The Virtual Success Show

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02:23 How to get the right mindset when pivoting

05:11  How to listen more effectively

08:55 Rising into a pivot from a negative mindset

13:05  The Next Steps

15:52  The Pivot Runway

20:26 The Important thing about pivoting

22:30 Final thoughts

25:09 Wrapping things up

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

Barbara Turley: Hey everyone social medialand… Welcome to another episode of our special COVID-19 series of the Virtual Success Show podcast. I’m your host, Barbara Turley and today I am joined by somebody who has become somewhat of a friend. Jenny Blake is author of pivot, the book called “Pivot: The only move that matters is your next one” and she also hosts the podcast, Jenny what’s the name of the podcasts?

Jenny Blake: Pivot with Jenny Blake

Barbara Turley: Yeah so welcome to the show, Jenny and she’s here to talk to us today about this whole concept of pivoting, it’s very easy to talk about it and everybody out there right now is talking about how in this crisis, that you know of course there’s gonna be opportunity there’s gonna be opportunity absolutely everywhere because in every crisis there is and those who know how to pivot, and those who can handle the pace of pivoting and pull it off can do quite well. From my own experience over the last what, we’re five weeks into this whole thing, 5-6 weeks into this thing and what I have personally found difficult and I wanted to talk to Jenny about this today is, you know when you’re coming out of saving your business in the initial stages of the crisis and then you have to try to shift very quickly into a different frame of mind, which is the creative side of yourself.

To try to pivot your business and get the animal spirits flowing again of entrepreneurship and it’s hard to wake up every day and to try and get yourself into the right mindset to do it, when you’ve come out of kind of being you know, beaten over the head every day with your ops and trying to save your clients and save the business. So Jenny, welcome to the show and talk to us about you know, how do we quickly shift this mindset and how much of it is mindset, if you can talk to us about that. 

Jenny Blake: Well there’s so much that you said there and I think one thing is giving ourselves permission to be on this roller coaster and have, that’s really one we do train for us entrepreneurs, is that exact journey, that exact roller coaster, but right now during a global pandemic, a crisis, the volume to such metaphors, the volume on that station just got turned all the way up to a ten. So we’re gonna, I feel that the highs are high and the lows are pretty low and what you described Barbara is so important is, I don’t know about you but I also, simultaneous to all the stress I felt a lot of adrenaline tried to navigate every single day these first five weeks and I do a lot of keynote speaking and traveling for work, all of that was canceled, not all of it went straight to virtual.

So there is a big lull in my business and a lot of companies that I do large-scale pivot programs have their budgets on hold because they’re doing the same thing we are, trying to batten down hatches, tighten the belts and weather the storm. So, I found myself with adrenaline, the highs and lows and then as you said, now, they’re still, I still feel we’re in listening mode, a little bit of what do people really need.

There is a lot of noise now of everyone who is kind of freaking out and figuring you know how do we pivot during this time, so for me listening comes a little bit before creating and sometimes in parallel too and during the creation process and part of the skill of this and entrepreneurs have already a great head start is navigating the creative process, staying open to that, staying receptive so that we’re not in panic mode because you can’t create from panic mode. While still holding the operational side in our minds and still addressing that because I don’t think we’re done making those shifts either.

Barbara Turley: Yes, I love that you’ve said listening, because I definitely I think the pressure I was feeling, I can imagine a lot of people out there are feeling the same, is that you feel this pressure to, “Okay I’ll fix that, I’ve done that bit, I now need to pivot” and you’re sort of thinking well, I actually did it quite quickly and I developed this whole new thing that we were going to go out to market with and we haven’t, because something in my gut has sort of said to me, “Hold on, maybe just follow the horse up there for a second”.

I’ve questioned why I been holding off, it doesn’t feel quite right yet, and probably because I think what you’re saying I just went straight for the pivot and didn’t necessarily listen that deeply and the market is still trying to figure out what it’s doing itself and where this is all landing. But how long should we listen for? I mean you know, when you say listening, can you give us some tips around how to sort of, how to listen, how to listen more effectively to what’s really out there.

Jenny Blake: I love what you just highlighted which is listening to your own intuition and I’ll give you a similar example with all my big corporate programs on pause or cancelled or postponed. I started to think, well should I just email all my former coaching clients and bring on a whole slew of coaching work which is what I did to sustain myself as bridge income for nine years but I made the commitment to myself in 2020 that I wanted to work on the business, not delivering services. So even though I like coaching, in fact I often love coaching, I’ve been doing it since 2008. I, just like you, I’m hesitating because there’s something about it that isn’t honoring my original intention and where I saw myself growing in the vision.

It would almost be a move, a stopgap move and I’m not ready to make that move yet and I do think that it’s important to pause until you feel very clear, that yes I would choose this path, not just out of fear but out of excitement and possibility because otherwise even the pivot you were thinking of making with your team there’s probably a very valid reason that you haven’t hit the launch button yet and it’s important to know what those are and I think that’s part of not freaking out and that’s a privilege depending on how much cash runway each of it has as well, so there may come a point where that runway is totally gone and we need to do whatever it takes and that’s fine too, but what you’re highlighting is not jumping straight to whatever it takes such that you’re digging yourself out of a project-based hole on the other side of this, in addition to financial.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s really good advice, yeah

Jenny Blake: In terms of specific strategies for listening, things like getting on the phone with former clients, current clients, and you Barbara, potential clients, so the reason we’re here today is that instead of having someone on your team, take my inquiry about working with you, you got on the phone and so in a way, that helps you get more closely in touch with the people that you’re serving and what they need-

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I was telling you that I needed, I felt the need to know these calls with clients now because I wanted to listen to what people were asking for now. So actually, there might be, I suppose I was kind of listening.

Jenny Blake: And it puts you in closer touch with the pulse of your business and your client base and I’ll share just one more strategy because I think it’s brilliant, my friend Leanne Hughes, she hosts a podcast called First-time facilitator in Australia. She put her listening to her right out on the podcast, she said “If any of you listening want to book me for 20 minutes, I just want to hear what’s on your mind, here’s my Calendly link and let’s chat”. So that’s an open call you know, it goes far beyond, even her current clients and just anybody that happens to be listening, so imagine, though I call it serendipity popcorn of that. Who’s gonna schedule? and Barbara, say, to you and your team’s credit, you also have an open scheduling link on your website, so it’s very broad, in a way you’re constantly listening by doing that.

Barbara Turley: Yeah and what I wanted to sort of veer into now is, I think for me, what ended up happening and you know, I like to share my own experience with this, so you know you guys listening to this, this is actually coming from my own experience, what I’ve been going through and I know others are going through this. I sort of realized that I had made that knee-jerk reaction of thinking that I had to pivot, because everyone’s talking about it but maybe you don’t have to, so I just want to talk, I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that I might not need to and maybe it will be distracting to pivot but I want to just focus on for a second.

The businesses that have been decimated, right… there are some that are just been completely decimated, cash flow completely gone to zero and maybe they’re in a really bad headspace and they’re struggling to figure out, do I just give up, you know am I just dead in the water or how do you come out of that and then rise into a pivot from that mindset.

Jenny Blake: Well, what a great question and I can’t even say I’m the expert on that because we’re all still living through it, it’s almost I’m picturing the phoenix rising from the ashes, we just don’t know what the phoenix looks like. The entrepreneur, the chef, the restaurant owner, you know the person, salon owner, there’s so many businesses, like you said that are just decimated. We don’t know if all of those businesses will survive, I’m sure there’s a percentage of people who are adamant that they come back online and they do whatever it takes to get back.

Then they’re gonna be some that take this time to pause and reflect and say “Was I happy with the way the business was going in my lifestyle and do I want to do things differently” and I think that’s for every individual person to sit with and they call it, this is a time of chaos and complete loss of control and even for so many people probably, the dark night of the soul, which I just heard someone on a podcast said, it’s the dark night of the ego. I think it was [inaudible] it’s the dark night of the ego, because the soul is light and the soul knows there is growth that can happen but it’s so hard when you’re right in the middle of it and they might not know what to do yet.

I mean part of the listening in that moment is actually just saying, I’m stuck here, show me one next step, and kind of surrendering every single day, to say I have no clue what to do, I am heartbroken, I’m devastated, I am under so much pressure, what’s just one thing I could do today.

Barbara Turley: I’m almost feeling like, you know as you were talking, I was thinking, you know, it’s actually okay for anyone listening out there that is in this situation, it’s also okay that if your pivot is to pivot into pause. That maybe, that is the listening, that maybe like you were saying, someone might actually look deep inside and say “Do you know what, I actually hated that business anyway, I was stressed out all the time”. Yes, things are terrible but maybe it is time for you to just pause and just to kind of get out in nature and you know, well, we can’t get out much because we’re all in isolation but you know to try to sit with yourself. And those who feel differently and loved what it was they were doing well, I suppose it doesn’t cost anything to get on the phone and talk to people like we’ve just been saying and I’ve been talking to people who are in the same industries as me, do the same business as me, clients, friends, people in different industries.

I’ve gotten on this podcast more just to talk to people and I find the more that I’m talking to people, the more ideas, the more my creativity is coming back and my energy is coming back because everyone’s sharing together. So maybe that’s the thing that you know anyone kind of really stuck at the bottom of the barrel right now can think about doing.

Jenny Blake: Yeah, I’m noticing too, like a little more creativity, the more I accept what all has just happened, you know. It’s just kind of, okay, that’s all happened, now from here Where do we go?  Where now? Where do I feel called?, in a way it’s just page one or turning, closing the chapter on one book of our businesses and then we’re almost starting a new book now and how are we gonna write it, what’s it gonna be like, I also think that it’s very hard to build the plane while flying it. That’s something that you hear often especially in business, it’s really hard to do, that it’s hard to get clear on your systems, and your software, and your budget, and your team, while serving clients, and supporting people every day, and trying to make sales, and trying to negotiate contracts, and try to… so there’s a lot that when things slow down this much, for some of us, not everybody, there’s a real chance to recalibrate and actually refine a lot of that stuff behind the scenes. Which I know is something you and your team help people with.

Barbara Turley: Yeah we have been doing a lot of that recently, yeah. So I’m interested to delve and this might be a tricky question, I just thought of it on the hub, but the concept of the book, the only moves that matters is your next one. What I love about that statement is that, how far ahead should we be thinking? like you know, should we be trying to plan this all out? Or is it really only the next step that you do need to think about? And maybe just sort of unpack that for us a little bit more.

Jenny Blake: In the book, I say that the five-year question is totally out of date, there’s even more in the business and entrepreneurship space now of saying you don’t even need a business plan, if anything it should be one-page, the authors of a book called “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work”, they’re also the co-founders of Basecamp, they call it a one-page business guest, that they say, no matter what-

Barbara Turley: I don’t even have one, I’ve never done one.

Jenny Blake: Exactly, 

Barbara Turley: I just kind of go with it, you know

Jenny Blake: And what I find so funny is that, for years I didn’t have any specific goals in my business, starting when pivot came out in 2016, I didn’t, I had ideas and I had things that would be cool of course, I wanted it to get momentum and traction and ideally hit a tipping point someday and earn out the advance, but I was never really attached to all these very serious quarterly, okay hours, and business goals that everyone talks about. And last year I set a revenue target and then 2020, I was like okay let’s start tracking our metrics as a team, let’s get serious, boom and then as of March, it’s like, whatever goals that’s whatever even revenue targets, who knows by the end of the year maybe we’ll all hit what we set out to but if you look at the Q1 report, profit and loss report, it’s not nearly what any of us probably were expecting, even in January two months prior, so yeah it sounds like you operate this way as well but I think.

Barbara Turley: [inaudible] because I just think people go, “Can you give as your forecasting?”, I’m like, “Well I can, but I mean you know, this could happen, you know, like, where I come from, financial market where stuff happens all the time, I think yeah it’s you know, it’s just, you gotta get a kind of rough idea of where you’re going and then and then try to you know keep moving, keep moving out on a daily, weekly, basis yeah.

Jenny Blake: And I do think it’s important to have business streams of income, a diversified pivot portfolio as I call it. It’s important to have pivot runway, it’s important to know how does your business succeed, when things are going really well and the economy is flush and how do you stay afloat or even thrive when we’re in a downturn or a recession or a depression and it’s important to think that through because not all businesses are counter cyclical or not all businesses have prepared for that.

The reason… just to finish on the only move that matters is your next one, for me that’s about staying present and I know you’re similar but it’s that intuition about what’s the one next project or what’s the one part of the business that is working best that we can double down on and that you don’t have to know how it’s gonna turn out and you don’t need to attach to it either but if you keep following those clues, the years that I didn’t plan any goals at all, I still earned more… my revenue was still up into the right every single year, it’s just I wasn’t attached to it.

Barbara Turley: And what about you mentioned a pivot runway, talk to me about what is that what’s a pivot runway? I’m very interested to know, delve a bit deeper into this whole method in pivot method.

Jenny Blake: Oh yeah, well thank you, I borrowed runway from the financial world and startups that runway is just how much cash you have, so if you look at your monthly net, your burn rate, how much are you spending each month and I do think there’s been a ton these last few weeks about, everybody look at what you’re subscribed to, cut back only to essential expenses, so many people have cut their team members, which is devastating, if you know, if you really like your team and are happy with the setup but you want to keep your business afloat to be able to bring them back on, so that’s what runway is. It’s just how much time do you have, until you have to pivot again, so what you and I were saying Barbara, in a way listening is a luxury, it means that you have some time to do that.

For some people they have to pay the bills in a week or two weeks and they just simply have to figure it out. Some might do that by talking to their landlord and asking can I postpone any and all things that I owe money on and others will say I’ll take any job even if it’s bagging groceries so that I make these commitments.

Barbara Turley: I love that we went there because that means the length of your runway is like you know, I think you know that’s probably as you say big in the startup world and those seeking funding and all that kind of thing but in the general… you know most smaller businesses are not thinking about it that way or maybe I’m the only one who wasn’t really thinking about it that way. I suppose maybe deep down I sort of had it in the back of my head but I hadn’t really formulated that as an idea and I think it’s important to know, what is that at any stage in the business. And it’s nearly more important than the forecasting of where you think you might be in three or four months time, it’s more what would be the runway if things change… yeah, so if the runway, you know tiny at the moment or non-existence, it’s gonna be harder to take off into a pivot.

Jenny Blake: Yeah and I like, oh that’s a cool analogy of like the actual runway of a plane, that’s true. Yeah it’s almost like taking off or landing, I like how Mike Michalowicz, he’s the author of Profit First, Clockwork, Fix This Next, some really great business books. He talks about contributing to your business reserve’s account and that, you know another way to put this, is business reserves, or on the personal fund, and emergency fund, and that ideally it has six months. Your emergency fund should have six months of your personal household living expenses and then the business reserves ideally would have six months of your operating expenses for the business, which is quite a large number, by the way. So,

Barbara Turley: I was thinking, does anyone really do that though? I mean you know, if you’re scaling a business, I mean this is the challenge, I think a lot of people were, when you’re trying to scale, I mean you know, do you have money on reserve or do you take risk on and invest in growing the business and all that sort of things. So I think that’s all great in theory.

Jenny Blake: And it’s so tempting, to just, it’s so tempting to reinvest the money and grow the business and I certainly have made that choice many many times, to the point where I don’t have six months of business reserves, I wish I did now, but…

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so that’s tricky… yeah

Jenny Blake: But I guess, maybe that’s something that will come out of this, is that moving forward we take a portion of every, this is the profit first method but just like we fund our tax account, for me every check that comes in gets divided into the profit first chunks of tax, operating expenses, owner pay, and profit, and maybe from going forward there just needs to be a fifth, called business reserves and it gets funded from every single deposit that goes in-

Barbara Turley: Well, I suppose it’s all about de-risking, I mean you know, business going, you know entrepreneurship is risky but I mean, there are ways to de- risk this. If you can come out of this strong and or you know, just come out of this thing and I mean I’m a firm believer but there’s gonna be so much opportunity in this market. I mean you know, the last crisis we had was the 08 or 09 thing, which is you know, 10 years ago a bit more now, so we are due this, we were actually due this crisis, I mean who knows which way it happens but you’re due a massive rumble every 10 years this one, 7 to 10 years.

So there will be massive opportunity coming out of this for those that can pivot and then you know, maybe we work over the next year or two, on making sure that we have that reserve thing going. And any final tips for us on you know what’s like, is there a crucial sort of one thing to remember that you want to share with us about pivoting.

The Important thing about pivoting

Jenny Blake: Sometimes during a crisis or when it feels like everything’s falling apart it’s easy to focus on what’s not working, what’s broken, what we don’t want, what we don’t have, what we lost. That’s part of the grief process, and it’s important, but it’s not gonna move anything forward necessarily. So I do think what’s most important and the crux of the pivot method is double down on what’s working and what brings you the most energy, so look at both pre-pandemic what was working best, what was producing the most revenue, at the most ease and the most joy, what energizes you most as the founder or the owner of the business, and you can ask this of course of your team members too and I do think it’s still important to say what does success look like, so it’s just like you, Barbara. We were due for this, we can come through this stronger, as hard as it may be to picture 3 or 6 months from now or even by the end of the year, what will weathering this successfully look like for you and for your business, what would be happening, you know and painting that, doubling down on what’s working and painting the picture of what’s possible. It’s so important, it’s like on Google Maps, you know, you are here and this is where you want to end up, now you can look at all the possible paths, and routes, and roadblocks, to get there but without those two brackets or anchoring points, it can lead to more flailing and confusion.

Barbara Turley: That’s really great advice, it’s that whole like you know taking back control of what you can control and then visualizing what you know, just slowly inching your way towards that goal and that vision. Listen, thank you so much for joining us today and just, I do think this is the topic, that you know, it’s very easy throw the word pivot around but I think a lot of people are in panic, about how to pivot, and should I pivot, and have I done fast enough, and like last week, I was thinking like I haven’t pivoted fast enough, everyone’s out with their thing now and I haven’t done it, but yeah listening to your intuition, I think it’s very important in that in that scenario.

Jenny Blake: Do you think, I’m curious. Oh, I know you’re closing us out but well you just say one thought on why do you think it is that you haven’t, because you had the idea of what you could launch but that you haven’t yet. I’m just curious what your intuition is saying around that.

Barbara Turley: My intuition is saying that I’ve resisted launching that thing for many years for a reason, is a completely… I was going to, so we still have this in the, you know, I’ll put it out there, we do dedicated VAs, dedicated staff through The Virtual Hub, and that’s what we do in the Philippines, mainly in digital marketing and we know that at the moment everyone’s online, everyone’s trying to launch podcasts, they’re trying to get their Shopify site up, everyone’s trying to capitalize on the traffic, or they’re going to start doing this, to try and do their own pivots.

We’re able to do those things for people, we have lots of staff that can do projects but the issue, it’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that I know that I am building a different business, in terms of the process and the delivery and the general to try to… you know to make sure our brand is successful and we deliver in the right way and we bring in the right client not the wrong client and tumble everybody. I just know there’s more to it than just saying “hey we can do a podcasts for you” like we’ve got a process for it, we can do it but there’s a lot of… the back end delivery, I just don’t feel that it’s going to be on brand the way I would like it to be, yet.

Now, I could do it in a week but I just wanted to sit back and say “Is the market really off what it is that we do as a core business anyway and do I need to pivot? and is that the right decision for us, the team, for everyone right now.” and that’s kind of what’s bubbling up inside and I’ve decided to sit with that for a little bit longer, so I hope that answers it.

Jenny Blake: It does and those are such great reflection questions you just paused at the end and thank you for sharing your example I really respect how you set up your team and your business and talk about doubling down on what’s working in a way, what makes you unique is how much you invest in your team, and your training, and your systems. And I can understand that you wouldn’t want to veer from that, just to fill a short-term need, if it doesn’t reflect your long-term vision and values.

Barbara Turley: Yeah and I feel as well like you know, I think people are still going to need offshore teams, I think offshore teams are an incredibly cost-effective strategy and as businesses are trying to save themselves, they’re gonna start looking at this, and I thought well what if we start doing this other thing and then it distracts the whole team and then we’re short people for the real thing…that people actually want and it which is not called capabilities so that’s, that was kind of where I settled and I thought I’m just pivoting because everyone says that you should, so sometimes maybe you shouldn’t.

Jenny Blake: Thank you for sharing that, it’s so helpful for all of us to hear your thought process and that it’s a pivot in progress, so you don’t know which way you’ll decide and either one will be perfect, but thanks for sharing that, I appreciate it.

Barbara Turley: And tell us, so if people want to connect with you, find out more, I mean get the book, Pivot the book, listen to your podcast, where can they go?

Jenny Blake: Check out pivotmethod.com If you go to pivotmethod.com/fft that’s my free mini course free-up founder time. It’s geared towards solopreneurs and small business owners, so I share it here because I think Barbara, your community would appreciate that one. Again totally free.

Barbara Turley: I’ll put it in the comments, in the show notes and everything, yeah… that’ll be great.

Jenny Blake: Perfect, and then Pivot with Jenny Blake that’s the name of my podcast so look for it and I’ve been podcasting daily since the pandemic started, so that’s one of the shifts that I made, because I’m home now I’m not traveling for work and there’s time on my hand and it’s been really fun.

Barbara Turley: Might as well podcast, yeah, everyone’s podcasting more.I am even doing it more. You know, we’re working anyway, you might as well do it. So,

Jenny Blake: And there’s so much going on, there’s so much changing every day, so those of us that study change and business and how to be agile, it’s like oh there’s so much to talk about and discuss and process together.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely and I think right now, you know I was talking to some other industry colleagues and stuff, we’re just saying that, like everyone is commenting on the front liners at the moment are our nursing staff, our doctors, our hospital people, and I mean they’re just you know, they’re putting their lives on the line basically for the health crisis but what’s going to happen after this and when we come through this, is the entrepreneurs and the business people, are going to be the ones who will be the front liners, saving the economy and that’s everybody. It’s all of you listening, it’s all of us here, and we all play a role in that and I really feel that we’re going to become the the first line of defense in the next crisis, the the one that’s coming after the health crisis, which is the financial and economy crisis that we’re now looking into. So that’s one of the reasons I’m out here trying to podcast as much as possible.

Thank you so much for joining Jenny, really appreciate your insights during this time and yeah go and check out Jenny’s podcast and I’m gonna be on again later this week. I’m gonna be talking to Peter Moriarty from IT genius in Australia and we’re gonna be talking about getting your systems right for remote work and making sure that if you need to move ever to remote from office or to just other locations that your systems are already in place and set up and ready so that you can turn that on in a second. And that was one of the reasons I was able to turn it on very quickly across 110 staff because I had set that up that way and Peter’s gonna talk to us about that. Until then, thanks very much everyone and enjoy your day!

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

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

02:09  Why Podcasts are a brilliant marketing strategy

04:10  How to capitalise on Podcasts

06:39  What makes a great podcast guest

09:17  How to be different with Podcasts

12:16  Content amplification and repurposing

15:11  Growth of the podcast industry

18:46  Wrapping things Up

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

Barbara Turley: Hey, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the virtual Success Show where we are streaming live now online for our episodes of the show. I’m Barbara Turley, your host, I co-host this show with my good friend Matt Malouf. And today we’re here to talk about the very topical topic right now of podcasts and I’m joined by, good friend and someone I work very closely with, Tom Schwab from Interview Valet, who is the go to guy if you want to be talking about podcasts, you know, getting on podcasts, getting guests on your podcast. Welcome to the show, Tom, thanks for joining us today.

Tom Schwab:  Barbara, I am thrilled to be here. And there’s a lot of problems in the world. But there is no better time to be alive. We look at the technology that we have. And still, we can reach customers around the world.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, yes. So you know, like, guys, you guys watching the Facebook Live, you know that we are in a major crisis right now. There are many crises that happened throughout time. I have to say I was thinking today to myself, I’m old enough now to say that this is not my first rodeo with crises like this. We’ve had the 2008 financial crisis, we had the tech bubble collapse, and in my career, I’ve been through a couple of these. So it’s every crisis brings its own challenges, but I always feel that they’re crises nonetheless and some things that we do in business are the same. Now in this particular situation that we’re in right now. I feel podcasts are really gonna be it. So Tom, talk to us about, first of all, why podcasts, in general, are a brilliant marketing strategy for any business right now. But also why now specifically.

Tom Schwab: Well, the way I look at it is that every business’s biggest problem is obscurity, right? There are millions – thousands, millions of customers that you could serve right now, with your current product, your current offering, your current service. The only problem is they don’t know you exist. Right now a lot of people talk about breaking through the noise.

Honestly, I think that’s like adding to the noise, right? The idea that I’m going to yell and somebody’s gonna hear me, I think is laughable, right? So, if I can get in on the conversation that my ideal customers are already listening to, that’s golden. If I can get introduced by somebody that is a trusted resource, a trusted friend of theirs, that’s golden. And really, that’s what podcasts and especially podcast interview marketing is all about, right? So, most of the people listening, watching, have no idea who Tom Schwab is, but they know who Barbara Turley is. They know the Virtual Success Show. They love that. And so there’s that transfer of authority. And so I think it’s a time-proven strategy, but it’s using current technology to connect with people in here. You know, here I am in Kalamazoo, Michigan. If I can do podcasts, and podcasts interviews from Kalamazoo, Michigan, you can do it from anywhere.

Barbara Turley: And I’m in France, right? So I’m here in the French Alps actually, stuck in the middle of the virus thing that’s going on right now and where we are. So Tom, with everything that’s going on right now. I mean, everyone’s kind of in panic mode, still wondering what’s going to happen next. But the one thing that I know I am certain of right now is everybody is on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, podcasts, webinars, like everybody is online right now because everyone’s stuck at home in this particular crisis that we’re in. So talk to me about you know, what, how can we capitalize on this fast with podcasts and we haven’t got a podcast yet. You know, podcast guestings, that’s another thing that people don’t really know is an opportunity, right now talk with more about that,

Tom Schwab: You know, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity that we have here. So you can look at it as a problem or as an opportunity. One of my, you know, I’ve been on 1200, podcasts, interviews, I’ve never launched my own podcasts, I’m going to take this opportunity to start doing that. But that’s going to be a long term play, that’s not going to get results for six to twelve months. The fastest way to get results with podcasts is using other people’s platforms for the leverage. So you know, a lot of times in finance, we’ll talk about other people’s money and leveraging that. It’s the same thing with media, right? So, if you can leverage other people’s platforms, instead of just building your own from scratch, that’s golden. So find somebody that already is talking to your audience that’s already trusted by your audience and go to them and show them the value that you can bring. And boy, if you can get introduced to their audience, get that know, like, and trust, get the backlinks from it. That is the quickest way and especially today, people are listening, right? They’re looking for answers, it’s not just entertainment anymore, it’s vital to their business. And I would say those, those early adaptors, those people that are going to come out of this strongest are the ones that are looking for the answers right now.

And I don’t know about you, but those are my customers that I want to work with. You know, there’s some people that still listen to 80s rock, God love them. But the ones that are trying to build something looking forward in the future, they’re looking for answers, and they’re either gonna hear us or they’re gonna hear our competitors.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, look, I think the other thing to remember is, you know, anyone listening out there who thinks, “Oh, I just, you know, trying to launch a podcast”, and we’ll get to that in a second. You know, that’s gonna take time, strategy, whatever. There are loads of podcast hosts out there that are looking for people to interview for people who can add value in this particular environment. And it might not, it might be to do with your business, it could just be building your brand, so you don’t always have to be selling something. You know, I think, Tom, you would say that it’s about being out there and having your voice out there. I know that’s what I’m doing with The Virtual Hub, I’m on podcasts all the time. Sometimes I’m not even talking about VAs, I’m just talking about business building, but it still drives business to The Virtual Hub for us, it’s been a very good strategy. So, Tom, what advice would you give somebody about? You know, first of all, what kinds of topics do you think right now hosts are really looking for and what makes a great guest? How do you be a great guest on a podcast?

Tom Schwab: That’s a great question. And I think this is not only what they’re looking for now, but they’ll always be looking for. Have something that’s timely, that speaks to their audience, but make sure it’s timeless also, right? So podcasts are an evergreen medium, while we’re recording this here in April. There’s somebody in October that’s gonna be listening to this. So you want to make sure that the advice is timely and timeless. The other thing too is, come ready to serve, right? Gary Vaynerchuk talks about jab, jab, jab, right hook. I probably missed a couple jabs in there. I look at it as serve, serve, serve, serve, ask, and the ask is going to be people asking to work with you, right? So when you reach out to a podcast host, nobody likes a cold pitch, right? Listen to the podcast, leave a rating and review, we’re all vain, right? We listen for our own names. So share the content, make comments on it, and then when you reach out, you can say hey, here is something that I have that would, I believe, add value to your audience. And you know, then go there and just add value.

You know, your goal as a podcast guest is not to sell, it’s to make the host look like a genius for introducing you to their audience. Because if you do that, they’ll promote you more than you ever could. And my favorite tweet out there is from a guy by the name of Rand Fishkin, Rand started a company called Moz, and he said, “Today, the best way to sell something, is not to sell anything, but to earn the respect, awareness, and trust of those who might buy.” And that’s what you’re doing with this show, that’s what I do on podcast interviews. Just getting out there, you know, people buy from those they know, like, and trust. That’s really hard to do off of a quick ad, but it’s easy to do off of a discussion.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, and people get to know you. And I think as well it’s leadership, the world is crying out for leadership right now. So I wouldn’t get too stressed out about what your topic is going to be like if you’ve got something you can share out there that helps in a crisis in particular right now, then podcast host are gonna want to know, so let’s move on Tom, quickly to you know, launching, I mean, of course, like launching your own podcast, it’s like having a book. It’s kinda like your business card, I mean, the credibility, having your own podcast gives you, is amazing. What in your experience, like are the best, you know, different podcasts, but in your How do you be different? Like there’s loads of podcasts out there? How do we be different? If it’s possible-

Tom Schwab: Right, cause, be different, not better. And so from that I, you know, people come to me and say, should I be a podcast guest or a podcast host? And I say it’s like asking to be an Uber driver, or an Uber passenger, same platform, two different goals, right? So if you want to get new clients, if you want to get new leads, then go out and be a podcast guest. If you want to nurture your current leads, if you want to nurture your current customers, that’s great to be a podcast host. And with that, be real, right? I always say the best podcasts are like just a discussion. Like if we were sitting down having coffee, and this discussion we’re having right now-

Barbara Turley: We do actually, I mean, you and I have these chats anyway-

Tom Schwab: Exactly. 

Barbara Turley: Cause we really happen to do this one live, you know,

Tom Schwab: That’s interesting. Take this spotlight, put it on other people. So it’s not just on you, show success stories from your team from your customers, bring in people that you think would be ideal customers, right? They might not take a 45 minute sales call from you, but they might go on your podcast, there’s a great book out there called Content Based relationships. Or I’m sorry, Content Based Marketing or Networking by James Carberry. And he talks about that, that if you start to build content with people, you build a relationship with them and it’s a great way to network there. And you know, be different, don’t be better, have a great discussion. I think the podcast where they ask the same five questions to every people, to every person, they get really old. I mean, they get old for the listener, they must get old for the host too.

Barbara Turley: Well, even for the guests, so I’ve done a few of those and you just find yourself kind of, you feel under pressure because you’re just answering this question all the time. The ones, the podcast. I love guesting on the best, well, probably because this suits my style. I don’t like preparing for these things too much. I just like getting on there and like, there’s no question you can ask me live that I wouldn’t be able to answer because I just answer as I would in a private conversation more often than not. And I know for me personally that has worked on podcasts, for the feedback I’ve gotten is that, you know, I’m just really raw and real, and I just say it like it is and that works really well. It might not work for everyone’s personality, but I think on a podcast, it’s a unique medium. And I always try and think about when you’re listening to the radio, it’s the same sort of thing like we love when people are really real on radio shows and it’s the same thing with podcasts, you don’t want it to be stilted.

And of course these days, you can do, I mean you can live stream like what we’re doing. And you know, the tech behind this, I did this myself with a couple of VAs and it’s actually not that hard once you get your head around it and then you can rip this and you can put it on iTunes, and you can, you know, you can do loads of things with it. So let’s talk, Tom, what else we can do with the podcast. So it’s not just the audio file, let’s talk about content and content amplification and repurposing. What sorts of things should we be doing with the podcast?

Tom Schwab: And I feel guilty as you were saying that because it’s true as a guest, I just show up and answer the questions. You were there, behind the scenes, making sure everything worked. And a lot of guests will just do that. They’ll show up, have the interview, and then move on. They’re missing such an opportunity. This is great content that you can repurpose, your team can repurpose. I mean, your team at The Virtual Hub helps me repurpose it. So we’ll take this discussion here, right 20-30 minutes. Well, we can then transcribe it. You know, I’ve written a whole lot of blogs in my life and everyone felt like a homework assignment. But you could take this transcription, clean it up, make it sound like I’m educated and you can turn it into blog posts, you can take a snippet and make a little audiogram out of it and put it up on Facebook. You can take a little meme, a tweet, and put it up there.

There’s so many different ways you can do it. You know, last year, during the slow times of the holidays, I challenged the team, what kind of content you could make from a podcast interview. And it was amazing without me doing anything, they were able to make a month’s worth of content out of every podcast interview. So that is such a powerful way and it’s evergreen content. So just because somebody didn’t hear it today, when it went live, doesn’t mean that they won’t find value from it six months from now or a year from now. And so from that standpoint, it’s easy to create, it’s easy to repurpose, and like you said, the medium is such that the host wants to make you look like an expert. They’re not going to ask you a question out of left field and most of the time It’s on your opinion on something or your expertise in business. So it’s just such a powerful medium.

Barbara Turley:  And look shameless plug for The Virtual Hub. I, you know, we train VAs on repurposing content. That’s what we do. We do podcasts, we make it easy for people to get started. And I was even thinking, you know, we did podcasts on this show, like, maybe two years ago? that I was looking through our podcasts and going, “Gee, we should re-promote those now with a little live to go with it, or a little maybe new intro”, to say like right now. For example, we did a podcast about managing expectations with a virtual team. And right now in all the whole remote work thing that’s going on. Everyone is trying to figure out how to do this. And we have some fantastic shows that we recorded, Matt and I record them like two years ago. So you know, what’s, you know, what’s the point letting dust gather on those? We may as well get them out and repurpose them and go again, it’s still great content. It doesn’t mean you’re just rehashing old stuff. And, so what about growth of podcasts and we might sort of finish up on this point. Growth of the podcast industry right now in general, I mean, it’s exploding. Can you give us some insights, you attend all the conferences and you’re in this game.

Tom Shwab: The numbers right now is that there’s over 900,000 podcasts. And people say, well, that means it’s saturated. No, there’s like, I think it’s 40 million blogs. So we’re not even close to that. But that 900,000, there’s a little Asterix by that. Only a quarter of a million, 250,000 have actually published in the last 30 days. So it’s really easy to start a podcast but in the industry, is called podfade. If you’re trying to do it all by yourself, life gets tough and most podcasts that die, die within the first 10 episodes. So there’s a lot of podcasts out there just recently, so here we are in April, podcast listenership is up 25% this year.

Now, if you look at some numbers, it depends on what the podcast is right now, during this crisis. There’s no sports going on, so sports podcasts are just getting killed, right? Who wants to listen to the score from six months ago, but other podcasts are really taking off. And the other thing that we’re seeing is that the average number of listeners per podcast is going down. And people say, well, that’s bad. So a few years ago, the top 1% of podcasts got 54,000 listeners per episode. Now it’s down to 47,000. And people said, “oh, it’s only 47,000?”. And I’m like, can you imagine going into a stadium and speaking to 47,000 people, or even even if it’s 100 people, or 1000 people, those are people that have opted in to listen to you.

You know, the studies say most of them, 80% of them listened to the entire episode. Last year, we had a client that spoke at a baseball stadium in front of 30,000 people and I remember talking to him beforehand, and he was nervous, and I said, don’t worry, you’ve talked to more people on a podcast than this. And he shook his head and goes, “Yeah, but they weren’t looking back at me.”

Barbara Turley: I was just thinking that like, it is actually the equivalent of speaking to that many thousands of people. And then the medium is just so powerful, this whole medium and you’d said something on your social media the other day, which I agree with, actually, you’d said, you know, it’s at the moment anyway, it’s like the new speaking from stage. And that resonated with me, not just because at the moment in the crisis we’re in right now, we can’t travel and we can’t fly and we can’t go to events, there’s no events, but even in a day to day thing, like I had a baby last year, you know, I’ve got two young children, I can’t fly to conferences and I’d love to go to lots of different things and I’d love to be a speaker but I can’t. It’s very hard for me to do that and lots of mums and dads and lots of people can’t, but you can still access the same number of people by doing podcasting and by appearing on video and like we didn’t even touch on YouTube. I mean, you can, this is actually streaming on YouTube right now as well. And we’re going to have this on our YouTube channel. So all of a sudden, we have a podcast and a video medium. So like, I’m a massive fan, it has worked really well for us at The Virtual Hub as a business and for me personally building my personal brand, so for us, we’re actually ramping up this strategy and not pulling it back in this environment.

And that was the reason I really wanted to get you on Tom to talk to our listeners. And just to encourage people that might have been just sort of thinking about it, but not sure how to do it, how can they find out more about Interview Valet, about you, the work you’re doing and connect, where do you want to send them?

Tom Shwab:  Well, thank you just go to interviewvalet.com/vss for Virtual Success Show. And there’s a page there and Barbs from The Virtual Hub makes those all for us. And on there, you’re going to see an assessment, right, that says, will this work for me? Answer the questions and you’ll find out. There’s also a copy of the book, it’s a free copy, right? I sell a lot of these, but I give more away. It’s Podcast Guest Profits, it’s how to grow your business with the targeted interview strategy. It’s the playbook, the cookbook that we use. And then finally, if any of this resonated with you, if it made sense, if it’s like, “Yeah, I’d like to do that. Can you help me?” I’ll put my calendar link there too. Also, at interviewvalet.com/vss

Barbara Turley: That’s brilliant. Listen, Tom, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing this like what I believe is one of literally the number one marketing strategy out there right now is this, especially when coupled with live streaming like what we’re doing right here and I’m doing this to show people kind of how you do it. We can help, thevirtualhub.com. If you need help with any of this stuff. set it up. We’ve got the VAs trained in all of this so come and chat with us as well. And don’t let the tech or the setup, stop you… basically, that’s the secret here. Don’t let any of it stop you because there’s people who could help you to do it. Thanks very much, Tom. We’re going to be going live again early next week and we’ll be talking about pivoting. And I’ll be talking to a lady who wrote the book on pivot methods. So, tune in next week, and Thanks, Tom. Thanks, everyone, for listening.

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

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

1:50 Xero as a Platform

2:38 Aspects of Utilizing Virtual Teams

4:50 Boundaries

5:12 Key Roles Within the Finance Team

8:21 Cost-Effectiveness Medium

10:14 Bookkeeping Role vs VA Role

12:55 Differences with Bookkeepers and VAs

15:11 Stop Doing Book

16:42 Xero Cleanup

19:29 Reporting Practices

20:53 Where to Start

22:10 Building Skillsets

23:22 Next Steps

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

Barbara Turley: Hey everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Success Show. Where we dissect everything you need to know about how to outsource, how to get the right team members into your business, and how to do it all in the right order. Because today’s show we’re going to be dissecting a very common problem, and I’m going to be sharing a big trap that I fell into myself. But of course today I’m joined by my cohost, Matt Malouf. Hi, Matt! How’s it going?

Matt Malouf: I’m well, Barbara, and yourself?

Barbara: I’m great, thank you. And I’m pretty excited that on the back of last week’s show, we invited Meryl Johnston, who’s the founder and CEO of Bean Ninjas back to the show to dissect this particular problem with me. So Meryl, welcome back to the show.

Meryl Johnston: It’s great to be back. Thanks.

Barbara: So guys, I was chatting with Meryl after we interviewed Meryl around the growth of Bean Ninjas and her experience around managing a global virtual team. Because obviously, that’s the genesis of this show. But in chatting after the show, I was sharing a story that I… A trap I fell into myself around using Vas, bookkeepers, accountants. And in the very early days, not that long ago, really, I decided in my wisdom that if I had Xero as a platform, which is your, you know the platform that everyone’s using I guess globally for bookkeeping and accounting. And a good VA that I could show a few tricks of the trade to, that then I wouldn’t need a bookkeeper.

And I went that route, and needless to say it blew up in my face. Let’s just put it that way. After a couple of years, and really cost a lot of pain. It wasn’t the VA’s fault. It was just a whole host of problems. And Matt, I’m sure as a recovering accountant yourself, this is making you chuckle because I’m sure you see this a lot.

Matt: I do. I do. You know, I think it’s interesting. Barbara, you and I have talked about this in many aspects of utilizing virtual teams, but find it, yeah. People’s expectations of that whole concept of the super VA that can do everything is still very, very prevalent in today’s society, business community.

Barbara: Absolutely. And you know, actually, I am still recovering, honestly, from that mistake myself. I was quite badly burnt. All my own fault. Completely and utterly my own fault. And Meryl, that’s kind of what led me to your company in the end, to go, “Oh my God. I really need to fix this. And quickly.” But I’m sure Meryl, is this something that you commonly seeing people coming? Going, I made a mess of this. You know, how can you fix it?

Meryl: Yes. It actually, it surprises me, but it happens regularly. So we will be talking with a business owner, and they might initially say, well, why do I need you? I could have a VA doing this. And my answer to that is to discuss what the role of a bookkeeper is, and the tasks. VA can definitely help with Xero, but they have their place in the finance team as well. And then we also have many clients that have come to us after trying with only a VA, and their tax accountant, and just found that they couldn’t trust the numbers in Xero. And parts of the process were working well, and they’re definitely were parts that the VA did well, but they didn’t necessarily have the processes, the training, the review steps in place to make it work effectively, and they couldn’t trust the numbers in Xero.

Barbara: Oh, yeah. That was me. I had the accountant, and I had the VA, and I had myself, and Xero. And the whole thing was an almighty mess. And actually, the ramifications of me making a mess of it myself means that when clients come to us, and they even mention Xero or bookkeeping or anything as part of their brief when they’re looking to get a VA, our entire team freezes and goes, oh, we need to be really clear with this client that we’re not comfortable with VAs being in Xero unless they’re clear on the boundaries.

Barbara: So yeah, like I said, I’m really keen for you to share with us today what those boundaries look like, and where does the VA come into them? You know, how do we start this whole process? And I think how you were saying off air, maybe defining the roles and the responsibilities and where everyone fits in a business from an accounting and financial perspective would be a good start?

Meryl: Sure. So I’ll start. There’s a couple of key roles within the finance team. And I say, finance team. You might be starting off small. So there’s a tax accountant. There may be a bookkeeper, a virtual assistant, virtual CFO, and the business owner. And you may not have all of these team members at the beginning. But I’ll go through and define the roles.

A tax accountant is an accountant, and it’s usually the first person that will be helping with the business. Their role is to help with things like business structure decisions. Tax planning, tax minimization. And tax compliance. The role of the bookkeeper is different in that they’re in charge of all of the transactions being captured in Xero and being accounted for correctly. They wouldn’t be providing tax advice, but they’d be making sure that all of the day to day transactions are captured accurately, and management reports, or the monthly reports are ready on time. And everything’s being allocated correctly.

Virtual CFO is often mixed up with a tax accountant. But they have a different skill set. So if you were looking at a big company, within their finance team they would have tax specialists, and then they would have the CFO who oversees everything, and they would also be looking at projection so that they’re kept looking forward. Cash [inaudible 00:06:35] forecast, budgets. And working with the business to make better decisions based on the numbers that are coming through. And that’s quite different to looking at things from a tax perspective.

A virtual assistant can help with a number of processes within the business like raising invoices, helping to pay bills, managing receipts. But their role is to follow processes that have already been established, rather than creating the processes, and you would want to have some kind of review of procedures.

And I’ve left the business owner till last, but their role is really important. They’re ultimately responsible for everything within the business. And it’s important that they understand their financial reports, and also their tax position. Yes, they can be outsourced to other accountants or bookkeepers, but ultimately the CEO or the business owner is responsible, and they need to have an understanding of… A little bit about their tax situation, and the key numbers in their business.

Barbara: And obviously you’ve mentioned that the tax accountant, and obviously that’s the first person that even if you’re just a solopreneur, for example, you would have a tax accountant. I think what I see happening, and I’m interested to see if you see the same thing, I think the next position that people naturally flow to, or at least what I see, is they go, I need a VA. They go tax accountant, VA, me. And that’s their finance team in the early days. Would you see that as well?

Matt: I do. And a lot of that’s because of leverage. A lot of business owners, when they start out, they’re doing the books, they’re doing everything. And then they’ll have a coach come along and tell them that they have to stop doing a whole heap of things. And so naturally then what they look for is a cost-effective medium in order to leverage. And so they’ll look at VAs as a mechanism for that.

Matt: And it really is in this instance, particularly in the finance, the wrong move. And you know, [inaudible 00:08:45] I think most people are looking at it as a cost-saving or cost-effectiveness perspective. You never want to be in a situation where your accounts are not reflective of what’s going on. Because number one, they tell you the story. It’s the report card of what’s happening in your business.

But number two is, if you need to raise capital. If you want to buy a home and get a home loan. Whatever it may be, if your accounts aren’t in order, particularly as a business owner, it makes it a lot harder to do a lot of these things that the numbers are critical for.

I just wanted to add one other thing. I think the way Meryl has described and outlined each of those roles, I would recommend that everyone go back and relisten to that unpack because it’s on the money. And each of those roles are essential in a business. Just knowing at which time along the growth journey of your business you need to bring those people in. In order to continue your growth, but also as your business grows, you’ll [inaudible 00:09:57] deeper and different understanding of things. And I think it’s a really, really clear picture of the roles of each of those and how they play out.

Barbara: Yeah, Meryl, I just wanted to share, even when you were explaining there. When you came to the bookkeeper part and the VA part, the virtual assistant part, even still in my head I was thinking, I can totally see how somebody would think that you can, one can replace the other, sort of thing. And if I could just share, I did do that. I didn’t have a bookkeeper. And everything was fine in the early days when it was simple. Reconciliation of money in, money out. But when it came to things like having to void invoices, and then split payments. And someone who didn’t pay exactly the right amount. And if that all happens over a number of transactions, I ended up with a real mess in Xero that I couldn’t even fix.

And then of course the other issue is, I don’t even know what it’s called. You know where you have to have the zero balance, and the bank balance matching? I’ve never understood that bit. And it was never matching. It was all over the place because we were using Stripe. And there was no Stripe feed. And all this sort of thing. So can we drill down into that VA bookkeeper bit a bit more? Around where is the line between the two of them, really?

Meryl: Sure. And I actually just wanted to add to your story, around the bank account balance in Xero not matching the statement. And this is, I would say that is the number one mistake that I see if I pick up a Xero file. That would be the most common mistake. And I know this isn’t, I won’t go into too much detail, but I’ll just quickly explain it because it happens so frequently.

Xero has a bank feed which pulls information in from transactions every day. And sometimes there can be a break in that bank feed and a couple of transactions are missed, and occasionally it can bring in duplicates as well. And so when your bank balance in Xero doesn’t match the statement from your online banking, it means that there could be a bank fee issue, which means that your account might be missing transactions or have duplicates. And so that is one of the common reasons that your accounts don’t make sense. And that is a cross-check that a bookkeeper would know how to do, but a virtual assistant, without financial training, they wouldn’t necessarily know how to go find that error, and then bring in the missing transaction. So that’s probably one good example.

Barbara: Now that you mention it, I really think that happened to us because what ended up happening was some of the wrong account lines got reconciled against the wrong invoices. But it looked like they were the right match at the time. But then we had all that host of issues, and we had to go back, and unmatch things. The minute we started that, the escalation, the problems just exploded after that.

Meryl: And I think that leads into one of the differences with bookkeepers and virtual assistants. Where virtual assistants may be doing a great job of reconciling transactions, but they might not understand the theory behind what they’re doing to pick up errors, like missing transactions. And follow a process, so bookkeepers will follow a process at the end of the month to check their own work. And to figure out what doesn’t look right, and what needs to be changed. And they’ll know about the quirks, like splitting transactions or how to handle payments that don’t quite… Someone hasn’t paid the right amount, or you’ve bought something that you paid for with cash. They’ll know how to handle all of those situations.

But if I answer this question from a bigger picture perspective, a bookkeeper will be able to help you to set up your processes. So standard operating procedures around how your customers pay you, how you pay bills, how transactions are reconciled. How you prepare the end of month accounts. And over times, as those processes improve, you may actually be able to hand over more and more to the virtual assistant. But I think what’s important is that you don’t start with you as the business owner and the tax accountant. And you doing the bookkeeping not really having standard operating procedures around it, and then training a virtual assistant without a lot of information and documentation.

Whereas, if you go the bookkeeper part, you can have all of those processes set up. Things are running smoothly, and then you can gradually introduce the virtual assistant to help with things over time. And I think that’s similar to how you would introduce a virtual assistant with another business function outside of finance too.

Barbara: Yeah, and I honestly believe that the majority of people out there are doing it the wrong way around. I’m seeing it. You’re seeing it. And that’s why I think this really is, it’s an important topic that we address here so that we also protect business owners. But also protect the VAs, because they don’t know what they don’t know either.

You know, sometimes they’ll go in and try and fix something, or try to help. And of course, they go on the Xero videos, and try and figure out what to do, and then make the situation worse. That’s actually my experience, what’s happened.

Matt: Just to add to this, one of the things I wrote about in the Stop Doing List book, and I’ve included it in the tool, is when you look at a task. So let’s take a task, which is bookkeeping. One of the questions you’ve got to ask yourself is, does this task require special skills in order to be performed? And bookkeeping is a special skill. We think it’s just a case of, you know, clicking okay or whatever. But if it’s done incorrectly, it really turns into a big mess real quick. And so it’s understanding certain… When you’re going to leverage and hand the tasks over. Is a special skill required? If yes, what are those skills? And who’s the best person or company or people in order to outsource that to?

Barbara: You know, if I could add, Matt, to that as well. Sometimes you don’t know the answer to that question yourself. And if you’re unsure, which was where I fell down, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so I sort of made up the answer. I should have actually probably asked somebody that was more in the know than me. Around whether this required skill or not. And deeply understand exactly what we’re talking about today, so that I could then make a decision, rather than just diving in, and going, oh, the VA can do that. It’ll be fine. That’s sort of… Well, it’s the classic you don’t know what you don’t know.

Matt: Absolutely.

Barbara: Yeah, and obviously, Meryl, I know one of the packages that you offer is a Xero cleanup, which I availed of myself. Because people just must hand over an entire mess to your team. To go, I don’t even know where to start with this. To get off the ground on a decent path, we have to fix it first.

Meryl: That happens quite often. And so we usually start by doing a health check where we go through and check everything and put together a list of changes. And then we can, from that list someone can go and clean it up themselves, or we can go and fix everything as well. So that’s often the first place that we start with working with a business owner.

Barbara: Yeah. And look, for all the listeners out there, the good news is we’re sort of conversing on this topic today, but Meryl and I are actually going to be doing a webinar deep dive into actually how to set this whole thing up. Because it is a much deeper topic. And the link to that webinar, you’ll be able to get the recording. It will be in the show notes. So just jump on that if you feel you want to dive deeper into this topic. Matt, interested to know from your perspective, how many clients you’re coaching, that you go in and the finance part of the business is humming nicely.

Matt: 5%.

Barbara: I was thinking, how do I word this? Like humming nicely, the right team structure, the right knowledge, and that’s part okay?

Matt: Yeah. I mean, 5%. And largely because it’s a function that a lot of business owners in the early phase of their business leave till the last minute. Until it’s tax time. Until it’s reporting time. And so then they rush it. And really having trained as an accountant, and for me, and you introduced me as a recovering accountant, but for me the numbers are the report card of my business. They enable us to make better, more informed and faster business decisions. And like, if all you’re doing is making decisions off gut feel, where gut stands for cave up thinking.

Matt: And the reality is that if you’re not looking at your metrics, or as in looking at the historical numbers or forecast into the future on things, you’re going to lose a lot of money. And so often when I start working with people, their accounts look like, just not meaningful. And what we need to consider, as Meryl was unpacking earlier, the various roles. There’s also different types of reports required. So the tax office, and what you submit is a format that’s very different than what we call management accounts, that might look at some ratios, we may look at even displaying things in a slightly different way that are more meaningful to the business.

But compliance requires us to look at things differently. And so it’s really a case of having… If the data that goes in is done well, then the information and interpretation that comes out is more meaningful. And enables you to really see your business through a different lens.

Barbara: Yeah, so if the data going in, like if we look back to the virtual assistant, let’s say, who’s usually the data type person at that level. If there are errors or mistakes, it’s almost putting too much responsibility, actually, on an untrained virtual assistant when you’re not trained yourself either, and you don’t have the right structure around, and as you said, Meryl, processes. That can actually, they can, like I keep saying, make a big mess even though they’re doing a great job and they’re doing their best. You know? So with this… So you recommend getting a bookkeeper first, really, and getting things nicely set up?

Meryl: I would. And then a virtual assistant can be introduced into the bookkeeping process. And I see that working well as a business grows. I’ll give you an example. Some of our bigger clients, our point of client will be the virtual assistant rather than the business owner. And so they might be responsible for raising invoices, but they can ask us questions if they have something like a split payment or something that doesn’t look right, and we can go in and reconcile that. Or they just raise the invoices, and we do the reconciling, and ask them questions. If we’re looking at chasing our missing receipts, again, the virtual assistant would be managing that rather than the business owner having to ask those kind of questions.

In some cases, we’ve trained the virtual assistants on how to look for spikes in expenses, so they actually do a preliminary look at the profit/loss that goes out. And try and flag… They won’t get that right from day one. But over time those kinds of things can be trained so they can be going in and looking at where there’s a spike, and where they may be able to cut costs. Not every virtual assistant will be able to do that, but I have seen that working. So I see it as a gradual transition in building the skillset of someone internally, and virtual assistant’s role is to really stop questions going to the business owner so that they’re looking accurate reports without it needing a lot of their time. And the bookkeeper is running the transaction processing and making sure everything’s accurate, and liaising with the virtual assistant.

Barbara: You see, for me, I just feel like oh my God, even you saying that has just like, my shoulders have relaxed. Because you’re basically saying, and listen up everyone who’s listening. You’re basically saying that there will be no more of the VA coming to you with a 100 million questions, and the accountant saying, “Sorry. I don’t know what you’re doing there, but this is all wrong.” Like, I have done two week stints where the accountants have said to me, “there’s problem here.” And it’s taken me probably two weeks just to intensively go in and try and fix Xero. So I just think it’s such a common mistake, and it’s just not worth it to not have the bookkeeper as well, is what I’m hearing. [crosstalk 00:23:19].

Meryl: And I just recap on that. So we talked about the initial stage. It’s probably the founder, the business owner, and the tax accountant. And I would see the next phase being founder, tax accountant, and bookkeeper, and then after that, then you want to introduce a virtual assistant. And it’s probably about that time or maybe a little bit later that you would introduce the virtual CFO. And the reason for that is you have to pay taxes, and you need your structure right at the beginning. And that’s why you introduce the tax accountant early on. Next you want your bookkeeping processes to be running really effectively, and that’s when you need the bookkeeper. And once you’ve got accurate data, that’s when you can start to get advice from a virtual CFO around how to improve your business performance, based on the numbers. If you haven’t got accurate numbers, and that’s not all humming along, and you’re not getting those reports regularly, then there’s no point in you working with the virtual CFO.

Barbara: That makes so much sense. I mean, I’m really glad, and thank you, Meryl, for sharing all that stuff. I’m really glad I got a chance, actually, to share my own negative experience with this. Happy to always share warts and all on this podcast. That it can happen to anyone. Like, I class myself who’s actually pretty good on the financial tools. I’m one of those people who, I actually didn’t have metrics. But I sort of know it in my head. I’m one of those people, where I know kind of where things are at. But that’s, as you get bigger and bigger, it’s an absolute bomb waiting to explode on you because you’re just relying on, not necessarily gut, feel mad, like what you were saying.

But the numbers are sort of in my head. I kind of know what’s right and what’s wrong. But no concrete dashboards or metrics or anything. And in the last year I’ve really been focusing on getting this bit right. So yeah, Meryl, awesome topic. Matt, have you any sort of closing questions or bits you want to touch on with Meryl?

Meryl: Just a couple of things to add. So to add to what Meryl was saying, so I know in our business we’ve had one of our virtual assistants doing our invoicing fees. And that process works really well. And I think that that process works well because it was set up and tested first by myself and our accountant when we set Xero up. That it was actually really easy to plug a VA into that function. And it didn’t require necessarily a bookkeeper to do that.

Barbara: Yeah, but you’re an accountant, though. So you know—

Matt: But I worked with my accountant as well, it wasn’t just [crosstalk 00:26:01].

Barbara: Yeah, so it wasn’t just you. But [crosstalk 00:26:01]

Matt: Accountant make sure Xero was set up properly. Which then enabled us to take the invoicing function and actually have a VA do that. And keeping in mind, you know, in our business we probably got six standard invoice templates that we use. So because it’s quite repetitive, and it’s quite simple, we do that. If there’s a one off kind of invoice, that won’t go out until I’ve signed off on it. So I’ll still send it to the VA. But our normal, recurring invoices go out without me even realizing, versus something that may be a little bit different. We have a slightly different process for that, which will be… It’s in the instruction. Utilizes certain template. Send it to me in draft that I can sign off and go from there. So just to add to what Meryl was saying, you can get your VA in time to do certain functions, but it’s got to be set up properly.

And the only other thing is that don’t hold on to these aspects of your business. Get the right people to do the right work for you, so that you can focus on growing and operating your business. Versus having to try and fumble your way through all of this. I always say that for many people, the numbers and finance of the business they’ve never been trained in. But you need to be trained in to do it effectively. It’s like any skill. It’s like any function of your business. And so I think having the right people, like the team at Bean Ninjas, and the like, to do these functions for you I think is critically important, and I can’t recommend it enough.

Barbara: Yeah, so Meryl, I know, I’ll just do the plug for you for Bean Ninjas, given that I’ve already become a client. Your company essentially solves… The core thing is the bookkeeper problem. Which is the ongoing bookkeeping. But I love about what you’re doing is you also have a program where you can train VAs on the bits they can do. And I’m actively talking to Meryl about doing training for our VAs so that our clients can benefit from this a bit more as well. So just a really great offer, and I think it’s something, like I said, we’re going to do a deeper dive webinar on this. And you’ll be able to get the link in the show notes to this, and actually watch that at a later stage. So thank you so much, Meryl, any final things you’d like to share before we sign off?

Meryl: Not really. I think we’ve talked about the different roles of finance team members, and that virtual assistants, they definitely do have a place, and it’s about introducing them at the right time, when you have established processes, and having clear boundaries about what they do and don’t do. And I think some business owners can feel a bit hesitant about passing their financials to an outsourced bookkeeping company or a virtual assistant. And there are controls, there are measures you can put in place to protect your data. And I do recommend not sharing things like bank account authorization logins.

And so you can protect yourself in that way, if that is something that you’re worried about. I don’t want to take the conversation in a different direction, but there are definitely ways to protect yourself if you are handing over bookkeeping. And I do encourage you to get bookkeeping off your plate, and gradually introduce a VA in your process, but having them trained first.

Barbara: And I 100% agree, and I know, Matt, you would too, with that advice.

Matt: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Barbara: Guys, if you enjoyed this show, please remember to share it. Because all of these topics we’re talking about, I always say to people, this show is very tactical. Where we’re literally talking about real-life stuff that happens. And we’re expanding the show into the topics like, you know, the bookkeeping topics. They’re all about VAs, really. But it’s starting to branch into a lot more tactical depth, is what I would say. So love to get the show out to more people.

Give us a rating or a review on iTunes. And yeah, till next time. Thank you, everyone. I’ll see you on the next episode.

Matt: Thanks, everyone!

Meryl: Thank you.

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

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

1:20 Meryl Johnson the founder and CEO of Bean Ninjas

3:38 The power of systems and processes

4:29 Building a business to scale

8:38 Key Tools or Methods to manage your team

10:24 Wrike

12:06 Systems, tools, and Processes as the front driver

13:30 The Strength of the machine

14:01 Team Meetings

17:07 Concept of the Lunch and Learn

18:02 Virtual Christmas Celebration

20:43 Local knowledge vs Overseas Knowledge

24:39 Training Guide Procedures

29:27 Highlights of the show

33:14 External Leverage

35:09 Top 3 Learnings working with Virtual Team

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

Barbara Turley: Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of the Virtual Success Show. I’m joined by my co-host Matt Malouf as always. Hey Matt.

Matt Malouf: Hey Barb. How are you?

Barbara: I’m good. And you?

Matt: I’m excellent. Yeah, I’m enjoying a sunny day here in Sydney after what’s been a very, very wet sort of week down here.

Barbara: Yes, unusually so for Sydney. But the Sydney sun is back, which is awesome.

Matt: It is, it is.

Barbara: Yeah. So we’re back, guys, doing one of our interview series, which we love doing. We love when we find interesting business owners that are building virtual teams and can really add value to our listeners and to ask quite frankly about how they’re doing things. So today’s guest is someone who’s become somewhat of a friend of mine, Meryl Johnston, and she is the founder and CEO of Bean Ninjas, which is a bookkeeping, financial reporting, and education business. She’s also a chartered accountant. She’s host up her own podcast, the Bean Ninjas podcast, which I definitely can recommend listening to. And she’s also a big surfer living on the Gold Coast, the beautiful Gold Coast here in Australia. So welcome to the show Meryl.

Meryl Johnston: Hi Barb. Hi Matt. Great to be here.

Barbara: Good. So listen, why don’t you just give us the quick rundown, Bean Ninjas. What is it? Why did you start it?

Meryl: Well, Bean Ninjas is a bookkeeping and financial recording business, and before starting Bean Ninjas, I was running a consulting firm, not very cleverly named MCJ Consulting, my initials. And I was doing project accounting work and quite quickly found the business difficult to scale. It was hard from a cash flow perspective, with project work being lumpy, and it was difficult to build a team. And I looked at some other business models out there and the kind of business that I wanted to build, which was recurring revenue, it would have processes so I could scale the business and I wanted it to have global potential. And then I looked at my skill set, which is accounting and thought about how I could marry the two together, my skill set and the kind of business that I wanted. And that’s where Bean Ninjas was born.

I founded the business with a co-founder who had a similar vision of creating a global business and a business that we could run from anywhere in the world. So that was where it started. We launched the business in seven days following Dan Norris’s 7 Day Startup method, where we created a logo, a website, fixed fee bookkeeping packages, and found a customer in our first week. And we really had no idea about how much to charge, what our packages were, anything like that. But we launched quickly and then from there we’ve iterated and grown the business, and now we’re almost 4 years old and we have a team of 15.

Barbara: Wow, yeah. And you know what I loved about… There was a couple of things I picked up in what you said there. You said a process driven business that is scalable and we’d… Matt and I talk constantly on this podcast about the power of systems and processes and therefore how… That leading into how teams work. So you had mentioned that you had struggled to sort of get a team together in the previous business. So talk to us a little bit now about the beginnings of that virtual decision to be virtual, because that’s a big change from the original business model. How did you attack it initially in terms of hiring virtual staff?

Meryl: It was initially out of necessity, in that my business partner was in Sydney and I lived on the Gold Coast, and at the very beginning we each had separate businesses and we were working on Bean Ninjas as a side project. So it probably took about, I think 5 months into the business was when we hired our first team member. But prior to that we still needed to communicate remotely and we were building… Our intention from the beginning was to build a business to scale. So from the beginning, we wanted to make sure we were using all of the tools that would allow us to bring other team members on regardless of where they were located around the world. From the beginning, we’re using Help Scout for emails to our clients. We were using Trello to start to create bookkeeping processes. We’re using Google Drive for collaborating and file storage, and of course Xero, which is the accounting software that we specialize in.

Barbara: Matt, I’m almost salivating at the mention of all these tools. We did a whole show about the four crucial tools you need to get this right. So, Meryl, you started out with the end in mind kind of thing. So Matt what are your thoughts on starting out that way?

Matt: As you said Barb, it was that, I guess the one thing you mentioned that I think is really important for all of the listeners, is a clear intention of what the end looks like. A business that could be global, work anywhere, process driven, scalable. And so when you get clarity like that, I think what happens for entrepreneurs is we go searching for the answers, but you can’t actually go searching for answers when you’re unclear on what you’re actually searching for. So I think that’s amazing. My question is, so you said at first you didn’t hire your first virtual team member for 5 months, who was the first person you hired?

Meryl: We hired a bookkeeper to start with.

Matt: Okay.

Meryl: Yeah. And the reason for that was we wanted to remove ourselves from operations, so client facing work as quickly as possible. And so that was why we hired a bookkeeper first. And the reason that it took us so long was because we started the business by putting in $500 each and then we’ve had to… Everything, we’re bootstrapping. So we basically had to earn enough to then hire that first contractor.

Barbara: Where was the contractor based?

Meryl: We actually hired two at the same time and we hired one in the US and one in Australia.

Barbara: Interesting. Oh, so you brought in the US element. So that’s very interesting. How did that… So obviously, the three of you, there was a bookkeeper and yourself and Wayne in Australia, which virtual, but bringing a US person in would have added, all of a sudden, complexity. Were there any sort of issues there around the initial stages there?

Meryl: So the story with Wayne is actually a whole other story. So I actually had… I started a business with a guy called Ben McAdam and bought it, and we can talk about this if it fits later on, but I bought him out of the business after about 18 months and then Wayne, who is my now business partner, joined the business after a couple of years and only recently, he became a partner in August 2018.

Barbara:  I see.

Meryl:  Yeah but we can dig into that if it fits.

Barbara: No, that’s fine. Just because I know him too. So I was thinking, I didn’t realize he wasn’t there from the beginning. That’s interesting because he’s in the US actually, I’ve just realized that he’s based over there.

Meryl: Yes. So we knew that we wanted to have global potential, but we weren’t actually intending to go down that path until much later, once we’d created all of our systems. We were using Australia as the testing ground to build all of our systems and then replicate what we were doing in other markets. But what happened, we had enough referrals from our app… Because our client base were location independent entrepreneurs and digital nomads predominantly, they interacted with a lot of US-based businesses or the US owned businesses. And so we had enough referrals that it made sense to actually hire someone in the US and test it.

And we treated it the same way in launching the business. We thought, “All right, well we’ll just give it a go. We have enough referrals, we’ll learn what we need to learn about US bookkeeping, we’ll exclude anything like sales tax that we don’t have enough knowledge for and we’ll mitigate our risks and then we’ll test it and see what happens.” And interestingly, the US market is actually our largest market in the business now.

Barbara: Yeah, that happened for us too, yeah.

Matt: And so what are some of the key tools or methods you use, Meryl, in managing your team that’s now… So is the team mainly Australia and the US, or are they spread all around the world?

Meryl: They’re spread all around the world. So we are in 6… We’ve got team members that are based in 6 countries. Some of that is just because our team members travel. So one of our team members has been living in Tokyo for a couple of years and has actually just recently returned to Sydney in Australia. But our core team is based in Australia and Wayne is based in US and we’ve got another accountant in Manchester who looks after our UK clients. And then we also have teams in Serbia and the Philippines.

Matt: Okay, and what are some of the key methods in order to manage a global team like that? You know, meetings, tools, et cetera.

Meryl: Yes, we hold regular team meetings with Zoom and we like to have video on generally to help build relationships within the team. Each team member has a a one on one call with their manager each week just to check in and see how they’re going, how their workload is looking for the future and how they’re going at present if they’re enjoying their role, that kind of thing. And then we also have team meetings, and again part of it is about trying to build culture within the business, not just follow up on whether tasks have been completed.

Meryl: We use Slack. That’s again great for building team culture if you’re intentional about it, but we’re in their day to day, we try and avoid using email to correspond within the team. And then as I mentioned, we use Help Scout externally, so they’re some of the tools. We’ve recently moved to a platform called Wrike for our internal project management. And I’d say it’s a bit like Asana, but it may be the step up from that. We went from Trello to Wrike and we actually use that as a CRM too, from the point of inquiry, where we perceive an inquiry in the business, we have checklists and a flow all the way through onboarding new clients to recurring bookkeeping and then the internal reviews that we have in place. So I’d say that’s probably the key tool that we use.

In terms of managing staff we use Wrike for resource planning, so to see what different bookkeepers have on across the course of a month and future months. And that really helps us in triggering the hiring process to know, right that team’s getting close to capacity. So we know it takes us a month to hire and a couple of months for someone to get up to speed. So it’s time to start the hiring process again.   And we also use Wrike… There’s a lot of different reports we can run in there. For example, exception reports on if there’s tasks that have been set that haven’t been completed for the week as well as reports done, what bookkeeping reports are being delivered, for example.

Barbara: You know what I love about that, when you’re just telling all of those stories, excuse me, is the… You know, a lot of people where they struggle I think with teams in general, but virtual teams, it can get worse, is that they don’t know where the bottlenecks are in a workload of somebody in the Philippines for example. You can have task lists and all that but sometimes you’re not quite clear. So it sounds to me like you’re allowing systems and tools and process to sort of be the front driver, and then the teams sort of plug into those things in order to do the work and be successful, which I love, because a lot of people do it the other way around. They try and hire people and then use the tools and systems and processes as kind of a secondary bit. Whereas you, it feels to me more like that’s the driving force and then the team is plugged into that, which is the way we should do it.

Meryl: Yes, it was… Well, you’ve reminded me of a story where we were looking at resource planning for a month and the number of hours of work fitted, but if you look at it on a day by day basis, then there was something like 40 hours scheduled for one work day. So it’s little things like that that are important, but then you’re right, we’re very processed based and I suppose we describe ourselves as a people first, profit second business in that we’re very people-oriented by the way the business was built was around repeatable systems that ensure that we, regardless of the bookkeeper that’s touching the file, the quality of the work would be the same. And the way that we deliver it would be the same regardless of who’s doing it.

Barbara: Yeah, so you’ve built the machine and like I said, and then… Because this is something we try and, definitely through this podcast and I know Matt, you coach your clients on it. We see it coming through with the virtual hub. We’re trying to always say that actually the strength of the machine that you build… You know, plugging the people in, of course, those recruitment and HR and all these other elements, but sometimes it does come down to the initial part of the strength of the machine that you’re plugging your people into. And then you don’t have that issue of, “Oh my God, my amazing bookkeeper, my amazing VA has left. I’m left in a hole because the IPs all walked out the door.”

Matt: Absolutely. So Meryl, just quickly, just backtracking to your team meeting, because I find that that’s awesome. So you’ve got a team meeting that you hold. How often are you doing that?

Meryl: We have a variety. I used to hate meetings in a past corporate life, but I’ve realized there’s less opportunity for team members to interact in a remote team. And we really want people to feel proud of being a part of the Bean Ninjas team, and feel like they’re part of something and that they have relationships with other team members across different time zones. So if our bookkeeping teams are split up into teams, so they might have a weekly or fortnightly team meeting themselves. We have a monthly, what we call lunch and learn, even though it’s often not lunchtime, but for some time zones, it isn’t.

Matt: So that was my… Sorry to cut you, that was my question. How do you, across 6 countries, how do you choose the time zone?

Barbara: I was thinking the same thing. I was like, “Do you get them all on the one call?” That’s amazing.

Meryl: It’s a challenge to do that. So what we’ve decided, with the lunch and learn, which is basically someone running an internal training session. So we actually have one scheduled tomorrow and Wayne and I are presenting the 2020 vision to the team and the roadmap of how we’re going to get there and what that means for them and their roles and opportunities within the business. And we were actually running the same meeting or the same presentation and an interactive part of the presentation twice. So we’re running it once for the Europe and US time zone and then we’re running a separate one for Australia and Asia. So it is hard to get everyone on the call. But for example, our management meeting where we have 3 time zones, we just do that really early in Australia, which is late in Europe.

Barbara: Yeah, you have to get everyone, but it’s a commitment to making it work and to… I love your idea around creating spaces where people can actually forge relationships, see each other because virtually there’s a lot of time you spend on your own or just updating systems like Wrike or doing the work. There isn’t the water cooler discussion. So that’s something I know a lot of people struggle with when they’re trying to build culture in a virtual team.

Meryl: Yeah, sometimes, Sometimes I try to be proactive, if there’s a new person, I think they’re really going to get along well with someone else, I’ll suggest that they go and have a one on one call or that they work on a particular small project together, just so that gradually we want everyone in the team to have had someone on one time with everyone else in the team, and as we get bigger that gets more difficult. But that’s something that we’re aiming for, because I think you could be in a group call for a whole year with someone, but unless you’ve had that one on one time and a chance to ask about what they do outside of work, their family, then you might not really know them and when it does come time to work on a project together, you might not feel comfortable speaking up or constructively disagreeing with them about something.

Matt: Yeah. And one other thing I just want to reiterate that Meryl said, for the listeners to hear. I love this concept of the lunch and learn. And I know in a lot of corporate organizations that’s a very big part of culture building and also training. And I love how you’ve adapted that into a virtual environment. And I think too often what happens is, as entrepreneurs and business owners, we place a block at times when we think, “Well we’re not all in the same office. We couldn’t possibly do that.” But with tools like Zoom and the like now, it’s having that open-mindedness that we can all sit around a virtual table, have a training, share a meal and achieve the same outcome. I think that’s just outstanding. So yeah, kudos to you. I love that. Really, really love that.

Barbara: Actually I have a follow on question from that, Meryl. I’m interested to know, have you attempted to do a virtual Christmas celebration or like a one year… You know like when the company hits one or two years or has a milestone or it’s Christmas because we don’t do the Christmas party obviously when we have people virtually all over the world. Have you attempted anything like that, like an event where people can do something simultaneously?

Meryl: Not really. So the only time we’ve had everyone on the call was probably a couple of years ago now when we wanted to map out our vision, mission, and values and we wanted to do a workshop with the whole team. And so we had everyone there for that. I suppose something we do do, it’s hard to get the whole team together, but that actually is one of my goals for 2020, is to do an in-person retreat.

Barbara: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah.

Meryl: We do smaller versions of that. So we have had a live Christmas party in Australia where we’ve had people within Australia fly to the Gold Coast and we’ve also had Wayne in the US and Tom from the UK fly out to Australia. I think Tom’s been here a couple of times and I’ve also traveled. So we have smaller team meetups and Tom, who manages the team in Serbia, has traveled out to Serbia to meet the team and take them out to dinner. But we haven’t actually done a virtual party, so.

Barbara: The reason I asked is because-

Meryl: I like that idea!

Barbara: We did one last year, so last Christmas I thought it’d be an interesting story for me to share, that we attempted it and what we actually did was that we… On the same night, so obviously in the UK it was a bit different from night, it was morning there, but we have a sort of a Facebook group and what we did was we had parties in Manila, Cebu, Sydney, Melbourne and Dublin on the same Saturday and we all did Facebook lives while we were at our dinner or having drinks to each other in the Facebook group. And it was awesome there was lots of people and it was our first attempt at an actual virtual Christmas party and we pulled it off. I mean, okay the guys in Dublin were a bit late to the party, but it was cool to see on the following week we had all the videos of all the Facebook lives in there.

Meryl: I love the idea of that.

Barbara: Yeah, it was a really cool idea.

Matt: Very cool.

Barbara: So we attempted that last year. So there’s an idea.

Meryl: Yes, I’ll have a chat with Wayne about it.

Matt: So Meryl, just a question around location of your team. One of the things I wrote about in my book, The Stop Doing List, was when you want to use virtual teams, you’ve got to make a decision on whether you’re going to go local or overseas… And I think certain roles and tasks require local knowledge versus overseas knowledge. And you mentioned earlier, so your first two, a bookkeeper in the US and a bookkeeper in Australia. So is that a very deliberate move that you keep your team local for that region in which they’re operating in?

Meryl: It does help. So we had found that Australian bookkeepers can do US bookkeeping and then we’d just have someone in the US do a review. But I think it does help with local knowledge and knowing the names of local suppliers.

That’s something I didn’t mention, so we hired those first two staff, but we also tried outsourcing to India in that probably first 6 months and it was an absolute disaster because we had no system… Even though we were trying to build systems and processes, I should say we didn’t have any, but they weren’t very good. We were still very early in the evolution of our systems and processes and so we spent more time reviewing work… We were reviewing every email because the English wasn’t strong enough to send to clients.

So it actually took more time to kind of manage that team than if we were doing the work ourselves. And so we cut that pretty quickly and then hired local staff and then it was probably only a number of years later, once we’d really refined our systems and processes and had everything running smoothly, that we then started to introduce team members in places like the Philippines. And we were able to do that with other team members, or other accountants and bookkeepers, training and onboarding those team members rather than… As a founder, I felt it was more important for me to be growing the business rather than doing detailed training with our accountants in places like the Philippines.

Barbara: You know, I love that story because something I see a lot obviously in what I’m doing, is that when people come… Offshoring and going to places like the Philippines, India, I’m not so sure about, depending on what you’re doing. But places like the Philippines for me, of course, I see it as a no brainer strategy, to have an element of offshore team members in your business. Now, not all of them, but I think it’s great, it’s brilliant for your bottom line, of course, it’s very cost effective.

But for businesses that are not ready yet or don’t know what they don’t know yet, like what you’ve just shared, it actually does waste time, energy and money. And there’s a lot of stories online of that. So can you share a little bit deeper around, you know, the refinements, was it India that gave you the realization or did you kind of know before you outsourced and then that proved that you were not ready? And then what did you do thereafter to really get ready for something like the Philippines?

Meryl: At the time I thought we had good processes, but I think that was just because we had really strong local accountants and so they plugging the lack of processes and detailed checklists that we had because they were highly skilled, highly capable, and didn’t need a lot of direction. And after reviewing their work for a couple of months, Ben and I felt like we could trust in the quality of their work and we didn’t need to do detailed reviews. And I think that lulled me into a false sense of security about how good our processes were, and then I realized when we went to India that they were not good at all and we didn’t have proper processes around, on things like onboarding and that transition from delivering an exceptional first 30 days, and then what does that look like, to go into recurring work and what are our deliverables?

Meryl: So then when we pulled it back to local team members, then it took us a couple of years to refine it. So we would have checklists, that team members would follow in Trello and we also have training guides, procedures basically in a tool called SweetProcess. And we did a project where we created over a hundred procedures of how to guides and that probably took us nine months to complete that. So it was when we had that in place plus all of our checklists and a reporting mechanism around the checklists, which was Wrike, that we then felt like we were in a much better position to then look at hiring staff in the Philippines. And that’s gone really well for us this time around. We’ve got great accountants over there and we’ve got great local managers in place to make sure that everything’s running smoothly.

Barbara: So that’s so interesting. There’s so much gold in what you’ve just said because it really is, a lot of people give up. They just have the belief that their systems are fine and that it’s the offshore thing that has screwed everything up. But what I’m interested to know is when you… So you fixed all of that, it is a huge project to fix it, so I’m not surprised it took two years and the depth that you’ve gone to is kind of what it takes to really scale it. Did you find that, with that paired then with the offshore strategy, that the business grew faster with better profit?[/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.27.4″ text_font_size=”16px” custom_margin=”||100px” locked=”on”]Meryl: Yes. I think we’re still not seeing all of the benefits of that. If we look at our teams structure now, the potential… The team structures definitely with a local manager managing a portfolio of Philippines accountants or Serbian accountants. Yes, there’s opportunity to receive much higher profits. It also means that managers can focus less on doing and more on customer experience, and looking at where there’s opportunities to add value or understanding their client’s businesses more. So I think we’re in the early stages of seeing some of these results, but we’ve only really laid that foundation. We’ve finished some of these projects in the last couple of months to the last 6 months, but we’re only starting to see some of these benefits, but I’m expecting them to come through later this year too.

Barbara: This is really, really… This is honestly, it’s gold for people listening, because I’ve always said to people, and I know Matt, you do this as well, it is a huge amount of work to do this, but the dividends that it will pay for your business, for your people, for your scalability later are quite enormous. That it’s worthwhile to invest 12 months, 2 years, whatever, in actually building this and taking it seriously. And what I love about what you’ve shared as well, is that your onshorer I’m going to call them or whatever, your Australian, your US, and UK managers, are now freed up a lot as well to do, I’m not going to say higher value work, although it is higher value in terms of revenue generating, but for them as well, it’s a growth experience because they actually get the chance to be more engaged in, as you said, the customer success, which elevates everything, your brand can take off with that kind of thing. So is that kind of what you’re starting to see the genesis of now, after all this work?

Meryl: Absolutely, yes, and it’s interesting, our UK manager, Tom, I think he’s starting to see… He actually do a lot of the recurring bookkeeping longer than we wanted, but it just took longer to get these processes and hire the right team and he’s starting to see the light where he can spend time on these other value-added tasks that he’s been wanting to do for some months or even years really. And he can see that now with a team in place who are full time, who are committed and highly skilled, that he can rely on them to do a lot of the bookkeeping processing. He can review and then he can focus on the more fun… It’s more fun too.

Barbara: I was just thinking to myself, your people genuinely have more fun, including those who are offshore, because they feel more secure in their own success, in their own careers, that they’re not going to be making mistakes everywhere and having bad employee reviews and even if they’re contractors and whatever. So it actually has benefits across the entire channel of the whole team and the customer at the end.

Meryl: Yeah. I’m really glad we’ve gone down this path.

Barbara: Oh good. Because I know Matt, you must be… I mean this is gold for us really. Because this is the hard work that you’ve put in, but you are going to see. This is the benefits that some businesses, they sort of conceptually go, “Yeah I kind of get it.” But they don’t get how much work is involved, to pull this off, how much it’s worth it.

Matt: Yeah. And I think a couple of things for listeners, to highlight here. Early in this episode the first thing Meryl was very clear on, was the vision for the business but also what she was creating, a process driven business that is scalable. And the second thing is, I see so often business owners jumping in wanting to scale fast, but they’re not ready. And I think it’s having the foresight to understand that and go, “No, you know what? We weren’t ready for that. We have to go in and layer in tighter infrastructure. Our foundation’s not strong enough.” 

And then to Barbara’s point, most people will blame the virtual team or the location… And one thing that Barbara and I continuously on this show and in the work that we do outside of the show, are sharing with people is, without strong, robust systems that you’ve tested and tried to break, et cetera, your business, you can’t grow in scale. It’s near impossible. And it’s having the patience for that. I think too often business owners try and throw money and people at the problem versus actually having the patience and investing the time, energy and effort into building the machine that is your business, so that then… I call it, if you have a strong system that’s proven, you can take someone with the right attitude and make them look like a superhero overnight.

Barbara: Yeah, you can. You can train people to be that.

Matt: And that’s what Meryl’s done. You know, Meryl has tried India, wrong location, and I think that’s a really important point. Not that they’re better or worse, it’s just the wrong location for her type of business and the type of people that she was looking for, went back to the drawing board, has tightened the system, identified where the problem and… Every day in what I do and I love that Meryl, you’ve done this, you took a hundred percent responsibility as opposed to blaming, and then what you’ve now got is the ability to have a business that can operate in 6 countries, and you or your team can work virtually anywhere in the world. That’s just amazing.

Meryl: So definitely got some team members that take advantage of that. Michael, from our team, he’s lived in Bali for a couple of months last year and he’s planning some surf trips to New Zealand actually, where he’ll be working, and he’ll be fitting in his work around what he’s doing.

Matt, I wanted to add something else to what you were talking about there, and something I found hard in probably the second year of business when we started investing in processes, was I had to put my ego to the side and as a founder originally some of my… I was attributing whether I was a good founder or not, around how quickly I was growing revenue and we had to put revenue gross on hold for a little while, really scale it back while we worked on systems and processes. And so that was putting ego to the side and really thinking about what the business needed for the long term. And it was challenging to do, especially when lots of other businesses were growing quickly around me, but it was not about what they were doing. It was about what was right for Bean Ninjas.

Barbara: I love that you’ve shared that Meryl, because I think as well, everyone’s trying to rise to the top and a lot of people are very focused on marketing, or what I call external leverage, which is marketing, sales, PR, client acquisition, traffic, all that sort of thing. And really internal infrastructure is what breaks that in the end because if you drive all of those sales and all of that hype into an engine that is rusty and half falling down, which is the engine of your business, then you blow yourself up in the end and we see that happening a lot. People do end up blowing themselves up. Where I’m with you, I just think this is a more sustainable… It’s more painful in some ways because it’s not fun. Building processes is just not fun.   Like who wants to sit down and do that? But again, I hear this all the time from people, I’m not on our sales calls anymore, but I see it coming through on the common commentary. People saying, “Oh look, I just don’t have time for that, sorry.” And my answer to that is always, “Well, if you don’t have time today, you’ll have less time in 12 months’ time.” 

Because you have to… It’s like going to the gym, right? You’ve got to work that muscle if you want to achieve the engine or the machine in the end that will take you where you want to go and actually give you the entrepreneurial freedom that we all went into business to achieve. Not necessarily sitting on the beach doing nothing, but you know what I mean? It’s having the opportunity to, in the end, do things like this, like do our podcasts, talk to people about the company growth, look at company culture, all the more fun stuff. But you’ve got to do the hard work, in the beginning, to make that happen. And it has to come from the owner, I think, the founder.

Matt: It’s your vision, it’s your dream, isn’t it? So, I’ve got one last question, Meryl. Knowing what you now know and you’ve been doing this for, I think you said 4 years, what are say the top three learnings when it comes to working with a virtual team that you could share with our listeners, who may be thinking of starting to employ their first virtual team member or may already have a virtual team?

Meryl: So the first one, I think we’ve talked about a bit, which is having good systems and good processes in place and having that as a cultural part of the business so that everyone knows why systems and processes are important. And so everyone within their role is maintaining the standard operating procedures and the checklists and continuing to gradually improve them, not just create them once and then two years later they are completely out of date. So systems and processes creation and also maintaining them.

The second is around who you hire. And it was only a couple of years into the business that we hired a project manager. Before that, I was creating all of the procedures and doing a lot of the thinking of behind that. And then when we hired a project manager, I could communicate my vision and then someone else who was very skilled could go and execute on that and rally the troops and get other people in the team organized or create the step by step process around that. And so in hindsight, and maybe we would’ve needed to have saved up for that in the business, but in hindsight, I would have hired someone of that skill level as early as possible. So rather than hiring people that can follow processes, I would have hired someone that could create the processes.

Barbara: I would echo that myself. I definitely think I should have done that earlier as well.

Meryl: And it’s hard when you’re starting out because it feels like you don’t have the budget, but I would have sacrificed marketing spend and my own salary to do that because that would have shaved months and maybe even a year off our growth curve, I would say.

And then the third one is not to neglect team culture. I think team culture is much easier to build when you’re in an in person-environment and it can happen by default because you walk out of the office at the same time as someone and you have a chat on the way to the train. Whereas you need to be a lot more intentional about it and clear about what kind of culture you want to create and then put in place strategies like the team calls or the virtual Christmas parties, the one on one calls as well as the technology behind it to enable collaboration with the team and to make everyone feel welcomed and that they’re listened to and part of a team rather than any individual doing some work on their own from home.

Barbara: That’s great. Those are three really strong points and I do think actually you’ve picked the best three possible because, as you were speaking, I was thinking I would echo those competing, particularly that project management role. And if I could actually just add there, often we see people coming to us wanting a virtual assistant and then kind of trying to morph that virtual assistant into the project manager role, which is always a disaster, but they’re trying to save on costs there and it’s just being realistic about what a project manager truly is and the value that they actually bring to the team and they can even run the offshore people eventually and delegate tasks, et cetera. So really powerful stuff, guys.

Matt: Thank you so much, Meryl, for sharing. Thank you.

Barbara: Honestly it’s such gold, great to see the growth of the company. I can’t wait to see where it goes from here. I’m a user of Bean Ninjas. I’m happy to say, so get on board everyone.

Meryl: It’s been fun. Thanks for having me.

Matt: Fantastic. Thanks, Meryl, and Barb once again, another great show, another great guest. To our listeners, if you’ve got any specific questions that you’d like to reach out, for Meryl or for us, feel free to post them in our Facebook group at the Virtual Success Show Facebook group. And also too, if you’ve got any show ideas, or you’ve just enjoyed the show, we’d love for you to share that or post them online. We’re always looking to ensure that what we’re bringing to the table for this show is relevant and exactly what you’re after. But once again, thanks to Meryl, thanks Barb and we’ll all be in touch soon.

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

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

1:18 How do you assess your Virtual Assistant?

1:52 Biggest Challenges to Assessing Your VA

3:10  Identifying your Key Areas

6:55 Delivering Feedback in An Effective Way

7:42 Identify KPI ‘s

8:14 Assess Your Onboarding Procedure

10:17 Feedback

12:35 The Stop Doing List

14:46 Role Expectations and Communication

16:04 Monthly Assessments

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

Matt: Hey everyone, and welcome to another show of the Virtual Success Show where I’m joined by my co-host, Barbara Turley. Hey Barb.

Barbara:  Hey Matt. How are you today?

Matt: I’m really well, and yourself?

Barbara: Good, thank you. Excited about our topic that we’re going to dissect into today?

Matt: I am, I am. As always, meetings before the show are always interesting conversations and topics just pop up. This one, it was funny. We were halfway through a conversation, Barbara and I, and we went, “This is a show, let’s start recording.” So we did.

Barbara: So here we are, to dissect what the problem I presented to Matt is…

Matt:  And it is. I think one of the questions I get asked regularly is how do I assess or measure the success or failure of my virtual assistant? How do I know whether they’re doing well or not doing well? It’s a really interesting topic. I think there’s many many different ways you can do this. But what we wanted to do today was open a discussion between Barbara and I because we were talking about this beforehand, and then we share some insights into this. I think one of the biggest challenges when trying to assess your virtual assistant is making it really complicated and then therefore hard to measure and be transparent. When you try to measure the success or failure of a role, you’ve got to make it really easy and transparent for both you and the persons you’re assessing to understand how they’re doing. There should be no surprises.

Matt: The way that I’ve done this over the years with the virtual teams and even local people that I’ve had working with me, I create a list of the things that they are responsible for. For instance, they may be responsible for managing my calendar, managing my emails, booking hotels, booking travel. One for Barbara and I is the podcast, so actually taking the recordings and producing the show. You need to create a list of all of the key areas or key responsibilities that your VA has. What you then need to do is you need to get them to score themselves, let’s say it’s a scoring system out of five, and five is that they are completely competent, confident, and do this task exceptionally well, and one is that they’re a novice at it, that they really don’t know what they’re doing and are struggling with it.

Matt: You get them to assess themselves in each of those areas as a score out of five. What you then do separately is you take the same list and you score them on how you believe they’re doing with that responsibility or that task. Then what you can do is you can have a really educated and robust conversation about the gap. For instance, I’ll just use the example of managing my calendar, and let’s say I score my virtual assistant as a three and they score themselves as a four. Then the discussion is why do they give themselves a four and why did I give them a three, and then what are we going to do differently in the next month or quarter depending on what period of time you’re reviewing to get them to a four or a five? That way then you’re understanding from their model of the world how they assess themselves and they understand from your model of the world how you assess them… what are your thoughts around that Barb?

Barbara:  Yeah, I was just thinking as you’re talking. What I love about that set up is that you get to the heart of things that are difficult to identify. For example, you as the business might say, “Yeah, you do a great job with the calendar management, I understand you’re there every day, you get back to the clients, everything’s always correct,” so I’m just trying think of an example of where you could dig into something that’s frustrating you that you haven’t been able to articulate or even realize before. You might say to the VA, “The only thing is though you’re constantly pinging every 10 minutes in Skype with questions about the calendar,” and that’s where the disconnect is. From their perspective, the calendar looks good, everything’s right, but they’re getting constant clarifications or whatever. There’s something that’s slightly outside of the task that is frustrating you and therefore causing your view of the task’s success in this scenario to be skewed negatively so that neither of you can.

That, as you say, that means the VA can see it from your perspective and you can see it from their perspective. As we know, generally we all view things differently. It’s really good to understand each other’s perspective around why something’s going right or why something is going wrong from the other person’s perspective. I think that is a really powerful conversation actually, and it reduces any negativity that people feel around feedback. As we know, we did a series of shows on this before. Delivering feedback in an effective way can be quite awkward for many people, and they feel it’s quite negative. And this is much more collaborative conversation around what’s needed by both sides.

Matt: Yes. Also to add to that, one of the earlier shows we did around expectations. What could happen is they could understand the task, but your expectation and their expectation may be misaligned. It’s often through what hasn’t been communicated.

Barbara: Yeah, and you only learn that by working together actually, each other’s style. That can really affect how things … But we were talking about KPIs basically, Matt and I, and while we did identify certain KPIs that you could use that are very metrics driven, of course, that’s the ideal pure way of doing this, but doing it that way can lose some of the stuff we were just talking about here. Matt, I’m just thinking you lose that connectivity of style and perspective and that conversation gets lost…

Matt: It does, it does. What this also does, as a business owner and an entrepreneur, it enables you to assess your effectiveness of onboarding and training your staff also. I’ve always found in the past where the gap often lies is because I haven’t trained my virtual assistant in the ways that I’m actually expecting them to do something, or I’ve only trained them in certain parts of it and I haven’t actually gone to the next level with the training. But also too, I may have trained them in something, but haven’t spent enough time practicing it with them, or enabling them to ask me questions, or maybe I rushed the training. There’s so many different things, and if we’re going to take responsibility around here, this is not an assessment tool to point the finger. It’s an assessment tool to be able to work together so that you get the best from this role and this person.

Barbara: I’m thinking as well, some of you guys listening will be thinking, “Oh my God, that just sounds so tedious, it’s like an HR role, I don’t want to do this.” But most of us, being entrepreneurial quite frankly would rather stick needles in our eyeballs than do this sort of analysis and team management, but sadly when you’re running a business, whether you like it or not, I think this becomes part of your role as a leader, even if you just bring one VA into your business. You can choose to not do it, but I think the power of doing it is that you start to invest in your people. That, I can safely say that’s one of the most powerful things that I have done in my business is to help my people be great regardless of how great they were before. They might have been A players coming in, but I need them to be my A players, and it does really help to get this right.

Matt: Yeah. But also too, what I think you’ve got to remember is everyone needs feedback. If I’m not getting feedback from whether it’s my superior or whoever it might be, I’m going to assume I’m doing a good job because I haven’t heard anything, I’m not being told otherwise, I’m doing the tasks that are asked of me. I’m just going to assume that I’m doing things the way that I should be or the way that are expected of me.

Barbara: Or… some people might be thinking, “Well, they haven’t pinged me for it, so nobody’s noticing that I’m not doing a good job.” For those people that know that they’re not really playing at the level, they’re skirting under the wire so to speak, if you have that type of person on your team, they’ll just keep skating along if they feel they can get away with it.

Matt: I think consistent and timely feedback, and also to having a… When I conceptualize this with my VA years ago, it was because I wanted to see how they assess themselves as well as I did. I mean I could assess them, but I knew that if we discussed the gap, then at least what I find anyway is that they don’t get defensive, because it’s a constructive conversation. They’ve had the opportunity to give you the score and why they’ve given themselves that score, and you’ve given the opportunity also. What could happen too at times is I’ve had instances where I’ve scored my VA higher then they’ve scored themselves. What it does is it helps build their confidence. It helps reiterate that they’re doing a really good job, and that they are I guess exceeding your expectations. This simple investment of time really does continue to reap and pay you back.

Barbara:  In fact, this is actually such a good strategy, Matt, and I’ve heard you talk about it so many times and I read it obviously in your book, The Stop Doing List. Amazing part of that book. We finally, finally, just at this point, we’ve just built it into some of our big system automations that we have around review time and we have an evaluation that goes to the client, to the team leader, and to the VA themselves, across three people. Then it’s we’re including this part where the employee or the virtual assistant gets to rate themselves so that they feel like they’ve got a seat at the table and they actually have a say. I’m interesting to know actually Matt, have you ever had an incident where you rated somebody, they rated themselves higher than you did, but upon discussion, you realized that maybe their rating actually was right and yours was skewed in the wrong direction for whatever reason? Has that ever happened?

Matt:  It has, yeah. And often it’s because either the parts that I was saying they weren’t doing had never been communicated with them…trained in those areas, or that responsibility, it may have been that we had three responsibilities in one, so it wasn’t clear that I was responsible for all three things. I thought I only needed to do this part.

Barbara:  I was just thinking, that’s a great example actually. Now that I’ve asked that question, I’m actually thinking that happens more often than we think. I had a situation a while ago where I probably was consistently rating one of my team lower than this person would rate themselves. And then it became apparent to me when I thought about it, I actually spoke to HR and I had some feedback from other people who interact with this role that that person saw themselves as supporting me as opposed to leading that area, and that was an eye-opener for me. I was like, okay, so that person’s expectation of themselves in that role is different from what my expectation of their role is, or the level of leadership that I was attributing to that role was higher than the level of leadership that they thought I was attributing in that role.

Barbara: Therefore it resulted in a lot of clarifications, still coming to me for guidance, et cetera, thinking that that was the right thing to do, because I was the leader. And I realized that I hadn’t communicated that effectively, so that was an eye-opener for me to have that experience. There’s multiple ways to look at this process, and it’s not just a cut and dry… you rate yourself, I rate you, and then we discuss and I win, like as the leader my rating stands as the right one.

Matt: Yeah, 100%. What you’ve got to be mindful of here, they score themselves, you score them, you discuss the gap, you need to have clear next steps, and you also have to have a clear timeframe within which you’re going to check back in.

Barbara: Yes. So there’s not left hanging.

Matt: Correct. If this is say a quarterly assessment, I recommend you should do something like this monthly, but at bare minimum quarterly, you might have a difference in writing, but you may say, “What we’re going to do on this particular area, because it’s of high importance, we’re going to check back in in a month. Let’s book it in the diary now so that we can have a little discussion in one month’s time just in this particular area. We’re not going to go through the whole thing again. We’re just going to talk about this particular one because it’s really really important.” Or what you may do is you go, “Okay, there’s a difference. The strategy used that you and I are going to spend some time training together over the next month, I think we need 30 minutes a week. Let’s book it in the diary now and make sure that it happens.”

Barbara: Yeah, and you have to make that commitment. Like I said, as the leader of the business, this is actually a role that you start to take on the minute you start to take people on in your business, and you have to kind of accept that. You can sort of delegate I guess, but until you get really big and you’ve got operations and team leaders and stuff like that, it’s actually hard to delegate this to anyone. You have to suck it up and do it yourself. But you’ll grow your people with it. But for me, it’s great, because this is an area I’ve struggled with myself is to how to progress things. I’ve got all the other strategies down pat as to how to onboard and train and get the most out of VAs, but this is an area now I’m really hitting up against as we’ve had people working with us for years, so we’ve got to do this on behalf of clients as well. We help to mentor the VAs up the ladder too in this way. Really great advice.

Matt: Thank you. Last thing I’d say is just keep this simple. Keep it simple. Simple list of responsibilities with a consistent timeframe and give it a go. It will make a huge difference, and it will help you build a deeper connection and get better results from your VAs.

Barbara: Yes. So if any of you want to share any stories about that, pop into the Facebook group. We’ve got the virtual success Facebook group. And you can also suggest shows that you’d really like us to do. We’re always open to new ideas. If you love the show, please make sure that you share it and subscribe on iTunes or your favorite podcast listening and give us a rating and a thumbs up review if you can so that we can help get the show out to more people. So Matt, thanks so much for that today. Thanks everyone for listening. Until next time.

Matt: Thank you Barb. We’ll see you soon.

Barbara: Bye.

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

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

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