light of the example that you gave earlier around the tasks in Asana, you’ve either put the comment in or you haven’t and I like that because it’s black and white. You’ve either ticked it off or you haven’t. You know what I mean?

Barbara: And if you haven’t, it’s going to invite a comment from me saying, ‘What happened here?’, because it’s not done! Even though it probably was done.

Matt: Exactly and I think that this is really important from a management perspective in managing both virtual and local people is that you got to have a clear metrics. You’ve got to have clear metrics on what success looks like and how they’ll know if they have succeeded or how they know if they’re outside of the scope of success. This is very, very simple. Do you know what I mean? It doesn’t have to be over the top and we’re not looking for fancy ways to record everything, it’s just understanding here’s what I expect and here’s the metric for success and here’s the metric for failure, quote-on-quote.

Barbara: I’ll give you a story on this success thing because I’ve actually seen this quite a lot because again you know some of us, I mean I’m a bit of a control freak and I’ll totally admit it. I think most of us entrepreneurs kind of are deep down, you know, we’re a little bit control freaky and we can be perfectionists and we really know how we want things done, but I’ve seen this happen – I’ve actually a few client-VA relationships unravel because of expectations around what success looks like not being communicated properly.

So, for example, this one client, she was very particular about her newsletter, which of course is her branding, her colours and fonts, all that sort of thing. And the VA was very good, she was sending back beautiful newsletters, they were all fine but the fonts she had used were different from the fonts on her website and the client used to go ballistic about this and you know I sat down with both of them and said, ‘Well we need to talk about first why this is important to you but also success in anything to do with the branding for this business means you need the exact color codes not something that looks similar, you need the exact font to be used all the time on any communication that goes about this business, that font is to be used and if you can’t use it, we need to know about it!’ So things like that, you know that actually solved the problem because the VA all of a sudden realized that this was so important to this particular client and that she was being unsuccessful because she wasn’t, she didn’t know that was such a key metric.

Matt: It’s interesting isn’t it?! Something that is so simple and that could be assumed when communicated effectively sets somebody up to win.

Barbara: Exactly, then you go from wanting to fire the VA to actually getting a total rock star in your team and that can be the difference between a rock star and someone who fails.

Matt: 100%! My thought just on this second point is ‘keep it simple’. It’s got to be measurable, it’s got to be black and white. There can’t be a grey area because the grey is where this will come undone and then it makes it really hard for you and for them. So keep it simple and as I said, keep it black and white.

Barbara: Absolutely!

Matt: So I think the third point then is around communicating your expectations. So you’ve now articulated your expectations, you’ve got measures around what success looks like and doesn’t look like and now it’s like, ‘How do I communicate to my team and team players what I expect? And how it’s going to be measured?’ And for me Barb on this, a conversation with a written document attached to it, in my opinion is the easiest way.

Barbara: And a written document is the bit most people won’t do. That’s where the downfalls happen, they have a chat and what I’m finding is yes the conversation was great but a chat is different to a meeting. What I notice people do is they have a chat and the chat gets caught up then report building and how’s your day and personal stuff and then we throw in a few lines around, ‘Okay my expectations are this!’ and kind of gets lost in translation. They’re almost needs to be an allocated meeting to discuss expectations and the list of you know how are we going to measure this together and then it’s very clear.

Matt: Well in my opinion actually is the first thing that needs to happen. With all of our new team members that come onboard in any of our companies, I’ll spend the first hour with them because inevitably they’ll report to me in some way, shape or form. The first thing I go through with them is our mission, vision and values and then the second thing is what I expect and what the measures are around that. And when I’m communicating that with them, and they have a written document that I send and get them to read beforehand, I then get them to repeat back to me their understanding of what I expect.

Barbara: Yeah that’s great! I would say nobody does that because you know I’m not even doing that, I need to do that. That’s very good!

Matt: Because again, remembering that for a lot of these virtual assistants, English is a second language and even if English isn’t a second language, all of us, all human beings put a filter on the communication. We put a filter on so we hear it differently than it may be meant.

Barbara: Absolutely, yeah! I definitely agree with that one.

Matt: So in order to set them up to win, you need them to repeat back to you their understanding of what you expect. Their understanding of what they’re going to be measured against, their understanding of what success looks like.

Barbara: Would you even go as far, Matt, in this conversation, it’s just something that popped into my head now, as to kind of also lay out, I don’t like to call it unacceptable behavior but it’s like the, what things if they do it are probably going to trigger very serious conversations. Not saying it in a serious way but more again, being clear about what those situations would look like!

Matt: I think you raise a good point. It’s not something I’ve done personally, but it’s certainly something I’ve just written down, I think it’s a fantastic idea. I would probably, again I think this is going to depend on your style, and I think for everyone it’s slightly different. As you were talking then Barb, my thought was what’s acceptable, what’s outstanding and what’s unacceptable? That is how I would position it.

Barbara: So no confusion over…I mean the reason I raised it is because it’s actually something we’ve started to implement literally in the last couple of weeks. And it has ruffled some feathers but going forward, we need to be very clear about what our expectations are because I was communicating a lot about what expectations for success look like. Well actually now I’m also communicating what failure looks like also. So that they’re very clear, first of all whether they want to stay with this company and second of all whether they can meet that and if they can then how not to fall into holes. Because sometimes people make mistakes, you know they fall into little traps without realising it. So setting them up to really win so that you also set them up not to fail, tell them what failure looks like.

Matt: Yes, I think it’s a great idea, giving them both ends of the spectrum, I think it makes sense. And just following on from this too, I just want to add another point. I mentioned earlier, when I’ve got new team members it’s the first thing I go through. If you haven’t gone through this with your people and now you’re going to implement this, you need to expect that there’s going to be some, you’re going to ruffle some feathers and people are going to feel uncomfortable with this because all of a sudden..

Barbara: You get resistance, that’s what I have found when it’s done too late, resistance!

Matt: 100% and I think anytime you’re raising the standards or changing what’s going on, you’re going to get that resistance and so it’s being clear and I think it’s what you mentioned earlier Barb – let them understand why you’re doing this and how it’s going to help them and you.

Barbara: Yeah I mean one of the things that I started saying when I started to have these conversations and there has been resistance, even if it’s just a mood, this resistance, and how I’ve sort of broken that down is to say, ‘Look, you know, the company is growing, we’re growing quite rapidly and we’ve got a great team growing, the culture is fantastic and in order for it not to fall over when things get very busy, we’re starting to just put these few extra bits in place, so we’d love if you could help us to implement and, you know, just to watch out for these issues if it’s happening to you’. And it’s sending a very clear but very nice message. It’s quite a supportive way of saying it but I’m saying a very clear message, that if you are doing this right now, you probably need to stop!

Matt: Yeah I love that!

Barbara: So I’m not saying they’re doing it but you know there can be things, you know messing around things on Facebook like that. I don’t mind a bit of that but the clear expectations are absolutely key. And Matt, I wanted to touch on an area, this is something I know we’ve talked about before as well. So getting clear on the expectations, defining it, making sure that you’re both very clear what success looks like, what failure looks like and why and writing it all down. But what about when we get to a situation where your expectations are completely out of alignment with the level of the role. So, for example, you’ve hired a VA and you want them to be a digital strategist – your expectations might be misaligned with the role.

Matt: Yeah I think that’s a great point. If that is the case when you go through this exercise then you may need to look at a restructure within your organization. It’s certainly going to articulate and make clear to you why that relationship probably isn’t working and then you got the opportunity now to go and find and match the right person with the right skillset to what you expect and what you need. So sometimes it might be a restructure internally, sometimes you may have to let a few people go and re-employ based on now what you do expect from the role.

Barbara: Yeah and also I think realizing, obviously a lot of people and a lot of clients that we have, we hire VAs because they’re offshore, they’re very talented and very skilled, never underestimate particularly the Filipino Vas, that’s what I always say. But having said that, I’ve noticed some people confusing a cheaper staff member with a strategist or a coach, not necessarily a coach but more of somebody who can think of strategy for them. And I always try to, in my sort of measuring expectations on the way in, I always say to them they can implement a lot for you but they cannot come up with an idea for you. Certainly not in the early days anyway. After a year of working together, I mean my VAs come up with fabulous ideas for me, they’re almost strategist at this point, but that’s because I’ve built them into that rather than they started out that way!

Matt: Absolutely! Look, it’s like what our friend Chris Ducker talks about in his book, the whole super VA…

Barbara: It’s the super VA, yeah!

Matt: You know and I think that if that’s your expectation, you will be let down, you will be let down! You’re going to find some outstanding people that have amazing skillsets that are going to come and work out with you. Often though it comes down to your ability to train, mentor and help them grow that will take them from being a good performer, to an outstanding performer. I know one of the things that we’ve done in our business around this, we’ve got some great people who love learning and one of the things I’m always trying to learn about my people, I think that’s one thing if you want to take people to the next level, learn what interests them. I’ve got some of my VAs that love learning, they love online, etc. I’ve purchased Facebook advertising courses before with the intension of rolling out Facebook Ads in our businesses. And given them access and said, ‘Can you please go away and watch this, learn what we need to do, share with me what you need me to do and I’ll let you do the rest.’ And the amazing thing is these people coming in were not Facebook trained, certainly had very little, if any, skillset around Facebook advertising but are now what I would deem ‘experts’ and love it because I’ve given them the opportunity to learn and grow.

Barbara: Absolutely yeah! Absolutely and then when you make the environment also safe for them to come up with ideas and to actually suggest things and also to get things wrong, you know, to come up with ideas that maybe aren’t going to work or whatever, but you want to create an environment where they can actually explore their own ideas as well and you just be open to their ideas. And that’s another expectation you could set. If your expectation is that you want them to show initiative then you have to create an environment where there is space and time for them to do that and also the training that they may need to get to that point.

Wow Matt, we thought this was going to be a short show! But this is a tricky topic actually and its one that people really struggle with.

Matt: Absolutely! And you know what? I think just in wrapping up, let me reiterate what I think the four most important things are:

Number one – getting clear on what your expectations are and writing them down. I can’t say that enough, you must write them down. Don’t just think about it, you need to write it down.

Number two – getting clear metrics about what success and what failure looks like around meeting or not meeting your expectations.

Number three – making sure you communicate the expectations with your team both having the written version in front of them and verbally and getting them to repeat back to you their interpretation of what you’ve communicated to them, and

Number four – making sure that your expectations are realistic for the role that you’ve invited them in to your business to fill. Are they in the right seat on the bus? Does their skillset serve your expectations and the business? And getting clear on that!

So, I loved this episode Barb! Thank you for your time and your contributions, really it’s been great.

Barbara: Yeah, this is fantastic! It’s even refining my own processes as we talk about it. I know you and I have both been taking little notes going, ‘Oh must implement that one!’ Because even though we are talking about these topics together, you’re constantly learning. There’s always opportunity to learn new tweaks and new things and I guess that is what the show is all about just you know taking these tips and implementing them and actively doing them and I know Matt you’ve done this with your virtual teams, I’m doing this with virtual teams and this stuff works, it really, really works! And the people who get success, what I’m seeing are people who actually take this stuff and implement it and the people who tend to flounder with this or even outright fail are the people who think they can just keep going a hundred miles an hour and never slow down to actually do this little bit of work in order to get leverage later! Plenty to talk about in our upcoming shows Matt!! I’m excited!!

Matt: Me too!

Barbara: Next week!

Matt: Have an amazing week Barb, I’ll talk to you then.

Barbara: See you then!

Matt: See you!

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.

Let us know what your key takeout has been from this episode and join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

In this episode:

01:21 – The scenario

04:39 – Common pitfalls when onboarding your VA

06:10 – Check your systems and processes

07:42 – Don’t overcomplicate things

09:11 – Regularly review your systems

11:00 – “People run the systems…”

12:45 – Have a strong vision for your business

13:32 – Expectations misalignment

15:07 – It starts with you, the owner

16:14 – Managing your relationships

16:51 – Viewing your virtual staff as an asset

19:26 – Am I setting my team up to fail?

20:22 – Fostering strong communication

22:09 – Let’s recap

24:42 – Wrapping things up

Matt: Hey welcome to the show this week! I’m joined by my co-host Barbara Turley, hey Barb!

Barbara: Hey Matt! How’s it going? Good week?

Matt: I’m having a great week and yourself?

Barbara: Ah yes pretty good! Busy as always but you know going well.

Matt: Excellent, excellent! Barbara I’m really, really looking forward to today’s episode. It’s really interesting, in the conversation we’re having, just preparing about some of the challenges that you’ve been witnessing with virtual teams this week and I’m really excited about the challenge you’re going to share with everyone today and how you are going to unpack that and help everyone learn how to solve this. Do you want give everyone an insight into what’s been happening?

Barbara: Sure, yes! Well I had a really interesting situation happen this week where, you know, we often send feedback forms out to our clients about how their VAs are doing in Virtual Angel Hub, where as you know we recruit and train Vas. And I call it ‘compare the pair’ because we’ve had this interesting one come back where we have the same VA working on two different client accounts, part time on both accounts. Both businesses are similar business models so they’re not that dissimilar, they both do similar task lists and one arguably is more complex than the other. But the business that is a bit complex, the feedback about the VA was she is fantastic, I don’t know what I would do without her, her attention to detail has been amazing, her initiative, you know, glowing, glowing report! The other business has come back with a list of complaints, says the attention to detail is low, basically not happy, not wholly happy with this VA, we want to have a whole discussion about it. So I find this very interesting because how can the same VA with the same experience and the same attitude have two dramatically different situations occur with different clients. So it’s been a tricky one for me to unpack.

Matt: Absolutely! So just to reiterate, we have very similar businesses, similar task lists that the VA has to perform for the both businesses. One raves about them and the other is considering what, dropping them?

Barbara: Yeah I would say not dropping them yet but I know from the feel that we’re heading in that direction.

Matt: So let’s call it, frustrated and unhappy!

Barbara: So frustrated, yeah! And unhappy.

Matt: So it’s really interesting isn’t it? Because again, just in the analysis piece here, you know you’ve got what’s the common denominator, well the common denominator is the virtual assistant. The environment is very similar and so where do the differences lie? The differences lie in the managers and leaders really, when you really start to look at this.

Barbara: Yeah absolutely, yeah! You know of course the natural tendency in this situation I’ve noticed with clients of ours, I mean this is natural, is the person who’s not having such a great experience, the first thing they want to do is they want to get rid of them, they immediately say, ‘well clearly the VA doesn’t really know what she’s doing and I just need someone else’. And we’ve had this situation happen a couple of times you know, and sometimes, and that particular client will end up going through strings of VAs so this is an add-on to this where they’ll end up having the similar problem happening, recurring with different VAs that go in.

Matt: Interesting and I think the thing to highlight here is there’s a common denominator in that scenario that you just posed, which is, it’s the business owner.

Barbara: Yes, so the common denominator in the first scenario is the same VA, different outcome and in the second sort of add-on, it’s same business owners, same client, different VAs.

Matt: And you know Barbara I think in my work as a business coach and I literally coach a thousands of businesses every year, I see this all the time. I see this both with virtual teams as well as, you know, people that you employ directly in your offices and the like, physical teams where business owners or managers are getting frustrated and so they’re hiring people and people aren’t doing what they desire, work the way they want, in the right manner. They get rid of that person, bring in another, same thing happens. They do it again and the interesting thing is, they never stop to look and ask themselves, ‘well, what’s the challenge here?’, ‘where’s this breaking down over and over again?’. And so what they end up doing is playing out insanity, they keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Barbara: And getting more frustrated along the way because obviously doing that you’re developing a vicious cycle of hiring, firing, hiring, firing, retraining – it’s very exhausting on any business owner.

Matt: And costly! Extremely costly! So, what I’d love to do for our listeners right now is probably give a little bit of a checklist or methodology that you can go through in unpacking and solving this kind of problem, what do you think Barb?

Barbara: That sounds great! I’m really keen to delve into this with you because you’ve done this with so many businesses, so that’s why I’m excited about today’s show because I’ll definitely learn a lot from this.

Matt: Fantastic! So the first thing that I always recommend in this scenario, let’s just go with scenario one. You’ve got one VA serving two people doing similar tasks but getting different results. For me if your virtual assistant or anyone in your team is not getting the result that you desire, the first thing I always go back to is the system that they’re implementing. We need to remember that the systems are what drive our business and our people drive the systems. So in our own businesses and together with the companies that we coach, that’s the starting point. Let’s go back to the system. Is there a system flaw? Is there a chink in the chain? It’s often new system and processes that are being applied, something’s often been forgotten, we haven’t documented something, we haven’t trained something in the right way. So, the first point and the starting point is always to go back to the system and run through the system and ideally what you would do is you would have your virtual team member run through from their model of the world, the system that they’re implementing.

Barbara: Yeah!

Matt: So that you can understand, are they doing it the way that it has been documented? Where is it falling down?

Barbara: It’s funny because, one of the things we do with clients when they come in to Virtual Angel Hub is we actually we talk a lot about their processes and something I’ve been out talking about a lot recently is saying to people, ‘sometimes a mistake is actually a gift because it shows you where there’s a hole in the process’, assuming nothing else is the problem. Often I see business owners and I know you would see this as well, they think they have a process but when you actually go to do it or you watch the person, maybe the VA or your staff member trying to do it, it’s such a complicated process that could be simplified and where there are so many areas where mistakes can happen. I call it the margin for errors. You know, the margin for error in their process is so large that a lot of people are going to end up making mistakes. So this problem of inefficient processes, how do you deal with that one? Or complex processes? I guess what I’m saying is, overly complicated processes.

Matt: I think, look, at the end of the day you need to make things as simple as possible. I think a big mistake I see with processes is people document, you need to do a, b and c when they’re teaching the system, though, they’re not teaching people how to think through what could go wrong or the questions that often you’re asking yourself unconsciously in your head as you implement the system.

Barbara: That’s very valuable! Yeah, yes that’s a really big problem that we see a lot.

Matt: Yeah, so I don’t know that it’s necessarily the complexity of the system, it often comes down to a training issue that you haven’t taught somebody how to think while they’re implementing the system. There’s only so much you can document or get through a video or an audio. It’s teaching people how you think. I think the second part of that is to make sure that you’re reviewing systems regularly and becoming efficient at what you do; you know what I mean? I found a lot of system breakdown occurs because people are trying to cut corners to save time rather than sitting there and working the system and going, how can we become more efficient? As I said, they simply try and cut things out without testing it and hence it leads to some mistakes. So I think the reality is that some systems are simpler than others. There are at times going to be complex parts to anyone’s business and its just addressing those and breaking things down to lowest common denominator, keeping it as simple as possible in order for people to succeed. And just to add to that last bit – it’s setting people up to win, it’s setting people up to succeed.

Barbara: So what about, so number one is check the system and really know how that’s performing. So let’s say that you feel like, you know, the system works well it’s very, you know, its detailed enough etc. Let’s say that’s not the issue, what would be the next thing that we would look at?

Matt: The next thing I would look at is I would try and understand from the person’s perspective, the team members’ perspective where they feel it’s breaking down. So as we mentioned before, systems run the business, people run the systems. So is it a people issue? Is it that my virtual team member is distracted? Have they got the right work environment? Am I communicating in a way that is effective for them? Am I training them the right way? Do they actually have the level of competency that I expect? Do they actually understand what I expect and how I want things done? So I’m asking all these questions around the people side of this so, if the system gets a big tick then we’ll look at the people and I think, are they the right person? Do they have the right skillset? Have I trained them enough? And I guess, are they aligned with me and my business?

Barbara: Yeah, I mean that can be a tricky one too! Because as you know, staff come in to jobs for various different reasons and often I will say to clients, they’re never going to love your business as much as you do, of course. They will, but it’s your baby really and sometimes I think business owners sort of have an expectation on their staff to, I guess, love and adore it all as much as they do. And well that’s nice in theory and I think in reality its – they never love it as much as you do of course. It’s a different relationship with the business.

Matt: Absolutely, absolutely! I think this is where, it was going to be my fourth point but I’ll make it now – I think this is where having a strong set of values and having a vision for the company helps people buy into something bigger.

Barbara: Yeah, that’s a good point!

Matt: So I think often with these breakdowns with people, and again coming back to the original scenario – person A loves the VA, person B it’s not working for them – there’s a mismatch, the mismatch comes because it could be a values misalignment or a culture misalignment within the business, or often there’s an expectations misalignment.

Barbara: I think that’s a huge one actually, I think expectations misalignment is a big one.

Matt: And this often comes about because the core values and the expectations have never been documented and the people within the company have never been educated around this. So there’s this assumption that, well they’re just going to do it the way that I expect them to do it, but you’ve never clearly defined how you expect them to do it. And I think this is very, it’s a very personal thing. I’ve coached companies before where you’ve got two business owners sharing a virtual assistant and the two owners have very different philosophies. You’ve got owner number one that needs to be updated constantly or effectively micromanages, but you’ve got owner number two who is more deadline driven and doesn’t mind how the virtual assistant gets from point A to point B as long as they get there by the due date. There’s always going to be challenges there because of the misalignment, that person will probably only ever meet the expectations of one of those owners. And so the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, number one – am I clear on what I expect? and, number two – is my virtual team member clear then on what I expect? And so it starts with you!

Barbara: Yeah rather than making assumptions.

Matt: That’s right!

Barbara: There are a lot of assumptions made in all these situations I think!

Matt: The reality is Barb, that with a lot of these challenges, both with virtual teams and local teams, it often comes back to the owner, manager or leader and it’s often because they’re so focused on so many different things, so many different areas of the business, ‘I’ve got to get to breakeven’, ‘I’ve got to keep the cash flow happening’, ‘I’ve got to market!’, ‘I’ve got to sell!’, ‘I’ve got to deliver!’. There’s so many things that this piece, which you know Steven Cavi would call ‘important but not urgent’ task of defining your core values and defining the expectations that you have gets forgotten and then we wonder why we have these people challenges.

Barbara: Yeah that’s not working! And interestingly, I love that you touched on this whole leadership piece because I want to know what your thoughts are on how important is, I mean I know it’s important, but how much can the relationship between a staff member – be they a virtual or not – and a leader, affect the sort of outcomes that you’re getting?

Matt: Well at the end of the day, people are people, aren’t they? So relationship, I think, is vitally important. We need to get clear that, you know, in managing people it’s about managing your relationship and in all relationships is what you give to it not what you can get from it. That’s why I think a lot of business relationships, employer–employee relationships fall down is because the employer is focused on what they can get from the employee as opposed to how can we work together in a win-win scenario to achieve what it is we’re setting out to achieve.

Barbara: I love that because there’s something I’m really noticing out there is the people I’m seeing that are doing really well with their virtual staff and I know it’s the same in regular offices as well. When the business owner truly sees this person as an asset that they can use and grow and you know an asset to be grown for the betterment of their company, they do really, really well! But naturally when we’re in business and, as you say, cash flow – one of the greatest you know headaches that any businesses goes through – and sometimes when cash flow is tight or things are a bit rough, even if you don’t realize it internally see your staff or teams as a real cost and a drain on you and I think that’s when relationships start to break down because you may not realize the it changes your tone, it changes how you communicate with them and they feel it and the whole relationship starts to kind of breakdown. I have seen that happen a little bit as well and I wonder what you think about that?

Matt: Absolutely! I think it’s all about personal management, isn’t it Barb? It’s understandable when you’ve got cash flow challenges which, by the way again in my experience in coaching many businesses, whether you’re a startup or, you know, I’ve seen companies turning over $20 million plus, there’s still cash flow challenges from time to time and so managing cash flow is one of the most critical parts of any business. But the reality is, you’re right, it’s about cash is tight, I want to get the most out of this person and I want to make sure I’m maximizing my return, why aren’t they getting things when I need them? And there’s all this pressure on you that you then project on to them and often they don’t understand why. They’re just there doing their thing and wondering ‘What have I done wrong? What’s going on today?’.

Barbara: That starts to induce fear as well, fear and uncertainty in the staff member and I’ve noticed that once people with the VAs that we have along the way, I’ve noticed that once they slip a bit, they think they’re not good enough you know I’m dealing with Filipinos and that actually culture over there I mean this is everywhere but constantly with them I’ve noticed that they start to feel that they’re not good enough, mistakes start to escalate because they start to really fear for their job, they fear for themselves and mistakes can actually escalates because of that.

Matt: Absolutely! I think anyone put under that kind of pressure is going to make mistakes. So it’s like what we were talking about earlier, setting people up to win. But you now we’re talking on this topic of communication, that’s where it comes down to. It’s another area where this needs to be addressed in order to solve this problem is the communication, ‘Am I communicating clearly?’, ‘Am I giving clear, concise instructions that the other person, my virtual team member, understands?’. You know, its remembering that for many of these virtual team members, English is a second language for them.

So one of the little techniques that I use regularly is I get my team to repeat back the tasks so that I hear it, I’ll get them to either type it back to me or say it back to me so I can hear it and refine it right at the front end.

Barbara: That’s great! Remember we did a whole show on this, obviously communication, I mean, it’s so key to remember to invest time with your communication with your virtual team member.

Matt: Absolutely! And I think with the communication side, one habit that I have gotten into with my teams is, the cycle of our business is that once a quarter we have a road show and a whole heap of events and the reality is there’s a lot of pressure, there’s a lot of stress. You know, we’re traveling from city to city and I think we hosted 6 to 7 events in the space of 5 days, so it’s full on. And I always preface to the team, I say, ‘Guys you know obviously we’re riding the big wave now, you know it’s kind of like the calm before the storm when we’re riding the wave, just keep in mind that I’m going to probably be short and I’m going to just be giving you things in bullet points. Please don’t take offense to it, I’m going to rushing it, I’m going to be on stage, off stage, a whole heap of stuff.’ They understand, so they don’t take offence to it. So if I give short sharp responses or instructions they understand because Matt’s got a lot going on at the moment.

Barbara: Yeah, not that I’m not good enough and the relationship has changed or I’ve done something wrong because that’s what starts happening particularly in written communication. You know short sharp written stuff; I find can sound sharper than the person meant to. So just to recap then because this is such a fascinating area you know and often I think people are getting rid of very good virtual teams or virtual staff too quickly is what I’m seeing. Sometimes we need to get rid of the person but sometimes it’s actually not the person.

So let’s just recap the points you made there so, first step is – look at the systems, system drives the business, people drive the systems, so system’s first. And after that it’s important to look at the person, but not necessarily I would say don’t immediately look at the flaws of the person, let’s look at how that person is implementing the system, how they have understood the training etc. before we move on to ‘Is this just a bad employee?’ for example. And then the relationship and the communication, the relationship and making sure that is, I guess, a positive reinforcing type of relationship rather than an underlying negativity that may be there that can affect communication. And then I love your point about the making sure that there’s no mismatch with values and expectations. So that both people understand what success looks like and what we’re striving for.

Matt: And I think all of these four points Barb need to form part of your recruitment process in recruiting your virtual teams and they also need to form part of your performance review criteria in assessing them on their performance against these criteria as well. So it shouldn’t only be a checklist that’s used when there’s a problem.

Barbara: Yeah can be ongoing – this actually formulates the entire backbone of your virtual team by the sounds of it, from recruitment, right through to ongoing management.

Matt: Absolutely, absolutely!

Barbara: I’ll definitely be taking that point! It’s very valuable to me.

Matt: So if we just bring this all back to where we started with this in the scenario, where you’ve got a virtual team member serving client A, who loves them and is getting a great result and client B, who is having some challenges. I’m sure if we went through each of these four points very quickly, client B would understand and start to highlight the gaps either in the client or in the systems within their business.

Barbara: Yes, I mean from my own knowledge of some of the issues I’ve seen, a lot of it comes down to having no systems and processes which we talked about many times and we will many times again on this podcast, is that’s just a road to disaster if you trying to scale a business or you’re trying to build something that is a true business. And I think the other one I see a lot is communication, we did a whole show on this because it’s so important. Communication style and the relationship, even the unconscious relationship is very, very important to look at and to look at yourself as well and how you are viewing your staff. If you’re viewing from an internal place of maybe a little bit of resentment, that sort of thing, the cost vs. asset thing that can really come back and bite people badly. Sometimes they don’t know they’re doing it.

Matt: Absolutely, absolutely! Well Barbara, I think that was great. I mean I hope that’s given you some insights that you can take back and work through some of the challenges.

Barbara: Absolutely! I’ve been furiously write notes Matt, this has been a great episode for me I have to say and I know that given I have got so much out of it, I can imagine people listening will really have an eye opener, a few eye opening realizations having had this process laid out. So thanks for that!

Matt: You’re welcome! Thank you Barb and have a fantastic week and until next week’s episode.

Barbara: Yep! See you then.

Matt: See you then!

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.

The purpose of this show is:

To kick things off in this episode we dived into:

Systems and tools we mention in this show:

Asana Project ManagementSkypeSlack ChatDropvox

In this episode:

01:04 – Using virtual teams for business growth

06:42 – Being a great communicator

08:00 – Create a recurring task list

11:25 – Use a project management tool

13:10 – Create a meeting rhythm with your team

15:35 – Build rapport

18:17 – Be direct in your communications

22:06 – Working out your communication style

26:32 – Slow down to speed up

29:57 – Wrapping things up

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 this task 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: Hey everyone, welcome to the show. I am very excited to be co-hosting with Matt Malouf. Matt how is it going?

Matt: It’s going great Barbara, how are you go today?

Barbara: Pretty good, excited to be kicking off our first show together.

Matt: I sure am. It just seems like yesterday that we were sitting around having a coffee talking about the challenges our clients and we were having with virtual teams, then we came up with the idea for this podcast. And here we are.

Barbara: Absolutely, yeah I know. We were just chatting and saying that one of the things that nobody is talking about is how do we solve some of the challenges that we face when you have virtual teams because it’s not easy. Let’s face it.

Matt: Absolutely. You know, I think the idea and ideal of a virtual team is attractive to a lot of people but then wading through the minefield of challenges like in most teams that you build within business, no one is talking about it and that’s the exciting part about this.

Barbara: Yeah, great. So, obviously you have teams in your business and you’ve been coaching a lot of business who are trying to put teams into lots of businesses.  You’ve got wealth and knowledge of this area.

Matt: Absolutely. Yeah, I think over the last 4-5 years having employed many virtual assistants with myself and virtual teams and coaching a lot of people both Australia and around the world, coaching them how to implement virtual team. I’ve made so much plenty of mistakes and also made success around it. The exciting around me that I can run multiple businesses from my home office and have people virtually around the world working with us to help us grow a successful company. It has been an amazing journey and open mind my eyes to the possibilities around this. What is interesting is that is similar how we met, to working together and your development of your virtual hub.

Barbara: Absolutely, yeah! We are so pinnacle that decision for me. As you know, I have putting virtual assistant to our clients business, clients that I was coaching. And I had a lot of success doing that. I had a lot of success of virtual assistant myself my own business in running multiple different things at the same time. And before I knew it, as you know I was getting phone calls from friends of friends saying “ Hey can you get me some of Virtual Assistant?” before I knew it, virtual angel hub was born.  But the issues I have seen with people trying to get success in this area as been ironing for me too. When we were chatting, it becomes so obvious this podcast is really needed. This show is to help people to get more successful in this area because it isn’t easy.

Matt: Absolutely. And I guess just flowing from there. Barbara, as we talking the real purpose of what we want to achieve with this show is to first to foremost educate everyone on how to implement and maximize the use of virtual teams in your businesses. I think secondly, to provide strategies and tactics throughout the implementation process. And I guess lastly is to talk about our own experiences and case studies. And also interview other successful business owners who we got virtual teams both small and large in there companies so that everyone can hear from others on their experience. I guess the pros and cons, do’s and dont’s of Virtual team.

Barbara: Absolutely, I think one of the exciting things that I am looking for is we got bringing people to talk to us to the listeners from lots of different industries because I bet with you this one I do. Oh that won’t work for me in my industry, you know. And I what I say to people that at the end of the day business is business. It doesn’t really matter what industry that you’re in. The systems and the teams and running people leadership is all the same stuff regardless of the industry.

Matt: Absolutely, I think it was Dan Kennedy who have that phrase with the above his desk in his office that said “It won’t work for me” If I have a dollar doing that I certainly don’t work again. But the reality is as you said the underlying fundamentals don’t change it doesn’t change in this area running a virtual teams either. It’s any area or business do. It’s about learning, it’s about understanding, it’s about implementing. It’s about optimizing. So it’s exciting and I think I certainly have the belief when it comes to virtual team s that every business across the industry can utilize this some way.

Barbara: Absolutely, I have put virtual team into everything from tennis center, to swim schools, to financial advice businesses a lawyer’s office, my own online coaching type businesses and content marketing and Social media. Everything so everything in between can really work. As you know Matt, the challenges, there are couple real challenges that trip people off that you will sees this and I see this and people trip off then get frustrated but that’s when the it doesn’t work for me feeling comes out. I think a lot of clients that I am dealing as well, the can feel down of themselves because they think how is anyone else making this work.  I reckon deal straight o what do you thing is the number 1, what is the number 1 challenge that you think people face When it comes to building virtual team that your saying?

Matt: As I was preparing for today, just that whole question about that number 1. Some of the areas come up. But the one that I think stood out, when I took my notes was really about communication to virtual teams that was appropriate and the best ways to communicate. What are your thoughts, Barbara?

Barbara: Oh you know, when you said that to me when we chatting putting up a show I mean just resonated as me because that would be you know there is a lot of number 1 challenge. One of the biggest one is definitely the communication. Naturally, as I was saying to you as humans we all think that we are effective communicators. We don’t wake up every day gosh I am a terrible communicator. Because we all think that we are very clear but the problem is sometimes what we say on someone us here are two different things that could cause massive breakdowns when it comes. Any team actually virtual teams even more so virtual teams I think

Matt: Absolutely, so what we explore this area of communication. You know what I was thinking Barbara we could do. What we share both of our top 3 communications tips working with virtual teams.

Barbara: Oh yes, definitely, have 3 keywords I’m sure you do too..  Let’s get straight into it. You know, the number 1 thing that I tell clients that whether they coming to virtual hub looking to hire VA or trying to put things into base and before we go out recruiting or we do anything about that client. The first thing we sit down and say they need to document their process in their own business. That sounds incredibly going when you talk process mapping sitting down and writing step by step processes and things. It is very boring and a lot of people are saying we don’t have time for that and my response to that is really “If you invest the time and just take a little time to pause actually thing about what are the recurring task that happen every day , every week, every quarter in my business that me and my business the engine keeps running can be everything from checking email to live websites to keeping up your social media, you know booking appointments whatever. It can be inventory, it can be anything but it’s about getting clear on what are those task are and document to them. It such a way that you are creating system that we can bring a person, like a virtual team or VA to run for you and the beauty around this when I do this several businesses of my own where we are very clear and very deep recurring task list what it means that I can actually swap one of my virtual assistant and putting new one quickly with one minimal training time because it step by step is so clear and it makes my life very stress free and its actually have it running that way like a real oil machine that way.

Matt: Barb, just a quick question when you are talking about recurring task list what’s the frequency of those.

Barbara: Well I run them like this, and this is what we do in clients as well. We get them to write down the daily task list go through the full day. And actually is every single thing that happens to one day the business to keep it going that is required then weekly task, monthly task and quarterly. We actually have those different 4 different recurring task lists. I mean obviously you love this one Matt there are things in there we need to eliminated or automated not necessarily delegated. That’s the whole point the next step. Getting clear task are to keep the business running and that aside from projects. That’s just like the maintenance of the business. A lot of small business owners are doing by themselves. There is an awful lot of task that can be done anyone else they just be clear what it is they are supposed to be doing.

Matt: Absolutely, it just add to that you know it was coaching a lot of clients this week and his got a virtual team and he was saying he’s got each member of a team a daily task list automatically comes up in the teamwork. As a project management tool.

Barbara:  I’ve got a project management tool to make that work. By the way, that is what point on that. You need a project management tool.

Matt: Yeah, we both use Asana. We got success on it in our own businesses. The amazing thing was, his comment about this week was because of this daily recurring list, there is no guessing they each member of the team, knows exactly what is expected to them when its due and then they communicate through the project management tool when its done or when its stop. Inline of the theme communication today, how brilliant is that where you don’t even need to have a conversation somebody because it’s all there, and they can start working and get straight to it.

Barbara: Yeah, what is important as well, when I love system and process. I just love everything written out document very clear. The other thing is that its very clear to the person doing task what success looks like for you. So they know they doing, if you have relate them properly you lead them of the path of towards success in the path rather than allowing them pause and trying to make stuff stop. You know, think about what you might like things like that. I like the written form of communication. So I guess my key take away for this particular point would be to try to take the time as actually invest the time in thinking about your business and what task needs to be done and how exactly the steps for each task you know. So matt what would be your top tip of communication do you think.

Matt: My top tip is really about creating a meeting in rhythm with your directly port with your virtual team what I mean about rhythm is how frequent you should meeting with your virtual team. I give a couple of examples here, I think it is very role dependent my Virtual/Assistant Vanessa who has worked  for me 3 years now we meet daily. We have a verbal conversation on skype and goes for 10 minutes is just checking in I own and operate 4 companies. So we are just checking in what is going on in each company where everything’s at, where she may be stuck. And give me an opportunity to delegate additional task if when needed. In one of our companies, we have online manager. It’s appropriate for me to meet weekly, he working with bigger projects so we have weekly meeting where we discuss each of the active projects where it at, how the rest of the team is operation, are we on schedule, behind ahead where is all at. At other times it may require meetings, to discuss issues or come up solution work together on the next steps. But I think communication perspective in choosing the most appropriate rhythm base from the role is critical. I think just to add to that as you need to visualize this person forget where they are in the world. Imagine, they are in your office sitting next to you.

Barbara: Yes absolutely.

Matt: They are in there sitting next to you and you are working in their role and yours how often you will meet with them. How often you will converse with them. How would that operate? It just take the same rhythm and apply it into the virtual assistant and utilize whether its tools like guide, goto meeting, google hangouts, whatever maybe utilize those communication channels in order to support your meeting with them.

Barbara:  I think as well on that Matt, I love that I was thinking you know we all work on office environment. There’s one thing we love in office environment together its always bit a fun here and there in the work day. When I find this, sometimes people don’t when they have virtual teams they think they can have that with their virtual team but you can. You can have a bond term or a little bit fun virtual teams as well just on skype or you know chat, slap chat or whatever you are using. But you know that is how you build a lot of rapport. It doesn’t always have to be you know, every second the task can tick off. It can be just times it just as rapport building as well.

Matt: Absolutely, again regardless with where somebody is in the world people are people. And people are attracted to relationship. That is what we all desire. That is we all want.

Barbara: hmm hmm. It’s funny that point of the meeting, you know I have been working clients virtual teams without having working out virtual assistant hasn’t work out and what I dealt in you know there is one particular case where I found that the person that I have spoken VA probably 3 weeks in a way just got lost, got mistakes, having I am just really saying I mean “Minimum we created a very clear agenda and even checking that just says how is it going? You know, rather than allowing someone that they can flounder there is no leadership I guess meetings develop rapport and a sense of leadership as well for you as business owners especially if you have a clear agenda for me.

Matt: Absolutely, I think the agenda is critical otherwise it just conversation isn’t it?

Barbara: Yeah people can get lost if you know. In order to lead is something that I discover a lot of people get struggle with because trying to be nice in meeting chit chat and in chit chat goes on for too long, there’s no action steps or conclusion reach of the meeting. It’s important of having an agenda and be fluent in having an agenda. I guess my second tips in terms of communication where you at you know when to meeting I like the idea of role dependent. Because somebody is your working directly with you. You know, my VA working directly to me. I talk to her every day, I mean its constant communication.

Matt: Yeah. How do you feel weekly meeting should go forth?

Barbara: I think half an hour, if just got a clear agenda you should be able to tick through quite a lot of stuff in just 30 minutes. IT depends on the size of the business. It is also depends on the complexity of the roles. You know I don’t think 2 hour meeting is warranted but you know half hour to 1 hour with the clear agenda and get to the point. And building rapport but gets to the point and have action items at the end of the meeting so that everyone knows what they are supposed to be doing and after meeting. I also think be very direct. I Guess my 3rd point will be people avoid, I find business owners avoiding direct conversation when issues come up. So dancing around issues causes things to fest faster and resentment grows. And then, when resentment builds with your team you can. We are all guilty of this, you know we can your tone can change let people know that you are annoyed without saying. I think its better to be upfront or be direct mistakes happening, if work is sloppy, if things are slipping call a meeting and very direct but nice. You can be nice and direct. You know what I am saying. Do you find that on your clients you are working with?

Matt: I Certainly do. Do you have examples this direct communication you’ve been experience for the last 4 months.

Barbara: Yes I do, I do. So for example we have issues for the last forth night you know particular in. It was not in my business, it was my client business. They are really struggling because the VA was they weren’t there when they supposed to be there. It was this issue that she is supposed to working for me during this time and although the task been done. I don’t know when they are being done. In the end we actually 3 of us got in the call together. I was very abdoment I wanted the VA on that call, otherwise it turns around between client and me. Its better everybody on the call lets address the issues. We actually got one of my assistant manages the account call saying look here is the issue, we understand task has been done; we know you are not available during the times when you need to be available. What actually transpired was its actually personal issue going on that particular VA and we got the bottom of it and we resolved the issue but it wasn’t that about bad employee or they are personal issue that is going on that we were able to help resolve and work around an everything everyone is happy. Everyone felt good about themselves and the whole issue got resolve and everyone is happy in the end.

Matt: How long those meetings go forth for?

Barbara: half an hour

Matt: Get straight to it.

Barbara:  Yes get straight into it. Everybody, thought the meeting was going to be bad.

Matt: I think that just a great example and I think that direct communication is critical in any relationship in any business relationship whether it just sitting next to you

Barbara: Even in the marriage

Matt: Hundred percent in the marriage, is my wife sitting next to you telling me the say that.

Barbara: Yes, she emailed me earlier (laugh)

Matt: Yeah I think that absolutely, direct communication is critical. Its easy jump ahead Barb and take 2 and number 3. That is ok,

Barbara: I am sorry I am out the line Matt

Matt: That is ok, when you are in the roll you are in the roll. My second one is I really think about that is really in line what we are talking about here in direct communication is being critical of your own communication style. Understanding what preference is. Let me give you an example, my preference is verbal communication. I am not very good and I don’t have the patience for large emails lots of typing lots of list, a lot are able to just jump on the skype call and quickly download what I need and have it done. The challenge with that though is that a lot of that will get lost because you know recorded there’s no record of it. So one of the ways around this that we use our business, we use Asana is that lets say I jump in the call with Vanessa with my personal assistant. We will have asana open and throughout that call I may download half a dozen tasks that I need done. What I can do in real time, I can watch input into Asana with due dates on them. There is a record of it, it works for Vanessa and works for me.

Barbara: She writes it you get her task that means she is writing she understand it that is very effective.

Matt: Absolutely.

Barbara: That is a great idea, then you are using verbal communication that works for you and she can also see that she’s interpreting what you’re saying and how she writing her task herself and be done. That’s great idea.

Matt: And then if I am on the run, when I am then also doing I use a little app called drobvox with the V. It enables me to have voice recording that get uploaded into a dropvox so Vanessa have access into it. SO if I am out about up I think task to be done, again rather than trying to type out messages. I will leave a quick dropvox message with bullet points. When I leave that message it’s critically important that you speak slowly that they can capture everything that you’re downloading to them. Again, we have process along with your first start point, we have a process when a dropvox message comes in which is transcribe, if its task attached to it they get put in asana. The audio is also uploaded to Asana as a record. So again, there is no he said, she said. It’s all there. It’s all very transparent. It’s simple.

Barbara: So this is great way for people who were yawning talking write process. A lot of people hate doing that. I totally understand that. Here is a way where you can actually get one of your Virtual Assistant or one of your team to actually help you create processes in your business for you. You can do this dropvox idea or verbal communication and have them as a role, it could be a project they can do when they build the system and process for the business without you actually write down with yourself.

Matt: Absolutely, I will add to that one of the methods that I use. I am one of these people, I love system I hate creating them. I don’t have the patience for them. For me the number 1 tools business for me is white board a3 pen sharpie markers.

Barbara: Ah you are one of those

Matt: I am very tech tile. I will literally have voice recorder open and I will be drawing a mind map while talking out the process. I finished that I take a photo of the whiteboard and sent the audio with the whiteboard to someone of my team and will then create a flowchart using the flowchart software as well as transcription what just I talked about in the system,  Right there.

Barbara: Fantastic I love that idea, Will do that immediately. (laugh) I love that idea

Matt: I think that as I said appropriate communication style but fit you and for them except. I don’t think it’s fair with any person of your team communicate that solely works for you. You have to work with them in what they need as well. My third and final point is a really quick one but I really do think it’s critical. I think many business owners has so much going on that we are going such hyper speed that often our communication is really fast. When you are doing with a virtual team particularly where you working people overseas where English is there second language. You got to remember that they have to listen in English but translate it from there to understand it as well. So one of the things, whenever that we got virtual teams both domestically and internationally whenever I speak to very international team. I have to send to myself prior to the call and slow my speech down in order speaks clearly so that I don’t need to repeat myself.

Barbara: In the language, you will find yourself in the industry juggle; I have a client that fell into this trap. Using industry jargon and then task goes completely wrong because somebody don’t really understand what work. Even I don’t understand jargon, I wasn’t in the industry but yeah clearer simple language to the point.

Matt: if industry jargon is relevant you need to train with them that you need to educate them in that. So absolutely, I think simple, clear, slowly spoken in communication is critical. I talk about this one not just for my theoretical perspective but it works. Every time, I still formally half of it. Even half of my virtual teams for many years now where I on the run, I quickly done download something to them, and gets lost because I am talking too fast.

Barbara:  Yes, I supposed I tend to lean towards for me that my communication sounds. Probably I have a tendency to speak way too fast and I got this funny accent sort of this. That is written work is better for me in that way.

Matt: I think it’s that combination, and I working through it. One thing to that I am just working with this I know the dictation devices becoming more or more accurate. I know the phone I use dictation quite a bit in sending messages in the like to the team also. SO that’s another way to combine both. In the upcoming book in the process that I am writing which is on theme around we are doing is podcast. 90% of the writing on the using dictation software though it’s becoming very powerful and it solves that problem of written and verbal communication. Isn’t it?

Barbara: Absolutely, absolutely, you know Matt I think the key thing we told so many times that we bringing virtual teams, bringing team on board in the business is not as easy as people think but it’s so worth it if you are making it work.  It can work on does work. It just put a little bit focus a little bit time and investment against in making it work. Would you agree Mat?

Matt: Absolutely. And you know what just to add I think may not be easy, but it’s simple. It’s simple quick principles. If you think about the 6 points we are talking about today. These are simple principles and not isolated to virtual teams success it’s in all relationship that you have. And keeping them in mind the simple fundamentals don’t shift whether you got local or international teams.

Barbara: Absolutely, you know so many things in right mind is buzzing with all the topics we can cover flow on this and the next few weeks and the all different shows that I am pretty excited.

Matt: Absolutely, it’s been a blast I really enjoyed this.

Barbara:  Looking forward to next week. Hey guys make sure you join us every week this virtual success shows we are really deligate this issue on. We are make sure we will get you guys really success with your virtual teams and they will work for you because when it does its explosively good for your business. Would you agree Matt? I’m sure you would.

Matt: 100 percent. Barb, you have a fantastic week and I look forward to the next episodes.

Barbara: Absolutely, you too. Thanks everyone

Matt: Thank you

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 all grow together. Find out more with the insides scoop in outsourcing success by going to our website, virtualsuccesshow.com. Until next time! Thanks for listening

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.