The Virtual Success Show

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The Stop Doing List

02:00 – Do I need a VA or a specialist?

06:25 – Understanding what your needs are

08:44 – Slowing down in order to speed up

12:08 – Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Hey everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Virtual Success Show, where I am joined by my co-host, Matt Malouf. Matt, how are you?

Matt:  Barbara, I’m excellent.

Barbara:  Good, how’s all your brood?

Matt:  They’re well, they’re all good. They’re on school holidays at the moment, so they’re back in school next weekend I’m sure my wife will be very, very happy about that.

Barbara:  Yeah, all the mums are like, “When is school coming back?” I’m not into that phase yet, I’ve just got my almost one-year-old, well she’s nearly 11 months, so I’m a bit off the school holiday thing yet.

Matt:  Nah, it’s all good.

Barbara:  Yeah, so today’s topic guys, is again, a sort of a scenario that Matt sees and I see. I probably see a bit more than Matt, actually, in my line of business at Virtual Angel Hub, where we had a particular case and we’ve seen this a few times, where a client will come in, all revved up, excited about getting a VA, get a VA and then it just doesn’t work, right? And then we get in and try to see what the problem is, get another VA in there, still doesn’t work and in one particular case I said to the team, “Can you ask the client to send us a very detailed brief of exactly what it is that they’re really looking for?” Just so we can get a better sense. We just had this feeling that we’re missing something. So the client very kindly sent a very detailed briefing, which was fantastic for us to see, because the whole team sort of collectively, virtually online went, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.”

Because what was laid out would actually…really what this client actually needed was kind of a marketing agency and they were trying to get a part-time VA to do things that really are way outside the scope of what a VA is capable of doing. So I thought this would be a great topic to discuss. When is a VA really not necessarily not the right choice, but maybe not the first choice you should make or you need something more developed alongside the VA. Otherwise, you are actually going to waste time and money. So Matt I was interested to hear your thoughts on this. Would you see this happen a lot? I mean you’re on the coaching side-

Matt:  Yeah—

Barbara:  So presumably, we’d actually recommended that this client go and get a strategist or a marketing person to sort of lay out what they need first.

Matt:  And I do see this regularly. I think when I wrote the stop during this book and put the tool together, I actually put one of the questions to ask, as you go through the tool is, I’m just going to read it, so I get it exactly right – Are special skills required for the task? And so, as you’re unpacking all of the things that you want to stop doing and categorising them into your excellence, competence or incompetence, you’re asking yourself, “Are specialist skills required?” If special skills are required, often that can indicate then, whether a virtual assistant is going to be the right fit or not or what particular kind of virtual assistant is going to be suitable. Let me give you a quick example. The VA’s that we talk about are normally, general VA’s that support on administrative functions within a business. I’ve got VA’s that I call upon on an ad hoc basis and use them for particular projects, so I’ve got a specialist that helps me with creating my slide presentations, because as I went through looking at my stop doing list and I said, “Does this require specialist skills?” The answer was yes.

I wanted someone with a good graphic design eye and also had a good understanding of Keynote and PowerPoint. Those two softwares. So, I think it’s understanding what it is you’re looking for this person to do and then asking the question, “Are special skills required?” What you’ll often find is the more specialised the skills required, the less likely your general VA will be the right person to do that task.

Barbara:  Yeah and I think it’s understanding as well. I mean often times we’re challenged financially in business and that’s a problem as well, where a person decides, “I’ll get a VA.” And they’re really trying to convince themselves that a VA is going to be a strategist for them. One of the items on this particular list was to develop out lead generation strategies for each of my products. And we were like, “Really? A VA is not going to do that for you.” That’s way outside the scope of any sort of virtual assistant and that is the role of a strategist. And I think it’s being … We’ve even said to some clients we’ve turned clients away actually on this, where we’ve said to them, “Really what you need, if you’re tight financially, then maybe it’s a good idea to use your budget right now to invest in a really good strategist or coach to help you to get ready to then flip the money into a VA and then actually get the value from what the VA is going to be doing.”

Otherwise, you will actually waste time and money and feel resentful of the money you’ve spent on the VA. That’s what I think anyway.

Matt:  Yeah and I can’t agree with that enough because it’s getting the right order, I guess, of operations, isn’t it?

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  And it’s what we talk about at times it’s the whole super VA concept, Barb, where people expect, “Well I’ve got this virtual assistant now, and they’ll be able to do everything.” Or they’re the saviour. When in actual fact there’s no strategy and in that example you just gave, that’s a very specialist skill to come up with an entire lead generation strategy that I don’t know even any general virtual assistant would be able to do.

Barbara:  No, no, definitely, not. No, no, they would be completely … I mean even I was overwhelmed when I saw the list and I’ve actually worked on stuff like that before. But you know it’s funny, because sometimes a client doesn’t actually know, so there’s a … In this particular instance, I mean this client didn’t really realise until we sort of went … I mean maybe they had never actually laid out what they wanted done so deeply before, so it was a great exercise for them and then we went back with advice and said, “Based on what you’ve given us, here is what we advise you to do and here’s some context that could help you with this and then when you’re ready please come back and potentially VA can work alongside someone like that.” Look, if any of the listeners are wondering, “Well, I don’t know what I need.” You can jump on a call with our outsourcing strategy consultant.  Just go to our website, VirtualAngelHub.Com and often on that first call our guys are able to spot that pretty quickly for you and advise you what to do and we often tell people, “Look, go and do this first and then come back in a few months when you’re ready.” Because otherwise you will waste money and we don’t want that. We don’t just get people in…we’re not in the business to just trying to churn as many VA’s as possible, we’re in the business of trying to get success or both VA and client and part of it is understanding what your needs are. It’s very important if you don’t want to waste money that you understand what your needs are.

Matt:  And you don’t waste time as well to add to that, because the time you will invest wanting to go down a road that is not going to work. It could be time spent educating or unpacking or putting a strategy together.

Barbara:  Yeah and I think a lot of people rush in. I think when people are really under pressure … We know Matt, starting a business is chaos, right? It really is. But it’s that whole thing of just don’t rush into … Before you go and get a VA, because a lot of people come to us and they say, “Oh my God I needed a VA yesterday.” But it is worth just sitting down, taking a deep breath, maybe do it on a weekend over a coffee and just try to figure out what is it that I actually need help with? And then maybe approach someone like us for example and let us have a look at it and we can tell you whether a VA is the first move you should make. It may not be the first move. Maybe the first move is, as I said, a strategist or somebody who could help you more deeply. It may cost a bit more money, but in the long run it will actually save you money.

Matt:  Yeah and I think just to open the listeners minds also, is that when we talk virtual assistants, utilising whether it’s overseas start that one version of virtual assistant. I’ve got Rose who works for me and I would consider Rose a virtual assistant. But she’s local to me and what’s great is that when I identified the needs that I had for that role, I wanted somebody to come to my office once a week, so that we can meet. They can do the running around and I knew that I didn’t need somebody full-time. It was just part-time and that worked for her and I think that when you do what Barbara is talking about go and have the coffee and unpack specifically what it is that you need and where you need the help, you start to look at things like, if it’s an overseas person, what’s the correct time zone? I was coaching somebody this week and they’ve got a 24 hour operation and so they’re looking for somebody to be able to answer the phones over night. So, choosing an overseas destination, where it’s day time for them while it’s our night time makes a lot of sense.

So I think it’s delving in and doing the work and we keep coming back to this phrase but it’s so true, it’s the slowing down and actually unpacking in order to speed up, which is critically important here.

Barbara:  So just to summarise the points I guess from today’s show, because it is really important, like I said, so that you don’t actually waste money with this. I think really step one is for me it’s just taking a step back. It’s that calming down and figuring out, “What do I actually need right now?” And laying out what is the detailed brief of … Forgetting about what does a VA need to do for me. It’s figuring out what do I need to get done in my business in order to move it forward.

Then step two is analysing that list and saying, “Well what parts of this can a VA do for me?” And if you’re stuck at that point because you don’t really know what a VA can do for you, then hop on a call with someone like us and let us have a look at it for you and we can actually tell you pretty quickly on a free call, whether a VA, what parts a VA could do for you and whether a VA going in first is the right solution or whether you need a strategist first or both at the same time, if you have the cash flow to actually support that or whether you’re willing to get the cash flow together to support that. And actually getting clear on those things I think is freedom in itself, because there’ll be a sense of relief that you know actually what to do next and you’re not just rushing into this VA thing with your eyes closed.

Matt:  And I think the only thing to add to that would be, ask yourself the question, “In order to get what I’ve got written down done, are specialist skills required?”

Barbara:  Absolutely, yeah, yeah, and like I said some people don’t really know, because it seems obvious to you and me, but sometimes when people are starting out in the VA things, they’re not quite sure … The scope of the VA and like I said, we can tell you pretty quickly, so it’s not something … Don’t let that part stress you out. There’s people who could help you with that. And Matt I know you sit down with clients all the time and figure this … you go into detail, depth with this kind of thing with clients.

Matt:  Absolutely, absolutely.

Barbara:  So yeah, often VA’s are a great idea, but there are situations where a VA is not the right solution for you either yet or maybe ever, because it could be a person physically in your office that you need and maybe in time than a VA, a virtual assistant or a virtual team as we talk about.  So don’t rush into it.

Matt:  Absolutely. I agree.

Barbara:  Guys, if you’ve got comments on this or love to hear in particular if anyone has fallen into this trap themselves, because it is a very costly trap that you want to avoid, you can join the conversation over on our Facebook Group, which is Virtual Success, just look us up on Facebook and there’s a group with lots of people in there talking about this stuff. The other area we’d love to hear from you is on iTunes or we’re on Stitcher now, if you could give us a rating and a review and let us know there your comments about these shows and how it’s helping you in your business, not to fall into these common traps. Any of these shows you want us to talk about or other situations we would love to hear about it and dissect it for you on a show. Until next time, thanks Matt.

Matt:  Thanks Barb

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

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

Want the transcript? Download it here.

The E-Myth by Michael Gerber

In this episode:

00:54 – My VA just resigned…

02:05 – Creating a turn key business

02:56 – You must document tasks

05:05 – Everybody is replaceable, including you

06:28 – Slow down to speed up

10:40 – Key takeaways

12:57 – 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. Hi Matt, how’s it going?

Matt:  Well Barb, and yourself?

Barbara:  I’m really well, thank you. We’ve been flat out busy, both you and me in the last few weeks, up-leveling.

Matt:  Absolutely. And braving that it’s very chilly here in Sydney today, but …

Barbara:  It is.

Matt:  But we’ve got a hot topic that we’re going to be talking about.

Barbara:  Yes, definitely, definitely. One of the questions … I mean, I hear this quite a bit at Virtual Angel Hub, but I also see it online and I’ve heard it from people I’ve spoken to, who’ve had VAs or virtual teams before, what if my … Let’s say you have an amazing VA, that just does epic work for you, is a massive asset to your business, and then they tell you that they’re resigning for whatever reason, they may be going back to study, or whatever. They’ve announced you that they’re resigning and you go into this total panic mode of, “Oh my god, what am I going to do now?” because this person is such a huge part of my business and knows all the processes and what we do.

And I find this really interesting, because in my business, I often move people around, I promote people. Thankfully nobody’s ever really left me, but people often very quickly have to be moved into new roles, which means that I can’t have a situation where they’re indispensable in the previous role.

So Matt, I’m really interested to talk to you about this as a business coach. How can people not fall into this trap of having somebody who is indispensable, I guess, in their business, and then you’re left in chaos if they leave?

Matt:  Yes. It was a really interesting conversation we were having just before the show, but I think that the person that put this best is probably Michael Gerber in The E-Myth, about you’ve got to create a turn key business. A business that can operate without you.

And I think that anytime in business, where knowledge is held with a person, without documented systems or processes, it’s risky. And I know Barb, what I see, a lot of these business owners holding a lot of the IP in their head, and doing things just naturally in the natural course of business. Then they bring a team member on, and what they do is they download their brain into the team member’s brain, without getting it all documented. So really what you’re doing is transferring the risk, as opposed to de-risking the business.

Barbara:  Yes. And you know what I find as well? Sometimes when a client comes to us, and we have a very high success rate as you know, and sometimes the client gets the VA and they’re just blown away. Not always, but often in cases they can be blown away by this person, and they get really excited and just dive straight into the work. And the VA starts doing massive, epic work for them, and they forget that actually still it’s probably a good idea, in fact, it’s definitely a good idea to still pause for a bit, so that you can get your operational thing documented in such a format that you can grow, and that you can then promote that person and slot another person into the role very quickly, or if they leave in this case, that you’re not in chaos.

Matt:  Absolutely. One of the rules we have in our businesses is that if there’s a task that’s going to be done more than twice, it must be documented. It must be documented, even if it’s just a simple little task, because it enables me to sleep well at night knowing that if someone chooses to leave, something happens, whatever it may be, that there’s a written documented process that somebody else can slide into. And it may be that it takes them a little bit longer, or there’s a bit of retraining and the like, but that’s actually the value in your business.

I think it was one of our early shows Barb, when we had Dan Norris. I think he said that the responsibility of the business owner is to build and create the systems or the machine, which is the business. And this is how you limit the impact of an amazing person leaving.

The reality is, if you’ve got an amazing person in your business, and as you said earlier, for whatever reason they choose to move on, that’s always going to hurt. They’re bringing value, they’re probably an enjoyable person to work with and alongside, so that’s always going to hurt. What you don’t want is for you to feel like your business is going to come crashing down, or to a screaming halt, because this person moves on.

Barbara:  Absolutely, yes.

Matt:  The business should never be dependent on any one person in any specific role. The mindset to adopt here is that everybody is replaceable, including yourself.

Barbara:  Yes. And I think you’ve made a very valid point there, that if you want to … I mean, a business is an asset, and you’re supposed to … the idea of building a business is not just building an income stream, you’re building a valuable asset, that even … and actually Michael Gerber says this in his book, that it should be built like something that can be easily sold or franchised out 5,000 times, even if you never intend to do that, because that is the value of the asset.

And if you have people in roles that they own all the IP … I mean, obviously they can be specialists in that, but it is much better to actually create the business as its own entity and people can slot in and out in different areas pretty easily.

I mean, I think that’s pretty easy to do, personally, but it does take a sense of … If you can’t slow down … Let’s say people that are just running a million miles an hour and they’ve hired a VA and it’s going great, well, what I would say to those people is potentially then, maybe you allocate two hours a week where you guys sort of just recap on the things that were done for the week and try to at least make a list of things that need to be documented, and then start the process of slowly chipping away at them, and every week doing one process map. That can actually work over six months.

Matt:  Absolutely. And I think also to … And you’ve mentioned it a couple of time, it’s in that slowing down. I think at times we are moving so fast forward, that we don’t realise that there is actually power and speed in slowing down.

When you take the time to document and systemise, what you’ll find is number one, you’ll get efficiencies in the process. In reviewing and documenting your processes, you’ll see that there’s better and faster and more efficient ways to do things.

Secondly is, things can be replicated a lot faster and more consistently so the delivery of your product or service is going to be more consistent, which is going to lead to happier customers, which is probably going to lead to greater referrals and bigger business growth.

And it’s counterintuitive thinking that it happens time and time again, and when you commit the time to making this happen, it does produce dividends.

Barbara:  100%. And as you were talking, I was thinking to myself, the majority of people, actually including myself even though I don’t mind creating processes, but I would probably prefer sticking needles in my eyeballs than do it, because most people feel that way about doing it.

And I was actually speaking to one of your clients recently. He said to me, “Oh my god Barbara. I’ve just spent the last month putting all … nailing down processes. And I’ve been stuck in my cave just doing systems and processes and I’ve hated every second of it.” And he said, “But the funny thing is, since that moment, I’m spending massive amounts less time in the business, and I’m now freed up to spend time on the business than ever before.”

So, listeners out there, we know, this is actually not particularly an enjoyable exercise, but if you’re running a business, the reality is that you’re building something, otherwise you’re just running a job, as we’ve said many times before.

And while sometimes income is your biggest driver, especially in the early days when you try to keep income going, you need to carve out a little bit of time somewhere in your week, to focus on building this what I call, “Internal leverage” in your business so that it can be leveraged, the machine itself can be leveraged. Then later, through sales and marketing, all the things that you’re going to do to actually grow it, otherwise you get the bottle necks when you try and grow.

Matt:  Absolutely. And it’s interesting, part of what I wrote about in the Stop Doing List book, was around that KRC model, the knowledge, responsibility and control, and talked about how the person who has the most knowledge about a task or area of the business can be responsible and hence control it.

If you want to prevent the boomerang of these tasks having to come back to you if someone moves on, having systems in place and then documented training processes to train people in the systems, is going to enable you to move quickly to insert somebody else into that role, train them up and ensure that those tasks don’t come back to you.

Barbara:  Absolutely. We’ve had a situation a while ago, where a client did fall into this kind of … I mean, you know, it’s a very common trap that clients fall into, and the particular VA did decide to move on. And that person just couldn’t … and we’ve got a lot of success in transitioning to new VAs for clients that go through this kind of transition. We’ve got a whole transition process and support thing for the client, but this client in particular had avoided this for so long, that we can’t even do a transition. And they’ve gone into total panic and decided that they just don’t want another VA and they’re just going to go back to doing it themselves, which is very sad for us to see, because that person is going to go through another year probably, of pain to try to … and just peddling and all the things we don’t want to be doing in business.

It’s a huge lesson when it happens to you, if somebody leaves you like that, but it’s probably a painful lesson to learn. But if you see the lesson in it, people can move on and create a better business actually from learning it.

Matt:  Absolutely. I think if we would just talk about a few key takeaways today Barb, I think for me, number one is to minimise the impact of a great person in your business moving on, you’ve got to have documented systems that are used. I know a lot of companies will have documented systems, but they’re never referenced, they’re not up to date, and hence they’re actually irrelevant when it comes to trying to get somebody into that role again. I think number one is up to date and current systematisation and documentation.

I think number two is understanding that you need to slow down in order to speed up. And if you don’t make the time, or take the time to document and unpack every single role in the business right down to the simplest task, then you’re exposing yourself and when somebody leaves, and it’s inevitable, people grow and move and you not going to be able to support this person on their career path forever, so it’s inevitable that people will leave and move on. You want to be prepared and feel bulletproof to that.

And for me, number three is really that point of if the task is going to be done more than twice, it should be documented for somebody to be able to pick it up and run with it.

Barbara:  Absolutely. And I was thinking as you were talking there, that I think the reason a lot of clients avoid that sort of thing, is because, like I said, most people don’t like doing it. It’s not the enjoyable part of the business, but it eradicates the other less enjoyable things that happen later, if you just knuckle down and do this. And it is actually an essential part of building a business whether people like it or not. That is the … some of the tasks involved in building an asset or building something that is a business that works, not necessarily without you, but isn’t so reliant on you, or reliant on any particular person. And as you talk about it a lot Matt, it makes it a more valuable asset in the end, for those people who are looking to build something that is scalable and saleable.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  Yes.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  Matt, that’s been great. Like I said, this is a common thing I see online, people commenting about it, I hear about it, we’ve got clients that go through it, and we just … it becomes frustrating, I guess, for me and I’d say for you as a coach, when you keep telling people this, but sometimes they don’t realise until it happens, how important it is to do this before it happens, and to get organised.

And I would even suggest to some people, if you’re looking to bring on a VA or a virtual team, or start this outsourcing thing in particular, I would actually advise, you might be better off deploying your cash and your resources and your time initially for a couple of months to get this stuff right, before you even bring someone on, because otherwise it’s chaos when they come in.

Matt:  Absolutely. Or the other part of that, which is probably option two to what you’re talking about there, is understand that in the initial pieces of the engagement with a person, that their time is going to be heavily spent unpacking your brain, and putting it on to paper.

Barbara:  And that can be three months, easily.

Matt:  Correct.

Barbara:  Easily three months of actually just unpacking, so yes, it’s being realistic about that.

Guys, if you’ve got any comments on this, or if you’ve gone through this yourselves, we’d love to hear about it. You can let us know over on the Virtual Success Facebook group. If you want to join that, the conversation’s going on over there. Or leave us a review and a rating on iTunes and you can comment there. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this particular situation, or on any other shows that you’d love us to do.

Matt, I think that’s a pretty good short and sharp show for today.

Matt:  I think so too.

Barbara:  Thanks guys.

Matt:  Thanks everyone. Bye 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.

Resources mentioned in this show:

VSS – How To Get Your Virtual Team to Ace Your Expectations

In this episode:

01:02 – Integrating a VA into your team

03:07 – A strong onboarding process

05:14 – Communicating your expectations

07:50 – Being properly prepared to welcome your new team member

09:15 – Building a human connection with your VA

10:16 – Be clear on your communication style

12:18 – Learning your VAs strengths

13:46 – Process for onboarding your VA

15:55 – In summary…

16:56 – Wrapping things up

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

Barbara: Hey Matt. How’s it going?

Matt: Excellent, yourself?

Barbara: Good, thanks. Good, thanks. I’m excited about today’s show. Got another great case study style topic to cover.

Matt: Absolutely. Absolutely. Hey, just before we get started, how’s that little Ruby of yours?

Barbara: She’s great. She’s just started walking, so for all of those people out there with young babies, well the fun has started. She’s running around the house.

Matt: Fantastic. Fantastic. Barb and I were just having a chat before the show and what came up in our conversation… I was just recently working with a client who was bringing on their first virtual assistant into his business. He’s got a team of seven in his office, but it’s his first virtual assistant. We were having a coaching session and he said, “Matt what do I do to get them started?” He was really puzzled and really unsure. It was like, he’d never onboarded a virtual assistant before. This guy’s got an amazing business, an amazing team, and it was … I was actually just saying to him, I said, “What would you normally do with your current staff if someone was joining your office?”

It sparked this conversation, and we’re going to go through it today, but it’s so interesting the mindset I see so often, and Barb I’m sure you see it as well, where we … there’s this, a virtual team member is there and our team is here and because they’re not in physical proximity there’s this huge difference that needs to happen. It has to be done in a different way.

Barbara: Well they don’t even see … For example, we often see clients getting all excited through our on-boarding process and they interview the VAs and they’re like, “Wow.” They pick someone and then we’re like, “Okay. Over to you guys,” and then they’re like, “What now?” We’re just like, “Well, you start to forge a relationship and you’re bringing someone in.” I think people still see … they just still don’t see it as someone in their business. It’s them and us, and that could be because of the distance and the virtual thing, I’m not sure, but it’s … I guess I’ve got experience doing it now but I can remember when I got my first VA, I do remember feeling the same way, and I had no idea where to start on day one. It is a common problem. Matt, what did you advise this client to do?

Matt: What’s interesting, I think this is a common problem whether it’s with VAs or just bringing team members in, is that a lot of business owners and managers don’t have a strong on-boarding process. What you’ve got to think about is you’re inviting someone to come into your business and work with you and for you to help grow your company. If you don’t get off to a great start initially, it’s like any relationship, it’s never going to get back on track. My first piece of advice was, “You’ve got to follow the exact same on-boarding process that you would if someone was joining your team in Australia,” and so I said, “What would you do?”

He said, “Well, we’d send them a gift before they start and on day one we have all of their information, their emails are ready to go, there’s a pack for them with their login details, et cetera. Then I would sit down and I would go through the values with them and what the company stands for: the vision, the mission, et cetera. Then they would start their training.”

I said, “Well, how can we do the same with your virtual team member?”

Barbara: Yeah, because it shouldn’t be … Well, the first comment I want to make is that this particular person actually had an on-boarding process. What we see a lot at Virtual Angel Hub is a client comes in and the only thing they’ve thought about is, “I need a VA,” but they haven’t actually thought about, “What is my on-boarding process?” They don’t even realise that you actually need an on-boarding process. Even when we’re bringing VAs on, although they’re working with a client of ours, and it’s sort of like an employee in their business, we have a very deep and fully developed VA on-boarding process that looks and feels very like what you were talking about with this client. We actually bring them through an entire process with our team. They’ve got to learn where things are, like where all our files are stored, how to interact with the client, how to interact with us. There’s a huge amount of stuff actually in the on-boarding process that needs to be done.

Matt: I think that what’s really important in that initial piece is to allow them to understand expectations.

Barbara: Yes

Matt: Not to overwhelm them, so you’re not trying to come up with this huge list of, “I expect this and I expect this, I expect this.” They just need to understand the rules of the game and how to operate within your business, and what’s expected of them.

Barbara: I also think actually, for listeners thinking about this, I even think that on day one that might be a little bit of overkill. I think you need a bit of a plan. For example, when somebody joins on day one, it’s probably a good idea to focus more on the vision, the values, where you see them integrating into that bigger picture sort of stuff. Then I think I would lay out what they can expect in terms of your conversations over the following week. You might say, “Well what we’re going to do is I’m going to have another meeting with you tomorrow and we’re going to run through our expectations of you and what you can expect from us.” It’s very important to do both, so, what we expect from you but what you can expect from us as well, so it feels like a two-way thing. Then it gives them time to percolate overnight, that that conversation is happening the next day, and it sort of sets the tone for there are expectations, so this isn’t … I’m going to make them very clear for you to understand.

Anyone who’s thinking about, “How do I articulate that?” Matt and I did a whole show on this. So, I think if you just search in the search box on virtualsuccessshow.com, expectations. It’s a show called How to Define Expectations with your Team, and it’s really, really good to go through that one to get the steps for that. I often find people don’t know what’s coming next. You know that feeling of, “What are the next steps now that I’ve joined?”?

Matt: Yes.

Barbara: And laying them out saying, “What we’ll do first is vision, then we’ll go through expectations, and then what we’ll do is we’ll meet some of the team. Then we’ll go through our systems, where to find everything,” so they have a plan and you have a plan.

Matt: Yeah, and I believe this client also who hired an angel through you Barb, arranged for a gift to be sent to his new virtual team member.

Matt: Absolutely. I think the other thing around being prepared and the like, I think that’s really critical, because there’s nothing worse than starting a job and on day one you don’t have an email, you don’t have logins. So instantly as an employee, you’re going to feel like a burden to this person, whereas you’re there to help and serve. I think it’s really important for the owners or managers to make sure that the basics are ready to go so that instantly on day one they feel part of the team, they feel like they’ve got their identity within the team.

Barbara: I also think actually it’s triggered something in me that often what I find, clients come to Virtual Angel Hub, not so much anymore, but in the early days we were getting clients that would come in and because they’re paying for it, they would want tasks done from the first second the VA started, and they would just fling tasks at them. I feel like this on-boarding thing is actually so pivotal to your relationship to get it right, that it is really worth spending the first week, I would imagine, or the first few days at least, on really just on-boarding the people and not actually having maybe a task or two to get them started. It’s very hard to just fling a task on day one with no conversation or no on-boarding of any team member. I don’t think you would expect somebody in your office to be like that.

Matt: Absolutely. I think you bring up a really good point too. What I see a lot of … a big mistake a lot of people making with virtual team members is not communicating, not jumping on to Skype, having a video with them, allow them to see you, allow you to see them, building that human connection. I think that it’s so simple these days with Skype or the like to be able to have a face-to-face meeting with somebody. I think it’s absolutely crazy to not do that. I think also too what it does for you as the business owner is you start to get a feeling of the environment in which they’re working in, and you can start to make a judgement  call on whether they’re actually in a productive environment, because a lot of virtual assistants work from home. You need to make sure in order to again set the standard and expectations, that they’ve got a good workspace where they can focus and do work that they’re asked to do.

Barbara: Absolutely, and that you’re … or things like … I’ve often said to clients, sometimes, you know, expectations can be things like … it depends on your work style. Matt, you’re quite busy all day because you’re in coaching calls with clients, so people can’t just ping you all day long on Skype with questions, whereas I’m actually more in a … I tend to be more in the operations of my business so I’m actually available a lot during the day for my team. I like to be kept in constant contact, but some clients don’t, so it’s even important to lay that out in the beginning around your expectations and their expectations of how you can follow up with each other and where questions are going to be answered, something as simple as that. I’ve seen that particular thing, some relationships fall down on that alone.

Matt: Yes. Absolutely. I think that’s really critical is to communicate that style to your virtual assistantinitially as well. Otherwise what’s going to happen is you may have the expectation of constant communication and you’re not getting it, or you may have the expectation of little communication and you’re getting overly communicated to.

Barbara: Yeah, which can drive you nuts. Both of them can drive you nuts. Yeah, it depends what you want. I learned that myself the hard way because I didn’t think about that other people have different styles. Some of my VAs are not … they are techy guys so they’re not great communicators and I get a bit antsy because I like to communicate. I’ve had to settle into their style for their particular role a little bit because my expectations of their natural style were misaligned, actually. There were great people at the job, I just didn’t settle on that in the beginning. That’s why I feel passionate about this on-boarding thing now and this particular setting of the communication style, and also understanding … I guess when you take someone on, you can’t just … you will have an expectation of how the communication is going to work but it may not be their natural style. You got to know that as well and you’ll figure that out over time.

Matt: Absolutely. I think in the initial phases also, you want to work out what your VAs strengths are and feed them some tasks that allow them to play to their strengths, because it’s going to help them to build confidence. What I find is that often in the very early parts of the relationship, a lot of these VAs are very, very talented people and have a lot of skills, but we never actually understand the extent of what they can do for us. Keeping the dialogue open is really important. The third thing is, what I always say to all my VAs at the start is, as you’re familiarising yourself with everything in our business, if you see something that can be improved or an area that you feel is within your strengths that you could either add value or take on, let us know because we want to ensure that you’ve got enough work in your day-to-day so that you’re not bored.

I think in the initial phases … I think it goes to two extremes. Number one is either we don’t have enough for them, and so they’re sitting around bored and we don’t feel like we’re getting the value, or the opposite is we dump a whole heap on them when they’re not ready for it, and then we get disappointed that, “This virtual assistant thing doesn’t work for me.”

Barbara: Yeah. That’s a very, very common problem. I was actually just thinking of what the steps really would be here. I’m thinking about our own clients at Virtual Angel Hub and we do … I’m actually thinking I might develop this out even more of teaching and actually maybe having a process that clients can use for this, because really like I said, step one is just building that initial rapport, talking about the bigger picture, how this person slots into the bigger picture of the business from your perspective. Then I would say step two then might be discussing the communication style. I think that communication should probably come before expectations, and figuring out what’s their preferred communication rhythm versus yours, and then settling on an agreement around how that’s going to operate so that they’re clear and then you.

Then that can really move you into then a deeper discussion around the expectations, let’s set the expectations of the role and then let’s work towards achieving those and being successful with those expectations together. Then you move into, let’s start doing some … let’s get the task list and let’s get into it, and the training involved in the on-boarding of the task list. When I think about it this whole thing could take a month, easily.

Matt: I was going to say the only other thing prior to communicating is those steps as you were saying earlier Barb on what training will occur over the next few weeks.

Barbara: Yeah, being very clear, here’s what’s going to happen next. Yeah, that whole thing. Everybody wants to know what’s going to happen next, because I even find it with clients coming into Virtual Angel Hub they’ll say, “What happens next?” When we got that question a million times, we actually created a page on the membership site saying next steps and we integrated it into our sales script. The guys straight away up on the sales call say, “Now here’s what’s going to happen next,” and clients love that because they feel like they know what the journey is going to be and it’s the same for your VA. They want to know what to expect over the next few weeks from you.

Matt: I think in summary, I think it’s keeping it simple. It’s spending some time, it’s ensuring that you set your VA up to win, but more than anything, is that you imagine that they were in your office next to you. Do exactly what you would do in that manner as well. If you would send a gift, send the gift. If you would have a sit down with them, put Skype on and have a video conference with them and a face-to-face meeting. If it would be a meet-and-greet with the team, pick your device up and walk around the office and do an introduction to everybody.

Barbara: Yeah, that’s a great idea.

Matt: I think it’s following the formula of what you’ve already got or taking on-board the process that we’ve just outlined for you, and keeping it really, really simple. More than anything, it’s ensuring that the person feels welcomed, they feel supported, and they’re very, very clear on what’s expected of them.

Barbara: Yes. Great, great tips there. I’m already thinking about revamping our own on-boarding process. It’s funny, every time I do these shows my mind ticks and I go, “Yeah. There’s a step missing. We have to …” This constant evolution of our own processes, I learn a lot from actually doing this show.

Matt: Absolutely. Barb, I think that’s been really, really good today. I think that’s going to be really helpful for the listeners. Please, if you’ve found this useful, we’d love to hear your comments in the comments box or on our Virtual Success Show Facebook page. Also too, please write to us if there’s any topics that you would love us to discuss. This show exists to help you succeed further with your virtual assistants and we’d love to hear from you and certainly want to make sure that we’re constantly adding value to the community and hearing back from you. Please feel free to leave your comments and also rate the show, would be great so we can get the message out there and help more people.

Until then, thanks again for listening. Thank you Barb.

Barbara: Thanks Matt, and 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.

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Resources mentioned in this show:

Audience Ops

Casjam

Slack

Trello

Help Scout

 In this episode:

02:28 – Who is Brian Casel?

05:57 – Initial challenges with building teams

09:55 – The importance of systems and processes

12:14 – Do you need a VA or someone else?

13:04 – Firing yourself from business processes

14:48 – Business processes are constantly evolving

16:50 – Brian’s business processes

22:30 – Challenges of bringing new people into your team

25:42 – Getting the onboarding process right

26:36 – How to deal with an underperforming team member

27:48 – Have your team suggest ways to improve processes

29:56 – Outsourcing a task that requires talent or expertise

33:18 – The need for good online content

35:37 – Brian’s #1 tool that has streamlined his business

40:20 – Wrapping things up

Barbara:  Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of the Virtual Success Show, where today I’m flying solo without my co-host Matt Malouf. When we have guests on the show, which we do today, often we find it’s easier to get really good guests if we can split the shows up and not have our own schedules getting in the way, so on today’s show I’m really excited because I’m talking to Brian Casel, who is the founder of Audience Ops and also has a fantastic podcast called… it’s called the Productize Podcast, Brian is it?

Brian:  Yeah actually I have two podcasts, but yeah Productize Podcast and the other one that I co-host with Jordan Gal is called Bootstrapped Web.

Barbara:  Oh fantastic, fantastic! So guys today we’re going to talk all about all things content and managing team’s when it comes to content and how to get content up on your site without it overwhelming you. I know one of the questions I get a lot Virtual Angel Hub is clients who have VA’s through us will say, “Well how do I get a consistent stream of content?”, particularly when the VA’s able to do quite a lot of work with that content but one of the challenges is trying to actually get consistency in this area. So Brian’s going to talk to us all about this today and his own journey with managing teams in this area. So Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian:  Well thanks Barbara. It’s great to talk to you. I just love talking about this stuff, whether it’s outsourcing, working with a team, collaborating, managing people, growing, yeah.

Barbara:  Me too because I think one of the key things to actually growing or scaling is getting this right, cause so many people can’t nail this and it will trip you up if you can’t figure out how to manage a team once you start to grow, as you and I’ve just been talking about off air Brian.

Brian:  Yep, absolutely.

Barbara:  The whole challenge of it. Okay so to kick off the show, give us first a quick Audience Ops, the Productize Podcast, all about you so give us the quick what are you doing these days with your businesses.

Who is Brian Casel?

Brian:  Sure. Yeah I tend to like to work backwards in this story. So today I’m running my business – Audience Ops – and as you said that’s a content marketing, done for you service, or productize service, if you will. We’ve been at this two and a half years now, or so, and we’ve got a great team of writers and editors and project managers. They’re all based here in the US. We’re all remote and I’m here in Connecticut in the US, near New York City. The team is spread out around the US but then we have a small team of assistants in the Philippines and I work with a couple of software developers on some of our tools, they’re in Eastern Europe. So, we’re all in Slack everyday and we’ve got remote working collaboration tools all set up. So, that’s what takes up most of my time.

The other stuff that I do is … on my personal site, over on casjam.com, that’s where I have my email newsletter. I talk about entrepreneurship and running a business. I teach a course. I do some coaching around … that’s Productize and that’s all about building a productized service, similar to what I’ve been doing with Audience Ops.

Before Audience Ops, I ran a business called Restaurant Engine. I worked on that for about four years and then sold it in 2015 and that was a web design service, software in service for the restaurant industry. So, I bootstrapped that for about four years and then working backwards from there, I’m basically a designer, web designer by trade and I did that as a solo freelance person for a while and yeah. That kind of works your way down.

Barbara:  And here you are. So what I love about this story is that you started out in that freelance world, doing a bit of web design and all of a sudden today, you’re running different businesses. You’ve got two podcasts on the go. You’ve got a massive amount of content getting out there and you have a family. You’ve got young children at home and you’re able to have time to be on these podcasts all over the world with other people to promote them

Brian:  I also didn’t mention, so right now, we’re all … we’re settled down in our home in Connecticut on the East Coast of the United States. But in 2015 into 2016, my family and I actually got into the car and we went coast to coast and lived in different places around the U.S. with our one year old daughter at the time and our dog. Spent about seven months out there on the road living in different Airbnb‘s, so that was-

Barbara:  Oh wow.

Brian:  And at the time I was actually launching Audience Ops throughout that whole period.

Barbara:  Yes.

Brian:  And travelling and working.

Barbara:  There’s so much gold in this for the listeners, because we have people listening to this show that are struggling to even get one business with one VA going and to be successful. So you know, people find this delegation thing quite difficult and one of the goals of this show is to bring people like yourself on, that are actually running a lot of people and are still having a life, which is the big thing. So, how many have you got now in the total team?

Brian:  It’s about 15 of us right now.

Barbara:  Yeah so that’s great. That’s a massive team to run everything and to be communicating with people all day. So that’s like pair it right back. First of all, let’s talk about the beginning when you started with bringing team members on. Did you always find that you were successful at it, or what were the initial challenges when you started working with a lot of people to build various businesses that you’ve done?

Initial challenges with building teams

Brian:  Yeah well certainly not successful from the beginning. It’s been a…

Barbara:  It’s such a journey, isn’t it?

Brian:  Yeah it’s a… I feel like hiring and managing people is one of those things that you do get better and better at it over time and I learned new things all the time, but it’s also very… it’s just very error prone.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Brian:  I’m always learning that it’s super unpredictable. I guess just looking back to the early days, my very first experiences of hiring somebody would be back when I was a freelance designer. I would hire on other designers or developers or copywriters to basically contract out pieces of my projects. I did that quite a bit and actually grew my web design business to a point where… I wouldn’t necessarily call it an agency, but I was taking on multiple projects and working with five to eight different contractors at any given time.

Barbara:  Which could be… that can be very stressful if you don’t know how to do it right, cause you’re the one managing all the projects. So, the client, deliverables and all that sort of thing.

Brian:  Yeah.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Brian:  Yep and definitely had some hard lessons learned there working with different contractors who didn’t deliver, they weren’t reliable, or I would have to redo their work and all that kind of stuff.

Barbara:  Actually, I just want to pause there for second, just for the listeners, right? Cause an awful lot of people will say to us at Virtual Angel Hub “Oh you know, it’s the Philippines and you know, I won’t get the quality and you know I have all these issues.” How many of these people were sort of Western, or U.S. that you were working with at the time that you still had these same issues? Cause it’s people right?

Brian:  Yeah. Well so I’ve worked on different businesses over these past few years, so there are different phases of all this. When I was doing web design stuff… I worked with… I’d say mostly U.S. based designers and developers. I think in that period, I learned that it just… I think I did experiment with outsourcing to developers overseas and at the time, I was pretty inexperienced with that. You know, there just didn’t deliver, unreliable. Again, I was pretty new at that and it was like… I’d say eight years ago or so. So, it’s not exactly the same market as it is today.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Brian:  Back then, I learned that… I mean I was working on projects that had pretty high budgets too. So, I could afford to hire a developer in the United States for certain pieces. So that was kind of the consulting business, but then into Restaurant Engine, which was like a bootstrapped sass service type business with a much lower price point… going for a high quantity of customers. That’s where I really had to focus on keeping costs down and being super-efficient with everything. And that’s really where I started to get more experience with outsourcing to assistants in the Philippines. Our entire customer support team on that business was in the Philippines… and that enabled me to, not only build up that business, but… I was still balancing the consulting work. Like the design consulting work with building up that business early on. And so having that team in place helped to free me up to working on consulting projects to fund building that business and then eventually I phased out the consulting stuff.

Barbara:  And what about… so talk to me about so that’s the customer service team for the restaurant business. Talk to me about the early stages of getting that together. I mean, I want to get into processes and systems here, cause one of the things that really trips people up, there’s a couple of things. Systems and processes, not having them, is the first thing that really trips people up. So did you know this before or did you learn this by being tripped by not having them fix your systems?

The importance of systems and processes

Brian:  Yeah I think I learned that really early on in building Restaurant Engine and actually the thing I learned there was… at that period, I was really, really busy and every day was very hectic… and I felt that because I was so busy and hectic, that’s why I should… at the time I felt like I need to hire help, because I’m too busy. I have too many things to deal with. But at that time I wasn’t truly ready to hire, because I didn’t have the tasks nailed down as repeatable processes. I just knew that I had a lot of tasks that needed to be taken care of and so I do remember that the very first VA that I hired, the person was very talented, great communicator and everything, but …

I found that I would… yeah like I gave… it’s years ago now, I think it was a her. I gave her… a couple of projects and she did them and then I didn’t have anything new for her to do, but I was still very busy. I was like “Well I could give her this thing, but then I have to spend a day training her on that thing and then when she’s done, we’re back to square one.” So, I think I-

Barbara:  You didn’t have a recurring… you didn’t have…

Brian:  Yeah.

Barbara:  Actually, it’s funny cause when clients come to us and they say, “Oh my god, I need a VA yesterday.” We actually will sort of say, “Yeah, you’re just going to create another job for yourself right now.” Because you almost need to learn to slow down right now, in order to speed up in the future. So, you sort of have to take a pause somewhere in the business if you’re not prepared, cause training and onboarding is a whole challenge in itself.

Brian:  Yeah and I think it was also… at that time it was also the nature of my business and the business model. So… like the consulting business was very varied, every project was different. So there really wasn’t anything that was totally repeatable. It wasn’t until I started building Restaurant Engine, which was a systemized business and that’s where I started to finally identify, “Okay these things have to get done every week and even when we’re supporting customers, these are the most common problems that come up, because it’s a very focused product.” And so, that’s I started to identify, “Okay, if I hire a VA, I know that at the very least they can do these five things every week and then I can give them more stuff on top of that.” That’s what built that up and then from there-

Do you need a VA or someone else?

Barbara:  And actually I want the listeners to pause here for a second, cause that’s a really key point. Cause often people think… particularly people in consulting businesses that, like what you said, don’t have… every project is so different. Because they are really hectic, they come in looking to get a VA. When maybe a VA, like I don’t mean an assistant in Philippines or offshore. Sometimes that may not be the right solution for them. So you’ve also got to think about, you know it may be better to just have a friend of a friend, or someone’s mom who’s free two days a week to come into your office and actually work with you. Rather than getting somebody offshore in that particular instance.

Brian:  Right.

Barbara:  Cause I think when you don’t have repeatable processes, or you don’t have a sense of what’s going on daily, weekly, monthly, it can be difficult to really delegate stuff to an offshore VA.

Firing yourself from business processes

Brian:  Absolutely and then as time went on… in that previous business, it’s just building up a library of processes and just methodically and systematically taking myself out of each individual piece. Whether it’s sending our weekly newsletter, supporting customers, eventually I got myself out of the sales process, updating features, like all that stuff was eventually-

Barbara:  And how long do you think, cause I love that whole process of the, the firing yourself from your business process.

Brian:  Right.

Barbara:  That you have to go through especially if you want to, as you know, to productize a business and kind of get something scalable. How long do you think that process for that business really took you, in order to nail it?

Brian:  It was a long time, so in that business… I started it… from the time started it to when I exited in 2015. It was about four years. I would say it wasn’t until… like the end of the third year into the fourth year when that business would have been truly ready to hand off to a new owner.

Barbara:  Yeah

Brian:  Too many things would have depended on me. So it was like in the last year, yeah.

Barbara:  What’s really interesting to me about that is again, I see clients where they get very tripped up sometimes who are newer to this, is that the hear that getting a VA or building a team is the way to fire yourself from a business, but they’re expecting it to happen in the first two to three months. When I would argue that depending on the business, I think that’s a 12 month project even when you know what you’re doing. Like if you … I reckon you could do it in six months if you really know what you’re doing and you’ve done it before, but 12 months really, that’s the kind of timeline.

Business processes are constantly evolving

Brian:  Yeah and I found that the business changes naturally and you have to keep redoing this whole process.

Barbara:  Yeah, the process has evolved.

Brian:  I mean in my current business, Audience Ops, you know this is kind of like my second time around with a business so, it started off much more systematic with processes and I was more experienced by the time I started Audience Ops… but now we’re two and a half years into it and I’m like a systems freak and still it’s…

Barbara:  That’s like me though, yeah, I agree.

Brian:  Like we’re still redoing things now, you know? It’s still…

Barbara:  It never ends though, yeah.

Brian:  As the team grows… processes are different when you have five people versus 15 people. When you have five clients versus 25 clients, you know it’s a different… new systems need to be introduced or the product or the service might change. You have need to update things, so…

Barbara:  So, what would you say to people? I mean obviously you’re a bit, it sounds that we’ve talked about this before. You become a systems and process junkie a bit, because you kind of have to if you want to build something that is scalable. So often people will say to me as well “Oh I just don’t have time to build systems and processes.” What would you say to somebody like that? Who’s also hectic?

Brian:  Yeah and I get it. I know how tedious and boring that kind of stuff could be and it bogs me down too, but at the same time I just know how valuable it is, because I feel like… my thing is, I don’t ever really want to work on something and know that I’m going to have to work on this thing again.

Barbara:  I’m like that yeah.

Brian:  You know, if I’m working on something, I’ll spend an extra hour or an extra day just to make sure that I work and build a system so that it can run without me after this. So, that’s the thing and I think the payoff is having that freedom. Being able to go on vacation, go travelling, or spend my time doing more valuable things; building new products, or marketing whatever and not getting bogged down in the service and day to day stuff.

Brian’s business processes

Barbara:  So let’s talk about Audience Ops a bit more, because I’m really interested in this area, because it’s… your managing writers. You’ve got lots of people… the main core thing is writers though so…

Brian:  Right.

Barbara:  When you… talk to me about the whole process there. So somebody comes to audienceops.com, they sign up for the service there and how does the flow go from there?

Brian:  Yeah well I-

Barbara:  How do you manage that whole process?

Brian:  Well I will say that… so, yeah audienceops.com, you could just come to the home page and sign up, but nobody just signs up. It… the price point is high enough that they’re going to want to speak to somebody before they sign up.

Barbara:  Yeah of course, yeah.

Brian:  Typically. So, usually what happens is they fill out our consultation form on the home page. That will, then I have a pretty good process now. It’s gone through many iterations, but basically they fill out that form and then immediately they’re taken to my calendar to book a consultation with me or one of our sales people and then immediately after they book the consultation, they’re directed to a demo video. They watch, it’s about 10 minutes long, it’s just everything about how Audience Ops works, our pricing packages, different options, everything you kind of need to know.

And then from there, we’ll have our call probably in the next day or two and by the time I get on the call with somebody, they’ve already seen the video, they’ve seen our pricing. You know, we’re also sending them emails in the background so…

Barbara:  I love that you’ve… I can imagine you-

Brian:  The sales calls become much easier.

Barbara:  Shorter, easier and shorter yeah so this is a great little system that you’ve built in order to indoctrinate people before they even gone through that call, cause I’ve gone through this little process with you, I’ve seen that and thought that’s gold, because on a sales call and for anyone listening that has to do sales calls, often you’ve got to get through a lot of information on a sales call and people only want to hear what they want to hear, so it can cause problems on the onboarding down the track, because they forgot what you said on the call.

Brian:  Yeah exactly and I use to do that, that little demo presentation, I used to do that live, like one-on-one with every sales call and… not only did it kill my voice, you know I’d have like the script, you know-

Barbara:  People don’t listen then, cause you’re so bland by the time you get to the-

Brian:  Yeah exactly and some days I’d just be too tired and it wouldn’t go so well you know… it was not very good. Having that-

Barbara:  Well I’ll give you a tip listeners, I’m stealing this idea for Virtual Angel Hub, because I reckon this is a gold one and this is nothing to do with outsourcing. This is actually thinking about efficiency of process and the-

Brian:  Yeah.

Barbara:  Utilising your people resources in the best possible way. So, shortening the sales call, getting more effective … not causing problems down the track for you team when they’re trying to onboard later.

Brian:  Yeah.

Barbara:  Things like that.

Brian:  But yeah. You asked about how does it work from there so, a person signs up, either with me over the call, or they come back to the site and they sign up there. As soon as their account is opened … this is where it becomes more manual on our team. So … I’ll get a notification and then I take the new client’s information and then I send it onto my team and basically I … we’ll take a couple hours to figure out “Alright, who’s going to be the manager? Who’s going to be the writer? Who will be the editor and the assistant?” And we assign those people as dedicated people to that account. So I send an email to that group. Say “Hey we’ve got a new client, here’s all their information. Here are my notes about that new client.”

And then the manager sends them an email, usually within a day or two days and they’ll schedule the kick off call and then from there like I’m basically completely hands off. So the manager has taken over, the writer gets on the call with the client and the manager and they are yeah-

Barbara:  Do you have a… with your a team, so do you have pods of people that work together all the time? Or is there a project manager working with a different set of people for each project?

Brian:  That’s a good question. We kind of tried to go the pods route a while back. That would be theoretically easier, but the problem we run into is… I assign writers to clients based on… like matching them up… yeah their strengths, like we assign our more technical writers to technical clients, lifestyle writers to lifestyle clients, that sort of stuff. So there’s that and then also writers availability, so some writers just get full and I can’t assign them anymore and so for that reason, we kind of have to mix and match. So… yeah.

Barbara:  And just as a question, I know I interject a lot in these things just to try and bring out the key learnings I guess. How do you… I mean obviously when you tried the pod thing, how did you discover that this wasn’t working? Was it feedback from the team? Was it complaints? Was it…

Brian:  Well we didn’t get very far with it. We discussed moving to that, to like a pod structure and then as soon as we started to look at the list of people and clients we’re like “Wait this is not going to work.”

Barbara:  Yeah so that’s working with your team though and taking feedback from them around what’s going to work and what’s not really.

Brian:  Yeah I have… one of our… we have a team manager who, she used to be a project manager, now she’s kind of an internal team manager and she helps out with that sort of stuff. Like basically supporting everyone on the team, but also helping to improve our systems and yeah-

Barbara:  And supply and demand is the whole big thing to manage, yeah. In businesses like mine and yours, this supply demand is what you’re always trying to balance.

Brian:  Yeah. Yep.

Challenges of bringing new people into your team

Barbara:  So, okay then we talked before the show, on the air I really want to delve into this, when you’ve got… so you’ve got great system and processes going… you’ve got good communications between the teams, you’re using systems, you mentioned Slack, which is a great communication channel. We talk about that channel, that tool all the time on this show. What about when you bring somebody new into the team, because the biggest challenge I see people having is sort of the second challenge. The first one is when you don’t have system and processes and the second one is, when you do have a lot of system and processes and you’ve built your whole task list and then you just bring someone in and you fire it at them and say, “Goodbye, off you go and just do the job.” Talk to me about where the pitfalls are in doing that.

Brian:  Well yeah, you know, we are highly systemized at this point. We have a ton of processes and I think actually a problem that I’m trying to somehow improve is, new people coming into the team tend to get really overwhelmed and like there’s too much for them to take in.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Brian:  So, I try to improve that in a few ways, but… one thing that I just recently did, so just last week I hired two new project managers. So we have two, now we’ve added a third and a fourth and a couple of weeks ago I created a like an internal training course for new project managers to go through. Cause that role in particular is really difficult to get up to speed on. Writers it’s easier for them to come onto the team. VA’s it’s kind of easier for them to come in, but project manager’s not only need to just follow the processes, but they need to be able to… they need learn our best practices and how-

Barbara:  They need to think like you guys do. Yeah and deal with things the way your company voice does or your company’s sort of brand and I know that’s a real challenge.

Brian:  Yeah.

Barbara:  And you could end up just firing people. I mean a lot of people go, “Oh they’re useless,” and just fire them. Where as that’s just not looking at it properly.

Brian:  Right, so I put together this training course and like this week, they’re going through it and basically it’s just a series of videos and slides. And I point off to some of our key processes that they need to be aware of, but some of the videos are just like, “Here are kind of our best practices and guidelines that are like our goals of this role.” And just trying to give my mind share on that. So, I recorded it so I don’t have to do it live every time.

Barbara:  Which is a lot of work in itself. You know, but again you’ve taken on that role of making sure that you … you have to do that work basically or else you got to do it live every time which is just a total waste of your time.

Brian:  Right yeah, I mean I spent about a week just creating that training. So, they’re doing that now and then next week, those new project managers will begin to shadow our other project managers and then probably the week after they’ll start to actually take on clients for them to manage.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Brian:  Yeah.

Barbara:  And what about so, these project managers are they based in the U.S.?

Brian:  Yes, actually one is in Canada now, but all of our writers and managers are U.S. and one guy in Canada now.

Getting the onboarding process right

Barbara: So what I love about that though is that, it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about … obviously the challenges with places like the Philippines or India or whatever, or Eastern Europe can be different of course, with different cultural locks and all these sorts of things. But when it comes to training and onboarding, I just think that if you’ve got, you’ve got to be realistic about your processes around that. And that people, no matter where they are and how experienced they are need to be trained properly and onboarded with your particular business. The way your business functions, the way your business voices and they can take time, regardless of how experienced they are. Would you agree?

Brian:  Yeah, definitely. I think it gets easier when you hire multiple people.

Barbara:  Yes.

Brian:  Hiring the very first writer is a lot of work and then the second and third it gets easier.

How to deal with an underperforming team member

Barbara:  So what advice would you give to somebody… Let’s say somebody has just hired that first person and they’re really struggling. The person is good, they’ve got a good resource there, but it’s just not working. What do you think… what would you do in that situation? How do you sort of manage that, or without getting rid of the person?

Brian:  Yeah, I think it’s kind of gut feel… either one of two things are happening. One, the person is just, they’re not picking things up, they’re… for a lack of better word, it’s their fault, they’re coming in late, they’re not showing. Those are real problems and maybe they’re just not going to work out and I’ve run into that from time to time. But more often than not, if they made it through the hiring process and they come onboard, they are a really good communicator, they are really talented and smart, so, it’s usually a process issue especially early on. So, I think … the tip that I would have, is just to really be open about the fact that other people won’t come to a task, or come to a project in the same way that I will.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Have your team suggest ways to improve processes

Brian:  So, I have to try to put myself into their shoes, and I’m a very visual thinker, but not everybody thinks that way. So, you have to account for how people tend to learn and tend to pick things up. The other thing is, especially as you start to really remove yourself from the process, it’s better to start relying on your team to suggest ways to improve the process, or have them just come up with a process themselves, because they’re on the ground. They’re doing it every day. They know all the tips and tricks and shortcuts and everything. And so, rather than dictate how something should be done, just you let me know. I’ll coach them on it a bit, but that helps as well.

Barbara:  Yeah I think it’s good as well to… because it becomes more of a collaboration thing, rather than I’m the boss, you’re the thing and here’s how I do it and if it’s not working. Cause sometimes it can be, as you say, some people are more visual, others like audio, others like to actually have steps written down. And what I see is people who are very visual, actually can sometimes find it very difficult to write steps in a… that’s not stream of consciousness writing. So, I’ve often been asked to review tasks where one of our VA’s might be really struggling and we’ve seen that it’s a great person, but the task is not happening and sometimes I’ll look at the task and go “Oh my god, even I don’t know what….” Cause I’m a reading person, I’m a word person and I’ll look at it and think “Oh my god, even I don’t know what the client wants” cause it’ll just be like one big long sentence, or like a huge paragraph. With no punctuation or anything-

Brian:  Right, right

Barbara:  It’s like the person just literally did a brain dump, but it was probably good in their head, but it’s just complete gobbledygook on paper.

Brian:  Yep.

Barbara:  And we’ll have to go back to the client… I mean how do you say, “look, we actually don’t know what you want.” So, I always encourage clients to write in bullet points. If it’s a writing thing, you’ve got to try to, or potentially work with the person that you’re working with and together collaborate on how you create the process better. Cause their experience of your process is an interesting one to look at.

Brian:  Yeah and I think obviously it depends on what type of project it is-

Barbara:  Yeah.

Outsourcing a task that requires talent or expertise

Brian:  That you’re working on, but the thing I get asked a lot is “How do you outsource something that requires talent or expertise”, or I talk to a lot of people who are like “I’m this analyst, or I’m this really strong designer, but how can other people design like I can? Or how can I get clients to trust my company if it’s not me doing the design work?”

Barbara:  Yeah that’s a great question. Yeah how do you answer that one?

Brian:  Well I mean, if you think … like Audience Ops, I’m not writing the articles for our clients in Audience Ops. We have a team of really talented writers, who are much better writers than I am.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Brian:  So, what we do is … first of all, I obviously hire very talented writers or whatever your company does, hire highly talented people who have that particular skillset and that particular experience, but then you can build a system and a process around the creative process. So, every article that we write is completely original, completely unique. It’s the writers’ work, they’re coming up with the idea, they’re doing the research, but at the end of the day; it’s created, it’s planned, it’s produced, it’s delivered in the same systematic way on the same schedule and …

Barbara: What I love about that is I’m always saying to people, you can have flexibility within a structure. If you have total… creativity is fantastic, but when you’re trying to run a business, something that’s scalable, or you want to build processes into something that’s more of a creative thing, you can place structure… there still can be structure without killing creativity, but no structure at all kind of just causes chaos in lots of ways.

Brian:  Yeah.

Barbara:  Depending on the business that you’re running, but it can cause chaos for you.

Brian:  Yeah, it’s chaos internally at the company, it doesn’t set any expectation with the client, or they’re left wondering what’s happening and you know…

Barbara:  Cause we find that-

Brian:  When you have that structure, yeah.

Barbara:  I find that sometimes clients will come in and say, “I just want to get a VA.” I mean this is obviously me talking about VA’s, “but I just want to get a VA and I just want to get rid of all my live chat email. I just want them to do it and I just want to show initiative and come up with ideas.” And I think yeah, this sounds a bit loose to me. You know, like that can happen if you could get a total rock star that just gets you completely and gets your business completely, but it’s unlikely that you’re going to have that outcome. If you don’t want to have any involvement in it. So some people just want to get rid of it, as opposed to delegate it, which is a different thing.

Brian:  Right.

Barbara:  Getting rid of it, you probably should just hire an agency that’s going to just take it over for you. But really with business, you have to kind of have oversight over the things that are going on, with your brand.

Brian:  Yeah absolutely. Especially when you’re working remotely.

Barbara:  Yeah. So just to wrap up, I want to talk a bit about the content piece. So talk to me about how effective, you know there’s also structure with content. So, for clients that are coming to you to get you guys to manage… I know people usually come to you and you take over the entire content management piece for them, from creating the content, getting it up on their site, so that they literally can, this is getting rid of it actually in lots of ways to you guys.

Brian:  Yeah.

The need for good online content

Barbara:  First of all, why do people really need content these days and why does it need to be consistently produced and distributed and leveraged in order to get success?

Brian:  Yeah, so a lot of companies, I mean all across the board, but we work with a lot of online businesses, software businesses, some online services, some eCommerce businesses and so, they know that when they’re publishing content on a consistent basis and it’s high quality, insightful, original, educational, that tends to bring in organic traffic, number one – so that’s the first benefit they’re going for. The consistency of publishing content over a long period of time, that helps you steadily grow your organic traffic. What we see a lot with clients is, they go from having very spiky traffic – they’ll have a launch or they’ll have a PR hit or something and that gives them a good spike – but then it goes back down.

Whereas, once they start to really build up their archive of quality content, that gives them more places on their site that can be found in search engines, social media and so on. I mean that’s one, but I think even more important than that, is being able to nurture leads who come to your site and they’re not necessarily ready to buy today, but they’re interested, or they’re interested at least in the topic or the space that you operate in. So, they’re willing to give their email address to get an educational resource or something actual that they can use and then they’re on your email list and then you have content assets in place to follow up with them, come back to their inbox every week. And when they do get into a mode of getting ready to hire or buy a solution to that particular problem, your name comes to mind, because you’ve been following up with them.

I mean if you think about, let’s say you’re running ad campaigns to sell a product. What…like 5% or 10% conversion rate is really good, right? If you can get five or 10% of people to buy it immediately that’s great, but the other 90% what’s happening to them? They need to be followed up with and nurtured over time and that’s where content comes in.

Brian’s #1 tool that has streamlined his business

Barbara:  And what about… what would you say… what is the tool that you use in your business… And let’s sort of talk about the internal workings and the structure of systems and managing teams. What’s the sort of number one tool that has kind of nailed this whole streamlining of your business, that you couldn’t do with now?

Brian:  Yeah, I’d say today it’s probably Trello… we use that pretty heavily internally – that would be one. But this year we’ve also rolled out our own content calendar software called Ops Calendar and that’s… it’s basically a planning and editorial content calendar, but it also weaves in social media scheduling and analytics performance tracking. So, you can see your content traffic to each individual piece of content on your calendar, which is a bit difficult to pull out of Google Analytics. So, we’ve been building that tool. It’s still kind of young, but that’s coming along.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Brian:  But we’re still heavily using Trello in terms of managing that production line of articles every week. The other big one that we use for client communication is Help Scout.

Barbara:  Okay.

Brian:  So, if you’re not familiar with Help Scout, it’s like a help desk software, where to the customer’s they only see our email address, [email protected], so they interact with that. But we receive that in Help Scout, where we can assign it to the correct manager, we can have tickets, we can have internal notes, private not… yeah so-

Barbara:  Is it kind of like Zendesk sort of thing? I haven’t really, I’ve heard of Help Scout, but haven’t investigated this one yet.

Brian:  It’s like the same sort of tool as Zendesk. Except it’s a little bit better in my experience, because it’s like totally… yeah it’s totally invisible to the clients. They don’t have to log into anything, they just send an email and to them it’s just a normal email. But to us, we have our organisation and systems and it’s also a way for us to … now we have four project managers and they’re each managing different clients, but we don’t want to have to have emails siloed in [email protected] and [email protected] and you know what I mean? So we only have one-

Barbara:  So if somebody leaves, then I mean this is the whole challenge, if that person leaves then you got all those emails on a private email address.

Brian:  Right.

Barbara:  Which you don’t have to have. And I would say we don’t do this in our business either. We try to centralise, you got to try to centralise your email flow somehow so that you don’t lose things.

Brian:  Yeah. And within Help Scout we have that email address for service. I’ve got a separate one just for sales and then … the other nice thing about it is, we’re constantly collaborating or communicating internally about conversations we’re having with clients. So, one of my project managers can send me a message on Slack and say “Here’s my conversation with that client about this thing. Here’s the link to it.” And I can just click it, now I’m viewing that email in Help Scout.

Barbara:  Yes. This is such great stuff, because every person that we’ve had on this show, not one person that we’ve ever interviewed does not use a project management tool. So, it might be Trello, could be Podio, Asana, you know Basecamp, any of them really and then a communication, some form of communication tool. Like some people just use Asana for that, there’s Slack, there’s you know, but this ties the team together and makes everything… it connects everybody. Which is really important if you want to get the team to work effectively together.

Brian:  Totally. I’m constantly telling the team, whenever you’re bringing something up to me, escalating whatever, always be sure to include the Help Scout conversation link, the Trello card link, the Google Doc and Google Doc is there other ones that we use that pretty heavily too. Yeah and like on that note, I also… in Trello, so every article that we’re producing gets a card in Trello. I always want there to be a history of everything that happened on that article in the comment feed on that card. So we can see, this was the date that the writer started the draft, then they finished it on this date. Then it went to the editor and there was a comment on it, then the client gave us some feedback and then this thing happened with it. So, I could just go into any article and see like the last four weeks what happened.

Barbara:  And there’s a process right there, that a lot people wouldn’t think of. So you’ve created a process around how to use Trello as well. So this is getting even deeper into kind of processes and systems, in order to make your team effective.

Wrapping things up

Listen that’s been so insightful, I could go on all day about this, but I think the key things I’ve taken from this is you know, systems and processes are key, but you have to keep evolving them. Bringing your team together, making sure you’ve got effective communication, not just chatting with each other in order to keep things running smoothly and onboarding and training, is the other one you’ve really got to get right.

And Brian, thank you so much for sharing all of that. So, if people want to get in touch with you, they head over to Brian … what is casjam.com?

Brian:  Yeah casjam.com is my personal site, audienceops.com.

Barbara:  And then audienceops.com if you guys want to outsource your content, content creation and getting your content on your site really moving in a consistent way.

Brian thank so much for sharing. Guys if you loved this show, then jump over to iTunes and give us a review and a rating. We’d love to get this show out to more people. And also, if there’s something you’d like us to talk about, you can join the conversation on our Facebook group, which is Virtual Success on Facebook and just let us know what topic you’d like us to cover, or someone you’d like us to interview on this topic. Until next time, 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.

Some of the areas covered are:

In this episode:

02:00 – How to actually ‘Stop Doing’

03:02 – The KRC model

04:38 – Linking the KRC

08:22 – Reporting and accountability

11:33 – Managing delegation

18:23 – Wrapping things up

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

Resources mentioned in this show:

The Stop Doing List – www.stopdoing.com.au

Barbara:  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another show of the Virtual Success Show where I’m joined by my co-host, Matt Malouf. How are you, Matt?

Matt:  I’m well, Barb, and yourself?

Barbara:  Good. Thank you. Good. Thank you. Really enjoying this series that we’re doing on your book, The Stop Doing List. I learn a lot every time I do this show, but it’s about refining things. Although I’ve gotten quite good at all these steps of delegation, and systems, and processes, and teams over the last few years I’ve been doing this, there’s always little bits that I learn more of when we do these shows and particularly from this series about The Stop Doing List.

Matt:  Yeah. It’s interesting. I started writing the book two years ago. Obviously, we published it three months ago now. As you go back, and you remember, and you go, “Oh, yeah. We put that part in there.” I was also preparing for the show, you know, there’s things you forget that you put into the book, so it’s really great for me to go back and reiterate what I actually put in here as well.

Barbara:  I think the point actually that it’s a good point we make here, and I’ve often said to clients, “Processes are not a one-time thing like, none of this stuff is you just set and forget. It’s a constant evolving process of mindset, ‘Stop doing. Stop doing. Stop doing.’” Okay. Today, we’re going to tackle part three of the book, which I think is probably one of the most important areas to get right and one of the areas we see a lot of clients getting tripped up in, which is actually how to stop doing.

When you create your task list, you’ve got all your processes and systems in place, and you delegate, and you got the VA on board, and you’ve done everything you were told to do, and then this is the area where people often fall down. First of all, Matt, can you tell me why is that? What happens in the actual process of how to stop doing?

Matt:  Yeah, and this was one of the most interesting parts to writing this book because I think many of us, myself included, have delegated and passed tasks on before, and it seems like that boomerang effect where they keep coming back to us. I was just intrigued and kept asking, “What is it? Why do these tasks keep coming back?” Then, in my research, I stumbled across what’s called the “KRC model,” the Knowledge, Responsibility, Control. It’s a model that is part of the Harvard Management System. I started reading, and I’m like, “I get it now. I understand.”

What the theory says is that without knowledge, we actually are unable to effectively be responsible or control any aspect of anything, and this is not just related to business.  And so what I came to realise was we were passing these tasks unto others, yet, as business owners and entrepreneurs, we were the greatest knowledge holders, and our teams didn’t have the knowledge. Yet, we were asking them to take responsibility and control aspects of our business. And so I was like, “This is it. This is it,” but it was more than just this knowledge, responsibility, control piece because whilst that theory makes sense, I was like, “Okay. How do you now take that and put it into a methodology that can actually now ensure that you can stop doing these tasks?”

Barbara:  It’s funny what I was thinking as you’re saying that. Often, a complaint we get from clients … not a complaint, more a feedback is, “Well, I want the VA to show more initiative or take more responsibility,” and I think, “Well, can you definite what exactly … Are they aware of what you mean by this, or are they … How have you communicated this, and what knowledge are you expecting them to have in all this sort of issues?” I think it falls into this whole “how to stop doing” thing where it’s actually really hard to stop doing unless you get this part right, which is this knowledge, responsibility, control thing that you talk about in your book.

Matt:  Absolutely, and on page 93 of the book, there’s a diagram, which I termed “Linking the KRC” because it’s one thing to have, “Yeah, I’ve got to impart knowledge so that they can take responsibility and control, but again, how do I do that?”.  And so the links were understanding that in order to start imparting knowledge and enable somebody else to take responsibility, there needed to be training systems and technology, and a blend of these, with systems being at the centre of this.

You see, in order to delegate effectively, you need a combination of systems and training, and in order to automate, you need a combination of systems and technology. In order to start enabling others to take responsibility and control aspects of your business, we needed to get clear systems, training, and the use of technology implemented into the business. One thing I really want to … as a big take-home. A lot of business owners are very good at creating systems, but they don’t actually create a system for training people in those systems.

Barbara:  Yes.

Matt:  There’s no training plan. There’s no methodology. There’s just, “Here’s a checklist or here’s a video. Go and watch it,” and that’s it, and you maybe have a conversation about it. If you look at big corporates, they invest millions of dollars into training their people to learn and grow constantly. Unless you’re committed to that, these tasks will keep boomeranging back to you.

Barbara:  The training thing. Honestly. People just don’t want to do it. That’s what we find when clients come in. The clients that get the most success are those that invest. Again, all of this is investing time, energy, money, whatever it is that you want to do in training. Although, at Virtual Angel Hub, we actually have … We have our own like I’ve invested heavily in training of the agents.

You know they’ve got to come through a massive training programme on digital marketing and all this sort of stuff with us. Even with that though, they go to a client, but there are specific things for that client’s business that we can’t train them on, but those are really the tasks that will trip the two people up because there was no training or effective training given. There was just a task list given and that’s it. “Here’s now your responsibility.”

Matt:  Just to add to that, I think part of it is avoidance. I think part of it is not knowing how to effectively train either.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  Yeah. Effective training is a skill in itself. Yeah, it enables … Sorry. It requires you to be an exceptional communicator and understand the steps to help people learn. And it’s interesting too, the one thing I love about Virtual Angel Hub and the team members we get from there is, number one, they’re trained, and number two, we are trained as entrepreneurs how to work with a virtual assistant too, and so it’s an invaluable service, but this training piece is so critical.

Barbara:  I’m even thinking actually as we’re talking. There’s so much more we can do in that area of Virtual Angel Hub. We are planning to offer more based on the programmes you’re bringing out in this whole Stop Doing concept because I see it as such a pivotal thing in getting success for clients, so this is really crucial.

So training, obviously, I know is one thing, but as you point out … I’m looking at the diagram here on page 93 of the book, and what I love is that you’ve got reporting and accountability here as well, which is another area that people forget about or that trips them up.

Matt:  Absolutely, and this is in that sort of linkage between responsibility and control. If there’s not effective reporting and accountability, then how will you know if somebody is, a) doing things when they should be doing them?, and b) doing them to the level that you expect them to do it? This is like a feedback loop to enable the original knowledge holder to understand that what needs to get done is getting done in the right way at the right time, and so these are simple either daily, weekly, or monthly reports, depending on the role and the task, but again, it’s a simple…

Barbara:  You know what as well?

Matt:  Yeah.

Barbara:  In this as well because some people will… I know the mindset of some people listening to this. They’ll say, “Ugh, but I just don’t want to micromanage someone,” so I’m going to use an example of… Everybody needs a level of accountability, so even when we work with business coaches ourselves as business owners or we set strategies for ourselves, how many times do we fall off the perch or go off the board, and we’d love to have somebody to keep us accountable?

A lot of this is not that somebody needs to be micromanaged. It’s more just like a collaboration thing. It’s teamwork. It’s building a culture within your company of people being involved together to get to an outcome, and that’s where this reporting and accountability thing I think you can change your mindset on that from micromanaging.

Matt:  Absolutely, and even … To go just one step further, most employees don’t understand what’s expected of them.

Barbara:  Yes.

Matt:  If they’ve got a report that they have to submit and they’re held accountable, they’ve got clarity on what’s expected and when it’s expected of them. It’s a win-win, and believe it or not, if you look at surveys done, yeah, for employees, they crave accountability. They actually want it because they then can have a sense of achievement. They understand what needs to get done and when it needs to get done by. It can be done in a negative way, and that’s not what we’re recommending here. It’s going to be done in a supportive and collaborative way, but we all want to, in some way, shape, or form, be held to a high level of account.

Barbara:  I would also add to that. Actually, a tip is not just saying how to do something, and the reporting lines, and all that. It’s why we’re doing it. I’ve noticed that even if it’s a simple task, if I explained to the VAs, “Well, the reason I want you to post tips, and quotes, and things on Facebook, for example, and consistently do it every week is because it actually increases our brand in the marketplace, people can see a little bit of what we’re about, and therefore, it leads to X, Y, and Z, which means we make more money, which means that your job and career growth can be this.” You know what I mean? It’s like tying it back into the greater vision and the strategy, and they get way more excited about it then.

Matt:  Absolutely. Yeah. Again, simple … That can be part of the training of this as well.

Barbara:  Yeah, I would add that to the training. Definitely, the why, why their role is important in the greater … It’s not just a cog in a wheel, it’s the greater scheme of things.

Matt:  Absolutely, and so the last linking piece is linking control back to the original knowledge holder, and this is management. This is where you need to develop a strong and simple meeting rhythm with your people, and it will vary from role to role and where they’re actually … You’re talking to these reports, you’re talking to these KPIs, and you’re working together to actually move everything forward. This is a really key piece because we spoke about the concept of abdication, “Here’s a task. Off you go. Go and do it…” That will always fail.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  Your role, as you stop doing these things, is to then manage. Again, as Barb was mentioning earlier, it’s not to micromanage. I don’t need you to be … You don’t want to be involved in that level. If you’re going to be, you might as well do it yourself, and that defeats the whole concept. The point is it’s knowing what’s getting done, when it’s getting done, and being able to guide and direct the person that’s doing it to do it the way you do it. Part of the management is teaching people how you think when you do the task and asking them questions to help them get a deeper understanding so that they can, again, gain greater knowledge so that they can do it to a level far greater than you ever will.

Barbara:  You know what? I want to share a little story here, and it’s a tip in doing this. A lot of people view the word “management” – it has a bit of a negative connotation. It’s a bit like a babysitting thing. People don’t want to do … “Management” all of a sudden is a bit … So, what I’ve started doing with my team, and I just cannot express the magic that has come from this, and I just didn’t know what I was doing at the time, but I got a few … I started doing daily huddles.

Now, this is this whole scrum technique and huddle. Huddle is like a 10 to 15-minute daily meeting that is fast and everyone has to say what they’re stuck on. What I started doing was I started getting one of my team to lead the meeting instead of me, so it gives them a sense of … I see myself as part of the team as opposed to the manager of the team, so we all collaborate together, and my role in the team is to help where people are stuck,  so all of sudden, everyone feels really good about this whole management thing that’s going on.

I’m not managing them, but I kind of am. I’m there to lead rather than just manage, and I think that’s a key thing that if you can flip the lid on that with your team, I have seen a massive increase in idea generation and not just productivity, but the ideas coming out has been magic from that move. I didn’t do it for that purpose. I did it more for productivity or for me to be more involved, but the result has been exceptional. I cannot express how good the results have been.

Matt:  Yeah. Again, there’s countless stories like this. Yet, it’s such a simple mindset shift that Barb’s just described to you. Yet, it’s so powerful and has an exponential return to your business.

Barbara:  Your people as well are far more honest and excited in that environment because you’re a member of the team as opposed to the boss, which is that flat structure thing. Maybe that doesn’t work for every business, but I’m more a fan of that myself, and that’s when you see people shine. They just really come out of their shells. They feel excited.

Matt:  Just to add to this, so management is where at time, you’re going to have to have tough conversations.

Barbara:  Yeah.

Matt:  You’re going to have to hold people to a higher level of account. You’re going to have to show them where they’ve done the “wrong” thing. But it’s about helping them and helping them to get back on track, but also, with a good management rhythm and meeting rhythm, things don’t get too far down the track or off-track before you pick it up, and so by meeting regularly and talking to an agenda, not just having a chat, you’ll find that you’ll get greater cadence in your business and faster growth.

Barbara:  I actually think you’ll have less of the tough conversations. You know why? What I found with my team, when we’re having these daily huddles, it’s very easy to see who the winners are, and the level of everybody lifts because they’re all going, “Oh, okay. I could do it that way,” and then the people who are either not interested or falling off the perch, there’s nowhere really for them to hide, so you will they’ll either resign or they’ll step up. Actually, I have found less difficult conversations because it’s very transparent who’s not lifting to the level that everybody else is.

Matt:  Yeah.

Barbara:  Yeah, so that’s a great … and it is tough to do this, guys, but it’s so worth it. When you follow these steps, it really is worth it. I learned this the hard way by myself, but this book just lays it all out for you and exactly what you need to do, so I think it’s pivotal for any business.

Matt:  Thank you, and it’s keeping in mind that it’s not going to be any one thing.

It’s the combination of all of it. It’s that KRC model. It’s understanding that it’s a combination of training, systems, and technology with reporting, and accountability, and management that is going to enable you to stop doing. Unless you focus in and … It’s a formula, and it works time and time again. Unless you follow the formula, it will be hard. The things will stay on your list. They’ll keep boomeranging back to you, and what you’ll find is you’ll have to be working harder and harder, and you’ll put a ceiling on your growth, and you won’t enjoy your business.

Barbara:  You’ll be hiring and firing all the time because you’ll blame your people.

Matt:  Absolutely.

Barbara:  I just want to make a point here that this KRC thing is completely the responsibility of the business owner and not the team.

Matt:  Correct.

Barbara:  In time, when your business gets bigger and you’re doing $10 million, you can hire a CEO to do this, or a general manager, or something, but this is really the job of the business owner, and like I would challenge any business owner to say, “If your team are failing and things are chaos in your business, it’s because you are not stepping up into this particular role, and the person that really you need to look at is yourself,” which is a very tough thing to say, but I’ve had to do it. Matt, you’ve had to do it. Really, the buck stops with you as the business owner to get this right.

Matt:  Yes, absolutely. That’s true.

Barbara:  Matt, listen. This series has been great. This has been a three-part series on The Stop Doing List book that Matt has recently published, and you can go to stopdoing.com.au. There’s lots of free resources over there. There’s links at the bottom of these shows to some of the resources that you can use to do this, and I would urge anyone… Get out, and buy the book, and take it on a holiday with you because honestly, I read it on a holiday, and I came back firing. I felt great.

Matt:  Fantastic.

Barbara:  I made some changes in my business. Also, guys, if you’re listening on iTunes, please give us a rating and a review. We’d love to get this show up the ranks in iTunes, and you can also join the conversation in our Facebook group, Virtual Success on Facebook, and let us know in there if you’re struggling with something or a topic you’d like us to cover in terms of teams, virtual teams, and virtual success. Until next time. Thanks, Matt.

Matt:  Thank you, Barb, and thank you to all the listeners. Barb, thank you for interviewing me on the book. It’s been my pleasure.

Barbara:  It’s been great. Okay. See you guys.

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.