The Virtual Success Show

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2:27 Timezones

6:21 Setting parameters and direction to avoid feelings of frustration

9:12 Loom and Asana

9:30 Designing a system that works

10:32 Stand up

15:06 Creating documentation for recurring tasks

18:21 Time, Patience and Attention to Detail

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

Barbara Turley:  Hey everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Success Show where I’m again joined by my co-host Matt Malouf. Matt, how’s the going?

Matt: It is. It is, and I had to think about that because we normally do these recordings in the morning but it’s—

Barbara:  Great, thanks. And as always we’ve come up with a fantastic topic again today that we think the listeners, you guys are gonna really love, common problem. I love how when we’re just chatting in the planning of the show, we just come up with all these ideas that just come from our experiences with clients and, Matt you with coaching clients, me seeing people getting VA’s, brings up the most interesting stories for us.

Matt: Absolutely, and I’m really excited about today’s show.

Barbara: Yeah, so a common one and something that did come up for us recently, and I know a lot of people in the Virtual Assistant, virtual team game out there globally would have this problem, is how do you get success when you’re working with a virtual team or a Virtual Assistant that is not in your time zone?

So for example, you’re in the US working, your business hours and you have a VA in the Philippines who works their business hours. So therefore, it’s in the middle of the night for you, which sounds like the Holy Grail because the idea would be that you wake up in the morning, and all these amazing tasks have been completed overnight.

But often we find that, while that does seem like the optimum solution, it doesn’t always work out that way. So, Matt, I’m sure you’ve seen this with people who have offshore VA’s and overseas contractors.

Matt:  Absolutely, and I’m, and I’m like, I’ve even seen it to the extent of where Australians are working with Filipinos where there’s only a couple of hours time difference. Don’t get this right. So its-

Barbara:  There’s a couple of extra tricks I think to getting this right. The…

Matt: I agree.

Barbara: I think all of the things that we talk about on this podcast all still hold very true. But when you’re working different shifts and different time zones from each other, you almost need to like crank up the fuel on all the things that we talk about and you need to be extra vigilant with so many things.

Of course that means, using things we always talk about, project management tools like, Asana or Trello, whatever, using Slack effectively, making sure that you’ve got really detailed processes and task lists, et cetera. But there’s a little bit more to it than that, isn’t there Matt, to get this right?

Matt: Absolutely.

Barbara: Yeah, so we had a case of this, the reason this is an interesting one for us. We had a case of this come up only a couple of weeks ago, where one of our clients had requested that they would like to have a VA working outside of their time zone. And after a couple of months, it came to light that it wasn’t really working out.

So we got in there and actually have helped to boost the situation and get things working more effectively. So one of the things that, and I actually also have, one of my team works in my nighttime. And we have an amazing relationship, gets so much work done yet we never have a live call together.

So what we’re gonna do today, is kind of dissect the important points to getting this right. Number one for me, and something that I definitely do. I mean, we always recommend having a non-negotiable kind of huddle, meeting every day with your team just to make sure that you answer questions on where they’re stuck.

But how do you do that if somebody is not in your time zone? Well, the way I’ve been doing it is, I still have a huddle with my guy who’s not in my time zone. He said, we do it over Loom. And I’ve given him a structure where I say, “I want you to do a video for me on Loom, every day.”

And it’s like, “Here’s what I’ve achieved for the day, here’s what I plan to do next, here’s where I’m stuck.” And then I ask him to give me a solution. So I go, “Here’s where I’m stuck.” And he lists out all the questions he has for me. And then he goes, now what I’m thinking is this, I just don’t know, I need your feedback.

And then, I do my Loom video and I go back to him, and we trade Loom videos basically. And it works really well for us because, we’re diligent about it.

Matt:  When does he have to have that done by, Barb?

Barbara:  It’s like an end of day report thing. So I wake up in the morning if his video is there. 

Matt:  Excellent.

Barbara:  It works pretty well for me, and then I’ve got the whole day to kind of come back to him, now, I have been guilty of not going back to him. And then I’ll be honest with you, if you don’t go back to them, if you don’t deal with that straight away, it’s like anything for days can go by, so you have to be extra vigilant with yourself.

I think, if you’ve got somebody who’s not in your time zone, it’s a commitment on both sides to do it.

Matt: Agreed, and I think what, I want the listeners to hear from what Barbara’s saying is, she’s just taking the framework that she uses with her team and adapted it utilizing technology. So we’ve gone, what’s the barrier that is actually occurring in its current form? Well, when I’m sleeping, he’s awake and when he’s sleeping, I’m awake.

So we’ve gone, what’s the compromise? Same questions asked as a normal huddle, and we’re just utilizing technology here. I think that, you bring up a really good point too, which is in responding because, like any of us, if we are doing something and we don’t get a response, we’ll just stop doing it.

Barbara: Well, they get even more stuck, because I find my guy, everything’s stalls and I could blame him for that, or I could go, well, he kind of doesn’t really know where to go next, because I haven’t given them anything.

Matt: Yes, and I think that’s a really good point when we talk about different times zones is, having some parameters around what to do when they do get stuck because, we don’t want your Virtual Assistant feeling frustrated. We don’t want you feeling frustrated that, I need to have their handheld but there’s gonna be this middle ground because, if they just go ahead and keep doing things, it’s likely to cost you time and money.

But if they don’t get timely responses from you, again, it’s gonna cost you time and money. So, I think this… And Loom, I mean, I don’t know about you but I love Loom.

Barbara: I’m addicted to Loom, I love Loom.

Matt: It’s so simple, easy, it’s there. And for anyone that hasn’t, utilized Loom, it’s a Google Chrome Extension. I was gonna point…..

Barbara: Yeah, it’s a Google Chrome thing.

Matt: Extension?

Barbara: The tricky part is this, the Web address is use loom.com. You use as in, U-S-E, to me, just to find the thing, because I couldn’t find that URL. But use loom.com, if you go there and if you go into the Chrome Extensions, you can put it on your desktop, it’s really handy.

Matt: Correct, now……

Barbara: I think as well the thing about the video though, you could, so of course you can type. I think one of the other things I do, which I forgot to mention, I do the Loom video, but then I also put in bullet points into Asana. So I drop the Loom video into Asana, so I still use Asana but then, I put bullet points as well into Asana of kind of the dot points of what I’ve discussed just to… I mean, I’m a talker, right?.

So just to sort of get it into a more, less of a blurb framework and to make sure that he has all the points that I hit in the video. And I think that helps him to then put some structure on everything I’ve said, if I ramble.

Matt: Yeah, and I like how you’re not compromising one system for another, we still use both. And, let me ask a question about, when you do your huddles with the rest of your team, does everything go into the Asana?

Barbara: Yes, so the rule we have, and I learned this the hard way, so definitely listen up guys, because I did this wrong initially. I used to think, well I used to say, constantly find myself saying to the team, “I discussed it on the huddle and then I became kind of like that tone about it.”

So it was like a thing in our whole business where I was getting really frustrated going, “But I told you this on the huddle.” But the reality was the huddle had become quite big and we have about 12 people on there and there’s a lot of things that get said on the huddle. So the rule is, we actually have one person for each section, is kind of a note taker.

And they have to put the instruction into the task as we go through the huddle and tag the person that is now gonna take it over. And we do it live so we can all see, and sometimes I might say, “Oh! Will you add this there.” Or, “Just make that clearer by saying whatever and I can add my thoughts.”

So definitely adding the bullet point or the pure instruction into Asana in the task is key, and that solved that problem for us.

Matt: Yeah, and everything that Barb was talking about here is so simple. And it’s a case of number one, designing your system that works for you and your business, and number two, then sticking to it. And the accountability has to go both ways with something like this, we can’t have an expectation on your Virtual Assistant that you’re not willing to uphold on your end.

Barbara: As I was saying this as well, I was thinking, the tendency is, and I did do this myself. The tendency is to go, “My team aren’t listening, they’re just not listening.” But they are listening, it’s just that, you may need that extra step and it just cleans everything up. And definitely someone not in your time zone, definitely put that step in as kind of a circuit breaker to make sure that everyone’s clear.

Matt: So we have a slight variation on the way we do that in our business, to what you’re doing about where, we have a Slack channel called, Standup.

Barbara: Yeah, I love that.

Matt: And we just, because we call it Standup because, how to…….another term for a huddle is a Standup meeting, so we call it Standup. And in our business, we don’t have American time zone, but the time zones that we do have, vary from, New Zealand, Australia and the Philippines.

By 9:30 Sydney time, everybody has to put their standup. And we have a three really simple questions. Question one is, what am I getting done today? And you need to bullet point the key things you’re gonna be working on today. The second question is, what do I need from others slash where I’m stuck? And again, you can you put it in there.

And then the third question for us is, did I achieve yesterday’s tasks? And the nice thing about that, particularly in my role, because I travel a lot, I rely heavily on Slack as a communication forum in our business is that, I know that I can keep my team on task and focused simply by, monitoring what they’re putting in their Standup.

We utilize Asana and the like also, for recurring tasks and projects. But this enables me to know, where their focus is, but also to, for instance, in today’s, Standup, one of my teams said, “I need a decision from Matt today on this event.” So, and I knew that I needed to do that, but it was just, that’s what that person needs in order for them to keep on track with their projects.

We had another team member who is a little bit low on work at the moment. So she’s come back and said, highlighted to the whole team, “If anyone needs any assistance or help, I’ve got some excess time today.” So it’s serves in a few different, I guess areas, but I just like that I can log into, Slack whether it’s on my computer or my phone and say by 9:30 every morning, everyone in our team has posted in there.

Barbara: Yeah, I love that. And I think, not only just to keep everyone focused, it keeps them all focused on what your needs are as the owner of the business, as the leader of the business. In terms of what report, like what do they need to tell you? Because I think, I find sometimes, when I talk to VA’s, they sort of don’t know what to put in their end of day report or, they’re confused about, what does the client need to know?

And they end up listing all the tasks they did for the day, which is kind of useless. And this whole thing helps your team to get really clear about, what is it that you need to know as the leader of the business so that you can make faster decisions? You could help them, you can make sure roadblocks and friction doesn’t happen.

And on the other side, on the more negative side, there’s nowhere to hide. So for example, if you do have a team member, like I hear a lot from people, I just don’t know what my VA is doing, I don’t, there’s all this. In this structure, you won’t have that problem, because they have to do this every day.

And you’re gonna see very quickly where their strengths are, where the holes are, whether nothing’s happening, or whether they’re just not doing it, and that produces then a different conversation. So it makes leadership of teams and actually managing more of the HR side, or more the performance management actually easier, because it gives you the tools to do it.

Matt: Yeah, and the other thing too, just to add to that list that Barb was saying, “It enables you to understand, are they prioritizing the right things at the right time?” Sometimes, it could be that you had a meeting and, or it could be your Loom video and something was missed and then all of a sudden you’re not seeing it, whether it’s in Asana or in the Standup conversation, you can remind that person that, “Hey? How about this thing that’s a really important, that they see get done today.”

Barbara: Yeah, so look, I think those are, definitely that’s the big thing for me. Another key thing with someone outside your time zone is, and I know we’ve talked about this a million times, but you need to have a very developed task list so that there’s no confusion with that person about what their job requires on a daily basis.

Now, someone outside of your times zone could be doing a recurring task list, a project task list or a combination of both. And it’s very, very important for you at the beginning that that task list is developed enough in terms of, systems and processes and instructions so that the person can actually effectively work without you.

So it requires a little bit higher level of detail, I feel. If it’s a project, then that is a little bit harder again because it’s not so clear cut. So you just need to think about that and raise the level of involvement initially from you to make sure, that actually is structured properly and they can get on with the job. Does that make sense, Matt, so that, because they’re on their own, right?

So they have to be able to get on with the job without you, and then report back to you at the end of the day, on where the challenges are, et cetera, and what’s been happening.

Matt: And remembering that they crave instruction, actually want the instruction. And the, that those recurring tasks lists, or whether it’s adult task lists, make it so much easier for your VA to win which in turn means that you win.

Barbara: Yes, a final one I think I would touch on just, which I think is a trap that some people would fall into if they’ve done all these other things is, the terrible trap of research. So naturally a lot of VA’s, this happens to them. You’ve asked her VA to do something for you and they go into the vortex of research.

And because it’s not in your time zone and you’re not available, and nobody’s really helping them during the day, they can go in and all of a sudden you get a time tracker or an end of day report or whatever that says that, they spend three hours researching this one thing and you had no intention of that happening.

And you were like, “Oh! My God, three hours for that?” So again, that comes down to effective, knowing that you’re not in that time zone. Again, this stuff is really important if you are in a time zone, but if you’re not, you want to lay the expectation out and help the person before they start that task with, what your thinking is.

So you might say, “Look, I want you to do some research on this particular topic for me, I don’t really, if you’re finding your spending more than an hour, I want you to stop and compile what you’ve done and I’ll, we’ll think, will do more tomorrow.” Or something like that, “Let me know what, where you’re, what you’re finding.”

So that they have some parameters around, that vortex because it is a vortex that they can get lost in for hours on end. And it, clients get very irritated with that, that’s the one like pay, it’s sort of something that really, irks a lot of clients and it’s like, it pushes their buttons of, “What’s my VA doing all day?”

Matt: Yeah.

Barbara:  Causes that a lot, yeah.

Matt: And it all comes back to the communication. Setting clear parameters, clear expectations of what it is that you’re after, when to check in, et cetera. And I think we at the, on the other side of what Barb was saying, if you need someone to go deeper on something, then you need to say, again, allow them to understand the depth of research that you’re after so that they cannot allocate enough time. They may go to short and not go as in depth as you would like.

Barbara: Absolutely, yes. Again, that’s mind reading. Like how do you know? So it’s all of these assumptions around, what you say and what someone else hears and you just gotta be more detailed, I feel when somebody is not in your time zone. And then you won’t waste time together and you can’t have a really effective relationship actually.

And you get that Holy Grail of waking up in the morning and going, “Wow! Look at all this stuff?” That actually does happen.

Matt: You need a mind reading tool, that’s what’s we need though.

Barbara: Yeah.

Matt:  That would solve this problem for everybody?

Barbara: Yes, I think, again, I always say, it’s a commitment to, I find myself writing instructions now and I’m stating the bleeding obvious kind of thing. But I just know that, you just, in any communication, like the other day I was in a coffee shop and this girl, I ordered like two large flat whites. It was a whole list of things and she was new.

So I said, “Why don’t you read it back to me to just, make sure he got the right order?” And she said, “Okay, so you want two coffees, one toast.” And I said, “Okay, it’s too large flat whites, because my husband would go mad if it was wrong. It’s one soy Lindseed toast with butter and jam.” Right? Because, otherwise you could get an order that was totally wrong.

So it’s this, just commitment to the detail that can be tedious for a lot of people, but it reduces the, reduces mistakes and misunderstandings.

Matt: It does, and I think again, like with any person you’re working with, when you’re working with people across different time zones, you’ve got to be patient and you’ve got to understand that there is a getting to know one another phase and you really got to find your groove together. And that’s where there someones, sitting next to you in your office or they’re on the other side of the world on a different time zone.

You’ve got to be, set realistic expectations in the short-term in order to set yourself and the other person up to win as well.

Barbara: Look and I will share, by the way, I mean, you might have someone who’s not a Virtual Assistant, you might have a consultant that’s working in another time zone. You might as in someone from your team, you might have a salesperson. Like I’ve got, I live in Australia and I’ve got a salesperson who runs the U.S sort of sales side, who is in a, is like literally the opposite end of the time zone to me.

And we have had all these, like we’ve had all these stumbling blocks because of these issues again, and you have to be very clear. And so it doesn’t, it’s not just about talking about Virtual Assistants, it’s anyone who is working a different time zone to you or in the virtual environment I would suggest.

Matt: Correct.

Barbara: Great, well, I hope that has helped a few people out there listening. I know, I definitely know this is a thing out there. And don’t get discouraged to that just because somebody wants to work in a different time zone or a few hours different to you that you can’t make it work, but you have to make a commitment to these few steps that we’re talking about here.

Matt: Absolutely, and if you’ve got any questions on this topic, please feel free to send them through to us via the Facebook group. We’re always looking for new topics to talk on the show as well. And as I said, “Please, we’d love for you to share the episode out there in the community so we can help a lot more businesses and entrepreneurs succeed with their virtual teams.”

And if you’ve enjoyed the show, we’d love for you to write us a review and again, share the love, because the more people that Barbara and I can help in this area, we believe, the more successful the entrepreneurial community will be.

Barbara: Absolutely, well said. Thanks guys. Until next time, see you 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.

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1:25 – Technology that is crucial to succeed in your business

2:58 – Tool Number 1: Project Management

9:25 – Tool Number 2: Effective Communication

17:49 – Tool Number 3: Data Management

22:40 – Why having processes is also crucial to your business

23:40 – Benefits of these tools

24:26 – Bonus Tech Tool

27:03 – Wrapping Up

Tools Mentioned:

Asana

Basecamp

Trello

Slack

Zoom

Skype

G Suite/Google Drive

Dropbox

Loom

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

Matt Malouf:  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another show of the Virtual Success Show where I’m joined by my co-host Barbara Turley. Good afternoon, Barb.

Barbara Turley:  Hey, Matt from sunny Sydney. Is it sunny where you are in Sydney today?

Matt: It is. It is, and I had to think about that because we normally do these recordings in the morning but it’s—

Barbara:  I know. It’s nice to do it in the afternoon.

Matt:  It is. It certainly is. How’s everything going?

Barbara:  Good, great. We’re heading into a nice time of the year here, my favorite time of the year in Sydney. The weather gets a bit cooler, which is good. But excited about today’s topic. I love how we pow-wow and come up with these problems that we see across business coaching and in what I do in outsourcing and gel them together and come up with these great topics. So what are we gonna talk about today, Matt?

Matt: As Barb and I were preparing, we were talking about the technology that’s crucial to succeed and win when you’re working with your virtual teams. I think there’s so much technology at our fingertips these days and so much advice around, you should use this, you need to get that, you need to integrate it with this, it can be very, very confusing for many of us. I know technology is not something that has come naturally to me. It’s something that I’ve had to learn and train myself with. But the key is that there are some crucial pieces of technology that you must adapt and adopt in your company to succeed with virtual assistants.

Barbara:  Definitely. I mean, I echo those thoughts. You know, Matt, I’m someone who is into technology and I love integrating systems and everything, but my love of simplicity is bigger. Even though I love tools, I actually have very few. We recommend strongly that clients stick to a few key things. It was great when we were discussing this today to actually come up with three. There’s lots of things we could talk about, but there are three that we would describe as the non-negotiable. If you want to get success with a VA or a virtual team, or, honestly, even if you have a company that just has a lot of people, there are three non-negotiable tech tools and setups that we’ve isolated to make this work.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara: Let’s kick this off, Matt.

Matt: Okay. The number one that Barb and I were discussing was you need a project management tool. It may be a tool like Asana, Basecamp, Trello, or the like. Our preference and what we both use in our respective businesses, and I know Barb you highly recommend it with all of your clients, is Asana. What’s the experience that you and your team have had around this and why it’s essential to have this project management tool?

Barbara:  Yeah, look, when you’re starting out small and you’ve only got a few tasks to hand to a VA, it’s very easy just to put it on a PDF doc or even a quick email, or if they’re the same every day, that’s okay. But what you find, and you find this very quickly, that things start to break down, mistakes start to happen, there’s confusion around who said what when, deadlines, et cetera get missed, and lots of things start to go wrong if you don’t embrace a project management tool, something like Asana. There’s also Trello. There’s Team Work PM. There’s a few different ones you can use early on. I would adopt it as early as you possibly can even though you may feel some resistance to it in the beginning. The trick with Asana, for me, is that it can do a lot of stuff, right, and you can actually have the paid version which does even more. But let’s deal with the free version. You can do a lot in there. The issue with it is that you can create Frankenstein.

Again, while we wanna create simplicity with our tools, we wanna have simplicity within our tools as well. For anyone starting out with this, the best thing to do is just to stick to tasks and projects. Don’t put too much dependencies and other things in there that you can do. It keeps things very tidy because all of your instructions to do with a particular task are attached to that task and you can update things, and your VA can update you on a particular task as you move through things. It’s different from email in that way in that you don’t lose the threads. There’s no, like, “I can’t find that email. I didn’t know what one you were talking about,” or “I got confused between tasks.” It eradicates all of those issues, which is very important when you’re dealing with virtual teams because this sort of thing happens a lot.

 Matt:  Absolutely. The thing I love most about it too is the accountability that it provides. One of the big, I guess, fears a lot of people have when engaging a virtual assistant, how will I know what they’re doing and when they’re doing it, and the like? The beauty with a project management tool like, say, Asana that’s used properly is this transparency over what tasks or projects they need to be working on at a given time. I love especially the recurring tasks, and we’ve done the show on recurring tasks earlier. But the beauty is you can see each day, did they do their recurring tasks?

Now, it’s very easy for them to go in and tick things off. However, if you inspect it and go in, well, the accountability standards are raised because you can be sure that either the task has been done or not, irrespective of if they ticked it off. But it’s a—

Barbara:  You can add stuff to that. For example, it used to tick me off when they would just tick tasks off and I wouldn’t really get any depth. But it’s up to you, the business owner, then to decide what level of depth that you would like. This is where you can even add reporting back into your Asana flow and say to your VA, “Well, I would like you to tick it off at the end of the day but also tell me the results of the day or the outcome of whatever it was you did for the day.” Even if it’s something as simple as checking the live chat on the website, say something like, “There were no live chats for today,” so that you know that there’s some sort of engagement. Really, at the very best, it improves communication, task flow, and accountability. And at the very worst, there’s nowhere to hide. 

If you do have a VA, and let’s face it, this happens out there in the VA land, who you feel you don’t really know what they’re doing, well, this will help with this problem because it’s very easy to highlight the good VAs and the bad VAs, put it this way, if you have a good process inside of Asana. Yeah.

Matt:  The last thing for me on the project management tool is when you’re working on a project and you’ve got multiple people, you may have a couple of VAs and yourself and it might be another supplier, the beauty with it, when you use a project management tool really well, is it’s not dependent on someone remembering to forward an email or relay a conversation because if all the comms around that project happen within Asana, then everybody that needs to understand and know about those comms gets access to it.

Barbara:  Absolutely.

Matt: You reduce a lot of double handling. You reduce a lot of error because of people forgetting, not deliberately, but it’s just people have got a lot going on and they forget aspects. To succeed with a virtual assistant, it’s a must. I don’t know anyone-

Barbara: It’s a non-negotiable, for me anyway. I’m like, “You can’t do this without— “

Matt: No.

Barbara: I mean, you can try, but the minute you get any bigger than a tiny weeny startup-y little business that’s just a hobby, anything more than that, you really need to get on board with something like Asana. Matt and I have been doing this for years. We’ve been coaching and watching clients do this for years. Any time I see a client coming through, if the brief says that they use email for task management, thankfully we don’t see this anymore in our business because we eradicate it in our communications before people come in, but if we do see that we all cringe as a team because we think, “Oh, it’d be uphill battle to make a VA work in there.” It’s tricky. Yeah, embrace it and treat it as a non-negotiable. Asana’s great. Trello’s also great. They’re the easy ones and they’re free which is even better.

Barbara: Then, of course, we have the big one of communication, Matt, which we’ve done… I mean, we did a three-part series on effective communication. But what we’re talking about here is how do we use technology to improve our communication flow? Even though you can comment on tasks in Asana, for example, there is a fine line between task management within your project management tool and flooding Asana with chat. You need some form of chat or communication tool that is for fast, I will call it fast, quick communications that are not instructions.

Now, I’m laboring that point because I know in my business I’ve got a rule. We fell into this trap ourselves, to be honest. You can use something like Slack or Skype. Some people use Facebook Messenger, whatever chat medium you wanna use, but you’ve gotta be careful that your rules are that you can chat about stuff in there, but you might wanna make sure that the instruction on the task is put in the comments in Asana. So you can chat about it, but when the instruction is decided upon, you want to add that to the task in Asana. So you keep Asana clean, keep the chat on your communication tool. What about you, Matt? How does that…?

Matt: Yeah. We’re exactly the same. Anything to do with a project or task happens in Asana. But chat happens in… we use Slack. We did use Skype. The challenge is if you want to go back and search something, it’s not as easy to do in Skype as it is in Slack. I also like that in Slack we can set up different—

Barbara: Channels.

Matt: …channels for different functions of the business. I know in ours we’ve got a finance channel, a marketing channel. It might be an event channel. That way, then those comms are only going to those people that need to be part of those communications.

Barbara: Yeah. No, look, I’m a Skype user and I totally agree with you. I’ve wanted to move away from Skype for a while because we have so many people now. The issues we’re facing is that a lot of our clients are using Skype as well so the VAs are on Skype all day with clients, et cetera, although a lot of our clients are using Slack these days too. But G Suite, Google have come out with their chat function inside of G Drive as well, which comes as part of all of the accounts in G Drive. If you’re a G Suite user, they are coming out with their version of Slack in there, so I’m investing in that too and about maybe moving our internal team to that chat function.

The main point here though I think is around making sure that you have settled on a communication tool, and preferably just one, because what you find if you have two or three running is Jimmy wants to communicate with you in Facebook Messenger and Joan is sending you a message in Skype, and someone else is sending you a text message, and before you know it, everything’s all over the place and you can’t follow anything. Important to settle on your tool and just stick to it. If you’re going to make a change, take your time because you’re moving an entire non-negotiable piece of the business to a new tool, just like what I’m doing, taking time with the decision.

Matt: You know what the big shift for me on this was, Barb? Before we used Slack, it was either Skype or there was email chats. Then what would happen is that as it starts to involve more than one person, you’d start getting copied in on these email chats. I’d step out of a coaching session and I’d have 70 emails.

Barbara: Oh, it’s terrible. You just ignore everything then. Then you miss the one important email that somebody needed you to comment on.

Matt: Exactly.

Barbara: It’s terrible. Yeah.

Matt: The thing I love with Slack is I’ve got the app on my phone or my iPad. It’s on my computer. I turn notifications off, but it means that when I go into Slack, that’s our internal comms. The team doesn’t email me. They may forward emails to me that I need to comment on, but they don’t email internal comms. Our rule is, you wanna converse, it’s in Slack, right? You-

Barbara: Yeah. We’ve that internal rule as well because I’m like email for me is not for internal or for very limited internal use. It is for me to communicate with people who wanna have me on their podcast or business relationships or things that are at my level of what my role is to be involved in. Yeah. Look, I’m looking so closely at Slack because I know the issues are on Skype. But I suppose, for the purposes of this conversation, it’s important to have these boundaries around what you’re using in your business, whoever’s listening to this, and to decide on a channel. Like Asana, decide on the rules of how communication goes on in that channel, versus your other thing.

Matt: 100%. Just to add to what Barb’s saying there, you need to spell out when a verbal conversation needs to happen versus a written back-and-forth conversation, right?

Barbara: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Matt: We use Slack. I’ll give some instances. We use it for I guess just camaraderie within our team because I’m on the road quite a bit. We used to have our standup meeting or our route meeting each day. Now, we’ve got a channel called Standup. Everyone has to, by 9:30 a.m. Sydney time, has to put in what are the three to five key tasks they’re working on each day, did they complete their tasks or the tasks they agreed to do yesterday, and do they need any help from me, right?

Barbara: I love this idea. I should do this.

Matt: But what’s awesome about that is we get the same effect of having a meeting, but it’s now done in Slack and there’s greater accountability. We’ll have a bit of banter in-house as well because we can create this culture across boundaries, across the ocean without necessarily the need to be sitting in the office. We have a sharing channel where you might share some photos from your weekend or something funny that’s happened in your day, you know what I mean? Actually, we should call it lunch room, right?

Barbara: Yeah. I was just thinking that’s a great idea.

Matt: …who are all in the lunchroom, and that’s the beauty of what Slack can create for you. But in line with what Barb said, you must have rules around communication otherwise people hide behind these tools.

Barbara: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, let’s talk about what you said about the face-to-face meeting or the voice meeting because sometimes you’re chatting back and forth and you’re like, “Hey, let’s just jump on a call.” In that instance, I know you use Zoom, I use Zoom. We actually use Zoom for webinars and recording podcasts and everything. But Zoom or one of these video tools is great for just hopping on a quick call. But you can also use Skype. You could use Skype for that.

Matt: Correct.

Barbara: But the trick I find though, if you are going to have a voice call, you then need to decide at the end of the call, okay, what have we decided here in this call, and then I would put that into your task instructions in Asana, because what happens is people forget. I forget. Like somebody will say, “Do you not remember I told you that on the call we had?” And I’m thinking, I don’t know. I have like 400 calls a day. So I have a very strict rule internally with the team around if we have a chat in Skype or we decide something on a voice call, we actually there and then decide what we’re going to update the task with and who we’re tagging, who we need to do something for us, et cetera. That’s what brings it all together, I think. It’s crucial.

Matt: Number three. You need a data management tool.

Barbara:  Yes, because, of course, we all have spreadsheets and PDFs and brochures and whatever else we’ve got in the business. Of course, each business is about tasks and projects and communication and workflows and all that sort of thing. But attached to that is data and how do you manage where that data … where does everyone find stuff? How do you have a system around not having to constantly have people pinging you, where is that spreadsheet or where do you find this sort of thing? You really need to choose one data management system like let’s say it’s Dropbox for your business or … I mean, I’m a G Suite user so I use G Drives, Google Drives, which has its challenges as well, I’ll be honest. But again it’s about creating the system that you are running inside of your data management tool to reduce friction within the teams.

Matt: Yeah. The beauty, if this is done properly, is again, you can, I guess, manage the risk of people having sensitive information, who has what information and access to it. But also, like Barb was saying, you can reduce the communications around where is this, where is that. I think the other important piece here, and I know when I first started working with VAs many, many years ago, often they’d save things onto their own computer, the hard drives on their own computer. Then I’d go looking for something, oh, sorry, it’s saved on my hard drive, right? Now, every single document we work on within the business is saved … we actually use one called Sync. We updated from Dropbox last year, but it’s same concept. The important thing is you choose one that works for you and your company.

Barbara: Oh yeah, and I would add to that, you choose one and then you as the owner or the leader or your operations manager or whoever it is, the system-y person, creates a system that other people in the business are taught to follow and need to follow. Look, I’m laboring that point because I learned this the hard way. I’ve only learned it recently. I got to the point where just I had too many people sharing folders and sharing files in G Drive with me and it just was a mess in there. I had to go back and actually revisit how everybody is using our data management system. It’s not just about the tool. We always talk about process and system, but it’s about picking a tool and then setting the tone and the system and the usage, and making sure that everyone on the team is on the same page, so to speak, about how they use it, which sounds like micro managing but it’s not. It’s actually just streamlining a business.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. The thing I would also just lastly say on the data management is you wanna think about, as I said, your business model, but also some of the current tools you’re already using. If you’re in an Office 365 environment, then you may wanna use SharePoint. If you’re in a G Suite environment, you may choose Drive. I think that, from a security perspective and the like, they’re all much of a [inaudible 00:21:56]. What was great last year, we transitioned from Dropbox to Sync. That enabled us to actually reformat exactly how we were going to catalog and file all of our files.

Barbara: Yeah. That’s great. It forces you to do that when you do a transition. Yeah.

Matt:  100%. The way we did that, I got the team to go, what are the things that you all need access to and use on a day-to-day basis? That’s all we brought across initially. I backed everything else up and then we put it all in there. What’s been great is as we’ve continued to operate our business, there are things that we didn’t come across. They were there, we included it, but we kept it really clean with a really clean structure. Everybody knows how to file, where certain things go, which then they know where to go and look for them, and it streamlines the whole business.

Barbara: Look, I’m just thinking, this is all process again. Here’s three literally non-negotiable, crucial tech tools you need. There’s project management tool, communication tool, data management tool. Those are the three. But then you need to process for how each of those is used within your business that everybody shares. Again, this might sound like, well, I just wanna hire A-players who know exactly what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter how much of an A-player somebody is. If everybody’s A-playing in a different process, in a different game, your business will be a mess. It won’t be an A-player business. I’m saying this really from the heart because I initially learned this the hard way myself. But, definitely, the whole virtual concept, to get these things right is the difference between success and failure often with virtual teams, particularly VAs. The VAs find it easier too because they know then which system they’re plugging into.

Matt: Yeah, 100%. When you’ve got these things set up, onboarding a virtual assistant into your business becomes easier. As you grow your team and you put people into different roles, it becomes easier to work out who needs access to what. Communication and management becomes very transparent and easy. As I mentioned earlier, it actually reduced the amount of emails that you actually—

Barbara: Yeah. Eradicate email. Yeah, definitely get that down. If you notice, actually, one of the tools we have not said that is crucial is email, even though that’s crucial for other things, but not necessarily. I would stay away from email. None of my VAs are allowed to email me. There’s just no email. It would have to be something very, very serious for them to email me about it. So, yeah, those are the top three.

Matt: Now, Barbara and I love to under-promise and over-deliver. As we were coming up with the three, there was another one that we both use regularly, but we wouldn’t necessarily put into the crucial categories. Here’s the bonus tech tool that we believe that is amazing and great and we both use pretty much on a daily basis, but not necessarily crucial to your success. It’s called Loom, a Google Chrome extension, and it’s free. The thing I love about Loom is if you’re reviewing something, if you’re trying to give an instruction, it’s on your screen, you can click Loom and create little short videos that then render very easily. They create a URL that you can then send to the person.

I’ll create a Loom video and I’ll post it in Slack to the person that I need to or I’ll post it in the task in Asana explaining what it is that I need done. Number one, it gives your VA the opportunity to watch what you’re putting multiple, multiple times so that they can get clear on the instruction.

Barbara: It actually helps you as well because I was thinking, for me, sometimes if I’m trying to write something, and you know when you get slightly tongue-tied except with writing, and you’re realizing that you’re just not able to articulate what you’re trying to say, do a quick Loom because then it’s much easier to show somebody what you’re trying to convey. Sometimes there’s been moments it’s really broken the back of that issue for me where I can’t really articulate. I’ve even them to my own accountant so it’s not just been VAs. Sometimes I can’t articulate to a tech person the problem I’m having or whatever and it’s much easier to show them. Loom is fantastic for that.

Matt: Yeah. I use Loom when I’m sending proposals to clients, particularly when I know the decision’s with more than one person.

Barbara: Oh yeah. Great, and they can all get the same … and it’s personalized so you can send it to a new client and it’s great for sales as well. Yeah. In terms of VAs, I wouldn’t describe it as the crucial non-negotiable, but it’s a fabulous add-on and it really is a bonus add-on to those three key things. If you’re not using that, definitely check it out.

Matt: Barb, I think that’s us for today. Look, please understand that what we’re sharing here, the first three tech tools that we mentioned, we believe are crucial. If you really want to succeed with virtual assistants in your business and make your life and their life a lot easier, I’d listen to the show again and give these tech tools a go. Reach out to us in the Facebook group if you’ve got any questions or you need any assistance or support because we’re more than happy to help with that. But understand that without these, you really are making it near impossible for yourself to succeed with virtual assistants.

Barbara: Let’s be honest, you’re going to waste an awful lot of time, energy, and money because it won’t work. The internet is littered with people who say, “It didn’t work for me.” But in the end, sometimes that can be a HR issue or a recruitment issue. But if it’s not those issues, then it’s the issues inside the business, this sort of thing, in getting them right and making a commitment to yourself to nail this, because actually, it makes your life easier in general in lots of ways.

Matt, I think that’s a wrap for today. Great show. If anyone has ideas for other shows you’d like us to cover, even the simplest things or a complex thing, we’d love to know more. You can always hit us up in the Facebook group, Virtual Success on Facebook and yeah, share this around with anyone else that you think would be interested. Remember, on iTunes, we’d love a rating and review. It helps us to get the show out to more people and help more people in this space, because we’re trying to eradicate overwhelm for business owners everywhere and this is all part of it. Thanks, Matt.

Matt:  Thank you, Barb.

Barbara: Until next time.

Matt: Yeah. Have a great afternoon.

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.

1.17 – Recruiting the right VA

3.23 – Biggest fears around hiring an offshore VA

4.05 – Barbara’s personal recruitment process

5.18 – Steps to successful recruiting

14.58 -Why a trial period is so important

15.43 – Hiring an expert to recruit your staff

18.02 – staff character and work culture

25.27 – Local insights into what’s important when hiring a VA from the Philippines

27.10 – Recapping of the major steps

27.59 – Wrapping up

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

Barbara Turley:  Hey, everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Success Show where I’m joined by my co-host Matt Malouf. Hey, Matt, how’s it going?

Matt Malouf:  Excellent, Barb. And yourself?

Barbara: I’m good. Now, where in the world are you today? Because I know you’re traveling a bit at the moment.

Matt:  I am. I’m in the beautiful sunshine coast of Queensland …

Barbara: And is the …

Matt: … up in Noosa.

Barbara: The weather?

Matt: It is, it is. I went for a beautiful walk this morning along the river there and it’s balmy and humid as Queensland is this time of year.

Barbara:  Yeah, Noosa is an amazing spot. Well, I’m based in my hometown of Sydney at the moment so it’s kind of wet and windy here today. Today’s show look, I’m really excited about today show because it’s a topic that’s close to my heart and it is we’re gonna tackle the difficulty in getting offshoring right and specifically the difficulty about recruiting because that is literally the first step to get right. I know I hear it all the time with clients coming to our business who sort of say, look I tried, I failed, you know, how are you different? That’s kinda what they … They’re burnt out from the experience of trying this and I know, Matt, you’ve had some stories like this as well.

Matt:  Even just yesterday. A lot of the business coaching that I do we’re obviously trying to help people grow their business but also increase their margins and their profits and so using Virtual assistants is one great way of doing that. Getting great people to do things. Yesterday I’m in a meeting and as soon as I broached the subject the callers like, “Stop.” He actually put his hand up, stop. I’ve done it, it doesn’t work for me. I looked at him and I was like, this guys been in business for a long time. I’m like, “What do you mean it doesn’t? I’ve tried it, I’ve tried it, I’ve heard it all, I’ve read the books, it doesn’t work for me.”

Barbara: Absolutely, yeah.

Matt: I think what we want to really get out of this episode today is to dispel this myth because Barb and I have a belief that it can work for everyone. It’s simple but not easy.

Barbara: Yes, and I guess what I really want to show today, is you know, I’m running … We’ve got almost 120 employees now in the Philippines and I can tell you first hand how difficult it is, but how successful and how rewarding it is when you get it right. I thought one of the biggest issues people face is recruiting. It is one of our pain points, as well, at the Virtual Hub. It is probably the hardest part of what we do is right up there at the front at the recruiting end.

Barbara: Let’s dissect this. Matt, I thought, I guess on our sales calls that come through, one of the questions we ask is, you know, what’s your biggest fear about hiring a VA offshore? One of the most common things, it’s sort of three common answers we get, but one of the big ones is, “I’ve tried it in the past, it was really bad, I’m willing to give it one more shot.” We almost have to change their belief before they even start, which can be hard for us from a mindset point of view. Thankfully we tend to deliver most of the time, and our success rate is very high. I’m happy to share today the gold about how we get that high success rate. How does that sound?

Matt: I think it’s awesome, I can’t wait. Do you have a pen and paper, I’ve got a pen and paper ready to go and everyone should have a pen and paper ready to go because you’re about to get some amazing learning.

Barbara: Yes, I can just share with you that I literally have gray hair from trying to get this process right. First thing that I’ve said to people when they present this problem to me. I say, look, don’t beat yourself up. It doesn’t matter how successful you’ve been in business. In every other part of business. It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is. It’s irrelevant because this is a whole new thing that is actually extraordinarily difficult to get right. It’s not that you failed. It’s that you just haven’t found the holy grail yet. It takes years of experience to hone that.

Barbara: Just to give you a bit of insight, and I’m going to talk through these stats with you. I’ve just looked at the last six months of last year of our stats in recruiting and over 1000 people applied for a job with us. In the end after an excruciating six week period they have to go through. It takes about six weeks for us to whittle it down. We employed only 3%, right, now that is an extraordinary cost on our business. It’s exhausting actually. We have a huge team that have to manage that. Let’s talk about the reasons why. Okay?

Barbara: First of all, you’ve got people that will apply for a job, and anyone who’s gone on a work would have noticed this. You’ve got a million applications for a job ad. Some of them won’t have even read the ad, right, so they’ll be the wrong applicant right off the bat. Of course, you have to whittle those people out. Then of the people who are kind of okay and look like we possibly could meet with them when we invite them, they have to come into our office to actually come in for the starting of the process. Over 50% of them won’t even bother to show up. They’ll confirm, but they won’t bother to show up at the time.

Matt: Yeah, wow.

Barbara: Now for me, it’s a bit like dating. If you were invited on a date and especially for women listening, and you’re sitting in a restaurant, and the bloke doesn’t show up? Well you would, I mean, you’re an idiot if you give him another chance or even take a phone call. For us that is like step one. We actually have a checklist.

Matt: For the guys on the show, for the guys, make sure you show up.

Barbara: Yeah. Like you know, half the battle is showing up. You will have like 50% of them you will not show up. It’s extraordinary for me to admit that, but that is actually the truth. Then of the people that do show up. Now here’s the clincher. Now, this is in the Philippines specifically, so anyone recruiting there … The people who don’t show up first are the ones who are not going to show up for work on time. They’re the ones that are not going to give you the work that you need. They’re going to be doing sloppy work, they’re going to say they will do it … They just basically, they’ve shown their character from the first moment of not showing up for the interview. If that happens, move on.

Barbara: Second test that most people fail. The next 50%, the majority of those that show up will fail our English tests. Now, English in the Philippines is a very strong second language. As you know, Matt their English is very good. The reality is, the level of English that a business owner requires from a virtual assistant is way higher than someone who’s just good at English. They need to actually be very highly proficient in English. We have a number of tests we put people through. One of which is called Berlitz. You can actually have a look at that. The Berlitz test, we look at that majority of people failed. Or they just, they don’t fail, they just get a very low level. That whittles people down, then like all of a sudden we’re down to kinda 20% of the pool at that point.

Matt:  Let me pause you for a second, Barbara cause I think you bring up a really, really good point here. One of the issues, I mentioned the client I was talking to yesterday. He was like we recruit in Australia because we recruit locally, because we need someone that has strong English and understands the colloquialisms of our market. I’ve had virtual assistants all around the world and they understand, they have great English. I’m guessing it’s a really, really good point that you made because you understand the importance of it but you test for it.

Barbara:  You have to test for it.

Matt:  This is where I think, yeah, so most people would just have a conversation and make a judgment call, but because someone has great verbal communication doesn’t mean they have great written communication.

Barbara:  Exactly.

Matt: Or that when they’re reading, and if you think about when you’re working with your virtual team. Much of that is in written language not verbal communication. I love that test. I think that’s unreal.

Barbara: Picking up nuances and you know as part of our tests, we don’t just do the Berlitz. We’re actually quite mean what we do to them but they have to sit like a five-hour exam when they come in for their first session with us. One of the reasons we are doing it is because we want to be fair to them as well. The reality is if we were to employ some of those people, they would never survive. The client experience would be terrible and then they’re experience as an employee of ours would be terrible.

Because we would have led them down a path that they’re never going to succeed. It’s much better to just be realistic about this upfront. Test written language. As you say an interview is not enough because people can say anything in an interview. We also get them to write a written piece about why they feel we should hire them. We don’t just ask them questions, we ask them to write that on an application form. We get a sense of what drives them, because people, people, you pick up little small things in how people write about themselves. That’s really, really key points to remember. Communication style, English, like you know show up. These are kinda step one and two.

For us then, because we’re more in a digital marketing kinda focused place we need to test for things like… We do a little test around branding to see who has an eye for detail or an eye for color. Now, we don’t hire designers, but some people have a natural eye for that. Let’s say you are hiring someone that you would like to be involved in your Instagram account or your social media. Well, you may not need to hire a designer. You may just need somebody who has taught themselves Photoshop, who is into photography, who’s quite creative in their own way. That can be enough for social medial, for example. We don’t cut people out at that point. We just want to kind of grade where their strengths lie.

Barbara: Now the next step after that for us is, you need… with a virtual assistant and you know this Matt. They need to be able to follow instructions. They need to have attention to detail. The next step for us and I would strongly urge someone to do this. Give them a task that has a couple doozies in there, like a … Sort of a slightly vague construction. See how they cope with that and then very specific instructions and see how much of it they pick up. You want to be very metrics-driven with this stuff. This is before you ever meet the person, right? You don’t have an emotional connection to them. You can purely grade them based on, did they get this instruction, this instruction and this one. The top three. Did they miss instruction four. How did they do on a slightly vague instructions in making their own instruction. Does that make sense about how you would do metrics driven?

Matt: 100% and the thing I’m loving about this Barb is, we hear this quote, it’s very cliche. Higher slow, fire fast. What I’m loving with this is your process, whilst for many, I mean you talked about a six-week process.

Barbara: Yes.

Matt: That’s unheard of and I love it because one of the biggest gripes people have in business is my people aren’t doing what I ask them to do, or I can’t find great people, or etcetera, etcetera. The beauty in what you’re doing and having … I can understand now why the quality of the people that you place and we hire. People from your team as well. Why their quality is so high, because the Virtual Hub takes them through this beautiful process. I love how you position it and it’s so true. Please hear what Barb said, “It’s in their best interest as much as it is yours.” Because the last thing you want to do is set someone up to fail.

Barbara: Yes.

Matt: This process is just, it’s unreal.

Barbara: Recently, for those that fail for example. Let’s say those that come through that, the ones that don’t show up we don’t bother but the ones that actually went through this process and actually sat down for the hours in our office and tried really hard. We don’t just say, “Sorry you failed.” We actually send them away with some pointers. We tell them how to succeed and we say you can reapply in six months time. We’re saying to them, you can go away and take what you’ve learned today. You can study how to become better and if you really want this, we’ll see you in six months time. We’ve had a few successful hiring that actually came back. Now that shows great determination and they’ve said in their interview when they came back, eventually, we do get to interview. The comment was, “I wanted to work for this company.” Because they just saw it was excellent to what we we’re doing and they want to be excellent. That’s kinda what we need, it’s what any business owner needs.

Barbara: Now the only thing I would say is it’s a six-week process and on average 220 people per month apply for a job with us. What I want to say with that is don’t deceive yourself as to how hard this is and the resourcing you will need to put behind finding the right fit. Particularly in the Philippines ’cause there’s a lot of people over there and you have to filter. You know, that’s a plug for my company. That’s why people like to come to us. On the flip side and here’s the real clincher. After all that time, sometimes what you would think, “Well, if you get people with experience or the right people with experience coming through, surely they should blitz that test.” Yes, they do, but what we find is in the interview we can sometimes pick up some character flaws or things that we don’t particularly like that are not a cultural fit for us. Often those people will get turned away, even though they have the right experience we can just feel they are not the right cultural fit.

Barbara: The other thing we notice is, after we eventually do interviews. Then we put them into a three-week intensive training program that we pay. We actually employ them as full-time employees and their first three or four weeks with us is this training program. You would not believe the amount of people that go into the training program but don’t come out the other side because it’s work ethic. You see the whites of their eyes over three or four weeks and you can pick up character, work ethic, values, cultural fit and sometimes we’ve let the most experienced people go because they don’t culturally fit with what we are doing. Hope that makes sense.

Matt:  It does, it does. Here’s why I think having an expert do this is so important. I know in all the businesses I work with very few people would actually have the time to invest into this. What happens is we make quick hiring decisions that don’t go through a thorough process like this and then out the back of poor experience make the judgment call that this can’t work for my business, or my business is different. What Barbara’s explaining today is vital for the success of your companies. It really is because you can’t grow a great business without great people.

You can’t build a great team and have great people without a great recruitment and onboarding process and you could ask any expert that. I’ve literally studied this for around the world. This is universal. It’s not isolated to any industry sector. It’s not isolated to any geographic sector. It’s universal and really understand the detail of this process. Not only that, Barb and I’m sure you’re happy to talk about this. You’ve got experts that are vetting these people, they’re not just anyone and everyone who is part of your recruitment process. These are trained recruitment professionals doing this.

Barbara:  Yeah and I’m quite heavily involved myself so one of the things people who are inside the Virtual Hub will notice is that I’m more involved in the operational end of things than I am on the client side. The reason I made that decision a few years ago is that I realized that the actual, the crucial thing for us to get right is the recruitment and the people we hire. Because they are the ones that then deliver success for a client. You know it’s better for me to sit on that side and keep a tight leash on that side of things and allow others to manage the client side, if you know what I mean, because that gives us success.

Barbara: Now, if you’ll notice from everything I’ve said. People always talk about A-players. Everyone goes, I want to hire A-players, I want to hire people with experience. In my opinion and it’s just my opinion you want to hire smart people that have the right character. Now character is something you’re born with and it’s breed into you as a child. You can’t teach it. You have to find people who are smart with the right character, the right work ethics and are enthusiastic about what you are doing. Because those things you can’t teach. Skills and processes and everything else you can teach, as long as you have got the right character and a person whose smart enough with the right level of English, for example. Sometimes our clients find this frustrating because this is where we’re different from a traditional recruiter, for example. A traditional recruiter might do a few tests. They’ll get a massive bank of resumes and they’ll just keep showing you people that they’ve interviewed.

Those people will not have been through a process like this. Therefore, the attrition rate and the failure rate is actually higher in those kinds of businesses and that’s why some people will say, well I went through an agency before and it was a disaster. Unfortunately, it’s because it’s this difficult. But that means our lead times are longer sometimes clients get frustrated because they only need two people, but our success rate is high. So I just wanted to add some context for how difficult it is.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely and I can’t stress enough, this, we hear about this … I love when you talk about character and that you can’t teach this. You know the number of times I’ve seen this happen where often you’ll make a bad hiring choice and choose the wrong character alignment when you are hiring too fast. You don’t have a strong process. But also too, you haven’t actually clearly articulated, and sat down. What are the values of our company? What is important and how do we align to that? You know, on previous shows, Barbara, we talked about systems and processes and the like. If you get someone who’s, as Barbara said, smart with the right character, you plug them into your system, your business system. They look like superstars.

Barbara:  Absolutely, and then getting onto this business system thing. If you’ve got a rockstar business system and you take ownership of that system yourself you can plug any virtual assistant into that. As long as you’ve gone through this kind of process. All you need is a great person who’s smart enough and who is the right cultural fit. Processes, you’re not asking them to develop processes because they don’t have the context across your entire business. Asking virtual assistants to create processes in your operations manual for you, well, some of them can help you with it. Some clients are really misguided in how they’re thinking about virtual assistants. As we’ve talked about many times. And therefore they try to hire people they’re almost looking for a skill set that almost doesn’t exist and in the Philippines, people will make it up. They will actually tell you what you want to hear in interviews.

I haven’t even touched on the HR aspect, which is things like background checks. You know, like nobody’s doing proper background checks, but because we’re a Philippine company with local HR staff we can check police records. We do full medicals, so we can tell if somebody’s taking drugs, for example. We’ve had that. We’ve had someone go right to the end of our training program, get hired and then we had to let him go because his medical came back with some dodgy stuff. You know you would never pick that up unless you’re being this rigorous.

Matt: I love this.

Barbara: That’s the tough part, right? It’s what keeps me awake at night, is the, is the medical.

Matt: It’s interesting, it’s interesting though, Barb. I remember so, I’ve been using virtual assistants now for probably the best part of eight years and in the early days I hired direct myself. Largely because the Virtual Hub didn’t exist. I used to always be … You’d get their resumes and it was like a roll of toilet paper with all the things that this person could do and I’m like, “Wow. This person is a superhuman. It’s unbelievable the experience,” but to your point. A lot of the time they were just telling me what I wanted to hear, and they were trying to wow me. They may have used a particular piece of software or you know …

Barbara: Or heard it. Or just heard of it.

Matt: Yeah, and that’s on their resume. You would have seen it as well and to the trained eye, you start to learn that this is now the way it is and unless you have a really, really strong and proven recruitment system, unfortunately, you’ll make the wrong hiring decision. I think, look we’ve all made those mistakes. The only way that Barbara’s process is as strong and gets such great results is not because of the all the success she’s had with it. It’s all the mistakes that she’s made in the past.

Barbara: Oh yeah, I’ve been burned too.

Matt: That brings her to this point.

Barbara: Yeah, like I mean we’ve refined this over years and years and years. You only learn this from doing it at scale. You know like, hiring at the volume that we need to hire. We can’t even hire as fast as we need to but you know, we sort of see ourself as protecting the client. If a client comes to us, I’ll be honest, not every client is down with it. Some clients would prefer a pure recruiter and that’s fine but I’ve even looked at what would happen if we were to lower slightly our English test results. My recruiters were saying to me, they’ve been doing this a long time. They said to me, Barb, “No because we don’t even get people.” It’s either like a clear pass or fail. We don’t get people that are borderline. If they get a borderline, someone who almost pass they tend to bring them through to the next level just to see how they go.

I’ve tried increasing it but it’s actually just recruiting and hiring people is a tough game. It’s tougher in the Philippines because culturally there are, you know, they are still behind and I don’t mean this in a derogatory way. You have to remember that an industry like the call center industry has exploded in the Philippines in the last 10 years in particular. With that bring shady cultural practices within businesses that don’t treat their staff well. You know, so therefore you get a culture of people who don’t care. You know, they just go for every job interview and that’s why they don’t show up. It’s not that they’re inherently bad people. It’s just the culture right now in the Philippines is churn and burn. You don’t want to get caught up in that because that’s what it’s like. That’s a bit of just cultural insight there.

Matt: Yeah. More and more people are now open to using a virtual assistant. The whole supply and demand curve is shifting. There’s still a huge supply but you’ve got to look at the quality. The great people often and this is in most markets around the world are in jobs.

Barbara:  Absolutely, yeah and they are hard to head hunt out. It depends, if you’re just hiring contractors what you have to remember is people like me who have companies over there. The stuff we’re offering staff is stuff you can’t offer them. Because you’re not in the Philippines. We have the highest level of health cover. We’ve got, we understand all the labor code. All the Philippine public holidays and how to navigate that. What they care about, you know, what’s important for them. For example, I’ll give you a tip. What’s very important for the Filipino’s is to have their children under the private health cover. That you will have someone work for you for life if you can get their kids on it. You know, having a local company gives me a lot of advantage in that, in that I can deliver a lot of those things. That means you can attract great talent by having culture like that. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t do it getting you’re own freelancers or contractors. You just got to be aware of all these dynamics, I guess, that are there.

Matt: Absolutely.

Barbara:  Yeah, that was actually good for me to share that because I’ve realized the depth of what we do.

Matt: Yeah, it’s amazing and like I just you know. I think this is one of those shows that everyone should go back and listen to a few times because there was so much gold that you were sharing and if you took nothing else away from this. Understand that in order for virtual assistance to work in your business, it actually starts with a strong recruitment process at the front end. If you don’t have strong recruitment process at the front end, then you really are playing Russian Roulette aren’t you. It’s a gamble. It really is.

Barbara: I mean if I was to say the steps, you need. First off you need this recruitment. This depth of recruitment process. Then as we’ve talked amount at nauseum on this podcast, it’s the strength of your business process and your engine that you’re going to plug this person into. And then the next bit after that is your things like HR, employee engagement, treating people like their part of your coulter. All that sort of stuff and if I could think about, those are kind of the three big prongs of how you can, how you get loyal, engaged, happy people who love working for you and will build your company for you. If you don’t get those three things right you will, you can end up very frustrated.

Matt: Yeah, well, Barb just in closing was there anything else you wanted to add? Cause I’ve got two pages full of notes here. It’s been amazing. Is there anything else we should … You know, having that right process, treating them right. The thing I would add is just, it’s making sure you don’t cut corners.

Barbara: Yeah, don’t. You’ll pay for them later.

Matt:  Yeah, it’s too often you will. I see so many people going, I don’t need do a reference check. I don’t need to do the English test. I spoke to them and they’ve got great English. The moment you cut corners on a proven process. It exposes you to challenges.

Barbara: Yeah, and look the thing I would add to that is be 80% metrics. 20% personality. ‘Cause they have to be a right personality fit for you. Do the metrics part first so all your testing needs to be metrics based so that you’re unemotional. ‘Cause if you’re like me, the minute you meet someone … I’m not allowed to interview people. I think I’ve shared this before because I just fall in love with everyone. And I see the best in everyone and I want to give everyone a job. It’s better for me, like I don’t get involved in any of the meeting of anyone, but I just look at the data.I’m supplied with all of the data and the decision making from my team. Yeah, just stick to your metrics and the same goes for KPI’s and when you’re eventually growing people within your business. Try to focus a lot on the metrics side of it so that you’re actually getting real data that you can make proper decisions on. Cause on the end of the day you are running a business, not a charity. I’ll finish on that.

Matt: Fantastic, well, thank you Barbs. Thank you so much for sharing this with us today. It really is… I just think it’s so generous of you to share this process with everyone.

Barbara: I just love how for the listeners how we come up with these shows. Sometimes Matt and I are just shooting the breeze and we’re like, “Hey, this happened this week or we’re like that will make a great show. Yeah, let’s do it.” We just do these shows so these are real, you know, nuggets of information that we share. We find that through our own discussions we come up with good ideas for the show.

Matt: Yeah, and just on that, if you’ve enjoyed this episode and others, we’d love for you to leave us a review. Share it out there in social media and also too, if you have any particular area you would like us to do a show on, a challenge you’re having, wins that you’ve had when it comes to your virtual team. We’ve got the Virtual Success Facebook group. Please, share that with us or reach out to us. We’re always looking for great show ideas, but other than that, Barb, you have an amazing day and I look forward to our next show.

Barbara: Yeah, great. Thanks guys.

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.

01:36 – “What is my VA working on?”

02:17 – How do I manage my VA?

02:45 – Set clear expectations

03:57 – Use project management tools

05:50 – Keep communication open

06:58 – Set clear deliverables

08:09 – Build a solid system

10:58 – Have I got the right systems and processes in place?

15:15 – Working within your ‘genius’

17:08 – Refining your systems and processes

20:58 – Wrapping things up

Barbara Turley:  Hey everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Success Show where I’m joined by my fabulous co-host, Matt Malouf. Matt, how is it going?

Matt Malouf:  Excellent, Barb. How are you today?

Barbara:  I’m good. Thank you. Loving doing this show as always. I’m always amazed of how many times we think we have no more topics to cover. Then, we go, “What about this question?” So many things to talk about.

Matt: Absolutely, absolutely. We would come up with a list of I think half a dozen in the prep for this show.

Barbara:  Exactly. I know. So, guys, what are the things we’re going to talk about today on today’s show? It’s a very simple topic, but it’s one I actually see quite a bit not just with clients, but people online talking about VAs, and the question that I get sometimes is… It’s not really a question. More of an observation or a fear. “I don’t know what my VA is working on,” which is a tricky one. So, people feel a little bit almost disempowered because they feel like, “Well, I think my VA is working, but I don’t actually know what they’re doing.” Now, Matt, is it just me, or do you hear anything similar in your coaching practice, right, your retreats, or any of your masterminds?

Matt:  Yeah. It’s very common. I hear, “I’m not clear or sure what they’re doing,” or it’s, “How will I know if they’re working all the time at their desk?” So, it’s very, very common. Very common.

Barbara:  Yes. Yes, and I think what happens is people start to feel, like I said, a bit disempowered, and then the fear comes in, and I even talked to our VAs about this actually. I say it’s very important that you don’t let yourself fall into this trap because the client in the back of their head won’t be able to help themselves, but wonder, “What are they doing?” So, you got to try to be visible, and you got to try to be demonstrating what you’re actually working on.

But at the same time, it does… I feel it comes back to the client and the way the client is managing their team and managing the flow of work that’s going on in a business, which really is the responsibility of the owner or the person managing… You might have an operations person that’s managing this. It’s really their responsibility to know this kind of thing. So, Matt, what would you… As a coach, what’s your take on this? What’s your advice?

Matt: Yeah, and just to add to what you’re saying, I think that being clear on what their deliverables are is always going to put your mind at ease. That’s number one, but here’s some of the advice that I think around. It’s like the reality is whether you’ve got somebody working in your office, physically in your office or working from an overseas or a home office, like you got to get clear on what… Set reasonable expectations. Like if I’m sitting in an office environment, I’m not productive 100% of the time in the office. I’m not sitting there, working, jumping on every little task or every little email that’s sent to me, and I think what happens is when people, business owners and entrepreneurs using virtual assistants, when they’ll send an email and they don’t get an immediate response, they’re like, “What are they doing? They must be slacking off in a lot.”

Barbara:  Yes.

Matt:  Right?

Barbara: Yeah, we see that a lot. Yeah.

Matt: It’s like, well, hang on a sec… They’ve got to go to the bathroom as well, and they’ve got to have some lunch, and they got to grab a cup of coffee or whatever it is, right? So, I think first and foremost, it’s just being realistic with your expectations.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  I think secondly with this is there are some really easy-to-use tools that can give you a degree of transparency on what’s going on, and I know two of these tools that, Barb, you and I talk about all the time. One is Asana and one is Slack.

Barbara:  Yes. Yeah.

Matt:  I think that any business owner using a virtual assistant, if you’re not using those two tools, then you’re setting yourself up to fail and struggle really.

Barbara:  Yeah, and we’ve talked about that multiple times. I mean, for me, I fall into this trap myself with people where I’m thinking, “Yeah, that’s all just going a bit awry,” and I think what I tend to do in that sort of situation is go back to the leadership part of it and going, “Okay. I need to get my team together. I need to run through all the projects, the various deliverables that each one of them has on their list,” and then I need to start saying, “Let’s…” I mean, I meet weekly with them about this, so we talk about like where you at.

Again, the huddle concept. Where you at with the deliverable, with the milestone, and why are… If you’re stuck, why are you stuck? Are you waiting on someone else? Is your daily task list maybe too overloaded that you can’t get to it? But you have to keep… I sort of keep digging until I get the answer, and the answer might be that they’re slacking off, but in that sort of an environment, it’s very difficult for them to hide that, but you can get to the bottom of it and deal with it, and usually, you’ll find… I find somebody is overwhelmed or confused with something, and they’re either afraid to say it or they just haven’t gotten around to saying it yet, so you’ve got to create the environment where you can bring it to the table, and get it out in the open, and fix it, so that things get back in flow again.

Matt:  I think you raise some really, really good points. One especially then, Barb, that I think all listeners should really take note of is that they may be afraid to come to you, and my experience in dealing particularly with Filipino VAs is they’re a very compliant culture, they don’t want to say or do the wrong thing, so they’re more likely to say nothing than ask the question.

Barbara:  Yeah, or they get into the vortex of, “Ugh, I’ll think about it tomorrow,” or, “Ugh, I’ll have another go tomorrow. I’ll try. I’ll try,” and then before you know it, three months have gone by and nothing happened.

Matt:  Correct, correct, and I think so. So, I think part of the success map with working with a VA is asking the question regularly. I know in my meeting with my Philippines team, I actually opened the meeting with, “How can I help?” That’s the agenda. The agenda is not, “What are you up to? What are you doing?” “How can I help?” and that actually opens them up to communicate with me, and they even ran me through their list.

Barbara:  That’s great. Yeah.

Matt: Which I think a second point in what you just said too, Barb, is my experience is often when business owners and entrepreneurs are asking the question of, “What are my VAs doing?” It’s because they don’t have deliverables set up in a structured manner with project plans and lists.

Barbara: Yeah.

Matt:  If you’re not clear on what they should be doing and when they should be doing it by, how can they deliver to what your expectation is? They don’t actually understand what it is.

Barbara: Well, they’ll degenerate… They’ll either start slacking off because they have nothing to do or the really conscientious ones that I find happens, they become… They have no direction, so they start trying to find things to do like researching things, and before you know it, all you’re getting back is, “I’m researching this tool or that tool,” and you’re thinking, “Is this really what I wanted?” So many clients avoid that. They just go, “Oh, okay,” and then what you find is they end up cancelling or firing the VA and going, “Look, I don’t really have any work for you to do,” which defeats the whole purpose of what you were trying to do in the first place.

Matt:  Yeah. Yeah, or the mantra will be, “VAs don’t work for me and my business.”

Barbara:  Absolutely. Yes.

Matt:  Which is not the case. It’s all a learning experience.

Barbara: Yeah, and it is this leadership thing. I think a lot of us… We all do it as business owners, as entrepreneurs. We want to get after the fun stuff, and the marketing, and the cool sales sort of end of things. We don’t really want to be bogged down in the operational side of things, so my view with operations is if you do have to do it yourself, if you’re early in business and you’re not yet able to put someone in for this role, the best way to get yourself out of it is to be very strict on processes, and communication channels, and reporting lines, reporting back to you on results, and you get a kind of a… It’s a whole system, and once the system is working well, you will find you’ll be in flow, and it won’t take you so long to actually run the operations.

Matt: Absolutely, absolutely. Barb, what’s your thoughts around when this… In your experience, when a client with a VA is feeling this way, what’s the first step you feel that they should do in order to stop feeling this way?

Barbara:  Yes, that’s a great question because I find when they start to feel this way, it’s like an emotional vortex that you start to degenerate. You spiral into it, and as you do that, you become less and less able to have the conversation because it’s like the giant elephant in the room. Before you know it, you start avoiding each other, VA as well as you, and it gets to a point where nobody is really able… You lose sight of how it started if you let it go too long, and anyone listening who’s gone into this will know what I’m talking about.

So, the way not to go there is to, first of all, recognise this person works for you, right, so your job is to delegate and to give direction to them, so you got to call a meeting and start to revisit the task list. It could happen where you’ve come to the end of a project. I find this when it will happen. A project wraps up where everyone was really busy, and then there’s no clear direction of what they need to do after that, and it degenerates, so you got to call a meeting and revisit the task list.

Go over what your plans are, your strategic plans as a business owner for the following quarter, what you’re trying to achieve, and where they fit in, and what their new task list is, or some tasks may have gone stale, but they’re not really useful anymore, and they’re still doing it every day, but it’s not useful for your business strategy, so it’s… Again, you’ve got to sit down. You got to approach the subject, but don’t approach it from the “Are you slacking off? I think you’re slacking off.” mindset. Approach it from the mindset of, “Hmm, I think my people have lost their way potentially a bit. I need to step in and help them to come back on the path.”

Matt:  Absolutely, absolutely. For me, with this, to add to what Barbara is saying, I always think it comes back to, “Have I got the right systems and processes in place, and does my team know what my expectation around the implementation of those systems is?” I know in our business, whenever I’ve felt this way, and I think we’ve all felt this way about local or overseas team before, you know what I mean? Particularly, when you get their invoice and you pay it, you go, “What have they actually done for me?” But for me, it’s about, “Okay. Well, have I been structured in managing them? Have I been inspecting Asana and seeing that things are done in a timely manner? Am I ensuring that all of our tasks are getting into our project management system?”

One of the things that I did in prep for the show was telling Barbara that we do in our business. In our Slack channel, we have a channel called Stand Up, and every morning, the team come on, myself included, and you have to… By 10:00 a.m. Sydney time. We’re in Sydney. By 10:00 a.m. Sydney, you have to have put in there, “What’s my focus for today?” and you list out what you’re focusing on. It has to be a minimum of three things and, “Where I need help from others?” It’s a really easy tool that we use in order to keep that communication open. When things break down, I’ll often find that either I’m not posting in Stand Up or the team have started to drop off in posting in Stand Up, and so you’ve just got to come back to some basics with this.

Barbara: Yeah.

Matt: Very quickly, you can turn this around. You really can.

Barbara: Look. I think what I’d love to add to that as well, Matt. Like I love that idea of that Stand Up thing. I think I’m going to pinch that one because I’m not actually doing that idea, but it’s a very quick way of people checking in as well, especially when you’re virtual like, “Hey, I’m checking in for the day. It’s hi.” You know?

Matt: Yeah.

Barbara:  One thing I want to express on this call is everything that we ever talk about like even this concept of, “I don’t know what my people are doing,” the reason I know for myself anyway that I passionately talk about it, and I come up with solutions for you guys listening is because I have felt the pain of it myself. As I was talking, I was going, “Yeah. Well, the reason I know this is because it has happened to me.”

Matt: Yeah.

Barbara: This is very normal. My business has grown. We’re up the hundred staff level now where I’ve got a lot of people reporting to me. There’s a lot of… Some of my reports have their own teams reporting to them, so it will happen at every stage that you grow. It’s starting to happen again to me now, and I have to now revisit all these strategies again and pull everyone in, rein the whole thing in and get everyone realigned again, but that’s my role. That’s my job to do that. It’s not their job to figure that out. It’s mine.

Matt:  Yes, yes.

Barbara:  Not to let them lose their way.

Matt: That’s it. That’s it. 100%. Here’s another really simple strategy or little tactic that everyone can employ particularly when you’re… Let’s say you’re in the first three months with a VA, and often, people will go, “Yes, I’m going to get somebody, bring somebody on. Do I have enough work for them? Not sure.” Then, you ask the question, “What are they doing?” Et cetera. So, what I do, any time this is happening for me, I put a little post-it note on my computer screen, which is, “What could I get…” and then insert person’s name, “To do right now?”

Barbara: Yes, great idea. You’ll come up with so many things business-related.

Matt: That’s correct. Right, and the thing here, what happens is because it’s staring at me, it means that what I’m going to do… As I go to do a task, could I get someone on the team to do it? Can I hand that over? Very quickly, you go from this mindset of, “Ugh, they’re not doing anything. Maybe I should get rid of them,” to, “Okay. There’s so many things that I have to do as an owner that I can get somebody else to do,” and you start learning how to delegate more things to them.

Barbara:  As you were saying that, Matt, I was just thinking to myself as well. I know for me this might not ring true for everyone, but for me, I don’t actually do that, but I have this kind of mindset that… I want everyone who’s listening to think about this. “What would my life look like and feel like if I was only working on growing the business and just delegate… like just having the…” Like all I do at the moment… I do a lot of the growth side of things, but mainly, on a weekly basis, I’m actually having huddles with the different teams and just guiding them in their roles. I’m not doing any of the doing, but I’m there as the guide.

When you make this work, that’s what it looks like. Right? That’s what it feels like, and you don’t end up doing all the busy work. You just have people to do it for you, but there has to be a commitment to getting to that level, and the commitment is to just… You shouldn’t be doing any of the doing, so if there is any doing that you are doing, you need to learn to offload that somehow, depending on the type of business you have but… and VAs. It takes work to get somebody a process delegated effectively to a new person regardless of their level of… their level in the business. Whether they’re a VA or an ops manager, whatever. It still takes time. But when you commit to doing that, like eventually, in 12 months’ time, your business is going to look totally different than it does today, and so with your life.

Matt: It’s interesting what you bring up, Barb. In my book, The Stop Doing List, I call it your ‘genius’.

Barbara:  Yes.

Matt: When you understand what your genius is, and they’re the things that you’re really good at, you love doing, and have a positive financial return to you and the company, and you understand that 60% to 70% of your time needs to be spent there, all of a sudden, there’s plenty you need to stop doing and can delegate to somebody else.

Barbara: Yeah. I mean, even these podcasts. I’m sure loads of you guys listening to this have dreams of having a podcast or have a podcast that’s hit and miss, or doesn’t really happen, or takes up all your time. Honestly, Matt and I just record. That’s all we do, and the VAs do everything else. They manage the whole… because we have a process. We’ve developed our own… There’s a system, and they all know what they’re doing, and everyone has a deadline, and we hold them to that, and it shows up online on time.

Matt: Yeah.

Barbara: But that’s because we lead it, and we have developed that, and we have delegated it, and we’ve worked hard to get it to work so that we don’t have to do that. We just do the fun bit, which is this bit.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara: This convo.

Matt: It’s an interesting example you bring up because as soon as we finish this, literally, we’ll extract the file. It will go into a Dropbox, but then it’s triggered in Asana that that is there, and all of a sudden, a templated process is then put in place for that show, and so this is where all of a sudden… Barb and I don’t have to wonder what’s happening or what our team are doing because we can just log into Asana and observe through that tool what’s going on.

Barbara: Oh, and actually, I’m going to add a point there that’s very important to this, “I don’t know what they’re doing,” thing. So, the one rule we do have is that yes, there’s a process at the background, but it’s not just in the ether. It’s in Asana as Matt said, and each of the people as they do their bit and bits, and it moves forward in the process, they have to update Asana.

Matt: Correct.

Barbara: So, that’s the reporting back bit, so we know, “Is something on track?” or we can quickly say… I mean, we don’t even look at it these days, do we, Matt? But we could see pretty quickly if something was derailing.

Matt: Exactly.

Barbara: The team would let us know. The team would be like, “Hey, guys. There’s a problem with the edit. We’re going to miss the deadline.”

Matt: Yeah.

Barbara: So, I think that’s… Yeah, it’s a commitment in the beginning to being heavily involved so that it does work, and then making sure that everybody understands their role, the system. Then, you never have to wonder what your team are doing.

Matt:  Yeah. I’m going to overlay one last thing on this. We did some shows very early in this podcast, Barb, on communication.

Barbara: Yes.

Matt: If you’re not communicating effectively and consistently with your VA, then you will be sitting there wondering what they’re doing. Barb called it a daily huddle. I gave the Stand Up in our Slack channel. It’s all communication, so rather than us having to sit here, and wait, and wonder, we’ve got proactive mechanisms in place so that we’re always made aware.

Barbara: Yeah.

Matt: I think this question around, “I wonder what they’re doing,” is often solved through communication.

Barbara: Well, and yes, and saying that if you have that question in your head… I mean, let’s say you’ve got a good person. It’s probably not the VA or your team because this can happen across a whole team. It’s the system you have in place for making sure that you don’t have to ask that question.

Matt: 100%

Barbara: That’s what it comes back to again, so again, that’s your job as an entrepreneur, a business owner, whatever to set the system up in place. As you always say, Matt, systems run your business. People run your systems.

Matt: Yes.

Barbara: You build the systems and then delegate it to your people, and that … I mean, that in itself is a rock solid business right there.

Matt: 100%. 100%.

Barbara: Gosh, I even… It’s funny. I even learn things myself from just us chatting together, and I think I’m writing little notes going, “Yes, I need to do that one,” and it’s this constant evolution and refining of little tips you pick up along the way. Just put them in place. Keep working at it. Keep evolving, and keep moving forward with all of this. Eventually, you build something that’s very robust.

Matt: Absolutely.

Barbara: So, thanks, Matt.

Matt: Oh, thank you, Barb. It’s been good fun. It’s been good fun, and if you’ve enjoyed this show, please, we’d love… We want to build an amazing community of people that we can help in this area, so we’d love for you to share it or give us a review on the show. Also, we have a Facebook group where you can jump on and ask us questions, and we can answer those or even potentially get you on and interview you on the show in order to answer that question.

Barbara: Absolutely, and I know there’s lots of you. I get feedback that there’s a lot of people listening, so for those of you who have connected with us, yeah, make sure that you share and ask us anything, and no question is too silly because even the smallest questions produce the best shows like this one.

Matt: Exactly. Well, Barb, it’s been fun again.

Barbara: Yup. See you on the next show.

Matt:  See you then.

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

02:37 – Task #1 – Research

04:10 – Task #2 – Calendar Management

05:54 – Task #3 – Formatting documents

08:27 – Task #4 – File management

09:16 – Task #5 – Create and send newsletters

11:37 – Task #6 – Blog posting

12:57 – Task #7 – Audio transcription

14:35 – Task #8 – Manage social media channels

16:56 – Task #9 – Reporting

21:09 – Task #10 – Invoicing

24:21 – Task #11 – Travel arrangements

27:15 – Task #12 – Appointment confirmations

29:04 – Wrapping things up

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

Barbara Turley:  Hey Matt, how are you today?

Matt: I’m excellent. Yourself?

Barbara:  I’m pretty good. I’m happy that my voice isn’t sounding as husky as it was earlier because I have a bit of a cough at the moment, but yeah, good radio voice, good radio voice for today.

Matt: Very good, very good. Well, I’m really excited about this show today for no other reason than its simplicity. And as Barb and I were preparing for today’s show, we sort of were talking about various different topics and I sort of suggested why don’t we just share…what are the top 10, or 10 easiest tasks that you could have a virtual assistant do for you. One of the regular questions I get asked as a business coach is, “Okay, you’ve given me this concept of a virtual assistant, but what would I have them do?” And so, what we wanted to do today was put a very simple show together just highlighting what Barb and I believe is the 10 easiest tasks you could have a virtual assistant do. And this can apply to any business.

Barbara:  Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I hear that a lot too, Matt. And I think sometimes it’s sort of… I get a bit thrown off by that question because I’m so deep into the virtual assistant thing that I’m almost too far into it to kind of be able to get back to that simplicity again. So, when we were running through the list, it was actually you coming up with more of the top 10 simplest tasks than it was me. So, I’m even excited because I can now talk to other people about this when they ask me that question.

Matt:  Yeah. I know, I know. And it’s going to sound sometimes over simplistic when we go through this today. But honestly, these top 10 that we’re going to give you, if you have somebody else do that, the time you’ll save and be able to invest into other areas of your business, or in your life, for that matter, is just going to be phenomenal for you. So, let’s rip into this. So, Barb, I think we had number one as getting a virtual assistant to do research for us.

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s such a great one because it can span so many different areas of your business. And I mean, who has time as a business owner even to keep an eye on what your competitors’ pricing is at? So, this was actually one that my husband had his VA do in his tennis coaching business. And it was like a quarterly task where the VA would go out and look at all the competitors and see where they were pricing. And it was really beneficial to him then when he wanted to know what was going on in the market. So yeah, really simple one, can span lots of areas.

Matt:  Absolutely. And the type of research that we get our team to do are things like, if I’m travelling it might be find me some hotels, or it could be researching restaurants. It could be researching event venues for us to host events. It could be researching competitors. It could be… you know, you and I, Barb, have people researching to find us people to interview on this show as well and reaching out to people. So, any time you think that, “I need to Google something,” that’s when you could actually have a virtual assistant do this for you.

Barbara:  I think as well, just on that one to round it out, you know I often find as well, you know when you’re picking a new tool to use, like an online tool, sometimes because you’ve no time, you just pick the first one you find. But actually, if you’ve got a VA that can go through all the tools and research it and compare and contrast different things and do a spreadsheet for you that shows them all, it’s such a fast way to make a decision if they do that for you. So, great one to do as well.

Matt: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, I think number two we had was calendar management.

Barbara:  Yeah, huge area. Lots of our clients are doing this one.

Matt:  Yeah, and I actually remember when I had my first VA, Ivy, many years ago. In the job description I put forth, one of the key areas I wanted was calendar management. And I guess with calendar management, this is someone reaching out and making bookings for you and potentially using Calendly or some other—

Barbara:  Tools.

Matt:  …calendar tools to help with this. But also too, making sure that your calendar is up to date, moving appointments if you need them to, simple things like that. And I just want to preface in here, this is a simple task that you could keep yourself, but every minute… you’ve got to start to value a minute. And every minute you can save and put into a direct income generating task, or something else in your life for that matter, is a minute that is valuable to you.

Barbara:  Absolutely. I mean, I think even if you’re using… like, we’re big users of automated tools to do all these things at The Virtual Hub, but I still have people that have to scan this stuff and make sure things are working properly. And you know, when sometimes calls, bookings come in, but the salesperson has changed because somebody rescheduled a booking, and all these different things. You still need people who can kind of manage this for you, or even set up the tools, you know? Set up the tools for you to do this kind of thing. So, VAs are great at that.

Matt:  Absolutely. Now, number three… yeah, you go, Barb.

Barbara:  Yeah, so one actually that I’ve definitely used this one quite a bit, and it’s something I’m terrible at and I’ve no patience for myself, formatting documents, right? So, let’s say… even the other day I had something come in from PayPal where I had to verify a new account I was using. And they sent me this link to a letter and they said the instructions were, “Can you put this on your letterhead, print it out, sign it, and send it back.” Now, obviously the virtual assistants I have are offshore, so they can’t print it and put it on my desk for signing, but I just shot it off to one of my VAs. I’m like, “Can you just stick that on one of our letterheads?” Because I just have no patience for that. I don’t even know where the letterhead is, to be honest. And it came back to me in a second, you know? And I didn’t have to do that. So, that’s just a simple example of a document that somebody can quickly do for you. I’m sure you’d have bigger documents than that though, Matt, going on in your business.

Matt:  Well, there is. But also too, I think for me with formatting, the number of times where I’ve had a Word document that I want to save down to a PDF, and just in that process the formatting changes, and it’s just frustrating—

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s so annoying.

Matt:  …having to do that. Yeah. So, having somebody else that, number one, does it way better than I do, and number two, has probably the better skill, it’s just so much easier for me on that. So, formatting documents, whether that’s… for me, that’s Word. It could be PowerPoint documents, it could be Excel documents. Simple documents that just need formatting, converting something, you know? You might receive a PDF and need it converted into an editable document. Anything like that, I think, is really, really simple.

Barbara:  That’s all the VA work, yeah.

Matt:  Yeah. And one other thing just on formatting documents, I’m very good at creating new things, and I often create them on paper or on my whiteboard. So, I can create, say, a new template on a whiteboard, take a photo of it, and have Vanessa, our virtual assistant, create that in Word or PowerPoint or whatever it is, and that’s another really good formatting exercise that you can have your VA do.

Barbara:  Yeah, and I think any business, I think the key point here is that a lot of these things we’re talking about can work in any business. It doesn’t matter what the business is, this is all just business management sort of stuff. So, it’s all business admin that everybody should have.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara: The next one I love, Matt, because it’s sort of like when I look at it, file management. It’s like having a cleaner in your house, right? To keep everything organised, dust free, go into your Dropbox and clean it up and just organise things for you, because we all get a bit chaotic when we’re trying to run our own businesses. And for someone to just keep things tidy for you and to liaise with you on how they’re tidying it is just gold, absolute gold. VAs can do all that.

Matt:  Absolutely. And I think with this too, if you have files that you want to, say, send to customers or clients also, having a VA who knows where it is and you can actually pass that task on to them and have them send it across is another really valuable task.

Barbara:  Yes, you’re not looking for the file on your phone, and yep. That’s great. Yeah, absolute VA work.

Matt:  Correct. So, number five, we had as create and sending newsletters. I think a really underrated marketing strategy is sending valuable content to your tribe. And I think what holds a lot of people back is the use of technology, whether that’s MailChimp or any other CRM programmes. And having a VA being able to do that, where you can send them the raw content and then they can set it up whichever system you’re using, choose the right lists for you, and actually make that piece of raw content be turned into a newsletter and sent out is a really simple task, but a really valuable task that a VA can do.

Barbara:  Yeah, and it takes a bit of work. Like, honestly, a simple newsletter, even in MailChimp would still probably, by the time you log in and format it all and fix it up, make it look good. Like, that’s not a few minutes. That takes a while. Like, it can even take an hour when you’re putting in links and you’re fixing up images and new bits. You definitely need a VA for that. And look, a lot of people get stuck here because they think, “No, my newsletter. I have to write it.” There is a way that you can create a newsletter that has a process attached to it. Maybe you have to write a little intro blurb, but I’ve actually gotten to the point with our newsletters where we have segments in there for the latest blog post. There’s a bit about the latest podcast, and we kind of have sections that are always the same stuff, but the VAs just swap in and out what’s happening during that week or during that month. So, it’s a very good way to kind of work with your VA on making it a simpler process so that you actually do it, because a lot of newsletters don’t go out because you just can’t get to it. Common problem.

Matt:  Absolutely. And just as a point there, I think a lot of people resist handing this type of task over. We don’t send anything broadcast out to our database unless there’s a test email that’s been sent to me and I’ve signed off on it.

Barbara:  Of course, yeah.

Matt:  Yeah, I think it’s just a… you know, if you set that up as a part of your process that nothing gets broadcast out unless you sign off on it, then you can control and ensure that the quality’s still there.

Barbara:  Absolutely. Look, I think a great one actually to talk about as a follow on from that, Matt, just because we’re in this area is this whole thing of blog posting. So, you know, a lot of people are producing videos, audios, like what we’re doing here, or writing content. But again, like creating a newsletter, creating a blog post that looks good on your website with nice images and formatted. Again, formatting correctly on your website takes ages. It can be really frustrating. And that is a classic VA job. They do it really well.

Matt:  Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And just even with just on those blog posts as well, having someone that you can, again, throw a piece of raw content to and then can create that, flick you a link, and you be able to sign off on that, and then be able to… it actually removes an excuse that I see a lot of entrepreneurs having on why they don’t actually create a lot of content.

Barbara:  Absolutely, there’s too much doing involved. Like, there’s not just the writing of the content, it’s like all the other stuff that goes with content production. I always say content production in itself is only about 20% of the job, 80% of it is getting it all up online properly, getting it out there, getting it looking good, images attached. It takes ages. There’s a lot of work in that.

Matt:  It does. And so, we might flick into number seven, which is… we’re talking a lot about content here, newsletters, blogs and the like. And I was mentioning to Barb as we were preparing for this show, I really struggle sitting down and writing content, but if you ask me to talk on a topic, I can go for it. And so, what I have our VAs in our team do is a lot of transcription, simple transcription where I will audio record a piece of content and then I’ll send it off to them and ask them to transcribe that. That way then I can edit that and then that might form an article, a blog, a newsletter, whatever it might be. But the transcription piece is a really invaluable task for me because I really don’t like sitting down and typing.

Barbara:  Yeah, and it’s much… well, not for everyone, but for me it’s much easier as well. Like, if somebody was to give me… and I actually did this with a couple of blog articles where I just got a VA to hash together a couple of points, research a topic, put it together because I find it very easy to go in and edit something really fast and almost rewrite it really quickly, rather than starting from scratch and having to sit down with a blank piece of paper. So, like that you can even put a blog post concept together, record it if you’re like this, get a rough transcription of it, and then you clean it up, or you have a writer clean it up for you. That’s a really good area to use VAs as well, speed up the process. It’s reducing all the excuses, Matt. There’s no excuse then, see.

Matt:  Absolutely. Absolutely. So, where are we up to? Number eight. Number eight is… so, you’ve now created your newsletter, you’ve created your blog, and you now need to obviously often get it out there you’re utilising social media. So, having a VA distribute your content for you through social media. So, just note, we’re not asking them to create a whole heap of content, we’re asking them to through various channels, it might be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., actually syndicate that out through those channels.

Barbara:  Yeah, and I think the thing to remember here is, across all those different channels, you might have one blog post, but there are different image sizings and different ways of distributing the same piece of content across different platforms. So, for example, Instagram is obviously very visual and very visual heavy, so you need to have a strong image for that. Twitter is different again with different image sizings and all that. So, if you’ve got a strong process for your VA to follow, they can actually distribute it across multiple platforms, but make it look slightly different in all of the different platforms, so that actually your content starts to… it comes to life a bit better. So, VAs are great at that. So, they love to create little images and things like that on Canva or whatever that takes a long time. Of course, you, again, want to be approving this stuff because it is going out across your public channels, but the grunt work is done. So, that’s the main thing to get right there.

Matt:  Absolutely. And I think one thing that I see a lot of business owners resisting here is giving access to these channels. I think at the end of the day, you have to trust your people irrespective of whether they sit next to you in an office or in another country, but there are ways you can ensure that you’ve got the protection. So, for instance, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest you setting this up on your personal Facebook or Twitter, always make sure it’s your business accounts. Make sure that you’re monitoring what’s going on as well, so it’s that age-old, you can only expect what you inspect. And just be sure that you constantly have up to date access and ensuring passwords haven’t been changed without your authorization.

Barbara:  Well, actually, that’s a really good point, Matt, because it sort of brings me on to the next one that I think links in here is this concept of reporting. So, for example, with social media, so let’s say that you’ve got a VA that’s distributing your content in different ways across different social media channels. What I would recommend is that they… this is what our VAs do. They create a content calendar for the following week or two that’s coming. And our VAs actually produce that calendar on a Google Doc, and then they literally screenshot the whole thing and just give me a look at it. And then I can go, “Yeah, that’s good. Yeah.” I get a feel for kind of what’s the plan, what wording is going to be on stuff, and you just give it that final tick. And it doesn’t take that long to do it that way. But it’s this concept of reporting back to you on the work before it goes out. And then you can do reporting afterwards on how much engagement it got or what posts got how many likes if your business has a lot of that kind of stuff going on, or if there was commenting going on on certain pieces of content and all that kind of thing.

Matt:  Absolutely. Absolutely. And reporting is, again, I think another underrated area in business, but this is actually one of the links that enables you to stay in control of everything while having others do these tasks. I think where an entrepreneur says, “I don’t want to let go of control,” it’s because they don’t have sufficient transparency and access coming back to them and reporting coming back to them. So, it’s underrated.

Barbara:  Yeah, it’s the missing link, actually. I’ve seen this happen a lot where people have said to me, “I created my processes, I have all my task lists. I did everything that you told me to do and there still were problems.” And I think, I actually only learnt this by accident really, I was like, “Yeah, but this is where things like establishing the reporting lines, the reporting structure. Is it a daily huddle where they report back to you on roadblocks, problems, and you can foresee things coming before they blow up?” So, reporting back in lots of areas is a really good way to lead, so you don’t have to actually micromanage people, but you still have control over what’s going on. So, reporting is a really big one.

Matt:  And just on the reporting, just one last piece on this. I think you need to have operational reporting together with project reporting. So, it’s ensuring that if your VA is involved in a project, for example, designing or executing on a new website, that means a specific report versus day to day tasks that they may be completing like your social posts, making sure that your calendar’s up to date, etc. That’s operational reporting, and I think you need to separate that in order to ensure that you’re clear on what’s going on.

Barbara:  And also a point here I want to add on this reporting thing. A lot of clients will say to us, “I don’t think I have enough work for a VA to do.” Well, if you think about all the areas in the business that you could have a VA create a report for you on a weekly basis, it is enormous actually. It’s almost like a dashboard where even things we were talking about when you’re looking at invoicing. Like, how many outstanding invoices do we have? You know? There’s reporting across lots of areas that a VA could collate data for you to make your life easier, which is the whole point of having a VA. So, it’s just thinking outside the box about how much stuff they actually can do that falls into admin and support areas, but it’s just about you being clear and realising that this is something you can let go of. And often we tell people, let go of the stuff you’re doing, but sometimes it’s also thinking about what are the things you’re not yet doing that you should be doing because you don’t have time? And those are the things that VAs can help with as well in this reporting area.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  So, I think we’re up to one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, I think by my calculations.

Matt:  Yes. I’ve still got three on my list, Barb. So maybe we’ll give the listeners a couple of bonus ones.

Barbara:  We’ll give a few bonuses, yeah. So maybe because we were talking about the reporting thing, it leads nicely into this concept of invoicing.

Matt:  Yes.

Barbara:  Now, this one is a key area where you can either get it really right or get it really wrong. So, Matt, I want to talk about the boundaries within this invoicing concept. So, of course, sending out a simple invoice where there’s already a template and it’s quite a good strong process attached to it, great. VAs can manage that for you. But, Matt, talk to me about when this goes really wrong. When we get into like bookkeeping and maybe just stretching the boundary too far with a simple VA.

Matt:  Yeah, so I think bookkeeping is a specialist skill, and a virtual assistant, as in like a personal assistant is not the right person for that because they don’t necessarily understand from an accounting perspective what they’re doing.

Barbara:  Absolutely. Yep. I see that happening a lot, actually, with clients where people have asked me, “Can they do invoicing?” And they can, it’s just, you’ve got to have a clear boundary in your own head around where the line is for a VA to stop. You know, there’s GST in Australia, there’s VAT in America. When you’re letting them inside Xero, it’s okay, but you have to have a strong boundary and a strong process, and you have to have strong training if you’re going to do it.

Matt:  Correct.

Barbara:  It can be done, but just be careful.

Matt:  And I think that Xero actually has really good training within it as well that can support a VA here as far as invoicing. And we’re only talking to invoicing here. So, I think that, like Barb just said, you’ve got to have a strong process. The beauty with, say, a software like Xero or MYOB is you can restrict their access. So, you can actually… they can’t necessarily post payments or anything else. So, I think it’s important to restrict access on what they can and can’t do. And often if these systems are set up properly, then invoicing can be actually quite simple. Ensuring the right templates are set up, ensuring that it’s set up in draft for you to go and then approve and send. Those simple things like that, but it all saves you time. And what you’ll find too is, depending on the nature of your business will come down to the complexity of your invoices. So, some businesses are simply for services rendered, and that’s the extent of the invoice, right? With a total. For others, it’s more itemised and the like.

So, what we’re trying to do here is help you get the 80-20 principle applied. So, the more complex it becomes, the more involved, obviously, you’ll have to be. But you want to get the simple monotonous tasks, getting it set up, maybe getting certain categories put in there, and have it saved in draft so that you now, rather than having to maybe spend 10 minutes on it, only have to spend two.

Barbara:  Yep. Absolutely, yeah. So, just be careful with the invoicing. So, our couple of bonuses now. Travel. This is one you do a lot of, Matt. I’m really keen for you to talk about this.

Matt:  Yeah. So—

Barbara:  I do it myself. I like to do my own travel, but I don’t travel that much. Not as much as you. So, this is your area.

Matt:  Yeah, so I have my team organise and arrange all my travel for me. If it’s overseas travel, we tend to use a travel agent. So, my VAs, I’ll sit down with them, I’ll specify where I’m going to be, what I need. They will connect in with our travel agent and make all the arrangements accordingly. I’ll get sent the invoice and often just get that paid. For domestic travel in Australia, the team takes care of it all. Now, I’ve got a Corporate Amex card, and what that allows me to do is have each team member with their own card, so on my bill I can actually see who’s spending the money. The other thing you could do is, I’ve also got a MasterCard with only a low limit, and the team has access to that. I feel okay with that. I monitor it, and I know who has access to that card also.

They will book flights for me. So again, we have a process around that. They know depending on where I’m travelling the time of day I like to travel, my preferred seat, my preferred airline, etc. And then what they’ll also do is they’ll arrange parking for me, they’ll arrange transfers if necessary. They’ll arrange accommodation, again if necessary. And a lot of this happens now automatically because we have a system in place. But if they’re unsure, they ask questions, and it all gets entered into my calendar. They create an itinerary for me on my trips and send it through to me, and it’s seamless and it really does.

Barbara:  I love that that really works, and I think a lot of people would fail with this travel thing because they’d be like, “Can you just book me some flights?” And then you end up on the wrong flight to the wrong place and nobody communicated. So, it’s this whole thing again, of creating a process and a streamlined well-oiled machine around what… and being involved in it, having that leadership of that system. That works really well for someone who travels a lot.

Matt:  Yeah, and the other thing for us too is… sorry Barb.

Barbara:  For someone who travels a lot, that’s really amazing.

Matt:  And see, a lot of my travel gets charged back as well. So, we’ve actually connected in the travel arrangements with then once I travel, there’s an invoice raised, the receipts are all attached, and off it goes as well. So, it works brilliantly.

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s really good. Really good. Do we have a… that’s 11 now. We’ve got one bonus in there. Did you have one more?

Matt:  I’m going to give one last… we’ll give the twelfth bonus. If you’re an appointments based business, appointment confirmations are great, and having a VA do that. And in our business, we do that via email and SMS. So, we have that all specialised within our CRM system. So, we use ONTRAPORT. So, we send out just for regular coaching calls that I do, we will send out an email confirmation. If I am travelling interstate and meeting with someone face to face, or it’s a new meeting that I’m having, we’ll send an SMS confirmation. And that all gets done. There’s templates for that, and the team takes care of it.

Barbara:  Yeah, and there’s a process for it. I love that. Yeah, that’s really good. That will help any business. And like we said at the beginning of this, this is like… this would be any business. So, any business can use a VA, this is the key thing. And it’s just about creating your processes and working with your team to make this happen and to actually get success with it. I think that’s the big thing.

Matt:  Absolutely. I’m going to add just one last thing. All of these tasks that we’ve highlighted today are simple to do, but you must have a system in place if you’re trying to leverage somebody else to do these. You must be patient and give the person some time. You didn’t get it perfect the first time. And you must invest into training with this person to help them actually learn the system that you have and then master it. So, really important.

Barbara:  Yeah, because a lot of the stuff on this list is each business and each business owner has their own little personal slant on how they like these things to be done. So, training is really important within this area. Yeah.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  Matt, that was fantastic, because like I said, sometimes I forget the simple things the VAs can do because some of our VAs are doing very complex things. We’ve got some very, very experienced VAs building funnels and messing with Zapier and connecting systems together and all this sort of thing. So, it’s good to just recap for people who have never done this before that how you start is here’s where you start. This is how you start it.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  Yep.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  That was a great show, Matt. Thanks very much.

Matt:  Thank you too, Barb. And please be sure to share these shows with your friends. We want to get it out there and really help many, many people understand how to succeed with virtual assistants. If there’s any specific shows that you would like us to talk to, or talk about, please feel free to comment. Send us a message in the Facebook group, Virtual Success Show Facebook group. And yeah, as I said, share it out there. And the more people we can help, the happier Barb and I are. And we both look forward to speaking to you all soon on our next show. And thanks for showing up again.

Barbara:  Thanks everyone.

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

Let us know in the comments below what your key takeout has been from this episode or why not join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

www.manageflitter.com

01:50 – What is ManageFlitter?

05:48 – Building the team

07:36 – The quality of your team is everything

09:20 – How to keep your team connected

12:19 – Keeping the communication complete

13:32 – Be clear in your communications

15:08 – Eradicate assumptions

16:54 – Bringing new team members onboard

19:00 – Guidelines around communication

21:32 – Sourcing the right people

23:02 – Incentivizing your team

25:46 – Offering your team flexibility

27:20 – Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Virtual Success Show, where I’m joined by my fantastic co-host, Matt. Hey, Matt. How’s it going?

Matt:  Good, Barb, and yourself?

Barbara:  I’m well. I’m well. I’m really, really looking forward to today’s show, because I love when we have a guest on, so as all the listeners know, we tend to try and find guests that are running large virtual teams so that we can actually get that sort of inside scoop from them on how we actually can get more success with this and what the benefits of it actually are. Today’s guest, I’m really happy to welcome Kevin Garber, who is the CEO and co-founder of a fantastic tool called ManageFlitter, which I am currently trialling at the moment. We’ll get into what that is in just a second, and he’s also the host of the It’s a Monkey Podcast, which talks all things tech, entrepreneurship, scalable business. Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin:  Thank you so much for inviting me on. I’m excited to be here.

Barbara:  Yeah, and I know, we’ve talked before you’ve got some great insights to share, I guess, around the journey with virtual teams and the benefits, I guess, of global talent pools versus more local talent pools and all that sort of thing. Before we kick off into that, give us the ManageFlitter story. What is ManageFlitter, and why should we care?

Kevin:  ManageFlitter is a set of search filtering and sort tools that sits on top of your Twitter account, helps you work smarter and faster with Twitter. We have paid customers from over 100 countries, although the bulk, at the moment, in the United States, and the bulk of our users are people that use social a lot. They use Twitter a lot. They use our product to clean up their account. They use our product to grow their account with the right followers, to search for people tweeting about certain topics and to easily follow them in a compliant way that keeps Twitter happy and keeps your account in good shape. It’s a nice set of tools for people that use Twitter a lot. We’ve been around since 2010. The tool was actually built internally first for myself, so I discovered Twitter on a trip to San Francisco. I can’t remember, it was 2008 or 2009 and I started using Twitter quite a lot, and my account started getting cluttered with accounts that stopped tweeting or they were fake accounts, and I was struggling to clean up my account properly and find the right people to follow.

I asked, I had a small digital agency at the time. I was lucky enough to have an incredible engineer working with me who landed up being a co-founder of ManageFlitter, and this will lead into our chat about the importance of team, Barbara, but he developed a prototype of this product. I started using it. I loved it. We released it to the world. At that stage, it was all the rage to build products on top of the Twitter API. This was in 2010, a very different world to today, where the social media companies are clamping down and closing APIs and forcing strong limits. In those days, Twitter was saying, “We’ve got this great, open platform. We’ve got this great API. Come and build. Come and build. We’ll support you.” Famous products like TweetDeck, for example, came out of that phase, and was actually a private product that Twitter then bought, and, of course, TweetDeck is a very important part of Twitter these days.

We released it to the Twitter ecosystem. People started using ManageFlitter, using our product. They started using it in ways which we didn’t even predict, which was very, very interesting and a great lesson in trying to get it out there to your market so you can get feedback, because they’ll start using your product in ways that you didn’t even anticipate. In 2011, we launched a paid version of that product, and we kept on growing. We were very lucky that our customers did marketing on our behalf, which is an absolute—

Barbara:  Oh, the holy grail.

Kevin:  …gift. The holy grail, where people were tweeting about us, blogging about us, YouTubing about us. Even today, if you go to YouTube and you type in “ManageFlitter” or “grow your Twitter account,” we’ll pop up there. People would put together hour-long YouTube videos on that we didn’t even know who these people were, and we weren’t paying them, and they weren’t even affiliates a lot of the time. It was a wonderful, wonderful journey.

James, brought him on as co-founder. We subsequently sold the digital agency to focus on ManageFlitter, and we grew out the team. We haven’t taken funding to date, so we’re still a small team, we, only about 15, going slowly and surely. We’re still around in 2018, still trying to make the product better, still dealing with all the ups and downs of the tech world, of team challenges, of technical challenges, of industry moving, dealing with all the ups and downs, and here we are.

Barbara:  Wow. I know, you and I have talked about the team challenges already, and obviously, that’s what we really want to dive into here. Talk to me about those early days. You had the digital agency, and then at what stage, when you made the switch over to ManageFlitter full-time and you stopped the agency, was it just you and the co-founder still, or what was the…

Kevin:  No, we had grown them… We had grown to a few developers, and some of the agency people had multiple roles, as in they would spend 50% of the time in an agency and 50% of the time in the product, so it wasn’t just myself and the co-founder at that stage. It was a few more, mainly developers. Mainly, there were another two, three developers working with him, and myself working on product and customer service and things like that, and we had a customer service person we’d brought on in the U.S., actually, to…

Barbara:  Were they all virtual? Were you and the co-founder in the same place?

Kevin:  Yeah. Myself and the co-founder, James, were in Sydney. The developers at that stage were in Sydney. We’d subsequently brought on one developer in South Africa. We brought on support in the United States. One advantage of a small business where you can be more creative about how you build your team, and I think a real quality that small business owners and start-up owners should develop, is an eye for finding a rough diamond that maybe other companies will not employ for a variety of reasons. Maybe they don’t have the right pedigree. Maybe their communication skills aren’t up to scratch, or English is their second language, or maybe they want to work from home, but they might be exceptional talent. As a start-up, that’s an advantage to look for those people that have slipped between the cracks, and we’ve been quite successful in finding these rough diamonds that have landed up being brilliant—

Barbara:  Yeah. I like that—

Kevin: …and a lot of—

Barbara:  …thinking, yeah. That’s interesting—

Kevin:  A lot of—

Barbara:  …that you’re not willing to take the risk on that, but actually, I think I’ve taken risks like that as well in my business, and it has really paid off.

Kevin:  Yeah and I think a lot of people also don’t want to work for big corporates, and they don’t want to work for governments, and they do want to work for smaller companies as well, but I was thinking before I got on the show, I was just doing a bit of a sort of run-through in my head of thoughts to share, and the one thought that just keeps on popping in my head is, a lot of these concepts of building a remote team, and leading your team in the right way, and finding the right people, really comes down to one thing. It’s been said a million times, and it’s such a cliché, but it is just so important to remember the impact that team is everything. The quality of your team is everything, just like in your personal life, the quality of your own relationships is everything, quality of your friends, and your partner, and your relationships with your family, everything.   It’s the same thing with your team. The quality of your team determines so much… In fact, it determines everything, and that’s why the big companies will land up paying all sorts of crazy numbers and doing all sorts of things to just hang on to the right people, and whatever you can do—

Barbara:  Team dynamic, as well. I mean, the team dynamic is everything, actually, so if you’ve got a lot of people that don’t like each other on the team, it doesn’t matter what their skills are like. It’ll be a disaster.

Kevin:  Absolutely, and that’s why if you’re a small business and you’re a start-up, and you can’t have the fancy office and you can’t… Don’t worry about it. Most people see through the gimmicks. The gimmicks are nice to have if everything else is there, but what people really want is to work with good people, and nice people, and people that…

…support each other in a collaborative way.

Barbara:  …what they’re doing together, absolutely, yeah.

Matt:  Yeah. Sorry. Kevin, I’ve got a… With such a broad-spread team, how do you keep everyone connected and working as a team?

Kevin:  Currently, our team’s about 15 at the moment. In Sydney, full-time permanent, we’ve only got three, including myself. We’ve got one person in the Northern Rivers. We’ve got then developers spread out all over the world, and it’s a question that we continually self-reflect on ourselves and try to get better on. Development team members tend, that type of work, we find, lends itself to remote work quite well. Other roles, we still, working hard at getting it right. We have weekly sort of all hands meetings, and we alternate the time every week so that people can actually join in all hands, because they are all in different time zones. People can at least join in all hands once every two weeks. We try, the sort of two to three sort of more senior people, we try to rotate through one on ones constantly with the team to make sure that… I never want someone to just feel like they’re just a resource, and they’re just delivering work, but it’s still a work in progress. We’re going to experiment with virtual water cooler type sessions.

We’ve got a Slack channel called Random, where we post all sorts of images and photos, and we have chats on there. I have micro catch-ups in different parts of the world with the team, and the aim is to do what a lot of full, remote teams have is, once a year or twice a year, have a full-team catch-up at a co-located venue. We’ve always seen—

Barbara:  An actual live, a live catch-up, you mean like all connect live?

Kevin:  Yes. Yes.

Barbara:  Wow.

Kevin:  Face to face, we’ll go to meet somewhere in Bali, or Thailand, or Singapore or something, and I think that’s really a good… To me, I think that’s a really good model when you can have a little bit of face-to-face time, even for a couple of weeks or a week, and then work remote. That really consolidates that working relationship in a huge amount, in a huge way. To me, that’s the sweet spot of the remote type of distributed team.

Barbara:  Do you know what I’m noticing, though, as you’re speaking, I think a really key point I’m picking up from this, the level of commitment that you have as the business owner, the founder, to the team communication and making sure that it works, like you’re leading that, making sure that, like you’re bending over backwards, literally, to make sure that the team connects in the right way as much as possible, that suits people and doesn’t make people feel like they’re just a resource. Right?

Kevin:  Well, part of, probably what my team would tell you is that one of the things that I’m always banging on about is to keep the communication complete, keep it thorough, keep it relevant, keep it timely, keep it organised. Make sure you’re threading chats in Slack and things aren’t just going on all over the place, keeping discussions out of email. If we are to make this distributed remote team situation work, we all have to be committed to getting this communication aspect right, because it’s all we’ve got. Right? You don’t have the bumping into each other and landing up going for a coffee and sorting out some issue. We have to be, have intent behind it, so yes, you have to be really committed to this journey. But to be honest, Barbara, in our industry, part of, a big part of the reason why we’ve gone for a distributed team is, we’ve actually been forced to. We’re based in Sydney, and the war for talent here is extreme, and I will not compromise on the quality of talent at all, and we need to open up to consider talent from everywhere, because Sydney is just, the supply’s just not there. It’s just not there.

Barbara:  Matt, I’m interested in your thoughts just on this communication thing and this commitment, like the level of commitment, Kevin, that, honestly, that you’re demonstrating to this. How do you… Matt, you will even see it in businesses that are brick-and-mortar businesses where all the team is together where there still isn’t that commitment to communication coming together, etc., and it just, it’s fundamental to the success of any of these things, whether it’s virtual or not.

Matt:  Absolutely. I mean, I was only doing a presentation to a company yesterday, and they commonly will… They believe their communication is good, but it’s so vague that it opens up a can of worms every time someone’s asking something of somebody else. I think that what Kevin was saying there, ensuring that it’s really specific and almost over-communicating, in some ways, to ensure that the job can get done, I think, is really, really important, but I think too often, people aren’t thinking enough about their communication and take, almost take it for granted that people will just understand what I’m—

Barbara:  But there’s assumptions.

Matt: …thinking.

Barbara:  Yeah. There’s…

Matt:  Yeah.

Barbara:  I mean, Kevin, are you finding, do you ever find that assumptions creep in sometimes? Because you said like, about this concept of making sure the communication is complete. So I want to delve into that a bit further. Is that like the eradication of assumptions and actually being overly obvious to make sure everything’s closed out properly?

Kevin:  Absolutely. Very important points, and I even say to the team, “If you feel that you’re making an assumption, if you think, ‘Oh, I’m not sure how this works, but it probably works that way,’ stop. Stop. Right? Just try and identify assumptions, because that’s when problems come in, and ask.” Even saying something that’s like… There was a case earlier this week where one of the team members said, “There’s this and this issue between the developers, and the customers are seeing it this way. I think they have it wrong,” and I said, “Who is ‘they’? The customers or the developers?” I just—

Barbara:  Yeah, that’s… Yeah. Yeah, being clear in your communication.

Kevin:  Being clear. It is critical, and it’s so easy when you’re in your head not to be clear, and simple techniques like always rereading your message and—

Barbara:  Yeah, because somebody—

Kevin: …even—

Barbara:  Like if you hadn’t asked that question, you might have assumed “they” meant the customer, and he might have—

Kevin:  Oh, it happens.

Barbara:  …meant developers.

Kevin:  It happens, and we’ve got another layer, by the way, Barbara and Matt. We’ve got another layer in that there’s time zones, so there’s asynchronous communication happening, and we’ve got another layer on top of that where actually our entire development team, even our tech lead, Marcela, who is in Sydney, are second language English. Now, they’re all very, very smart people, and their English levels vary from almost native to not as good, but these are all factors to really come into play, so it’s very important. We’re in an industry where one simple miscommunication can actually lead down a whole different path and, at the best, just wastes time, and, at the worst, cause a significant commercial problem.

Barbara:  How do you—

Matt: Do you—

Barbara:  …train new …Sorry, Matt. Sorry. I just, this is an interesting one for me, because if you’ve got a new person joining that ecosystem, how do you train, and how long does it take you to train a new person into that thinking and how that process works?

Kevin:  Again, a great question, because onboarding is crucial. I mean, it’s crucial to get the sweet spot right, so of onboarding them in a way that works for the business, but also onboarding them in a way that they start getting confidence about their own skills and are confident that they made the right choice. Remember, again, especially with the tech team, they’re dealing with multiple job offers.

Any decent tech person anywhere in the world, is dealing with multiple job offers. So you actually, if you actually get it wrong in the first week or two, they actually probably got a very warm offer that they can slip out to quite quickly, so you want to onboard in a way that they can see how organised you are, how smart the team is, give them projects that aren’t overwhelming but are already quite challenging. From the communication perspective, I mean, immediately as they hop into Slack, they can see our rigorous communication, our well-organized channels, the banter.

They can get on board it quite, you get the tone of the culture quite quickly, but I think onboarding a lot of not just providing a scope of a project and leaving them, a lot of chats, checking in, even, with the developers, even though I don’t work directly with them. The first couple of weeks, I’ll be pinging them regularly and asking them, “How is it going,” what are they working on, making them seen, heard and seen, and like they’ve joined a part of something. I mean, as you said, there’s got to be commitment, and I think most CEOs do have commitment and understanding around this, but I think to take the distributed approach at having a distributed team, you certainly do need the next level of commitment.

Barbara:  Yeah. Matt, what were you going to say there?

Matt:  Yeah, no…are there rules around communication within the team, like when something should be written versus having a chat to somebody like audio or versus video? Do you have rules around communication?

Kevin:  There’s a few. We’ve got a Slack channel called Daily Updates, and everyone has to post into their channel at least once a day, preferably twice a day, with anything from a big-picture view of what they’re working on and what they’re going to work on, or some detailed aspect of something that they’re working on, right, so that way, there’s an ambient type of communication, a sense of what everyone in the company is working on. That’s totally cross-functional. Developers, content marketers, support. That’s, in a way, the heartbeat of holding the team together, and it gives us a sense that we’re all working on the same thing.

Video-conferencing is a big part of what we do, any small catch-up or large stand-up, we include faces. Besides that, there aren’t really any hard and fast rules, so to speak, more so just guidelines. I think, I mean, back to the point of commitment as well, though, Barbara, I mean, a lot of the team members, they also committed to making a distributed team work, which is very important.

Some of them have, really want to work remote. They either want to be a digital nomad, or they want to not live in a big city, or not have a commute, or not deal with the office politics, so I’ve got commitment with that, but a lot of the team also has commitment in meeting it halfway. That’s also very much needed. I think there’d be certain team members where, really do want to be in an office and don’t want to be part of a distributed, remote team.

Barbara:  A follow-on question, actually, for me, just… I just love what you shared, by the way, and I’m totally stealing that idea that it’s like a daily huddle, but it’s done in a Slack channel, because I often get asked by clients, I’m sure you do as well, Matt, that, “How do I run a daily huddle with a virtual team,” but you’ve just explained there how you can actually, it’s sort of a version of that by everyone sharing what they’re working on in this Slack channel. I’m totally stealing that. My other one, and the question’s slipped out of my head, but I was thinking… Yeah. It’s gone out of my head. I had a great question to ask you. Matt, have you anything to interject with?

Matt:  I guess one question I’ve got written down here, Kevin, is, how are you going about sourcing your people? Is there any particular channel or group and the like that you’re using in order to source your people?

Kevin:  I’ve tried everything over the years. On the developer side of things, on the engineer side of things, there are websites that specialise in jobs for remote workers, people looking for remote work, and we’ve had some success with that. There are some recruiters popping up that specialise in technical remote teams. Connections, people that I’ve met at conferences and meetups and even just socially that have landed up working for you. I mean, I think as CEO, one of the top five tasks that you have is just to always be thinking about your team and building your team, and risk management around your team and when team members leave. There’s no one sort of solution. I get comforted when I hear people like Atlassian have the same challenges. Sometimes, as a small start-up, you think, “Oh, it’s just because we’re small and marginal,” but it’s the war for talent is that serious, so we have to… I leave nothing off the table in building the right team.

Barbara:  How do you, just with that building, the war for talent, how do you incentivize, without sort of overpaying and constantly getting into that merry-go-round of just financial upping the salaries and things like that? Is there any other things that you think retain people that we use?

Kevin:  I think, I mean, I think when there’s a good fit and the basics are in place, i.e., market rate, I do think overpaying people actually causes more of a problem than—

Barbara:  Yeah, it does on the VA side as well. We were just talking about this earlier. It’s kind of unintended consequences that cascade across an industry when you do that.

Kevin:  Yeah, and not only that. You don’t… I mean, do you really want someone that’s only in the job for the money? You don’t. It’s not good for anyone, so obviously, the basics of paying market rate is important, but in terms of beyond that, I really think people… To me, I always like coming back to first principles with everything in mind, and what did people want? They all want to wake up and do work that makes them feel fulfilled and satisfied with people that they like and they like to learn and move a bit forward and be able to feed themselves and their family at the end of the day. I like to keep an eye on the fact that the team’s fulfilled, they’re learning and growing.

I think one of the challenges with a smaller business is that sometimes, people can grow very, very fast, and they can actually outgrow the business. It has frustrated me in the past that I don’t have the right role for the person. It’s not only about having the right people on the bus. It’s having the right seat for them on that bus. That can be a challenge where sometimes, there will be a developer that’s not as good on the technical side of things, but they’re great on the product side of things, and you just don’t quite have a product role for them. Just getting the basics right, talking with them, reading between the lines, but it’s difficult. When a good team member leaves or transitions out, it can really feel, you can sometimes take it personally and a lot of self-reflection on—

Barbara:  Yeah.

Kevin:  …what you’ve done wrong.

Barbara:  I know. It’s actually good for me to hear this, too, because I’m thinking, “Oh, wow, so it’s not just my business that suffers all the same stuff,” so I think any listeners as well, I think it’s just any industry, any… Doesn’t matter what you’re doing. Business requires people, and working with people is challenging in some ways, but very rewarding in others.

Kevin:  Yeah, and it’s, and people do sometimes leave for different reasons, but I do think that one which would be interesting for you guys, and this is one, we recently had a new tech lead join, and one of the things he asked everyone in one of the Slack channels was, “I want you to list three things that you love about working here and three things that you’ve done.” The top element across the board of what people loved in working for us was the flexibility. Right! I think what you can offer in terms of having a distributed team in that flexibility is so valuable. I think the corporate nine to five, I can see why it evolves, and I can see why it’s needed and it’s there, but at the end of the day, who really wants less flexibility over more flexibility? Sometimes, just a little flexibility makes the whole difference.

Sometimes, being able to work from a café every morning for two hours just makes you feel a little bit more human than having to be that, have that rigidity. I think it’s an opportunity that a lot of businesses are not capitalising a lot is having the faith to give your team a little bit of flexibility to time-shift a little bit, to location-shift a little bit, to maybe choose their own projects, but that was easily number one in terms of what they were loving working with us was that they had flexibility to do their thing in their own way.

Matt:  Kevin, I’m just going to say, a big thanks. Your insights today have been amazing, and I hope for our listeners that you really do take a lot from this. If nothing else, just Kevin’s emphasis around communication, and I really think that irrespective of whether you’re running a virtual team or a local team, the communication piece is vitally, vitally important.

Kevin:  I’d just like to add quickly that around the communication, I’ve got this theory that we all are communicating a lot less than we think we are, whether it’s in business or in personal lives. We all think we might be communicating thoroughly, but it’s actually probably 30% less than we actually are in reality, so up it all the time.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  Yeah. Committing to it. Listen, Kevin, thank you so much, and for all the listeners, I like, we echo this stuff all the time, so I know there’s so many lessons and learnings in this interview with Kevin today. Make sure that you share the show, give us a rating and a review on iTunes if you can. It helps us to get the show out to way more people, and hopefully by the next show, my voice will be back. It’s starting to really fail me now. Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin:  I’d just like to say, if people want to contact me, they just follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn, and I’m always happy to answer questions or even hop on a quick call. That’s… Feel free—

Barbara:  You’re very kind—

Kevin:  …to reach out.

Barbara:  …with your time. You’re very kind, I have to say, even from my perspective. You’ve been very kind with your time, and of course, try the ManageFlitter tool, because we’ve been testing it out the last week or so, and it’s really an awesome tool, so get on there at ManageFlitter and try it out. Kevin, thank you, Matt. Thank you, everyone.

Matt:  Yes. Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin:  Thanks. Appreciate your time and the invite, folks.

Barbara:  Till next time. See you.

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

Let us know in the comments below what your key take out has been from this episode or why not join the continuing conversation over in the Virtual Success Facebook Group.

www.testimonialtree.com

01:49 – What is Testimonial Tree?

03:26 – The power of stories

04:34 – How Testimonial Tree started out

06:55 – Funding helped grow the business

09:00 – Finding the right people…

11:49 – How do you run the company today?

13:12 – What is your communications plan?

18:54 – Have you had offshore staff?

20:25 – Tips for building a SaaS company

22:29 – Plan now for the future

25:35 – How long does it take to integrate a new recruit?

27:48 – Invest in your people

30:43 – How do I use VAs?

31:48 – Learn more about Testimonial Tree

36:04 – Wrapping things up

Barbara: Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of the Virtual Success Show, where I’m flying solo today without my co-host Matt, but I’ve got an absolutely fantastic guest that I’m interviewing. Jason Dolle, who’s the founder of Testimonial Tree. The beauty about this particular interview today is that Jason’s background, he was actually an engineer, who started selling luxury real estate on the side. One of his clients flew in on a private jet and bought a $4.4 million home, and then flew out the same day. And Jason thought to himself, “How on earth do I get this guy to give me a testimonial?” Because testimonials are so strong. To cut a long story short, basically, Testimonial Tree was born out of that. From an engineer, it’s now doing million dollar annual recurring revenue and has 95,000 customers with a 95% retention rate. And Jason’s running a team of 10 people and is here to talk to us today about the challenges of growing a SaaS company and growing a team at the same time. Welcome to the show, Jason.

Jason Dolle:  Yeah, thank you for having me.

Barbara:  Cool. So, listen, Jason, give us a little bit of background first on Testimonial Tree. What is it? It’s obviously a SaaS product out there in the market for people to get testimonials. But give us a kind of a feel of what it is.

Jason: Yeah, it’s sort of evolved over the years. It started about 2013. I built it for myself just to mainly get my, like you said that one customer for example, to get him to share a testimonial on social media, because at least in US here, your licenced to sell real estate in a certain state, and you can’t really do a lot of stuff outside the places you’re licenced. So I was trying to get him to share his experience in a place where I normally couldn’t get. So social media was the easiest way to do it. And that’s how it started. And it’s evolved since then, but what happened after that experience you just mentioned, some real estate broker here got wind of it, and said, “Hey, we can use this thing if you pay us.” And it’s grown exponentially since.

Barbara:  Oh, so you had a business. Actually, it’s a bit like Virtual Hope.

Jason:  Yeah.

Barbara:  I call it my accidental business. I didn’t mean to launch it. It sounds a bit like what you’ve done.

Jason:  Exactly.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Jason:  It’s been awesome. I mean, the more we get into this and the deeper we get in testimonials and the feedback, the more opportunity there is for us. It’s just this huge, cool space. But what we do normally is, let’s take real estate for example, and there are all kinds of articles, but we mainly focus on customer feedback. So whether survey requests or testimonial requests, we try to automate it through different systems, and then we take that customer feedback and we can use it for marketing, get in on social media, maybe their power and testimonials on their website. There’s also other branches of our tree too. It’s more about learning and HR and things like that, improving companies. So long story short, we’re just trying to take this feedback and customer experience and help companies grow. Basically.

Barbara:  Yeah, and they’re so powerful. I mean, everyone’s talking about the power of stories these days, and how stories are actually what sell, and social proof. But as we all know, we all spend a fortune on our marketing and our lead magnets and our funnels and stuff like that, but actually going out and getting testimonials, there’s a lot of work involved in doing that. I think we… Like, I know for outside The Virtual Hub, it’s something that we do, but I don’t think we do it very well. And I think we miss out on a lot of great testimonials, because we haven’t really nailed a bit of a process around it, or even a product that helps us to do it, like Testimonial Tree. So obviously we’re trying out this product at the moment.

Jason:  Yeah.

Barbara: Great. So I’m interested, I know our listeners… and we’re obviously here to talk about virtual teams, virtual success, and what I love about your company is that your team, the team is actually not virtual. They are in an office, mainly working together. But you’re virtual from them, which makes you a virtual team as the owner. So talk to me about the beginnings of this. Did you start out just you? Who was your first hire, and just talk to me about some of the challenges in that first…

Jason:  Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So at first, it was just me. And honestly, that first year was sort of part-time. I was getting things going, sort of lean methodology. I built everything myself in the beginning, and then it just got to a certain point where I was like, “You know, I could probably use some help with this.” And so I actually had a contractor, a guy that I knew, a friend basically, and I said, “Hey man, you want to help us out with some stuff?” He helped me out with some stuff. So I did sort of have a virtual team at first. And it was still local, as in the same town, but he helped out, built a lot of the core stuff we have today, even still. It was really helpful.

Barbara: Did you say, “Hey mate, here’s what I want,” and you just let him at it? Or was there… How much direction did you have to give him? Or was it an easy…

Jason:  Yeah. Well, at first it was like, you don’t know exactly how to delegate that stuff. So I think naturally, it was small things. Just thinking back, I think like one thing, for example, I had a query that I was trying to do that was taking me some time to get optimised and fast. And I was like, “Man, I can get this done, but this is like taking me longer than I should spend on it. If I have someone else work on it, I could probably do something else.” And so, that sort of how the idea came. Like, “I need some help here.” And so I gave him that, and then it kind of kept growing from there. You build trust, you know? You just give little tasks and then they do well, or if he does well, just keep giving them more.

Barbara: So talk to… Is that person still working with you?

Jason: No, no. So what happened was… No. I mean, I probably could still use him. But what happened was he had a pretty cool full-time job, so it was kind of a moonlight gig, and then it kept growing, and he couldn’t leave. He was making too much money in his other gig, so I couldn’t steal him away. But…

Barbara:  Obviously you came up against it. That’s a big roadblock actually. ‘Cause you go, “Oh my God, I’ve got this great person, but I can’t afford to hire that person.”

Jason: Yeah, it was like… It was interesting because we started growing, and we were doing some decent revenue for what we were, and I was like… I thought this guy would be a no-brainer. He’d come aboard and jump ship and leave what he was doing. But I sort of found out not everyone has the same risk tolerance as me or other entrepreneurs. He decided not to take that leap of faith.

And not too long after… I mean, in 2016 is when we got funded. We raised a $1.25m from a sales channel up in Chicago. By that time, we had other folks involved or whatever, so it wasn’t as dependent on one person at that point.

Barbara: With the money that you raised, did people come with that money? Was there a bit of team that arrived with the money? Or was it just the money you were able to hire them?

Jason:  I had a minimal sort of team. Like it was very lead. I mean, it was like, nobody really full time, even. It was like me and some other helpers. And when we got the funding, then it really sort of started to grow. And the main idea behind the funding was, we had been doing really well in real estate, and people were happy, and it was just awesome. But now we saw opportunities in other verticals in healthcare, insurance and mortgage and whatever else. And then, in our market, in our space, speed is sort of key, probably just like other SaaS companies. But if you’re not moving fast in those verticals, others are going to beat you. So we decided to take some capital on and move faster, get a bigger team, and… Again, that was in another challenge, but it was good.

Barbara:  So talk to me then, because obviously you’ve got an engineering background. So I’m really keen to know. Like, you get a bunch of money. Now you can hire people. So now it’s really critical that you hire the right people, and that you step into that leader role of being able to lead those people and lead that team. How did you find that transition? Did you have a background at all in leading teams?

Jason:  Not really. I feel like an engineer, I was on a team a lot, even in college. You’re always on teams in engineering school. But I never lead a team in the way that I needed to for this company or this role. I’m still learning now, I feel like. So it’s not like I have it figured out, for sure, but…

Barbara:  I don’t think you ever figure it out. I think you’re always learning. But talk to me about the… Were there any kind of early mistakes, or what have your learnings been, I guess, from those?

Jason:  Yeah.

Barbara:  From your first team to now. What would you do differently, if you had known everything.

Jason: Well, honestly… So one of my first hires was a… Well, I had a choice, actually, between two different people. And one was sort of an expensive CTO guy, like maybe a 125 or something thousand a year, which seemed to me like a lot of money for the state we were in. And I had another guy that was sort of senior that was less money. And I thought, if I get this less expensive guy, I can probably afford to hire another person too, so I’ll get almost two for the price of one. I ended up going for the two for one whatever, and that was my first… I had to let that guy go. So after about…

Barbara: First mistake.

Jason: …Four or five months, I figured out, “This is not working.” And that was the first time I had to let someone go, and I cried.

Barbara: Yes. It’s very hard. It’s very difficult, yeah. So what was it, in those first four months, what went wrong? Was it just obviously that that person didn’t have any skills, or was it a wrong… Talk to me about how you discovered the wrong move there.

Jason:  In hindsight, I think I probably didn’t have the best interview process in place. I sort of was really trusting. They sort of knew a lot of technical stuff, but until… I probably should’ve tested him a little more than I did.

Barbara: Yeah.

Jason:  But not that they didn’t have skills. Just that the nature of our product, it seems really simple on the surface, but it can get pretty complex underneath, and I just… Things were happening really slow, and it just wasn’t working out. I mean, it was pretty obvious. We’re trying to hit deadlines and figure out issues, and they just weren’t getting fixed. And it’s like, “Hey man, we going to…”

And then I think he didn’t show up for work a few days, and then it was pretty obvious this is not working out. You know?

Barbara: Yeah, At work, that whole character piece in work ethic… I talk about it in the Philippines a lot. But having to get that right, I think that’s something people have to get right, regardless of where you are.

Jason: Yeah, exactly. And I’ve learned I think a lot since then. And overall, honestly that was an experience that I think I needed to have to get where we’re at now. So I mean, you learn from everything.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Jason: So, it wasn’t like a devastating mistake or anything like that obviously. But I learned that my intuition on some of this stuff wasn’t as good as I had thought probably. So I need to have a little bit more processes in place and things moving forward to make sure whoever we hire was a good culture fit and a good technical fit to where we’re going.

Barbara: Yeah, the culture fit piece is something that’s really hard to get right. But it’s so pivotal to actually having a successful team. It’s worth investing time in that.

So talk, again about… So when you were on the road, your team are all in the office and you’re pretty virtual. How do you run it these days to make sure… How do you get to a point where… You’ve got all your processes running. How do you keep in control without doing everything, or doing anything, as such? How do you lead them?

Jason: I’m not totally sure I’m in that position just yet. I’m trying to get there. So what we have, we’re mainly in the same office most of the time. But the nature of what I’m trying to do is get out and get bigger accounts and deals maybe our normal sales guys might not be able to do as easy. So I’m on the road doing shows and doing different things. So I guess, in a way, my team is virtual when I’m out there.

So one, we have different tools in place, like Slack and things that really help us a lot. We have different teams and different channels set up there. That’s been really, really helpful for us. But the key is, I think, to get the right leadership in place so that I know when I’m on the road, I know there’s like one or two calls that I’ll always make. One, in particular, just to know the pulse of the company. So make sure there’s no fires to put out or whatever. So that one person I always call. Say, “Hey, man. How’s it going man?” And I always say if he’s smiling, then we’re good. You know?

Barbara: Yeah.

Jason: That’s like, the main thing.

Barbara: And what about a communication plan? Do you guys do daily huddles, or do you have a project management tool? Do you use Asana or Basecamp or any of these more project management style tools to run things? Or is it just Slack?

Jason: No, we have a couple different tools, but Slack’s the main communication tool. But culturally what we do is every Monday at like 9:30, we do a little stand up in the office, and generally, the department heads will just give a report of what happened last week, what their plans for this week are. And sometimes we’ll do little demos or whatever. If some new feature came out or whatever, we’ll show the team. Usually, there’s about half an hour meeting there, maybe, max. And then normally what I’ll do too is read testimonial to the team, and kind of make sure they know we have hundreds of these coming in every day, and just kind of get more tangible part of what we’re actually collecting. So that’s kind of cool.

But so also we do is we bookend the whole week. So at four, four-thirty on Friday… I mean, generally about four o’clock we’ll come out from our computers, come in the main room here, we’re kind of an open office space here, and grab a beer, coffee, whatever you want. And we kind of talk through what happened this week, how can we improve, what went wrong, whatever. If we did a really good job, we have these little sheets of things we’re trying to cap, accomplish for the week. In theory, if we get all these things accomplished, we have a little karaoke thing going on. So it’s… We have a really cool culture.

But things like… We use Get Hub for a lot of the tickets for the technical side. We use Zen Desk for a lot of the internal, like the other stuff we have with different ticketing for different issues with customer facing. So we have different systems in place for different things. Project management side, we have some Base Camp going on, we have some Atlassian tools we use. There’s a couple different tools we use that we put together.

Barbara: Yeah, ’cause what I love about what you just said there, is the Monday… I love that sort of huddle meeting on a Monday, to sort of set the stage for the week. And then I love that you do that Friday meeting that talks about what went wrong for the week, what went right, so what we’re going to do about it. So do you find… Like that sort of bookending meeting in the week, it keeps everyone, I would imagine, on track. It keeps projects moving, and it stops the roadblocks from toppling everyone, or people just forgetting to do stuff, or not reporting back to the team properly. Do you fund that sort of clears up those issues?

Jason: Yeah, definitely. ‘Cause it’s a natural conversation you have too when you’re in the same room and you’ve gone over some different things. It’s more conversational. It’s a little more relaxed. The other side of it too is it’s more creative. So like, you might have some issue that came up, and there’s maybe a more creative solution. Or now you have time to sit there and kind of talk about it, whereas if you’re in a regular week, people are doing stuff and you feel like you’re interrupting them. So…

End of the week’s actually a little bit more productive. That’d be more productive than the one at the beginning of the week, really.

Barbara: Yeah. Exactly. I just think… So have you ever been virtual for that meeting yourself? Have you ever been on the road for that?

Jason: I don’t think I’ve… Not yet, I don’t think. I mean, I think I’ve been gone before, but they have it without me. So I haven’t really called in for it.

Barbara: Yeah.

Jason:  I also have people that run it. I have not… I don’t think I’ve ever done one where I called in and kind of virtually did it.

Barbara: ‘Cause I know a lot of people who say to me you can’t do that virtually, whereas, like I actually do the same sort of thing. I actually have a daily huddle that we do, as you’ve got a massive pipeline happening every day. But we actually do it virtually, and I always hammer home to people that it’s almost more important to do it when you are virtual. So we all get out on video and everything. And there’s like 12 people on the whole thing. And we all have a laugh, and you just connect everyone virtually. You can really do it that way as well.

Jason: You sold me. I’m going to do it. Next time I’m gone, I’m going to call in.

Barbara: You should do it. Yeah. You should dial in from your phone. And see how it goes. ‘Cause then it shows the team, that as you do grow, you’re going to get… You may have virtual team members. ‘Cause I know that, obviously, you guys are thinking now about maybe putting on some off-shore people with us. How are you going to integrate those people in those team meetings? It is a good idea to bring them into the vision, and part of the whole thing. So it’s a good exercise in running virtual teams.

Jason: That is a very good point. So yeah, I’m looking forward to that actually. It’ll be kind of fun to figure that out a little bit, and I totally agree. I mean, as we scale, you sort of have to have that mentality, ’cause even salespeople or whatever it is, they’re not going to all be here. I mean, so we’ve got…

Barbara: Yeah. You’ve got salespeople all over the country eventually. Depending on how big you go globally with the platform, you’re going to have to think about this virtual thing, I think more as you get bigger.

Jason: No question. So yeah. We have plans to go international. Well, we already have international customers, but we haven’t really had that as a main focus. But we will, moving forward, so it will be more and more important. And it’ll be interesting in how to fit those stand-ups in there. Even the virtual beers, I guess, on Friday. I don’t know how that’s going to work, but…

Barbara: Yeah.

Jason: We’ll virtual karaoke, I guess. Or something. Overseas, it’ll be kind of interesting.

Barbara: Yeah. We have some clients that’ve been doing some really interesting virtual stand-up meetings and stuff with their teams offshore. ‘Cause obviously when you start thinking about bringing on contractors or VA’s or whatever, it’s good to bring them into the culture as well. And not just have them as a kind of a separate thing.

Barbara: So talk to me now about have you had any offshore staff in this thing before, even as contractors or plug-ins to the business?

Jason: Yeah. We had one project where they wanted us to design some mobile feature, or whatever, and one of the guys in the team, one of the tech guys, had a connection to somebody actually in Pakistan or somewhere over in that vicinity. And so we used him for some design things that we did, and…

Barbara: And how did that go? ‘Cause that would’ve been your first foray.

Jason: It went pretty well. It was hard to pay him but other than that it was pretty good. I tried to wire money, and it was really interesting when you try to do that. But we did it once, it worked. And then next time it was taking so long, we ended up doing some other way, some other app or something to pay him.

Barbara: How about communication? How did you manage the communication with him?

Jason: Slack was the main way. He was a… I don’t think we ever actually talked to him. It was all just typing via Slack, and there was some mockups and things. So it was mainly visual stuff that he was doing, so it was pretty easy. But you can just draw stuff. Like, he had some chains or whatever. It’s easy to draw some arrows and circles or whatever. But it was pretty seamless, and it was actually pretty good.

Barbara: Yeah.

Jason: It was good for us to have that specific kind of project where, like, “Hey, we need help with this one thing,” and this person had expertise in this one thing we were doing, so…

Barbara: And what would you say… So like, SaaS companies, they grow fast, right? So you know, you’re in a fast growth path, you’ve got this technology platform. What would you say to people sort of listening to this who are trying to build teams, or feeling frustrated that they can’t grow their business. Either they can’t grow it fast enough because the team is a roadblock, or their company is growing too fast for their team to keep up. What sort of tips would you give people, who are listening?

Jason: I’m sort of right in the middle of all this right now, so I’m sort of learning.

Barbara: I don’t think it ever ends, ’cause I am as well. I’m just listening to myself going, “What tip would I give?” Yeah.

Jason:  Exactly. So I think, and I’m not sure this is the answer to the question, but I’d say, if it’s my business, getting to the first million dollars in revenue was hard. Obviously to get there is hard, but I could get there with sort of some brute force and sort of some less processes and things in place. But I think going… Now we’re trying to double, and we’re in the middle of that, and we’re ahead of schedule, which is great. But you’re forced to think about things in ways that everything’s going to scale.

So what I tell the team is, “Look. You’re doing this job, but you going to think of it in terms of having five people underneath you. You can’t do… You going to make it really efficient.” And so the whole goal right now is to make everything scale, whether it’s onboarding or the customer service piece or whatever. It’s all the processes have to be scalable.

Even the sales side. Sales seems like it’s easy to scale to an extent, maybe easier than the other ones, but in reality, that’s, for us anyway, that’s been interesting because every vertical’s a little bit different for us. And trying to learn the differences and getting the salespeople to understand those differences. And then trying to… Instead of doing things that are like one-offs, like answering some question on a Zen Desk ticket or whatever it is, making articles that answer those questions and just little, all kinds of things that you can do that just are repeatable. And so there’s hopefully less one-off things you’re doing.

Barbara: I love what you said there because you know what? I actually just had this conversation with my own team about a week ago. And for anyone listening, I think the problem I see, and I fell into this trap myself also, is that yes you build processes and systems and put teams in place. But it’s all based on what we’re doing today. Usually, this is what happens, and I sort of say to my team, “Every process you build, you need to present it to me and you need to show me how you think that’s going to work with five times the volume going through our pipes.” In every single thing. You know, of four team members under you, because you’re right. Because the only way to run a team or to run a business and scale it is to make sure that the systems and your people don’t break when you double. That resonated with me because I just realised that about a year ago. I thought, “Oh gosh, everything needs to be built now for five times the size, ’cause that’s where we’re going.” You know?

Jason: Exactly.

Barbara: So really important point there for anyone listening. I even think if you’ve just got you as a solopreneur and one VA, a lot of people get stuck in that trench because that’s quite a difficult place to get to, even with your first person. But you’re going to start working with that person based on what happens when I have five VA’s, or five team members, or a salesperson, a project manager and three offshore staff. And some people get very overwhelmed with that. But actually, it’s less overwhelming in the long run if you think about it in the first place, which I’m sure you’d echo what I’m saying there.

Jason: Oh, no question. Yeah. I mean, it’s all process driven. And I think the hard part, sort of for me anyway, was… And I’m still doing this. In my company, I pretty much have done… As any startup really, you do every job. So you know how you would do every job. Like, customer service…

Barbara: Yeah. You do everything first yourself, and then…

Jason: And whatever.

Barbara: And it works. Yeah.

Jason: And you achieve a certain level of success in taking the next step because you generally are pretty good at most of those jobs. And so you’ve got to figure out what made you good at those jobs, and figure out, “How do I train someone else or trust someone else to do it their way?” And it may be different than your way. Like, you going to decide how much autonomy to give them, or what things make you special. You know what I mean? So that’s the part that you’re going to be introspective about and say, “Okay. What part of customer service was valuable to my customers? I’ve got to make sure I keep that intact.” And other than that, you can do it the way you want. Know what I mean? So…

Barbara: And actually, just on that point of training, that’s a really interesting point that you brought up. Cause I’m keen to kind of just delve into this slightly. A lot of people think… Well, the feedback I sort of get sometimes is, “Oh, you know, I’ve got someone in the Philippines. It’s harder to train. It takes too long.” I’m of the view that like, I’ve brought on people in my own country and I still had to train, not because they weren’t skilled, but because they’re entering my company that I built. So they kind of need to get their feet under the desk of what we’re doing here.

Barbara: What would you say, even with somebody who has experience and you’ve hired someone whose an A-player, how long do you think it takes to kind of still train someone on your internal workings?

Jason: Yeah. I mean, honestly, people that’ve been here for even four or five months, we hired people at the end of last year, they’re still learning things.

Barbara: Yeah.

Jason: So I mean, there’s certain core things that you need to know to be able to be successful. And I think that takes, for us anyway… On the outside looking in, our product it’s not that complicated. It’s like two or three months you’re pretty much up to speed. You can do a lot of stuff.

But the way we’re set up, and the way our company’s set up, it’s very customizable. There’s a lot of settings, lot of things you do that are dependent on what the customer needs. So teaching folks, especially on the sales and the onboarding side, to sort of listen and figure out what the actual customer’s saying and figure out what to turn on or off or on to make them successful. That takes a little bit more nuance training.

But other parts that we’re doing with the ticketing and stuff like that, I think there’s ways to make it really simple. Just having the boundaries or, “Hey, here’s what we want you to do, here’s the rules around this.” If it goes outside those rules, maybe escalate it to someone else in-house, or whatever. That’s sort of my vision for the way maybe… in my work for some of the stuff on our support.

Barbara: Yep. It’s just funny because often we have people… I see this, not as much anymore, but sometimes people will hire a VA and after a week they’re like, “Nah. Can’t do it.” I’m like, “Okay.” There is still an onboarding time with new people in your business and all that sort of thing that has to happen. So I always try and say to people that you have to be realistic, and think that you’re in the long game, really. And it’s sort of a two, three-month time frame to for people to really get their feet under your culture, and the way you do things, and how things are done. And they get their own style in there as well.

Jason: Yeah.

Barbara: I think that would be a fair enough assumption to make, regardless of where the person is actually stationed. Whether they’re virtual, offshore, whether they’re in your office in the US beside you, things like that. It’s good to be realistic.

Jason: Yeah. You have to invest in your people, so if you treat the VA or someone on your team like a normal employee, you going to invest time. Getting up to speed is not overnight. Even, I think in my mind, you could hire someone here that may not be as motivated or a cultural fit that could be… My point is, a VA, as long as their of the right mindset and they’re motivated and want to learn and their passionate and energetic, that’s what you really want.

Barbara: Yes.

Jason: Someone that’s…

Barbara: Yeah. That’s what we hire for. Yeah. We try and find that. It’s actually hard, but that’s what we… We don’t worry so much about the skills, ’cause we can teach that.

Jason: Right.

Barbara:  The character that you want and the enthusiasm and that sort of thing that you’re looking for.

Jason: We’ve had people that I’ve hired, and this is in-house, that have that enthusiasm, they’re great, they want to learn. They make sort of catastrophic mistakes sometimes. I mean, I could tell you all these horror stories about things they’ve done, on accident. You know? But I’m like, “Hey, man. Don’t worry about it. We’ll get through that.” So people are going to make mistakes. Takes a little time. But as long as they have that right mentality, that’s what I look for. I want people that are hungry, that want to learn. And then if they have that, just keep feeding them the information and training, and they absorb it and it’ll be great.

Barbara: I think the key point I’ve really taken out of this chat with you today, Jason, is that, and I want the listeners to kind of focus in on this point, is that whole thing of, you know… You’ve got this business, you know it’s scalable, you’ve got the platform. You are scaling it, and you’ve basically, you’re focusing on what it looks like in two, three years time, and what the team is going to look like then, and what the processes are going to look like then. And then you’re sort of working towards that now. And invest time and energy in your systems, your processes and your team and your people, so that they can take it there with you, I think is the end goal.

Jason: That’s exactly right. And the way I want to do it, I mean, again, I’m not sure this is the right funnel or not, but as we started working with VA’s my thought is, “I want to have one or two VA’s.” I was hoping like, one at first, that might be cross-functional, doing more than one team thing. But the idea is to teach… Right now, for example, we have different teams that are one person. And so just giving them someone to delegate things to…

Barbara: Giving them an assistant would free up their time to more high-level stuff.

Jason: Well, and it helps them figure out how to scale. Because now they have to train that person in things. So I’m giving them responsibility to have a team now, and there’s a lot less risk with a VA as far as the financial outlay, and all the things that normally come with an in-house employee. But as long as they have the same sort of mentality and a decent skill set, my team’s getting as much out of it in the learning process as the VA, I’m sure.

Barbara: Yeah. That’s a great point to make, that when you are scaling the company, even if you have a big team on shore, like in your own place and anyone listening to this thinking, “How do I use VAs?” Well, I always say to people, I mean, if you want a team to grow bigger, you’ve got a couple of choices. You can invest in more people in your own country, or you can take some of the grunt work off your people and offshore that to a company like ours or VAs or whatever. And it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s lower value work, it’s just more of the grunt work that can be done, and then allow those people to elevate into those kinds of higher value and more strategic kind of positions within your company who are onshore. And it’s a really cost-effective way to actually leverage your scale of business, to do it that way. Tooting my own trumpet here, of course, but between that and testimonials, get testimonials free, working for you and get your testimonials and your client surveys pumping. So Jason, if people want to find out more about Testimonial Tree and your journey, where do they go to get a demo of the product or have a look at what you’re doing.

Jason: Yeah. Well, our site is TestimonialTree.com, so you can go there and there’s some forms and everything you fill out to get demos, or you can just contact us directly or on one of our phone numbers and whatnot. But yeah, we love… The fun part about our company is we get to work with all sorts of businesses, and so we really do get a lot of stories of how they can make their customers happy. We’ve learned a lot ourselves just from our own customers and the way they’ve shaped their own cultures and things, so…

Barbara: And I think you’re going to be sharing that. You’re launching a Podcast too that’s going to be sharing all of that. Those…

Jason: And you know, so our philosophy… Actually, what I’m learning is… So first our company was more about leveraging the happy customers in growing business for marketing. Like, it being people to share on social media, maybe getting different play platforms, whatever, getting testimonials on your site. Like, mostly marketing oriented. And now, we’re finding that the testimonial itself actually is, yes, you can use for marketing, sure. Extremely powerful tool, one of the most powerful tools, but what it really is is someone telling you how you’ve wowed them. So, they’re going to remember and write about things that made you different. And so, at scale, we have a lot of interesting data, and our goal is to help you or help companies get better baseline data. So let’s say you have a big real estate company or whatever, you might want to figure out, “Hey, what are my customers really wanting? How am I wowing them?” Is it communications or knowledge or whatever?” And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so many cool things you can do with that, but overall we’re finding opportunities to help companies use the data we collect to get better.

Barbara: Yeah. And I’m just thinking, you know, that’s a classic job the VA’s can help you with, ’cause they can dive into your platform and extract the data that you’re getting and maybe put it into some slides for you and just present… You know, put it into a format that you can have a quick look or whatever. So that’s the main thing that I’m working with some of my team, on looking at Testimonial Tree at the moment right now. How we’re going to be using it. ‘Cause although I’d love to be diving in there myself, I have way too much to be doing to be tinkering with the platform, so my team are going to be taking over that role for us as well.

Jason: Perfect. Yeah, I mean, that’s the kind of stuff. We’ve actually onboarded real estate agents, or teams, or mortgage teams that use VA’s that we’re actually talking to VA’s…

Barbara: Yeah.

Jason: To get this implemented. And I remember one of my onboarding guys that were doing that came in, he was… Our office is kind of open, so some of the people walk in the hallways or whatever. He came in from outside, he’s like, “Hey, this is unbelievable. I just onboarded this company, but it was the VA.” And he was like, going nuts on how great this was.

Barbara: That’s like us… we’re going to train our teams of VA’s on this Testimonial Tree platform so they can actually do it for clients that are interested in having this platform work for them. It’s about having the mindset that yes, you can get people to do this stuff for you. You don’t need to be the one to be doing that. If you’re running the company, you can install these things and have VA’s do it for you.

Jason: Yeah. And that’s sort of our goal. One of our differentiators that we try to maintain is we’re not just a platform, whereas normally you sign up for a product and it’s something that’s just kind of totally virtual. We’ve grown, partially because we try to have a relationship with our customers. And it’s, at 95,000 or so users, it’s a little bit hard to do that in the same scale as we used to, but so we’re hoping to implement some things there with some VA’s and different things that keep that experience. And not only that, the way we were able to grow is because we listened to our customers and figured out the problems and issues…

Barbara: What they want. Yeah.

Jason: Yeah. They trust us at a certain point, so they’ll come to us with ideas on our own products. “Hey, I wish I could do this, or that.” That’s how we grew the whole platform. So for example, we had a broker say, “Hey, we love what you’re doing on this testimonial part, but can you do our survey?” And we’re like, “Hey, yeah.” We kind of looked into it, and we figured out we could definitely do this survey. And then there’s all kind of things that’ve been enhancements. So we need to maintain that same sort of mindset, but we hope that VA’s and things and the way we use them can help facilitate that in the future.

Barbara: Yeah. Listen, Jason, thank you so much for your time and sharing that story with us because I really do think, you know, at the end of the day we’re all about… This podcast is really becoming about these whole things of teams, systems, processes and how everyone is using this to scale businesses, whether it’s offshore or onshore or whatever way, it’s all important stuff. So thank you so much for sharing your insights, and everyone goes to TestimonialTree.com. Check it out. I’m currently checking out this platform as well, and I’m really impressed. It’s a fantastic product. And until next time, Jason, thanks so much. If you’re listening to this Podcast and you got value from it, please do leave us a rating and review on iTunes. It would be awesome to get the message out, and of course, share the show with anyone that you think would benefit. Alright, until next time. Bye.

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.

02:12 – What is an Online Business Manager?

04:58 – The difference between VAs and OBMs

06:56 – When you should consider bringing in an OBM?

09:25 – OBM versus having someone physically working next to me

11:26 – Online presence vs. offline presence

13:28 – Knowing when to replace and OBM with an Operations Manager

15:05 – Choosing the right team member for the right stage of business

19:19 – Having team members play to their genius

20:50 – Sarah’s Top 3 Tips

24:00 – Wrapping things up

Barbara: Hey, everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Success Show where I’m joined by my co-host, Matt Malouf. Hey, Matt, how’s it going?

Matt: I’m excellent, Barb, and yourself?

Barbara: I’m good, thanks. I’m good, thanks. I’m trialling out a new space today in Sydney. I’m at the beautiful WeWork Co-Working Space in Sydney recording this podcast.

Matt: Very cool. Very cool.

Barbara: For today’s show, guys, we’re going to do the third in a three-part series that Matt and I are quite excited about. The three-part series where we talk about VA versus project manager versus operations directions, or more of an operations manager. The first show we did, it’s worthwhile listing to that, where we dissected each of those roles and where they fit in your business. In the second part of this three part series we looked at getting the right people in the right seats on the right bus. Sometimes you got the right people, but they might be in the wrong seats and that can destabilise things. Often you see people just getting rid of staff rather than just figuring out whether that is the issue. In this third part we really want to get into this operations project manager piece.

Barbara: I’ve brought on a very good friend of mine and someone who helps me out a lot in my business too, Sarah Noked, who is a certified online business manager and trainer. She’s one of only three people in the whole world who is actually able to train people to be online business managers. She runs an amazing agency of OBMs from Tel Aviv and she’s joining us today, very early in the morning, from Tel Aviv. Hey, Sarah. How’s it going?

Sarah: Hey, I’m fabulous. Thanks for having me on.

Barbara: You’re very welcome. Look, Sarah, to kick things off, can we just talk about … You run OBMs which are online business managers. Let’s just explain to the listeners, break it down, what is an online business manager? What’s the sort of definition there?

Sarah: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, a great question that I get asked quite often. Basically, an online business manager deals with the management piece of an online business. Project management, people management, operations management, and resources management. You’ll often find an OBM in the place working alongside the business owner where the business owner comes to the table with the “what”. You know, what is it, what’s the strategy behind the business, what are the products that we’re selling, what is our “why”, basically. The OBM comes with the “how”. How are we going to implement this, what team members do we need, what strategies or tools do we need to build out, and then they will work together with a business owner and the team to make sure that the day-to-day operations run really smooth, make sure that projects run smooth, and that the team is happy, basically, on a lot of levels.

Barbara: Wow. Yeah, and what about… You guys build out processes as well

Sarah: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, we’re—

Barbara: …owners hate doing.

Sarah: I know. I don’t know what it is. It’s so funny. I love systems. I’ve always built out systems for things. I feel like, “Well, doesn’t everybody love this?” In my years as working as an OBM I’ve realised that that is really not the case. Our agency specifically specialises in systems, and generally speaking as somebody who certifies OBMs, there is a degree of systems creations and systems management because the idea is to have the business running like a fine-tuned machine based on the systems in the business rather than based on people.

If you’re an online business owner and you have a blog or a podcast and you have a virtual assistant who comes on the team and is the one responsible for manage… Not for managing but for carrying out the tasks, and then that person leaves and you’re like… The online business owner’s like, “Well, I don’t even know what she was doing, and we’ve got no system for this, and now we’re basically building it again.” An OBM in that case, as part of the team management would work with the VA or alone and set up systems so that when people, which happens… I know you guys have talked about this too, on the podcast… People leave and you need to have a system set up so that someone can come right in there and seamlessly carry on.

Barbara: I’m interested here now, in your view, because I know you see this a lot as well. Some clients come to us and they want all these systems and processes and they hire a VA, and that’s great. Our VAs can take people a long way in this path, but where’s the line for you between the whole VA thing and then online business manager…

Sarah: Yes.

Barbara: … and where do people get confused?

Sarah: Yeah, so generally speaking, an OBM would not come onto a team if there was no VA on the team. Basically, a VA … It’s the implementer, the doer role, so it doesn’t necessarily need to be a VA. It could be like a tech support or a developer, but generally speaking it is a virtual assistant who is in the seat of implementing and doing, whereas the OBM is more in the role of managing and having an oversight to make sure that that gets done. An OBM is very much a big picture thinker, and usually comes on the scene when a client is really mentally and emotionally ready to kind of hand over the reins of what is the management day-to-day.

When it comes to who else is on the team, an OBM wouldn’t be on a team with just the business owner. There has to be somebody there who can implement. Often times, when I come on a team as an OBM working in the OBM role, I might be the doer of a task for 60 days, for example, in order to make sure that that task runs smoothly, that it works well in the grand scheme of the big picture of the business. Then, once that’s done and buttoned up, then I would pass that along to the VA to further carry on the recurring, repetitive task of completing that.

Matt: What are some of the easy identifiers for our listeners on whether an OBM is right for them or they should be considering one?

Sarah: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that’s a great point. First off, because as someone who’s been an online business owner for going on almost seven years, I think the first piece is: do you have a proven business model? Is your business something that is clearly making money? You’re able to recreate success, meaning if you’re selling a product it doesn’t just sell once and then that’s the end of it, but something you’re selling your services or you’re selling an online product over and over again. Definitely a proven business success model.

There is a certain revenue that we like to see as online business managers, so I generally say like … I like to give it a figure. I’m a really straight up kind of gal, and I say, “If you’re making at least between $5 to $10K US in revenue a month, then you’re likely ready to start to bring on an OBM. Of course, the first person you hire on is likely a VA because these online business owners will be the OBMs of their own business until the revenue is where it needs to be and the team members … There needs to be something to manage, right? It’s sort of like, “Is there a business to manage? Is there a team to manage? What is really happening on the operations?”

The idea for us, really, at the end of the day is to take the day-to-day project and people management off of our client’s plates so that they can really focus on growing the business in terms of the creative aspects. What products can I create? What clients do I need to schmooze? More of that stuff. We’re freeing up their time by taking over the team management so they can actually do what they are good at. Not all of them are great project managers or operations managers.

Matt: Most of them aren’t, in my experience.

Sarah: That’s right. That’s right.

Matt: The reality is not many of us got into business to be project managers. We got into…

Sarah: Exactly.

Matt: … what you just talked about.

Sarah: Yeah. Exactly.

Matt: Okay, so we’ve identified I’ve got a business and a model that’s working. Obviously then I’m probably quite busy and I’m looking for somebody to come in and take over all of those tasks you’re talking about and projects. How would I decipher between an online business manager or maybe having someone come into an office working next to me?

Sarah: I think it really depends on you as the business owner. I would say most of my clients don’t actually have a physical office, so that would be the first thing. They work from home. I think if you’re at the point where you’re sitting in a physical office and want to build out a business that is more offline in a sense… Our clients are building empires online from their homes. A lot of them, part of their ‘why’ of having the business is their taking care of their kids or they’re a caregiver or they want to have the flexibility to travel.

I don’t really come across clients who… I would say then you probably need to look at hiring maybe a part or full time employee. Generally, online business managers, like virtual assistants, are contractors. Do you want to hire a contractor or do you want to have an employee coming in? For the record, all of my OBMs here in Tel Aviv are all employees and we all work remotely. Of course, we do have days where we try to get together once a month for team morale and all of that stuff. You generally wouldn’t have an OBM working in the office.

Barbara: Is it really for online? So, the OBM thing. Let’s talk about the difference then between an online business manager, the OBM thing, and then getting an operations director or a chief operating officer type role into a larger business that maybe could have a large online presence but also has a large offline presence? Where would you draw the line there? How would you describe that?

Sarah: Again, I think, for me, it comes back to a revenue thing in a lot of ways. If a business is generating more than $2 million in revenue… I speak in US dollars. Most of my clients are… Well, I have a lot of clients in Australia too, but… I would say that if your business is making over $2 million, you probably do need to look at bringing in an operations manager in the employee sense. That person might have started off as an online business manager that moved into a more… I think as the business grows the OBM kind of comes in when the business is at a very sensitive point of growth. Maybe before the business owner can really afford to have consistent employees and salaries and all of that.

Barbara: … ’cause I love this because it’s actually a bit of a stepping stone, which I didn’t realise.

Sarah: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes.

Barbara: It’s more like if somebody’s not quite ready yet to have their own operations manager, but they’re struggling with… They’ve got the VA, but they’re finding that… Does the managing the people. They haven’t really built out their processes as effective—

Sarah: And they don’t even want to.

Barbara: …and they’re in that kind of crevice, I suppose, and they…is to think about something like what you guys are offering… business manager type role to get you over that hump of that initial set-up stage.

Sarah: That is exactly it, Barb. It’s funny, because as an OBM my success comes when I can off-board myself from a client’s business and replace myself with a full or part-time employee to take over that operations role or the project role or the team role. Sometimes it takes a couple different team members to replace us. Usually that’s the case. Because the business is bigger, there’s more revenue, there’s more products, there’s more team to manage. Yeah. That’s success for us. Yes.

Barbara: I see.

Sarah: I actually had that. We have it quite often and I just recently, for example, off-boarded myself from a client I had been working with for two years. This is a woman who makes more than a million in revenue in her online business. She’s a coach. It was a joyous occasion when I was able to bring on a full-time employee to replace me and take over managing. I had the system set up. We were using TeamworkPM. I know you guys are Asana fans. Whatever. Everything was done.

Barbara: … anything project manager.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Everything is done. Everything was like, here’s… I rolled out that red carpet for that person to waltz in and take over the reins. It was a good day for both me and the client because I was ready to take on a new project and she was ready to take on employees, which was cool.

Matt: I think this is…

Barbara: Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Matt: …a really important point for listeners is that it’s choosing the right team member for the right stage of business. What Sarah was just talking to there is she was invited in, probably when the business was a lot less than a million dollars in turnover. Builds up, fulfills her role, and then, effectively, almost makes that particular role redundant because it’s reached its expiry date within the business and needs someone new. The reason I think this is a really important point for listeners is I think that too often we hold onto people too long, and we don’t allow our people and systems to grow with the business. I think that’s just a really important point you’ve highlighted.

Barbara: Yeah, that’s excellent.  It actually brings us back, Matt, to the second show that we did in this three-part series is that whole thing of right people, right bus… Right people, right seats, right bus, at the right time and as your business does grow… I think this is a really interesting space because I think a lot of people don’t realise this exists out there and they need that stepping stone actually to going from VA to potentially team of VAs. Then not getting stuck in that crevice because you think you can’t afford to hire an operations director, which would be eventually that you would move to that level. This is like your big stepping stone, which is great for so many businesses.

Sarah: It really is. I think it’s true; a lot of people don’t know that we exist or that … It is a virtual support role and in a lot of ways we get categorised under the virtual assistant greater umbrella term as a type of person that can come in and do these things. I did my own sales calls for my agency for years, and most of the people that come in are beside themselves with stress and overwhelmed because they have a few VAs or a few team members, and they’ve kind of put off or ignored or maybe felt like, “Well, you know, I’m an okay project manager,” or “I can’t handle the operations,” or “I don’t want to pay somebody to do all of this,” but they’re literally spinning their wheels. Burnt out. Their customers aren’t happy because they’re not given enough attention. The business owner, quite frankly, doesn’t have time for every last thing.

Barbara: I think, I see it on my side and I know, Matt, you would see this as well when you’re coaching, but we see is that somebody gets a few VAs through us. They’re all excited in the beginning and it goes great. Then they try to elevate the VA into this role, because they’ve got a great VA that is exceptional and may progress into that kind of a role. What they do is they promote them into this sort of a role and overnight expect them to be able to take that on, but it’s actually a totally different … It’s a whole other level to being a VA.

Sarah: Yeah, it totally is.

Matt: It’s actually a different mindset and skillset. Sorry to cut you off.

Sarah: Yeah, no. Totally. Absolutely. It is a different skill and mindset. I think, a lot of the time, these business owners expect that the VA will continue to be the implementer or the doer on the team in addition to project management. I think one of the things as business owners that you really have to be attuned to is, you can’t be the big picture thinker… You can’t be in the OBM role, helping the client with the strategy, and helping the client carry out the ‘what’ in their business by managing. You can’t be in the day-to-day and have the big picture in mind. It’s hard. A lot of the time, because I see it all the time on my teams, is the VAs are still very much in that mentality of doing. A VA is such an important role in a business. You need to have somebody that’s strong with the implementation and strong with the tech skill and strong with what it is that they’re doing. A lot of the times it just doesn’t translate over.

Barbara: Yeah, Matt, what would you see? You would see this in coaching businesses as well. Major gaps when you’re trying to get strategy through and there’s gaps in the team.

Matt: Absolutely, and it comes back to that second show in this series. It’s putting the right people in the right seats and getting them doing the right things. I talk to it in my book, The Stop Doing List, this about playing to your genius. Doing the things you love, the things you’re really good at and that are profitable. I think too often we try and get people to do things that they’re not very good at or don’t have the right skillset or desire to learn the skills. The third thing is it actually needs to be done now and can’t afford the time for somebody to learn the new skills. All it does is create frustration and stress, rather than choosing the right person and putting them in the right seat. I think it makes a huge difference.

Barbara: Yeah, and I think the promoting somebody as well. I’ve seen a lot of our clients in particular really want to promote their VAs. I think what we’ve got to recognise there is while that is great… I love to see that happen because, obviously it’s career development for our VAs. But you’re almost taking on a whole new role for yourself again. You’ve got to mentor that person and train them up into this new position. It might be worthwhile looking at what an online business manager… To even work alongside that VA and then, as you say, Sarah, when the business eventually graduates off you guys, there could be a role for that VA to maybe step up into or play a bigger role eventually. But the truth is, there’s a lot involved.

Sarah: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Barbara: It’s a whole other role. Sarah, what are the sort of final … The top three tips that you would give to anyone who’s in this wheel-spinning, has a few VAs… What are your sort of top three…

Sarah: Yeah, well that’s juicy. Top three I would say recognising that it’s a mindset shift. As a business owner you really have to be prepared to kind of explore what it would mean to step out of that day-to-day. I think a lot of us as online business owners, we hold onto the control. Tip one is get ready to relinquish the control.

Tip two would be, you definitely need to have other team members. It’s very, very rare that my team will come in and support an online business owner or any business owner if there aren’t any team members. It just isn’t good for anybody and the roles get very skewed. The tip is that you need to bring on a VA, ideally, or have somebody in the implementation role. If we were to come on a team like that, and we do, it’s just about coming in with the expectation that, “Okay, in the next 60 days we’re hiring a VA.” Tip two is know that there has to be other team members. There will be other team members.

I think tip three is just really you have to have enough revenue in order to bring on this kind of role. If a client is making anywhere between $5 to $40 or $50K a month, that’s kind of the sweet spot for an OBM. Is your revenue where it needs to be and are you making consistent revenue?

Barbara: Yeah, that’s a very good point. I think if somebody isn’t making that kind of revenue you’re still in the stage where there’s a lot of doing to be done by yourself and you may just have to cope with the VA.

Sarah: That’s right.

Barbara: online business manager.

Sarah: You have to be that project manager, OBM. You have to be that role.

Barbara: I guess, unless you’ve got money to invest. Like maybe—

Sarah: Exactly.

Barbara: …want to invest the money.

Sarah: Yes.

Barbara: Some people do that.

Sarah: Yes. Some people do do that. I think they’re in the mindset for like, “I’m ready to scale. I’m ready to elevate. I know that this is going to work” kind of thing.

Barbara: Yeah.

Sarah: We have come across clients like that, but it’s always kind of that tricky situation. There are certain requirements that we have. Also, as OBMs, we tend to be on a team for sometimes six months, sometimes two years. It’s usually around two or three years where maybe it sort of gets stale after a while and the business kind of needs to grow a little bit more. Generally speaking, business owners have to do it themselves if their revenue isn’t where it needs to be, with the VA.

Barbara: Yeah. Any final questions from you, Matt?

Matt: No, all good. It’s been fantastic.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you guys.

Barbara: I really feel this is an under… I just think this is an area that people are not aware of out there. It’s like years ago when nobody knew what a VA was. It’s like this is kind of the next thing. A lot of people don’t know that this stepping stone is out there, so I think this is a valuable show.

Sarah: Yeah, one of the things that, just to sort of speak to that, I think in the last five years — I know I’ve noticed this; I’m sure you guys have too — there has been so many changes and you can no longer have that one size fits all team member that can be the unicorn and do everything. Tech is becoming more complicated. Not more complicated, but just more advanced. You know, online tools are more sophisticated. Online businesses are more sophisticated and there’s no really a ‘one team member fits all’ kind of role that used to be okay five years ago. Now, people are up-levelling. People want more. There’s more virtual teams and all of that comes along with that.

Barbara: If people want to connect with you, find out more, they want to talk to you guys about maybe how an OBM would work in their business where should they go?

Sarah: Yeah, they can head on over to sarahnoked.com. S-A-R-A-H-N-O-K-E-D.com and they can book a free consultation with us. I’ll straight up will tell them if it’s a good place or not, because as OBMs we need to make sure that the business can actually support us. Otherwise, it just makes for not a comfortable situation. Usually, I’ll send them your ways.

Barbara: Of course, I know there’s going to be some people listening might actually like the idea of becoming an OBM…

Sarah: Yes.

Barbara: …something that you, you’ve got another business…

Sarah: Yes.

Barbara: …that actually trains people in that, so where should anyone go if they want—

Sarah: They can head on over to the website as well, or to even obmcertification.com and see the whole program there.

Barbara: Brilliant. That’s great. Thanks so much for today. I know the listeners are going to get loads out of this. Guys, if you are getting a lot out of this show, please give us a rating and a review over on iTunes. We would love it, because it helps us to get the show out to more people and help more people. Also, if there’s a show that you want us to cover, an idea, pop into the Facebook group, The Virtual Success Show on Facebook and let us know what kind of show that you would like to do.

Barbara: Thanks, Sarah. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, everyone for today.

Sarah: Thanks Barb and Matt.

Matt: Thank you.

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

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